Please no. The impact of things you mentioned, made D3 such a bad game in the first place. RMAH, oh god Now, from patch to patch game is getting better. I would say rune words, necro class, even talent trees, etc are the nostalgia stuff many player would appreciate.
Cheers.
Rune words? Sure.
Necro? Sure.
Talents Trees? No thank you. I don't have time to re-level another character when I want to play a different spec (D2). However, I might be game if I can change trees for some sort of gold fee.
You do realize that 50% of current is nowhere near the old drop rate? It was raised several times in a number of patches - sometimes by as much as 300%. If you want oldschool, you get at best 5% to 10% max.
Add to that, legendary items used roll with a much, much higher window on stats, so, some could have half of the maximum in a stat, making it worthless.
And, let's also remember that in the old system drops were not weighted to class, so you could get a wand with strength, or a huge 2h with Intelligence. Statistically, the vast majority of legendary items (the 5 - 10% you get on a good day) were completely worthless to a character, so forget gearing up yourself.
And, since the Blues have already said limiting items to bind is part of what allowed for more flexibility in design, prepare to lose the orange affixes. Yup, legendary items become special looking rares again. Get ready to roll a few hundred rares each in several of your slots to get geared. And, if we're going old school, that means materials are all different based on difficulty, and crafting costs go up by 500%.
I miss D3 vanilla too. The interesting thing is nearly all my D3V friends never came back, even after RoS. Makes me wonder how many of them would have still been playing now if D3 wasn't changed so heavily from how it was originally.
D3 vanilla obviously had plenty of issues, but it's not like everything is great with the current variation of D3 either. I could probably list 50+ issues with D3V, but here are some of the main things I miss from D3V:
1) solo being viable.
In D3V I can log in and play when I want. Now I have to log in and find a group to do anything even remotely efficient.
2) gearing choices.
MF vs actual stats was a pretty big choice. There were also more times when taking offense vs defense was actually a choice. Current gear comes with everything, and everyone wants the exact same rolls. Also there were actually choices of what to waer, and yellows could be better than legendaries. Right now sets make most non-sets useless. Every yellow item is bad.
3) skill choices.
Right now the only viable skills are the ones that go with the sets.
4) longevity.
This season it took like 10 hours per alt to pick up enough gear to get on the solo leaderboard. Seriously screwed up how fast you get gear right now. If gear drops so fast, the seasons need to be significantly shorter. I'm not going to say the drop rates of D3V were perfect - they're not. However, the current system is just way too short to gear up. The funny thing is the game is hardly even about drops anymore. Like 90% of my gear came from the cube or kadala.
-----
The current version of D3 really feels too much like a game on training wheels. The game is missing choices, everyone is looking for the same items. Everyone runs nearly the same comp for exp and progression. It's really kind of like there's 1 path to follow.
I like how you guys read this and assume RMAH, where the OP mentions nothing of the sort.
I for one like the concept of player trading, not through the AH, as well as a decrease in drop rate.
I do not however support the removal of Kadala. Instead, I would like some portions of this game to be fixed, where others are variable. I would rather Kadala cost 500 bloods for a 100% chance at a legendary armor of your choice, and 750 bloods for a legendary weapon/jewelry of your choice. At this point, where you can convert set items and roll deaths breath into legendary items, why not to be honest?
Incorporate my suggested Kadala improvement with player trading via a trade menu, not an AH, and I really like where the game could go. Right now, community is dead, games like Diablo thrive if there is a strong player community.
add a trading area for materials/non ancient items, provide a way for gold to be useful as sitting on 10's/100's of billions of gold and nothing to spend it on is pretty terrible tbh, the AH was perfectly fine, the RMAH was the issue, such a shame the cornerstone feature of D3 had to go because clueless people failed to understand this fact, i miss the AH i really do, it was so awesome for getting rid of excess materials/buying materials you needed (remember when pages/books were needed for crafting etc).
as for the other changes OP proposes, hell no, the loot that drops is fine as is, there is no need to nerf any drop rates, kadala is in a world of her own and while is majority of the time annoying, is a necessary evil, the only thing that needs "fixing" in my eyes in regard to items is that non ancient items should be unbound, and ancient items are BoP, as it would really help with not only being able to get hold of starter legendaries at the start of a season for example, but also as a way to help friends/clan members out with some interim loot if they get shafted by RNG or whatever.
I agree with many points, especially about solo benig actually viable and not abysmally inefficient compared to group these days. I have also some points i don't agree and/or need better explanation.
- gearing choices: choosing between MF and offense means you either farmed for gear or progressed with your char and it was simply awful. Ok, it was based on a completely wrong base system, and it would probably work now, but still i don't think that gathering two sets of gear and using one to get the second is a good approach. Most players like the game as a "log in, do stuff, log out" thing, and this woukld just add an arbitrary time layer which doesn't accomplish much.
- skill choices: i agree completely. Sets are cool but at this point we don't have builds, we have sets and the skills are chosen based on them. Sets should have been something on the line of "your fire damage is increased by 500%" and have only like 4 pieces bonuses (while being part of a 6/7 pieces set) so you could use a set and combine it with a bunch of legendaries to actually make your build. This anyway won't stop the search for the "best one" and i simply think that most players will in any case just run with the cookie-cutter spec.
- longevity: i agree that gear is extremely fast to get, but imho season duration has nothing to do with it. There are many players that start the season immediately, farm 24/7 and complete verything in a week, but most players play like 1 hour/day and they still need a chance to at least complete the journey, which requires some time if you have very short sessions. Too many stuff to do would become annoying, but a too short season would just make playing time matter much more and imho it's not a good meta to follow (as it is now paragon farming).
I agree with many points, especially about solo benig actually viable and not abysmally inefficient compared to group these days. I have also some points i don't agree and/or need better explanation.
- gearing choices: choosing between MF and offense means you either farmed for gear or progressed with your char and it was simply awful. Ok, it was based on a completely wrong base system, and it would probably work now, but still i don't think that gathering two sets of gear and using one to get the second is a good approach. Most players like the game as a "log in, do stuff, log out" thing, and this woukld just add an arbitrary time layer which doesn't accomplish much.
- skill choices: i agree completely. Sets are cool but at this point we don't have builds, we have sets and the skills are chosen based on them. Sets should have been something on the line of "your fire damage is increased by 500%" and have only like 4 pieces bonuses (while being part of a 6/7 pieces set) so you could use a set and combine it with a bunch of legendaries to actually make your build. This anyway won't stop the search for the "best one" and i simply think that most players will in any case just run with the cookie-cutter spec.
- longevity: i agree that gear is extremely fast to get, but imho season duration has nothing to do with it. There are many players that start the season immediately, farm 24/7 and complete verything in a week, but most players play like 1 hour/day and they still need a chance to at least complete the journey, which requires some time if you have very short sessions. Too many stuff to do would become annoying, but a too short season would just make playing time matter much more and imho it's not a good meta to follow (as it is now paragon farming).
The way I saw it, gearing was more a trade of mostly defensive stats from MF. In which I played a completely glass cannon MF stacked DH with low IAS. I know melee classes had a requirement on how much defensive they needed just to survive, so for them maybe they had to lose lots of offense or not use MF at all. My entire game playing was focused around that, because I sold most of my good gear (trifectas) on RMAH while sticking with my low attack speed MF glass cannon gear.
You're probably right about the way skills and sets could have been. It won't stop people from going to a cookie cutter spec, but it will let more players try different specs that have a chance to become the cookie cutter. There could also be the result where more variations of the cookie cutter exist.
Yea, I don't really know about longevity, I don't know if there is a solution to it. I don't know how much most of the people even play. One things that caught my attention though, is that you mention "complete the journey". I wonder why Blizzard made a journey that probably everyone can finish. When they first announced the season journey, I actually thought it'd be a system so everyone ends at different parts of the journey. Before the season started, I was thinking the season journey might be the thing to end the whole mindless paragon farm. It sounded like it'd be the goal to try and get as far as possible during the season rather than something most people finish in a couple weeks.
I miss D3 vanilla too. The interesting thing is nearly all my D3V friends never came back, even after RoS. Makes me wonder how many of them would have still been playing now if D3 wasn't changed so heavily from how it was originally.
D3 vanilla obviously had plenty of issues, but it's not like everything is great with the current variation of D3 either. I could probably list 50+ issues with D3V, but here are some of the main things I miss from D3V:
1) solo being viable.
In D3V I can log in and play when I want. Now I have to log in and find a group to do anything even remotely efficient.
2) gearing choices.
MF vs actual stats was a pretty big choice. There were also more times when taking offense vs defense was actually a choice. Current gear comes with everything, and everyone wants the exact same rolls. Also there were actually choices of what to waer, and yellows could be better than legendaries. Right now sets make most non-sets useless. Every yellow item is bad.
3) skill choices.
Right now the only viable skills are the ones that go with the sets.
4) longevity.
This season it took like 10 hours per alt to pick up enough gear to get on the solo leaderboard. Seriously screwed up how fast you get gear right now. If gear drops so fast, the seasons need to be significantly shorter. I'm not going to say the drop rates of D3V were perfect - they're not. However, the current system is just way too short to gear up. The funny thing is the game is hardly even about drops anymore. Like 90% of my gear came from the cube or kadala.
-----
The current version of D3 really feels too much like a game on training wheels. The game is missing choices, everyone is looking for the same items. Everyone runs nearly the same comp for exp and progression. It's really kind of like there's 1 path to follow.
I feel I must disagree here. It is quite a fallacy to assume that your friends left because of the changes. Changes to d3 have tried to make the game more rewarding and give us more varied content (which I think has extended it's longevity tremendously). I'd wager that your friends were simply done with diablo and started playing other games or cut back on gaming altogether.
1) Furthermore, you mention solo, but your argument does not make sense to me. You can still log in and play when you want. Sure, if you want max XP, you'll need a group. If you want to push your gems to 80+, you need a group. However, you can dick around in campaign mode, push solo GRs, play without being bothered by others, or simply join public bounties and speed rifts. It seems like with time, you've become obsessed with efficiency (given that you can gear a character in 10 hours for leaderboard would support that you do that very well). Maybe you wanted to be efficient in vanilla too, which entailed farming content that was too hard for a goblin and pray for clusterfuck RNG lv 63 6 affix yellows, or some other rediculous exploit that we had back then that mostly had to be done solo because groups were not rewarding.
2)Gearing choices: I was very happy to finally be able to do away with cheesy tactics like switching gear at the last minute for 'more efficient gameplay', or gimping yourself just for those couple of legendaries. That did not make for fun and rewarding gameplay, and blizzard agreed and removed it. The same discussion can be held for XP gear, and the extreme consequences it has for high end players in terms of plvls. Furthermore, we still have to make stat choices, how much CDR on gear, how much vit, getting that extra armor roll just to survive big hits. To me, the big difference is that the community is highly informative. The build section on this website alone is incredibly informative, and streamers like Quin have the time and knowhow to think about all these stat choices for us. This does not mean there are less choices, it means that information is more readily available on what the best option for each choice is.
Sure, sets are key, because they give an extra dimension to skill usage that would be harder to implement otherwise. And sets have always been a big part of diablo. Sure, we could do without them, but i see no reason why it is not good to have strong legendaries and sets that are stronger than rares. Remember all the flak blizzard got when rares would roll better than legendaries? Maybe every yellow is bad to you, but i'm always happy to get more resources or to gear my leveling character.
3) skill choices: that's an overly simplified view, and again a matter of information that we get from the 'professional' community. There will always be a most efficient build, and i'm glad that blizzard aims to rotate this with different patches, that increases the longevity greatly.
4) as a said previously, if you can gear your character in 10 hours, you are indeed very efficient. However, that makes you part of a small minority that is that efficient, and for the rest of the playerbase that has maybe 10 hours a week or less this gives them the chance to actually decently gear up in a season, maybe even try different classes. The fact that so much of your gear came from craftables tells me that you've been very efficient in acquiring bloodshards and mats, because you usually have to force thousands of shards down kadala's throat before she shits out a decent item.
TLDR: All in all, to me it seems like you're obsessed with efficiency, and playing for maximum efficiency indeed limits the rich experience that you can have with the game, because you need to do everything in a certain way to be efficient. I see no blizzard-based solution for this, because there will always be a most efficient way to play.
I had friends from other games that came to Diablo because it was so heavily hyped. I had people I played with at the start, and most of us liked the game. Progressing gave the feeling of progression, because it felt like we worked towards it. I didn't hear any complaints from them, but as the nerfs to content started rolling in, players started leaving. It simple felt like progression was being cut out from the game. Personally I already finished Inferno on launch week before the nerfs came in, but it felt kind of retarded to just give hand outs to people that didn't even spend time to farm for gear. I've seen some of them log on to other various Blizzard games from time to time, but just not back into D3.
As for my comment on solo, I like playing efficiently. At the same time I don't like carrying people and I don't like being carried. In vanilla I played a DH and I could farm any zone in inferno with pretty low deaths by the second week of the game, YET it still felt like I was putting effort into doing it. I don't think I necessarily became obsessed with efficiency since I was all over efficiency before I even heard they were making a game called D3. Before D3 I played StarCraft, and to keep my rank (high masters), every build I played had to be played efficiently.
Hmm, I'm not sure it's due to more people being more informative or not. I think the only D3 video (aside from my own) that I watched all the way through was the recent Striken one from Quin. Which of course I'm too lazy to bother snapshotting anyways, but it's info that was interesting anyways. Generally speaking, no offense to streamers/youtubers, most videos don't seem to provide anything useful that a glance at the leaderboard wouldn't tell me. Back pre-RoS I've put builds together and shared videos on youtube as well, but now it feels like the builds practically build themselves. Can't agree with you on the sets things, but I'm sure a lot of people do like sets the way they are now.
As far as skills goes, I wish they'd let us hide our gear/skills that were used for GRift clears. I feel like the leaderboards probably have a lot more impact on skill choices than the "professional" community. It just seems worthless to experiment when builds simply get copied as soon as they're used.
I wore sage set since like day 2 of the season. The DB monk was up and running before my main monk, so I had a good number of DBs for gear. Instead of aiming for ancients, I geared my characters using reroll set, which let me have my 4 classes all on the leaderboard early in the season. I'm not really playing anymore since I don't like paragon grind and it's that time of the season where high paragon players will just take over the leaderboards.
I actually like your TL;DR, and it's probably why I don't like this current variation of D3 for as long as some players do. Sometimes I do wonder how it would feel being not part of the 1% in games I play, though in reality there's no way to change it without a feeling of under-performing. I did quit WoW after I no longer had my teammates that could make it to gladiator as well, since it no longer felt like there was reason to play. However, because of the way D3 is structured with seasons and with a solo leaderboard, the starts of seasons always feels like even ground to play again. For the first couple weeks things like paragon levels aren't different enough to have heavy impact on leaderboards. So even as a primarily solo player, you don't have to sit in a group all day. The easiest way Blizzard could fix this is by putting a cap or soft cap on paragon levels, or by significantly shortening the season length. I play at the start of every season, but the fun simply doesn't last even half way through the season.
Sets should [...] only like 4 pieces bonuses (while being part of a 6/7 pieces set) so you could use a set and combine it with a bunch of legendaries to actually make your build.
+1 on this. They did something like that in late WoW: TBC, when they added more pieces to existing sets but in "lesser" slots (boots, bracers and belts). That allowed players to keep their bonuses but equip the new chests, pants etc. This would be great in D3. Imagine green bracers being no instant-souls or making use of all those second-best chests, pants, helmets. Suppose we have this situation because they focused more on graphic models for those sets, which I personally couldn't care less about.
Adding on sets: the fact bonuses are strictly tied to specific skills/synergies is what makes current builds strong. If bonuses were "neutral" then you could have multiple classes wearing the same set and combining it with class specific legendaries, opening up even more builds. The fire damage example was pointing this way: any class wioth fire damage can concieve a build focused on it; sure there are classes that won't have any use for it, but there will be many sets and it would be fine to have a selection of them available for your character; some class-only sets would be still fine if present.
The main point is that sets should be increasing playaer raw power, and not the efficiency/power of determined skills. Tbh, if the plan to releasee more and more sets i will still be fine as i don't play competitively; though in the "let's try to improve the game for everyone" spirit these are my 2 cents.
@Tianzi: well, now your point about longevity is perfectly clear. D3 is a time based game more than everything - if you want to compete you need to do a lot of stuff as fast as possible -> here's where efficient gameplay kicks in.
The fact is that i don't compete and have a way more relaxed way to play, but still i look for a decent degree of efficiency due to the very limited time frames i have for playing it. And maybe that's also the reson why i enjoy the game a lot, having small time i find myself to have plenty to do. And still i want to complete the journey so i can move onto other games before next season XD
TL;DR: different playstyles open to very different views on the game.
I miss D3 vanilla too. The interesting thing is nearly all my D3V friends never came back, even after RoS. Makes me wonder how many of them would have still been playing now if D3 wasn't changed so heavily from how it was originally.
D3 vanilla obviously had plenty of issues, but it's not like everything is great with the current variation of D3 either. I could probably list 50+ issues with D3V, but here are some of the main things I miss from D3V:
1) solo being viable.
In D3V I can log in and play when I want. Now I have to log in and find a group to do anything even remotely efficient.
2) gearing choices.
MF vs actual stats was a pretty big choice. There were also more times when taking offense vs defense was actually a choice. Current gear comes with everything, and everyone wants the exact same rolls. Also there were actually choices of what to waer, and yellows could be better than legendaries. Right now sets make most non-sets useless. Every yellow item is bad.
3) skill choices.
Right now the only viable skills are the ones that go with the sets.
4) longevity.
This season it took like 10 hours per alt to pick up enough gear to get on the solo leaderboard. Seriously screwed up how fast you get gear right now. If gear drops so fast, the seasons need to be significantly shorter. I'm not going to say the drop rates of D3V were perfect - they're not. However, the current system is just way too short to gear up. The funny thing is the game is hardly even about drops anymore. Like 90% of my gear came from the cube or kadala.
-----
The current version of D3 really feels too much like a game on training wheels. The game is missing choices, everyone is looking for the same items. Everyone runs nearly the same comp for exp and progression. It's really kind of like there's 1 path to follow.
Fully agree with you on Your Points. Vanilla was far from Perfect (RMAH was the biggest error Blizzard made just because they wanted extra income), but good drops felt special, there was actually some gearing options and most of all, more challenge (not just getting newest 6-piece from Kadala in 2 days of gaming). I for one enjoyed the slow progress in inferno towards Diablo and when I finally got there it felt like an achievement. Also liked the fact that you could farm in any level of the game With decent efficiency (despite teh fact that there was "the best zone" with every patch). Now it's just an endless generic pipe called the rift/grift...
Don't get me wrong, the current game is still good and fun to play, but as you say "With training wheels".
My thought is that the "legendary" word is actually not suitable for those items, they are so common that in some hours of play you are geared and the "legendary feeling is totally gone.
I would love they introduce a real new brand kind of items, a real legendary items with the feeling of actually being legendary and epic pieces of equipment( imo ancient legendary is just a cheap way to continue item progression) after all that's actually the real essence of diablo, the joy of getting a real mythical item.
What i miss from the "old good days" is that it took time to get gear, now in S4 its like get gear for the first 3weeks, then 2months of paragon farm, that isnt FUN, diablo is about the item hunt, not exp farm
My thought is that the "legendary" word is actually not suitable for those items, they are so common that in some hours of play you are geared and the "legendary feeling is totally gone.
I would love they introduce a real new brand kind of items, a real legendary items with the feeling of actually being legendary and epic pieces of equipment( imo ancient legendary is just a cheap way to continue item progression) after all that's actually the real essence of diablo, the joy of getting a real mythical item.
So if you add another layer of legendaries (knock knock - ancients) with the insane RNG in the game you dont solve anything unless those new legendaries had precisely fixed rolls and once they dropped theyd simply be perfect. If they had such insane rng as the current ones youd still have to drop 10 of them until you got one "good", except now they wouldnt drop once per 5 hours, but once per 50 hours, but youd still drop 10 of them until you found one that was good and youd once again feel like those items are common and not "legendary".
That's what i meant a real legendary item, really rare but an outstanding item. The amount of rng that involves lengendary items is way too much and as you say one you get it you will probably have to farm it again because there are high chances it has bad stats, not to mention the fact that if that legendary is not ancient you have to get it ancient and good rolled eventually.
@ frolk, I honestly agree with you, i had a lot of fun gearing and getting legendary items, i found it more satifying than just mindlessly farm paragon, not to mention that it has no limit.
That's the feeling i have, my experience and opinion is that i had a lot of fun starting d3 and getting legendaries, after i got my char geared i felt something was lost and then started to get more bored than usual.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
-Reduce legendary drop rate by 50%.
-Remove kadala from the game.
-Open trade (blind on equip / blind on trade)
why, you miss the days you could simply buy your entire set of gear from gold farmer?????
I didn't have much fun those days, maybe the topic should be "Bring me back what I consider the old good days"?.
To the OP, I can't support any of the things that you suggested.
Rune words? Sure.
Necro? Sure.
Talents Trees? No thank you. I don't have time to re-level another character when I want to play a different spec (D2). However, I might be game if I can change trees for some sort of gold fee.
You do realize that 50% of current is nowhere near the old drop rate? It was raised several times in a number of patches - sometimes by as much as 300%. If you want oldschool, you get at best 5% to 10% max.
Add to that, legendary items used roll with a much, much higher window on stats, so, some could have half of the maximum in a stat, making it worthless.
And, let's also remember that in the old system drops were not weighted to class, so you could get a wand with strength, or a huge 2h with Intelligence. Statistically, the vast majority of legendary items (the 5 - 10% you get on a good day) were completely worthless to a character, so forget gearing up yourself.
And, since the Blues have already said limiting items to bind is part of what allowed for more flexibility in design, prepare to lose the orange affixes. Yup, legendary items become special looking rares again. Get ready to roll a few hundred rares each in several of your slots to get geared. And, if we're going old school, that means materials are all different based on difficulty, and crafting costs go up by 500%.
Gr8 b8 m8, I r8 8/8.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA NO.
Although I guess if we brought back trading you might be able to get rid of those rose tinted goggles you're wearing.
Jebus on ice skates troll much op.
I miss D3 vanilla too. The interesting thing is nearly all my D3V friends never came back, even after RoS. Makes me wonder how many of them would have still been playing now if D3 wasn't changed so heavily from how it was originally.
D3 vanilla obviously had plenty of issues, but it's not like everything is great with the current variation of D3 either. I could probably list 50+ issues with D3V, but here are some of the main things I miss from D3V:
1) solo being viable.
In D3V I can log in and play when I want. Now I have to log in and find a group to do anything even remotely efficient.
2) gearing choices.
MF vs actual stats was a pretty big choice. There were also more times when taking offense vs defense was actually a choice. Current gear comes with everything, and everyone wants the exact same rolls. Also there were actually choices of what to waer, and yellows could be better than legendaries. Right now sets make most non-sets useless. Every yellow item is bad.
3) skill choices.
Right now the only viable skills are the ones that go with the sets.
4) longevity.
This season it took like 10 hours per alt to pick up enough gear to get on the solo leaderboard. Seriously screwed up how fast you get gear right now. If gear drops so fast, the seasons need to be significantly shorter. I'm not going to say the drop rates of D3V were perfect - they're not. However, the current system is just way too short to gear up. The funny thing is the game is hardly even about drops anymore. Like 90% of my gear came from the cube or kadala.
-----
The current version of D3 really feels too much like a game on training wheels. The game is missing choices, everyone is looking for the same items. Everyone runs nearly the same comp for exp and progression. It's really kind of like there's 1 path to follow.
I like how you guys read this and assume RMAH, where the OP mentions nothing of the sort.
I for one like the concept of player trading, not through the AH, as well as a decrease in drop rate.
I do not however support the removal of Kadala. Instead, I would like some portions of this game to be fixed, where others are variable. I would rather Kadala cost 500 bloods for a 100% chance at a legendary armor of your choice, and 750 bloods for a legendary weapon/jewelry of your choice. At this point, where you can convert set items and roll deaths breath into legendary items, why not to be honest?
Incorporate my suggested Kadala improvement with player trading via a trade menu, not an AH, and I really like where the game could go. Right now, community is dead, games like Diablo thrive if there is a strong player community.
add a trading area for materials/non ancient items, provide a way for gold to be useful as sitting on 10's/100's of billions of gold and nothing to spend it on is pretty terrible tbh, the AH was perfectly fine, the RMAH was the issue, such a shame the cornerstone feature of D3 had to go because clueless people failed to understand this fact, i miss the AH i really do, it was so awesome for getting rid of excess materials/buying materials you needed (remember when pages/books were needed for crafting etc).
as for the other changes OP proposes, hell no, the loot that drops is fine as is, there is no need to nerf any drop rates, kadala is in a world of her own and while is majority of the time annoying, is a necessary evil, the only thing that needs "fixing" in my eyes in regard to items is that non ancient items should be unbound, and ancient items are BoP, as it would really help with not only being able to get hold of starter legendaries at the start of a season for example, but also as a way to help friends/clan members out with some interim loot if they get shafted by RNG or whatever.
I agree with many points, especially about solo benig actually viable and not abysmally inefficient compared to group these days. I have also some points i don't agree and/or need better explanation.
- gearing choices: choosing between MF and offense means you either farmed for gear or progressed with your char and it was simply awful. Ok, it was based on a completely wrong base system, and it would probably work now, but still i don't think that gathering two sets of gear and using one to get the second is a good approach. Most players like the game as a "log in, do stuff, log out" thing, and this woukld just add an arbitrary time layer which doesn't accomplish much.
- skill choices: i agree completely. Sets are cool but at this point we don't have builds, we have sets and the skills are chosen based on them. Sets should have been something on the line of "your fire damage is increased by 500%" and have only like 4 pieces bonuses (while being part of a 6/7 pieces set) so you could use a set and combine it with a bunch of legendaries to actually make your build. This anyway won't stop the search for the "best one" and i simply think that most players will in any case just run with the cookie-cutter spec.
- longevity: i agree that gear is extremely fast to get, but imho season duration has nothing to do with it. There are many players that start the season immediately, farm 24/7 and complete verything in a week, but most players play like 1 hour/day and they still need a chance to at least complete the journey, which requires some time if you have very short sessions. Too many stuff to do would become annoying, but a too short season would just make playing time matter much more and imho it's not a good meta to follow (as it is now paragon farming).
No, but not just no. More like
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eO3XmuVry4
(hope it's english, no sound enabled )
http://eu.battle.net/d3/en/profile/Sol77-2972/hero/66110450
You're probably right about the way skills and sets could have been. It won't stop people from going to a cookie cutter spec, but it will let more players try different specs that have a chance to become the cookie cutter. There could also be the result where more variations of the cookie cutter exist.
Yea, I don't really know about longevity, I don't know if there is a solution to it. I don't know how much most of the people even play. One things that caught my attention though, is that you mention "complete the journey". I wonder why Blizzard made a journey that probably everyone can finish. When they first announced the season journey, I actually thought it'd be a system so everyone ends at different parts of the journey. Before the season started, I was thinking the season journey might be the thing to end the whole mindless paragon farm. It sounded like it'd be the goal to try and get as far as possible during the season rather than something most people finish in a couple weeks.
I had friends from other games that came to Diablo because it was so heavily hyped. I had people I played with at the start, and most of us liked the game. Progressing gave the feeling of progression, because it felt like we worked towards it. I didn't hear any complaints from them, but as the nerfs to content started rolling in, players started leaving. It simple felt like progression was being cut out from the game. Personally I already finished Inferno on launch week before the nerfs came in, but it felt kind of retarded to just give hand outs to people that didn't even spend time to farm for gear. I've seen some of them log on to other various Blizzard games from time to time, but just not back into D3.
As for my comment on solo, I like playing efficiently. At the same time I don't like carrying people and I don't like being carried. In vanilla I played a DH and I could farm any zone in inferno with pretty low deaths by the second week of the game, YET it still felt like I was putting effort into doing it. I don't think I necessarily became obsessed with efficiency since I was all over efficiency before I even heard they were making a game called D3. Before D3 I played StarCraft, and to keep my rank (high masters), every build I played had to be played efficiently.
Hmm, I'm not sure it's due to more people being more informative or not. I think the only D3 video (aside from my own) that I watched all the way through was the recent Striken one from Quin. Which of course I'm too lazy to bother snapshotting anyways, but it's info that was interesting anyways. Generally speaking, no offense to streamers/youtubers, most videos don't seem to provide anything useful that a glance at the leaderboard wouldn't tell me. Back pre-RoS I've put builds together and shared videos on youtube as well, but now it feels like the builds practically build themselves. Can't agree with you on the sets things, but I'm sure a lot of people do like sets the way they are now.
As far as skills goes, I wish they'd let us hide our gear/skills that were used for GRift clears. I feel like the leaderboards probably have a lot more impact on skill choices than the "professional" community. It just seems worthless to experiment when builds simply get copied as soon as they're used.
I wore sage set since like day 2 of the season. The DB monk was up and running before my main monk, so I had a good number of DBs for gear. Instead of aiming for ancients, I geared my characters using reroll set, which let me have my 4 classes all on the leaderboard early in the season. I'm not really playing anymore since I don't like paragon grind and it's that time of the season where high paragon players will just take over the leaderboards.
I actually like your TL;DR, and it's probably why I don't like this current variation of D3 for as long as some players do. Sometimes I do wonder how it would feel being not part of the 1% in games I play, though in reality there's no way to change it without a feeling of under-performing. I did quit WoW after I no longer had my teammates that could make it to gladiator as well, since it no longer felt like there was reason to play. However, because of the way D3 is structured with seasons and with a solo leaderboard, the starts of seasons always feels like even ground to play again. For the first couple weeks things like paragon levels aren't different enough to have heavy impact on leaderboards. So even as a primarily solo player, you don't have to sit in a group all day. The easiest way Blizzard could fix this is by putting a cap or soft cap on paragon levels, or by significantly shortening the season length. I play at the start of every season, but the fun simply doesn't last even half way through the season.
+1 on this. They did something like that in late WoW: TBC, when they added more pieces to existing sets but in "lesser" slots (boots, bracers and belts). That allowed players to keep their bonuses but equip the new chests, pants etc. This would be great in D3. Imagine green bracers being no instant-souls or making use of all those second-best chests, pants, helmets. Suppose we have this situation because they focused more on graphic models for those sets, which I personally couldn't care less about.
http://eu.battle.net/d3/en/profile/Sol77-2972/hero/66110450
Adding on sets: the fact bonuses are strictly tied to specific skills/synergies is what makes current builds strong. If bonuses were "neutral" then you could have multiple classes wearing the same set and combining it with class specific legendaries, opening up even more builds. The fire damage example was pointing this way: any class wioth fire damage can concieve a build focused on it; sure there are classes that won't have any use for it, but there will be many sets and it would be fine to have a selection of them available for your character; some class-only sets would be still fine if present.
The main point is that sets should be increasing playaer raw power, and not the efficiency/power of determined skills. Tbh, if the plan to releasee more and more sets i will still be fine as i don't play competitively; though in the "let's try to improve the game for everyone" spirit these are my 2 cents.
@Tianzi: well, now your point about longevity is perfectly clear. D3 is a time based game more than everything - if you want to compete you need to do a lot of stuff as fast as possible -> here's where efficient gameplay kicks in.
The fact is that i don't compete and have a way more relaxed way to play, but still i look for a decent degree of efficiency due to the very limited time frames i have for playing it. And maybe that's also the reson why i enjoy the game a lot, having small time i find myself to have plenty to do. And still i want to complete the journey so i can move onto other games before next season XD
TL;DR: different playstyles open to very different views on the game.
Don't get me wrong, the current game is still good and fun to play, but as you say "With training wheels".
Leave drop rates as they are.
Reintroduce trading, but only for gold, no real money crap.
IMO it was still a mistake to introduce bind on account. But I agree with most other changes.
http://eu.battle.net/d3/en/profile/Twoflower-2131/hero/47336841
My thought is that the "legendary" word is actually not suitable for those items, they are so common that in some hours of play you are geared and the "legendary feeling is totally gone.
I would love they introduce a real new brand kind of items, a real legendary items with the feeling of actually being legendary and epic pieces of equipment( imo ancient legendary is just a cheap way to continue item progression) after all that's actually the real essence of diablo, the joy of getting a real mythical item.
What i miss from the "old good days" is that it took time to get gear, now in S4 its like get gear for the first 3weeks, then 2months of paragon farm, that isnt FUN, diablo is about the item hunt, not exp farm
@ frolk, I honestly agree with you, i had a lot of fun gearing and getting legendary items, i found it more satifying than just mindlessly farm paragon, not to mention that it has no limit.
That's the feeling i have, my experience and opinion is that i had a lot of fun starting d3 and getting legendaries, after i got my char geared i felt something was lost and then started to get more bored than usual.