So there's been a lot of talk with regard to "lack of investment" and the resulting loss of uniqueness as pertains to Blizzard's "skill runes" concept and the impact it will have on class uniformity for D3. There seems to be quite a bit of fear that everyone will ultimately flop to one of a handful of cookie-cutter specs once the game is released. It's to this idea that I propose a challenge:
Post a link to a build for any character you wish to play and include what the build is intended to do (ie top single-point damage, crowd control builds for pvp, mass mob slaughtering, etc.) and see if even one person agrees 100% with your concept design. I have a feeling that if everyone is truthful and no trolls are hanging out under the bridge that you're virtually gaurenteed to get at least 1-2 suggestions or alternate ideas from each person that responds.
My goal here is to demonstrate how everyone's playstyles and mindsets affect their decisions where skills and runes are concerned and how class uniformity is something that we might not need to fear quite so much after all...
*Edit*
I'll post a build tomorrow to get this started if no one else wants to be #1 - but it's late and I want a couple minutes of Beta time before I hit the sack.
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this post is a few months early, no one will agree because it is all theory and nothing is actually tried and proven in the game so until then we don't know.... but blizzard developers DID say that there is going to be cookie cutter builds but they will try to keep gap between optimal and viable as small as possible, yet even the truth behind there words can't be 100% believed until we play the game.
anyway what i am afraid of isn't cookie cutter builds as people who will go that way wont switch there skills all the time on the other hand playing with someone who keeps switching his build every encounter will break my immersion and the flow of the game.
this post is a few months early, no one will agree because it is all theory and nothing is actually tried and proven in the game so until then we don't know.... but blizzard developers DID say that there is going to be cookie cutter builds but they will try to keep gap between optimal and viable as small as possible, yet even the truth behind there words can't be 100% believed until we play the game.
anyway what i am afraid of isn't cookie cutter builds as people who will go that way wont switch there skills all the time on the other hand playing with someone who keeps switching his build every encounter will break my immersion and the flow of the game.
Yeah, I understand that it's early. My point though is that even if you look at any given thread right now where people post their own desired build you inevitably see several following posts demonstrating why this, that, or the other would be better and why... and most of the logic used seems to be seated more in each players mentality more than any number crunching and theory crafting with support from tooltips.
And I have to disagree with your statement that blizzard agreed there would be cookie cutter builds. I've read the blue posts and the closest thing I've see to that is a statement where they mention that there will inevitibly be builds that are stronger for given situations than others - going on further to say that they're sure people will try to maximize certain set-ups, but in my mind they fell short of agreeing with the cookie-cutter concept. Just my 2 cents...
As for skill swapping and loss of immersion - I don't see that as a threat. If someone wants to swap from a mob killing spec to a single target boss killing spec, I don't mind holding up 15 seconds. If the D3 structure is even remotely similar to D2 in terms of quest lay out and act progression then it's going to be:
Mob killing for an hour -> Swap spec -> Kill act boss -> swap spec -> mob killing for an hour - > so on....
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usually when i make builds i do so many hours of research and comparing that any suggestions people give arent good ones or its merely preference and doesnt improve anything. most people post builds for input. i post them to show what amazing things the classes are capable of. people are extremely naive to think there wont be cookie cutter builds when every game with a skill system that isnt restrictive has them. its impossible to make a game perfectly balanced. ill show everyone shortly after release if someone doesnt beat me to it.
the cookie cutter builds we all knew in D2 still had people saying "well i do this and that is better bla bla" but it didnt make them any less cookie cutters. so even if people give suggestions or slight tweaks the build can still be considered a cookie cutter
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"once the pretty hardcore gamers we had testing inferno found it fairly difficult, we then we doubled it" -trolololol jay wilson
Yeah, I understand that it's early. My point though is that even if you look at any given thread right now where people post their own desired build you inevitably see several following posts demonstrating why this, that, or the other would be better and why... and most of the logic used seems to be seated more in each players mentality more than any number crunching and theory crafting with support from tooltips.
And I have to disagree with your statement that blizzard agreed there would be cookie cutter builds. I've read the blue posts and the closest thing I've see to that is a statement where they mention that there will inevitibly be builds that are stronger for given situations than others - going on further to say that they're sure people will try to maximize certain set-ups, but in my mind they fell short of agreeing with the cookie-cutter concept. Just my 2 cents...
As for skill swapping and loss of immersion - I don't see that as a threat. If someone wants to swap from a mob killing spec to a single target boss killing spec, I don't mind holding up 15 seconds. If the D3 structure is even remotely similar to D2 in terms of quest lay out and act progression then it's going to be:
Mob killing for an hour -> Swap spec -> Kill act boss -> swap spec -> mob killing for an hour - > so on....
yeah they didn't say cookie cutter builds but builds stronger than others mean that these stronger builds are ...the cookie cutter builds?? IDK <_<
boss build and mob build is understandable. and i don't mind that really but if an ice wizard finds a mob that is risistant so he pulls back and leaves me for 15 secs or maybe more "the skill GUI" on my own until he switches to his fire build.... i am not a fan of that.
my point is, switching should be instant but continious switching should be penalized.
usually when i make builds i do so many hours of research and comparing that any suggestions people give arent good ones or its merely preference and doesnt improve anything. most people post builds for input. i post them to show what amazing things the classes are capable of. people are extremely naive to think there wont be cookie cutter builds when every game with a skill system that isnt restrictive has them. its impossible to make a game perfectly balanced. ill show everyone shortly after release if someone doesnt beat me to it.
the cookie cutter builds we all knew in D2 still had people saying "well i do this and that is better bla bla" but it didnt make them any less cookie cutters. so even if people give suggestions or slight tweaks the build can still be considered a cookie cutter
I agree to some extent with what you're saying. When a game is based off series of math formulas it's only logical that at some point someone will crank out a recipe that yields the highest numbers in terms of raw dps/hps/tps etc. But I don't think it's going to be quite so easy to calculate with this one.
For:
1. Someone will have to produce results for what I perceive to be the "easy" math. That is to say, calculate numbers using values from the tooltips with theoretical max dps gear.
2. Someone will need to determine for what situation the given set is being used. A "max dps" build for a single target is going to be vastly different than that of a pack of mobs - and in the Diablo series (especially in the upcoming Inferno difficulty) one could argue that depending on what mobs you're fighting your set (both skills and gear) might change as max enemy hitpoints and player attack speeds will factor into your actual throughput where killing is concerned. For example: with a theoretical DPS of 100 using a build centered around a 2.00 attack speed would yield you less throughput than a DPS build of 80 centered around an attack speed of .75 if the mob had 160 HP total. A lot of that extra dps (from the first build) would be wasted on overkill. Obviously that's an extremely simplified expression but the underlying point is valid.
3. Someone will still need to figure out how movement speed affects DPS in this game - which is something no one has managed to really do in any game thus far since downtime due to movement can't really be factored without knowing exactly how long you'll be on the move - which varies from encounter to encounter. And we've already seen movement speed modifiers in the beta.
Games like WoW were relavitely easy to calculate in comparison since all gear was uniform, boss HP pools compared to damage throughput allowed for sustained encounter time which in turn provided good capability for parsing, aggro control by a tank allowed for dps to focus primarily on number crunching, and lastly (probably most importantly) the enemy of choice was known. The Dev team has already stated that inferno difficulty was designed in a way to encourage more random farming of content - so if you've got to play random areas to find the desirable random superunique "bosses", then you don't know if you're going to need a bursty build for taking down low hp/high dmg mobs, or a steady high dps build for high hp/mid dps mobs, etc.
I'm not saying it's impossible, but I feel there will be a lot more room for speculation provided there isn't glaringly obvious OP skillsets.
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yeah they didn't say cookie cutter builds but builds stronger than others mean that these stronger builds are ...the cookie cutter builds?? IDK <_<
boss build and mob build is understandable. and i don't mind that really but if an ice wizard finds a mob that is risistant so he pulls back and leaves me for 15 secs or maybe more "the skill GUI" on my own until he switches to his fire build.... i am not a fan of that.
my point is, switching should be instant but continious switching should be penalized.
To your first statment: Yes I understand what you're getting at, but I'm trying relay that even if there is "stronger" builds that could potentially be considered cookie cutter - How often will you actually get to use them. The stars are going to have to align for any player to really be given the opportunity to utilize a pure max dps build (for example) ... there's no tanks here, no threat control, no real aggro table. A theoretical "best" build might be worthless when you have to spend half your time kiting the mob - suddenly you might wish you'd kept more utility... or less utility... who knows?
I hear you on the switching thing though - constant switching should be penalized. Maybe the more often you switch the longer the cooldown time grows before skills reactivate. Not permanently since that would fundamentally be opposed to their design choice, but a timer that grows or diminishes based on time between skill swaps... idk. In beta I've already found that I really only skill swap between 2 "real" sets - and pack mob slayer set and a boss set. I don't know if that makes you feel any better :D?
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Liquid Cooled Intel I7 2700k OC'd to 5.0ghz at a max pull of 1.44v ~ 19-21C Idle ~ 68C max under load.
16GB G Skill Ram ~ 2x Mushkin 120GB SSD's ~ MSI GTX 570 Twin Frozer ~ Asus P8P67 Deluxe
My fear is that everyone will have the same build early game (like act 1 normal) because there WILL BE an optimal choice out of the 3-4 spells you get and 3-4 runes or so. This is because, for e.g. cleave is AOE and almost the same dmg as bash, and you dont need the knockback of bash in the early levels. So why would anyone make a bash barb <level 20? Everyone will run cleave and whatever else is the best for early game power levelling.
If we were allowed to choose our rune unlocks, then there might be incentive to take bash + an AOE rune instead of cleave, just for example.
EDIT: I also think its going to be strange that you can respec before boss fights and just max your single target dmg at the expense of aoe + crowd control. I guess the dev's can penalise players for this by making the bosses spawn periodic mobs so that if you dont have any AOE or cc you will be screwed.
I kind of liked in D2 that we had to be a jack of all trades (aoe, single target, tank and heal).
My fear is that everyone will have the same build early game (like act 1 normal) because there WILL BE an optimal choice out of the 3-4 spells you get and 3-4 runes or so. This is because, for e.g. cleave is AOE and almost the same dmg as bash, and you dont need the knockback of bash in the early levels. So why would anyone make a bash barb <level 20? Everyone will run cleave and whatever else is the best for early game power levelling.
If we were allowed to choose our rune unlocks, then there might be incentive to take bash + an AOE rune instead of cleave, just for example.
EDIT: I also think its going to be strange that you can respec before boss fights and just max your single target dmg at the expense of aoe + crowd control. I guess the dev's can penalise players for this by making the bosses spawn periodic mobs so that if you dont have any AOE or cc you will be screwed.
I kind of liked in D2 that we had to be a jack of all trades (aoe, single target, tank and heal).
Bash generates more Fury then Cleave. In the beta there are Barbarian using Bash... I think you shouldn't be really afraid because in the beta i never find someone using the same skills then me. Except for wizard, but thats because of skill unbalalances. Arcane Orb is way too strong at the moment, specially runed, thats why i never saw a wizard not using it.
usually when i make builds i do so many hours of research and comparing that any suggestions people give arent good ones or its merely preference and doesnt improve anything. most people post builds for input. i post them to show what amazing things the classes are capable of. people are extremely naive to think there wont be cookie cutter builds when every game with a skill system that isnt restrictive has them. its impossible to make a game perfectly balanced. ill show everyone shortly after release if someone doesnt beat me to it.
So............... you're never wrong? Someone give this guy a gold star!
usually when i make builds i do so many hours of research and comparing that any suggestions people give arent good ones or its merely preference and doesnt improve anything. most people post builds for input. i post them to show what amazing things the classes are capable of. people are extremely naive to think there wont be cookie cutter builds when every game with a skill system that isnt restrictive has them. its impossible to make a game perfectly balanced. ill show everyone shortly after release if someone doesnt beat me to it.
the cookie cutter builds we all knew in D2 still had people saying "well i do this and that is better bla bla" but it didnt make them any less cookie cutters. so even if people give suggestions or slight tweaks the build can still be considered a cookie cutter
its diablo if you gotta do so much research to get it right then you fail.
I've been planning out quite a few different builds for AOE and Boss fights. I have also made many "themed" builds I guess you could say. Will they all work? Who knows I haven't seen the game passed the Skeleton King. People are worried about others running around with the same build as them but I can't imagine it being too much different with the old system. As mentioned above if there is math involved with skills there will always be a way to theorycraft the best possible build. Only difference between new system and old system is that in the old system people may have not been able to use the same exact runes right away. We don't know what the drop rate of runes were .. for all we know they could have had a high drop rate .. then everyone would have had the same argument as they do now. Cookie cutter builds will always exist just now anyone can use them - but I don't feel this will be as large as a problem as some may think. Inferno.
End game is obviously huge and Inferno is new. As some argue the new skill system is to appeal to the WoW player. I would assume anyone playing Inferno would be able to construct a build on their own based on knowledge of the class and game play experience so far. There are 100's of WoW fan sites that provide full details guides on specs, glyphs, talents, gems, enchants and spell rotations for every type of encounter and any situation. One would assume that every Warlock that read the guide could do x amount of dps in equal gear because they are using the same build and rotation. Wrong. People suck at WoW - and if the "WoW players" are the ones using cookie cutter builds, or just new players in general they will still not succeed. Diablo involves strategy and awareness something many people who we are afraid the game is being catered to lack.
Pretty much TL;DR is: While cookie cutter builds will exist I don't feel players who follow them blindly will succeed in later difficulties. I understand WoW and Diablo are two different genres and game play experiences. I want to believe that the later difficulties are to test skill more than builds. Obviously there will be "Cookie Cutter AoE Barb Build Inferno Edition" and a totally random build won't work no matter how skilled a player is - but I feel that Inferno and even Hell will be more "Bring the player not the class".
Post a link to a build for any character you wish to play and include what the build is intended to do (ie top single-point damage, crowd control builds for pvp, mass mob slaughtering, etc.) and see if even one person agrees 100% with your concept design. I have a feeling that if everyone is truthful and no trolls are hanging out under the bridge that you're virtually gaurenteed to get at least 1-2 suggestions or alternate ideas from each person that responds.
My goal here is to demonstrate how everyone's playstyles and mindsets affect their decisions where skills and runes are concerned and how class uniformity is something that we might not need to fear quite so much after all...
*Edit*
I'll post a build tomorrow to get this started if no one else wants to be #1 - but it's late and I want a couple minutes of Beta time before I hit the sack.
16GB G Skill Ram ~ 2x Mushkin 120GB SSD's ~ MSI GTX 570 Twin Frozer ~ Asus P8P67 Deluxe
anyway what i am afraid of isn't cookie cutter builds as people who will go that way wont switch there skills all the time on the other hand playing with someone who keeps switching his build every encounter will break my immersion and the flow of the game.
Yeah, I understand that it's early. My point though is that even if you look at any given thread right now where people post their own desired build you inevitably see several following posts demonstrating why this, that, or the other would be better and why... and most of the logic used seems to be seated more in each players mentality more than any number crunching and theory crafting with support from tooltips.
And I have to disagree with your statement that blizzard agreed there would be cookie cutter builds. I've read the blue posts and the closest thing I've see to that is a statement where they mention that there will inevitibly be builds that are stronger for given situations than others - going on further to say that they're sure people will try to maximize certain set-ups, but in my mind they fell short of agreeing with the cookie-cutter concept. Just my 2 cents...
As for skill swapping and loss of immersion - I don't see that as a threat. If someone wants to swap from a mob killing spec to a single target boss killing spec, I don't mind holding up 15 seconds. If the D3 structure is even remotely similar to D2 in terms of quest lay out and act progression then it's going to be:
Mob killing for an hour -> Swap spec -> Kill act boss -> swap spec -> mob killing for an hour - > so on....
16GB G Skill Ram ~ 2x Mushkin 120GB SSD's ~ MSI GTX 570 Twin Frozer ~ Asus P8P67 Deluxe
the cookie cutter builds we all knew in D2 still had people saying "well i do this and that is better bla bla" but it didnt make them any less cookie cutters. so even if people give suggestions or slight tweaks the build can still be considered a cookie cutter
boss build and mob build is understandable. and i don't mind that really but if an ice wizard finds a mob that is risistant so he pulls back and leaves me for 15 secs or maybe more "the skill GUI" on my own until he switches to his fire build.... i am not a fan of that.
my point is, switching should be instant but continious switching should be penalized.
ARE YOU AFRAID OF THE DARK REALM????
Doomwolf (Male Demon Hunter)
Kainé (Female Monk) - Nier Reference
I agree to some extent with what you're saying. When a game is based off series of math formulas it's only logical that at some point someone will crank out a recipe that yields the highest numbers in terms of raw dps/hps/tps etc. But I don't think it's going to be quite so easy to calculate with this one.
For:
1. Someone will have to produce results for what I perceive to be the "easy" math. That is to say, calculate numbers using values from the tooltips with theoretical max dps gear.
2. Someone will need to determine for what situation the given set is being used. A "max dps" build for a single target is going to be vastly different than that of a pack of mobs - and in the Diablo series (especially in the upcoming Inferno difficulty) one could argue that depending on what mobs you're fighting your set (both skills and gear) might change as max enemy hitpoints and player attack speeds will factor into your actual throughput where killing is concerned. For example: with a theoretical DPS of 100 using a build centered around a 2.00 attack speed would yield you less throughput than a DPS build of 80 centered around an attack speed of .75 if the mob had 160 HP total. A lot of that extra dps (from the first build) would be wasted on overkill. Obviously that's an extremely simplified expression but the underlying point is valid.
3. Someone will still need to figure out how movement speed affects DPS in this game - which is something no one has managed to really do in any game thus far since downtime due to movement can't really be factored without knowing exactly how long you'll be on the move - which varies from encounter to encounter. And we've already seen movement speed modifiers in the beta.
Games like WoW were relavitely easy to calculate in comparison since all gear was uniform, boss HP pools compared to damage throughput allowed for sustained encounter time which in turn provided good capability for parsing, aggro control by a tank allowed for dps to focus primarily on number crunching, and lastly (probably most importantly) the enemy of choice was known. The Dev team has already stated that inferno difficulty was designed in a way to encourage more random farming of content - so if you've got to play random areas to find the desirable random superunique "bosses", then you don't know if you're going to need a bursty build for taking down low hp/high dmg mobs, or a steady high dps build for high hp/mid dps mobs, etc.
I'm not saying it's impossible, but I feel there will be a lot more room for speculation provided there isn't glaringly obvious OP skillsets.
16GB G Skill Ram ~ 2x Mushkin 120GB SSD's ~ MSI GTX 570 Twin Frozer ~ Asus P8P67 Deluxe
To your first statment: Yes I understand what you're getting at, but I'm trying relay that even if there is "stronger" builds that could potentially be considered cookie cutter - How often will you actually get to use them. The stars are going to have to align for any player to really be given the opportunity to utilize a pure max dps build (for example) ... there's no tanks here, no threat control, no real aggro table. A theoretical "best" build might be worthless when you have to spend half your time kiting the mob - suddenly you might wish you'd kept more utility... or less utility... who knows?
I hear you on the switching thing though - constant switching should be penalized. Maybe the more often you switch the longer the cooldown time grows before skills reactivate. Not permanently since that would fundamentally be opposed to their design choice, but a timer that grows or diminishes based on time between skill swaps... idk. In beta I've already found that I really only skill swap between 2 "real" sets - and pack mob slayer set and a boss set. I don't know if that makes you feel any better :D?
16GB G Skill Ram ~ 2x Mushkin 120GB SSD's ~ MSI GTX 570 Twin Frozer ~ Asus P8P67 Deluxe
If we were allowed to choose our rune unlocks, then there might be incentive to take bash + an AOE rune instead of cleave, just for example.
EDIT: I also think its going to be strange that you can respec before boss fights and just max your single target dmg at the expense of aoe + crowd control. I guess the dev's can penalise players for this by making the bosses spawn periodic mobs so that if you dont have any AOE or cc you will be screwed.
I kind of liked in D2 that we had to be a jack of all trades (aoe, single target, tank and heal).
Bash generates more Fury then Cleave. In the beta there are Barbarian using Bash... I think you shouldn't be really afraid because in the beta i never find someone using the same skills then me. Except for wizard, but thats because of skill unbalalances. Arcane Orb is way too strong at the moment, specially runed, thats why i never saw a wizard not using it.
So............... you're never wrong? Someone give this guy a gold star!
End game is obviously huge and Inferno is new. As some argue the new skill system is to appeal to the WoW player. I would assume anyone playing Inferno would be able to construct a build on their own based on knowledge of the class and game play experience so far. There are 100's of WoW fan sites that provide full details guides on specs, glyphs, talents, gems, enchants and spell rotations for every type of encounter and any situation. One would assume that every Warlock that read the guide could do x amount of dps in equal gear because they are using the same build and rotation. Wrong. People suck at WoW - and if the "WoW players" are the ones using cookie cutter builds, or just new players in general they will still not succeed. Diablo involves strategy and awareness something many people who we are afraid the game is being catered to lack.
Pretty much TL;DR is: While cookie cutter builds will exist I don't feel players who follow them blindly will succeed in later difficulties. I understand WoW and Diablo are two different genres and game play experiences. I want to believe that the later difficulties are to test skill more than builds. Obviously there will be "Cookie Cutter AoE Barb Build Inferno Edition" and a totally random build won't work no matter how skilled a player is - but I feel that Inferno and even Hell will be more "Bring the player not the class".
Hopefully. This is based on speculation.
its just how i play the game. i love to research any game i play.
oh yea of course. like i said its going to be harder to find then D2 by far since its obviously way better balanced. but itll happen nonetheless.