Diablo 3

[konfeta]

For people whose draw in an ARPG is starting new characters, yeah. Blizzard pretty much, without any good reason, dismantled that aspect of the game, with only overall excuse being "handholding of casuals takes priority." I happen to think that most complaints about Diablo 3 being casualized to be stupid, but this is a rare case of where the accusation has genuine merit and Blizzard is only hurting themselves by ignoring it.

It's not even that the game is being made casual. It's that, at some point, while Blizzard was attempting to ensure that no new player would be scared off, they forgot about an entire segment of veteran players that doesn't care about max level gameplay; or flat out decided those don't matter.

[Nalkor]

The problem with doing that is potentially alienating a hardcore devoted fanbase in hopes of bringing in new people who might not even stick around for very long.

[DeafMute]

Good thing you bring up Konfeta, is these new cauals come aboard and stop playing after normal or when nightmare shows alittle challenge, they'll cry on the forums or outright quit.
My point being, normal is the fishing hook for casuals, youll either love it or hate it.
Im talking RMAH here, blizz want everyone to work so they get paid.

[konfeta]

Cynical, but probably the accurate reason why Blizzard doesn't want veterans starting new characters non-stop. The hardcore player base will be the supplier of the AH products, a good player messing around with 20 new Wizards is player that's not farming shiny inferno tems to sell in the RMAH. I would imagine even newbies are more valuable than those kind of veterans, because those newbies will potentially become new high level players. The veterans are less malleable to change I imagine, and have other ARPGs giving them what they precisely want (Path of Exile especially, that game is huge on replayability factor of start new characters thanks to the league system).

Personally, I am a huge fan of the freespec system as I don't like to obsessively reroll characters to perfect them or just to experiment, so this doesn't affect me too much, but I did enjoy occasionally playing fresh, planned out builds from the start.

[Paladin]

My monk's name is PaiMei btw

[Guilliman]

Hardcore players/vets be definition are a minority. There's more money catering to casuals. We can argue all we want on how good or bad that is. But at some point in the past, blizzard stakeholders wanted money, and analysis most likely showed them this way is the way to do it.

That said, I've never played diablo 1 or 2, and I'm having a blast in 3. It's like Single player WoW, been looking for a game for aaaaages. sad, had the beta since it became beta (fun having blizzard dev on your facebook friendslist), but only started playing this week..

[Misiok]

@Nalkor - this is Activision we're talking about. They never cared about their games' longevity. You paid the overpriced price, and they stopped caring about you in an instant.

[Nalkor]

@Misiok - Please don't remind me, I'm still hating how Prototype 2 suddenly made Alex Mercer the villain, and how Troika got no real development time for VtM: Bloodlines. The biggest problem is Bobby 'Make Call of Duty require an online subscription for more money' Kotick.

[konfeta]

Hardcore players/vets be definition are a minority. There's more money catering to casuals. We can argue all we want on how good or bad that is. But at some point in the past, blizzard stakeholders wanted money, and analysis most likely showed them this way is the way to do it.

If that was true, Diablo 3 would be a plain ol' subscription or micro-transaction driven game. Diablo 3 isn't ignoring veterans. It's just favoring a specific type of veterans (the guys who play ARPGs for the item hunt). It kind of shows, there are plenty of old Diablo fans who absolutely love what Diablo 3 is, and plenty of those who hate it.

[Paladin]

Played around with some of the other classes... Wizard is hilarious... Frost Nova, Arcane Orb. Kill umpteen mobs with one blow! The Jar of Souls was hilarious with him... Got like a 40 kill massacre before dying because I forgot about health potions

[Starfisher]

I'm conflicted about this.

It looks better in person than it does in videos for some reason, so the cartoonishness/WoW feel to the characters is less of a problem for me than I anticipated. I still keep expecting them to accidentally reference WoW/WC3 somehow, but I guess that's the cost of 3D. I also wish the dungeon was actually dark, but whatever.

That said, the skill system redux strikes me as.. bizarre. As near as I can tell, you never have to make a choice for your character, which means that there's no reason to have more than one of each character class - you can't make a WW barb instead of a Fury barb. The total lack of choice seems like it's designed to destroy replayability. I'll level on barbarian, he'll have all the skills, and while I have to make the "choice" of which one to have active, I can swap that in a second instead of having to make a new character.

I mean I spent ages making characters to use the cool items I found with other chars, but now, I won't have to do that after the first few times. So... I dunno. Seems like the longevity of the game is ridiculously shortened.

[Waterbizkit]

Played around with some of the other classes... Wizard is hilarious...

Yeah. I originally thought I was going to attach myself to the Barbarian and never look back, but after a run-through with the Wizard I'm not sure. I got mine to level 9 and was having fun with my arcane orb, wave of force, and over-charged magic missile. Something about it felt more satisfying than my cleaving, rending, leaping barbarian... and that's saying something.

I'm hoping to get one more play-through before the open beta ends. I've already tried the barb, the wizard, and the demon hunter.... and now I'm thinking of trying the monk. I had thought I'd never want to touch the class, but given my surprise with the wizard I'm now thinking that the beta is the right time to give the bearded martial artist a try.

[Starfisher]

One thing that cracks me up about these games is the whole "you start naked" thing. The wizard starts out looking like Harry Potter, but the barb and the monk apparently were wandering around literally naked prior to seeing the shooting star.

Also, "magic pants" still makes me laugh.

[Waterbizkit]

Female wizards start out mostly naked as well. Then again female anything in these games are typically mostly naked, even later on when they have "good armour", haha. And yes, magic pants are a little funny. When I found myself telling my friend "No. I don't need those, I already have a great set of magic pants." I couldn't help but laugh.

[konfeta]

That said, the skill system redux strikes me as.. bizarre. As near as I can tell, you never have to make a choice for your character, which means that there's no reason to have more than one of each character class - you can't make a WW barb instead of a Fury barb. The total lack of choice seems like it's designed to destroy replayability. I'll level on barbarian, he'll have all the skills, and while I have to make the "choice" of which one to have active, I can swap that in a second instead of having to make a new character.

You still have to make choices, they just lost permanence. The closest you will come to "permanent" choices is gear selection that helps you define a particular build.

As for the replayability argument, there is another perspective on this: How many total builds did you actually end up playing with in other ARPGs out of max available? Diablo 3 loses play time in terms of having to create new characters to try out new builds, but the converse is, you have a massive time entry barrier removed for playing new builds. In short, time you would have spent leveling new chars for new builds will be spent on actually playing (more of) them.

Oh, also:

I also wish the dungeon was actually dark, but whatever.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcnIIVYSuLM

I trust that satisfies your inner Necromartyr!

Spoiler

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/08/06

[Mokino]

I mean I spent ages making characters to use the cool items I found with other chars, but now, I won't have to do that after the first few times. So... I dunno. Seems like the longevity of the game is ridiculously shortened.

That's why they have four expansions planned. I'm not trying to snide, that's the honest truth.

[konfeta]

Source...?

[Afoxi]

The beta amused me enough that I'll buy it.

Since the game's pricetag is going to drop shortly in about six years just like every other Blizzard game, I figured I may as well buy it either at release, or soon after (depending on when RL friends pick their copies up).

[Malachi]

Hmmm yeah, after actually playing the beta, I found that the game looks much less WoW-inspired than I thought. The atmosphere is definitely Diablo worthy, the music and ambient are excellent, and even the Witch Doctor and his pets look wicked enough to play. I really liked the interactive and mostly destructible enviroment.

So, I guess I will be buying after all. Still wishing for some kind of hard mode available from the start, but that's probably not going to happen.

[Afoxi]

Ok it might just be me, but anyone else noticing a shit ton more monsters around the acts? I'm seeing twice as many elites compared to the last two days, and I'm actually finding it challenging enough to have to use Health Potions on a decently geared DH.

[ph03nIXx]

@Malachi

How dare you to like the Witch Doc? I still can't stop to hate blizzard for making the summoner the most ridiculous looking class of them all... because all good players choose class from looks alone ;-)

While I was in the crowd of buyers - and still am concerning gameplay - I have a problem: 10-15 mins in, my grafics card locks up and shuts down the whole system. Anyone having similar problems and found a workaround?

[Malachi]

Don't get me wrong, I'm still raging about Blizz choosing the Witch Doctor over my beloved Necromancer. It's just that I thought his looks and overall feel will annoy me to the point where I would sooner choose another class as my primary, but that is not the case.

[Mokino]

@konfeta, it appears that was an early rumour

Now it's only two expansions with the first one out by 2014. http://www.diabloiiiblog.com/rmah/di...e-short-lived/

Of course that's also only Blizz's plans for the next couple years. If the game remains popular a 3rd or 4th expansion could happen.

[DeafMute]

[Starfisher]

How many total builds did you actually end up playing with in other ARPGs out of max available? Diablo 3 loses play time in terms of having to create new characters to try out new builds, but the converse is, you have a massive time entry barrier removed for playing new builds. In short, time you would have spent leveling new chars for new builds will be spent on actually playing (more of) them.

Well that's the thing. Once I actually finished the build... I mostly stopped using it except to help other people level their stuff. I mean what was the end game content for D2? Cow runs? You did those to level your character to the point where you could use the cool shit you found, at which point you did cow runs to help other people do that, until you found a cool thingie that made you need to make a new character.

Then you'd go level up again.

The process of leveling up was the entire game once you beat it once. They seem to have removed that completely, and I'm still fuzzy on why.

re: darkness: no I don't mean I want everything to be GRIMDARKBROWN, I mean I want the light radius to actually be enforced. The dungeons all have this weird ambient glow about them. In the circle of light that you can see, fine, make it glowy and cartoony, but outside of that, make it BLACK or at least much, much darker.

[Afoxi]

I have a feeling there will be a demographic of players who WOULD play Witch Doctors, given their current aesthetics/theme.

[DeafMute]

Well with 10 character slots, thats enough for 1 of each sex for all 5 champions
5 for gameplay 5 for pvp if you want. or 5 for hardcore. Think its enough but time will tell.

Coming back to people lolin about our heroes starting naked, ever stop to think it was the loot goblin stole our shit whilst we slept on our way to the new tristram? ala~golden axe style.
How I will choose to see things.

I think one of the possible reasons for blizzs new team not wanting us to relevel characters is simply because we'll have access to all skills, and we can do whatever build we please and going into hell or inferno will definatly weed out the strong from the weak when it comes to teamwork and playstyle/build. Remember in inferno youll gain a temp buff to gold and magic find upon each champion packs demish upto a cap. but if you change even 1 of your skills you lose the buff. Meanign some champ packs youll be strong at killing others youll get your ass handed to you, or youll have a build were you are inbetween, take abit of damage but wont kill them quickly, factor in 3 other champions alongside you and you can build to cover a wide range of strengths, my barbs weakness could be covered by the witch doctors debuffs, monk heals to keep us going. wizz pure dmg to melt our foes whilst the monkl and barb get stuck in. The game will come alive in later differculties and im glad for it.

Let the noobs and cry babies stay in nightmare or normal.

[Paladin]

Man... I've played all the characters up to level 5+, most are at 9-10... And I like them all. It's weird, there are usually classes I don't like in a game like this, but they're all really awesome.

However, for a completely new player, I'd have to say play Barbarian, because he's so versatile, weapon wise, you can use most of the drops you find, and then later you can use him to buy decent starter gear for classes that have a harder time finding gear (Wizards, for instance. In all the time I've played the beta, which admittedly isn't all that much, but gotta be 10+ hours, I got one wand drop. One. And you can find bows and crossbows for the Demon Hunter, but quivers and hand crossbows are rather thin on the ground.

On the other hand, if you level a barbarian to 10 and clear the whole beta act, you can buy hand crossbows and wands and whatever you want, and a lot of it is usable from level 1, or level 3, which is quick to get to.

Actually, now that I think about it... The Witch Doctor is probably second easiest to gear, because knives/daggers drop constantly. Voodoo dolls less so of course... But Dagger/Shield is certainly a viable gear option for him anyway. And speaking of the Witch Doctor... He looks stupid, but he might just be more hilarious than the wizard. Area snare + jar of spiders? That's some quality lulz right there. I found a 13 dps dagger while playing with my Barbarian, and it had no minimum level, and I found him a voodoo doll as well (Much like the wand, one drop, in my entire playtime). The spiders did just outrageous damage once they got to critical mass... It was pretty sick. And <3 zombie dogs

Demon hunter is also fun, but moreso when you get a quiver, or dual hand crossbows.

Barbarian is fun... Mine wasn't leaping though. Cleave/Rend/Stomp for maximum minion pwning lulz. Although Rend is good against bosses too... The bleed helps, and it wipes out any minions that might be swarming you of course. Stomp->Rend->CleaveCleaveCleaveCleave tends to make huge groups of enemies disappear. Oh, and my Barbarian's name is "Zerkules". Because puns are awesome.

Monk is fun... But those punch knuckle weapons are nearly as hard to find as wands. And unlike wands, you can't buy them from any of the vendors :/

I'd actually keep playing... but it's almost 6am, and I need to go to bed.

[DeafMute]

Concerning the wands, I think this is why youll want to level up the blacksmith. he can craft all youll need. he can make a lvl 5 wand, his journeyman teir gear is lvl 15however.
LIke others im not so keen on my monk running around with 2 swords out then punching. making fish weapons and staffs all the more appealing.
I fount jar of spiders annoying, simply for the sound it constantly makes again and again. which is what youve to do to make it earn its skill place on your action bar.

Barb is awesome, I do like monk too but I fount using that teleport punch runed skill to give off a slight headache with how it skipped right to the monster. If only blizz could add a template effect like that which they use for 7 sided strike (monk body outline, black center mass with a holy aura outline) just to make it read better, easing our eyes into the rapid transion. Or am I the only one who has an issue with this?

[Paladin]

For me, the only problem I had with the Monk's teleport strike was that I tend to spam the mouse button (Unnecessarily, I know... I could just hold it down, but I'm an old arcade button masher from my youth and old habits...), so I'd tend to teleport and then run past because I'm clicking in the wrong spot after the teleport.

But if you're playing a bit more precisely, a well executed tele-punch into the roundhouse kick is pretty awesome.

Oh, and you should see how fast the Monk punches with dual wielded punch weapons. Dude's a little buzzsaw of doom.

The Barbarian I tend to use a two hander on, because Cleave. I mean, if I'm usually hitting multiple enemies, I feel that high damage per hit is better than lots of faster but lower damage attacks. Though, against a boss there's an argument to be made for dual wielding fast weapons with the knockback/stun skill instead of cleave. I'd recommend daggers... The Witch Doctor's signature weapon is counterintuitively higher DPS than almost anything else at any given level.

[Starfisher]

Yeah that was weird too. My brother and I played a WD (him) and a barb (me), and he was doing more damage than me for a substantial period of time because he had some stone dagger of death while my combat tank only had a piddly two handed sword.

One thing I don't like about the new skill layout is that it doesn't seem to tell you how much damage you do with the skill. As a wizard, the magic damage seems to scale with the weapon you have enabled, so I was using a two handed sword for a while. But there's no "hover over the skill, see damage stats" feature that I could see. The result seems to be that wizard weapons like wands have to do 15+dps, which puts them right up there with barbarian weapons, in order to make the spells do damage. But then I can whack people with the wand for the same damage my barbarian is doing with his epic fury/cleaves? Zuh?

[DeafMute]

Starfisher and anyone else who wants to know which skills do what damage.
Go into the options and toggle ON Elevtive mode on. Lets you place skills wherever you want and also above that switch on advanced tooltips.
Will give you %dmg modifiers.

[konfeta]

Go to options, turn on advanced tooltips. It will tell you the weapon damage % of skills. The UI is actually fucking atrocious when it comes to conveying information about skills, but I suppose that is in spirit of Diablo 2's Lying Character Screen. People been doing tests, the way it works is:

1. Regular, spammy attacks do your ((flat damage from gear + base weapon damage)*gear ED% bonuses) * skill multiplier (175% of weapon damage on Arcane Orb for example) * primary attribute multiplier (1% per Int point on Wizard/WD for example) * other multipliers. Your attack speed directly gives you your cast rate. Some skills have an inherent, hidden modifier that speeds up their speed (Like fists of thunder are about ~1.4x faster than your actual attack speed).
2. Damage spells on cooldown do the same as above, except they also factor in attack speed (so if you attack 2 times a second, it will double the damage of that spell) into the damage because of the cooldown.
3. Damage over Time spells that are NOT on cooldown use weapon damage rather than weapon DPS to scale. You can cast more Haunts/Blizzard with higher attack speed, but it won't actually increase your damage output against any single target because two identical DoTs from you won't stack on a person. Don't remember how it works in parties.
4. Channeling spells are a bit more complicated and have attack cycles with x attacks per cycle, but the gist of it, they scale like normal spells - higher attack speed means you do more damage events and it costs you more resource.

Well that's the thing. Once I actually finished the build... I mostly stopped using it except to help other people level their stuff. I mean what was the end game content for D2? Cow runs? You did those to level your character to the point where you could use the cool shit you found, at which point you did cow runs to help other people do that, until you found a cool thingie that made you need to make a new character.

Then you'd go level up again.

The process of leveling up was the entire game once you beat it once. They seem to have removed that completely, and I'm still fuzzy on why.

The reason is ostensibly that they wanted to make the game fun enough to play at level 60 for its own sake. As in, when you pick a new build (you might still have to farm items for it), you spend a few days or more of actually playing it because you find it fun to play. It remains to be seen whenever that will work out. What you could try doing is retire your universally overpowered pieces of gear come Inferno completion and start Inferno fresh with hell gear on a new build.

Also, they did say that Inferno is not their only end-game solution, so we *should* be getting stuff later in patches (at the very least, we know PvP is coming and I have never seen a poster who played it diss it as boring). I am hoping for stuff like challenge modes/dungeons that are actually difficult for maxed out characters.

[Starfisher]

I suppose it will all hinge on how the gear scales with difficulty. If their goal is to make the game fun and challenging on its own, without the clinical grinding of D2, then you'll have to be able to actually use drops in NM and Hell instead of having them just be screen-clutter. There were only a few builds in D2 that could go all the way through the game untwinked, or at least not without the benefit of a shitton of grinding on the side. It'll be intriguing to see what the drops look like in Hell - more prefixes and suffixes? Maybe crafting really gets good towards the end?

[konfeta]

Well, they are actually balancing the entirety of normal through inferno this time around (the reason Diablo 2 was so broken after Normal? They never actually tested it, they largely theorycrafted the numbers), so you will have to keep upgrading your gear regularly (Drops, crafting, AH).

As far as datamining shows, as you progress through the game, more affixes unlock and the most rare/crafted items can have is 6. Affixes scale up all to level 60; up until you finish hell you will largely be looking for basic weapon upgrades, in Inferno it seems that you will need to scale by finding items with better affix combos and better rolls.

And, if anything, I hope drops catch up to crafting. Crafting items in the beta seems to be far more likely to give you the good stuff. Hell, look at what you could do with it before they nerfed it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHorZSXg4QU

IIRC, people legitimately one shot the skeleton king.

[DeafMute]

Starfisher I think the item drop usefullness will scale like this.

Crafted, Rares, Set Items, Legendaries.

[Starfisher]

@deafmute: Yeah they had that in the previous diablos, but it was exceptionally rare to get many Unique/good rare items without grinding boss battles. If the goal of the game is to make the actual game fun/challenging in Nightmare/Hell/Inferno, they're going to have to change that somehow. From konfeta's post, it seems like the magic and rare drops will probably get better and better as you go, whereas in D2 by the end of nightmare just about every drop that wasn't unique was worthless.

[konfeta]

Well, that's not strictly true. Godly uniques/runewords came in the expansion, vanilla Diablo 2 rares were king. And even then, blue/rare weapons could spawn with high enough ED% modifier that they could be valuable. Certain rare items were also popular (like Circlets and Amulets) in the era of uber items.

In Diablo 3, the intent is that at level 60, you are using a mix of rares/crafted/uniques. I originally was hoping that it would be like this:
1. Rares with most potential to get best raw attributes.
2. Uniques have hand-crafted stats/arrays that are situationally powerful.
3. Crafted in between (a few guaranteed attributes, rest random).

But it looks like rares/crafted items are essentially identical, just different ways to acquire the same thing; and unique will have some guaranteed affixes and others random. As long as Blizzard remembers to actually give unique items unique mods, this system should still work out fine (the datamined affix list is decent as far as vanilla magic/rare items go; but if that is all the game has on items, Diablo 3 item game will be considerably poorer and less interesting than Diablo 2 or Titan Quest. It would actually be as boring as Torchlight's; which could be fatal to the end-game IMO.)

Outside of game challenge in later levels, I would say that how Blizzard handles unique/set items is currently the biggest unknown factor that could easily ruin the game.

[DeafMute]

Starfisher, biggest change I can see over D2 boss runs to D3s loot runs is that you arnt running bosses all the time.
How it will go is something like this.
Fully farmed team of 4 champions enter inferno with good enough gear to not die in a split second. Workign together they start from the beginning of act1, kill off champion packs which have atleast 4-5added skills (teleport,knockback and many MANY more) each elite pack thats killed will give a buff to the team which increases gold find and magic find. this stacks upto a certain amount and killing X ammount of elite packs triggers that act boss group to drop even more loot.

So rather then aimlessly running the same boss, youll be pushed into hunting elite enemy packs which in inferno are said to slap your shit, the bonus you get from bosses will just be extra icying on the cake.

[Starfisher]

aahhhh, I see. So instead of Mephisto and Pindle runs, you're clearing levels, and the game has some sort of mechanic to increase your MF as you go.

That should certainly cut down on the bots.

[konfeta]

Yes. The mechanic is called Nephalem Valor, and it gets wiped if you swap skills, so it's an incentive to not suck at making builds. Personally, I think it should also be wiped on death, but whatever, Blizzard believes that repair costs from death will be punishment enough.

Heh, I wonder how many people conditioned to just fly straight for the boss will keep doing so.

[Paladin]

3. Damage over Time spells that are NOT on cooldown use weapon damage rather than weapon DPS to scale. You can cast more Haunts/Blizzard with higher attack speed, but it won't actually increase your damage output against any single target because two identical DoTs from you won't stack on a person. Don't remember how it works in parties.

Hmm. Playing the Witch Doctor, his spider swarms definitely seem to stack, and they could be considered a spammed DoT, but perhaps they don't count as one. Then again, the impact of the jar itself seems to do some damage, so there's reason to keep chucking them either way.

In other news... I'm in withdrawal

----------

Also, you know what Blizzard should really do? A Diablo style game set in the Starcraft setting. Small party of heroes versus hordes and hordes of Zerg and crap. Character classes could be like Marine, Ghost, Zealot, Dark Templar, Templar...

[konfeta]

Spider Swarm is weird. They are like summons, but untargettable, and actually scale very well with attack speed (imagine 4 on 4 WD arena fight with stacked attack speed to fire off 2 jars per second per WD). DoTs are things that essentially say "does damage per second" or "does damage over x seconds."

Withdrawl for another 3 weeks. Have fun!

Diablo style game in Starcraft, well, I am sure there are a billion custom maps in SC2 that already did that.

[Paladin]

Meh, not the same.

[DeafMute]

3 weeks eh?
And to think Ive been following this game for almost 4 years now. how time flies.

[Afoxi]

Heh, I wonder how many people conditioned to just fly straight for the boss will keep doing so.

I was playing with old friends and i kept ticking each and everyone of them off (and they all kept ticking me off) during the open beta by exploring EVERY nook and cranny and killing elites, while they kept rushing past everything.

I have a feeling Nephalem Valor will hit them pretty hard when they figure it out.

[konfeta]

Well, in the beta at least, rushing the SK is the fastest way to level because of the quest XP, I can understand doing that.

But on release? Oh boy, maphack is going to be even more popular now. There is apparently a version already out that lets you see champions on the minimap.

[DeafMute]

With the RMAH on the line, I think blizz will come down like a sledge hammer on anyone who tinkers with the game.
Bare inmind "Warden" isnt active atm. it will be upon release.

[Nalkor]

I'm pretty sure people will figure out how to bypass Warden in attempts to figure out how to get the maphacks and such to work. Blizzard can claim all they like, but people will circumvent these things if they see it as an inconvience to them.

[konfeta]

Well, Warden seems to work in WoW just fine.