Frankly, I can't really think of any other game where this would be different. There're always top-builds. Tried being in the tops. Boring. Staying in the 'gray zone' ever since for fun and embracing all varieties of builds :3 Quite new to d3, but not gonna change my attitude here. And tops seem to be occupied by bots in d3 anyway. Don't think they care about variety. Casual players and new-comers have got much choice here so far.
OK so. None of this is a personal attack against you....but here it is:
MANY games do not suffer from this disease of "best build"
Starcraft did not have best units......Hearthstone does not have best cards........and Wow does not have a best arena or raid composition.
You can't compare these with diablo. Starcraft is a strategy game: you adapt to your opponent. If your opponent does strictly the same thing all the time, you will find one best way to beat him (e.g. in the campaign).
Hearthstone's "campaign" mode suffers from the very same thing: for every boss, you have one best deck to defeat it.
It's like chess: if someone plays always in a pre-determined way with always the same moves and answers, there will be a best way to beat him.
So once you re-center your argument on something that is comparable, it falls appart. If you spent time reading the answers here, you would note that the real issue is that diablo end-game is focused on a single objective. If there is just one objective, and it does not change or adapt itself, there will be one best way to beat it.
Wyatt Cheng goes one step further than your (and ultimately quinn's) analysis. He realizes that having a very large choice set means you can identify the best solution, and this means you really only have one choice. The idea is then to create multiple choice sets, not just one. These items, while not the solution by any means, are a step towards this idea. It allows to balance things in such a way that different skills can have pretty much the same overall efficiency at clearing GR. Then it is up to the players to choose the skill, and the items that go along it. You end up with different gameplays to clear the GR as efficiently -- in short, you increase variety.
We should not complain about them reducing variety while all they are doing is just the opposite.
I welcome this change of mindset. But what we need I think (and we are many to share this thinking) is multiple end-game objectives, not just GR.
Frankly, I can't really think of any other game where this would be different. There're always top-builds. Tried being in the tops. Boring. Staying in the 'gray zone' ever since for fun and embracing all varieties of builds :3 Quite new to d3, but not gonna change my attitude here. And tops seem to be occupied by bots in d3 anyway. Don't think they care about variety. Casual players and new-comers have got much choice here so far.
OK so. None of this is a personal attack against you....but here it is:
MANY games do not suffer from this disease of "best build"
Starcraft did not have best units......Hearthstone does not have best cards........and Wow does not have a best arena or raid composition.
Starcraft - Terrain, specifically marines. Hearthstone - Grim patron Wow arena - changes with each season, but rmp has always been one of the best if not the best 3's team. lock/druid in season 2, mage rogue season 1 and 3. Wow raids - whatever the top guild uses to clear content before it's nerfed into a oblivion for the average player.
there is always, always an optimal strategy for any given game, if you think there isn't then you just dont know the game.
You lack game theory knowledge and game design knowledge, you're ranting and dont know why
Frankly, I can't really think of any other game where this would be different. There're always top-builds. Tried being in the tops. Boring. Staying in the 'gray zone' ever since for fun and embracing all varieties of builds :3 Quite new to d3, but not gonna change my attitude here. And tops seem to be occupied by bots in d3 anyway. Don't think they care about variety. Casual players and new-comers have got much choice here so far.
OK so. None of this is a personal attack against you....but here it is:
MANY games do not suffer from this disease of "best build"
Starcraft did not have best units......Hearthstone does not have best cards........and Wow does not have a best arena or raid composition.
You can't compare these with diablo. Starcraft is a strategy game: you adapt to your opponent. If your opponent does strictly the same thing all the time, you will find one best way to beat him (e.g. in the campaign).
Hearthstone's "campaign" mode suffers from the very same thing: for every boss, you have one best deck to defeat it.
yes you can compare the two games despite them being different genres. why then can programmers mix the elements of first person shooters and roleplaying games at all? why did they make so many guns in borderlands? why is Deus Ex even a thing? why are there classes in Team Fortress classic? Isn't there a law against mixing genres? what good can mixing genres even do? why does destiny and call of duty and modern warfare and all that shit have "loadouts and ranks and stats and experience and levels? how was that possible?
why do situations where the Hearthstone AI does the exact same thing every time reinforce your argument and destroy mine when the situation you describe is hardly even possible without being able to choose what cards both you and him will draw? why is that?
In the case of starcrafts campaign, you may coast through campaign mode and find the AI doing the same thing over and over again....
But then you have to ignore the entire player vs player portion of the game, the portion upon which the legacy of the game was built. why the hell would you do that? why would you not see the good portion of the whole game as you state exactly "adapt to your opponent" why?
Why ignore the decade spanning legacy of starcraft PVP and latch on to the short comings of its AI????
and yet.... when you fight the same brain dead enemies in D3 year in year out....thats perfectly OK? why?
Frankly, I can't really think of any other game where this would be different. There're always top-builds. Tried being in the tops. Boring. Staying in the 'gray zone' ever since for fun and embracing all varieties of builds :3 Quite new to d3, but not gonna change my attitude here. And tops seem to be occupied by bots in d3 anyway. Don't think they care about variety. Casual players and new-comers have got much choice here so far.
OK so. None of this is a personal attack against you....but here it is:
MANY games do not suffer from this disease of "best build"
Starcraft did not have best units......Hearthstone does not have best cards........and Wow does not have a best arena or raid composition.
Starcraft - Terrain, specifically marines. Hearthstone - Grim patron Wow arena - changes with each season, but rmp has always been one of the best if not the best 3's team. lock/druid in season 2, mage rogue season 1 and 3. Wow raids - whatever the top guild uses to clear content before it's nerfed into a oblivion for the average player.
there is always, always an optimal strategy for any given game, if you think there isn't then you just dont know the game.
You lack game theory knowledge and game design knowledge, you're ranting and dont know why
there are PILES of units that counter marines. Units that marines cannot even do damage to. I'm not going to list them you can go look them up.
There are LOADS of cards that flat out destroy the attempted building of a brawler attack. cards that clear the whole board and cards that silenced the former charge mechanic of the Warsong Commander. cards that taunt incessantly, cards that steal units etc....
there are COUNTLESS examples of matches and skill combos and chance happenings were RMP was absolutely crushed and if it is so OP as you state, no other arena comp would have existed.....many did and despite the intense reliability of RMP, many many times for many many reasons it was toppled over like a wet paper towel.
WoW raids are so long and so story rich that I cant even begin to explain it to you. you think that everything is just a carbon copy of the worlds best guild at the moment and you simply haven't had the discussions about how varied the game can actually be, situations exist within the GM sculpted raid environments where classes one would not even think to use as a tank become viable options including druids , rogues and warlocks among probably many more.
discussions raged on over the inclusion of individual skill points and abilities and probably continue to rage. combat logs post wipe will be studied for hours on end by an endless stream of competitive players.....so...pretty hilarious for you to attempt to summarize wow raiding into "just copy the top dudes.....
and again......if its such a bad feature in WoW, if you even were correct.....which you are not....
Why then is Diablo 3 just click skills in town and dress like everyone else seen as a feature of convenience?
Raid strategies have already been an endless discussion, that obviously you are unaware of....
Clicking Diablo 3 items that grant +150% damage are not and endless discussion have not been and probably never will be.....
There are no counters to a higher damage percentage, to the same magnitude as there are counters to cards in hearthstone or units in Starcraft or comps in WoW arena. in fact one has to pretty much bend the preaking point to find such a thought provoking counter, with ideas that you have to sacrifice some SSS damage in order to be able to cast it more often. but this idea should be EVERYWHERE, and its hardly in trace amounts.......
but please continue teaching me about game theory. I cant wait. lol..
Don't forget that most of the competitive maps in sc2 are made not by blizzard for a looooooong time now. WoW 3 team arena had easily over the first 6+ seasons always something like 1-2 combos which dominated. In hearthstone a lot of the cards which get "balanced" are in most cases outright gutted and nearly unplayable. Oh and some cards not top of the game? Never looked at dr.boom, ragi or sylvanas who somehow are always a good pickup for most decks?
Too busy watching videos of those cards basically being thrown in the trash or causing flat out losses.....
Videos and plays are out there having 1 mana creatures be stolen by sylvanas and hit by rag. "top end powers" as you say wasted on nothing, by cunning players and crazy luck. LAST NIGHT I was coming back from a loss, played Rag and because I did not anticipate the correct paladin secret Rag caused me to lose the game. I would have won without him. Dr boom is WIDELY regarded as the very best 7 mana creature in the game. and who knows if you will draw him, who knows if his bombs will hit the desired target who knows if the guy has a SW:death or a BG Hunter...and you just threw that card away or luck stole the win.
the discussion we are now having RIGHT NOW will never stop in hearthstone and it will never happen in Diablo 3 items. some players are OK with this and some are just beside themselves with confusion over the sheer waste of potential on display.
When I happened to use them to describe elements of roleplaying/strategy games that incite discussion and competition and learning and curiosity and specialization. Five things that Diablo 3, weapons and items in particular, seem to cheerfully lack......
Kinda start to think that they doing this because its the only way to balance legacy of nightmares, or something else, i think its not thought thru and kinda naive, while at otherhand it is cool, in long run its not cool.
Frankly, I can't really think of any other game where this would be different. There're always top-builds. Tried being in the tops. Boring. Staying in the 'gray zone' ever since for fun and embracing all varieties of builds :3 Quite new to d3, but not gonna change my attitude here. And tops seem to be occupied by bots in d3 anyway. Don't think they care about variety. Casual players and new-comers have got much choice here so far.
OK so. None of this is a personal attack against you....but here it is:
MANY games do not suffer from this disease of "best build"
Starcraft did not have best units......Hearthstone does not have best cards........and Wow does not have a best arena or raid composition.
You can't compare these with diablo. Starcraft is a strategy game: you adapt to your opponent. If your opponent does strictly the same thing all the time, you will find one best way to beat him (e.g. in the campaign).
Hearthstone's "campaign" mode suffers from the very same thing: for every boss, you have one best deck to defeat it.
yes you can compare the two games despite them being different genres.
NO! You can not compare those games. Those 3 are PVP games. D3 is not a PVP game. That's a HUGE difference.
PvP has an ever shifting metagame (as long as balance is not utter shit). When the meta is A then people will try to counter it with B, which gets countered by C, which gets countered by A again. And so on. D3 is a PvE game! There are no counters! It's like WoW raiding but without the predefined specs with their predefined dps rotations and their predefined dropped equip. And this is also the reason why balance is way harder in D3 than in WoW pve. The reason why there are mostly no predefined raid compositions is simply that balancing WoW is IMMENSLY easier. And I say mostly because in times where balance was not that good, there WERE those best raidgrps!
Yeah comparing diff genres is not valid. You edit where you were saying that the game is flawed ^^. Even if some1 dont use the TOPbuild in a dpser, for example, its not like TOPbuild hit 5billion and ur damnnbbuild hit 100m. There is no difference like that in wow.
Frankly, I can't really think of any other game where this would be different. There're always top-builds. Tried being in the tops. Boring. Staying in the 'gray zone' ever since for fun and embracing all varieties of builds :3 Quite new to d3, but not gonna change my attitude here. And tops seem to be occupied by bots in d3 anyway. Don't think they care about variety. Casual players and new-comers have got much choice here so far.
OK so. None of this is a personal attack against you....but here it is:
MANY games do not suffer from this disease of "best build"
Starcraft did not have best units......Hearthstone does not have best cards........and Wow does not have a best arena or raid composition.
You can't compare these with diablo. Starcraft is a strategy game: you adapt to your opponent. If your opponent does strictly the same thing all the time, you will find one best way to beat him (e.g. in the campaign).
Hearthstone's "campaign" mode suffers from the very same thing: for every boss, you have one best deck to defeat it.
yes you can compare the two games despite them being different genres.
NO! You can not compare those games. Those 3 are PVP games. D3 is not a PVP game. That's a HUGE difference.
PvP has an ever shifting metagame (as long as balance is not utter shit). When the meta is A then people will try to counter it with B, which gets countered by C, which gets countered by A again. And so on. D3 is a PvE game! There are no counters! It's like WoW raiding but without the predefined specs with their predefined dps rotations and their predefined dropped equip. And this is also the reason why balance is way harder in D3 than in WoW pve. The reason why there are mostly no predefined raid compositions is simply that balancing WoW is IMMENSLY easier. And I say mostly because in times where balance was not that good, there WERE those best raidgrps!
Yes thank you for agreeing with me in a roundabout way. D3 has no shifting meta game and there are no counters.
Diablo 3 is as deep as "damage counters life bars". This unfortunate outcome dictates that weapons need only to help drain those life bars and nothing more. skills need only to apply damage, there need only be one sole type of damage and hell lets make it so for the most part damage is added via a percent. its just simplicity feeding the mouth of simplicity. To some people this is the best that an Action RPG can hope for. those people are just....not smart enough to think outside the square.
It's unfortunate you cannot see any other far flung ideas for what they are and draw from them and use them for leverage to make Diablo 3 better than what it is, The way many people assumed that the professionals in California would have done in 2012......
It's unfortunate you simply lack the ability to see what elements of one game can aid the elements of another when I give you such beginner examples like Deus Ex.
its unfortunate that you think because 2 games belong to different genres or are split between PvP and PvE, you cannot borrow elements from one or the other to make one or the other better....its really unfortunate, because that's how some of the best games are made.
There was a time when real time strategy games did not even have numbers or stats of any kind. and were not PVP at all. Numbers and stats and PVP centric game play that appeared in other genres back in the mid 80s.......but lets keep it at a beginner level for the time being shall we? No need to wrestle with such a blasphemous statement that the numbers and unit stats in a game from one genre originated from a different one.......
It seems some people are just hell bent on dictating which genres are which and deciding which aspects of game play belong to one and not the other. I just want D3 weapons and items to be more interesting instead of less so, and don't really care where the inspiration comes from. One would hope it came from the other games their company is working on but apparently they can only borrow the shitty parts of WoW and none of the good....
There is a reason terran is the most played race and had the highest win percentage for most of brood wars later years, marine and marine micro was far too strong
grim patron had over a 70% win rate before the nerf
RMP was much the same, it had over a 65% win rate against the field at it's peak.
I was in death and taxes, but please do school me on how high end raiding works in wow. We needed specific groups of healers dps and the like for each boss encounter. By the time people at your level got around to doing naxx and the like it was nerfed into the ground and a potato could complete.
Why bother? anything I type in reply you're just going to say "It's horrible.." and "you are glad I'm not working on D3 haha..."
The pvp in your head is a train-wreck.
The IDEA of pvp as it covers decades of gaming and spans countless fan-bases and organizations and teams and genres of games is not.
PVP in D3 could be anything they imagine it to be, and instead they imagine it to be nothing at all. Just 4 players in brawling room hitting each-other. Did not even put so much as a a fucking score board up for Christ's sake. Because your version of PVP is a train-wreck and their attempted version was an unpolished log of my shit, does not even tarnish one molecule of the globe spanning Idea of Players competing with other players. an idea that their other games took and ran to the end zone for points.
And as far as the pathetic idea they are gearing up for next year, this putting a few hundred % damage of a skill on a handful of items and calling it a day and patting themselves on the back over it...well....
The bulk of the player base seems to think this is wonderful added content everyone should be thankful for so when they just roll it out as it is to please the masses and ignore Quin's video you will know that its just par for the course.
I did not said whats wrong ? The thing about choice is, u can always change the fak u will use. There is no commitment in ur build, that is why this game is flawed, and can't even be compared to PoE(or any arpg). Just my opinion, the same as i had in vanilla. I could try make my own build as always, but here u get in the same point as the #1 leaderbsboard. Another thing about the season feat, for me they don't know how long the seasons will be, and that shows how much they planned the game.
You can't compare these with diablo. Starcraft is a strategy game: you adapt to your opponent. If your opponent does strictly the same thing all the time, you will find one best way to beat him (e.g. in the campaign).
Hearthstone's "campaign" mode suffers from the very same thing: for every boss, you have one best deck to defeat it.
yes you can compare the two games despite them being different genres.
NO! You can not compare those games. Those 3 are PVP games. D3 is not a PVP game. That's a HUGE difference.
PvP has an ever shifting metagame (as long as balance is not utter shit). When the meta is A then people will try to counter it with B, which gets countered by C, which gets countered by A again. And so on. D3 is a PvE game! There are no counters! It's like WoW raiding but without the predefined specs with their predefined dps rotations and their predefined dropped equip. And this is also the reason why balance is way harder in D3 than in WoW pve. The reason why there are mostly no predefined raid compositions is simply that balancing WoW is IMMENSLY easier. And I say mostly because in times where balance was not that good, there WERE those best raidgrps!
Yeah comparing diff genres is not valid. You edit where you were saying that the game is flawed ^^. Even if some1 dont use the TOPbuild in a dpser, for example, its not like TOPbuild hit 5billion and ur damnnbbuild hit 100m. There is no difference like that in wow.
Because you don't have the freedom in WoW that you have in D3.
My response (copied from Reddit): 100% agree. Actually, I think this ruins itemization on so many levels:
Play a day more and you get a guaranteed 50 or so main stat from paragon, in S5 add a guaranteed 200 or so main stat from adding an augmentation to a new item, and the only unknown variable in progress *might* be a new item that yields a 20 main stat increase due to even more perfect rolls. Yay. Does that keep you playing? Good for you then. It doesn't work for me anymore.
I agree, this part is an issue. I do not like that time spent playing trumps quality of gear obtained automatically.
It is my understanding that when they announce the new Xpac next year, they will also have a new system set up, essentially removing Paragon from the game.
Yes, the new Xpac is real, an estimated release of March 2017 has been discussed within the Dev ranks and was overheard by several people at Blizzcon, for instance, comments that said, "wait until Blizzcon 2016 Diablo fans, we will have several things that will blow your socks off!" This leads to an obvious understanding that we will A - get a new Xpac or B - get Diablo 4. The obvious then becomes a new Xpac, because that is the Blizzard model.
Well since there was a 12 year gap between D2 release and D3 release, don't expect a D4 release this soon.
My response (copied from Reddit): 100% agree. Actually, I think this ruins itemization on so many levels:
Play a day more and you get a guaranteed 50 or so main stat from paragon, in S5 add a guaranteed 200 or so main stat from adding an augmentation to a new item, and the only unknown variable in progress *might* be a new item that yields a 20 main stat increase due to even more perfect rolls. Yay. Does that keep you playing? Good for you then. It doesn't work for me anymore.
I agree, this part is an issue. I do not like that time spent playing trumps quality of gear obtained automatically.
It is my understanding that when they announce the new Xpac next year, they will also have a new system set up, essentially removing Paragon from the game.
Yes, the new Xpac is real, an estimated release of March 2017 has been discussed within the Dev ranks and was overheard by several people at Blizzcon, for instance, comments that said, "wait until Blizzcon 2016 Diablo fans, we will have several things that will blow your socks off!" This leads to an obvious understanding that we will A - get a new Xpac or B - get Diablo 4. The obvious then becomes a new Xpac, because that is the Blizzard model.
Well since there was a 12 year gap between D2 release and D3 release, don't expect a D4 release this soon.
Honestly, it doesnt really mean anything, the market has changed.
There is a reason terran is the most played race and had the highest win percentage for most of brood wars later years, marine and marine micro was far too strong
grim patron had over a 70% win rate before the nerf
RMP was much the same, it had over a 65% win rate against the field at it's peak.
I was in death and taxes, but please do school me on how high end raiding works in wow. We needed specific groups of healers dps and the like for each boss encounter. By the time people at your level got around to doing naxx and the like it was nerfed into the ground and a potato could complete.
In post # 98 I say that there are no "best" cards or units in hearthstone and in Starcraft. What this means in the scope of the arguement set by the idea Quin put forth, that choice seemingly does not exist when one item shoves all others into the instant garbage bin because it is so much more powerful. I'm sorry you did not understand this at first and I fear we have gone off on a tangent far away from where it originated.
The basis of this argument in this thread is the overwhelming and instant selection of one item that has had 100% damage slopped onto it, that 100% being a ball park figure.
RMP does not fall into that category. it is not auto chosen, nor is patron warrior, nor is any blend of units or even races in Starcraft, nor is any mix of classes automatically chosen as the best in WoW when raiding or during PVP. This is simply not the case. They are not auto chosen and they are not auto win. what that means is across a span of time things will change, certain skills or certain mixtures will shine from fight to fight. A weapon that boosts your damage of a skill from 0% to 100% is an auto win, and in Diablo 3's case i sure does not seem like in due time things will change....
Within the context of this argument put forth by Quin and the staggering boost in bonus damage driving all other items into complete obsolescence these new items are auto win.
in Diablo 3 weapons like this will be auto chosen and sadly the entire game has proven that this is the model that they are happy with.
Lacunis are auto chosen, end game set pieces are auto chosen, trifecta jewelry is auto chosen, furnaces and F-R Rings are auto chosen, SMKs are auto chosen. Mempos are auto chosen, as are witching hours. A sad pile of items is auto chosen for a short list of sad reasons. They are "auto desired" and auto shoveled down the players throats by developers who incessantly relax the drop rates on everything imaginable....
this is not the case with RMP,
this is not the case with marines
and it is ESPECIALLY not the case with any hearthstone cards because you do not even know what cards are going to be drawn from game to game. Even the most powerful cards might arrive in your hand RIGHT on curve and playing them in that particular situation might mean their complete waste and your assured demise. just last night I played Ragnaros into an empty board and lost the game because of it.
There will seemingly never be a case where you equipped a weapon with to "much damage to a skill" and it assured your demise,
also you will never be in a situation were equipping an item that boosted damage to a skill hinder your progress or assured your demise,
you wont ever be in a position where using items in D3 that "boosts all your damage" is the wrong thing to do.
the goal in D3 is boost your damage boost your damage boost your damage.
the goal in Hearthstone is not build a patron deck, build a patron deck, build a patron deck
the goal in WoW arena is not "click on RMP and win the game
the goal in Startcraft is not create marines until you win the game.
the goal in many games is not so clearly defined. And That's a good thing. but in D3 you have nothing but unflinching and automated definition.
That's a bad thing.
This is the elaborate reply to explain why mentioning the things that you did does not even remotely prove that mathematical superiority is an unavoidable outcome, in games. Even though you are correct about how strong they are and how reputable. And you identify that they are very successful, to the point where they are absolutely nerfed into oblivion as was the case of the grim patron charging warrior.....even in that ultra extreme case, the success rate of grim patron was absolutely peanuts compared to choosing a weapon that boosts your skill damage 100% vs one that boost it 0%. Within the context of this debate the points you raise no matter how accurate, prove and explain virtually nothing.
Many notable players and figureheads love to echo the statement about how everything in accordance with their character can be "mathed out" and a final solution is waiting to be found and copied...but they all so often fail to see the bigger picture of the game in question. they simply refuse to acknowledge the staggering list of nuances that fly the complete opposite direction of their theory. Even some of the very top end DPS hunters to ever walk planet earth have risked making that claim casually in discussion. I suppose they were correct back on the podcasts upon which they made their claims that when a profession might provide you even a single point of dexterity or agility that would lend itself to even one single % more damage in a parse, the claim was made within the scope of that hunters DPS.
Outside of that scope existed all the variables of the whole game and an exhaustive list of measures of success, some that had absolutely nothing to do with damage at all....certainly this hunter was aware that they are "only talking about" their class or their damage or the damage of the equation of the game. He must have been....only a fool would think with such a closed mind...
Unfortunately In D3 the damage equation IS the game, or at least in contrast to WoW a hilariously over-sized portion of the intrigue pie....
And I don't even raid at all, I never did anything beyond a handful of public dungeons for some welfare set of armor penetration pieces from Dalaran...
Frankly, I can't really think of any other game where this would be different. There're always top-builds. Tried being in the tops. Boring. Staying in the 'gray zone' ever since for fun and embracing all varieties of builds :3 Quite new to d3, but not gonna change my attitude here. And tops seem to be occupied by bots in d3 anyway. Don't think they care about variety. Casual players and new-comers have got much choice here so far.
OK so. None of this is a personal attack against you....but here it is:
MANY games do not suffer from this disease of "best build"
Starcraft did not have best units......Hearthstone does not have best cards........and Wow does not have a best arena or raid composition.
You can't compare these with diablo. Starcraft is a strategy game: you adapt to your opponent. If your opponent does strictly the same thing all the time, you will find one best way to beat him (e.g. in the campaign).
Hearthstone's "campaign" mode suffers from the very same thing: for every boss, you have one best deck to defeat it.
yes you can compare the two games despite them being different genres. why then can programmers mix the elements of first person shooters and roleplaying games at all? why did they make so many guns in borderlands? why is Deus Ex even a thing? why are there classes in Team Fortress classic? Isn't there a law against mixing genres? what good can mixing genres even do? why does destiny and call of duty and modern warfare and all that shit have "loadouts and ranks and stats and experience and levels? how was that possible?
why do situations where the Hearthstone AI does the exact same thing every time reinforce your argument and destroy mine when the situation you describe is hardly even possible without being able to choose what cards both you and him will draw? why is that?
In the case of starcrafts campaign, you may coast through campaign mode and find the AI doing the same thing over and over again....
But then you have to ignore the entire player vs player portion of the game, the portion upon which the legacy of the game was built. why the hell would you do that? why would you not see the good portion of the whole game as you state exactly "adapt to your opponent" why?
Why ignore the decade spanning legacy of starcraft PVP and latch on to the short comings of its AI????
and yet.... when you fight the same brain dead enemies in D3 year in year out....thats perfectly OK? why?
You can't compare these games to diablo because their replayability is based on pvp, while Diablo isn't.
You may also consider changing your tone and actually thinking your answer through for your next post, although I think by now that you may just be a troll.
I think the discussion is closed and that the conclusion is: wyatt cheng knows better than quinn, has thought through this questions more thoroughly, realized that there is a trade-off, and has chosen for the trade-off that would make the game move forward in the correct direction.
So having "millions of combinations" reduces the game to an optimization problem where one build/gearset will be better, and there is no straightforward way to balance the items so that the second best option is close enough. The new items allow to balance the game more easily, in an orthogonal fashion for each build (so balancing the gearset for one build does not affect the other build), so the second-best option may indeed be very close to first best, so close that we may have true end-game variety in builds. Something that we currently don't have.
While he is at it, he may also realize that "randomizing end-game content" is not equivalent to "making end-game content replayable". Quite the opposite.
So... Let's see how the comparison should have been:
Diablo 3 PvE compared to Heartstone SOLO ADVENTURES and Starcraft SINGLE PLAYER CAMPAIGN, that way it would have made sense!
Comparing a PvE game with a PvP game makes no sense.
- Of course in a PvP game there is NO PERFECT BUILD (if it is decently programmed) because the metagame (the way players study the game and prepare to counter the most prominent builds/decks/ways to play) continues to shift or cycle.
- In a PvE game the metagame is pretty much fixed, once you find the most effective way to deal with the computer, it is that, unless new factors are brought in (like an update of the AI, of skills or of balance). Being it even SLIGHTLY better than others or exceedingle better, doesn't matter.
Now the cmparison with WoW.
- No sense in comparing Diablo 3 to WoW PvP (see above).
- Comparing to Raid WoW:
In WoW the classes have become pretty much interchangeable and the builds too. Everything is pretty much doable as long as you have 2-4 tanks + 3-5 healers and 5-16 DpS in your raid. Even in that "chaos" having the widest range of character is generally the "best way to go" because you have the widest variety of buffs and the right tool for every sitation.
But let's see the itemization (I stopped playing at Wrath of the Lich King expansion) The itemization was pretty much at the levels of Diablo 3 Vanilla. You looked for the same stats all the time and the items handed them to you every time because the items had fixed stats. All you had to do was adapt your skills to the effects of the Tier Set you were using. This means pretty much having the same build for every spec.
Ok, some of the classes benefited from multiple builds, but it as pretty much because they had different possible roles, for example the Druid could be a tank, a healer, a melee DpS or a Ranged DpS, but for every one of those roles there was like just one "most" effective build, with very small variations.
Now I don't know how it evolved with Pandaria, Warlords and the upcoming Legion, but I don't think it will be much different.
About the raid strategies.
Raid bosses behaviour is dependent on how the AI is programmed and if you stretch the term of "best build" then there are very few strategies used to kill a boss and most raid groups stick to those, as much as Diablo 3 stick to a single build that has the best performances.
So...
Now please... Can we return to the main topic?
We never left the main topic, the main topic is items are boring, what could be fun?
you and others around you simply strive to ignore any discussion or claim it false if it happens to not have anything to do with items in a single player game that is of the same genre.....
the main topic is that items and the players choosing between them is becoming stale and automatic and flavorless....just like how your vision of being locked in Starcraft single player vs a hodge podge unchanging basic card dealing Innkeeper....would be stale and thankfully, unlike you are prepared to accept, the entire rest of both of those games exist and are immediately and forever playable and enjoyable.....
I'm sorry that you cannot see the issue for what it is and think outside the square and apply what you think about to potential solutions
So far in this thread I have heard:
-We cant use anything that has to do with PVP, to circumvent the issue,
-We can use games if they are a different genre, to circumvent the issue,
-Wyatt Cheng "knows more about it" than Quin
and
-certain players don't see and issue, and so there is no issue...
It's really heartbreaking to be honest...especially when in your next paragraph you look at a tiny cross section in WoW, the items, and say "The itemization was pretty much at the levels of Diablo 3 Vanilla" are you admitting that Diablo 3 is doing OK if it compares to a small slice of a small portion of a different game? or is the comparison void because "PeeVeePee" ?
Not to mention you're wrong anyway... items in Wow had many occurrences in its item landscape that were WAY more interesting, situation and unique than Diablo 3 Vanilla, reforging came and went, items were continuously added to the game professions yielded wild and wacky contraptions etc,etc....
High end items had interesting special powers, giving you creative boosts to certain situations....
..........OH but lets ignore all of that. and then lets say something like "oh its a different genre / game / it's PVP.....yes that's a good line of reasoning..."
lets look at a cross section of a several year old game, ignore everything around it, including the flair and the actual interesting features of items specifically....then come up with an excuse that seems to make sense....its an RPG.......not an ARPG. there that will do. it has subscribers.....
That should justify Diablo 3 items.
What's next? We cant look anywhere for examples unless the game begins with the letter D?
My god, what happened to this place....
You can't compare these with diablo. Starcraft is a strategy game: you adapt to your opponent. If your opponent does strictly the same thing all the time, you will find one best way to beat him (e.g. in the campaign).
Hearthstone's "campaign" mode suffers from the very same thing: for every boss, you have one best deck to defeat it.
It's like chess: if someone plays always in a pre-determined way with always the same moves and answers, there will be a best way to beat him.
So once you re-center your argument on something that is comparable, it falls appart. If you spent time reading the answers here, you would note that the real issue is that diablo end-game is focused on a single objective. If there is just one objective, and it does not change or adapt itself, there will be one best way to beat it.
Wyatt Cheng goes one step further than your (and ultimately quinn's) analysis. He realizes that having a very large choice set means you can identify the best solution, and this means you really only have one choice. The idea is then to create multiple choice sets, not just one. These items, while not the solution by any means, are a step towards this idea. It allows to balance things in such a way that different skills can have pretty much the same overall efficiency at clearing GR. Then it is up to the players to choose the skill, and the items that go along it. You end up with different gameplays to clear the GR as efficiently -- in short, you increase variety.
We should not complain about them reducing variety while all they are doing is just the opposite.
I welcome this change of mindset. But what we need I think (and we are many to share this thinking) is multiple end-game objectives, not just GR.
there is always, always an optimal strategy for any given game, if you think there isn't then you just dont know the game.
You lack game theory knowledge and game design knowledge, you're ranting and dont know why
why do situations where the Hearthstone AI does the exact same thing every time reinforce your argument and destroy mine when the situation you describe is hardly even possible without being able to choose what cards both you and him will draw? why is that?
In the case of starcrafts campaign, you may coast through campaign mode and find the AI doing the same thing over and over again....
But then you have to ignore the entire player vs player portion of the game, the portion upon which the legacy of the game was built. why the hell would you do that? why would you not see the good portion of the whole game as you state exactly "adapt to your opponent" why?
Why ignore the decade spanning legacy of starcraft PVP and latch on to the short comings of its AI????
and yet.... when you fight the same brain dead enemies in D3 year in year out....thats perfectly OK? why?
there are PILES of units that counter marines. Units that marines cannot even do damage to. I'm not going to list them you can go look them up.
There are LOADS of cards that flat out destroy the attempted building of a brawler attack. cards that clear the whole board and cards that silenced the former charge mechanic of the Warsong Commander. cards that taunt incessantly, cards that steal units etc....
there are COUNTLESS examples of matches and skill combos and chance happenings were RMP was absolutely crushed and if it is so OP as you state, no other arena comp would have existed.....many did and despite the intense reliability of RMP, many many times for many many reasons it was toppled over like a wet paper towel.
WoW raids are so long and so story rich that I cant even begin to explain it to you. you think that everything is just a carbon copy of the worlds best guild at the moment and you simply haven't had the discussions about how varied the game can actually be, situations exist within the GM sculpted raid environments where classes one would not even think to use as a tank become viable options including druids , rogues and warlocks among probably many more.
discussions raged on over the inclusion of individual skill points and abilities and probably continue to rage. combat logs post wipe will be studied for hours on end by an endless stream of competitive players.....so...pretty hilarious for you to attempt to summarize wow raiding into "just copy the top dudes.....
and again......if its such a bad feature in WoW, if you even were correct.....which you are not....
Why then is Diablo 3 just click skills in town and dress like everyone else seen as a feature of convenience?
Raid strategies have already been an endless discussion, that obviously you are unaware of....
Clicking Diablo 3 items that grant +150% damage are not and endless discussion have not been and probably never will be.....
There are no counters to a higher damage percentage, to the same magnitude as there are counters to cards in hearthstone or units in Starcraft or comps in WoW arena. in fact one has to pretty much bend the preaking point to find such a thought provoking counter, with ideas that you have to sacrifice some SSS damage in order to be able to cast it more often. but this idea should be EVERYWHERE, and its hardly in trace amounts.......
but please continue teaching me about game theory. I cant wait. lol..
Videos and plays are out there having 1 mana creatures be stolen by sylvanas and hit by rag. "top end powers" as you say wasted on nothing, by cunning players and crazy luck. LAST NIGHT I was coming back from a loss, played Rag and because I did not anticipate the correct paladin secret Rag caused me to lose the game. I would have won without him. Dr boom is WIDELY regarded as the very best 7 mana creature in the game. and who knows if you will draw him, who knows if his bombs will hit the desired target who knows if the guy has a SW:death or a BG Hunter...and you just threw that card away or luck stole the win.
the discussion we are now having RIGHT NOW will never stop in hearthstone and it will never happen in Diablo 3 items. some players are OK with this and some are just beside themselves with confusion over the sheer waste of potential on display.
Why did this turn into SC2 and Hearthstone talk?
Kinda start to think that they doing this because its the only way to balance legacy of nightmares, or something else, i think its not thought thru and kinda naive, while at otherhand it is cool, in long run its not cool.
Diablo 3 is as deep as "damage counters life bars". This unfortunate outcome dictates that weapons need only to help drain those life bars and nothing more. skills need only to apply damage, there need only be one sole type of damage and hell lets make it so for the most part damage is added via a percent. its just simplicity feeding the mouth of simplicity. To some people this is the best that an Action RPG can hope for. those people are just....not smart enough to think outside the square.
It's unfortunate you cannot see any other far flung ideas for what they are and draw from them and use them for leverage to make Diablo 3 better than what it is, The way many people assumed that the professionals in California would have done in 2012......
It's unfortunate you simply lack the ability to see what elements of one game can aid the elements of another when I give you such beginner examples like Deus Ex.
its unfortunate that you think because 2 games belong to different genres or are split between PvP and PvE, you cannot borrow elements from one or the other to make one or the other better....its really unfortunate, because that's how some of the best games are made.
There was a time when real time strategy games did not even have numbers or stats of any kind. and were not PVP at all. Numbers and stats and PVP centric game play that appeared in other genres back in the mid 80s.......but lets keep it at a beginner level for the time being shall we? No need to wrestle with such a blasphemous statement that the numbers and unit stats in a game from one genre originated from a different one.......
It seems some people are just hell bent on dictating which genres are which and deciding which aspects of game play belong to one and not the other. I just want D3 weapons and items to be more interesting instead of less so, and don't really care where the inspiration comes from. One would hope it came from the other games their company is working on but apparently they can only borrow the shitty parts of WoW and none of the good....
There is a reason terran is the most played race and had the highest win percentage for most of brood wars later years, marine and marine micro was far too strong
grim patron had over a 70% win rate before the nerf
RMP was much the same, it had over a 65% win rate against the field at it's peak.
I was in death and taxes, but please do school me on how high end raiding works in wow. We needed specific groups of healers dps and the like for each boss encounter. By the time people at your level got around to doing naxx and the like it was nerfed into the ground and a potato could complete.
Why bother? anything I type in reply you're just going to say "It's horrible.." and "you are glad I'm not working on D3 haha..."
The pvp in your head is a train-wreck.
The IDEA of pvp as it covers decades of gaming and spans countless fan-bases and organizations and teams and genres of games is not.
PVP in D3 could be anything they imagine it to be, and instead they imagine it to be nothing at all. Just 4 players in brawling room hitting each-other. Did not even put so much as a a fucking score board up for Christ's sake. Because your version of PVP is a train-wreck and their attempted version was an unpolished log of my shit, does not even tarnish one molecule of the globe spanning Idea of Players competing with other players. an idea that their other games took and ran to the end zone for points.
And as far as the pathetic idea they are gearing up for next year, this putting a few hundred % damage of a skill on a handful of items and calling it a day and patting themselves on the back over it...well....
The bulk of the player base seems to think this is wonderful added content everyone should be thankful for so when they just roll it out as it is to please the masses and ignore Quin's video you will know that its just par for the course.
I did not said whats wrong ? The thing about choice is, u can always change the fak u will use. There is no commitment in ur build, that is why this game is flawed, and can't even be compared to PoE(or any arpg). Just my opinion, the same as i had in vanilla. I could try make my own build as always, but here u get in the same point as the #1 leaderbsboard. Another thing about the season feat, for me they don't know how long the seasons will be, and that shows how much they planned the game.
"NO! You can not compare those games" xD
Well since there was a 12 year gap between D2 release and D3 release, don't expect a D4 release this soon.
The basis of this argument in this thread is the overwhelming and instant selection of one item that has had 100% damage slopped onto it, that 100% being a ball park figure.
RMP does not fall into that category. it is not auto chosen, nor is patron warrior, nor is any blend of units or even races in Starcraft, nor is any mix of classes automatically chosen as the best in WoW when raiding or during PVP. This is simply not the case. They are not auto chosen and they are not auto win. what that means is across a span of time things will change, certain skills or certain mixtures will shine from fight to fight. A weapon that boosts your damage of a skill from 0% to 100% is an auto win, and in Diablo 3's case i sure does not seem like in due time things will change....
Within the context of this argument put forth by Quin and the staggering boost in bonus damage driving all other items into complete obsolescence these new items are auto win.
in Diablo 3 weapons like this will be auto chosen and sadly the entire game has proven that this is the model that they are happy with.
Lacunis are auto chosen, end game set pieces are auto chosen, trifecta jewelry is auto chosen, furnaces and F-R Rings are auto chosen, SMKs are auto chosen. Mempos are auto chosen, as are witching hours. A sad pile of items is auto chosen for a short list of sad reasons. They are "auto desired" and auto shoveled down the players throats by developers who incessantly relax the drop rates on everything imaginable....
this is not the case with RMP,
this is not the case with marines
and it is ESPECIALLY not the case with any hearthstone cards because you do not even know what cards are going to be drawn from game to game. Even the most powerful cards might arrive in your hand RIGHT on curve and playing them in that particular situation might mean their complete waste and your assured demise. just last night I played Ragnaros into an empty board and lost the game because of it.
There will seemingly never be a case where you equipped a weapon with to "much damage to a skill" and it assured your demise,
also you will never be in a situation were equipping an item that boosted damage to a skill hinder your progress or assured your demise,
you wont ever be in a position where using items in D3 that "boosts all your damage" is the wrong thing to do.
the goal in D3 is boost your damage boost your damage boost your damage.
the goal in Hearthstone is not build a patron deck, build a patron deck, build a patron deck
the goal in WoW arena is not "click on RMP and win the game
the goal in Startcraft is not create marines until you win the game.
the goal in many games is not so clearly defined. And That's a good thing. but in D3 you have nothing but unflinching and automated definition.
That's a bad thing.
This is the elaborate reply to explain why mentioning the things that you did does not even remotely prove that mathematical superiority is an unavoidable outcome, in games. Even though you are correct about how strong they are and how reputable. And you identify that they are very successful, to the point where they are absolutely nerfed into oblivion as was the case of the grim patron charging warrior.....even in that ultra extreme case, the success rate of grim patron was absolutely peanuts compared to choosing a weapon that boosts your skill damage 100% vs one that boost it 0%. Within the context of this debate the points you raise no matter how accurate, prove and explain virtually nothing.
Many notable players and figureheads love to echo the statement about how everything in accordance with their character can be "mathed out" and a final solution is waiting to be found and copied...but they all so often fail to see the bigger picture of the game in question. they simply refuse to acknowledge the staggering list of nuances that fly the complete opposite direction of their theory. Even some of the very top end DPS hunters to ever walk planet earth have risked making that claim casually in discussion. I suppose they were correct back on the podcasts upon which they made their claims that when a profession might provide you even a single point of dexterity or agility that would lend itself to even one single % more damage in a parse, the claim was made within the scope of that hunters DPS.
Outside of that scope existed all the variables of the whole game and an exhaustive list of measures of success, some that had absolutely nothing to do with damage at all....certainly this hunter was aware that they are "only talking about" their class or their damage or the damage of the equation of the game. He must have been....only a fool would think with such a closed mind...
Unfortunately In D3 the damage equation IS the game, or at least in contrast to WoW a hilariously over-sized portion of the intrigue pie....
And I don't even raid at all, I never did anything beyond a handful of public dungeons for some welfare set of armor penetration pieces from Dalaran...
You may also consider changing your tone and actually thinking your answer through for your next post, although I think by now that you may just be a troll.
I think the discussion is closed and that the conclusion is: wyatt cheng knows better than quinn, has thought through this questions more thoroughly, realized that there is a trade-off, and has chosen for the trade-off that would make the game move forward in the correct direction.
So having "millions of combinations" reduces the game to an optimization problem where one build/gearset will be better, and there is no straightforward way to balance the items so that the second best option is close enough. The new items allow to balance the game more easily, in an orthogonal fashion for each build (so balancing the gearset for one build does not affect the other build), so the second-best option may indeed be very close to first best, so close that we may have true end-game variety in builds. Something that we currently don't have.
While he is at it, he may also realize that "randomizing end-game content" is not equivalent to "making end-game content replayable". Quite the opposite.
We never left the main topic, the main topic is items are boring, what could be fun?
you and others around you simply strive to ignore any discussion or claim it false if it happens to not have anything to do with items in a single player game that is of the same genre.....
the main topic is that items and the players choosing between them is becoming stale and automatic and flavorless....just like how your vision of being locked in Starcraft single player vs a hodge podge unchanging basic card dealing Innkeeper....would be stale and thankfully, unlike you are prepared to accept, the entire rest of both of those games exist and are immediately and forever playable and enjoyable.....
I'm sorry that you cannot see the issue for what it is and think outside the square and apply what you think about to potential solutions
So far in this thread I have heard:
-We cant use anything that has to do with PVP, to circumvent the issue,
-We can use games if they are a different genre, to circumvent the issue,
-Wyatt Cheng "knows more about it" than Quin
and
-certain players don't see and issue, and so there is no issue...
It's really heartbreaking to be honest...especially when in your next paragraph you look at a tiny cross section in WoW, the items, and say "The itemization was pretty much at the levels of Diablo 3 Vanilla" are you admitting that Diablo 3 is doing OK if it compares to a small slice of a small portion of a different game? or is the comparison void because "PeeVeePee" ?
Not to mention you're wrong anyway... items in Wow had many occurrences in its item landscape that were WAY more interesting, situation and unique than Diablo 3 Vanilla, reforging came and went, items were continuously added to the game professions yielded wild and wacky contraptions etc,etc....
High end items had interesting special powers, giving you creative boosts to certain situations....
..........OH but lets ignore all of that. and then lets say something like "oh its a different genre / game / it's PVP.....yes that's a good line of reasoning..."
lets look at a cross section of a several year old game, ignore everything around it, including the flair and the actual interesting features of items specifically....then come up with an excuse that seems to make sense....its an RPG.......not an ARPG. there that will do. it has subscribers.....
That should justify Diablo 3 items.
What's next? We cant look anywhere for examples unless the game begins with the letter D?
My god, what happened to this place....