My problem isn't really with MF, it is what MF suplimented. I personally don't like how item dependent Diablo became. How many SoJ's, zod runes or whatever you have or need. The fact that almost every build is gear dependent with the exact gear you need. Stuff like that. The drops in Diablo should be random and it should never be as easy to get such specific gear. MF and MF runs is what caused this aspect of Diablo. In my opinion, the focus of the game should be killing, not obtaining specific gear and drops.
As for fixing it I have come up with three options that could be used to deter the item finding scenario.
1. Lower the rate of MF. stacking MF became to easy and too potent. They need to make sure that you are not able to raise MF as high as you could in D2 which will lower it's importance.
2. Add a system like the exp bonus for killing combos but with items. The more monsters you kill, you raise your chance for better loot. This will help add the loot system to the games concept of killing hordes of monsters.
3. Give a reason for killing tons of monsters. Through in-game rewards, battle.net rewards or achievements so that later on the games life there is still a reason to actually play through the game rather than just doing MF runs.
Again, these are all just my opinions. I do understand that some people love the item findig aspect of the game. However, when these items become the focus of the game it changes the game for people who actually want to play it by creating the previously mentined problems.
I absolutely love the MF aspect of Diablo 2. However, I see where you are coming from, and especially #2 intrigues me as something really cool that could be implemented. Because of the randomness of item drops, MFing will always be in the game I think, and giving a bonus for chain kills would be a really cool and fun way to go at the problem of the repetetive farming aspect of it.
My brother, best friend, and I will all be in the same room installing. While it is installing we will start a mega Metallica playlist cranked up so loud that we can barely hear our own thoughts.
I will create a Wizard.
My brother will create a Barbarian.
My best friend is undetermined at the moment, but we don't want to have to compete with gear much.
Playing private games we will start out and get through the game as quick as possible on softcore.
As soon as we unlock hardcore, we will all reroll on hardcore. As soon as we get to a decent level, we will begin our quest for the top. My best friend will play the economy, he is a master of it, while my brother and I magic find.
It is destined to be a night/week of unimaginable laughter, fun, and god-like music.
I think that PvP in Diablo 3, if it exists outside of what it did in Diablo 2, could not exist like PvP in WoW.
Arenas will not work because Diablo is a much faster paced game, and the lack of healing type classes will make games go much too quickly.
I think the best system would actually mimic something like Halo 3, or other first person shooters. Specifically I think a deathmath play style would be extremely fun in an game like Diablo. Each team (or player if it is ffa) will spawn, and the winner is not determined by the last team (person) standing, but rather most kills obtained, or most kills when the timer expires. Of course players could respawn, powerups items could potentially respawn ect.
I believe this is the system that would work most for the Diablo universe because Diablo has always been a game that is fast paced, and combat is over extremely quickly. It does not take a long time sink to get on and find a match, and the matches don't have to last very long. People can play in sessions of under an hour and feel like they did something meaningful.
Teams (players) should then be able to go up or down in rank (level, think again Halo style, or even WC3 style), and get matched against people of their own level.
Rewards can and should exist. However, the rewards should be purely cosmetic, or trivial at best. Immortalized in ladder lists, a special pet (if pets exist), titles ect. However, nothing that would make people "grind" for pvp gear or such.
Of course other game variants could work in this system including king of the hill, territories, capture the flag, ect.
Trading:
First, a currency should exist.
If said currency does exist, I propose a system that is sort of like a "Market". This would exist by players (or possibly guilds) buying a space in a designated area or something similar. You can then place items in a storage place, maybe under an NPC like character, and set a price for your items. This npc or whatever can be interacted like a normal NPC, and anyone and everyone can shop there.
The Stands should stay up when the person logs off. Maybe items can be placed on a counter or something, where youc an visibly display a certain amount of items (of course costing $).
"We know where our breads buttered on this License... we totally understand that people want to collect cool loot, to trade with other people..." Sounds like good news to me.
I really like what some of you have done with the before and after pictures. I definetly think they should make the colors a little bit darker/narrower pallete of colors. However, it truly is beautiful how it is also and won't make or break the game for me.
Age of Conan will be out soon. Early access is this Saturday, I hope it lives up to the hype I have for it now. If anyone cares I am rolling a Tempest of Set on Deathwhisper with a handful of WoW friends. If you are getting in the early access and want someone to quest with you should definitely roll a character on Deathwhisper with us!
Anyone out there into DOTA? If so look me up I'll play a game or two with you. I play on west account name SpeshulerMe. I'm not on a whole lot, but you are bound to catch me sometime!
So there was an official announcement/slip/whatever you would want to call it that WOTLK will be out late 2008.
I quit about a month and a half ago with the pretense that I would start back up in WOTLK. Don't know though, now that it is coming up maybe I won't. I think I finally beat the addiction :D.
I am thinking about starting to play diablo 2 again. I typically only play on hardcore, which is sort of the reason why I quit awhile back. Are the realms as laggy as they used to be? I hated leveling/gearing up a hardcore character just to have a 5 second lag spike to your death. Nothing like not having any power over whether you live or not.
I like the exp rate in diablo 2. I would like to see that rate continue over on to diablo 3. However diablo 3 will most definetly have a lot more content, therefore there would need to be more levels. Plus there arn't very many games out there that have over 100 levels, and I think that would be cool having a vast choice of where to allot points/stats/whatever a lvl intels. As far as how long it would take to level, since the rates would be the same it would probably be easier to level to say 99 simply because there will be content higher than hell baal runs, yielding higher exp rates. However those last few levels should be a grind like 95-99 are. On a side note, I think I would like to see "end game content" available to players who arn't maxed out, pretty much like diablo 2 is. Compared of course to the juggernaut that is wow, where more than half the content is literally unaccesible until you hit the max level.
Edit: I just noticed... what if I would want say 55 to be the max level? There isn't even an option eh?
Since I haven't seen much here about pvp/arena addons here are the only ones I use and have obtained a 2400 personal and team rating.
Nature Enemy Castbar (NEC): A good castbar addon that keeps track of all cooldowns used by everyone around you. If you learn to use it correctly it can definetly mean a win over a loss.
Proximo: An arena addon that is very basic but nearly 100% necessary for synchronized play with your team mates. It creates bars for every enemy that you or a teamate targets (up to 5 in a 5v5). The bars are color coded for their specific classes. The bars show the health in real time of every enemy. You are also able to simply click on the appropriate bar to target them allowing easy target switching.
Healer specific addons:
CTRaid: This can be any raid interface helper that you want. I use CTRaid because it shows exactly what information I need/want to know, in a very simple fashion with very little clutter. If you configure it right, you can have it show exactly what information you want. First and foremost it shows all of your party members health (mana bars are optional). Second you can configure what buffs you want to be aware of on every aprty member (up to 4 with priorities set). This is very useful if you want to glance quickly if your hots/buffs ect have faded. Finally, I find it the best decursing helper in the game. You can configure it to where the name of the person who gets a curable debuff on them turns bright red, then shows the debuff on the normal buff table. Many people like using specific addons/macros for this, but I find I am quicker than those addons and more alert of other situations.
Caster Weapon Swap: This is a nifty little addon that if used properly can help tremendously with mana problems in long fights, especially in 5v5 competition. The addon's main purpose in arena is to automatically swap two sets of main hand weapons, specifically one with the enchant "Spellsurge" on it. Spellsurge is an enchant that grants 100 mana over 10 seconds to every person in your party. The proc rate is extremely high (somewhere like 50%), but the proc has an internal cooldown of 50 seconds. The addon automatically detects the spellsurge buff, and changes the weapons directly after a cast is initiated. This is important because swapping weapons generates the GCD, but you can swap weapons while GCD is already initiating, so with this addon you will have no impact on the amount of spells you can cast from GCD downtime. If every caster or simply healer in your party has this enchant/addon it is similar to having a static +70 MP5 per person. Very game breaking.
The most memorable moment for me was way back in 1.09. I had just had most of my best gear stolen by a real life friend. I join a cow game and realize it is already over when I go down the portal. I notice stuff on the ground and see it is a full set of great gear (shafstop, fury balrog blade, perfect vamp gaze ect.) I get excited and pick it up quick as the guy transfering joins the game. I leave the game and get a whisper from him asking for the stuff back. I tell him no. Well, I start feeling really self conscious about it (my morals tell me this is just like stealing in real life) and I join his game and give the stuff back. He says thanks, tells me to put him on his friends list and follow into his game. I do, and he gives me a inventory full of raven spirals and I am instantly richer than I have ever been.
I thought the hype was fun. Sure most of us still had that little part of us that wished it was something more. But hearing of the story of blizzard acquiring it ect is pretty cool. Although you might not think this is a big announcement, this compared to a simple announcement of D3 in the works is not a huge jump. This is about as close as you can get without a leak. Plus like MD said, having such a friendly transfer of ownership probably shines good in blizzard's eyes for future news/keys/interviews.
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I absolutely love the MF aspect of Diablo 2. However, I see where you are coming from, and especially #2 intrigues me as something really cool that could be implemented. Because of the randomness of item drops, MFing will always be in the game I think, and giving a bonus for chain kills would be a really cool and fun way to go at the problem of the repetetive farming aspect of it.
I will create a Wizard.
My brother will create a Barbarian.
My best friend is undetermined at the moment, but we don't want to have to compete with gear much.
Playing private games we will start out and get through the game as quick as possible on softcore.
As soon as we unlock hardcore, we will all reroll on hardcore. As soon as we get to a decent level, we will begin our quest for the top. My best friend will play the economy, he is a master of it, while my brother and I magic find.
It is destined to be a night/week of unimaginable laughter, fun, and god-like music.
- Of course other game variants could work in this system including king of the hill, territories, capture the flag, ect.
Trading:I quit about a month and a half ago with the pretense that I would start back up in WOTLK. Don't know though, now that it is coming up maybe I won't. I think I finally beat the addiction :D.
Edit: I just noticed... what if I would want say 55 to be the max level? There isn't even an option eh?
Nature Enemy Castbar (NEC): A good castbar addon that keeps track of all cooldowns used by everyone around you. If you learn to use it correctly it can definetly mean a win over a loss.
Proximo: An arena addon that is very basic but nearly 100% necessary for synchronized play with your team mates. It creates bars for every enemy that you or a teamate targets (up to 5 in a 5v5). The bars are color coded for their specific classes. The bars show the health in real time of every enemy. You are also able to simply click on the appropriate bar to target them allowing easy target switching.
Healer specific addons:
CTRaid: This can be any raid interface helper that you want. I use CTRaid because it shows exactly what information I need/want to know, in a very simple fashion with very little clutter. If you configure it right, you can have it show exactly what information you want. First and foremost it shows all of your party members health (mana bars are optional). Second you can configure what buffs you want to be aware of on every aprty member (up to 4 with priorities set). This is very useful if you want to glance quickly if your hots/buffs ect have faded. Finally, I find it the best decursing helper in the game. You can configure it to where the name of the person who gets a curable debuff on them turns bright red, then shows the debuff on the normal buff table. Many people like using specific addons/macros for this, but I find I am quicker than those addons and more alert of other situations.
Caster Weapon Swap: This is a nifty little addon that if used properly can help tremendously with mana problems in long fights, especially in 5v5 competition. The addon's main purpose in arena is to automatically swap two sets of main hand weapons, specifically one with the enchant "Spellsurge" on it. Spellsurge is an enchant that grants 100 mana over 10 seconds to every person in your party. The proc rate is extremely high (somewhere like 50%), but the proc has an internal cooldown of 50 seconds. The addon automatically detects the spellsurge buff, and changes the weapons directly after a cast is initiated. This is important because swapping weapons generates the GCD, but you can swap weapons while GCD is already initiating, so with this addon you will have no impact on the amount of spells you can cast from GCD downtime. If every caster or simply healer in your party has this enchant/addon it is similar to having a static +70 MP5 per person. Very game breaking.