This is entirely a Crushing Blow issue. If you freeze-frame through his kills, the highest non-CB crits that you see are around 5 million. (A very reasonable number for someone with 1.4M character screen DPS) Diablo has 33 billion HP (Not reasonable at all), which would require 6,600 crits to kill. Even if he had a castspeed of 2.5 casts per second, and each cast hit 6 times, that would only be 15 hits per second. Even with a 100% crit rate and without any movement, he'd take 440 seconds (7m20s) to down Diablo. Realistically it would take much longer.
On the other hand, each crushing blow deals 5% of current HP - up to 1.65 BILLION damage from full health. That is as much damage as 330 Crits. Even if the boss was at 1%, a Crush would deal as much damage as 3.3 Crits.
It is obvious that Crushing Blow is hilariously imbalanced at the moment. Because CB is a percentage of monster health, it doesn't matter how much HP you give the monsters (33 billion!). I'm sure Blizzard is aware of this and CB will soon meet the nerfstick.
Personally I'm not sure why they even brought back CB. CB is difficult to balance because it scales with monster HP. No matter how weak it is, there will be some level of enemy difficulty where CB vastly out-scales all other forms of damage. (Just ask the Ubers from D2)
I think Bounties need to be changed to encourage players to clear more of the zone. The whole point of bounties is to encourage exploration of zones that you normally wouldn't go to, which could reveal rare dungeons that you wouldn't normally see, which would be awesome. If it's just a "run, claim bounty, leave" then it is much less interesting.
A lot of the new affixes (monster shrine I'm looking at you) could lead to rampant item swapping. I hope they implement something like how swapping trinkets in WoW inflicts a significant cooldown on the trinket effect. Players should not feel like they have to carry around a bunch of swap items in their bag. (Same problem as pre-Paragon MF swap gear)
So the guy starts his mega-post by implying that "My opinions are more legitimate than yours because I have spent 1,800 hours playing this game," and he ends it by implying that "Blizzard always ignores its customers and is a terrible company".
Why doesn't he just quit playing?
***
A lot of the post is completely valid suggestions that most players would agree with (better minibosses, more meaningful low level loot, better skill damage display) but it's worded in a super-negative, almost whiny manner.
Some of it is hilariously unrealistic. For example, calling the game a failure because it's not 100% cheat- and bot-free is absurd. No computer system is 100% secure, especially not multiplayer games. Worse yet, the OP implies that anyone who has over a billion gold is a scammer or botter, and that's just stupid. A billion gold is worth at most $40 USD, there are people who have spent hundreds of $ just on the Hearthstone Beta, I'm sure the majority of multi-billion-gold spenders are real money spenders.
I would be shocked if they didn't remove Lifesteal in RoS, or at least nerf/change the mechanics to the point where it no longer works as a primary source of survivability.
Currently the game has too much ability to bypass gearing survival stats in favor of DPS stats. Instead they are forcing players to have to make more diverse and intelligent gear selections. That along with build changing items has me excited to actually play diablo 3, since the current model of stack a ton of DPS and barely enough survival to get by isnt very compelling.
* As long as trading is relatively "effortless", you will get loot 10-20x faster by selling every item you find, and only getting upgrades from the AH. This order-of-magnitude multiplier is a mathematical certainty, regardless of how bad or how good the loot is.
* Making trading "painful" (difficult and time consuming) introduces the possibility that you will get loot faster by playing self-found and not trading at all. This is a good thing.
* No matter how difficult trading is, there will always exist a certain gear level where trading is more efficient than self-found. However, it is possible that most players are optimal, or near-optimal with self-found play. (for example - nearly all "casual" Diablo 2 players played self-found or very close to self-found)
* In an "efficient trading" universe, you only get a 15% incremental value from sharing free items among a trusted social circle - the difference between AH tax and no AH tax. Yet you get 1000% or more value from selling items on the AH, compared to playing self-found. This creates a strong disincentive to share items with your friends. In D2 if my RL friend found an item that's godly for my Sorc (and he doesn't have a Sorc), he would give me the item for free. (and vice versa if I found something for his Zon) In D3 if he found a comparable item, he would look on the RMAH and see that it's $100, and there's no way he'd give me the item for free.
* In a "painful trading" universe, you get an extremely high incremental value from freely sharing items. If a group of 6 friends shares free items, each friend has access to a pool of items that's 6x as large as self-found. (+500%) This is a much larger efficiency benefit than barter-style trading (which is inefficient and vulnerable to mistrades and/or scamming). Therefore, everyone has an incentive to share, and having trustworthy friends is worth major in-game benefits.
Upon reading about the RMAH/GAH removal, I am shocked. Shocked that Blizzard would admit they made a mistake, and shocked that they would fix it. That takes a huge amount of chutzpah, and I give them a ton of respect for it.
I've heard a lot of people argue that "barter trade is really painful" and therefore it is a mistake to remove the AH's. I beg to differ.
To put it simply, trade needs to be painful or else itemization will suck. It doesn't matter what they do with Loot 2.0, the AH removal is actually the most important part. And here's why:
----- *** THE MATH ***
The simple mathematical fact is that AH's dramatically skew itemization. Let's assume there are 2 versions of the game with identical itemization: self-found and AH:
*Self-Found*: I find an "awesome" item every 20 hours of gameplay. However, 80% of the time, it's designed for a different class or spec. So I equip one "awesome" item after 100 hours of gameplay. Once I have one slot occupied by an "awesome" item, the next one that drops has a 1/12 chance of being a sidegrade. After two slots, each item has a 2/12 chance of being a sidegrade, etc.
Mathematically speaking, it will take me an average of 3,723 hours to find an "awesome" item in every slot.
*GAH*: I find an "awesome" item every 20 hours of gameplay. 80% of the time it's designed for a different class or spec, so I sell it on the AH and get 85% of the Gold required to purchase an equally awesome item. Better yet, I know exactly which item slot needs the upgrade. Even if I have terrible luck and never find a usable item in my life, on average I only need to play for 23.5 hours to earn enough Gold to purchase an "awesome" item.
Mathematically speaking, it will take me 306 hours to earn enough Gold to purchase an "awesome" item in every slot.
Using the GAH decreases the time needed to gear out your character by a factor of 12! Remember that this is a paper napkin estimate, completely ignoring the increase in kill speed and MF/GF for the GAH user.
If itemization was tuned to be "reasonable" for self-found characters, an AH user would have every item BiS after 2 weeks and could never get another upgrade again. In order to prevent this, Blizzard has to intentionally tune itemization to be extremely slow. (ie 3700+ hours to get all-BiS, the real number is probably even higher)
This is the reason why itemization is so bad on PC.
***
There are other reasons why the AH is so bad for itemization. One reason is that the AH is equally efficient regardless of your gear/wealth level. A player with 500k to his name can buy a whole bunch of 50k items just as easily as a player with 2B can buy a bunch of 200M items. This causes three harmful effects:
There is no gear level at which AH'ing is not optimal (by an order of magnitude or more). D3 players are AH dependent from "cradle to grave".
There is no change in optimal behavior from "poor" to "rich", therefore no sense of progression for the player.
Since it is easy to turn items into gold, players sell all their items and don't just drop them on the ground. Think about how often you saw people give away stuff for free in D2, and compare to how often it happens in D3.
This is completely different from a barter economy. Bartering requires time and effort, and is highly inefficient - this is exactly why it is good for the game:
Bartering takes a large time investment. At a poor gear level, you will get more items playing the game rather than hanging out in trade chat. Only high-value items are worth the time and effort required to barter them.
Therefore, the optimal behavior changes dramatically when going from a "poor" account (never barter) to a "rich" account (frequent barter). This gives a sense of progression.
Bartering requires a huge amount of game knowledge. Therefore, the "real money player" does not have an insurmountable advantage over "in game players", unlike with GAH/RMAH.
Bartering is a huge pain in the ass and a lot of players would rather play the game self-found. This is a good thing if you believe that videogames should be about gameplay.
The players who don't barter because it's too much hassle give away their items for free. This feels really good for the newbies in their games and generally helps the sense of "friendliness" and "community".
So anyone who thinks that Blizzard will introduce another "efficient" method of trading, I beg to differ. They may put in trade channels and game names, but they will remain inefficient, spammy, and painful - just like D2. It's not a problem, it's intentional.
Trade needs to be painful. It's the best way to improve the game.
I've noticed several MP0-2 farming videos using zombie bears as the elite group killer, and every time I see this I wonder "Why?"
Zombie Bears deals a lot of damage (up to 708%) but it is a really touchy spell. You have to position yourself in a way that funnels all 3 zombie bears onto the target. If your positioning is off, all three zombie bears could miss, and you end up spending a lot more casts to kill the target.
Wave of Zombies is an alternate zombie charger rune that deals 115%x3 damage (345% total), approximately half of zombie bears. All three zombies are guaranteed to spawn directly in front of you, so if you are next to an elite all three zombies will *always* hit. 345% damage is significantly better than the 236% of a single zombie bear. You don't need to worry about being out of position where your zombie bears aren't hitting. You'll always hit.
In my experience, Wave of Zombies clears low-MP elite packs much more reliably than zombie bears. While you never get the same amount of raw damage, you don't need it, low-MP elites are extremely fragile. It's more important to have consistent damage so you can kill it and keep moving.
Now that reflect damage no longer annihilates pet builds, fetish sycophants is a very good passive. The fetishes can add quite a lot of damage when you have 5-10 of them out.
I agree 100% that Plague Bats is the best way to proc fetishes. As long as you've got enough mana regen (easy with the Zuni 4pc) and a -Firebats Cost on your helmet, you can spam firebats all day long and they proc fetishes like crazy. Plague Bats deal considerably more damage than the other varieties of firebats (except cloud of bats which is melee range). If you lack survivability, plague bats is a great way to apply Bad Medicine debuff.
I've toyed around with taking Fetish Sycophants + Fierce Loyalty (gives all pets HP regen). Normally the Fetish Sycophants die off very rapidly to stronger enemies but fierce loyalty gives them enough survivability that you end up with boatloads of fetishes. Not sure if it's worth it but its hilarious to watch.
Changing itemization to make items higher quality does NOT make it more interesting or fun. Look at WoW. Every max-level DPS item is the equivalent of a D3 "Quadrafecta" - they all have Stamina, Primary Stat, and at least two of (Hit, Crit, Haste, Mastery). Itemization is very boring in WoW because every ilvl 496 epic is very similar in power to every other ilvl 496 epic. If every single item that dropped was awesome, then "awesome" very quickly becomes "boring".
What D3 needs is the opposite of super awesome items that appeal to everybody. What D3 needs is items that are more specialized and appeal to a very narrow niche.
As long as everyone wants exactly the same gear, everyone will compete for the same few stats. A relatively small difference in stats leads to an immense difference in sell price - just look at the sale prices for any Legendary. Even more importantly, there is nothing interesting you can do with gear. Unlike D2, you can't stack gear and turn an underpowered variant build into a decent farming build, or turn your class into a totally different class.
The best thing for Blizzard to do in an expansion pack would be to greatly nerf stats that benefit everyone (Primary stat, ASPD, CHC, CDB) and buff or add new stats that benefit specific skills, builds, or playstyles. (For example, "+% to Summoned Creature Damage", "+% to Single Target Melee Attacks", "+% to Bleed Damage", "+% to Damage over Time Spells", "+% to Ground Targeted Spells", "+% Damage to Enemies 30 yards or further", "+% Proc Damage", "+% Damage vs. Stunned")
=========================
Diablo 3 is a good game that has the potential to be great. The famous "Complete Diablo Fix" thread had a lot of suggestions, but it was written from a Diablo 2-centered worldview. For reference, http://eu.battle.net...ic/6444144744#1
I was wondering: what would Diablo 3 be like if it fully embraced its nature as a new game separate from Diablo 2? The following are my rather long ideas.
==================== TL,DR summary:
In order from smallest to largest game mechanic changes,
Challenge players to compete against one another in ladders and scenarios.
Make Nightmare and Hell relevant again.
Diversify loot. Eliminate the Quadrafecta. Stats should be a choice, not "all of the above".
Deisgn "loot sinks" to get rid of loot accumulation.
Embrace the action in ARPG. Monster attacks and player skills should function more like a Zelda, God of War, or Ninja Gaiden.
====================
1) Challenge players to compete against one another in PvE:
Competitive PvE has been a part of RPG culture for decades - in fact, long before videogames existed. Gygax's Tower. Moria/Angband. Final Fantasy Secret Bosses. Diablo 2 Ladder. World First C'Thun/Illidan/Heroic Lich King/Heroic Sha.
Diablo 3 has absolutely no mechanics for PvE competition. Inferno was beaten shortly after the game was released. Posting "4 MILLION DPS!!!!" videos on YouTube gets old fast. There is no ladder, no way for the most dedicated players to flaunt their insanity. Yet there is no reason for this to be the case. D3 could be an excellent competitive PvE game, and here's how:
Ladder: Not one, but many.
The argument against Diablo 3 ladders was that D3 loot is supposed to be "permanent", and having ladder seasons would make loot non-permanent. I will go into detail later on why permanent loot is a bad idea. The fact is, ladder was a very easy way for players to show off their insane competitiveness. Give players a choice between multiple different ladders with different objectives.
Ladders could be designed to be more like a leaderboard (ie, WoW Challenge Leaderboards) that shows elapsed time down to the millisecond.
Paragon Ladder, Unlimited: Shortest real time from Level 1 to 60(100). Can freely group and trade including with non-ladder players.
Paragon Ladder, Solo: Shortest in-game time from Level 1 to 60(100). Cannot group with other players but can exchange items from the Stash/AH.
Short Ladder, Unlimited: Shortest real time from Level 1 to 60. Can freely group and trade including with non-ladder players.
Short Ladder, Solo: Shortest in-game time from Level 1 to 60. Cannot group with other players but can exchange items from the Stash/AH.
Short Ladder, Ironman: Shortest in-game time from Level 1 to 60. Cannot group with other players. Cannot take items from the Stash/AH. Stuck on MP10.
Slayer Ladder, Solo: Shortest in-game time from Level 1 to beating Inferno Diablo on MP10. Cannot group with other players but can exchange items from the Stash/AH.
Slayer Ladder, Ironman: Shortest in-game time from Level 1 to beating Inferno Diablo on MP10. Cannot group with other players. Cannot take items from the Stash/AH. Stuck on MP10.
Slayer Ladder, Fixed Build: Shortest real time from Level 1 to beating Inferno Diablo on MP10. Once a skill is learned it cannot be unlearned, unless the character is transferred off-Ladder. Once a skill rune is learned it cannot be unlearned, unless the character is transferred off-Ladder.[/li]Items from restricted ladder (Ironman) should be transferrable to non-ladder characters (but not vice versa).
Scenarios: Faster than ladders.
A lot of us don't have the free time to compete in ladders. We should have an alternative means to compete. Scenarios would provide those alternatives.
Each Scenario would have its own Scoring system allowing players to score points for impressive performances. Your name would show up on a leaderboard just like any Flash or iPhone game. For example, "I'm #16,234 worldwide on the Reign of Fire survival!"
Dungeon Crawl, Random: An ordinary random dungeon (ie, Caverns of the Betrayer) with very high density of creatures and elites. Players would score points for damage dealt, killing sprees, etc. At the end of the scenario players would fight a boss and gain points based on how quickly they kill it.
Dungeon Crawl, Designed: These scenarios would have be hand-crafted levels, somewhat like a D3 version of Halo "Spartan Ops". Point scoring works as above. Because they are non-random they would be more competitive, but would have to drop less loot. (or players would learn to farm them)
Dungeon Survival, Random: Players are confined in a randomly picked area (ie, Skeleton King's Throne) and are faced with a never-ending spawn of random creatures and elites. Monster power increases by 1 with each round of spawns, and can increase to infinite values. Points are scored for every second alive, and also for damage dealt and elites killed.
Dungeon Survival, Designed: Same as above but non-random.
Speed Run, Random: A random dungeon populated with high difficulty creatures/elites, with a goal at the end. Players would be scored based on shortest time (down to the millisecond) to complete the speedrun. Some areas could be gated to force players to actually kill stuff instead of just running.
Speed Run, Designed: Same as above but non-random.
Scenario loot would be different from regular loot in that you wouldn't loot during the actual scenario (it would slow down your times). Instead, you get a certain amount of loot in a box at the end of the Scenario. The loot should be somewhat less efficient than plain farming. The idea is to give players something to do that gives loot but isn't pure farming.
====================
2) Make Nightmare and Hell relevant again.
A large number of Diablo 2 items and Diablo 2 builds were never intended to actually compete in the endgame (Hell Baal, Key Farming, and Ubers). Instead you had teleport builds that could clear Nightmare Andy/Mephy/Baal over and over for specific low level drops (SoJ, etc.) and builds highly optimized for farming Hell Countess or Hell Mephy. This is because low level stuff mattered.
Low level stuff doesn't matter in D3, largely because there is no reason to re-level a fresh character. This is a shame because the leveling process in D2 was a big part of the fun!
Frequently resetting ladders would encourage players to actually level new characters at a regular pace. In order to further emphasize lower-level items and builds:
Crank up the drop rate of low level Legendaries and Sets.
Give low level Legendaries and Sets more unique affixes.
Introduce mechanics that allow players to "upgrade" items, like Cubing Exceptionals into Elites.
Introduce recipes, quests, and/or scenarios that require farming of large masses of low level items. Burning SoJs for Uber Diablo would be a primitive example.
After PvP is implemented, implement Twink Brackets and "Turn off EXP Gain". We'll soon find out what is the Strongest Possible Level 20 (or w/e).
The Quadrafecta absolutely dominates D3 gearing because there is no other way to improve DPS.
Diablo 2 wasn't exactly perfect in this regard - most classes really had a Trifecta that looked like this:
Attackspeed or Castspeed, up to breakpoint.
Damage: For physical this was weapon damage + primary attribute, for casters it was +Skills
Buffs/debuffs: "-20% to enemy resistance", "Conviction Aura", "Amplify Damage Proc", etc.
However, D2 had the advantage of having different stats appeal to different players. An Amplify damage proc was amazing for a Bowazon but useless for a Lightning Sorc. Vice versa for +lightning skills.
Diablo 3's damage stats have one very interesting mechanic that D2 didn't, which is the multiplier effect of %CRIT and %CDB. %Crit doesn't do much good without %CDB. %CDB does absolutely no good without %Crit. I like this mechanic because it encourages players to commit to stacking DPS stats. Instead of removing Crit and CDB, we should add more stats so that we have a choice.
A few principles should be observed for the new damage stats:
Don't let too many damage stats spawn on the same piece. If a Hexafecta item exists, it will eventually become the "gold standard" because it is the best possible item regardless of your build. Multiplicative damage stats should be limited in overlap, just like how a weapon cannot spawn with +200-600 Arcane Damage and +200-600 Fire Damage at the same time.
Damage stats should be a choice, not an "all of the above". Alternative non-crit DPS stats should NOT crit, and should not work well with crit-heavy builds.
Damage stats should be supported by passives and runes. Weapon Mastery, Critical Mass and APOC strongly favor Crit builds. In an expansion pack, new passives and skills should be designed around the new non-Crit DPS stats.
I think the following stats could be balanced to be similar in power to Crit and CDB, without directly stacking with Crit:
% Inflict Deep Wounds: Bleed already exists in game but is weak. Change it to a Deep Wounds that deals a percent of weapon damage.
+% Bleed Damage: This modifier would improve the effectiveness of Deep Wounds as well as any existing Bleed procs and skills (Rend, etc).
+% On-Hit Proc Damage: This modifier would improve the effectiveness of everything from Hellfire Rings to the skeletons summoned by Wailing Host. It would also increase player abilities such as the Magic Weapon rune that says "Chance to arc lightning for 10% of weapon damage."
% Proc Effect on Hit: There should be enough pieces of gear with on-hit effects so that a player stacking Procs and +% Proc Damage could deal the majority of his damage with just procs. Procs should not be able to crit.
+% Damage vs Demon/Undead/Beast/Human: Make this affix a lot stronger, but make it stack non-multiplicatively with %CDB. So +100% Damage vs Demon and +100% CDB would only equal 3x base damage, not 4x.
+% Damage vs Stunned/Frozen/Feared/Confused: Make this affix very strong for CC-heavy builds but make it stack non-multiplicatively with %CDB. So +100% Damage vs Frozen and +100% CDB would only equal 3x base damage, not 4x.
====================
4) Design "loot sinks" to get rid of loot accumulation.
Everyone knows that D3 loot feels extremely weak compared to loot found on the AH.
This has nothing to do with drop rates or itemization mechanics. Instead, it's all about the durability of loot. Namely, good loot is indestructable. A sufficiently powerful item will exchange hands many, many times and never be vendored or sharded.
Therefore, any newly dropped piece of loot has to compete with every other piece of loot dropped since Diablo 3 was released. Any time Blizzard buffs loot stats and drop rates, the newly dropped loot feels stronger only for a short time until it becomes commonplace. If every piece of loot was godlike for 6 months, then every piece of loot would have to compete with 6 months' worth of equally godlike loot.
The one and only way around this is some form of permanent loot destruction. I would suggest taking a cue from Diablo 2 and introducing loot destruction through ladder competition. D2 took the primitive approach of doing a Reset every once in a while (destroying EVERYONE's characters and loot on Ladder). I would take the gentler approach of "optional" loot destruction:
Sealed Stash Ladder, Pennant Race: Players race from level 1 to 60(100) on permanent MP10. Upon character creation, loot may be transferred from your main stash to a "Sealed Stash". Any loot collected within a Sealed Stash game CANNOT be transferred to any other characters, it is effectively Soulbound.
At the end of each Sealed Stash season, the top X% players recieve a title, a portrait, and a special item that gives a bonus you cannot get anywhere else in the game. For example, a unique Charm that gives +10% MF/GF and can exceed the Paragon MF/GF cap.
====================
5) Embrace the action in ARPG.
When D3 was first announced, I recall Blizzard using an awful lot of action game terms to describe the gameplay. The names Zelda, God of War, and Ninja Gaiden were thrown around in several interviews. Right after the first Monk unveil, I imagined running around blocking fireballs and chaining mouse clicks into ridiculous Limit Break type combos.
None of that ever happened. The ability of melee characters to block incoming projectiles was rapidly removed from the game. Following this, melee became much weaker than ranged due to the ease of kiting. In response, Blizzard increased the size of player hitboxes and made it much harder to avoid enemy attacks with movement. This was a huge disappointment.
I still think that Diablo 3 would be a lot more fun if it played more like a true action game. For those who think that Blizzard servers are too slow to run an action game: Starcraft 2 is a lot faster paced (some would say too fast) than Brood War and it is online-only and doesn't lag much.
Melee abilities should work more like a fighting game, with a few basic melee classifications.
Jabs: Jabs would deal low damage but interrupt fierce and stagger attacks. This mechanic could include Fists of Thunder, Frenzy, Regular Skeleton and Demon hits.
Fierce: Fierce attacks would deal tons of damage and break Guard, but can be interrupted or run away from. This mechanic could include Wave of Light, Hammer of the Ancients, "overhead smash" slow monster hits.
Stagger: Stagger attacks have less attackspeed and damage than Fierce attacks, but can inflict snares, interrupt Fierce attacks and wear down Guard. This mechanic could include Crippling Wave, Cleave, and knockback/snare monsters.
Guard: Guard abilities would allow players to deflect ranged attacks and melee jabs, but remain vulnerable to fierce, stagger and grapple attacks. This mechanic could include Ignore Pain, Shield Skeletons, Shielding elites, etc.
Counter: A Counter ability can interrupt an enemy attack and deal massive damage/stun, but is useless if not used at the right timing. This mechanic could be used for Exploding Palm - its base damage is weak but it triggers the explosion immediately if used to counter a Fierce attack.
Ranged characters should be vulnerable because they can't Guard/Counter, not because they inherently take more damage.
Bullet Hell: Creatures should throw more projectiles and more melee attacks, but players should have a very small hitbox so they can dodge.
DPS Off: Creatures should have abilities that counter or reflect player projectiles, but with a notable "telegraph" so you can anticipate it and stop attacking.
Stutter Step: Ranged classes should have some abilities and/or passives that actually reward continuous movement over standing still. For example, a runed Acid Cloud that "saves up" damage stacks over ~3 seconds so that casting it every 3sec will deal almost as much damage as spamming, but with much lower mana cost.
Enemies need to have more interesting behavior:
Random Monster Onslaughts: Like the skeletons falling from the ceiling in the Keep Depths, and Winged Moloks descending in flocks throughout A3. Make these encounters fancier, with a wider variety of attacking monsters.
Random Monster Patterns: When trash monsters swarm you, have them come from all directions. Think of it like a "bullet hell" game rather than a traditional RPG. Some parts of Act 4 are fairly good at this. Do it in more Acts.
Special Monster Behaviors: Stuff like Goatmen beating on drums to become huge, it's fun and it changes the pace.
Traps that don't suck: Traps give a lot of flavor to Act 1 but honestly they are mostly unfun. The Act 3 fire grates are a random and crappy way to die. Make traps more entertaining to combat. Throw fires and lasers and sound orbs and plague pools at us, then give us a Resplendent Chest for surviving the traps.
Using Monster Abilities against them: What if you could dodge a Dark Berserker's smash and have it kill off one of the Dogs around him? That would be fun.
Random elite pack behavior could be more varied:
Make the existing SuperUniques much stronger and more lootable, much like the Keywardens already are.
Give them "AQ40/BWD" behavior where killing one gives the remaining elites more affixes.
Have some of them change behavior after reaching a certain health %.
Have some of them occur in a chain, where killing the first group of Elites automatically spawns a second pack.
Encourage players to actually fight storyline bosses. Better yet, encourage us to stay in game after killing a boss:
Change the less-exciting storyline bosses (ie Araneae) to be more fun to fight.
Give more bosses multiple phases with different abilities, such as Belial and Diablo.
Allow players to gain up to 7 stacks of Nephalem Valor. However, Elites and Resplendents stop giving stacks at 5. (you only need 5 for Keywardens) Storyline Bosses provide two stacks and can go up to 7.
Equalize monster density and elite density throughout the entire game, at least on Hell+Inferno. Cathedral, Caves of Araneae, Aqueducts etc should all be viable for farming. Put monsters in the monster-free zones like the area outside Caverns of Araneae.
Just a sketched (and not necessarily 100% accurate) example: Attack speed for Blizzard is kind of useless - you can cast Blizzard faster, but you still have to wait for its full duration because it doesn't stack, therefore basically rendering IAS useless for Blizzard. You want low APS but high sustained DPS. A CMWW wizard is the exact opposite: having 3.01 APS and decent APoC makes you almost invincible, but DPS is not that important (it's more important to have a good stunlock, once that works you care about how to actually kill stuff and increasing your DPS).
I think what I was trying to say in the OP is this:
- Blizzard wants players to have a way to DPS hard without stacking %crit and %CDB.
- They suggest in their 1.07 preview, that stacking Attack Speed and +Weapon Damage is a way to DPS without having %crit.
- However, this is wrong. Anyone with high (100k+) DPS has a ton of crit. The guys with world-champion (400k+) DPS will have tons of Crit, CDB, Aspd, and +damage.
- This is because all of the damage increasers are multiplicative. There is no "choice". You want "all of the above".
If D3 gearing is supposed to be a "choice" then there should be enough stats to choose from that you can't simply get "all of the above". That is why there needs to be other competing stats besides Crit.
Also, a DoT centric build does not necessarily have to be "slow killing". See poison nova necros and plague javelin zons from D2.
One line from the official Patch 1.07 preview sticks out as rather strange, and that is:
...Players often ask why their Sentry or Hydra doesn't inherit their Critical Hit Chance and Critical Hit Damage. The answer is that we want players to be able to build their characters in different ways, and we would rather Critical Hit Chance and Critical Hit Damage weren’t always automatically the right answer. While this is not something that will change overnight, "different stats for different builds" is a high-level design goal and introducing a very strong Ruby is a step in the right direction.
This sounds nice but it really isn't the case in the current D3 itemization. There are really only five ways to increase your DPS in diablo 3:
Weapon Damage
Primary Stat
%Attack Speed
%Critical Chance
%Critical Damage Bonus
Out of these, most of your weapon damage comes from your weapon (+/- offhand) and primary stat is mandatory on all pieces you wear. This leaves only three stats that actually increase your DPS. Skills that don't Crit basically lose 2 out of 3. There is no way to make up for the lost Crit.
The Blue posts make it seem like they want "weapon damage and attack speed" to be the alternative to "%Crit and %CDB". The problem is that weapon damage and attack speed multiply with %Crit and %CDB. Giving people the option to get damage and aspd doesn't make crit weaker, it means they will want all of the above.
=================
IMO: "giving players an alternative to Crit" will require the addition of competing DPS stats other than Crit and CDB. These alternatives already exist in game to some extent! Blizzard only needs to add a quadratic multiplier (like how CDB multiplies with Crit) to make it more of an investment. All of the alternative DPS stats should multiply with Primary Stat or else they won't remain viable at high gear levels:
1) Bleed Chance and +%Bleed Damage: Bleed exists on tons of gear but is currently very weak. What if it scaled with Primary Stat, and there was a separate +%Bleed Damage modifier? A player that stacked tons of Bleed would have very poor burst damage but very high sustained damage compared to a Crit player.
2) Proc Chance and +%Proc Damage: What if there was an affix that increased the damage of all procs? Everything from Hellfire Ring to Schaefer's Hammer to the skeletons summoned by Wailing Host. This would encourage alternative gear builds and make proc items more exciting - to some players but not others.
3) Crowd Control Chance and +%Damage vs CC: Chance to stun, fear, freeze etc all seem fairly weak right now, but what if there was an affix that increased player DPS versus incapacitated targets? This would not only be interesting gear-wise, but would encourage different skill builds to maximize CC uptime. The only drawback of this stat is that you could totally stack it with Crit. (ie, CM/Frost Nova)
There are issues with red ring damage ranges as well, no rubies give the correct amount of bonus damage (upper value is always lower than expected, sometimes it only gives the same as the min value). There is a rumour that it is based on weapon attack speed, but I don't know if that's true.
I had found the answer to the ruby thing while creating my spreadsheet (meaning I found someone who figured out what was going on, not that I'm responsible for figuring it out). It actually had nothing to do with the rubies themselves; they always gave the amount they list now (+x to min and +x to max). It had to do with the way the phsyical damage bonus on weapons/rubies was displayed. You can read more about it here:
The reddit thread is the one that really made it clear to me what was going on.
If you don't want to read:
min/max physical damage on weapons and rubies was not actually an x-y range. Instead it was an x-(y+x) range (so to find the actual max damage bonus, it would be the displayed max minus the min) which is probably why they split them into 2 stats to alleviate the confusion about the max damage number.
This min/max bug applies to all +physical damage modifiers in the game (including physical damage bonuses on weapons themselves), and there is a separate bug involving how min/max affixes are displayed. Basically an item that rolls two separate affixes, "+6 minimum damage" and "+6 maximum damage", will sometimes incorrectly display "+6-12 damage" when it is really +6-+6. A red gem that says "+10-20 damage" actually has +10 minimum and +10 maximum damage, which is "correctly" displayed when you socket it into a weapon.
Any time the SUM of all your "+ minimum physical damage" affixes, including +Physical on the weapon itself, equals or exceeds the base damage spread of your weapon (max - min), any additional +minimum physical damage will be applied to your maximum physical damage also. This effectively doubles the usefulness of bonus minimum physical damage. Equipping a weapon with a large base damage spread and no "+ minimum physical damage" will decrease the efficacy of +minimum physical damage back to 1x.
Note that Bonus Elemental Damage (on weapons) always doubles the effectiveness of the minimum, it is applied to both minimum and maximum. This is because weapons do not have any base elemental damage. This effect causes the displayed "+6-12 Arcane Damage" to be accurate for an item with +6 minimum arcane and +6 maximum arcane.
As a Monk with 840 resist all, 5.5k armor, 30k hp, and 100 LOH I used to be unable to kill a single elite pack in Act 3. I am now able to kill ~70% of elite packs without deaths. However, Hulking Phasebeasts + Fire Chains is just cheating... the moment they teleport on you you're dead, with no way to counter the damage. I'm shocked that they nerfed Morlu Fire Chains (Act 4) but not the Phasebeast Fire Chains.
Everyone's DPS went down significantly with the patch so stuff is taking a VERY long time to die in act 3. I think now that you can get Level 63 items in act 1-2, it's probably better to farm there.
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On the other hand, each crushing blow deals 5% of current HP - up to 1.65 BILLION damage from full health. That is as much damage as 330 Crits. Even if the boss was at 1%, a Crush would deal as much damage as 3.3 Crits.
It is obvious that Crushing Blow is hilariously imbalanced at the moment. Because CB is a percentage of monster health, it doesn't matter how much HP you give the monsters (33 billion!). I'm sure Blizzard is aware of this and CB will soon meet the nerfstick.
Personally I'm not sure why they even brought back CB. CB is difficult to balance because it scales with monster HP. No matter how weak it is, there will be some level of enemy difficulty where CB vastly out-scales all other forms of damage. (Just ask the Ubers from D2)
Why doesn't he just quit playing?
***
A lot of the post is completely valid suggestions that most players would agree with (better minibosses, more meaningful low level loot, better skill damage display) but it's worded in a super-negative, almost whiny manner.
Some of it is hilariously unrealistic. For example, calling the game a failure because it's not 100% cheat- and bot-free is absurd. No computer system is 100% secure, especially not multiplayer games. Worse yet, the OP implies that anyone who has over a billion gold is a scammer or botter, and that's just stupid. A billion gold is worth at most $40 USD, there are people who have spent hundreds of $ just on the Hearthstone Beta, I'm sure the majority of multi-billion-gold spenders are real money spenders.
QFT.
* Making trading "painful" (difficult and time consuming) introduces the possibility that you will get loot faster by playing self-found and not trading at all. This is a good thing.
* No matter how difficult trading is, there will always exist a certain gear level where trading is more efficient than self-found. However, it is possible that most players are optimal, or near-optimal with self-found play. (for example - nearly all "casual" Diablo 2 players played self-found or very close to self-found)
* In an "efficient trading" universe, you only get a 15% incremental value from sharing free items among a trusted social circle - the difference between AH tax and no AH tax. Yet you get 1000% or more value from selling items on the AH, compared to playing self-found. This creates a strong disincentive to share items with your friends. In D2 if my RL friend found an item that's godly for my Sorc (and he doesn't have a Sorc), he would give me the item for free. (and vice versa if I found something for his Zon) In D3 if he found a comparable item, he would look on the RMAH and see that it's $100, and there's no way he'd give me the item for free.
* In a "painful trading" universe, you get an extremely high incremental value from freely sharing items. If a group of 6 friends shares free items, each friend has access to a pool of items that's 6x as large as self-found. (+500%) This is a much larger efficiency benefit than barter-style trading (which is inefficient and vulnerable to mistrades and/or scamming). Therefore, everyone has an incentive to share, and having trustworthy friends is worth major in-game benefits.
I've heard a lot of people argue that "barter trade is really painful" and therefore it is a mistake to remove the AH's. I beg to differ.
To put it simply, trade needs to be painful or else itemization will suck. It doesn't matter what they do with Loot 2.0, the AH removal is actually the most important part. And here's why:
-----
*** THE MATH ***
The simple mathematical fact is that AH's dramatically skew itemization. Let's assume there are 2 versions of the game with identical itemization: self-found and AH:
*Self-Found*: I find an "awesome" item every 20 hours of gameplay. However, 80% of the time, it's designed for a different class or spec. So I equip one "awesome" item after 100 hours of gameplay. Once I have one slot occupied by an "awesome" item, the next one that drops has a 1/12 chance of being a sidegrade. After two slots, each item has a 2/12 chance of being a sidegrade, etc.
Mathematically speaking, it will take me an average of 3,723 hours to find an "awesome" item in every slot.
*GAH*: I find an "awesome" item every 20 hours of gameplay. 80% of the time it's designed for a different class or spec, so I sell it on the AH and get 85% of the Gold required to purchase an equally awesome item. Better yet, I know exactly which item slot needs the upgrade. Even if I have terrible luck and never find a usable item in my life, on average I only need to play for 23.5 hours to earn enough Gold to purchase an "awesome" item.
Mathematically speaking, it will take me 306 hours to earn enough Gold to purchase an "awesome" item in every slot.
Using the GAH decreases the time needed to gear out your character by a factor of 12! Remember that this is a paper napkin estimate, completely ignoring the increase in kill speed and MF/GF for the GAH user.
If itemization was tuned to be "reasonable" for self-found characters, an AH user would have every item BiS after 2 weeks and could never get another upgrade again. In order to prevent this, Blizzard has to intentionally tune itemization to be extremely slow. (ie 3700+ hours to get all-BiS, the real number is probably even higher)
This is the reason why itemization is so bad on PC.
***
There are other reasons why the AH is so bad for itemization. One reason is that the AH is equally efficient regardless of your gear/wealth level. A player with 500k to his name can buy a whole bunch of 50k items just as easily as a player with 2B can buy a bunch of 200M items. This causes three harmful effects:
- There is no gear level at which AH'ing is not optimal (by an order of magnitude or more). D3 players are AH dependent from "cradle to grave".
- There is no change in optimal behavior from "poor" to "rich", therefore no sense of progression for the player.
- Since it is easy to turn items into gold, players sell all their items and don't just drop them on the ground. Think about how often you saw people give away stuff for free in D2, and compare to how often it happens in D3.
This is completely different from a barter economy. Bartering requires time and effort, and is highly inefficient - this is exactly why it is good for the game:- Bartering takes a large time investment. At a poor gear level, you will get more items playing the game rather than hanging out in trade chat. Only high-value items are worth the time and effort required to barter them.
- Therefore, the optimal behavior changes dramatically when going from a "poor" account (never barter) to a "rich" account (frequent barter). This gives a sense of progression.
- Bartering requires a huge amount of game knowledge. Therefore, the "real money player" does not have an insurmountable advantage over "in game players", unlike with GAH/RMAH.
- Bartering is a huge pain in the ass and a lot of players would rather play the game self-found. This is a good thing if you believe that videogames should be about gameplay.
- The players who don't barter because it's too much hassle give away their items for free. This feels really good for the newbies in their games and generally helps the sense of "friendliness" and "community".
So anyone who thinks that Blizzard will introduce another "efficient" method of trading, I beg to differ. They may put in trade channels and game names, but they will remain inefficient, spammy, and painful - just like D2. It's not a problem, it's intentional.Trade needs to be painful. It's the best way to improve the game.
Zombie Bears deals a lot of damage (up to 708%) but it is a really touchy spell. You have to position yourself in a way that funnels all 3 zombie bears onto the target. If your positioning is off, all three zombie bears could miss, and you end up spending a lot more casts to kill the target.
Wave of Zombies is an alternate zombie charger rune that deals 115%x3 damage (345% total), approximately half of zombie bears. All three zombies are guaranteed to spawn directly in front of you, so if you are next to an elite all three zombies will *always* hit. 345% damage is significantly better than the 236% of a single zombie bear. You don't need to worry about being out of position where your zombie bears aren't hitting. You'll always hit.
In my experience, Wave of Zombies clears low-MP elite packs much more reliably than zombie bears. While you never get the same amount of raw damage, you don't need it, low-MP elites are extremely fragile. It's more important to have consistent damage so you can kill it and keep moving.
I agree 100% that Plague Bats is the best way to proc fetishes. As long as you've got enough mana regen (easy with the Zuni 4pc) and a -Firebats Cost on your helmet, you can spam firebats all day long and they proc fetishes like crazy. Plague Bats deal considerably more damage than the other varieties of firebats (except cloud of bats which is melee range). If you lack survivability, plague bats is a great way to apply Bad Medicine debuff.
I've toyed around with taking Fetish Sycophants + Fierce Loyalty (gives all pets HP regen). Normally the Fetish Sycophants die off very rapidly to stronger enemies but fierce loyalty gives them enough survivability that you end up with boatloads of fetishes. Not sure if it's worth it but its hilarious to watch.
What D3 needs is the opposite of super awesome items that appeal to everybody. What D3 needs is items that are more specialized and appeal to a very narrow niche.
As long as everyone wants exactly the same gear, everyone will compete for the same few stats. A relatively small difference in stats leads to an immense difference in sell price - just look at the sale prices for any Legendary. Even more importantly, there is nothing interesting you can do with gear. Unlike D2, you can't stack gear and turn an underpowered variant build into a decent farming build, or turn your class into a totally different class.
The best thing for Blizzard to do in an expansion pack would be to greatly nerf stats that benefit everyone (Primary stat, ASPD, CHC, CDB) and buff or add new stats that benefit specific skills, builds, or playstyles. (For example, "+% to Summoned Creature Damage", "+% to Single Target Melee Attacks", "+% to Bleed Damage", "+% to Damage over Time Spells", "+% to Ground Targeted Spells", "+% Damage to Enemies 30 yards or further", "+% Proc Damage", "+% Damage vs. Stunned")
http://us.battle.net...ic/7789719213#1
=========================
Diablo 3 is a good game that has the potential to be great. The famous "Complete Diablo Fix" thread had a lot of suggestions, but it was written from a Diablo 2-centered worldview. For reference,
http://eu.battle.net...ic/6444144744#1
I was wondering: what would Diablo 3 be like if it fully embraced its nature as a new game separate from Diablo 2? The following are my rather long ideas.
====================
TL,DR summary:
In order from smallest to largest game mechanic changes,
====================
1) Challenge players to compete against one another in PvE:
Competitive PvE has been a part of RPG culture for decades - in fact, long before videogames existed. Gygax's Tower. Moria/Angband. Final Fantasy Secret Bosses. Diablo 2 Ladder. World First C'Thun/Illidan/Heroic Lich King/Heroic Sha.
Diablo 3 has absolutely no mechanics for PvE competition. Inferno was beaten shortly after the game was released. Posting "4 MILLION DPS!!!!" videos on YouTube gets old fast. There is no ladder, no way for the most dedicated players to flaunt their insanity. Yet there is no reason for this to be the case. D3 could be an excellent competitive PvE game, and here's how:
Ladder: Not one, but many.
The argument against Diablo 3 ladders was that D3 loot is supposed to be "permanent", and having ladder seasons would make loot non-permanent. I will go into detail later on why permanent loot is a bad idea. The fact is, ladder was a very easy way for players to show off their insane competitiveness. Give players a choice between multiple different ladders with different objectives.
Ladders could be designed to be more like a leaderboard (ie, WoW Challenge Leaderboards) that shows elapsed time down to the millisecond.
- Paragon Ladder, Unlimited: Shortest real time from Level 1 to 60(100). Can freely group and trade including with non-ladder players.
- Paragon Ladder, Solo: Shortest in-game time from Level 1 to 60(100). Cannot group with other players but can exchange items from the Stash/AH.
- Short Ladder, Unlimited: Shortest real time from Level 1 to 60. Can freely group and trade including with non-ladder players.
- Short Ladder, Solo: Shortest in-game time from Level 1 to 60. Cannot group with other players but can exchange items from the Stash/AH.
- Short Ladder, Ironman: Shortest in-game time from Level 1 to 60. Cannot group with other players. Cannot take items from the Stash/AH. Stuck on MP10.
- Slayer Ladder, Solo: Shortest in-game time from Level 1 to beating Inferno Diablo on MP10. Cannot group with other players but can exchange items from the Stash/AH.
- Slayer Ladder, Ironman: Shortest in-game time from Level 1 to beating Inferno Diablo on MP10. Cannot group with other players. Cannot take items from the Stash/AH. Stuck on MP10.
- Slayer Ladder, Fixed Build: Shortest real time from Level 1 to beating Inferno Diablo on MP10. Once a skill is learned it cannot be unlearned, unless the character is transferred off-Ladder. Once a skill rune is learned it cannot be unlearned, unless the character is transferred off-Ladder.[/li]Items from restricted ladder (Ironman) should be transferrable to non-ladder characters (but not vice versa).
Scenarios: Faster than ladders.A lot of us don't have the free time to compete in ladders. We should have an alternative means to compete. Scenarios would provide those alternatives.
Each Scenario would have its own Scoring system allowing players to score points for impressive performances. Your name would show up on a leaderboard just like any Flash or iPhone game. For example, "I'm #16,234 worldwide on the Reign of Fire survival!"
- Dungeon Crawl, Random: An ordinary random dungeon (ie, Caverns of the Betrayer) with very high density of creatures and elites. Players would score points for damage dealt, killing sprees, etc. At the end of the scenario players would fight a boss and gain points based on how quickly they kill it.
- Dungeon Crawl, Designed: These scenarios would have be hand-crafted levels, somewhat like a D3 version of Halo "Spartan Ops". Point scoring works as above. Because they are non-random they would be more competitive, but would have to drop less loot. (or players would learn to farm them)
- Dungeon Survival, Random: Players are confined in a randomly picked area (ie, Skeleton King's Throne) and are faced with a never-ending spawn of random creatures and elites. Monster power increases by 1 with each round of spawns, and can increase to infinite values. Points are scored for every second alive, and also for damage dealt and elites killed.
- Dungeon Survival, Designed: Same as above but non-random.
- Speed Run, Random: A random dungeon populated with high difficulty creatures/elites, with a goal at the end. Players would be scored based on shortest time (down to the millisecond) to complete the speedrun. Some areas could be gated to force players to actually kill stuff instead of just running.
- Speed Run, Designed: Same as above but non-random.
Scenario loot would be different from regular loot in that you wouldn't loot during the actual scenario (it would slow down your times). Instead, you get a certain amount of loot in a box at the end of the Scenario. The loot should be somewhat less efficient than plain farming. The idea is to give players something to do that gives loot but isn't pure farming.====================
2) Make Nightmare and Hell relevant again.
A large number of Diablo 2 items and Diablo 2 builds were never intended to actually compete in the endgame (Hell Baal, Key Farming, and Ubers). Instead you had teleport builds that could clear Nightmare Andy/Mephy/Baal over and over for specific low level drops (SoJ, etc.) and builds highly optimized for farming Hell Countess or Hell Mephy. This is because low level stuff mattered.
Low level stuff doesn't matter in D3, largely because there is no reason to re-level a fresh character. This is a shame because the leveling process in D2 was a big part of the fun!
Frequently resetting ladders would encourage players to actually level new characters at a regular pace. In order to further emphasize lower-level items and builds:
- Crank up the drop rate of low level Legendaries and Sets.
- Give low level Legendaries and Sets more unique affixes.
- Introduce mechanics that allow players to "upgrade" items, like Cubing Exceptionals into Elites.
- Introduce recipes, quests, and/or scenarios that require farming of large masses of low level items. Burning SoJs for Uber Diablo would be a primitive example.
- After PvP is implemented, implement Twink Brackets and "Turn off EXP Gain". We'll soon find out what is the Strongest Possible Level 20 (or w/e).
====================3) Diversify loot, eliminate the Quadrafecta.
Primary Stat. %Attack Speed. %Crit Chance. %Crit Damage Bonus.
The Quadrafecta absolutely dominates D3 gearing because there is no other way to improve DPS.
Diablo 2 wasn't exactly perfect in this regard - most classes really had a Trifecta that looked like this:
- Attackspeed or Castspeed, up to breakpoint.
- Damage: For physical this was weapon damage + primary attribute, for casters it was +Skills
- Buffs/debuffs: "-20% to enemy resistance", "Conviction Aura", "Amplify Damage Proc", etc.
However, D2 had the advantage of having different stats appeal to different players. An Amplify damage proc was amazing for a Bowazon but useless for a Lightning Sorc. Vice versa for +lightning skills.Diablo 3's damage stats have one very interesting mechanic that D2 didn't, which is the multiplier effect of %CRIT and %CDB. %Crit doesn't do much good without %CDB. %CDB does absolutely no good without %Crit. I like this mechanic because it encourages players to commit to stacking DPS stats. Instead of removing Crit and CDB, we should add more stats so that we have a choice.
A few principles should be observed for the new damage stats:
- Don't let too many damage stats spawn on the same piece. If a Hexafecta item exists, it will eventually become the "gold standard" because it is the best possible item regardless of your build. Multiplicative damage stats should be limited in overlap, just like how a weapon cannot spawn with +200-600 Arcane Damage and +200-600 Fire Damage at the same time.
- Damage stats should be a choice, not an "all of the above". Alternative non-crit DPS stats should NOT crit, and should not work well with crit-heavy builds.
- Damage stats should be supported by passives and runes. Weapon Mastery, Critical Mass and APOC strongly favor Crit builds. In an expansion pack, new passives and skills should be designed around the new non-Crit DPS stats.
I think the following stats could be balanced to be similar in power to Crit and CDB, without directly stacking with Crit:- % Inflict Deep Wounds: Bleed already exists in game but is weak. Change it to a Deep Wounds that deals a percent of weapon damage.
- +% Bleed Damage: This modifier would improve the effectiveness of Deep Wounds as well as any existing Bleed procs and skills (Rend, etc).
- +% On-Hit Proc Damage: This modifier would improve the effectiveness of everything from Hellfire Rings to the skeletons summoned by Wailing Host. It would also increase player abilities such as the Magic Weapon rune that says "Chance to arc lightning for 10% of weapon damage."
- % Proc Effect on Hit: There should be enough pieces of gear with on-hit effects so that a player stacking Procs and +% Proc Damage could deal the majority of his damage with just procs. Procs should not be able to crit.
- +% Damage vs Demon/Undead/Beast/Human: Make this affix a lot stronger, but make it stack non-multiplicatively with %CDB. So +100% Damage vs Demon and +100% CDB would only equal 3x base damage, not 4x.
- +% Damage vs Stunned/Frozen/Feared/Confused: Make this affix very strong for CC-heavy builds but make it stack non-multiplicatively with %CDB. So +100% Damage vs Frozen and +100% CDB would only equal 3x base damage, not 4x.
====================4) Design "loot sinks" to get rid of loot accumulation.
Everyone knows that D3 loot feels extremely weak compared to loot found on the AH.
This has nothing to do with drop rates or itemization mechanics. Instead, it's all about the durability of loot. Namely, good loot is indestructable. A sufficiently powerful item will exchange hands many, many times and never be vendored or sharded.
Therefore, any newly dropped piece of loot has to compete with every other piece of loot dropped since Diablo 3 was released. Any time Blizzard buffs loot stats and drop rates, the newly dropped loot feels stronger only for a short time until it becomes commonplace. If every piece of loot was godlike for 6 months, then every piece of loot would have to compete with 6 months' worth of equally godlike loot.
The one and only way around this is some form of permanent loot destruction. I would suggest taking a cue from Diablo 2 and introducing loot destruction through ladder competition. D2 took the primitive approach of doing a Reset every once in a while (destroying EVERYONE's characters and loot on Ladder). I would take the gentler approach of "optional" loot destruction:
- Sealed Stash Ladder, Pennant Race: Players race from level 1 to 60(100) on permanent MP10. Upon character creation, loot may be transferred from your main stash to a "Sealed Stash". Any loot collected within a Sealed Stash game CANNOT be transferred to any other characters, it is effectively Soulbound.
- At the end of each Sealed Stash season, the top X% players recieve a title, a portrait, and a special item that gives a bonus you cannot get anywhere else in the game. For example, a unique Charm that gives +10% MF/GF and can exceed the Paragon MF/GF cap.
====================5) Embrace the action in ARPG.
When D3 was first announced, I recall Blizzard using an awful lot of action game terms to describe the gameplay. The names Zelda, God of War, and Ninja Gaiden were thrown around in several interviews. Right after the first Monk unveil, I imagined running around blocking fireballs and chaining mouse clicks into ridiculous Limit Break type combos.
None of that ever happened. The ability of melee characters to block incoming projectiles was rapidly removed from the game. Following this, melee became much weaker than ranged due to the ease of kiting. In response, Blizzard increased the size of player hitboxes and made it much harder to avoid enemy attacks with movement. This was a huge disappointment.
I still think that Diablo 3 would be a lot more fun if it played more like a true action game. For those who think that Blizzard servers are too slow to run an action game: Starcraft 2 is a lot faster paced (some would say too fast) than Brood War and it is online-only and doesn't lag much.
Melee abilities should work more like a fighting game, with a few basic melee classifications.
- Jabs: Jabs would deal low damage but interrupt fierce and stagger attacks. This mechanic could include Fists of Thunder, Frenzy, Regular Skeleton and Demon hits.
- Fierce: Fierce attacks would deal tons of damage and break Guard, but can be interrupted or run away from. This mechanic could include Wave of Light, Hammer of the Ancients, "overhead smash" slow monster hits.
- Stagger: Stagger attacks have less attackspeed and damage than Fierce attacks, but can inflict snares, interrupt Fierce attacks and wear down Guard. This mechanic could include Crippling Wave, Cleave, and knockback/snare monsters.
- Guard: Guard abilities would allow players to deflect ranged attacks and melee jabs, but remain vulnerable to fierce, stagger and grapple attacks. This mechanic could include Ignore Pain, Shield Skeletons, Shielding elites, etc.
- Counter: A Counter ability can interrupt an enemy attack and deal massive damage/stun, but is useless if not used at the right timing. This mechanic could be used for Exploding Palm - its base damage is weak but it triggers the explosion immediately if used to counter a Fierce attack.
Ranged characters should be vulnerable because they can't Guard/Counter, not because they inherently take more damage.- Bullet Hell: Creatures should throw more projectiles and more melee attacks, but players should have a very small hitbox so they can dodge.
- DPS Off: Creatures should have abilities that counter or reflect player projectiles, but with a notable "telegraph" so you can anticipate it and stop attacking.
- Stutter Step: Ranged classes should have some abilities and/or passives that actually reward continuous movement over standing still. For example, a runed Acid Cloud that "saves up" damage stacks over ~3 seconds so that casting it every 3sec will deal almost as much damage as spamming, but with much lower mana cost.
Enemies need to have more interesting behavior:- Random Monster Onslaughts: Like the skeletons falling from the ceiling in the Keep Depths, and Winged Moloks descending in flocks throughout A3. Make these encounters fancier, with a wider variety of attacking monsters.
- Random Monster Patterns: When trash monsters swarm you, have them come from all directions. Think of it like a "bullet hell" game rather than a traditional RPG. Some parts of Act 4 are fairly good at this. Do it in more Acts.
- Special Monster Behaviors: Stuff like Goatmen beating on drums to become huge, it's fun and it changes the pace.
- Traps that don't suck: Traps give a lot of flavor to Act 1 but honestly they are mostly unfun. The Act 3 fire grates are a random and crappy way to die. Make traps more entertaining to combat. Throw fires and lasers and sound orbs and plague pools at us, then give us a Resplendent Chest for surviving the traps.
- Using Monster Abilities against them: What if you could dodge a Dark Berserker's smash and have it kill off one of the Dogs around him? That would be fun.
Random elite pack behavior could be more varied:- Make the existing SuperUniques much stronger and more lootable, much like the Keywardens already are.
- Give them "AQ40/BWD" behavior where killing one gives the remaining elites more affixes.
- Have some of them change behavior after reaching a certain health %.
- Have some of them occur in a chain, where killing the first group of Elites automatically spawns a second pack.
Encourage players to actually fight storyline bosses. Better yet, encourage us to stay in game after killing a boss:I think what I was trying to say in the OP is this:
- Blizzard wants players to have a way to DPS hard without stacking %crit and %CDB.
- They suggest in their 1.07 preview, that stacking Attack Speed and +Weapon Damage is a way to DPS without having %crit.
- However, this is wrong. Anyone with high (100k+) DPS has a ton of crit. The guys with world-champion (400k+) DPS will have tons of Crit, CDB, Aspd, and +damage.
- This is because all of the damage increasers are multiplicative. There is no "choice". You want "all of the above".
If D3 gearing is supposed to be a "choice" then there should be enough stats to choose from that you can't simply get "all of the above". That is why there needs to be other competing stats besides Crit.
Also, a DoT centric build does not necessarily have to be "slow killing". See poison nova necros and plague javelin zons from D2.
This sounds nice but it really isn't the case in the current D3 itemization. There are really only five ways to increase your DPS in diablo 3:
Weapon Damage
Primary Stat
%Attack Speed
%Critical Chance
%Critical Damage Bonus
Out of these, most of your weapon damage comes from your weapon (+/- offhand) and primary stat is mandatory on all pieces you wear. This leaves only three stats that actually increase your DPS. Skills that don't Crit basically lose 2 out of 3. There is no way to make up for the lost Crit.
The Blue posts make it seem like they want "weapon damage and attack speed" to be the alternative to "%Crit and %CDB". The problem is that weapon damage and attack speed multiply with %Crit and %CDB. Giving people the option to get damage and aspd doesn't make crit weaker, it means they will want all of the above.
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IMO: "giving players an alternative to Crit" will require the addition of competing DPS stats other than Crit and CDB. These alternatives already exist in game to some extent! Blizzard only needs to add a quadratic multiplier (like how CDB multiplies with Crit) to make it more of an investment. All of the alternative DPS stats should multiply with Primary Stat or else they won't remain viable at high gear levels:
1) Bleed Chance and +%Bleed Damage: Bleed exists on tons of gear but is currently very weak. What if it scaled with Primary Stat, and there was a separate +%Bleed Damage modifier? A player that stacked tons of Bleed would have very poor burst damage but very high sustained damage compared to a Crit player.
2) Proc Chance and +%Proc Damage: What if there was an affix that increased the damage of all procs? Everything from Hellfire Ring to Schaefer's Hammer to the skeletons summoned by Wailing Host. This would encourage alternative gear builds and make proc items more exciting - to some players but not others.
3) Crowd Control Chance and +%Damage vs CC: Chance to stun, fear, freeze etc all seem fairly weak right now, but what if there was an affix that increased player DPS versus incapacitated targets? This would not only be interesting gear-wise, but would encourage different skill builds to maximize CC uptime. The only drawback of this stat is that you could totally stack it with Crit. (ie, CM/Frost Nova)
This min/max bug applies to all +physical damage modifiers in the game (including physical damage bonuses on weapons themselves), and there is a separate bug involving how min/max affixes are displayed. Basically an item that rolls two separate affixes, "+6 minimum damage" and "+6 maximum damage", will sometimes incorrectly display "+6-12 damage" when it is really +6-+6. A red gem that says "+10-20 damage" actually has +10 minimum and +10 maximum damage, which is "correctly" displayed when you socket it into a weapon.
Any time the SUM of all your "+ minimum physical damage" affixes, including +Physical on the weapon itself, equals or exceeds the base damage spread of your weapon (max - min), any additional +minimum physical damage will be applied to your maximum physical damage also. This effectively doubles the usefulness of bonus minimum physical damage. Equipping a weapon with a large base damage spread and no "+ minimum physical damage" will decrease the efficacy of +minimum physical damage back to 1x.
Note that Bonus Elemental Damage (on weapons) always doubles the effectiveness of the minimum, it is applied to both minimum and maximum. This is because weapons do not have any base elemental damage. This effect causes the displayed "+6-12 Arcane Damage" to be accurate for an item with +6 minimum arcane and +6 maximum arcane.
Everyone's DPS went down significantly with the patch so stuff is taking a VERY long time to die in act 3. I think now that you can get Level 63 items in act 1-2, it's probably better to farm there.