Right now everyone is building 1 of 2 ways:
Glass Cannon - max offensive power and die in a single hit (basically every class but Barbs/Monks)
Barbs/Monks - Max vit, resist, armor, then pop the 2 minute cool downs to kill packs and run from everything else.
I think this will change as we find better and better gear. People are just now starting to find enough gear to enable infinite WotB / Whirl Wind in inferno. Soon gear like that will become more common and then people can start to specialize.
is the official thread not good enough?
LOL. I never tried poison Nova.
And I guess I get what you were saying. Back in the days of Diablo 1, I remember playing a wizard and my buddy played a warrior. After a few books of fireball and flame wave, we would go stomping into a room. He would charge and i would flamewave 10 times. Everything in the room would be dead by the time he hit the third time.
but I think that your experience was based on unfortunate choice, rather than there only being a few 'Combos' per class. I could be wrong on that front. But it doesn't change the fact that Diablo 3, everyone is so generic, you've seen one Demon Hunter, you have seen them all. At least in Diablo 2, even if there were only a few combos, that is more than you have with Diablo 3.
I get what you're talking about and customizability, having a sense of accomplishment and uniqueness. But having said that, games look to be going more "mainstream" and approachable, accounting for the fact that a lot of people don't/won't spend that much time on games. The developer's thinking "why spend so much time making it customizable when only a fraction of customers see/use it".
I use to think and believe what you do, but my expectations have changed. The way I see it, Diablo III has a pretty good balance of uniqueness/depth/customizability and "dumbed down"-ness. It's better than the super "dumbed down" generation of games I remember a few years back.
Not for the GOTY.
Actually, the point is that it doesn't matter how old or new the game is going to be. The fundamental structure of the classes, specifically that every player gets all skills associated with that class, means that at level 60, your character is no different than every other character of that class. There is no variability.Point is the game isn't even a month old, changes will be made, and variance is there in builds you just have to look for it.
Also normal mode is a joke as we all know, that's why blizzard went with a RMAH, gold is going to be quite worthless really quick. I stopped playing normal after getting a DH and Monk to 60, I now just play hardcore and the game feels more enjoyable as it is no longer a corpse zerg race in Inferno just to be the "first" to do something that in a month nobody will care about.
Yes, exactly. Game developers are making games for the more mainstream, wider audience. Unfortunately that means making them for the Lowest common denominator. It means that players who aren't Mainstream have to put up with lowering our standards and just be happy to play any old dumbed down thing that the developers decide to roll out.
I am old school enough to believe that we should be able to get both. Make a game with reasonably intelligent auto-level system so that the masses can have fun. But allow for gamers who actually want the customization to have it should they choose.
Marginalizing a segment of the consumer public because they appear to be in the minority is a bad move. And considering that the segment that is being marginalized is the segment that is the most avid and probably the segment that has been around the longest, it may not be a great strategy to splinter the core market. Just saying.
That is my point essentially and what I think makes it a bad game. The systems in Diablo 3 are simple. They've done away with Diablo 2's item design, which was diverse and complex, and brought in WoW's very simple dps, primary stats, attack speed(haste) and crit focused itemization.
This is more in the vein of aiming the game at a wider audience , as well as keeping it simple. They tried to give the game a feeling of challenge in the same way WoW raiding does, using huge damage output and the need to avoid it. Just a broken way of doing it in this game, this is not a slow paced mmo, but now it plays like one in Inferno. It's not challenging, just tedious and careful play is needed. Again, not how an arpg generally feels.
They did away with stat points, skill trees and deep item design. Then via youtube videos and marketing tried to say everyone just did the same thing to sell the dumbing down off. The only folks doing that were people who played D2 casually and found a guide somewhere. There was a ton of depth to D2 using those systems if you looked for it.
On the surface the combat is much improved and the game looks better, but that is not impressive when you consider D2 is 12 years old and you would expect that sort of improvement as a de facto inclusion in a game in 2012.
Blizzard basically has turned into Zynga with Diablo 3 and made a Farmvilled game that revolves around micro-transactions and paying for progression. The simple item design with baby step upgrades fosters usage of the RMAH. You're supposed to be stupid overpowered in Diablo, it's what made it fun. Never mind that the thrill of D2 for players was hunting for loot. Hunting for loot in Diablo 3 amounts to running database searches on the auction house.
The game is just plain bad, should of been made by the creators of Diablo, but unfortunately for Blizzard they lost all that talent.
I agree with everything you said. But for me, it makes the game merely mediocre, rather than bad. I paid my money for the game, and have gotten more enjoyment out of it than others I have paid as much for. But that is all.
Where Diablo 1-2 will go down in my list of all time favorites, Diablo 3 is merely a game I played for a little while until I got bored of it. The developers did a lot to unify, simplify and streamline the game for the wider consumptive audience. But just about every decision, wasn't about 'Improving' game play, but shunting as many players as they can towards the auction house with the intent to get them to the real money auction house and the real profit (for them).
More's the shame. I feel like this is Diablo 3: The quest for more money.
You seem to enjoy mentioning in every post that D3 is designed to push people towards the AH, yet you never give an example. Can you please elaborate? And while you think about it, keep in mind that the AH was not functional for the vast majority of internal testing, and so the skills and difficulty was balanced around not having an auction house available (this has been stated by the developers).
Absolutely.
1. Finding equipment of level is like .0000000001% chance (maybe a slight exageration, but not a huge one. If 100,000 items drop and one is level appropriate, I would be surprised.) Add to that the fact that just being level appropriate isn't enough. You can still get level appropriate junk.
2. Selling items in game to the vendors yields next to nothing in the way of monetary loot. If you want to make any cash what so ever, you are strongly incentivised to go auction house.
3. Items SELL from the vendors at something like 500X what they buy from you for. Quite a markup, but it keeps the players in constant need of cash. And then why sell for peanuts, if you can sell for reasonable rates in the Auction house?
4. The Blacksmith and the gem dealer require cash to upgrade in order to give you better stuff as you progress. And your Stash is also severely restricted unless you buy it larger. So cash is a premium, yet selling loot and even drops of cash are severely limited. So why not go to the auction house?
5. Then there is the auction house. You can now 'Buy' level appropriate stuff from other players. You can now sell stuff that the vendor won't give you 10 gold for, for thousands of gold. And you can pick and choose from appropriate items instead of whatever randomly drops.
Don't get me wrong, you can navigate all of the above without ever once using the auction house. I know because I do. I won't get sucked in to the Auction house. But it is 100x easier to use the auction house. The idea is the same as crack dealers use. Give them a taste for free, and make the alternative harde. Pretty soon they are hooked. Why farm for good stuff when you can buy it. Don't have the gold? Go to the Real money auction house.
I agree with everything you said. But for me, it makes the game merely mediocre, rather than bad. I paid my money for the game, and have gotten more enjoyment out of it than others I have paid as much for. But that is all.
Where Diablo 1-2 will go down in my list of all time favorites, Diablo 3 is merely a game I played for a little while until I got bored of it. The developers did a lot to unify, simplify and streamline the game for the wider consumptive audience. But just about every decision, wasn't about 'Improving' game play, but shunting as many players as they can towards the auction house with the intent to get them to the real money auction house and the real profit (for them).
More's the shame. I feel like this is Diablo 3: The quest for more money.
that's how i feel to. that everything they did is to get you to the AH and RMAH. you need shitloads of gold if you want the best items. to get that you gotta play the AH.
Also the Blacksmith is a waste of time and gold.most of the stuff that you can make for your level is crap.
Alright so I'm going to take a stab at this question.
As mentioned in a different thread, the drop rates were carefully tuned for a single player playing through from 1 to 60 without ever using the AH.
All of our items are randomly generated, and so follow a distribution curve in power. Let's say for the sake of argument that you were to somehow distill an item down to it's "power level" and created a distribution graph of drop rate vs. power level. This graph would probably be normally distributed with outliers at high power levels dropping at a lower rate.
Looking at this graph, an average item drops every 5 minutes, a higher power item drops every 15 minutes, even higher power drops every hour. etc. As you move up the curve to ever more powerful items, the amount of time it takes to find such an item increases. This is what makes certain items more desirable, this is how things worked in D2.
What happens for a standard player who is playing solo when they first hit level 60 is they see an item upgrade every 30 minutes or so. Pretty quickly it becomes every hour, then every 2 hours. The higher the power level of your gear, the longer it takes to find your next upgrade, that's just the underlying math of this distribution. It's not really anything we set either. If we magically made all drops rates 10x higher, all it would do is shift the power curve left or right, it would not change the fundamental property that the higher up in power you go, the longer (statistically) it is going to take until you find your next drop.
So then let's say you visit the Auction House and get infusion of power that hurls you forward on that power curve. So whereas at one point your gear may be at a point that you are statistically speaking probably going to get an upgrade every 2 hours. After visiting the Auction House you hurl yourself forward on the power curve so far that now you are statistically going to get a drop every 8 hours.
To further illustrate the point, let's talk about the coming changes in 1.0.3. In 1.0.3 we're going to start dropping level 63 items in Act I of Inferno. We're also reducing incoming damage. What do I expect to happen? I expect that there will be a rapid increase in power across the entire community as all of these items become more widely accessible. It's like we took the distribution curve of items and made everything drop more. That item that used to take 10 hours to find is now a 2 hour item. An item that used to be a 2 day item is now an 8 hour item. After the initial frenzy of power increase, things are just going to settle again. People who think drop rates are too low now will probably still think drop rates are too low a week later when they move to the new point on the curve. I've spent a long time on this question so I'm going to move on but hopefully somebody who gets what I'm saying will be able to expand on it more, maybe draw some graphs to better illustrate the point.
tl;dr we could make drops 100x what they are now and it would just cause everybody to settle at a new equilibrium point. Anything you can farm in a few hours you'll already have, anything that takes longer you'll wish you could get faster.
Actually, the point is that it doesn't matter how old or new the game is going to be. The fundamental structure of the classes, specifically that every player gets all skills associated with that class, means that at level 60, your character is no different than every other character of that class. There is no variability.
You have it the wrong way around. Blizzard MADE it so that gold was a joke because they wanted people to go the RMAH. That makes them more money. I wouldn't care so much except that they were so very obvious and made it so prolific within the very structure of the game. It's the difference between an Agatha Christi novel vs a Sesame Street book.
I admit there are some limitations to the class system. But there has got to be something more than "And YOU are the chosen one that can do EVERYTHING." You are some farmer's son that grew up in some Podunk village, yet you can mold magic like a master, swing a sword with the best of them AND pick the odd lock when you can''t bash in the lid.
Back in the day, Wizards used to mean something. It meant that you spent your days toiling over tomes and ancient writings till the cows came home every night. You only knew what the sun looked like because it had been described on scrolls from a bygone age. And you had done your time and singed your fingers more times than you had a healthy bowl movement. Now everyone can cast spells. They crap better magic than elves who have been studying for centuries. It just isn't reasonable anymore.
Actually, the point is that it doesn't matter how old or new the game is going to be. The fundamental structure of the classes, specifically that every player gets all skills associated with that class, means that at level 60, your character is no different than every other character of that class. There is no variability.