Oh man, I'm bummed out that I'll never get to experience the Nephalem Cube & Cauldron of Jordan.
I really hate full bags. About the stats: It's the same thing they did for WoW not too long ago.
Simplify it to make it more 'derp' for everyone. In my opinion: It's too simple.
You're really gonna go for two stats. I love working towards a 'hit/precision' cap, sacrificing one stat for
the other...
About another possible delay (they never mentioned a release date so how can you call it a delay):
They already made the interface changes so they have begun working on it.
Don't think they just made it up and are starting to work on it now.
I don't get it. They just got themselves so much against their own claims that it doesn't feel right.
The "don't break the combat" thing was quite nice. As I do like to go back to town sometimes and maybe take a leak or eat something while everyone sold their items and stuff, I really like the idea that you could opt to not do it at all. Imagine that the four players have different ways of picking items, so they would all have to go to town at different times. With 4 players max, 1 less player makes a big difference.
The attributes were simplified so people didn't have to research what each attibute do to understand what's going on. Now we may see a lot of monks investing in strength items because they didn't research about it before. (And I think monks SHOULD benefit from strength).
The removal of identification scrolls is quite nice. I hope that they come up with an explanation for it, like the hero having a big book and needing to look for some information to know about the item, or just meditating to an angel or something like that. It may be a pain in the ass when you spend a lot of time to identify 50 rings you picked up. Maybe making identification instant in town.
I didn't like the removal of the mystic. It would be another artisan to level up and grant new achievements.
Really don't care about the minor details, but I really wanted to know about the rune system. As they are going back in their previous groundbreaking news, they may very well put skill points back in the near future.
''We want to make it clear that junk items aren’t worth picking up, and make it easy to identify other items as not for your character.''
They seem to think they're still in diablo 2 where gold had close to no purpose. Of course you won't want to pick and equip white items but what about the money you will get from selling them? I don't see a single reason to not pick white items in inferno and sell them for money to buy epic items in AH.. I really don't like where they're going with their game. They prefer to just remove features and possibly add them in later expansions rather than adding them on release and improve them with patches.. The game is starting to interest me less and less as they screw it all up.
IT FEEL SO DAMN GOOD! to say i knew it before they announced it. the enchanting and gem SUCKED. they split the effects up way to far and should of refinded them better before even announcing them, i'm hoping they get a rework that makes more sence across the board on all item enhancing items. great job blizzard lets hope the fix gems next.
I just didn't like also the junk items in D2. In D1 we felt very rewarded when we got a magic item, don't need to throw us lots of completely useless items. I didn't like at all when I killed Mephisto and got 2 quivers of arrows, one stamina potion and 300 gold.
Some of these changes are somewhat questionable... I'm glad they put townportalling back in because the "constantly be in action, never ever come to town except for quests, streamline everything so you are killing stuff all the time" approach felt like they are just forcing simplicity into the game and were all just "fight, fight, fight" and not "stop and think about what you're gonna do with your stuff". The identification however is a mistake I think, if you just have to right click to identify, you might as well just pick it up and it identifies as it enters your inventory because that serves no purpose at all. The stat changes were definitely a good choice because IMO there was a little too many of them and the system wasn't very transparent with everything being different from D2. The only thing I dislike is that no stat adds crit now while many skills and runes depend on crits. As for the mystic, I'd prefer more if they just perhaps took some tasks off blacksmith and gave them to the mystic because it feels like blacksmith is the only artisan used, ever. I think he is too loaded with stuff he does. Overall I have to say I'm liking the direction they are taking however. Hopefully some more changes of this sort will happen concerning the skills and runes, sounds like it could be something major.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
A soft answer turneth away wrath. Once wrath is looking the other way, shoot it in the head!
Their view on items is that it's better to have a crapload of useless items drop as opposed to the occasional useful item. When you played Diablo 2, did you even think of a non-magic or better item dropping as even BEING a drop? When you were playing with friends, and you killed something that didn't drop a rare, but dropped an extra white item, did you say "wooo double drop off Pindle!"? I'm assuming not.
They are just generating screen clutter to disguise the fact that the items that you do pick up aren't as interesting as they were hoping they would be. I have no idea what other changes they are planning on making, but none of the ones they just announced make me go "oooh, that's way better than what it was before"
They can continue to modify this game all they want, eventually they either have to release it or eat the who knows how much money they spent developing it. I'm sure when they release it they will sell a lot of copies and that most people here will buy one, but seriously, I grew bored with the Beta in under a week, I'd rather start new characters in Skyrim than play more Diablo 3 and I don't really see that changing even after release, they just don't seem to be making it that much more interesting. That being said, I'm fairly confident when the game comes out I'll buy it and play for awhile, but I doubt I'll bother playing to inferno at all and I probably won't play past normal on more than one character if that. If their goal is to make the game lasting, this isn't helping, but if their goal is to sell one-off copies, they probably, correctly, figure "who cares"?
TLDR: Meh, release delayed, boring changes that don't mean much.
I like the idea behind the stat changes. In D2 different stats were good for different classes so you could look at something and say "that's a Barbarian item" or "that's a Sorceress item". With the current D3 stats, everyone wants the same stuff so there's fewer reasons to want to trade/AH that great Wizard item you found on your Barbarian for something that's better for you.
This also explains why Unique/Set item stats have been MIA since Beta Patch 5 (they probably started trying to do a final itemization pass on that stuff and realized they couldn't actually target the items to specific classes, so they changed all the stats.)
I was a little concerned at first about class balance thinking that some classes might only need 1 or 2 stats now while others might need 3 or 4 of them, but I suspect what will end up happening is that people will want items with their "primary" stat on it, and then whatever else they can get of the other stats will be a bonus (all stats provide a survivability bonus, so they will probably all be decent and somewhat interchangeable).
Salvaging Changes
I'm not a huge fan of these changes. In the beta right now its pretty exciting to get your Nephalem Cube (similar to getting your Horadric Cube in D2) since its a noticeable quality of life improvement. Forcing people to go back to town to salvage and sell seems like it will just be annoying.
Not being able to salvage common items anymore is a bit of a mixed bag. It was a bit strange to not want to vendor anything (starting out a new character in the beta my bags tend to get full and I feel bad about dropping or vendoring items before I get that cube to salvage them with). On the flip side, it seems like white items will be virtually useless now which is a departure from D2. In D2, an elite armor was worth picking up to vendor the for 35k gold if you had the inventory space, and because of gems and eventually runewords they could be quite valuable to players as well (particularly superior and etherial versions with specific numbers of sockets). That system made the common items a sort of secondary loot lottery--mostly they weren't that interesting, but if the right one dropped it could be valuable.
Mystic Removal
I think this depends on what happens with gems. From looking at the data files, my suspicion is that gems were supposed to provide 2 stats in all slots (one stat no matter where its socketed, and a 2nd stat based on what slot its put into). There are also icons for more types of gems than are actually items in the game. If they flesh out the gem system a bit more then I guess removing the mystic until an expansion is fine.
My biggest concern about the mystic is what will happen to the runestone-combine recipies: http://www.d3lexicon.com/recipe-type/mystic#other ? I don't think this was ever an officially announced feature, but it definitely made a lot of sense to be able to "cube up" lower quality runestones to get those rank 7 ones you really want. I guess I should reserve judgement on this one, though, until they release more info on the skill/runestone changes.
Other Stuff
Scroll of Identify - Not sure if this is a quality of life improvement or not. Scrolls take up an inventory slot, but they are instant. Why make people waste the cast time to ID items? If they decide to remove the cast time it would be a nice little improvement, but at that point why not just have the rares IDed from the start just like magic items? I just really don't see the logic behind this split system where magic items come IDed already but rares don't.
Dedicated Potion Button - This change is just dumb. They are spending developer time to implement a feature that reduces player choice? Really? Not everybody likes to have a skill bound to their left click, but with 6 skill slots and 4 action buttons now, everyone has to use both mouse buttons to bind all their spells. In addition, not all spells can even be bound to left-click. I'm not sure if a build would crop up in practice that used 6 skills like this (perhaps some sort of WD summoner build?) but if such a build exists then its no longer viable because of this change. (On top of this, moving the button is just bad UI design--it messes up the physical-to-virtual spacial relationship with the default keybinds).
This is absolutely mindblowing. As always I'm right behind Blizz's decisions and am looking forward to the skills and runes changes. This will all obviously come into the final release date but... alas. We've waited this long, might as well hold it for a few more months.
[Spoiler Alert] (Next Jay's article) We decided on full circle to forget about D3. Just put D2 and add lots of WoW to it and release the game after 6 years of making monkeys out of you fans.
I can see the reason behind these changes, but... I don't care. This should've been in the game ages ago. This just feels like something to show, while the real changes are made in the background
It's getting to the point where it feels like they're just tweaking things to tweak them. I'm getting a distinctive vibe that this has something to do with console development, but I won't start kicking at that horse.
If taking out the Mystic means that the Jeweler is basically going to take over some of those duties, thus fleshing that artisan out, I don't see it as a bad thing. I'm not in the beta, but if the enchanting was not overly useful then I agree with scrapping it, and using what worked for the Jeweler.
I don't know why they're even bothering to keep the identification system in the game to be honest. The whole "unwrapping a present" aspect is something I like, but why even bother at this point? You're breaking the game's momentum by having a delay on identification. Just let me hover my mouse over it and it's identified. Using this new system is just adding an unnecessary layer honestly.
Attribute changes are what they should have been in the first place. Simple names that everyone recognizes and actually resemble Diablo as we've known it for years. If it took them years to figure this out, I have to wonder a little.
Salvaging change is fine, and makes sense. Make it cost some gold and you've got a nice little gold sink included. Seems a little counterproductive, as others have said, to talk for years about the game's momentum and then ultimately still tie us to going back into town for downtime. I don't mind having downtime (hell, make someone like Deckard identify our items for a price, or something), but why the sudden philosophical change?
Potion button should be mappable for anything. Don't force me to map my potion to a button. If I'm playing a Demon Hunter I might not even be using potions as much as a Barbarian...so why am I losing a hotkey for it? MAPPABLE BUTTONS Blizzard. I'm not an idiot...I can figure out what I need and map it accordingly.
I'm sorry...but some of this reeks of the console team. Not that I'm crapping on consoles really...I own all three. Just some of this stuff seems odd to change now.
This is RETARDED. This game is feeling less and less like Diablo. And yes I'm a beta tester.
The game was simple enough as it is, anyone who cannot figure out how to play it shouldn't play computer games to begin with. What ever happened chance to hit?? What's wrong with having PLAYERS decide what item is good for their character or not? I don't see anything wrong with gray-area items, and not super-defining items for one class over the other. This makes trading INTERESTING.
Why are you going to get rid of scrolls of identify or cain identifying? This is a symbolic function in the Diablo franchise. With the amount of town traveling you have to do anyway, using cain is not going to cause much inconvenience at all.
The only change I like is changing the stone of recall. I don't even know why you thought of changing the name from town portal to begin with. What's with the design department??
One question, Blizzard: Who the hell are you listening to about these changes? Holy shit!
I'm pretty damn close with cancelling my two collectors editions preorders just like some guy who posted earlier on this thread.
I really hate full bags. About the stats: It's the same thing they did for WoW not too long ago.
Simplify it to make it more 'derp' for everyone. In my opinion: It's too simple.
You're really gonna go for two stats. I love working towards a 'hit/precision' cap, sacrificing one stat for
the other...
About another possible delay (they never mentioned a release date so how can you call it a delay):
They already made the interface changes so they have begun working on it.
Don't think they just made it up and are starting to work on it now.
It is what it is.
The "don't break the combat" thing was quite nice. As I do like to go back to town sometimes and maybe take a leak or eat something while everyone sold their items and stuff, I really like the idea that you could opt to not do it at all. Imagine that the four players have different ways of picking items, so they would all have to go to town at different times. With 4 players max, 1 less player makes a big difference.
The attributes were simplified so people didn't have to research what each attibute do to understand what's going on. Now we may see a lot of monks investing in strength items because they didn't research about it before. (And I think monks SHOULD benefit from strength).
The removal of identification scrolls is quite nice. I hope that they come up with an explanation for it, like the hero having a big book and needing to look for some information to know about the item, or just meditating to an angel or something like that. It may be a pain in the ass when you spend a lot of time to identify 50 rings you picked up. Maybe making identification instant in town.
I didn't like the removal of the mystic. It would be another artisan to level up and grant new achievements.
Really don't care about the minor details, but I really wanted to know about the rune system. As they are going back in their previous groundbreaking news, they may very well put skill points back in the near future.
They seem to think they're still in diablo 2 where gold had close to no purpose. Of course you won't want to pick and equip white items but what about the money you will get from selling them? I don't see a single reason to not pick white items in inferno and sell them for money to buy epic items in AH.. I really don't like where they're going with their game. They prefer to just remove features and possibly add them in later expansions rather than adding them on release and improve them with patches.. The game is starting to interest me less and less as they screw it all up.
They are just generating screen clutter to disguise the fact that the items that you do pick up aren't as interesting as they were hoping they would be. I have no idea what other changes they are planning on making, but none of the ones they just announced make me go "oooh, that's way better than what it was before"
They can continue to modify this game all they want, eventually they either have to release it or eat the who knows how much money they spent developing it. I'm sure when they release it they will sell a lot of copies and that most people here will buy one, but seriously, I grew bored with the Beta in under a week, I'd rather start new characters in Skyrim than play more Diablo 3 and I don't really see that changing even after release, they just don't seem to be making it that much more interesting. That being said, I'm fairly confident when the game comes out I'll buy it and play for awhile, but I doubt I'll bother playing to inferno at all and I probably won't play past normal on more than one character if that. If their goal is to make the game lasting, this isn't helping, but if their goal is to sell one-off copies, they probably, correctly, figure "who cares"?
TLDR: Meh, release delayed, boring changes that don't mean much.
I like the idea behind the stat changes. In D2 different stats were good for different classes so you could look at something and say "that's a Barbarian item" or "that's a Sorceress item". With the current D3 stats, everyone wants the same stuff so there's fewer reasons to want to trade/AH that great Wizard item you found on your Barbarian for something that's better for you.
This also explains why Unique/Set item stats have been MIA since Beta Patch 5 (they probably started trying to do a final itemization pass on that stuff and realized they couldn't actually target the items to specific classes, so they changed all the stats.)
I was a little concerned at first about class balance thinking that some classes might only need 1 or 2 stats now while others might need 3 or 4 of them, but I suspect what will end up happening is that people will want items with their "primary" stat on it, and then whatever else they can get of the other stats will be a bonus (all stats provide a survivability bonus, so they will probably all be decent and somewhat interchangeable).
Salvaging Changes
I'm not a huge fan of these changes. In the beta right now its pretty exciting to get your Nephalem Cube (similar to getting your Horadric Cube in D2) since its a noticeable quality of life improvement. Forcing people to go back to town to salvage and sell seems like it will just be annoying.
Not being able to salvage common items anymore is a bit of a mixed bag. It was a bit strange to not want to vendor anything (starting out a new character in the beta my bags tend to get full and I feel bad about dropping or vendoring items before I get that cube to salvage them with). On the flip side, it seems like white items will be virtually useless now which is a departure from D2. In D2, an elite armor was worth picking up to vendor the for 35k gold if you had the inventory space, and because of gems and eventually runewords they could be quite valuable to players as well (particularly superior and etherial versions with specific numbers of sockets). That system made the common items a sort of secondary loot lottery--mostly they weren't that interesting, but if the right one dropped it could be valuable.
Mystic Removal
I think this depends on what happens with gems. From looking at the data files, my suspicion is that gems were supposed to provide 2 stats in all slots (one stat no matter where its socketed, and a 2nd stat based on what slot its put into). There are also icons for more types of gems than are actually items in the game. If they flesh out the gem system a bit more then I guess removing the mystic until an expansion is fine.
My biggest concern about the mystic is what will happen to the runestone-combine recipies: http://www.d3lexicon.com/recipe-type/mystic#other ? I don't think this was ever an officially announced feature, but it definitely made a lot of sense to be able to "cube up" lower quality runestones to get those rank 7 ones you really want. I guess I should reserve judgement on this one, though, until they release more info on the skill/runestone changes.
Other Stuff
Scroll of Identify - Not sure if this is a quality of life improvement or not. Scrolls take up an inventory slot, but they are instant. Why make people waste the cast time to ID items? If they decide to remove the cast time it would be a nice little improvement, but at that point why not just have the rares IDed from the start just like magic items? I just really don't see the logic behind this split system where magic items come IDed already but rares don't.
Dedicated Potion Button - This change is just dumb. They are spending developer time to implement a feature that reduces player choice? Really? Not everybody likes to have a skill bound to their left click, but with 6 skill slots and 4 action buttons now, everyone has to use both mouse buttons to bind all their spells. In addition, not all spells can even be bound to left-click. I'm not sure if a build would crop up in practice that used 6 skills like this (perhaps some sort of WD summoner build?) but if such a build exists then its no longer viable because of this change. (On top of this, moving the button is just bad UI design--it messes up the physical-to-virtual spacial relationship with the default keybinds).
Character Stats on Inventory Page - Good change.
Ha. Bagstone.
Templar = barbarian gear
rogue = monk gear
enchantress = wizard gear
Perhaps? But templar has a few spells too.
If taking out the Mystic means that the Jeweler is basically going to take over some of those duties, thus fleshing that artisan out, I don't see it as a bad thing. I'm not in the beta, but if the enchanting was not overly useful then I agree with scrapping it, and using what worked for the Jeweler.
I don't know why they're even bothering to keep the identification system in the game to be honest. The whole "unwrapping a present" aspect is something I like, but why even bother at this point? You're breaking the game's momentum by having a delay on identification. Just let me hover my mouse over it and it's identified. Using this new system is just adding an unnecessary layer honestly.
Attribute changes are what they should have been in the first place. Simple names that everyone recognizes and actually resemble Diablo as we've known it for years. If it took them years to figure this out, I have to wonder a little.
Salvaging change is fine, and makes sense. Make it cost some gold and you've got a nice little gold sink included. Seems a little counterproductive, as others have said, to talk for years about the game's momentum and then ultimately still tie us to going back into town for downtime. I don't mind having downtime (hell, make someone like Deckard identify our items for a price, or something), but why the sudden philosophical change?
Potion button should be mappable for anything. Don't force me to map my potion to a button. If I'm playing a Demon Hunter I might not even be using potions as much as a Barbarian...so why am I losing a hotkey for it? MAPPABLE BUTTONS Blizzard. I'm not an idiot...I can figure out what I need and map it accordingly.
I'm sorry...but some of this reeks of the console team. Not that I'm crapping on consoles really...I own all three. Just some of this stuff seems odd to change now.
Second what ever happened to not going back to town staying in the action????
Third glad the stats are clear cut, it's anoying in many games were alot of the stats info is vague.
The game was simple enough as it is, anyone who cannot figure out how to play it shouldn't play computer games to begin with. What ever happened chance to hit?? What's wrong with having PLAYERS decide what item is good for their character or not? I don't see anything wrong with gray-area items, and not super-defining items for one class over the other. This makes trading INTERESTING.
Why are you going to get rid of scrolls of identify or cain identifying? This is a symbolic function in the Diablo franchise. With the amount of town traveling you have to do anyway, using cain is not going to cause much inconvenience at all.
The only change I like is changing the stone of recall. I don't even know why you thought of changing the name from town portal to begin with. What's with the design department??
One question, Blizzard: Who the hell are you listening to about these changes? Holy shit!
I'm pretty damn close with cancelling my two collectors editions preorders just like some guy who posted earlier on this thread.