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Quote from Zrana

God i really hope we dont need +xp gear now

Otherwise, this change is awesome.

Given that you'll have to kill 7-8 million mobs to get to Paragon level 100, at about 1400xp each, and that the maximum +xp you can get from gear is 332 (24 per slot I believe), you're much better off keeping your dps gear and maxing out your Nephalem Valor stacks for the 75% xp boost. The 332 +xp/mob bonus only works out to ~24%. Might be worth it for some people, but probably not for me

Quote from SuicidalLemming

I don't really see the problem. If you play videogames to be sexually aroused, you're just weird. She's strong and a warrior, if you don't like powerful women, you can just play as the male.

+1

Totally agree with this, and I prefer playing the female barb (rather than the male) just for the voice acting. Nothing like getting a little kill streak going and hearing her say "Back to hell, dog!".

Kind of anticlimatic at this point, but I got an e-mail from something like DiabloUSBeta@Blizzard.com, figured it was spam so I deleted it right away. It did give me the idea to check my Battlenet account and voila, beta access! Don't really know when I got it, as I only check my account now every few weeks.

Anyway, to those who aren't in (yet), don't give up all hope, and keep checking your battlenet account!

Let's face a couple facts here:

1. The beta takes maybe an hour to an hour and a half to complete. (solo virgin run to a SK kill, killing everything, probably even faster than this in a group)

2. The beta comprises about a third of Act 1 (admitted by Blizzard).

Given 1 and 2, the entire content could be experienced in 20-24 hours of gameplay, obviously just Normal Difficulty, with some extra time thrown in for the later acts being longer/more difficult.

3. Blizzard's main focus for Diablo 3 is co-op play. (again admitted by Blizzard)

4. Due to each person getting different loot from each kill, their inventory will fill up at different rates.

5. The game could be very hard to play on later difficulties without all members present and doing their part.(Blizzard, again)

It can be inferred from 3 and 4 that being in a group, while supposedly increasing the monster kill rate thereby increasing the rate at which loot drops and is collected, will also increase the frequency of pauses required by the group for people to go back to town and sell/break down items in their inventory. Also, because of 5, success of the group could depend on everybody being in the same area if they're trying to clear content.

6. Every magic item is worth something, either gold or crafting materials once broken down, or on one of the auction houses.

Now that the cube is gone, 6 means that you will feel obligated to pause and return to town to break down EVERY blue or above quality item.

7. Some people still like to pick up absolutely everything.

Having one of these people in a group with white items still worth something would be annoying at the very least, and would no doubt drive many people to leaving the group, given that inventory would fill up every 5-10 minutes. Solution? Make white items useless.


TL;DR: I think you can see where I'm going here, and I probably missed a couple more points, but in a nutshell, this is a conscious effort to make the game take longer to play, without increasing the annoyance factor so much as to make it unbearable for those who like to play fast and hard. While I think they are incredibly hypocritical for going back on their stance of 'trying to keep players in the action', it makes good sense from a 'designery' point of view.

For the most part I think that you have some great ideas. The specialized crafting material for getting a prefix/suffix that you want is a good idea, although it adds a lot of complexity to the crafting system and randomness to material collection. I definitely agree that there should be some way to influence what you get out of crafting an item. I think the crafting system (at least the blacksmith) has WAY too much rng as it stands. Say you're crafting an item with 4 random properties (some items have more than 4). There must be 10 or more different properties each of those slots could have. Has anyone done the math on the odds that you'll get 3 of those 4 properties that are actually useful, let alone ideal, never mind all 4? How about even 2?

Also your ammunition idea sounds somewhat clunky, not on the basis of adding more or a different type of damage to shots fired, but simply due to the fact that only a DH uses ammo. It would create more useless drops for other classes (which will be swimming in useless drops already), and also give the DH a 3rd class-specific item, unbalanced with only 2 for the other classes. Not to mention an unfair advantage in the AH, with 4 other classes essentially farming gear for an additional slot on the DH.

All in all, an interesting read, thanks

Have to agree with Enkeria, if it's useless, I don't even want to see it. Heck, even back when I played Diablo2, once I got up in levels and had decent gear, I'd stop picking up regular magic items because they weren't worth the time and I knew they wouldn't be an upgrade. I know this will change in D3 because I'll always want to break them down for crafting mats, but this won't change my opinion of the white 'crap'. I guess I can only hope for Blizzard to add some sort of 'loot filter', so when I hit the alt key I don't have to sift through a sea of white garbage for that crappy blue item I'm just going to dust anyway.

The only reason I didn't mind white items dropping in the beta was because you needed a metric crap ton of them to break down into common scraps for levelling the blacksmith and crafting gear. I can only assume Blizzard is adjusting the materials required for these purposes to take into account that this source of common scraps is now gone. Perhaps they are even taking common scraps out of the game as a crafting reagent, or maybe having a blue item break down into one essence and a few scraps. I haven't heard anything about any changes to material requirements either way, so I guess we'll have to wait for the patch to see.

As for all the white items dropping that are now useless, I sincerely hope that they will put in a loot filter similar to Titan Quest. At least then I won't even have to look at those items that are essentially garbage.

Quote from Drekko

Quote from Spanman

Quote from Drekko

Hi

Sorry I dont use these forums much and havent been following diablo 3 lately but I just read Jay Wilsons changes to the game

I just want to know, why on earth have they removed a whole Profession/Crafting NPC from the game entirely? The Mystic..? What will enchant our weapons now?

I really dont understand that, are they going to give us something else instead? It makes no sense that they would remove something so big that you can level up and customize in the game

Only reason I can think of is that they were running out of ideas for stuff to put in future expansion(s). Enchants in the first exp, charms in the second, in addition to a new class and some content in each, ofc.

Wow so they remove stuff so they can re-add stuff later.. lol.. But this still doesnt make sense, how are we going to enchant items? Wasnt enchanting even in diablo 2? They cant just remove enchanting all together

Nope, no enchants in D1/D2. They had runes in D2, but they fit into sockets like gems, not into skills like D3. They also had jewels, but they went into sockets as well.

Quote from Jarune

They also mention the skills and rune system. Those are huge parts of the game, they have been working on that too.

I just want to see the proof.

Quote from Drekko

Hi

Sorry I dont use these forums much and havent been following diablo 3 lately but I just read Jay Wilsons changes to the game

I just want to know, why on earth have they removed a whole Profession/Crafting NPC from the game entirely? The Mystic..? What will enchant our weapons now?

I really dont understand that, are they going to give us something else instead? It makes no sense that they would remove something so big that you can level up and customize in the game

Only reason I can think of is that they were running out of ideas for stuff to put in future expansion(s). Enchants in the first exp, charms in the second, in addition to a new class and some content in each, ofc.

/agree, this is nothing more than another massive release pushback, not to mention a further reversion towards D2-style play systems. Don't get me wrong, I loved D2, but it's starting to seem like D3 could just be an expansion for D2, 10 years after the fact.

While I have faith in Blizzard's product quality, I'm starting to worry about D3...

It's not 11 tons of radioactive material, it's 7-11 tons of toxic rocket fuel, which will likely ignite during re-entry and blow up the vehicle. They say there is a small amount of radioactive Cobalt in one of the gauges, but it poses no risk. They do however expect 20 -30 fragments of the satellites/space vehicle, weighing upwards of 200kg (440lb) each, to hit the earth's surface.

Head's up!

Re: The delays by the South Korean Games Rating Board:

They're obviously locked in a room somewhere, too busy playing Diablo3 to take the time to release an official decision... ;D

It's an Asus laptop, best price I could find was on Amazon.ca, I didn't check into their shipping policy, but here's a link, and it's only $600 (CDN):

http://www.amazon.ca...3SV-XP1&x=0&y=0

I've been playing the beta for quite a while, gotten a few rare items (yellow), and this is how it seems to work for me (no data, just how it feels):

1. I've gotten rares from normal mobs probably more than champions/SK (other than SK first kills), due more likely to the fact that I've killed FAR more normal mobs than champions.

2. Magic find seems to just work as a multiplier on a mobs base chance to drop any kind of magic item. I've made MF sets up to around +100%, and although I seem to pick up more blues, it doesn't make a huge difference. I think it works like this:
- regular mob has a .5%(example only) chance to drop a blue, +50% MF = .5% + (.5*50%) = .75%, still very low, almost unnoticeable over a couple hundred mobs.
- anything breakable (barrels, loose stones, etc.) has about the same chance as a regular mob, maybe even less, certainly not more.
- anything openable (regular chests, those stone coffers, etc.) has a much greater chance (maybe 5-10x a reg mob)
- resplendent(sic) chests have a 100% chance to drop at least one blue item, many times 2 blues, I don't recall ever getting a rare from one, but Blizzard has taken most of them out since the beta started, I think the only one left is at the end of the second level of the rarely spawned Den of the Fallen.

3. As far as rares go, I personally have only gotten rares from mobs, champions, or boss-types. Never from anything breakable, and as far as I can remember, no chests or quest/event reward drops.

4. Chance to drop a rare item is probably on the order of 100x less than a blue (.005%) They call them 'rare' for a reason. Might be a second roll for rare quality, .5% to get a magic item, then if it passes that roll, another roll (maybe a one in a hundred chance) to see if the item is a rare.

If anyone knows for sure how the system works and can tell me I'm way out to lunch on this, feel free to correct me, like I said, this is just how it feels.

TLDR: From my experience, chance to get a magic item from a champion/boss is greater than a regular mob, chance for it to be a 'rare' doesn't seem to change much.