...I hope the game doesn't turn out to be a mindless WoW clone were grinding gear is all that matters...

...In Diablo 2 everything was skill based. You just needed the "basic" gear (Enigma, skill/life charms, torch/anni, HOTO or Grief, Stormshield for max block, Spirit for casters, Exile for Smiters etc)...

Mozelleple112

What in the what?

Also, Diablo 2 wasn't skill based. It was very much gear based with more ways to cheat death with potions and TPs. Every difficulty involved a gear check lest you stand around whacking at a mob forever before they gather up and bop you on the head. The thing with Diablo 2 is just as you said; get these runeword sets and you are pretty much golden for the rest of your D2 career since you have enough stats to deal with anything. That defeats the purpose of a loot whore game when there is an endgame to that gear.

As for Diablo 3, the one thing I am really bothered with is skill balance within classes. As a lv55 WD, the synergy between spirit walk and soul harvest is so overpowering that it transcends any specific build. It suddenly becomes that thing I need for both damage and survival, gimping myself if I choose to ignore both. While I suspect that tying classes to a primary stat has something to do with this, thus preventing players to evenly explore other stats for survival without solely relying on their "Get out of Jail Free" cards, I can't be too sure. That requires too much theorycrafting for my patience. All I know that these staples in my skill list are rendering their initial plans for class identity useless.

I think those are good points, but those things still certainly bother me. I also saw an image a couple of days ago with a legendary axe that had like level 60 requirement and +20 exp per kill, they really need to fix some of the item randomization. I've gotten sweet axes with like 20% more attack than my current one, but it's like +30 int, +20 dex, +4% mf, oh thanks, that's totally better than my +125 str and +60 vit. I wish it was just a little less random, I know some of those are cross-class weapons, but I've gotten barbarian-only gear with some of it before too.110million

Yeah, as I stated in my last post, the way itemization is handled is wonky as hell. It has less to do with "Why is their intel on my massive axe?" and more to do with "Why is there 20 intel on my level 56 massive axe?"

As it stands, all classes can use all stats similarly. In otherwords, dex affects the monk's dodge rate the same way it would affect a witch doctor's dodge rate. The problem here is that Diablo 3 forces players to attach themselves to their designed stat for damage. That attachment is making everybody pretty obsessed with just getting their damage stat up and their vitality aplenty so they don't get one shot, or forego vitality all together and go all in with their main stat. It is something Blizzard will have to address if the player base are incapable of getting out of that mindset, and its hard to with how everything else in this game is designed.

Anyways, speaking of Blizzard, they put up an interesting article on the current state of the game as well as plans for the future. Great read for those planning on playing this game for a long time.

It's short, the story is painfully bad, not even like 'oh i'm not playing for the story so I don't care' bad, but 'we went out of our way to make it terrible' bad. Boss fights are inconsistent, act 2 has a tougher and more developed villan than act 3. Enemy difficulty is increased by random effects that are often more annoying than difficult like 'high hp, teleports'. Higher difficulties are completely unbalanced, I mean they got the best players they could for inferno, and then doubled the difficulty when they said it was hard enough? How stupid can they be?110million

The story isn't as bad as people made it out to be. It is serviceable (About what you would expect from a game involving the black and white battle of heaven and hell), self aware of its own cheese and sprinkled with gorgeous CGI. Pretty much what you would expect from your average Blizzard game. With that said, the monster lore, journal entries, and side quests were more interesting than the main mission, and did a wonderful job with the worldbuilding.

As for boss fights, none of the boss fights were tough. All were interesting, however, and provided a break from right clicking things to death. That is all the bosses needed to be and they succeeded.

Higher difficulties are not imbalanced, just gear dependent. In a game about loot, things tend to be balanced out by loot. The biggest problem currently has more to do with how itemization is handled, especially at the higher levels.

As for the whole "doubling the highest difficulty", lets face it; people are trying to figure out the game in a few months, write guides, and have it farmed as badly as Baal runs in D2. It would have been sooner if they kept it as it was in internal playtest due to the increased pool of players that you'd get from a retail release.

Making the randomized Elite Packs a central aspect of endgame means that there is no set way of tackling them. You'd have to play each pack by ear, taking their randomized affixes into mind every encounter. It will take a very long time before even the hardest of the hardcore can write guides on every endgame affix combo, let alone be geared for every encounter, keeping endgame Elite Pack gear runs from stagnating like D2's endless Baal runs.

Not to mention you don't even need to bother with loot because someone else probably got something better than you, and isn't even charging too much for it. If you feel the need to manually limit yourself by not using the AH, you're just going to fall behind.110million

Which could be said about any online RPG involving loot as an important resource that can be traded and bought. In fact, it was much worse in Diablo 2. The flipside of this is making top gear bind on pick up, trivializing the randomized item system, reducing the AH to a stale economy focused on commodities (like WoW). Anyways, I suspect that we will see less great gear in the gold AH when the real money AH is released, and the rate in which people will be geared will stabilize since most people are not willing to shell 10 bucks for an online sword.

It's fun, but only because these things can be overlooked when playing with friends. I would never have played this is a solo experiance.110million

It is not that these things can be overlooked with friends as these systems are in place with multiple people in mind. Again with Street Fighter, its like overlooking it's crap campaign mode since you can play with other people when versus mode was the entire point of SF to begin with.

[QUOTE="110million"]pretty sure if everything was the same, but it was a single player game, it would get like a 6/10.psn8214

Disagreed. I don't think it's that the game itself is necessarily boring when played alone, it's just that once you've played with someone else it kinda spoils the whole solo experience.

That is like saying Street Fighter is fine solo, but playing somebody else would ruin the experience of playing solo. I mean, of course it would. That's the point.

[QUOTE="Redmoonxl2"]

[QUOTE="nitekids2004"]

Itemization in this game sux really bad.

I just got a wand with +strength and +dex :lol: wtf?

princeofshapeir

It is definitely weird. This would make more sense if different abilities were affected by different stats in each character, but at this point with my level 52 WD, all I want is intel and vitality, nothing else. I can never see myself using strength in any situation.

Vanilla WoW itemization was very linear, to be very honest, especially with dungeon loot designed the way it was. The problem with D3 is that while the loot is very nonlinear (hence stats being all over the place), character progression is. No matter what build I make as a WD, intel will forever be my damage stat and I need to balance it off with health for survival.

Itemization in this game sux really bad.

I just got a wand with +strength and +dex :lol: wtf?

nitekids2004

It is definitely weird. This would make more sense if different abilities were affected by different stats in each character, but at this point with my level 52 WD, all I want is intel and vitality, nothing else. I can never see myself using strength in any situation.

My friends play a little too late for me to actually get coop in(I have a bed time these days). So I finally gave up and just started the game solo. Saved old dude. Started as a Demon Hunter, because I don't want to be a monk. He's okay I guess. jg4xchamp

Let me know if you need any items, broop or a runthrough.

PSU acquired, Diablo 3 finally accessible!

Makkiworth#1785, btw.

lol of course I want a balanced game, I have a monk myself. I'm just sayin that's all. Balancing wont happen till arenas are fully fleshed out and blizzard gets a chance to see how things play out between all of the classes right now. Hard to judge if the game is balanced or not if we can't duel yet. Rayne718

D3 PvP isn't meant to be balanced so don't expect it to be. Blizzard already stated that any balancing done will be through PvM.

I'm not saying it could or couldn't occur, my point is simply that intense speculation without any solid proof is pretty disingenuous, especially when people are in full blown "Blame Blizzard for everything!" mode. Plenty of things to criticize Blizzard over, foggy accounts of sessionID hacks that have yet to be proven aren't one of them.