I wish you would have posted sooner. I started an account when the ladder reset and gave it away to some random person last week (decided I needed to get some work done before D3 release). It was a pretty stacked account to.
Xfering, bots, and hacks are the big ones for me when it comes to D2.
How about some things that we will miss when playing D3. For instance:
-Runewords. It was a fun system when you actually had to obtain the runes legitimately. Plus, I enjoyed searching for the socketable items.
-Being able to ask "Hey, what kind of character are you building?"
I figured that I would give D2 another shot with the new ladder reset. I always enjoyed the resets because everyone started from scratch, and finding those low level items became exciting again. But it wasn't a week into the reset and everyone is running around at level 95 wearing Enigmas and EBOTD's. What the hell?
When the ladder resets, doesn't someone have to legitimately find a high rune before it can be duped? There's no way that all of these runes have already been found. Or maybe they have, I don't know. In any case, I gave my account away. It's probably a good thing, I need to get some work done before D3 is released.
I can't say that I will like or dislike any of the new systems until I play the game. I just reeeeaallly hope that they get it right. D2 had some issues, but overall, they got it right. The attributes of D2 that I loved were MFing, character building, and leveling (which admittedly was kind of broken). In D3 it seems as thought they have effectively removed the character building (no attribute or skill assignments) and leveling (60 cap will be fairly easy to reach), so I hope that MFing can make up for that.
I think that increasing the quality of Champ/Uniq monster drops is a good idea because of all the points that have already been made. But, should boss drops be reduced to the point that they are no longer worthwhile? The downside of bosses dropping the best gear is that people farm them repeatedly, but that problem has at least partially been addressed by the fact that no character will be able to spam teleport. In order to get to the bosses people will have to walk, and will be killing monsters along the way. But, if I have to walk all the way to a boss, and the boss is sufficiently difficult to kill, then I expect the potential of being well rewarded. I'm not saying that boss drops should be scaled the way they are in D2, but a boss should at least drop a little better than Champ/Uniq monsters.
Another concern that I have about D3 is that, without runewords, will normal white, socketed, or ethereal items have any value? One of the things that I enjoyed doing in D2 was killing monsters all over hell looking for that superior arcon plate or ethereal colossus voulge. It's just another facet of the game that seemingly will be eliminated (along with character building, leveling, etc, etc). I just fear that D3 will lack the variety that was present in D2. And therefore lack the endgame playability.
I do not really see more than one build per class at the moment due to being easy to switch to any skill (as seen on the recent F&F beta streaming videos). Yes runes will make an impact on the skills but the skill is still going to be close to the core skill.
I agree, the ability to change out skill selections has pretty much ended "builds" as we know them. You can have fun generating some monstrous number of combination possibilities anytime you have multiple variables that relate in a factorial sense. However, you could do the same thing for sandwich possibilities at Subway. It's easy to generate a system with quadrillions of combinations, it only becomes interesting to consider this number when you are forced to pick only ONE.
The difference is that in D2 we had to pick a sandwich and eat it, whereas in D3 we get a sandwich and then sit there and swap out toppings all day. I personally like to eat my sandwich, and think that being able to change skill selections is a horrible idea. For me, much of the end game involved specialty builds. I would build an mf character for a specific area, or try a non-traditional build that I felt may have some potential. These pursuits represented an investment of time, and a sense of finality when skill selections were made. Putting forth the effort to create these builds was rewarding because you would have specialty type characters that others did not have. I would have a Buffing barb, WW barb, Frenzy barb, Singing barb, Goldfind barb, etc, etc. With the current system we will just build one barb that can instantly morph into whatever we want at the time. That sucks!
I always wondered why people are afreid of that. You were simply out of luck of that was a personal choice. Some hipster reply will work "What do you know about which items I should use for my buid".
I'm not afraid of it, and honestly won't mind it all that much. But it will be a bit of an annoyance nonetheless.
As many have stated, the appropriate cooldown is based upon the properties of the skill. We really cannot formulate educated opinions with such limited information.
But, I was thinking that maybe it would be a good idea to scale the cooldown times based on the number of players in the game. If the cooldown for a particular skill when soloing is 1 minute, then maybe the cooldown should be 3-4 minutes when playing in a 4 person game. If the cooldown remained 1 minute for each player then screen nuke type skills could still be casted 4 times per minute between the 4 of them. If the cooldown times were scaled then people would have to put more thought into casting them, which is the point of cooldowns to begin with. This would also deture people from joining partially filled games and soloing particular areas (some people are really annoyed by people that do this).
The Barb has 3 Level 7 skills. Will casting one of them initiate cooldowns on all 3? Or will each skill have it's own cooldown timer? If they are independent, and have 2 min cooldowns, then theoretically a level 7 skill could be used every 40 seconds.
I personally do not feel strongly about these features one way or another. I suppose that it will be interesting to investigate what other people are wearing, and I don't really care if people see my stuff. The ability to see other people's gear may promote "cookie cutter" builds, but they will come about anyway so that doesn't really matter.
There will be a few annoyances that come along with the feature. For instance, I don't want to join games (or watch other people join games) and get bombarded with "why are you wearing that with that you noob!" or "You're a WW Barb, you should be using different boots idiot!" If we can see eachother's gear at a click, then there will be a lot of that going around.
Another annoyance will have to do with trading. I do not want to find and equip some godly piece of gear just so that I can get spammed by whispers from people that want to trade for it. Not exactly sure how the trading system is going to work, but something like this would definitely be possible.
All things being equal I probably would go Barb, I always liked playing them in D2.
However, I have decided to pick my first character based on what I believe others will be choosing. In particular, I'll be choosing the character that is chosen the least by others. The idea is that character specific items will be easier to trade for if less people are playing that character. It seems as though the Demon Hunter will be the least popular, so that's probably what I'll go with.
Strangely, being a male I would have assumed that all of my characters would be the male versions. But I'm so engrained in the idea of the amazon that it would just seem strange to build a bow toting male character. Probably go with the female, but not totally decided.
It is nice that changes are being made, the D2 drop system was a bit annoying sometimes. I like the idea of each player getting first shot at their own drops, but having to pick up and drop items to make them available to other players would be a bit tedious. It would be nice to have a hotkey that could be pushed to instantly make all of the items on the screen visible to other players. You could have first pick, but then quickly and easily share the rest.
What if players are in a group, but playing in different areas? If I clear a dungeon while my buddy clears a different dungeon do we have sets of drops in eachother's dungeons? This may cause situations where people are doing a lot of roaming around in cleared areas for fear that they might miss something.
If your MF applies to drops from monsters killed by others then I can already see what is going to happen. Groups will consist of 1,2,or 3 characters designed for dealing massive damage quickly and 1 or 2 characters will be standing around holding as much MF as possible.
Not that these are necessarily bad things, strategically exploiting the game is part of what makes Diablo fun. But this situation is the kind of thing that the designers seem to be trying to avoid.
I was keeping up with the forum 6 months ago until I got tired of hunkering down under Blizzard's table waiting for a freaking crumb to fall. I thought I'd check back and see if we fans had been granted any information of value, and this scenario answers my question in full. Not only do we have to wait for a crumb to fall, but we are expected to beg for it.
Why the constant shroud of secrecy? They are working (at least they claim to be working) on a game. They guard every detail from us as though it was a matter of freaking national security. How hard is it to let us know how things are going, what progress has been made, what possibilities are being considered? We love the game and simply want to feel as though we are part of the process.
Here are a couple of questions:
-When will the game be released?
-Why the hell is it taking so long?
I liked runewords, and I liked the idea that other character's skills could be obtained from them. True, the way that they eventually dominated the game was a bit aggravating, but that's not how it was supposed to be. The problem with D2 wasn't the runewords or what they did, it was the dupers. There simply should not have been enough Jah and Ber runes going around for everyone to have 5 Enigmas.
The elite runewords provided overpowering abilities which reflected how difficult they should have been to obtain. The real purpose of "Enigma" wasn't supposed to be giving everyone teleport, it was simply supposed to provide endgame players with something further for which to strive. This is important because continuously having a variety of goals to strive for is what makes a game like Diablo fun over the long run. Achieving that 1 in 100,000 Pallys that could teleport would have been something special.
As someone pointed out earlier, there was a time when so many people were playing on bnet that you could type in something like "awebpav" and get "game already exists". There will not be neeearly as many people playing now as there were then. How could a change in stash size possibly account for a performance difference that would outweigh the number of players? Whole thing seems fishy.
You all complain about it, but blizzard is not forced to do that, they don't obtain cash for, they use resource for us and you all cry !!
That's just it, WE did not create the situation! Blizzard came out and announced that a patch was coming soon. They created the situation, They intentionally created the hype. We get excited and then the patch doesn't come, and it doesn't come, then it doesn't come again. We get excited about D3, then it doesn't come. All the while we are left in the dark as to what is going on. All I'm saying is, don't get our hopes up about something that cannot be delivered as promised. And, if our interest is supposed to be sustained, then be more transparent about what is going on. The ultra-secrecy is confounding to me. Why can't they be more interactive? I don't know whether they do these things intentionally, I am seriously beginning to wonder. I prefer to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that unexpected hitches cause delays that could not have been foreseen. But their resistance to share meaningful information tends to make me believe otherwise. Do they refuse to share information because there is nothing to share? Are people dropping the ball? Is the whole team dropping the ball? Are these people really motivated to get work done in an efficient manner? I don't know what is going on. But, I do know that in my line of work this type of performance would not be tolerated. Missing deadlines by years SHOULD NOT be the NORM. When you make a promise to your customers, your first priority should be to make good on that promise. Unfortunately for us, Blizzard does not seem to follow these philosophies. I suppose that they do not feel pressured to do so. The problem is that they have us by the balls, and they know it!!
How about some things that we will miss when playing D3. For instance:
-Runewords. It was a fun system when you actually had to obtain the runes legitimately. Plus, I enjoyed searching for the socketable items.
-Being able to ask "Hey, what kind of character are you building?"
When the ladder resets, doesn't someone have to legitimately find a high rune before it can be duped? There's no way that all of these runes have already been found. Or maybe they have, I don't know. In any case, I gave my account away. It's probably a good thing, I need to get some work done before D3 is released.
I think that increasing the quality of Champ/Uniq monster drops is a good idea because of all the points that have already been made. But, should boss drops be reduced to the point that they are no longer worthwhile? The downside of bosses dropping the best gear is that people farm them repeatedly, but that problem has at least partially been addressed by the fact that no character will be able to spam teleport. In order to get to the bosses people will have to walk, and will be killing monsters along the way. But, if I have to walk all the way to a boss, and the boss is sufficiently difficult to kill, then I expect the potential of being well rewarded. I'm not saying that boss drops should be scaled the way they are in D2, but a boss should at least drop a little better than Champ/Uniq monsters.
Another concern that I have about D3 is that, without runewords, will normal white, socketed, or ethereal items have any value? One of the things that I enjoyed doing in D2 was killing monsters all over hell looking for that superior arcon plate or ethereal colossus voulge. It's just another facet of the game that seemingly will be eliminated (along with character building, leveling, etc, etc). I just fear that D3 will lack the variety that was present in D2. And therefore lack the endgame playability.
I agree, the ability to change out skill selections has pretty much ended "builds" as we know them. You can have fun generating some monstrous number of combination possibilities anytime you have multiple variables that relate in a factorial sense. However, you could do the same thing for sandwich possibilities at Subway. It's easy to generate a system with quadrillions of combinations, it only becomes interesting to consider this number when you are forced to pick only ONE.
The difference is that in D2 we had to pick a sandwich and eat it, whereas in D3 we get a sandwich and then sit there and swap out toppings all day. I personally like to eat my sandwich, and think that being able to change skill selections is a horrible idea. For me, much of the end game involved specialty builds. I would build an mf character for a specific area, or try a non-traditional build that I felt may have some potential. These pursuits represented an investment of time, and a sense of finality when skill selections were made. Putting forth the effort to create these builds was rewarding because you would have specialty type characters that others did not have. I would have a Buffing barb, WW barb, Frenzy barb, Singing barb, Goldfind barb, etc, etc. With the current system we will just build one barb that can instantly morph into whatever we want at the time. That sucks!
I'm not afraid of it, and honestly won't mind it all that much. But it will be a bit of an annoyance nonetheless.
No, but 95% of them will think that they do. And, anonymity tends to make people obnoxious and rude. Not a huge deal, just annoying.
But, I was thinking that maybe it would be a good idea to scale the cooldown times based on the number of players in the game. If the cooldown for a particular skill when soloing is 1 minute, then maybe the cooldown should be 3-4 minutes when playing in a 4 person game. If the cooldown remained 1 minute for each player then screen nuke type skills could still be casted 4 times per minute between the 4 of them. If the cooldown times were scaled then people would have to put more thought into casting them, which is the point of cooldowns to begin with. This would also deture people from joining partially filled games and soloing particular areas (some people are really annoyed by people that do this).
The Barb has 3 Level 7 skills. Will casting one of them initiate cooldowns on all 3? Or will each skill have it's own cooldown timer? If they are independent, and have 2 min cooldowns, then theoretically a level 7 skill could be used every 40 seconds.
There will be a few annoyances that come along with the feature. For instance, I don't want to join games (or watch other people join games) and get bombarded with "why are you wearing that with that you noob!" or "You're a WW Barb, you should be using different boots idiot!" If we can see eachother's gear at a click, then there will be a lot of that going around.
Another annoyance will have to do with trading. I do not want to find and equip some godly piece of gear just so that I can get spammed by whispers from people that want to trade for it. Not exactly sure how the trading system is going to work, but something like this would definitely be possible.
However, I have decided to pick my first character based on what I believe others will be choosing. In particular, I'll be choosing the character that is chosen the least by others. The idea is that character specific items will be easier to trade for if less people are playing that character. It seems as though the Demon Hunter will be the least popular, so that's probably what I'll go with.
Strangely, being a male I would have assumed that all of my characters would be the male versions. But I'm so engrained in the idea of the amazon that it would just seem strange to build a bow toting male character. Probably go with the female, but not totally decided.
What if players are in a group, but playing in different areas? If I clear a dungeon while my buddy clears a different dungeon do we have sets of drops in eachother's dungeons? This may cause situations where people are doing a lot of roaming around in cleared areas for fear that they might miss something.
If your MF applies to drops from monsters killed by others then I can already see what is going to happen. Groups will consist of 1,2,or 3 characters designed for dealing massive damage quickly and 1 or 2 characters will be standing around holding as much MF as possible.
Not that these are necessarily bad things, strategically exploiting the game is part of what makes Diablo fun. But this situation is the kind of thing that the designers seem to be trying to avoid.
I was keeping up with the forum 6 months ago until I got tired of hunkering down under Blizzard's table waiting for a freaking crumb to fall. I thought I'd check back and see if we fans had been granted any information of value, and this scenario answers my question in full. Not only do we have to wait for a crumb to fall, but we are expected to beg for it.
Why the constant shroud of secrecy? They are working (at least they claim to be working) on a game. They guard every detail from us as though it was a matter of freaking national security. How hard is it to let us know how things are going, what progress has been made, what possibilities are being considered? We love the game and simply want to feel as though we are part of the process.
Here are a couple of questions:
-When will the game be released?
-Why the hell is it taking so long?
Are those "core issue" enough
The elite runewords provided overpowering abilities which reflected how difficult they should have been to obtain. The real purpose of "Enigma" wasn't supposed to be giving everyone teleport, it was simply supposed to provide endgame players with something further for which to strive. This is important because continuously having a variety of goals to strive for is what makes a game like Diablo fun over the long run. Achieving that 1 in 100,000 Pallys that could teleport would have been something special.
All I'm saying is, don't get our hopes up about something that cannot be delivered as promised. And, if our interest is supposed to be sustained, then be more transparent about what is going on. The ultra-secrecy is confounding to me. Why can't they be more interactive?
I don't know whether they do these things intentionally, I am seriously beginning to wonder. I prefer to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that unexpected hitches cause delays that could not have been foreseen. But their resistance to share meaningful information tends to make me believe otherwise. Do they refuse to share information because there is nothing to share? Are people dropping the ball? Is the whole team dropping the ball? Are these people really motivated to get work done in an efficient manner?
I don't know what is going on. But, I do know that in my line of work this type of performance would not be tolerated. Missing deadlines by years SHOULD NOT be the NORM. When you make a promise to your customers, your first priority should be to make good on that promise. Unfortunately for us, Blizzard does not seem to follow these philosophies. I suppose that they do not feel pressured to do so.
The problem is that they have us by the balls, and they know it!!