DiabloFans

So just to be clear, if an individual receives a beta invite, are they notified through e-mail or is one's account simply flagged?

Enigma problem? Pretty simple. Charges.

And also I play mainly SP.
I use teleport charges from staves.
And yes teleport was fun and added a lot to gamplay.
I also played the sorc.
No my necro didn't feel like a sorc.

So I guess it's pretty much our experiences of the gameplay here governing our opinions.

Charges would certainly help with that, I agree. If enigma had charges, I would agree it added a lot to gameplay as it would have required strategic use. I also agree with your final point of our experiences governing our opinions. Essentially, that's all anyone can present here; there are no objective ways of determining whether or not runewords should be implemented.

Quote from Nekrodrac

I think they will implement it however, because it is FUN and that's what a game should be. Plus it offers you NEW strategy. Obviously you won't be getting the uber skill of another char (they will have learned from D2) and that is why the char will KEEP their uniqueness. If you think like 1-3 skills define the uniqueness of a char, you are being sadly narrow-minded about it.
The unique argument is lame as far as I am concerned. It's all about proper balancing to me.

For me the idea of runewords is so iffy; Blizzard is going to have to be extremely careful about what they give. I think movement skills (such as teleport) should be not be shared, regardless of how they have been changed in D3. I would have been overall fine with runewords in D2 if it wasn't for that damned Enigma. That item is the sole reason I swore off PvPing. As to your point about 1-3 skills defining the uniqueness of a character...again, that really depends on the spell. Teleport (an example that will always be brought up) was, in my opinion, a skill that really helped define the sorceress class. Because the skills in D2 were almost all just various forms of dps (often AoE), teleport was a bit one that really set the class apart. You can disagree with me all you want, but no one could ever dissuade me from that way of thinking. The moment Enigma was put into the equation, anyone using that just felt like some weird variation of a sorceress.

My concluding point? Would I eventually like to see runewords? Sure, but they will have to be really damn careful about what skills they give out.

The D2 death penalty was easily one of the worst/stupidest I've ever encountered. All it did was make me spend a minute running back to my corpse. The gold loss was inconsequential, and the exp loss (for me, who usually didn't level beyond 80-85 because there wasn't any real incentive beyond that) amounted to a couple Baal runs. Let's not kid ourselves by saying the D2 penalty was hardcore in any way, shape or form; it wasn't. "Oh no! My corpse is surrounded by monsters that kill me before I reach it! What do I do?! Oh, wait, I'll just exit and make a new game."

And to those anyone who says WoW didn't have a death penalty, I'm guessing you didn't play much at high levels with a lot of purple gear. Dying meant your items would lose durability, which may not sound like a big deal, but it cost an ass ton to repair. This was especially bad for raiders who needed money for mats, pots, etc.

Quote from "emilemil1" »

I never said worthless, but they could make the builds more equal and power up the builds that are currently worthless.

Well you said remove, so I took it to mean remove, but now we're just getting at semantics. In any case, all I really meant to say was I won't be playing

Quote from "emilemil1" »

The only time when the inventory should auto arrange is when a item doesn't fit. As much player interaction as possible should be encouraged.

I agree with you on this one. I have a certain order I typically keep inventories in, and I wouldn't like it if the game changed it automatically on me.

Quote from "emilemil1" »

They can change the strength of certain skill combinations to remove OP builds like Smiters or Hammerdins. They can make old useless skills into good skills so we can discover new builds that actually can do something.

They could, but I'd bet they won't. They especially won't take effective builds and "remove" them, that would be stupid. As OP as they can be, I don't think they should be made worthless. Even if they made their synergies a bit weaker, that's not what I'd call a major change.

No animosity drawn, sir. I wasn't saying I knew it wasn't a content patch, I was just going off what emil was saying. Even with that being the case, I'm more or less just sort of curious as to what they're adding. I doubt they're going to do any major re-balancing, emil, mostly stemming from the fact that I don't see what they could add that would require the game to need more balancing. Items certainly wouldn't do that (they would tailor items to what's in the game now, not the other way around),

Quote from "emilemil1" »

@.1

Yes, identified items are of course worth much more, but only if it is the correct item.

Don't tell me you haven't seen someone selling unidentified rings for gems and runes? I see them everywhere (on Europe)

I'm not even sure how to respond to the first statement. By correct item, do you mean an item with the correct stats? Then yes, that was my point to begin with. People don't want to trade nearly as much for unidentified items because you might end up with a total piece of crap.

To your second point, jest or not, one type of unidentified item being desired is not nearly enough (for me) to justify keeping it in.

Quote from "emilemil1" »

I'm playing LoL too It rocks!

But you should have some faith in Blizzard. It is not going to be a content patch, but changes to currently existing things can completely change the game, hopefully to the better.

I can't agree with that, I'm sorry. There isn't anything they could do right now to "completely change the game." For example, even something like respecs, which I think should have been in the game to begin with, isn't a game-changing mechanic; it's a time saving mechanic. All it means is that I would only need to make 1 paladin instead of 3, or whatever. It's not that I don't trust the Blizzard to add in some nifty stuff, but it won't be anything interesting (to me), especially if it's not a content patch. In fact, you saying it's not a content patch makes me want to play even less.

Quote from "emilemil1" »

I like the identify system.

1. You can trade unidentified items, something that is done in D2 all the time. It is like gambling but you know you will get something good.

2. It is a potential gold sink which is good in a gold economy.

3. It is exciting enough for me to let it remain.

The only downside is that you have to stop and identify it, but I think it is totally worth it.

1. I don't know when you last played D2, but when I played it it this summer, it was still as it had been for quite a while: no one traded unidentified items, or at least not for much. When people trade for items, they want to know what they're worth. When I was playing, identified items were worth much more than unidentified. Also, it's sort of like gambling, but not really. First of all, you don't always know you're going to get something good (though "good" is subjective). I can't count the number of times I found items that had the potential to be very good but ended up being pieces of crap because their stats were low. If I took the effort to find an item myself, I shouldn't have to further "gamble" for the stats.

2. To be honest, I wouldn't really call identifying items a "gold sink," unless Blizzard makes scrolls and such extremely expensive. When I htink gold sinks, I think of things like huge amounts of gold for respecs, or mounts in WoW, or whatever. Identifying items is even on a lower level than repairing items. I will grant this though: that when I played WoW (pre-BC and some BC), repairing items did take a fairly substantial amount of gold, especially if you died, and for those who didn't spend all of their free time farming mats, this was very expensive and sometimes crippling (if you needed potions and such for raiding). Repairing items is about the lowest I'll go for calling something a "sink," and even that's pushing it. I guess it all depends on how you define "gold sink," however.

Furthermore, I don't think identifying items should cost more than a minute amount of gold. It would be stupid to have to pay much of anything in order to simply use an item, which is all identifying essentially was: paying a bit of gold to use an item you found.

3. I won't argue against this point; the excitement is purely subjective. You think it's exciting, while I think it got boring and just a waste of a time after about the first 3 weeks of playing the game back in 2000.

I hope they remove the identification part of the game. It was just an obnoxious waste of time, having to stop what you're doing to identify some items. Honestly, to me it often felt like just a cheap thrill factor: "Ooooh, is the ED high enough for me to trade for x? I don't know, I have to identify it!"

Originally I was waiting for the patch to pick up playing D2 again, but I started playing League of Legends (awesome game by the way, would highly recommend it), so I'm not going to play it anymore. In any case, not to sound like a downer, but there's really nothing they could add that would get me interested again.

Quote from "CheehC" »

Blizzard have been talking a lot about character customization as being a key element in d3. In terms of how much you can carry ,I think that what would be really good would be if there were draw backs from having a big inventory space.

For instance; You could have a basic inventory with say 40 tetris slots. You could also choose to add 5 more. But to do so would mean that maybe your defence would be decreased by X amount or the damage you do would go down, or your MF is lessened.

This is just an idea, but this would be cool i think as it would add more of that thinking element found in diablo games.

I have to agree with SFJake, this idea is horrible. Aside from his reasons, which I won't repeat, it doesn't really make any sense. If we were going for realism, honestly the only stat that I think would make sense to drop because of inventory size would be move and/or attack speed. Making your stats drop as a trade-off for inventory way is a just a lazy way to make the game more difficult.

Quote from "Awain" »

Honestly, I never really liked the MF system and hope it does not re appear in D3. The idea of you need really good gear with lots of MF on it to get really good gear just seems like an odd concept to me. However who knows if the system in D3 will be anything like D2 and I usually trust blizzard with such decisions to make the game the best possible.

Honestly though, I thought it made for a good progressive system. Every time I played D2, I would delete my old characters and start from scratch; I never had any real problem getting good MF gear. Essentially, I would buy what MF gear I could from vendors (gloves, boots, etc), then find perhaps a socketed helm and stick some perfect topazes in it. I would mf some, get some mediocre gear, put that on, go mf, get better gear, etc. While time consuming, I thought it worked well.

The only alternative I can think of would be something like WoW where each boss just has a % chance to drop specific items, but I don't like that system. I like the system in which bosses can drop any items within their clvl.