Diablo 3

[darkelf]

I would add that if you cannot be bothered to track market trends etc, and would normally vendor your yellows don't. You can easily make a 100 times as much just selling them cheap on the AH. They seem to get bought out near instantly for between 5 and 10k.

Only problem I have with that is that my bags will fill up with stuff that probably would sell for more than vendor cost and I would have to lose my NV stacks to get rid of them, so it's usually just easier to vendor it except when I get to Butcher or Belial.

[Akranadas]

I'm kind of stump how Diablo 3 went from the videos we saw 4 years ago to what we have now. It even seems we lost a lot of visual quality during that time.

[Nalkor]

Akranadas, don't you get it? Lower visual quality = moar people can play/buy their game!


Of course, even more would be willing to buy and play it if it had a dedicated offline mode, which would likely make it easier on login servers and all that jazz that keeps on hiking up financial liabilities.

[Kien]

Now it's error 37 again.

[Sohtaraz]

I'm a bit confused about Zombie Dogs in Inferno as my WD.

I tried it a bit to see why my dogs were dying and using leeching beasts. (Your zombie dogs gain 50% of damage they deal as life, and half of which heals you.) So my dogs hit for an average of 480'ish.

Confused Blizzard math

480x0.50x0.50= 21-28 average healing.

If this is a sign of testing done on end game things I can definitely understand why pets are entirely useless there.

[konfeta]

Life leach by % apparently has an 80% penalty in Inferno. I know life leach can be and usually is ridiculously overpowered, but they basically nerfed it into complete worthlessness for release.

Another way to look at Inferno, considering their statement of "We tested Inferno at the hardest we could do it, then doubled it," is that we are essentially beta testing Inferno right now by looking for exploits that allow us to do it while way underfarmed.

[Skullcap]

Yeah, life leach %/on hit has the 80% penalty, since simply put a 40k+ dps character could chug in 5-8k health per hit with life leach.

Life on hit is still uneffected, so you could stack that as a alternatives, found it was quite successful on a barb with 600 life on hit and using frenzy + 1hander.

[Vintage]

What Skullcap and konfeta said is correct. Lifesteal is essentially worthless outside of normal difficulty, as even in nightmare you are penalized for using it. Stack life on hit instead, and don't use abilities which have life steal.

[konfeta]

Meanwhile, every time I recast Hydra, I get 4.5k HP heal because my weapon happened to have 1.5k heal on enemy kill and Hydra unsummons apparently count as 3 enemy kills. Dat quality Inferno strike testing team.

[Sohtaraz]

So, why on earth would you make a glyph that is locked somewhere in act2 in hell difficulty that becomes worthless in less then two acts later? I understand nerfing life leach to the ground on itemization, they could have capped it at X% only on weapons and call it a day? Specially when its not helping anyone in inferno if you go 'splat' in few hits anyway...

Some design decisions in this game make my head hurt. Like the entire itemization, witch doctor and glyphs in general and the lack of their testing.

I would have figured that 'it will be released when its done' does not mean 'we did some testing and its ok for about half of the games length'.

[konfeta]

Of all the problems with the game, the painfully blatant lack of testing hurts the most. We told them in god damn autumn to let us beta test higher difficulties for this exact reason. All we got in turn is "we got this bros, we just need you to test the servers/AH."

Fastforward to Spring, they admitted they made changes as a result of the feedback in Normal difficulty, fastforward to release, we got massive server and AH errorfest galore of downtime. So, eh... now we are stuck waiting for multiple balance patches and maybe even an expansion to get the game we probably could have gotten on release if Blizzard bothered to use the playerbase to test the high level game mechanics.

[Kryopsis]

Since everyone else is posting character screenshots, here's my level 60 Barbarian.

[Sohtaraz]

I wish error #37 would stop so I could go play the witch doctor special 'Permanent Spirit Walk super Zombie Bear working as intended I'm sure'-build.

[Kien]

@Kryopsis
Holy crap a Skeletor helmet! :O I want one. I bought myself an ugly but good helmet yesterday. I want a skull helmet and one of those skull staffs so I look like Skeletor.

Error 73 and 4001 now btw.

[Codex]

It's worth noting that the life leech % penalty by difficulty is inherited from Diablo II, so it's not like they just decided that they wanted to troll it out of nowhere. The penalty on Nightmare was 33%, and Hell 66%.

[Kien]

Error 73.

Error 37.

[Hirmetrium]

At this point, I don't know what to say. Between ME3 failing to run after the new patch, and Diablo 3 not working at all, I'm pretty pissed off.

Blizzard are failing again. *sigh*.

[Kryopsis]

Kien: The funny thing is that the helmet is pretty awful. It's the Giant Skull legendary and not only is it level 52 but the stats are relatively low. Of course, it looks really cool when combined with my full plate of unkempt blue lawn.

[Waterbizkit]

After looking at some of the screen shots of level 60 characters in this thread, I wonder if I'm focusing too much on my vitality?

Both my level 38 Monk and my level 34 Barbarian have vitality well over 600. Their DPS is significantly lower of course, but they're some 20-odd levels shy of 60 and so the weapons they're wielding aren't exactly mind-blowing.

My Monk has definitely become my main character now though and will probably be the one I aim to get to 60 first.

Despite all the continuing issues of the community at large, I've still been going strong with little-to-no problems regarding server-connectivity and auction house functionality. In fact, I'm making money hand over fist in the auction house. I'm just spending it equally fast.

[Malachi]

Oh come the fuck on, servers unavailable AGAIN?

It's really turning into a 50/50 situation for me - I can play the game I paid for only half of the time. I can't think of an MMO that had it that bad.

[TheWickedGerman]

Despite all the continuing issues of the community at large, I've still been going strong with little-to-no problems regarding server-connectivity and auction house functionality. In fact, I'm making money hand over fist in the auction house. I'm just spending it equally fast.

Try logging in right now

TBH, the AH is pissing me off more and more. It´s clear that Blizzard tweaked the loot drops so you have to rely on the AH to get usefull equipment, futher they made sale prices of ingame vendors so pathetic that you have to sell your stiff in it.
he AH too, to have enough money to afford decent gear(if you don´t want to grind ages for gold).

I wanted to stay away from all online features, but it´s not possible if you want access to the full game(you don´t get that far with the shit you´re looting ingame).

Edit:

@Malachi:

It´s even worse than 50/50 for me. I think people with limited "time windows" to play are those suffering most if they in the unlucky situation that their "play time" matches their downtimes too often. To add insult to injury, I´m reading comments like " LOL the sun is shining go outside and do something else"

Reading this, I would like to scream at them: "IN OPPOSITE TO YOU WHO ARE SITTING IN FRONT OF YOUR BLOODY PC 24/7 AT YOUR MOM´S BASEMENT, I SPEND ALREADY ALL THE DAY OUTSIDE, PLAYING WITH MY KIDS, DOING GARDEN WORK, AND OTHER STUFF PEOPLE DO WHO HAVING AN ACTUAL LIFE"

But beeing the nice guy with excellent gentleman-like manners that I am, I never would do this

Instead I´m going to play again the Colonization remake like the last couple of days

[Skullcap]

Rule of thumb from WoW patch days which can be applied just the same in D3:

- Don't expect the server to run in the first 8-12hours on patch day
- Expect unstable playing
- Expect it not to be fixed to next day
- If its really bad, come back in 2days when they have issued emergency hotfixes.

Beyond that, ya shit out of luck, these problems always happen on the patch days and it was extremely bad for US side yesterday so not particularly unsuprising, that the more unstable EU servers are completely boned today.

[Waterbizkit]

Try logging in right now

Just got on. Twice. No issues at all. And sent about 20k in gold to my stash from a few items that I sold in the last three hours.

*shrugs*

[Starfisher]

Life steal is NOT worthless. You just need ridiculous DPS to make it work.

My barb has ~8% life steal. 3% of that comes from a skill (which is not nerfed, btw), so I get 20% of 5%, which is 1%, which means I get 4% life steal. I do ~24kDPS and I'm not even well geared yet, so that means I'm getting ~960 life/second back. And that's just my base DPS, not counting my build which is based around spamming the hell out of an AOE with high crit chance. When I turn on the thingie that shows you the amount of damage you do per hit and the life you get back, I see little green 600-900s coming up even in inferno. When I spam seismic, my globe stays full (26k life) or shoots to full almost immediately in a decent mob pile.

[Malachi]

@Bizkit: I guess it's just the EU servers that are fucked up then.

@Skullcap: During my year of playing WOW I never had such problems. Why the fuck are they taking the servers down in the evening, when the majority of people have time to play? They could at least limit all these maintance breaks to around 2-8 AM, when most of Europe is asleep.

[Kien]

Does the time of auctions ignore the error 37 times? Like if it was 6h left on an item will that clock still tick during the down time?

Since later half of nightmare is it possible to play wizard without diamond skin and crystal shell? For me it's freaking vital.

Are brown (legendary) items overrated? Feels like they are the equivalent of gold (unique) items in Diablo 2. Before the exp gold items (and green) was useless compared to rare items and many blue items. They might have aesthetics but their mechanics are too low. :L

[Kryopsis]

After looking at some of the screen shots of level 60 characters in this thread, I wonder if I'm focusing too much on my vitality?

It's a good habit, to be honest. In fact, if I didn't spend so much time soloing, I'd definitely look for gear with VIT over STR. This said, I really need that DPS, otherwise it would take far too long to progress. I got my first legendary drop today so now I have over two million gold to spend. I am actually considering the Bul-Kathos' Children set now.

EDIT: Kien, the overall consensus is that the legendary items suck. They are frequently inferior to rares of their level and level 60 legendaries often lose to Inferno blues. I went through a dozen or so legendaries because they were cheap and readily available on the auction house. They also have a more predictable resale rate so I wasn't too worried about failing to sell them back.

[DeafMute]

Recent patch notes say that legendaries will be buffed when the pvp patch comes. Current legendaries will not be buffed but newly found/created will have the new buffs. Im not opredicting anything major here tbh. no crushing blow, no deadly strike or any other weapon/armor based special skills. Its why D2 legendaries are miles better.

[Nalkor]

@Kryopsis - Haha! You look like one of those goddamn spikey blueberry Chosen tanks from Warhammer online: Age of Reckoning! Given how much Blizzard rips off of Warhammer, that wouldn't shock me at all.

[Akranadas]

Rule of thumb from WoW patch days which can be applied just the same in D3:

- Don't expect the server to run in the first 8-12hours on patch day
- Expect unstable playing
- Expect it not to be fixed to next day
- If its really bad, come back in 2days when they have issued emergency hotfixes.

Beyond that, ya shit out of luck, these problems always happen on the patch days and it was extremely bad for US side yesterday so not particularly unsuprising, that the more unstable EU servers are completely boned today.

I'm sorry Skullcap but, If Blizzard expects us to always be online to play their game. We should expect Blizzard to always be online when we want to play it.

[Kien]

ah i just had a 15min game and quite. now when i want to play again i get punched in the face by error 37.

[PetarB]

I'm sorry Skullcap but, If Blizzard expects us to always be online to play their game. We should expect Blizzard to always be online when we want to play it.

I'm afraid that's too reasonable to expect.

[Skullcap]

Aye they expect you to be online to play the game, but the TOS everyone clicked "I agree" to says your agreeing to download, maintaince and server issues. However at the same time, for the past 6 years in WoW, patch days have never gone well on day of patch release and then the next day aswell, sometimes even extending to up to 5days on both US and EU sides on major content patches, its been well documented and moaned about and I don't see why its a suddenly a shock that the servers are down, considering that they have been unstable since launch anyway for D3 and considering how D3 is in general shouldn't be quite expecting much.

Its not I don't agree about the servers being down is bad, its preventing me trawling the AH and doing some clears with my barbarian, but at the same time I see little point in getting bent out of shape over it, especially after how bad the servers have been and what seems like a half hearted approach to finish D3 anyway.

[Akranadas]

The only reason I can see for the way Diablo 3 is constructed around 'always connect' is to allow Blizzard to continue to make money. It's quite obvious that same one got the idea of the Real Money Auction House and that sparred Blizzard to build Diablo around that notion.

This probably sums it up best - http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/top...1504839?page=1

ot I don't agree about the servers being down is bad, its preventing me trawling the AH and doing some clears with my barbarian, but at the same time I see little point in getting bent out of shape over it, especially after how bad the servers have been and what seems like a half hearted approach to finish D3 anyway.

The issue is paying money for a product that you are only allowed to use when Blizzard allows it. It's sort of like buying a sports car and only allowing you to drive it when there are no clouds in the sky.

[Skullcap]

But that is the thing, were only paying a one off fee for the game and that is it, no subscriptions or further money to them, so its not really much different than any other game title which has a multiplayer with servers to play on, but yeah there is a slight flaw there in that we got the always on DRM, but at the same time I doubt there is little else that will change untill the RMAH comes up atleast, only then would money start flowing to Act-Blizzard's coffers to fund servers on the long term, otherwise D3 is not much different than a Ubisoft title with always on DRM.

Also when you think about that one off fee and take of the annual pass D3 numbers, then leaving what is left maybe a couple of million people purchasing D3 and I'd be hard pressed to be convinced that those sales would even cover the budget of D3, let alone provide enough to get a decent server hub which always runs all the time.

I agree with the link you provided to, whichever way you look at it, D3 feels like a cutdown game, rushed in quite a few areas and primary focused around RMAH and providing a profit to blizzard, they get a decent chunk of each RMAH auction sold and well the WoW cash cow is dying, the pandas ain't going to save that game now so they need another source of venue untill there "Titan" project is finished.

When you think about it, Blizzard left making SC2 and D3 to long and primary focused on just WoW and I suspect one of the many reasons to merge with Activision was to fund SC2 and D3, but aswell as cover the ever rising inflating costs of WoWs continued content production, Blizzcon events and all the other stuff associated with it.

Its a shame really, alot of stuff could have been different, but its not meant to be so and this is the final results given, but if we take a wider look at the gaming industry and especially the PC side, gaming titles haven't particularly screaming innnovation or wowed many over the past few years, alot are just mass duplicate sequels with just a few new features bolted on.

I think Minecraft was a good example of a throwback to probably the better times of gaming, its sparked creativity, innovation, especially in the modding community and created a entire cult aswell as being used now as a education tool for some school classes, it felt abit like we gone back to Sid Mier and the likes era again when titles were produced by developers as something they wanted to do, rather than just in it for the money and big numbers.

But I guess that is what the span of time does

[DeafMute]

That link Akra, sums up alot of what ive thought to myself, back when I said this game feels soulless, it really does.
Im sick of running the same areas, the outlines dont change at all, only afew little rooms/caves open up every so often or some trivial event happens. Cannot believe I waited 4years for this when it looks like it easily could of been done in 2.

-Edit
Im hoping developers looking to rekindle the A-RPG genre take note of D3's combat and ignore everything else thats within D3. Atleast soemthing can be salvaged from this train wreck that will take 2 expansions to finaly live upto what it should of been upon its first release.

[Kryopsis]

@Kryopsis - Haha! You look like one of those goddamn spikey blueberry Chosen tanks from Warhammer online: Age of Reckoning!

That's exactly what I was going for. Originally, I was going to paint the armour grey (one of the two the collector's edition dyes) but after trying the blue dye on the chest piece, I ended up painting it all blue (mariner dye) precisely because it looked like something out of Warhammer.


EDIT:
Other than the server issues, I really don't understand all that doom & gloom regarding Diablo 3. Hell, this is the only Diablo I ever enjoyed. I played Diablo 1 at release and wasn't impressed whereas Diablo II remains my most hated big budget game ever created. I only finished it on Normal around 2006 after about 8 tries. The gameplay of Diablo 3 is actually enjoyable, for a change. I couldn't care less about the rest.

[Afoxi]

After looking at some of the screen shots of level 60 characters in this thread, I wonder if I'm focusing too much on my vitality?

You can never have enough Vitality at level 50+.

You see those guys that have 10-15k health in act 3-4 hell? They always blame lag for dying.

[Kryopsis]

Act I Inferno, thankyouverymuch.

[Starfisher]

Me too. I keep incrementally increasing my all resists on my gear, trying to maintain my DPS while increasing survivability. Unfortunately, I'm approaching a point where the next gear upgrade is costing 200k+ each time, so I can't just do a run, upgrade, do another run, etc.

I only have 27k life last I checked. Having more would be nice, but raw vitality is actually not the best option out your mechanisms to increase effective health; damage reduction and all resist actually are better options for Inferno once you have a certain base life. I saw a barb build who soloed inferno and inferno diablo with 35k life, but of course had something like 500 in each resist slot and insane strength related damage reduction.

[Nalkor]

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/vide...ays-Online-DRM

I think these guys sums up quite nicely the problem with well, always online drm for D3.

[Kryopsis]

Me too. I keep incrementally increasing my all resists on my gear, trying to maintain my DPS while increasing survivability. Unfortunately, I'm approaching a point where the next gear upgrade is costing 200k+ each time, so I can't just do a run, upgrade, do another run, etc.

I only have 27k life last I checked. Having more would be nice, but raw vitality is actually not the best option out your mechanisms to increase effective health; damage reduction and all resist actually are better options for Inferno once you have a certain base life. I saw a barb build who soloed inferno and inferno diablo with 35k life, but of course had something like 500 in each resist slot and insane strength related damage reduction.

Even with the 30% damage resistance Barbarians get by default (Monks get it as well), I find that going pure tank is counter-productive. The Molten, Arcane, Plague and Desecrator enemies are almost guaranteed to kill you if given time and stacking resists won't get you through the fight. You need that DPS Starfisher is talking about. It's not all about stacking VIT :0).

[TESB]

you need resists armor vitality and dps, if you lack either of this you will not make it far in inferno (unless you are a ranged class). I am currently in act 3 as a melee wizard with 36k hp, 1000+ resists, 6k armor and 35k dps. act1 is a joke with these stats, act 2 is difficult but manageable (i only have to skip ~20% of the champion packs) and act 3 well, lets just don't speak of it

[Akranadas]

So, I'm rocking my Wizard. What Stats should I focus on besides Intelligence?

[TESB]

as long as you are in pre inferno you are fine with int + vit. if you hit inferno you need to keep to look out for all resists and armor too. of course you can also go full out damage, but then you will die to any mob touching you and kiting is the only viable playstyle. currently i have 35k dps with 30% + chance to crit and 188% crit damage and this is not enough to burst down mobs, but with my stats i can also tank a bit.

[DeafMute]

Keep an eye out for gear with sockets and vit already on the armor, try and get some int on it too before you add int gems. throught normal-hell just focus on int id say as you shouldnt be letting anything get close enough to do real dmg. Get yourself a 2 hander bow, forget mage staff or a 1 hander with off hand. "hander with a open socket. and slap the best red gem you can on the wep will last you awhile before you upgrade, I set myself a mark to upgrade wep wise as the wiz every 5 lvls but ive the gold to do so. Just do whats best for you. Oh and make sure you get yourself int/vit and movement speed boots to match your level. Makes progresing that much faster. Enjoy, wiz is fun.

[darkelf]

Hehe Afoxi, I had like 5k health until act 1 inferno on my wizard

[Kien]

Error 37.

[Guilliman]

Ditto. Tempted to ask for a refund, and if they refuse I'll walk to w/e it's called for fair trade commission thing.

[Hirmetrium]

I'd be tempted to go directly to the FTC, and not ask for a refund. I like the game, and I WANT to play it - but Blizzard are making it increasingly difficult to do so. If this is another evening where you can't possibly log in until 10:30, it's completely unacceptable. These are my games and I declare when I want to play them - not Blizzard. Maintenance is barely acceptable as is (being only a morning).

The lack of backlash over this online DRM is shocking. Most outlets are like "lol error 37, some of our readers are getting it". Very few places have done a full blown critical analysis.

Wonder if RPS can ask their lawyer friend.