You seem to be comparing D3 in week 1 with D2 after several years of patches and expansions. I'm not sure that's a useful reference point.
True but mostly what I have stated is the CORE make up of the game. How can this game progress if people leave it in the first year?
I'm sure your too young to know this but Diablo 2 classic had almost NONE of the things you currently enjoy about the game. The leveling game to 99? The total immunity mobs? The hard Hell difficulty? The Runes/runewords you have? Useful followers? The Ubers as you call them? None of these were in the game at launch.
So if Diablo 3 happens to last another 10 years, you can be assured that you would have had nothing to do with it. It is true diablo fans that are anxious to improve the game by keeping the community going, by making constructive criticisms to Blizzard, by continuing to enjoy playing the game realizing that things take time.
PS. I personally feel the game is good enough to go another decade, provided of course we get regular patches and expansions. And hopefully along the way, we can weed at least some of these negative people from the community.
Sure sounds good, just sucks right now. Maybe I should wait a few weeks or a month before i play again and it will feel new again, or hopefully sort out all the bugs they should have during the beta. I can see your point, comparing a long developed game to the start of this was naive, but blizzard could have done A LOT better than they did. We all know that.
You are correct they did not have all the time in the world or all the money to make this game, but they did have knowledge from Sc2, WoW and other games they have created. They have experience in this type of game more so than others, right? Blizzard is a very experienced company, the design flaws we see are really like history repeating itself, blizzard should learn from it's own mistakes.
Diablo 3 is a different piece of software with different design considerations. Even concepts used in their previous games have different design intentions, different implementations, different effects on the game experience. Both Diablo 3 and World of Warcraft have economies based on trading items, but the end effect of those item trades and the way the economy works through the designed mechanics is something completely different. Think about why World of Warcraft has Soulbind and Diablo doesn't. Two similar concepts from two different games are not necessarily analagous because of their similarity. Furthermore, "Blizzard Entertainment" is not one homogenous entity, nor is it a machine. The vanilla WoW team is not the Starcraft 2 team is not the Diablo 3 team. Therefore, they do not just simply "learn from their mistakes". They make design decisions based on observations and results from other projects and other development teams, and there are likely many of those in Diablo 3 that go unnoticed. It is unfair to draw parallels between problems in this game and in previous games because for one, their similarity does not necessarily make them analagous, but additionally, this development team is at least a partially new entity with a different collective of ideas, passions, and methodology. Therefore, similar design flaws are not history pointlessly repeating itself, but rather a result of both the number of moving parts in large-scale development and simple human error.
Sure sounds good, just sucks right now. Maybe I should wait a few weeks or a month before i play again and it will feel new again, or hopefully sort out all the bugs they should have during the beta. I can see your point, comparing a long developed game to the start of this was naive, but blizzard could have done A LOT better than they did. We all know that.
There's definitely room for improvement. Obviously right now there is a lot of instability in the scaling of defensive powers, and a lot of people are facing the loss of significant farming toward a gearset for a build that's being nerfed. Ideally Blizzard would have a better handle on how certain mechanics would play out beforehand, but they didn't and it's going to take some time for those waters to settle.
I also think if internet forums existed the same way in '00 that they do today, Diablo 2 would have been ripped to shreds in week 1 by the fanbase. Time will have a lot to say on whether or not D3 compares in terms of successful patching and replay-ability.
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I grew up gaming without internet forums. The entire phenomenon of being upset with a game developer makes no sense to me. No sense. I cannot imagine spending my time and energy being upset about something I choose to do for recreation.
There's definitely room for improvement. Obviously right now there is a lot of instability in the scaling of defensive powers, and a lot of people are facing the loss of significant farming toward a gearset for a build that's being nerfed. Ideally Blizzard would have a better handle on how certain mechanics would play out beforehand, but they didn't and it's going to take some time for those waters to settle.
I also think if internet forums existed the same way in '00 that they do today, Diablo 2 would have been ripped to shreds in week 1 by the fanbase. Time will have a lot to say on whether or not D3 compares in terms of successful patching and replay-ability.
I don't want to add anything else to to this thread, beating a dead horse, then eating it, then defecating it then beating the defecation of the beating of the dead horse. 95% of posts of right now are from people who haven't played the Diablo series for that long or have forgotten what it was like and how Blizzard's new approach to items sucked the big one. Seriously be nice to see a constructive post that suggested how to fix this issue or QQ about something else.
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Playing Diablo since 97. I know nothing and having nothing good to say, I be a troll.
I also think if internet forums existed the same way in '00 that they do today, Diablo 2 would have been ripped to shreds in week 1 by the fanbase. Time will have a lot to say on whether or not D3 compares in terms of successful patching and replay-ability.
Totally agree with this. In 2000 forums were literally only visited by a handful of people. Heck in 2004 when wow was first released, it was a debacle. When was the last time you had a game stop selling all box copies because they could not add new severs fast enough? And the AH was a HUGE problem that took Blizzard over 6 months to finally correct, in the mean time no one went to Ironforge because you would literally slow to a crawl cos it had the only AH around.
There is no way any game could have had the issues Wow had at launch and survived nowadays. Mostly because people are too well informed and games are much more mainstream now. Also there just wasn't much choice. Now a days we have Torthlight 2, Path of exile, Guildwars 2 etc to look forward to, and every year has new highly anticipated games. A mediocre or bad game just won't make it.
I did not care to read past the first insult, you are welcome to your opinion, but I will not read it from a person that acts like that. Discussions can be held while still acting mature and respecting other people, without insults, please remember that.
What insult? I'm more inclined to believe that you can't handle honest feedback about your openly sharing your opinion unless said feedback aligns with yours which actually makes you closed to honest discussion.
Oh wait, was that another insult?
*edit* I love how people come in talking about how they are so mature and open to discussing their honest opinion, but then when you actually get down to the details of the thread they were so proud of creating, they dismiss a quite lengthy and sincere response in the name of being mature. SMH...
Here are just some of my personal thoughts on why this game will not last anywhere near as long as d2 did. Each person has their own opinion and I respect that and am open to discuss them. I am not however ready to deal with close minded people saying things like " you cannot compare the two games", or any insult so i will simply ignore them.
-This game is linear, directed by quest, meaning each act is separate and the user cannot explore everything at will, this will lead to the game getting old faster because you HAVE to do things in order.
-There is nothing to do at 60 but get more gear for no purpose, D2 had ubrs, this has Inferno mode? which is the same game already played 3 times just "harder".
-Gems are boring and have small use, Back in d2 runes and runewords were farmed, adding months to the game.
-People hit level cap in under a day, it took weeks to hit level 99 in d2.
-Gear is horrid, some piece you find in normal can last you until 60 and sometimes even for a while there. There is no Gap between 20's and 50's. That difference should be pretty big.
- Yellow, Blues, Legendary, they seem to be very similar with no Huge difference in quality.
-The auction house will greatly reduce the grind, not to mention it has horrible ui
-Bots are already spamming, we have this tiny chat square that holds 8 lines of text and cannot be customized. (minor issue but annoying)
-D3/sc2 are anti-social. You cannot just go into a chat room and talk to people. It is all focused on gameplay and will burn people out quickly
- Some skills are NEEDED and have to be used to manage the character, full customization is a myth.
Do not get me wrong I was waiting for this game for years, it just seems that the "New" games, d3 and scII do not live up to their previous counterparts. I believe they should have waited before releasing this game.
I do not speak English very well, but I'll try to express myself here.
I'ma fan, I played diablo 2 for 5 years and waited several years fordiablo 3.
I liked everything in the game.
But the problem is that they did not test the game well before release.That was the mistake.
Now I'm lvl 60 with my wizard. To me the game is over.
Do not want to skip the elite mobs in hell to kill only the boss ..
At D2 we farmed gear forever with a smile in the face! Couse in that time there was nothing that could compare to it! Nothing to do, nothing better. Now we are in a different time.. we need more challenge!
The AH just does not work on American servers.
I think the biggest problem of all will be when they launched the AH with real money ... I wonder .. How much you think it is worth an item that costs
U$ 10.00?
Perhaps 1,000,000,000 gold? This will certainly ruin the in game economy.
I still believe we have a very cool game in the future. I'm confident that Blizzard ill not disappoint us as they did with WOW ...
I agree with the OP on a lot of what he said. Majority of his issues are the same ones I have and see.
One thing that bothers me is all of the people who enjoy the game say give it time, they'll fix it etc. Why is that the accepted things? Why can't it be good from the start? Why did tons of people have to post about legendaries being worse than blues for it to get looked at? Bliz couldn't look up and see the stats on their items to tell that?
It just seems that Bliz either got lazy or had way too much on their plate to hit release date. Inferno difficulty was practically untested just judging by what was seen. It has yet to be addressed why monks and barbs have to be tanks to do well in groups. It also hasn't been touched as to why grouping is many many many times worse than solo/duo for anything but act bosses.
Bliz also didn't seem to learn much from D2. It is the same company, probably with a lot of the same people who worked on D2. Why is it too much to ask to get the good parts of that game? That would be the first thing I'd do when making a squeal/xpac, what made the previous good enough to warrant a new one.
I do agree with a lot of the opposition that D2 at release was a fraction of what it is now. Lots of the fun things that are in game today weren't around back then. That being said, why does it have to start over with D3? Why can't it just bring along the good parts? The jump from D1 to D2 is a good example. They dropped the obvious easy ability to dupe, they dropped the skill books, they added more classes, new spells/abilities, etc. They didn't scrap the whole project and start over. Fireball was a good spell in D1, so why not take it to D2! It was still a good spell in D2, but lets drop it for D3.
The last thing I'll touch on is the customization issues. I can't stand the counter argument to D2 had more customization. The only better part to D3 customization is that you can change skills instantly whenever you want for no cost. I'm talking about all forms of customization, not just skills. Stats are another customization that were stripped down in this game as well.
Both games have about the same number of skills. D2 had more actual skills, but the rune system of D3 brings it count up a bit.
Talking strictly late game, early inferno(act 1/2) vs hell farming(no ubers), how many options are there for D3 skills? Every Wiz I've seen has 3 of the exact same skills/runes. Majority of them have the exact 6. Pop over to D2, jump in a Baal farming game, more likely than not with at least 5-6 sorcs. Of said sorcs, what were the odds of finding all the exact same build, or a close build at all? Meteor/orb, blizzard, lightning, enchant, all very popular builds are played at a higher level. There are some less common builds you could have seen be it aura/zeal/etc but in the end there were a lot more different ones going on. Sure, you could get a game with all Bliz sorcs, but it would be rare to do so. Sorcs and Wiz are probably the closest possibility since they mirror each other so well.
Where all of the D2 sorc builds good? Not at all. Where they all able to play at late game? God yes. Now look at D3 Wiz. How many spectral weapon builds are there? How many use mirror image as a primary function? Is there a build without crystal shell? Where are the electrocute builds or arcane torrent?
Yes, D3 has more options of skills, but how many of those options are actually used or useful in the least?
I'm not going to touch on the lacking of stat customization because I can only hope everyone sees that we can't change them and knows that means a lack of customization.
I know its a long rant, and I'm too tired to make a tl;dr. I'll keep an eye on the thread to give some responses to feedback.
Where all of the D2 sorc builds good? Not at all. Where they all able to play at late game? God yes. Now look at D3 Wiz. How many spectral weapon builds are there? How many use mirror image as a primary function? Is there a build without crystal shell? Where are the electrocute builds or arcane torrent?
I had to come back for this one... Most of those builds didn't even exist till synergies where introduced and unless you had hardcore end game gear (all of it was duped) most of those builds couldn't be used either...
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Playing Diablo since 97. I know nothing and having nothing good to say, I be a troll.
I agree with both sides here.. the game is not bad, but it's just not polished yet.. it feels like they had a deadline and they had to rush, which is obviously why the PvP is gone (hopefully not for good, but we will see.. I can't really see arena being fun at all in this game to be honest). But there are some things they really dropped the ball on, like blacksmithing.. and item customization.. and random things like having a quest that will let you add a socket to an item. Things like that that were in D2, but were for some reason left out in D3.
The blacksmith.. they need to remove the gold cost of crafting. You're losing a ton of money, even just if you were going to vendor the items. There's no need to make you lose another 50k, to craft some shoulders that are going to have strength and int on them with 90 melee damage to attackers. Yeah, you could get some good ones, but blacksmithing has completely replaced gambling from D2, and no one seems to have realized it.. And at least with gambling, you had a chance at uniques (Legendaries as they are now called). If Blacksmithing could crit? Yeah, that'd work better.
Item customization just seems to have disappeared. They cut down the number of gems to 4. Am I the only one who misses Sapphires? I miss having the cold damage. I'm sure they took it out for a reason, but it wasn't game breaking in D2, surely wouldn't have been gamebreaking in D3. And I have seen absolutely no mention of Runes. REALLY?! Runes were awesome. Runewords. Runewords and the hunt for finding that PERFECT item to word your hard-found runes for that word you've been wanting for a month or more. Instead, we have 4 gems.
Yeah, some runewords sucked. But the greatest part of runewords was coming up with a combo on an item that no one was expecting, and then showing the world how awesome it was. And yes, I know runes and runewords were not released until LoD, I'm hoping they are just saving them for an expansion at this point.
As far as itemization goes, no one seems to have taken this point: Strength is pretty useless for anyone but barbs. Dex is good for 2 classes, int is good for 2 classes. You find a strength item and you don't even care, because only one class can use them, and they aren't worth jack because of it. This was not a problem in Diablo 2 because everyone needed strength to wear armor, and you could use whatever you wanted to. Sure, it was stupid to see a Sorc running around with Grandfather, but it was possible. And honestly, with the way they changed sorcs to scale with weapon damage, I think the game would have had a lot more to offer if they had that option still. I hated the customization of stats in D2 personally, but with the way weapons make your damage scale on any class now, it makes more sense to have stat customization NOW than it did THEN. Sure, you'd be dumping all your stats in to vit, but then again, let's not kid ourselves.
Wizards are not grabbing any Vit at all. They don't need it. And from what I have dealt with in Act 2 inferno, you're going to get 1 shot by anything anyways. Melee seems to stand no chance past Act1, Act 2 and onward is just extremely overtuned. It should still be soloable.
And besides that, my biggest gripe is that they for some reason didn't balance stats between classes. As a Monk, with my gear, I have more IAS gear on than most DH do, and the same amount of DEX, and same weapon damage. I have around 1300 dex, and my damage is like 16k or something around there.. I've seen and looked at DH who have 50k+ damage and have the same or less DEX than me. At least they aren't a ranged class that can hide around corners and shoot things.
The game needs a lot of balance changes at this point, Act 2 Inferno is just a brick wall, if you want to play solo, they should make it so you can play Solo. They did a great job of it, up until Act 2 starts. You can say it's a gear check, but my gear can't get much better than what is out right now, I have mega resists, mega armor, and my dex is higher than most, my build is for survival, and my damage is kinda meh, I will admit. I'm at about 40k health, and there's no way I'm going to get another 50k health from gear. I'll still get one-shot. Besides that, seems Monk needs to be looked at, as the healing aura just got nerfed, which makes sense if it was pushing out incorrect numbers.. however, heals in this game stop scaling at level 60.. they need to rework that IMO so that it at least scales to SOME degree with your stats.
I've been all over the place with this post. I've tried to keep it constructive though, hopefully people will see that.
And besides that, my biggest gripe is that they for some reason didn't balance stats between classes. As a Monk, with my gear, I have more IAS gear on than most DH do, and the same amount of DEX, and same weapon damage. I have around 1300 dex, and my damage is like 16k or something around there.. I've seen and looked at DH who have 50k+ damage and have the same or less DEX than me. At least they aren't a ranged class that can hide around corners and shoot things.
When you were comparing your Monk's dmg to a Demon Hunters, what passives did the DH have? As passives are reflected in your character window's dps meter, using the Sharp shooter passive enormously inflates dps. It isn't an accurate portrayal. Sharp shooter increases the Demon Hunter's critical strike chance by 3% every second until they crit. So what you're seeing is their dmg with 100% crit. It's pretty meaningless. It just means they have high burst. It's not as if they can sustain 100% crit.
The benefit of Dext is equal to both Monks and Demon hunters. 1 dext = 1% dmg.
And besides that, my biggest gripe is that they for some reason didn't balance stats between classes. As a Monk, with my gear, I have more IAS gear on than most DH do, and the same amount of DEX, and same weapon damage. I have around 1300 dex, and my damage is like 16k or something around there.. I've seen and looked at DH who have 50k+ damage and have the same or less DEX than me. At least they aren't a ranged class that can hide around corners and shoot things.
When you were comparing your Monk's dmg to a Demon Hunters, what passives did the DH have? As passives are reflected in your character window's dps meter, using the Sharp shooter passive enormously inflates dps. It isn't an accurate portrayal. Sharp shooter increases the Demon Hunter's critical strike chance by 3% every second until they crit. So what you're seeing is their dmg with 100% crit. It's pretty meaningless. It just means they have high burst. It's not as if they can sustain 100% crit.
The benefit of Dext is equal to both Monks and Demon hunters. 1 dext = 1% dmg.
Ah, I wasn't aware of that passive. You can disregard that part of my rant then. I'd still argue that melee damage should be a bit higher considering you have to get hit to hit.. but that's an age-old argument and I don't want that can of worms to be opened.
It just seems that Bliz either got lazy or had way too much on their plate to hit release date. Inferno difficulty was practically untested just judging by what was seen. It has yet to be addressed why monks and barbs have to be tanks to do well in groups. It also hasn't been touched as to why grouping is many many many times worse than solo/duo for anything but act bosses.
They purposely made it so hard they couldn't tested it properly. They have said this many times. They expected to be able to use the fans who are much better then their best tester (and who have more time) to balance it properly. Their alternative was to make it much easier, and balance it then. Personally, I think it is awesome that they want to make a super hard game.
Bliz also didn't seem to learn much from D2. It is the same company, probably with a lot of the same people who worked on D2. Why is it too much to ask to get the good parts of that game? That would be the first thing I'd do when making a squeal/xpac, what made the previous good enough to warrant a new one.
Well, it's the same company in the way Activision-Blizzard is the same company. Blizzard North was a seperate division. And no, I'm pretty sure a lot of the people who made D2 left. I think most of the people who actually ran the project at the time are now running their own companies, making their own versions of ARPGs.. Also, they did keep a lot, and they did learn a lot. For example, they learned that their rune words were stupidly OP'd and imbalanced, and so they changed the system. I think they kept what made Diablo Diablo - item grind and demon slaying. Could you explain what you think they left out that they should have kept in, because I'm not seeing much I miss.
i will admit, I am surprised they flobbed the AH UI so baddly. Not sure what happened there. They probably just gave it to an intern to build.
The last thing I'll touch on is the customization issues. I can't stand the counter argument to D2 had more customization. The only better part to D3 customization is that you can change skills instantly whenever you want for no cost. I'm talking about all forms of customization, not just skills. Stats are another customization that were stripped down in this game as well.
So, you can't stand the argument that stats basically had a wrong way to do it, and a right way? Or that if you wanted your skills to have enough power to actually do anything in Hell you had to limit yourself to a small handful? Or that every Sorc you saw in Hell was an orb sorc, with the occasional Blizz sorc or meteor sorc? I mean, the "customization" that they removed was stats and skill points, correct? I guess what you mean is you want your customization to be permenant, and difficult to change, because there are plenty of different ways to play D3. Are all of them viable in Inferno? No, but they're working on it. And D2 was much worse, despite it having 11 years for them to balance.
Talking strictly late game, early inferno(act 1/2) vs hell farming(no ubers), how many options are there for D3 skills? Every Wiz I've seen has 3 of the exact same skills/runes. Majority of them have the exact 6. Pop over to D2, jump in a Baal farming game, more likely than not with at least 5-6 sorcs. Of said sorcs, what were the odds of finding all the exact same build, or a close build at all? Meteor/orb, blizzard, lightning, enchant, all very popular builds are played at a higher level. There are some less common builds you could have seen be it aura/zeal/etc but in the end there were a lot more different ones going on. Sure, you could get a game with all Bliz sorcs, but it would be rare to do so. Sorcs and Wiz are probably the closest possibility since they mirror each other so well.
Where all of the D2 sorc builds good? Not at all. Where they all able to play at late game? God yes. Now look at D3 Wiz. How many spectral weapon builds are there? How many use mirror image as a primary function? Is there a build without crystal shell? Where are the electrocute builds or arcane torrent?
So what you're talking about here isn't lack of custimization, it's balance, in which they can't, as everything is new, really use the 11 years of experince from D2. This is something that you HAVE to say will take time, be patient. That said (and I will admit I am only in Hell) but I am seeing way more builds that are radically different then I saw in D2. Sure, you might see all those builds you listed, but you rarely did. By and large, people chose the best builds and stuck with it. Will that happen in D3? Yep, it's happening now. But I have faith Blizz will be able to balance it a little better and you'll start to see more builds.
Yes, D3 has more options of skills, but how many of those options are actually used or useful in the least?
How many were actually useful in D2? Especially when you consider that to actually solo the game, none of the sorc builds you listed were really viable, because they're all single elements, and D2 had that awful immune affix.
And again, this is a balance issue. Balance is something that takes time, especially when we are talking about Inferno, in which Blizzard chose to make it so hard they themselves couldn't beat it, which means they couldn't balance it, which they did so that the best and most dedicated players would actually have a challenge.
I'm not going to touch on the lacking of stat customization because I can only hope everyone sees that we can't change them and knows that means a lack of customization.
It's less customization if you're okay with gimping your character. If we go with the idea of viable builds (which we've been doing this whole time), then how many stat plans were ever used? ONE...FOR EVERY CLASS. Every single guide I ever read said "enough str/dex for items you want to use, and the rest in vit." Okay, a few recommended a few points in Energy (or w/e the stat for mana was) if you weren't going to go out and get the best gear that gave you gobs of mana. How is that customization?
I know its a long rant, and I'm too tired to make a tl;dr. I'll keep an eye on the thread to give some responses to feedback.
TL;DR is for the weak and feeble. If they don't have time to read the thread fully, then they probably don't have time to put together a decent post. If they're too lazy to read it, they're unlikely to be able or willing to put together a decent post. We're debating something. That usually means there are a lot of words.
One thing that bothers me is all of the people who enjoy the game say give it time, they'll fix it etc. Why is that the accepted things? Why can't it be good from the start? Why did tons of people have to post about legendaries being worse than blues for it to get looked at? Bliz couldn't look up and see the stats on their items to tell that?
Most of us (obviously myself and clearly you) have no idea what goes into producing a AAA world-class PC game title like this. The stats for Legendaries are in fact an issue (Blizzard has surrendered this already), but responding to a thread titled "Diablo 3 will not last as long as Diablo 2" with this point 10 days after launch is more sensationalism than anything. And it would be really great if you could point out exactly how in Blizzard's operations where they went wrong in "allowing this to slip through", so to speak. That would be much more helpful instead of:
Because at that rate, why can't everything be good from the start? No PC title release is perfect, so you might want to take a more realistic approach in your discussion tactics instead of overstating and sensationalizing the situation.
It just seems that Bliz either got lazy or had way too much on their plate to hit release date. Inferno difficulty was practically untested just judging by what was seen.
It was tested. They just never beat it. And then they doubled the difficulty. I recommend you read more on Blizzard's responses. diablofans.com is a great resource for tracking "Blue" posts.
It has yet to be addressed why monks and barbs have to be tanks to do well in groups.
I run in a group of 4 as a DH with a WD, Monk and Barb. NONE of them are 'tanks'. Monk and Barb are melee - yes, but does that automatically mean they are tanks?
It also hasn't been touched as to why grouping is many many many times worse than solo/duo for anything but act bosses.
I'm finding being grouped is many times more advantageous and actually goes faster than solo/duo ESPECIALLY farming elites. Where do you get this? Perhaps the people in your groups were all trying to do their own thing instead of focusing down targets together.
Bliz also didn't seem to learn much from D2. It is the same company, probably with a lot of the same people who worked on D2.
And here is where we genuinely see you don't really know many facts and just look more like a band-wagoner than anything else. VERY FEW people from Blizzard North were even offered positions at Blizzard HQ when they shut down Blizzard North. Even then, those few were put on other projects - NOT anything Diablo.
Why is it too much to ask to get the good parts of that game? That would be the first thing I'd do when making a squeal/xpac, what made the previous good enough to warrant a new one.
First (and again), do you have a CLUE what goes into producing a title of this magnitude? And you act like NOTHING that made D2 fun is in D3. I question your claims that you even played Diablo 2 as long as you seem to imply with your lengthy criticism of D3 being so "wrong" and D2 being so "right", so to speak. I clarify this point in the next point.
I do agree with a lot of the opposition that D2 at release was a fraction of what it is now. Lots of the fun things that are in game today weren't around back then. That being said, why does it have to start over with D3? Why can't it just bring along the good parts? The jump from D1 to D2 is a good example. They dropped the obvious easy ability to dupe, they dropped the skill books, they added more classes, new spells/abilities, etc. They didn't scrap the whole project and start over. Fireball was a good spell in D1, so why not take it to D2! It was still a good spell in D2, but lets drop it for D3.
You're not making your point very clear. One minute you're criticizing them for "starting over" with D3, but then speaking as if they didn't do exactly that with Diablo 2. They didn't add more classes to D2, they made 5 completely new ones. In fact, Diablo 3 is the first time they didn't start completely over with all classes. There's a Barbarian in D2 AND D3. Remember? You DID play Diablo 2, didn't you?
Stats are another customization that were stripped down in this game as well.
I invite you to enable 'Advanced Tooltips' in the game options and mouse over the main stats. Then click the details button and see just how many different stats are accounted for in D3 that you can actually see what they are now. Did you know Intelligence increases all resistances ON ALL CLASSES? Also, there is no point in having to manually allocate points in your base stats in D2. It's the same formula. Put your points into Str/Dex to wear your gear, dump the rest to Vit. It's brainless and quite a waste of time, actually. This is what gems are for AND why I would argue that gems are WAY more useful in D3 than in D2 MAYBE with the exception of the magic find gem.
Both games have about the same number of skills. D2 had more actual skills, but the rune system of D3 brings it count up a bit.
You are so far off with this it's not even funny. With the rune system and all of the passive skill choices, there's actually about 130+ skills per class. Diablo 2 DOES NOT EVEN COMPARE. Just... wow...
Talking strictly late game, early inferno(act 1/2) vs hell farming(no ubers), how many options are there for D3 skills? Every Wiz I've seen has 3 of the exact same skills/runes. Majority of them have the exact 6. Pop over to D2, jump in a Baal farming game, more likely than not with at least 5-6 sorcs. Of said sorcs, what were the odds of finding all the exact same build, or a close build at all? Meteor/orb, blizzard, lightning, enchant, all very popular builds are played at a higher level. There are some less common builds you could have seen be it aura/zeal/etc but in the end there were a lot more different ones going on. Sure, you could get a game with all Bliz sorcs, but it would be rare to do so. Sorcs and Wiz are probably the closest possibility since they mirror each other so well.
You're trying to illustrate build diversity of Sorcs in D2 by throwing in some Paladin builds? And even if you're referring to getting non-sorc skills through runewords, those builds were not PvE viable in the same way you're saying Wiz's should be with end-game D3. Your comparison is far from fair.
Where all of the D2 sorc builds good? Not at all. Where they all able to play at late game? God yes.
Another gross overstatement. I'm sensing a trend here. Maybe 4 sorc builds were viable in the greatest percentage of end-game D2. Blizz, Orb/Meteor, Fireball/Meteor, and Lightning had some slight variance to them depending on which order you chose to max your synergies, but hardly a grand differentiation.
Yes, D3 has more options of skills, but how many of those options are actually used or useful in the least?
OK, now that's an overstatement and understatement all in the same sentence. D3 has a ridiculously greater number of skill choices, and EVERY BASE SKILL has viability in end-game. It depends on which runes you select and what other complimenting skills you choose to go with them. Basically, it depends on your build.
I'm not going to touch on the lacking of stat customization because I can only hope everyone sees that we can't change them and knows that means a lack of customization.
No, it doesn't. You can stack gems like nobody's business. You can gem a ring in D3 for crying out loud! Add more stats that way! And don't forget that stats do more in D3 than D2. GO READ.
First off Lunasea, THANK YOU for a well stated post. It really is quite refreshing. And though I have some minor disagreement, I still welcome those points as well because you are clear and realistic about it. Thank you. Everyone else should +1 your post.
One thing I would like to touch on is your remarks about base stats. The main thing I would like to suggest is you go into options and turn on "Advanced Tooltips", and then mouse over your stats. You will see that stats give you more than you think especially your point about Intelligence. Intelligence boosts all resistances for all classes. So it's useful for 5 classes, not 2.
Also, I think the gold cost for crafting is valid. However, it is not clear to me that it is attractive enough to be all that significant of a gold sink for the sake of the economy. I feel like they dialed it back too much in Beta patch 16. I would agree in Beta patch 15 there was way too much emphasis on crafting, but they over-corrected it in my mind.
And I too miss runewords. That was probably my favorite gear to farm. But for me, there's a new gear style to Diablo 3 and I'm excited to obtain it. I can't guarantee I will like it as much as runewords or that I will like it at all which is why I must get there (end-game legendaries) and see for myself.
Thanks again for breathing some life back into this discussion. Cheers!
I think you compare it with the wrong game , you talk about runes , ubers etc ... but you forget one important fact : Diablo 2 was released without diablo 2 LOD & Patches right away . So please , when you compare diablo 3 with diablo 2 , dont forget to add classic to it .
The only reason I used to play for years Diablo 2 , was Lod (expansion) . So I'm not worried about D3's future .
@OP: Yeah, Blizzard is pretty much screwed when it comes to Diablo 3's longevity. If only they had some sort of way to add more content and to fix the things that aren't working at the moment...
I really don't see a reason to be so pessimistic about this. The game is still a work in progress, just like Diablo 2 was for quite a while after it launched. I agree that the game is not quite where I'd want it to be right now, but I'm pretty sure the guys over at Blizzard are capable of improving it to a point where it'll last for years.
I'm not saying you shouldn't voice your concerns about it. In fact, I would encourage you to do so. But the situation isn't as hopeless as you seem to try to make it sound like.
Sorry, I am at work and didn't explain as much as I'd have liked to on my view on the stats.. while yes, int and strength do increase your stats, there's no point in the game where you're going to take something that, (let's say as a wizard), as a wizard, you will never grab an item that has a bunch of strength on it over an item with intellect on it. And as a monk, grabbing a few points of intellect, is a nice little bonus, but I think that it's something relatively low.. like .3 resist per point of intellect? Don't quote me on that, I'm at work and my brain has melted already. I'm just saying that as far as primary stats go, I see strength and I vendor it. Most of the items that I've found with Strength+Vit on them, huge amounts of each, I go search the AH and theres like 50ish of the same stat range, and they're selling for 5-15k, for a level 60 item. Maybe it's just that I've been having bad luck, but I dunno.. because only one class uses strength, it feels like the market for strength items has too many items in it, so the prices are dirt cheap.. which is fine, it just doesn't compare to the rest of the classes at this point.
As far as the gold for crafting goes, it WOULD have been a fine addition, it would have been great even.. if the auction house wasn't around. The risk/reward is too high for crafting, when you could save the money from 1-3 attempts of blacksmithing, and go to the AH and grab a piece of awesome gear for sure.
gems might seem bad at start but the highest one which cost 400k just to make and the 3 gems before that which cost 200k each are really good for instance my demon hunter added 15k dps by putting a green gem in a socket if i had the best ones it would be double if not triple that second u can join a general chat if u want there is a option to do that and third the reason the gear u see on auction house for 60s looks bad and comparable to lvl 30 gear is because there the very low end 60 stuff its alot of luck to find an insanely good item which people will farm and farm for.
also at 30 i had 1.2 damage at 60 i have 90k damage big difference i think lol
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I'm sure your too young to know this but Diablo 2 classic had almost NONE of the things you currently enjoy about the game. The leveling game to 99? The total immunity mobs? The hard Hell difficulty? The Runes/runewords you have? Useful followers? The Ubers as you call them? None of these were in the game at launch.
So if Diablo 3 happens to last another 10 years, you can be assured that you would have had nothing to do with it. It is true diablo fans that are anxious to improve the game by keeping the community going, by making constructive criticisms to Blizzard, by continuing to enjoy playing the game realizing that things take time.
PS. I personally feel the game is good enough to go another decade, provided of course we get regular patches and expansions. And hopefully along the way, we can weed at least some of these negative people from the community.
Diablo 3 is a different piece of software with different design considerations. Even concepts used in their previous games have different design intentions, different implementations, different effects on the game experience. Both Diablo 3 and World of Warcraft have economies based on trading items, but the end effect of those item trades and the way the economy works through the designed mechanics is something completely different. Think about why World of Warcraft has Soulbind and Diablo doesn't. Two similar concepts from two different games are not necessarily analagous because of their similarity. Furthermore, "Blizzard Entertainment" is not one homogenous entity, nor is it a machine. The vanilla WoW team is not the Starcraft 2 team is not the Diablo 3 team. Therefore, they do not just simply "learn from their mistakes". They make design decisions based on observations and results from other projects and other development teams, and there are likely many of those in Diablo 3 that go unnoticed. It is unfair to draw parallels between problems in this game and in previous games because for one, their similarity does not necessarily make them analagous, but additionally, this development team is at least a partially new entity with a different collective of ideas, passions, and methodology. Therefore, similar design flaws are not history pointlessly repeating itself, but rather a result of both the number of moving parts in large-scale development and simple human error.
There's definitely room for improvement. Obviously right now there is a lot of instability in the scaling of defensive powers, and a lot of people are facing the loss of significant farming toward a gearset for a build that's being nerfed. Ideally Blizzard would have a better handle on how certain mechanics would play out beforehand, but they didn't and it's going to take some time for those waters to settle.
I also think if internet forums existed the same way in '00 that they do today, Diablo 2 would have been ripped to shreds in week 1 by the fanbase. Time will have a lot to say on whether or not D3 compares in terms of successful patching and replay-ability.
I don't want to add anything else to to this thread, beating a dead horse, then eating it, then defecating it then beating the defecation of the beating of the dead horse. 95% of posts of right now are from people who haven't played the Diablo series for that long or have forgotten what it was like and how Blizzard's new approach to items sucked the big one. Seriously be nice to see a constructive post that suggested how to fix this issue or QQ about something else.
Totally agree with this. In 2000 forums were literally only visited by a handful of people. Heck in 2004 when wow was first released, it was a debacle. When was the last time you had a game stop selling all box copies because they could not add new severs fast enough? And the AH was a HUGE problem that took Blizzard over 6 months to finally correct, in the mean time no one went to Ironforge because you would literally slow to a crawl cos it had the only AH around.
There is no way any game could have had the issues Wow had at launch and survived nowadays. Mostly because people are too well informed and games are much more mainstream now. Also there just wasn't much choice. Now a days we have Torthlight 2, Path of exile, Guildwars 2 etc to look forward to, and every year has new highly anticipated games. A mediocre or bad game just won't make it.
Oh wait, was that another insult?
*edit* I love how people come in talking about how they are so mature and open to discussing their honest opinion, but then when you actually get down to the details of the thread they were so proud of creating, they dismiss a quite lengthy and sincere response in the name of being mature. SMH...
Signature by Aranoch
I do not speak English very well, but I'll try to express myself here.
I'ma fan, I played diablo 2 for 5 years and waited several years fordiablo 3.
I liked everything in the game.
But the problem is that they did not test the game well before release.That was the mistake.
Now I'm lvl 60 with my wizard. To me the game is over.
Do not want to skip the elite mobs in hell to kill only the boss ..
At D2 we farmed gear forever with a smile in the face! Couse in that time there was nothing that could compare to it! Nothing to do, nothing better. Now we are in a different time.. we need more challenge!
The AH just does not work on American servers.
I think the biggest problem of all will be when they launched the AH with real money ... I wonder .. How much you think it is worth an item that costs
U$ 10.00?
Perhaps 1,000,000,000 gold? This will certainly ruin the in game economy.
I still believe we have a very cool game in the future. I'm confident that Blizzard ill not disappoint us as they did with WOW ...
One thing that bothers me is all of the people who enjoy the game say give it time, they'll fix it etc. Why is that the accepted things? Why can't it be good from the start? Why did tons of people have to post about legendaries being worse than blues for it to get looked at? Bliz couldn't look up and see the stats on their items to tell that?
It just seems that Bliz either got lazy or had way too much on their plate to hit release date. Inferno difficulty was practically untested just judging by what was seen. It has yet to be addressed why monks and barbs have to be tanks to do well in groups. It also hasn't been touched as to why grouping is many many many times worse than solo/duo for anything but act bosses.
Bliz also didn't seem to learn much from D2. It is the same company, probably with a lot of the same people who worked on D2. Why is it too much to ask to get the good parts of that game? That would be the first thing I'd do when making a squeal/xpac, what made the previous good enough to warrant a new one.
I do agree with a lot of the opposition that D2 at release was a fraction of what it is now. Lots of the fun things that are in game today weren't around back then. That being said, why does it have to start over with D3? Why can't it just bring along the good parts? The jump from D1 to D2 is a good example. They dropped the obvious easy ability to dupe, they dropped the skill books, they added more classes, new spells/abilities, etc. They didn't scrap the whole project and start over. Fireball was a good spell in D1, so why not take it to D2! It was still a good spell in D2, but lets drop it for D3.
The last thing I'll touch on is the customization issues. I can't stand the counter argument to D2 had more customization. The only better part to D3 customization is that you can change skills instantly whenever you want for no cost. I'm talking about all forms of customization, not just skills. Stats are another customization that were stripped down in this game as well.
Both games have about the same number of skills. D2 had more actual skills, but the rune system of D3 brings it count up a bit.
Talking strictly late game, early inferno(act 1/2) vs hell farming(no ubers), how many options are there for D3 skills? Every Wiz I've seen has 3 of the exact same skills/runes. Majority of them have the exact 6. Pop over to D2, jump in a Baal farming game, more likely than not with at least 5-6 sorcs. Of said sorcs, what were the odds of finding all the exact same build, or a close build at all? Meteor/orb, blizzard, lightning, enchant, all very popular builds are played at a higher level. There are some less common builds you could have seen be it aura/zeal/etc but in the end there were a lot more different ones going on. Sure, you could get a game with all Bliz sorcs, but it would be rare to do so. Sorcs and Wiz are probably the closest possibility since they mirror each other so well.
Where all of the D2 sorc builds good? Not at all. Where they all able to play at late game? God yes. Now look at D3 Wiz. How many spectral weapon builds are there? How many use mirror image as a primary function? Is there a build without crystal shell? Where are the electrocute builds or arcane torrent?
Yes, D3 has more options of skills, but how many of those options are actually used or useful in the least?
I'm not going to touch on the lacking of stat customization because I can only hope everyone sees that we can't change them and knows that means a lack of customization.
I know its a long rant, and I'm too tired to make a tl;dr. I'll keep an eye on the thread to give some responses to feedback.
I had to come back for this one... Most of those builds didn't even exist till synergies where introduced and unless you had hardcore end game gear (all of it was duped) most of those builds couldn't be used either...
The blacksmith.. they need to remove the gold cost of crafting. You're losing a ton of money, even just if you were going to vendor the items. There's no need to make you lose another 50k, to craft some shoulders that are going to have strength and int on them with 90 melee damage to attackers. Yeah, you could get some good ones, but blacksmithing has completely replaced gambling from D2, and no one seems to have realized it.. And at least with gambling, you had a chance at uniques (Legendaries as they are now called). If Blacksmithing could crit? Yeah, that'd work better.
Item customization just seems to have disappeared. They cut down the number of gems to 4. Am I the only one who misses Sapphires? I miss having the cold damage. I'm sure they took it out for a reason, but it wasn't game breaking in D2, surely wouldn't have been gamebreaking in D3. And I have seen absolutely no mention of Runes. REALLY?! Runes were awesome. Runewords. Runewords and the hunt for finding that PERFECT item to word your hard-found runes for that word you've been wanting for a month or more. Instead, we have 4 gems.
Yeah, some runewords sucked. But the greatest part of runewords was coming up with a combo on an item that no one was expecting, and then showing the world how awesome it was. And yes, I know runes and runewords were not released until LoD, I'm hoping they are just saving them for an expansion at this point.
As far as itemization goes, no one seems to have taken this point: Strength is pretty useless for anyone but barbs. Dex is good for 2 classes, int is good for 2 classes. You find a strength item and you don't even care, because only one class can use them, and they aren't worth jack because of it. This was not a problem in Diablo 2 because everyone needed strength to wear armor, and you could use whatever you wanted to. Sure, it was stupid to see a Sorc running around with Grandfather, but it was possible. And honestly, with the way they changed sorcs to scale with weapon damage, I think the game would have had a lot more to offer if they had that option still. I hated the customization of stats in D2 personally, but with the way weapons make your damage scale on any class now, it makes more sense to have stat customization NOW than it did THEN. Sure, you'd be dumping all your stats in to vit, but then again, let's not kid ourselves.
Wizards are not grabbing any Vit at all. They don't need it. And from what I have dealt with in Act 2 inferno, you're going to get 1 shot by anything anyways. Melee seems to stand no chance past Act1, Act 2 and onward is just extremely overtuned. It should still be soloable.
And besides that, my biggest gripe is that they for some reason didn't balance stats between classes. As a Monk, with my gear, I have more IAS gear on than most DH do, and the same amount of DEX, and same weapon damage. I have around 1300 dex, and my damage is like 16k or something around there.. I've seen and looked at DH who have 50k+ damage and have the same or less DEX than me. At least they aren't a ranged class that can hide around corners and shoot things.
The game needs a lot of balance changes at this point, Act 2 Inferno is just a brick wall, if you want to play solo, they should make it so you can play Solo. They did a great job of it, up until Act 2 starts. You can say it's a gear check, but my gear can't get much better than what is out right now, I have mega resists, mega armor, and my dex is higher than most, my build is for survival, and my damage is kinda meh, I will admit. I'm at about 40k health, and there's no way I'm going to get another 50k health from gear. I'll still get one-shot. Besides that, seems Monk needs to be looked at, as the healing aura just got nerfed, which makes sense if it was pushing out incorrect numbers.. however, heals in this game stop scaling at level 60.. they need to rework that IMO so that it at least scales to SOME degree with your stats.
I've been all over the place with this post. I've tried to keep it constructive though, hopefully people will see that.
Endrant.
When you were comparing your Monk's dmg to a Demon Hunters, what passives did the DH have? As passives are reflected in your character window's dps meter, using the Sharp shooter passive enormously inflates dps. It isn't an accurate portrayal. Sharp shooter increases the Demon Hunter's critical strike chance by 3% every second until they crit. So what you're seeing is their dmg with 100% crit. It's pretty meaningless. It just means they have high burst. It's not as if they can sustain 100% crit.
The benefit of Dext is equal to both Monks and Demon hunters. 1 dext = 1% dmg.
Ah, I wasn't aware of that passive. You can disregard that part of my rant then. I'd still argue that melee damage should be a bit higher considering you have to get hit to hit.. but that's an age-old argument and I don't want that can of worms to be opened.
Well, it's the same company in the way Activision-Blizzard is the same company. Blizzard North was a seperate division. And no, I'm pretty sure a lot of the people who made D2 left. I think most of the people who actually ran the project at the time are now running their own companies, making their own versions of ARPGs.. Also, they did keep a lot, and they did learn a lot. For example, they learned that their rune words were stupidly OP'd and imbalanced, and so they changed the system. I think they kept what made Diablo Diablo - item grind and demon slaying. Could you explain what you think they left out that they should have kept in, because I'm not seeing much I miss.
i will admit, I am surprised they flobbed the AH UI so baddly. Not sure what happened there. They probably just gave it to an intern to build.
So, you can't stand the argument that stats basically had a wrong way to do it, and a right way? Or that if you wanted your skills to have enough power to actually do anything in Hell you had to limit yourself to a small handful? Or that every Sorc you saw in Hell was an orb sorc, with the occasional Blizz sorc or meteor sorc? I mean, the "customization" that they removed was stats and skill points, correct? I guess what you mean is you want your customization to be permenant, and difficult to change, because there are plenty of different ways to play D3. Are all of them viable in Inferno? No, but they're working on it. And D2 was much worse, despite it having 11 years for them to balance.
So what you're talking about here isn't lack of custimization, it's balance, in which they can't, as everything is new, really use the 11 years of experince from D2. This is something that you HAVE to say will take time, be patient. That said (and I will admit I am only in Hell) but I am seeing way more builds that are radically different then I saw in D2. Sure, you might see all those builds you listed, but you rarely did. By and large, people chose the best builds and stuck with it. Will that happen in D3? Yep, it's happening now. But I have faith Blizz will be able to balance it a little better and you'll start to see more builds.
How many were actually useful in D2? Especially when you consider that to actually solo the game, none of the sorc builds you listed were really viable, because they're all single elements, and D2 had that awful immune affix.
And again, this is a balance issue. Balance is something that takes time, especially when we are talking about Inferno, in which Blizzard chose to make it so hard they themselves couldn't beat it, which means they couldn't balance it, which they did so that the best and most dedicated players would actually have a challenge.
It's less customization if you're okay with gimping your character. If we go with the idea of viable builds (which we've been doing this whole time), then how many stat plans were ever used? ONE...FOR EVERY CLASS. Every single guide I ever read said "enough str/dex for items you want to use, and the rest in vit." Okay, a few recommended a few points in Energy (or w/e the stat for mana was) if you weren't going to go out and get the best gear that gave you gobs of mana. How is that customization?
TL;DR is for the weak and feeble. If they don't have time to read the thread fully, then they probably don't have time to put together a decent post. If they're too lazy to read it, they're unlikely to be able or willing to put together a decent post. We're debating something. That usually means there are a lot of words.
Most of us (obviously myself and clearly you) have no idea what goes into producing a AAA world-class PC game title like this. The stats for Legendaries are in fact an issue (Blizzard has surrendered this already), but responding to a thread titled "Diablo 3 will not last as long as Diablo 2" with this point 10 days after launch is more sensationalism than anything. And it would be really great if you could point out exactly how in Blizzard's operations where they went wrong in "allowing this to slip through", so to speak. That would be much more helpful instead of:
Because at that rate, why can't everything be good from the start? No PC title release is perfect, so you might want to take a more realistic approach in your discussion tactics instead of overstating and sensationalizing the situation.
It was tested. They just never beat it. And then they doubled the difficulty. I recommend you read more on Blizzard's responses. diablofans.com is a great resource for tracking "Blue" posts.
I run in a group of 4 as a DH with a WD, Monk and Barb. NONE of them are 'tanks'. Monk and Barb are melee - yes, but does that automatically mean they are tanks?
I'm finding being grouped is many times more advantageous and actually goes faster than solo/duo ESPECIALLY farming elites. Where do you get this? Perhaps the people in your groups were all trying to do their own thing instead of focusing down targets together.
And here is where we genuinely see you don't really know many facts and just look more like a band-wagoner than anything else. VERY FEW people from Blizzard North were even offered positions at Blizzard HQ when they shut down Blizzard North. Even then, those few were put on other projects - NOT anything Diablo.
First (and again), do you have a CLUE what goes into producing a title of this magnitude? And you act like NOTHING that made D2 fun is in D3. I question your claims that you even played Diablo 2 as long as you seem to imply with your lengthy criticism of D3 being so "wrong" and D2 being so "right", so to speak. I clarify this point in the next point.
You're not making your point very clear. One minute you're criticizing them for "starting over" with D3, but then speaking as if they didn't do exactly that with Diablo 2. They didn't add more classes to D2, they made 5 completely new ones. In fact, Diablo 3 is the first time they didn't start completely over with all classes. There's a Barbarian in D2 AND D3. Remember? You DID play Diablo 2, didn't you?
I invite you to enable 'Advanced Tooltips' in the game options and mouse over the main stats. Then click the details button and see just how many different stats are accounted for in D3 that you can actually see what they are now. Did you know Intelligence increases all resistances ON ALL CLASSES? Also, there is no point in having to manually allocate points in your base stats in D2. It's the same formula. Put your points into Str/Dex to wear your gear, dump the rest to Vit. It's brainless and quite a waste of time, actually. This is what gems are for AND why I would argue that gems are WAY more useful in D3 than in D2 MAYBE with the exception of the magic find gem.
You are so far off with this it's not even funny. With the rune system and all of the passive skill choices, there's actually about 130+ skills per class. Diablo 2 DOES NOT EVEN COMPARE. Just... wow...
You're trying to illustrate build diversity of Sorcs in D2 by throwing in some Paladin builds? And even if you're referring to getting non-sorc skills through runewords, those builds were not PvE viable in the same way you're saying Wiz's should be with end-game D3. Your comparison is far from fair.
Another gross overstatement. I'm sensing a trend here. Maybe 4 sorc builds were viable in the greatest percentage of end-game D2. Blizz, Orb/Meteor, Fireball/Meteor, and Lightning had some slight variance to them depending on which order you chose to max your synergies, but hardly a grand differentiation.
OK, now that's an overstatement and understatement all in the same sentence. D3 has a ridiculously greater number of skill choices, and EVERY BASE SKILL has viability in end-game. It depends on which runes you select and what other complimenting skills you choose to go with them. Basically, it depends on your build.
No, it doesn't. You can stack gems like nobody's business. You can gem a ring in D3 for crying out loud! Add more stats that way! And don't forget that stats do more in D3 than D2. GO READ.
Feedback posted.
Signature by Aranoch
First off Lunasea, THANK YOU for a well stated post. It really is quite refreshing. And though I have some minor disagreement, I still welcome those points as well because you are clear and realistic about it. Thank you. Everyone else should +1 your post.
One thing I would like to touch on is your remarks about base stats. The main thing I would like to suggest is you go into options and turn on "Advanced Tooltips", and then mouse over your stats. You will see that stats give you more than you think especially your point about Intelligence. Intelligence boosts all resistances for all classes. So it's useful for 5 classes, not 2.
Also, I think the gold cost for crafting is valid. However, it is not clear to me that it is attractive enough to be all that significant of a gold sink for the sake of the economy. I feel like they dialed it back too much in Beta patch 16. I would agree in Beta patch 15 there was way too much emphasis on crafting, but they over-corrected it in my mind.
And I too miss runewords. That was probably my favorite gear to farm. But for me, there's a new gear style to Diablo 3 and I'm excited to obtain it. I can't guarantee I will like it as much as runewords or that I will like it at all which is why I must get there (end-game legendaries) and see for myself.
Thanks again for breathing some life back into this discussion. Cheers!
Signature by Aranoch
The only reason I used to play for years Diablo 2 , was Lod (expansion) . So I'm not worried about D3's future .
I really don't see a reason to be so pessimistic about this. The game is still a work in progress, just like Diablo 2 was for quite a while after it launched. I agree that the game is not quite where I'd want it to be right now, but I'm pretty sure the guys over at Blizzard are capable of improving it to a point where it'll last for years.
I'm not saying you shouldn't voice your concerns about it. In fact, I would encourage you to do so. But the situation isn't as hopeless as you seem to try to make it sound like.
As far as the gold for crafting goes, it WOULD have been a fine addition, it would have been great even.. if the auction house wasn't around. The risk/reward is too high for crafting, when you could save the money from 1-3 attempts of blacksmithing, and go to the AH and grab a piece of awesome gear for sure.
also at 30 i had 1.2 damage at 60 i have 90k damage big difference i think lol