Quote from SFJake
I disagree.Quote from ScyberDragon
I disagree, if there was anything that got boring first after years of playing D2, it was the quests. Completing the same small amount of quests became trivial in D2. With randomized quests, it will "feel" different every time you play and will give you different objectives to complete.
Quests were just landmarks. I did everything in the game because I could. Some specific few had permanent rewards, which made it even better.
The randomized quests are completely pointless. And I wonder, why should I care about some idiot with his caravan that lost something completely meaningless, a guy that won't even be there the next time.
Random quests are shallow and boring.
At least it's easy loot. Going back to the caravan example, you may have fought the unique fallen shaman anyways. Why not get a little extra reward for it? It is true that random quests are usually not super fun like handcrafted ones, but I will enjoy the extra rewards for something I probably would have done anyways.
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Yes, hopefully during beta like they did for Starcraft 2.
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Another great episode by the way.
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That's why Bashiok said they are thinking about maybe some crafting recipes to be able to upgrade gems directly to higher levels with crafting mats. Also, I think gems stack to 10 in D3, so they should take up a lot less space than before.
Here's the quote:
Official Blizzard Quote:
//forums.battle.net/thread.html?topicId=27805270362&pageNo=1&sid=3000#6"" class="blizzsource">We'll probably be dropping gems a couple levels further than the 5th (as previously stated), which should help. We also want to make sure it doesn't become a pain to have a ton of gems sitting around waiting for another one to upgrade, so there may be some crafting solutions that help with that. But more importantly we expect a more robust trading system will make it much more feasible to sell off a ton of gems, earn that wealth, and then buy back into gems later when you want - and on the buyer side of that, if you have some gems and just need one more to upgrade, it will be quick and easy to go get one for a reasonable price.
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I have no idea if they will have PvE in beta, but it seems like they won't need it. PvE doesn't really have any balance to work on. I mean some classes might be a little easier or faster to level than others, but that's good enough. As long as you can beat the game with every class, it should be fine. They can fix the little things after release with patches.
Battle.net 2.0 was already fully tested with Starcraft 2. D3 isn't doing anything new than SC2 did last year. Matchmaking? SC2 has that. Custom Games? Done in SC2. Chat/Communication? Already in SC2.
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Traits - We have seen very little on what they can actually do. Would be nice to see the full set.
Skills - Similar to traits. We know a little bit more about skills than traits, but I'd still like to see the full set.
Items - This seems to be one of the least covered topics by Blizzard. In the videos they don't really show any of the items. Maybe Blizzcon people have an idea, but so far I don't see any info online about items, item stats. Like just go through a dungeon and log everything that drops, so we can get an idea of drop chances.
What I don't want to see:
Quests - I want to see the story for myself.
Areas - Same as quests really, it kind of spoils the first time you see it.
Lore - This might be okay, but only if it doesn't reveal story.
Spoiler tags work but try not to put them in the middle of an article where we will have to skip past it somehow without seeing anything. Use separate pages, spoilers only at the end of the page, or even spoiler tags (if this forum has that, basically a show/hide button around text).
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It's funny. Back in 2000, I was a huge Blizzard fan with Warcraft and Starcraft, but I never paid any attention to Diablo. I wasn't following Diablo 2 at all. My best friend had showed me Diablo 1 on PlayStation, but it never interested me. My friend was visiting after school and brought his copy of Diablo 2.
We quickly installed it on my dad's laptop. I think it was Windows 95 with only a Pentium 300MHz and 16MB of RAM. The family computer, a Mac, was even worse. The laptop didn't meet the game's requirements, but somehow the game still worked. Even though the framerate was really low, we both had an absolute blast. I bought the game myself the very next day after school.
We both got online with our slow dial-up connections and logged on Battle.net. We had to use cell phones to communicate game name/password. It seemed like everyone was on Battle.net, because multiplayer was unplayable. It took us an hour before we got through the "new game" queue. Then we both had problems getting into the game. Every time it failed we were back at the bottom of the queue. For some reason we didn't care about these problems. We just went back to playing single player.
I played Diablo 2 all the rest of summer break. I fondly remember days of playing all day until 3am, sleeping in until 11am, and skipping lunch most days. There were just so many classes to try, all with unique skills. Then there were unique items to try to find. Looking back, it was really grindy leveling new characters from scratch to try out new builds, but it never bothered me at the time. I was completely addicted.
I must have played the game every day for a year straight, not always long hours but at least 30 minutes. Even when I took a break later, I would always come back to it for a few months to try the new patch, new builds, or to get better items. These days, I still play the game at least once a year, but just casually for a few weeks. There's just something magical about Diablo 2 to me.
Anyways, I'm a huge Blizzard fan and have every game except Diablo 1/Hellfire. I've been playing Starcraft 2 most days from beta until now, but it's starting to feel a little bit stale. I'm really excited about Diablo 3 and wanted to join a good fansite to pass the time until beta. I got invited to Starcraft 2 beta very early. I hope I am just as lucky with Diablo 3 beta.
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I think Bashiok also said there might be ways to skip ahead a few gem levels with the crafting system. Say from level 6 to level 8 or 9 with one recipe, only one gem required. If they do this, the recipes will probably be pretty expensive or time consuming to limit their use. It's supposed to be an option in cases where you are getting really unlucky for a long time. Like if you have a level 6 ruby for a month and still haven't gotten enough other rubies to upgrade.
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I did the same with entire mules just full of gems. I remember back when I played online, 80 chipped gems = 1 high rune. It's how I got my first MF gear. Back when one of the patches had just added a new cube recipe to reroll charms with chipped gems.
In D3 I said both because I will use them for powering up items, but also collect them for the future or trading. As long as I have extra storage, I will save every gem. Plus I've heard there are ways to upgrade gems with crafting mats when you don't have 3 of a kind.
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The volume needed to be more balanced between the three guys talking.
On a scale of 1 to 10
Force - 10
Sixen - 6
ScyberDragon - 5
Ideally, all three would be the same number. Maybe in the future you guys can do a sound test before the real recording, with everyone adjusting their volume as needed.
Again good discussion, and I will follow the podcast while we all wait for beta.