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Quote from Shad3slayer

Yeah I agee with everything. But I'm afraid there aren't any viable solutions outside of making Ladder/ SelfFound.

I've been thinking about that for quite a bit now. Ladder is certainly a solution but it brings more problems than it solves in the current game environment. Self-found option is certainly possible but I doubt it will be widespread, so it is a nice at best.

What I think, however, is that the game needs for a way to siphon out items without making people reroll toons all the time. There are several ways to do that, such as (these are all hypotheses of course):
- When playing above Monster Power X, the items lose Y% of their max stats every time you die, up to Z% of the original stat. This way, eventually, your equipment will gradually lose power. It will still be good enough to play (if Z=75, for instance), but you may want to replace it at some point. Also, it won't affect new players having trouble powering up their toon for higher MPs. In compensation, maybe MF% in higher MPs should be increased.
- A more extreme way would be for the item to break after you die several times (in other words, reduce item's max durability).
- Alternatively, you could restore the said durability with a scroll/item obtained using salvaged legendary ingredients (brimstone or w/e), but only obtained from legendaries of comparable power (e.g. same ilvl). This would siphon legendaries out of the system as well.
These are only several hypotheses which need to be checked and tested, of course. But I'm afraid that in a game with RMAH, getting items out by whatever means (including turning a ladder toon into a non-ladder) carries serious risks. I don't even know how people who spent thousans of dollars on their toons will react at ROS release.

Quote from Shad3slayer

Kind of the same with what Ghostcrawler always brings up as an issue for WoW - if one spec is 3% better than the other, a huge majority of people will go that spec.

Indeed, but the problem isn't D3, it's the humans
And frankly, I don't think deliberately undertuning the game like D2 was (esp. prior to 1.10) is the solution to that.

Quote from Shad3slayer

That's all good and well, but the point is sitting in Trade chat wasn't MANDATORY in Diablo 2. You could just play self-found and steadily progress. You could also trade very quickly by offering too much and making a game called O Mara N Shako and MFing in it. In Diablo 3 you can argue that the AH isn't mandatory either, but you won't ever be able to play the higher MP's unless EXTREMELY lucky.

Of course you won't be, as high MP inferno is way more difficult than hell in D2. So yeah, in D2 you could play self-found (which I did in HC) and progress. Same thing you can do in MP0/MP1 in D3. And D3 devs realized that perfectly, which is why they created a fourth difficulty level to begin with.

Quote from Shad3slayer

Constant alt rerolling also wasn't a requirement at all. But it was something to do. You gear one char fully, get it to your desired lvl, play some PvP.. at some point if you get bored, you can make another char, but you don't HAVE to. Experiment with builds/ combinations etc. In D3 you WON'T EVER need/want more than 1 of each class at lvl 60.

You answered the question in your following paragraph in part. The other part is: D3 is a B2P game. Hence there is no financial need (except the RMAH which is marginal from that PoV) to give players something to do all the way during game's life. You level a toon once, you can respec it as you wish, you can leave it for months, then come back and it will still be able to play (see "No ladder"). In this way, D3 resembles, for instance, GW2 (plus the gear treadmill mandatory for RPG). When there is no sub, you're not pressured into making people play all the time. Playing sometimes is enough.

Quote from Shad3slayer

So yeah they deleted my big post that I answered to you Grafikm. Also got an Infraction. Gotta love the community here, as soon as you don't agree with the mods/ the majority, it's time to bring up the admin tools. Anyway cba rewriting it, and it'd probably get deleted again.

Yes, I saw the post. I don't remember all the points you raised, but I'll answer just one about the usefullness of items. What you seem to miss is the ability to disjoin the effects of the ladder with the actual usefulness of the items. Because of the short duration of the ladder, the items were - by definition - much more valuable. Finding a shako alone was cool because you wouldn't find a bunch early on and by itself, it was valuable. But with D3 SC, since there is no way to pull items out of the economy, you end up with the current situation. And yes, it is a problem. But ladder isn't a solution, because it would bring more problems.

Consider D3 early on. Decent weapons (I don't mean good, I mean blues with decent DPS) were going for quite a bit - I remember paying 1 or 2 mil for my DH's crossbow and I was like "woohoo, imba DPS inc". But several months later, with no way of pulling items out and with MF being independent of MP (after it was introduced), we got what we got.

Plus, the AH bugs didn't help. But hey, we got the same bugs in Marvel Heroes and it's run by a former D2 boss, so apparently no one is shielded

Quote from Shad3slayer

What does it even matter how it was in vanilla? The game has been out for 14 years. I don't see what "how it was in vanilla" has to do with anything, when they had LoD 1.10 already out before they started working on Diablo 3. So WHY would they mess up this bad? Why not keep what was good, throw out what was bad and make the Perfect game?

But that's precisely what they did. Only, they don't have the same definition of good and bad. To you, constant alt rerolling is a good thing, but to a casual players it's an absolute pain in the booty, especially if you mess up with your skills/stats. To you, bartering in trade channels is an awsum experience, to a lot of new players it's a huge mess, especially after something like WoW (or any other MMO with an AH for that matter). And so on, so forth. Essentially, what remains is the item division (unique/leg - set - yellow etc...), some of the stats and the general concept - smash monsters to get gear to smash monsters. Which, by the way, is a dying concept in the modern video games.

Quote from Shad3slayer

Why build it from the ground up with a team of people who've obviously never played ARPG's before?

Because the team from BNorth left when they wanted to turn D3 into an MMO, which would cause problems with segment cannibalization because of WoW. Failing to reach an agreement, they left.

Quote from Shad3slayer

It would of course be best if they just improved on Diablo 2 with new items, polishing its systems and getting rid of redundant ones while adding their own... But no.

NO, NO, NO. Diablo 2 system wouldn't hold water with modern gamers. Constant rerolling, being punished for a misplaced point (before anyone brings up D2 respec again - it was done in 1.11 and NOT by the original dev team, which left prior to that), cryptic transmutes with the cube, horrendous leveling if your character acquired its main skills at level 24+ - all of that wouldn't fly with today's typical casual gamer. So, you couldn't just "polish" systems, you had to scrap them and start anew. Which they did - maybe not in the best way, but it is still more adapted to the modern audiences than the original.

Quote from Demon665

I'm still not sure whether it's reasonable to compare D3 to vanilla D2.

Not only you can do that, but you can compare it with any vanilla Blizzard game. Which was OK at best, and it took an expansion and a lot of patches to get a great game. See WoW, Warcraft 3, SC1.

Quote from Demon665

I know that a game in this genre takes quite a while to fully balance and tweak to the customers liking, especially when you try to reach such a broad audience. Yet I feel that they left some of the valuable experience they gained behind.

Because the valuable experience was obtained with a totally different audience. D2 was first and foremost a single-player game (and tuned as such) with no mandatory online access and targeted towards more hardcore players that would not mind rerolling each time they screwed up stat or skill attribution. Except that gamers changed a lot, they are now more casual and less likely to spend months or even years on a single game. And most of them certainly wouldn't tolerate constant rerolling, bartering in channels with scammers and generally not very bright people, and other things that were OK in 2001 but aren't in 2012.

Plus, please don't forget that games like D3 are a dying breed to begin with. Many younger players simply don't get the goal of an ARPG like D3 (or Torchlight, or POE, for that matter). The whole concept of "kill mobs, get gear, kill more mobs" is getting strangely alien in the modern VG world.

Quote from Demon665

Let's for instance take the current gem system. While most likely noone socketed an El rune unless it was part of a rune word, there were quite a few reasonable socketing additions for runes on their own that tweaked the gem system; D3 just employed a system of 4 gems with very little variation to their effects and quite some of those limited options being fairly useless.

If you ask me, both systems had flaws. In D2, in effect, only diamonds and topazes were used. In D3, it is just about stacking your primary damage stats. If anything, gems should have more varied effects, and their combination should produce an effect greater than the sum (either through socket-bonuses like WoW) or some other more intricate system.

Regarding runes, it is slightly another story. Early in D3 beta, they planned on dropping skill runes rather than gaining them when leveling. But the system was pulled off the market, I guess because they feared that it would make the corresponding items either too valuable or vendor trash depending on the tuning of the drop rate. Not to mention the storage space issue. But again, I agree that rune effects (I'm not talking runewords here, just single runes) were very interesting, and that's something gems should be doing in D3.

Quote from Demon665

That really depends on playstyle, playtime and patch. 4 years might not be much if you played it very casually and mostly just did stuff like group baals. I spent most of my time in D2 MF'ing or doing runs like chaos and baal on my own.

Clarification: I did almost no Baal group runs, it was either solo Baal runs or 3SU/Pit runs.

Quote from Demon665

I might have been lucky when I played D2 or I just played a lot, possibly both. But from my experience, good loot felt a bit more tangible in D2 than it is in D3 right now on the Pc. But with the console release and the tendencies Loot 2.0 seem to take, we might see this change as well.

First, yes Loot 2.0 will probably fix some of it.
Second, the reason loot felt more tangible is because it was regularly siphoned off the economy every ladder reset (and because of deaths in the case of HC). THAT made loot more valuable indeed. The totally crappy rune drop rate prolly helped too.

Quote from DesmondTiny

ummm what? Yea leveling really wasn't all that exciting. Yay lets sit in 29807458390 chaos and baal runs to level and have all the bots pickit the good items so we get nothing! Super duper fun times!

Not to mention the generally inept ALL CAPS players, TPPK hacks, non-shared loot and all the wonders of pubbie games.

Quote from Shad3slayer

It's true that 1.07 was quite a few patches + LoD. The difference is LoD was ALREADY OUT a year and a half after D2 release. Back when Blizzard was a way smaller company with much more limited resources and personnel.

D2 was much simpler to develop. Game development costs increased exponentially in the last years. The "guest monsters" in A5 alone must have saved a lot of costs on sprites. Also, the RMAH somewhat restraints the possibility of doing whatever ones likes, as there is money behind.

Quote from Shad3slayer

Now we got some half assed first aid fix atttempts (ubers - recycled maps with recycled enemies giving a useless reward, whoopdedoo),

Right, because Tristram for D2 ubers wasn't recycled.

Quote from Shad3slayer

Duped stuff in D2. Exactly, who cares?

Errr... everyone because dupes totally messed up with the economy. You found a Windforce? Gratz, except that those bots are selling them by dozens! Heck, D2 economy was referred by some people as "jokeonomy". Not too hard to figure out why.

Quote from Shad3slayer

If I MF, find stuff, trade it for what I want, I don't care if it's duped or not.

Sure, and when I buy stuff IRL, I don't care if it was stolen? Is it supposed to be funny?

Quote from Shad3slayer

Also about sitting in channel. 1) it was fun as you spoke to someone all the time, bartered, talked via /f m (I still can't believe this is not in Diablo 3) 2) you could always offer a good deal and trade instantly if you cba "wasting time looking for a good deal". When I wanted my first Tal Armor in any ladder, I'd MF for a couple days, find a few Arach's/ Shakos/ Occys/ runes and stuff and offer more than the worth of Tal armor, I'd get it instantly, then I'd continue MFing and getting better and better stuff...

Listening to you, it's like uniques rained all over the place. Well, they didn't. I played for 4 years (even made it to the hardcore ladder and stuff) and I can literally count the number Occys/Arachs/Shakos on the fingers of one hand. Highest rune I saw was an Ist.
I won't even mention the fact that chatting in /f m while playing was plain dangerous for me.

Quote from Shad3slayer

you know, constant upgrades, constant buying and selling. Just the opposite of Diablo 3 where you buy good stuff for a couple of million that you pick from the ground (as you rarely get anything sellable) and then you can't get anymore upgrades unless you buy gold.

I don't buy gold, yet I'm progressing quite fine. Sure, I won't be farming MP10 with my gear, but I'm doing MP7 and I'm pretty happy with that. It's just that - again - D2 was tuned much lower. Why? Because it is a single player game, basically. Which is supposed to be playable offline, with no trade. So of course, once you get access to some decent gear, you just mow stuff down. In 1.09 and before, it went all they way up to solo-8.

Quote from Shad3slayer

Ladder. Yes, good point. Ladder is a big part of what makes D2 so long lasting. Though I'm happy we don't have it in D3 due to the extremely boring lvling process I already mentioned in one of my previous posts (and I note no one disagreed on that :P).

How is D2 leveling different from D3 one? They're both boring after a couple of times. Actually, D2 was worse because if you got your main skills at lvl 24 or 30, you had to resort on boring and painful leveling. Same deal if you're a no-energy class (which for HC, was all classes). If anything, D3 leveling is more fun (with the exception of closed areas for final bosses - which IS a gigantic pain in the booty, I'll agree).

Quote from Shad3slayer

What would you get by MFing? Tons of stuff. I'd go as far as to say you get SOMETHING sellable EACH or very nearly each run. You can get Runes (Pul+)

Hmmm, why didn't I get those tons of stuff, I wonder?

Quote from Shad3slayer

I know respec was released with 1.11. Still, I think it wasnt a neccessary addition to Diablo 2. Its system actually stimulated making alts

"Making alts" makes a huge time sink, which runs contrary to today's gamer's profile. Today's average gamer won't do that, he will rather leave and play another game whose editor is not as clueless.

Quote from Shad3slayer

Pala - Hammerdin (you are correct about it being the most common at least), Zealot, Holy Fire Chipadin

Holy fire is 1.09, it was all but eliminated in 1.10. Zealot was marginal, especially in HC.

Quote from Shad3slayer

Assassin - Shadow, Trapsin, Phoenix Strike

PS got the axe in 1.10, shadow as well. The HUGE majority of assassins in 1.10 ran either DS/LS or a hybrid with Dragon Talon.

Quote from Shad3slayer

Amazon - Light Javazon, Poison Javazon, Bowazon, Spearazon (though much less common)

The huge majority ran the cookie-cutter Lightning or the Burrito Cannon with MS.

Quote from Shad3slayer

Necro - Summoner. Bone Spear. Bone Spirit. Poison. All about equally played.

How can you list Bone Spear and Bone Spirit separately, as the synergize each other in 1.10.
Necro is either Summon or Bone. Some motivated guys run poison nova but not much.

Quote from Shad3slayer

Druid - Elemental/ Werewolf/ Werebear.

Elemental was crap in 1.09, and half of the tree is still useless in 1.10. WW/WB are cool, that's for sure. But hey, I thought the class had 3 trees?

If anything, patch 1.10 gutted the build diversity much more than D3. Which is expected - builds requiring 60 or 80 points into a skill + synergies can only be extreme. But somehow, people did not complain about it. Also, again, you can have diverse builds in Diablo 3. Especially on very low MPs, because that's how complicated D2 was once you got some gear. So sure, you can have just about any skill and it will work. It's just that the higher the obstacle is, the less builds remain. And in D2, once the patch 1.10 buffed the mobs and synergies were introduced, the build diversity plummeted dramatically as well.

Quote from Shad3slayer

D2 had so many useful legendaries/ sets.

And a lot of crap legendaries and sets. Let's take the bows: who used anything else than WF or Burrito? Maybe some WWS here and there too. Everything else (especially low levels)? Utter garbage.
Same thing for e.g. crossbows. Oh yeah, and it totally makes sense that you use a lvl 42 xbow at level 90+. And yeah, instead of CC/Crit dmg/AS, we had +X to all skills and resists. Big difference.

Quote from Shad3slayer

FYI I played Diablo 2 since 1.07 and still do to this day. Just so we know where we stand. From some of your points it seems to me that you didn't play Diablo 2 online AT ALL

Yeah except 1.07 is already Diablo 2 classic + LOD + 6 patches. You just don't know how crappy it was prior to that (like, let's say, in 1.04 where there was this wonderful bow bug that took months to get fixed).

Quote from Shad3slayer

Diablo 2 had THE best economy system of any online game - a Barter based system with values only serving as basic guidelines. Prices of any item are well known (if you spend any time trading) in High Runes/ Ists/ SoJs, but you can still get good deals either way (buy low, sell high, just like D3 flipping) but it actually involves human contact and isn't just Open AH -> enter stats -> Click Buyout.

Yeah, except most of that stuff was duped. But hey who cares.
Also, the big problem with bartering is that it forces you to spend hours in trade channels instead of - you know - actually playing the game.

Quote from Shad3slayer

This is a good thing however as it lead to D2 economy obviously being far better and more stable than D3 one, even with the game being 13 years older.

The main reason D2 had a more stable economy was the ladder. End of story. D3 doesn't have a ladder (which is both good and bad, though I'm happy I don't have to go through the pain of leveling every 6 months). Since no items are taken out of the system, yeah it is slightly less stable. Hopefully, BOA-ing items with the mystic will correct that.

Quote from Shad3slayer

Also you could just magic find and play in any part of Hell and nearly guaranteed get stuff to sell every now and then.

And what would I get? That's right, uniques that for most part are not worth a damn. Like woohoo, I get my 1256th steelclash, my 785th maul and the 95th WWS. Woohoo. Oh wait, those aren't worth a damn.

Quote from Shad3slayer

There's a reason why 100% of rich D3 players are either Flippers or Dual Visa wielders. (This was all before d2jsp took over and D2 had an actual economy in-game - I can see how someone wouldn't like d2jsp, though it has its merits)

Yeah, an no one never ever bought stuff online in D2? Like ever? But of course, all those enigmas were 100% legit and not store-bought at all. /sarcasm

Quote from Shad3slayer

Let's get the obvious right out of the way: D2 has a respec system (again obvious you haven't played it in a long time/ ever).

Yeah, and it only took patch 1.11 to add it. Whoop-dee-doo. Check the calendar and look when it was released.

Quote from Shad3slayer

Diablo 3 skills are unbalanced. Every class has 1-2 viable builds and everything else is used than less than 1% of the population.

And it was the same thing in D2. Most pallies ran hammerdins, most sorcs ran with FO/FB (with an occasional lighning) and so on.
Maybe the game had slightly more diversity, but you wanna know why? Because it was undertuned as heck. If you got some half decent (duped) gear, the chance of getting killed was closed to zero. Like, if Inferno had only MP0 (at its current level), you would have a bajillion of builds as well. Luckily, you have 11 sub-levels.

Hi Jaetch, Thanks for the follow-up video!
However, I have a question regarding your farming route. You do both Fields of Misery and Weeping hollow. However, in this post on Barb forum, the poster estimates that exp/hour for Weeping hollow is ~2 times less than Fields.
So the question is: is it worth running WH or is it better to just run Fields + Crypt?

Thanks in advance,
Graf.

Quote from WorldMaggot

To those who say that the different resource system they've implemented in Diablo 3 is better - can you all elaborate instead of just saying that you think it's better?

It lead to messy leveling for classes not investing into energy, potion chugging with a crapload of trips to town, and overreliance on Insight merc for a some specs (e.g. trapsin). And once you got those, mana effectively became irrelevant. So it was only two situations - either mana was a mess or a complete non-issue.

Awesome compilation, thanks! I really can't wait for Beta now

Quote from Bagstone

I thought about that as well yesterday, but the point is: it doesn't matter. All we know is that they'll look at the experience and not levels gained, so whatever character nets most XP/hour is best.

This was my initial assumption as well, but I wanted to compute it to make sure

Quote from RasAlgethi24

I dont get how you can calculate this when we dont how much exp will be required after paragon 100 yet. Once we know this we can figure out what our account wide paragon level will be given our total exp from all characters.

I interpolated those for 100-130 as follows:

For Levels 61 - 70, experience requirements increase at a rate of 2,880,000/level (=2*1,440,000).
For Levels 71 - 80, experience requirements increase at a rate of 5,020,000/level (=3.5*1,440,000).
For Levels 81 - 90, experience requirements increase at a rate of 6,480,000/level (=4.5*1,440,000).
For Levels 91 - 100, experience requirements increase at a rate of 8,640,000/level (=6*1,440,000).
Interpolation:
For Levels 100-110, experience requirements increase at a rate of (7,5*1440000)/level
For Levels 111-120, experience requirements increase at a rate of (9*1440000)/level
For Levels 121-130, experience requirements increase at a rate of (11*1440000)/level

Still, for people who don't have p100 characters (like me, which is why I started it to begin with ) it can be interesting.

In any case, my initial goal was rather to determine the following:
I have a Wiz that is close to P70 and a WD at P30, what is the fastest way to get more future plvls?
I just shared the table because I thought it looked pretty.

Maybe some kind of perfection rating, like the one on d3up.com?