So for the 18 boss images, we have (x,y).
(1,1) An angel. Anyone know which angel this is? He doesn't have a sword insignia so Imperius is out. Is it some other angel?
(2,1) A female demon with moth demons.
(3,1) A ghostly looking guy on fire.
*(4,1) The Mistress of Lust, presumably one of the seven Sins.
*(5,1) The Summoner Horazon. Looks enough like the D2 version anyhow.
(6,1) A bone axe that's partially under water. Could be anything.
*(1,2) Deckard Cain. OMGZORS! Not even gonna speculate on why Cain would be a boss.
(2,2) An undead looking fellow with a big mace.
*(3,2) The Spider Queen, Araneae.
*(4,2) Diablo.
(5,2) Vipermages and lightning?
(6,2) Some chick wearing a hood.
*(1,3) Azmodan.
(2,3) A bunch of different looking demons.
(3,3) Some chick shooting fire out of her hand.
(4,3) WTF is this?!??!?!
(5,3) A really fat demon, presumably Gluttony (a Sin!)
*(6,3) Good old Leoric.
So, if there are seven Sins then we are missing:
Greed (who has already been mentioned as a possible in-game demon)
Pride
Envy
Wrath
Sloth
Not sure if any of the portraits clearly represent one of the above.
0
On the other hand, each crushing blow deals 5% of current HP - up to 1.65 BILLION damage from full health. That is as much damage as 330 Crits. Even if the boss was at 1%, a Crush would deal as much damage as 3.3 Crits.
It is obvious that Crushing Blow is hilariously imbalanced at the moment. Because CB is a percentage of monster health, it doesn't matter how much HP you give the monsters (33 billion!). I'm sure Blizzard is aware of this and CB will soon meet the nerfstick.
Personally I'm not sure why they even brought back CB. CB is difficult to balance because it scales with monster HP. No matter how weak it is, there will be some level of enemy difficulty where CB vastly out-scales all other forms of damage. (Just ask the Ubers from D2)
0
0
8
Why doesn't he just quit playing?
***
A lot of the post is completely valid suggestions that most players would agree with (better minibosses, more meaningful low level loot, better skill damage display) but it's worded in a super-negative, almost whiny manner.
Some of it is hilariously unrealistic. For example, calling the game a failure because it's not 100% cheat- and bot-free is absurd. No computer system is 100% secure, especially not multiplayer games. Worse yet, the OP implies that anyone who has over a billion gold is a scammer or botter, and that's just stupid. A billion gold is worth at most $40 USD, there are people who have spent hundreds of $ just on the Hearthstone Beta, I'm sure the majority of multi-billion-gold spenders are real money spenders.
0
QFT.
1
* Making trading "painful" (difficult and time consuming) introduces the possibility that you will get loot faster by playing self-found and not trading at all. This is a good thing.
* No matter how difficult trading is, there will always exist a certain gear level where trading is more efficient than self-found. However, it is possible that most players are optimal, or near-optimal with self-found play. (for example - nearly all "casual" Diablo 2 players played self-found or very close to self-found)
* In an "efficient trading" universe, you only get a 15% incremental value from sharing free items among a trusted social circle - the difference between AH tax and no AH tax. Yet you get 1000% or more value from selling items on the AH, compared to playing self-found. This creates a strong disincentive to share items with your friends. In D2 if my RL friend found an item that's godly for my Sorc (and he doesn't have a Sorc), he would give me the item for free. (and vice versa if I found something for his Zon) In D3 if he found a comparable item, he would look on the RMAH and see that it's $100, and there's no way he'd give me the item for free.
* In a "painful trading" universe, you get an extremely high incremental value from freely sharing items. If a group of 6 friends shares free items, each friend has access to a pool of items that's 6x as large as self-found. (+500%) This is a much larger efficiency benefit than barter-style trading (which is inefficient and vulnerable to mistrades and/or scamming). Therefore, everyone has an incentive to share, and having trustworthy friends is worth major in-game benefits.
19
I've heard a lot of people argue that "barter trade is really painful" and therefore it is a mistake to remove the AH's. I beg to differ.
To put it simply, trade needs to be painful or else itemization will suck. It doesn't matter what they do with Loot 2.0, the AH removal is actually the most important part. And here's why:
-----
*** THE MATH ***
The simple mathematical fact is that AH's dramatically skew itemization. Let's assume there are 2 versions of the game with identical itemization: self-found and AH:
*Self-Found*: I find an "awesome" item every 20 hours of gameplay. However, 80% of the time, it's designed for a different class or spec. So I equip one "awesome" item after 100 hours of gameplay. Once I have one slot occupied by an "awesome" item, the next one that drops has a 1/12 chance of being a sidegrade. After two slots, each item has a 2/12 chance of being a sidegrade, etc.
Mathematically speaking, it will take me an average of 3,723 hours to find an "awesome" item in every slot.
*GAH*: I find an "awesome" item every 20 hours of gameplay. 80% of the time it's designed for a different class or spec, so I sell it on the AH and get 85% of the Gold required to purchase an equally awesome item. Better yet, I know exactly which item slot needs the upgrade. Even if I have terrible luck and never find a usable item in my life, on average I only need to play for 23.5 hours to earn enough Gold to purchase an "awesome" item.
Mathematically speaking, it will take me 306 hours to earn enough Gold to purchase an "awesome" item in every slot.
Using the GAH decreases the time needed to gear out your character by a factor of 12! Remember that this is a paper napkin estimate, completely ignoring the increase in kill speed and MF/GF for the GAH user.
If itemization was tuned to be "reasonable" for self-found characters, an AH user would have every item BiS after 2 weeks and could never get another upgrade again. In order to prevent this, Blizzard has to intentionally tune itemization to be extremely slow. (ie 3700+ hours to get all-BiS, the real number is probably even higher)
This is the reason why itemization is so bad on PC.
***
There are other reasons why the AH is so bad for itemization. One reason is that the AH is equally efficient regardless of your gear/wealth level. A player with 500k to his name can buy a whole bunch of 50k items just as easily as a player with 2B can buy a bunch of 200M items. This causes three harmful effects:
Trade needs to be painful. It's the best way to improve the game.
0
Zombie Bears deals a lot of damage (up to 708%) but it is a really touchy spell. You have to position yourself in a way that funnels all 3 zombie bears onto the target. If your positioning is off, all three zombie bears could miss, and you end up spending a lot more casts to kill the target.
Wave of Zombies is an alternate zombie charger rune that deals 115%x3 damage (345% total), approximately half of zombie bears. All three zombies are guaranteed to spawn directly in front of you, so if you are next to an elite all three zombies will *always* hit. 345% damage is significantly better than the 236% of a single zombie bear. You don't need to worry about being out of position where your zombie bears aren't hitting. You'll always hit.
In my experience, Wave of Zombies clears low-MP elite packs much more reliably than zombie bears. While you never get the same amount of raw damage, you don't need it, low-MP elites are extremely fragile. It's more important to have consistent damage so you can kill it and keep moving.
0
I agree 100% that Plague Bats is the best way to proc fetishes. As long as you've got enough mana regen (easy with the Zuni 4pc) and a -Firebats Cost on your helmet, you can spam firebats all day long and they proc fetishes like crazy. Plague Bats deal considerably more damage than the other varieties of firebats (except cloud of bats which is melee range). If you lack survivability, plague bats is a great way to apply Bad Medicine debuff.
I've toyed around with taking Fetish Sycophants + Fierce Loyalty (gives all pets HP regen). Normally the Fetish Sycophants die off very rapidly to stronger enemies but fierce loyalty gives them enough survivability that you end up with boatloads of fetishes. Not sure if it's worth it but its hilarious to watch.
2
What D3 needs is the opposite of super awesome items that appeal to everybody. What D3 needs is items that are more specialized and appeal to a very narrow niche.
As long as everyone wants exactly the same gear, everyone will compete for the same few stats. A relatively small difference in stats leads to an immense difference in sell price - just look at the sale prices for any Legendary. Even more importantly, there is nothing interesting you can do with gear. Unlike D2, you can't stack gear and turn an underpowered variant build into a decent farming build, or turn your class into a totally different class.
The best thing for Blizzard to do in an expansion pack would be to greatly nerf stats that benefit everyone (Primary stat, ASPD, CHC, CDB) and buff or add new stats that benefit specific skills, builds, or playstyles. (For example, "+% to Summoned Creature Damage", "+% to Single Target Melee Attacks", "+% to Bleed Damage", "+% to Damage over Time Spells", "+% to Ground Targeted Spells", "+% Damage to Enemies 30 yards or further", "+% Proc Damage", "+% Damage vs. Stunned")
1
http://us.battle.net...ic/7789719213#1
=========================
Diablo 3 is a good game that has the potential to be great. The famous "Complete Diablo Fix" thread had a lot of suggestions, but it was written from a Diablo 2-centered worldview. For reference,
http://eu.battle.net...ic/6444144744#1
I was wondering: what would Diablo 3 be like if it fully embraced its nature as a new game separate from Diablo 2? The following are my rather long ideas.
====================
TL,DR summary:
In order from smallest to largest game mechanic changes,
====================
1) Challenge players to compete against one another in PvE:
Competitive PvE has been a part of RPG culture for decades - in fact, long before videogames existed. Gygax's Tower. Moria/Angband. Final Fantasy Secret Bosses. Diablo 2 Ladder. World First C'Thun/Illidan/Heroic Lich King/Heroic Sha.
Diablo 3 has absolutely no mechanics for PvE competition. Inferno was beaten shortly after the game was released. Posting "4 MILLION DPS!!!!" videos on YouTube gets old fast. There is no ladder, no way for the most dedicated players to flaunt their insanity. Yet there is no reason for this to be the case. D3 could be an excellent competitive PvE game, and here's how:
Ladder: Not one, but many.
The argument against Diablo 3 ladders was that D3 loot is supposed to be "permanent", and having ladder seasons would make loot non-permanent. I will go into detail later on why permanent loot is a bad idea. The fact is, ladder was a very easy way for players to show off their insane competitiveness. Give players a choice between multiple different ladders with different objectives.
Ladders could be designed to be more like a leaderboard (ie, WoW Challenge Leaderboards) that shows elapsed time down to the millisecond.
A lot of us don't have the free time to compete in ladders. We should have an alternative means to compete. Scenarios would provide those alternatives.
Each Scenario would have its own Scoring system allowing players to score points for impressive performances. Your name would show up on a leaderboard just like any Flash or iPhone game. For example, "I'm #16,234 worldwide on the Reign of Fire survival!"
====================
2) Make Nightmare and Hell relevant again.
A large number of Diablo 2 items and Diablo 2 builds were never intended to actually compete in the endgame (Hell Baal, Key Farming, and Ubers). Instead you had teleport builds that could clear Nightmare Andy/Mephy/Baal over and over for specific low level drops (SoJ, etc.) and builds highly optimized for farming Hell Countess or Hell Mephy. This is because low level stuff mattered.
Low level stuff doesn't matter in D3, largely because there is no reason to re-level a fresh character. This is a shame because the leveling process in D2 was a big part of the fun!
Frequently resetting ladders would encourage players to actually level new characters at a regular pace. In order to further emphasize lower-level items and builds:
3) Diversify loot, eliminate the Quadrafecta.
Primary Stat. %Attack Speed. %Crit Chance. %Crit Damage Bonus.
The Quadrafecta absolutely dominates D3 gearing because there is no other way to improve DPS.
Diablo 2 wasn't exactly perfect in this regard - most classes really had a Trifecta that looked like this:
Diablo 3's damage stats have one very interesting mechanic that D2 didn't, which is the multiplier effect of %CRIT and %CDB. %Crit doesn't do much good without %CDB. %CDB does absolutely no good without %Crit. I like this mechanic because it encourages players to commit to stacking DPS stats. Instead of removing Crit and CDB, we should add more stats so that we have a choice.
A few principles should be observed for the new damage stats:
4) Design "loot sinks" to get rid of loot accumulation.
Everyone knows that D3 loot feels extremely weak compared to loot found on the AH.
This has nothing to do with drop rates or itemization mechanics. Instead, it's all about the durability of loot. Namely, good loot is indestructable. A sufficiently powerful item will exchange hands many, many times and never be vendored or sharded.
Therefore, any newly dropped piece of loot has to compete with every other piece of loot dropped since Diablo 3 was released. Any time Blizzard buffs loot stats and drop rates, the newly dropped loot feels stronger only for a short time until it becomes commonplace. If every piece of loot was godlike for 6 months, then every piece of loot would have to compete with 6 months' worth of equally godlike loot.
The one and only way around this is some form of permanent loot destruction. I would suggest taking a cue from Diablo 2 and introducing loot destruction through ladder competition. D2 took the primitive approach of doing a Reset every once in a while (destroying EVERYONE's characters and loot on Ladder). I would take the gentler approach of "optional" loot destruction:
5) Embrace the action in ARPG.
When D3 was first announced, I recall Blizzard using an awful lot of action game terms to describe the gameplay. The names Zelda, God of War, and Ninja Gaiden were thrown around in several interviews. Right after the first Monk unveil, I imagined running around blocking fireballs and chaining mouse clicks into ridiculous Limit Break type combos.
None of that ever happened. The ability of melee characters to block incoming projectiles was rapidly removed from the game. Following this, melee became much weaker than ranged due to the ease of kiting. In response, Blizzard increased the size of player hitboxes and made it much harder to avoid enemy attacks with movement. This was a huge disappointment.
I still think that Diablo 3 would be a lot more fun if it played more like a true action game. For those who think that Blizzard servers are too slow to run an action game: Starcraft 2 is a lot faster paced (some would say too fast) than Brood War and it is online-only and doesn't lag much.
Melee abilities should work more like a fighting game, with a few basic melee classifications.
0
I think what I was trying to say in the OP is this:
- Blizzard wants players to have a way to DPS hard without stacking %crit and %CDB.
- They suggest in their 1.07 preview, that stacking Attack Speed and +Weapon Damage is a way to DPS without having %crit.
- However, this is wrong. Anyone with high (100k+) DPS has a ton of crit. The guys with world-champion (400k+) DPS will have tons of Crit, CDB, Aspd, and +damage.
- This is because all of the damage increasers are multiplicative. There is no "choice". You want "all of the above".
If D3 gearing is supposed to be a "choice" then there should be enough stats to choose from that you can't simply get "all of the above". That is why there needs to be other competing stats besides Crit.
Also, a DoT centric build does not necessarily have to be "slow killing". See poison nova necros and plague javelin zons from D2.
0
This sounds nice but it really isn't the case in the current D3 itemization. There are really only five ways to increase your DPS in diablo 3:
Weapon Damage
Primary Stat
%Attack Speed
%Critical Chance
%Critical Damage Bonus
Out of these, most of your weapon damage comes from your weapon (+/- offhand) and primary stat is mandatory on all pieces you wear. This leaves only three stats that actually increase your DPS. Skills that don't Crit basically lose 2 out of 3. There is no way to make up for the lost Crit.
The Blue posts make it seem like they want "weapon damage and attack speed" to be the alternative to "%Crit and %CDB". The problem is that weapon damage and attack speed multiply with %Crit and %CDB. Giving people the option to get damage and aspd doesn't make crit weaker, it means they will want all of the above.
=================
IMO: "giving players an alternative to Crit" will require the addition of competing DPS stats other than Crit and CDB. These alternatives already exist in game to some extent! Blizzard only needs to add a quadratic multiplier (like how CDB multiplies with Crit) to make it more of an investment. All of the alternative DPS stats should multiply with Primary Stat or else they won't remain viable at high gear levels:
1) Bleed Chance and +%Bleed Damage: Bleed exists on tons of gear but is currently very weak. What if it scaled with Primary Stat, and there was a separate +%Bleed Damage modifier? A player that stacked tons of Bleed would have very poor burst damage but very high sustained damage compared to a Crit player.
2) Proc Chance and +%Proc Damage: What if there was an affix that increased the damage of all procs? Everything from Hellfire Ring to Schaefer's Hammer to the skeletons summoned by Wailing Host. This would encourage alternative gear builds and make proc items more exciting - to some players but not others.
3) Crowd Control Chance and +%Damage vs CC: Chance to stun, fear, freeze etc all seem fairly weak right now, but what if there was an affix that increased player DPS versus incapacitated targets? This would not only be interesting gear-wise, but would encourage different skill builds to maximize CC uptime. The only drawback of this stat is that you could totally stack it with Crit. (ie, CM/Frost Nova)
0
This min/max bug applies to all +physical damage modifiers in the game (including physical damage bonuses on weapons themselves), and there is a separate bug involving how min/max affixes are displayed. Basically an item that rolls two separate affixes, "+6 minimum damage" and "+6 maximum damage", will sometimes incorrectly display "+6-12 damage" when it is really +6-+6. A red gem that says "+10-20 damage" actually has +10 minimum and +10 maximum damage, which is "correctly" displayed when you socket it into a weapon.
Any time the SUM of all your "+ minimum physical damage" affixes, including +Physical on the weapon itself, equals or exceeds the base damage spread of your weapon (max - min), any additional +minimum physical damage will be applied to your maximum physical damage also. This effectively doubles the usefulness of bonus minimum physical damage. Equipping a weapon with a large base damage spread and no "+ minimum physical damage" will decrease the efficacy of +minimum physical damage back to 1x.
Note that Bonus Elemental Damage (on weapons) always doubles the effectiveness of the minimum, it is applied to both minimum and maximum. This is because weapons do not have any base elemental damage. This effect causes the displayed "+6-12 Arcane Damage" to be accurate for an item with +6 minimum arcane and +6 maximum arcane.
0
Everyone's DPS went down significantly with the patch so stuff is taking a VERY long time to die in act 3. I think now that you can get Level 63 items in act 1-2, it's probably better to farm there.