Hopefully D3v, similar to how they are finally making a vanilla version of WoW. Would be interesting to see how many players truly liked the original version of D3 more than the current version. At least it would give them some more solid info on player preferences before they make D4.
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- TianZi
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Member for 11 years, 3 months, and 13 days
Last active Wed, Jan, 23 2019 02:28:11
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Sep 17, 2015
TianZi posted a message on Rank #1 Barbarian Clear, Zero Crit Shenlong's MonkPosted in: NewsI ran a somewhat similar build earlier in the season, but without BP or partheons. I preferred using unity + strongarms. Had some differences in skills as well. Overall didn't feel competitive to U6 though, so eventually just re-gered that monk into a simple gen build with sages to farm my DBs while doing Grift with the regular U6 setup.
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Sep 3, 2015
TianZi posted a message on Reddit Q&A Round-upPosted in: News
That answer on multiplayer vs single player is really kind of sad. Their perspective is placed entirely around friends, when in reality many people that enjoy single player need to join public games or screw with their real life schedule in order to play in groups.
It's not just more efficient, it's that 4 players that are terrible at the game would be more efficient than the best player in the world solo'ing.
If your friends aren't on, you shouldn't have to add random players into your party to stay semi-competitive.
The gap is just way too large. I mean why is there even a solo leader board when all the solo players are in groups to gain the gear and paragon exp that they use in solo.
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Jun 23, 2015
TianZi posted a message on Patch 2.3 Preview and PTRPosted in: News
To be completely honest, I wasn't expecting very many big changes in the near future. What makes it more interesting is that so many big changes are all being put into the same patch.
Hope they pull it off well.
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Jun 23, 2015
TianZi posted a message on D3's Biggest Problems?Posted in: News
i kinda disagree ..the leveling process, yes it feels nice, but it is something what you should only do once.. you go through whatever you want and you are done (if you like it, you DO HAVE the option to do it again).., if you were forced to lvl up every single character through story mode with no boost etc.. i guarantee that there would be much more ppl complaining..
I think leveling should be completely removed from seasons. However, if leveling is staying in the game than it should be relevant, and about finding the right gear and skill to level. The start of the season went like this:
Spend like 5-7 hours to level
Take like 3-5 hours to gear enough to farm T6
Do Grifts over and over again
The leveling right now wastes more time than gearing your character for the highest content outside of GRifts. It's clear that the whole game revolves around GRifts. So if leveling is going to be a thing, it needs to be relevant rather than just a pointless time sink. Otherwise they would be better off just starting players at 70 and just let them start GRifting.
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Jun 23, 2015
TianZi posted a message on D3's Biggest Problems?Posted in: News
Something to keep in mind is that it's pretty much impossible to keep D3 as a truly competitive game. The main reason is that it's a loot hunt game, meaning loot has to be worth farming for. Same goes with paragon exp. At the same time, anytime players stats are no longer equal, skill become less and less important, while luck and amount of time played becomes more and more important.
When you look at competitive games, the playing field is nearly even for all players. Differences go as far as cosmetics, and that's about it. D3 has too many layers of separation between player base. Looking at just armor you have:
No set
Wrong set
Right set non ancient, wrong rolls
Right set non ancient, right rolls, low rolls
Right set non ancient, right rolls, high rolls
Then on top of that you have the whole thing in ancient form. And then there's weapons, following a similar pattern. Paragon levels is one more level of character disparity between players. Realistically people can't compete out of their own gearing category, which leaves that game so better gear = gets further. Skill only really matters assuming gearing requirement is met.
Basically every time the loot hunt is improved (hellfire amulet, ancient items, etc) the competitive aspect of the game is worsened due to the larger gear disparity. Improving the loot hunt and making the game more competitive really can't go hand in hand unless there is a competitive aspect that doesn't account for player gear and paragon points. And if something like that were to happen, there likely would be no point farming gear.
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May 3, 2015
TianZi posted a message on Patch 2.2 Discussion, Blizzcon Contests, Solo Key Farming BarbPosted in: News
D3 at launch was by far my favorite version of D3. I played a DH back then.
The game now is definitely better than it was a few months back, but far from being my favorite version of D3.
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For some classes leaderboards ended extremely low compared to the classes potential, because not that many people really compete for ranks in a not really competitive game anyways. Like my Wizard, last played towards the end of September was still like 120-130'ish by the time season ended, and I didn't even fish for rifts to do that clear back in September.
Ever since RoS I don't put much effort into this game since I'm against botting and THUD, yet still have several classes on the leaderboards occasionally in top 100 during the times I play. TBH the skill level in this game for top 20 is probably lower than even playing at Masters in StarCraft or like Duelist in WoW. It's really not that competitive because the game is heavily RNG based due to it's PvE nature.
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The letter spends too much time talking about the competitiveness, and just seems to direct so much of it at botting, when the main issue, THUD, doesn't even get mentioned. The fact simply remains that removing botting won't fix the competitiveness of the game. That's not to mention botting goes hand in hand with paragon levels, which at least can be seen on the leaderboard. So being a few ranks behind that guy that's 1000 paragon levels ahead really isn't a big deal anyways.
If the competition is going to be shit with THUD, it hardly matters that it's a little more shit with botting. I mean either way, terrible competition is terrible competition. It really goes hand in hand. If Blizzard doesn't want to fix the game to be competitive, I'd rather they not waste resources half-assing it. They might as well put that money towards WoW, StarCraft, Hearthstone, HotS, etc.
As much as I hate botting, and all forms of cheating, I really can't agree with sending that letter to Blizz without a mention of THUD. It's pretty ridiculous to start it out like "This is a message on behalf of the portion of the community that engages in the competitive aspects (such as Leaderboards and Conquests) of this game you created" when some players that are part of the competitive community do not agree with your letter.
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I've also had multiple goblin packs in regular rifts quite a few times, so that likely has nothing to do with the cow rift.
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THUD is a far larger issue than botting anyways.
As long as programs such as THUD are around (yet not legal to use) the ladder really can't be competitive.
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Have gotten the cow rift 4-5 times, including times with 0 legendaries. Never had a goblin pack in one.
The first times I got it the exp bonus from the event seemed really nice. In more recent times the bonus was pretty much unnoticeable since GRifts already give so much exp.
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Keeping main-stat is practically irrelevant in that even in the highest tier GRift groups the heal monk isn't the one really at risk of dieing. Plus 99.99% of players never play that high tier anyways.
It's really more of a theoretical thing than something practical. I think doing a video of rolling a RoV offhand to not have damage range would have been a better example of the same thing.
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Coming into the season now might not be as bad as joining in at the start. At least it wasn't 3 out of 4 people playing a Uli monk when only 1 works in a group.
And Blizz pretends like they designed the game to play with friends. In reality, you end up strait to chat channels looking for random players while having to decline clan mates due to the classes/specs they're playing.
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The item hunt is fun, but far too short. And next you go farm paragon with
your friendsrandom people.The part that makes it all worse is the reality that the real item hunt is shorter than it seems. This is simply because the stat boosts from ancients (aside from weapons) is pretty irrelevant compared to what paragon levels covers. Because rolls like CC/CD/IAS/CDR/skill damage are all capped the same with ancients and non ancients, all ancients even give over non ancients is main stat (and very limited resist).
Sadly, paragon gives the same thing. When you factor in the perfect rolls needed for items like gloves, amulets, rings, it becomes pretty clear that looking for ancient ones are really not even worth the time or effort compared to just farming paragon.
In previous seasons it took like like 3-5 days to get my gear for grifting. This season with the addition of the cube, everything was in place for my uli monk on day 2.
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I'm mainly like a rework of the UI, and more varied content would be nice.
I'd rather not have more classes or more skills. I'd rather have the current ones balanced better first.
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You're probably right about the way skills and sets could have been. It won't stop people from going to a cookie cutter spec, but it will let more players try different specs that have a chance to become the cookie cutter. There could also be the result where more variations of the cookie cutter exist.
Yea, I don't really know about longevity, I don't know if there is a solution to it. I don't know how much most of the people even play. One things that caught my attention though, is that you mention "complete the journey". I wonder why Blizzard made a journey that probably everyone can finish. When they first announced the season journey, I actually thought it'd be a system so everyone ends at different parts of the journey. Before the season started, I was thinking the season journey might be the thing to end the whole mindless paragon farm. It sounded like it'd be the goal to try and get as far as possible during the season rather than something most people finish in a couple weeks.
I had friends from other games that came to Diablo because it was so heavily hyped. I had people I played with at the start, and most of us liked the game. Progressing gave the feeling of progression, because it felt like we worked towards it. I didn't hear any complaints from them, but as the nerfs to content started rolling in, players started leaving. It simple felt like progression was being cut out from the game. Personally I already finished Inferno on launch week before the nerfs came in, but it felt kind of retarded to just give hand outs to people that didn't even spend time to farm for gear. I've seen some of them log on to other various Blizzard games from time to time, but just not back into D3.
As for my comment on solo, I like playing efficiently. At the same time I don't like carrying people and I don't like being carried. In vanilla I played a DH and I could farm any zone in inferno with pretty low deaths by the second week of the game, YET it still felt like I was putting effort into doing it. I don't think I necessarily became obsessed with efficiency since I was all over efficiency before I even heard they were making a game called D3. Before D3 I played StarCraft, and to keep my rank (high masters), every build I played had to be played efficiently.
Hmm, I'm not sure it's due to more people being more informative or not. I think the only D3 video (aside from my own) that I watched all the way through was the recent Striken one from Quin. Which of course I'm too lazy to bother snapshotting anyways, but it's info that was interesting anyways. Generally speaking, no offense to streamers/youtubers, most videos don't seem to provide anything useful that a glance at the leaderboard wouldn't tell me. Back pre-RoS I've put builds together and shared videos on youtube as well, but now it feels like the builds practically build themselves. Can't agree with you on the sets things, but I'm sure a lot of people do like sets the way they are now.
As far as skills goes, I wish they'd let us hide our gear/skills that were used for GRift clears. I feel like the leaderboards probably have a lot more impact on skill choices than the "professional" community. It just seems worthless to experiment when builds simply get copied as soon as they're used.
I wore sage set since like day 2 of the season. The DB monk was up and running before my main monk, so I had a good number of DBs for gear. Instead of aiming for ancients, I geared my characters using reroll set, which let me have my 4 classes all on the leaderboard early in the season. I'm not really playing anymore since I don't like paragon grind and it's that time of the season where high paragon players will just take over the leaderboards.
I actually like your TL;DR, and it's probably why I don't like this current variation of D3 for as long as some players do. Sometimes I do wonder how it would feel being not part of the 1% in games I play, though in reality there's no way to change it without a feeling of under-performing. I did quit WoW after I no longer had my teammates that could make it to gladiator as well, since it no longer felt like there was reason to play. However, because of the way D3 is structured with seasons and with a solo leaderboard, the starts of seasons always feels like even ground to play again. For the first couple weeks things like paragon levels aren't different enough to have heavy impact on leaderboards. So even as a primarily solo player, you don't have to sit in a group all day. The easiest way Blizzard could fix this is by putting a cap or soft cap on paragon levels, or by significantly shortening the season length. I play at the start of every season, but the fun simply doesn't last even half way through the season.
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I miss D3 vanilla too. The interesting thing is nearly all my D3V friends never came back, even after RoS. Makes me wonder how many of them would have still been playing now if D3 wasn't changed so heavily from how it was originally.
D3 vanilla obviously had plenty of issues, but it's not like everything is great with the current variation of D3 either. I could probably list 50+ issues with D3V, but here are some of the main things I miss from D3V:
1) solo being viable.
In D3V I can log in and play when I want. Now I have to log in and find a group to do anything even remotely efficient.
2) gearing choices.
MF vs actual stats was a pretty big choice. There were also more times when taking offense vs defense was actually a choice. Current gear comes with everything, and everyone wants the exact same rolls. Also there were actually choices of what to waer, and yellows could be better than legendaries. Right now sets make most non-sets useless. Every yellow item is bad.
3) skill choices.
Right now the only viable skills are the ones that go with the sets.
4) longevity.
This season it took like 10 hours per alt to pick up enough gear to get on the solo leaderboard. Seriously screwed up how fast you get gear right now. If gear drops so fast, the seasons need to be significantly shorter. I'm not going to say the drop rates of D3V were perfect - they're not. However, the current system is just way too short to gear up. The funny thing is the game is hardly even about drops anymore. Like 90% of my gear came from the cube or kadala.
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The current version of D3 really feels too much like a game on training wheels. The game is missing choices, everyone is looking for the same items. Everyone runs nearly the same comp for exp and progression. It's really kind of like there's 1 path to follow.
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Reinstall game then do a bounty.
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I think you're running more into gameplay or RNG issues than gear issues. I did 62 back when i was wearing 4 ancients (both weapons and 2 armor), and I wasn't dieing. You shouldn't be dieing any times as a Uli monk. By the time NDE procs, you should be playing safe, and in most cases skipping past whatever just killed you. The chance to get to the end of a GRift and running out of mobs is really low.
Most of the time you should just run past the elites, which is generally the only things that can kill you in the first place.