At the beginning of this PTR phase we had an occasional blue post on PTR forums, for the last 2 weeks there practically was no real "conversation" with them regarding where they wanna go with items/sets/skills/classes.
Even the last 2 PTR patches (where it seems they mainly did hidden nerfs), we didn't get any patch notes...
Makes me feel, that we as players are practically not important to them anymore.
Your thoughts?
And yes, I understand it's their game and they can do whatever they want with it, however, they stated by themselves that they need to improve communication with the community, but it seems to just get worse.
Really seems like they needed another round of futzing on primals, but I just don't think they want to devote many resources to D3. Hopefully they are at least working on D4 for sometime in the 2020s.
honestly, for the difficulties there is way too many. Like mannercookie and meathead Mckail said a while back when he was playing the game, re-scale all the difficulties.
I say bring it back to D3 vanilla naming convention.
The CC immunity is absurd as well. It just dawned on me reading your post why my LoN bomb build feels under whelming. It pretty much felt pointless to have Bane of the trapped on that build.
Caps are needed for sure. For Gems they need to do what they did for the Taegok. Remember that gem scaled infinitely and there was a 3 sec delay per level. Re-scale the bonus % of gems such as stricken and PE. Then cap it at 10. I remember when Stricken was first introduced EVERYONE said put a cap on stricken its too OP. 2 builds come to mind that reveals the true potential of stricken (not limited to these builds). Firebird Archon and Vyr Rasha Archon. The stacks scales infinitely with archon stacks that scale infinitely. It almost feels like it double dipping. Archon needs to be capped at 100 stacks and keep it at 6%.
IMHO everything needs a cap. But they'll never cap paragon or GRs. I think GRs needs the real cap because then solo / groups can then compete for who has the fastest time. Having infinitely will always invite power creep. In the top 100 we might see all GR100s, but not all will have 10 min runs. some will have 14min runs. You also invite more builds to become the dps. rather 3 choices (with an overwhelmingly obvious optimum choice).
Bagstone - that was a FANTASTIC post and wonderful read. Thank you for taking the time to put down some of the major issues that plague/separate the developers from the community and for also writing it in a thoughtful way. I infuriates me that the first person who posted, decided to pull their forum pants down and get their 15 seconds of fame, but I wanted you to know, from this reader: it was brilliant!
a) We will get challenger rifts that solve this problem. All players have the exact same stuff and level to compete
When i am pushing, i want to beat a higher GR than before, not the same in a shorter time. And i think this is the case for most people.
gem caps: maybe, but for sure striken is too strong for some builds and at the same time kills builds. In general each build that you
can imagine having a one punsh slow attack speed is punished by stricken.
Another idea i had was doing something similar for slow attacks "if you attack less than x-times in 2 sec, your damage to this mop will increase- until a max of xx damage".
Tornments:
I would be okay with that. At least for the low difficulties. For the higher ones i like the levels t10-t13 because at each state of your charackter one is the most efficient to farm on!
honestly, for the difficulties there is way too many. Like mannercookie and meathead Mckail said a while back when he was playing the game, re-scale all the difficulties.
I say bring it back to D3 vanilla naming convention.
The CC immunity is absurd as well. It just dawned on me reading your post why my LoN bomb build feels under whelming. It pretty much felt pointless to have Bane of the trapped on that build.
Caps are needed for sure. For Gems they need to do what they did for the Taegok. Remember that gem scaled infinitely and there was a 3 sec delay per level. Re-scale the bonus % of gems such as stricken and PE. Then cap it at 10. I remember when Stricken was first introduced EVERYONE said put a cap on stricken its too OP. 2 builds come to mind that reveals the true potential of stricken (not limited to these builds). Firebird Archon and Vyr Rasha Archon. The stacks scales infinitely with archon stacks that scale infinitely. It almost feels like it double dipping. Archon needs to be capped at 100 stacks and keep it at 6%.
IMHO everything needs a cap. But they'll never cap paragon or GRs. I think GRs needs the real cap because then solo / groups can then compete for who has the fastest time. Having infinitely will always invite power creep. In the top 100 we might see all GR100s, but not all will have 10 min runs. some will have 14min runs. You also invite more builds to become the dps. rather 3 choices (with an overwhelmingly obvious optimum choice).
I can see maybe having only some difficulties made public, but for people who play HC and play solo, there needs to be the same difficulties as exist now. There is often too big a jump between, say, T6 and T10, and farming T8 might make sense. For folks who PuG and get carried a lot, it probably doesn't matter, but for those trying to progress on their own, there are huge differences.
Why would they keep spending energy and resources on this game when they are obviously working on a new one. We are lucky we get the necro pack for this outdated game that is barely hanging on lifesupport. There is no use what so ever for blizzard to act like this game have a future when its obvious its replaced within a fair timeframe.
well you did ask for thoughts and thats what i thought after reading your post. anyway i'll stop being a pissbag before my joke goes on and evolves to a meaningless internet fight. so what i really think? they stopped giving a shit because:
A: they are developing a new game and they see no point spending resources on this one.
B: they did actually stop caring, seeing the decline this game is facing.
C: they are delusional and they actually think D3 is in a great state atm.(highly unlikely)
Anyway whatever their reason is, this game has become old, this game provides close to non-existent income for blizzard and if you take some time to actually think about it, why do you think they should care anymore?
I have like three reasons:
1.) The Necropack is incoming and blizzard wants to have as many people possible buying it
2.) People tend to forget asian servers, where transactions are possible and blizzard can earn money
3.) This is a minor point maybe. But blizzard has had a good reputation because they cared about there games for a long time in the past.
But also without these points. We know there is a small team working on D3. And we are just asking for changes that are possible for the small team.
E.g. changing the difficulties should not be a big deal, the same goes for balancing primal ancients so they would give more motivation to farm (pls lets not discuss this again now ;D).
If people ask for like "i want 2 new acts, completely revolutionize the gameplaye" i am totally with you
I have like three reasons:
1.) The Necropack is incoming and blizzard wants to have as many people possible buying it
2.) People tend to forget asian servers, where transactions are possible and blizzard can earn money
3.) This is a minor point maybe. But blizzard has had a good reputation because they cared about there games for a long time in the past.
But also without these points. We know there is a small team working on D3. And we are just asking for changes that are possible for the small team.
E.g. changing the difficulties should not be a big deal, the same goes for balancing primal ancients so they would give more motivation to farm (pls lets not discuss this again now ;D).
If people ask for like "i want 2 new acts, completely revolutionize the gameplaye" i am totally with you
Of course, Blizzard did care about their games, but realistically they just patched them up to a point. There were 14 major patches to D2 and D2:LoD combined, and some of those, like 1.14, had no content associated with them. We are already far past 14 patches of D3.
I think they know the problem with D3 is at the core of it's gameplay. A game that relies on nothing but endless riftrunning needs more things to prop it up. It would take such massive investments every season of time to keep players happy, and they just aren't interested in making that investment. Even if they made every change you wanted, and I'm not sure the changes are good, it would keep people happy for one more season.
Quite frankly, you can only run so many rifts, and trying out new builds doesn't require the time investment that it did in D2. People get through with the game of D3 much quicker than they got tired of it in D2. A lot of people who have played D2 still have some build or another they want to try out, or want to mess with PvP or speedrunning or whatetever, whereas you can cycle through every major build in D3 in a season due to the high loot drop rates and the ease of switching from build to build. A lot of the things they put in for "quality of life" reasons, also reduced the amount of time people will put into the game, and they don't want to offset that with coming up with new content.
Well it seems like you did not read my post at all but just quoted it. I said we are asking for small changes, NOT game fixing changes. I am fine that diablo is a game that i played the first 2 weeks a season for many people (or lets say i accepted it a year ago).
I also played D1 and D2 as well, but please.. D2 came out at a total different time. Imagine the possibility to look up the number one build after the first few days and just copying it...But please lets not speak about that.
What we are talking about here are small changes, that can bring motivation to farm longer, again NO complete gamechanging patches.
We ask for small meta adjustments to have some rotations or better balance.
Well it seems like you did not read my post at all but just quoted it. I said we are asking for small changes, NOT game fixing changes. I am fine that diablo is a game that i played the first 2 weeks a season for many people (or lets say i accepted it a year ago).
I also played D1 and D2 as well, but please.. D2 came out at a total different time. Imagine the possibility to look up the number one build after the first few days and just copying it...But please lets not speak about that.
What we are talking about here are small changes, that can bring motivation to farm longer, again NO complete gamechanging patches.
We ask for small meta adjustments to have some rotations or better balance.
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but what you are proposing are in fact game changing changes. Assimilating difficulties? I get that the difference between Normal and Hard is almost non-existant at max level, but it the leveling process it's a substantial increase per level. Take that into account and you come to realize that it's not just that you skip torment 1-2-3-4-5, but why you skip them. It's experience/loot vs kill time. Generally speaking, most builds have an item or two that can and will push them above and beyond T6 very easily. However, that's not true of T8-10, because not every build can clear T8-10 efficiently. Take Sage's builds that for the most part are T8-10 capable, and a few (mostly Wizard) that can push T13 fairly well. The proposed method would actually force those builds down to T6 or cause them to be less efficient, thus creating more cookie cutter builds.
I think the lack of concept is evident here, with a side of whining about Devs not talking to us about changes they're making in 2.5. How exactly though, can you say they don't care, when they continue to ban botters, update the site, post update news, and are working on Necro?
People have said from the beginning, Stricken is too powerful, yet Trapped is still a mainstay in almost every build. Stricken was the answer to gem options and it clearly loses to Trapped in the long run, as having a scaling by level multiplier generally will. Also, Stricken takes forever to stack, so there's that. Stricken is also the answer to the ever scaling RG health pool that is well into the G's instead of the T's. I remember a build that used to basically gather 75-80% of a GR, and then explode the whole thing so it could fight the RG for 8 minutes to just barely beat the timer by seconds, it was a genius build, and RG strat, but it also highlighted the scaling problems that GRs had. Stricken was the answer saying 'don't worry, the more you hit things with me around, the closer they'll come to death'. Which alleviated most of that problem while creating new ones.
Nobody forgets the Asian servers. VyrRasha's? Came from Asian servers. Helltooth/Aracyr's Firebats? Asian servers (although, this one wasn't really all that hard because it was 'replace Helltooth with Aracyr's and go') How about Support Monk/Barb, Gen Monk... Hell anything that's been meta for the past... oh... 9 seasons? Asian servers did it first. That's a real problem too. There's nobody left on the US servers who actually takes the time and puts in the effort to math this stuff out anymore. Everybody just copies what's ahead of them, and at the end of the day, somebody always tries to take credit for it. Even though it's not the "meta" build exactly, using the VyrRasha's setup and using a different Lightning Skill to proc the Mandald Heal is still the VyrRasha's build. What about changing one of the most iconic Wizard farming builds to include the Mandald Heal? Yup, still the same build, it just does more damage with it's Signature than it used to... I bet I could find 3 builds that are the exact same on here in just a few minutes, it's hilarious. The truth is though, most of them have come from the Asian servers, and most people who post guides are just decrypting the information in front of them. Except Quin69, although his voice drives me crazy and his slang is horrid, he legit deserves props for testing, building and using some of the best and most original Monk builds ever created. I think the only build he stole from the Asian servers was the Static Shock Monk that got swiftly nerfed into the ground after it crashed the servers a billion times.
Think before you speak; do you really think that Blizz will cater to you while at the same time alienate people who play on difficulties that you're attempting to eliminate? Don't forget, a lot of the difficulties were adding to add more 'challenge' to end game players who wanted more while they were key farming because T6 just wasn't hard enough anymore. Then they kept going with that trend since the complaint was made again about T10. The simple truth is that you will never be satisfied, and to give in to every single demand immediately would be ridiculous, and wouldn't cause you to be satisfied but to find the next thing to complain about. PTR 2.5 has some major QoL changes, which should tell you that while they aren't adding anything to the game in 2.5 content wise, they do care. Even if Primals aren't what you want them to be, it still shows they care enough to add them. This isn't being spoon fed either, I realize that they'll throw D3 a bone every once and a while to keep players interested, sometimes they'll even try to pull the wool over our eyes. Fact is they care enough to try that as well, so it's not that they don't care, but where else can they go that satisfies everybody?
Paragon Problem. Who does it affect most? Why? Possible Solutions? Pro/Con Solutions list. Repeat.
Difficulty Settings. Who does this affect most? Why? Possible Solutions? Pro/Con Solution list. Repeat.
You can repeat the same steps for every single problem you perceive in D3, and you'll find that 9 times out of 10 Blizzard has had one of the better solutions. An example:
Paragon Problem. Who does this affect most? High-End players top50/class and Mid-Tier players attempting to scramble to leaderboard.
Why? Primary Stat is the only farmable upgrade after 0.1% gear, stands to reason that in perfect gear, player with more primary stat deals more damage and therefore will be better. (Also note; can farm more paragons faster because of paragon advantage.)
Possible Solutions?
Paragon cap. Pro: fair and equal playing field, reduced botting. Con: an eventuality that will have the same effect as Gear capping, causing long term players to find something better to do, imbalance classes/players that prefer Maximum Resource/Vitality to Main Stat as a paragon option, After reaching Gear, Skill and Paragon caps there is no reward for playing the game.
Reduction in Primary Stat gain. Pro: causes each paragon point to have a more impactful choice, each Cald's to mean more, and each Gear capped item to mean more. Con: not enough to cause players to shift focus, possibility of polarizing the playerbase.
Reduction in Primary Stat weight (Primary Stat means less and Ability Skill Runes mean more). Pro: causes each ability to deal varying damage increasing diversity, less focus on just paragon farming without making it irrelevant. Con: (without changing every skill based on AS and Damage) causes more 'cookie cutter builds' in that each Skill Rune will be different and players will still choose the best and most powerful ones.
Force all Ancient items to roll with 2 minimal stats (this was actually suggested by a player once) Pro: Nothing. Con: Everything.
Increase legendary affixes to dwarf paragon power. Pro: Items have more relevance, paragon farming not as effective as item farming but not irrelevent. Con: RNG in a time frame causes disparity amongst competitors, they who get the best items wins as opposed to who uses the best items best, gear capping still possible so doesn't actually alleviate the problem.
It's really not a complicated process. You also have to be able to discredit your ideas as well, and try to reduce the impact of the cons in the idea. It's a process, and most of this thread isn't well thought out. The OP sounds like a bad one-night stand answering machine message -sorry I have to- "Hey Bliz! Haven't heard from you in like, 2 weeks, just checkin in to make sure you're still, ya know, interested in my &^* $%$^ @##%^*&. Call me!"
Seriously, as an avid gamer, Blizzard is probably the worst for talking to it's community (not because they don't do it, but because they do it.) They talk to the community through "Community Managers" that have about as much power to influence the game as the Admins on Diablofans do. That aside, they continue to promise things that they couldn't possibly deliver on. If anybody remembers the WoW Wrath of the Lich King promo, you'd know what I'm talking about when I say the words "Titan's Path". Was a huge selling point for WotLK, and yet it never made it, in fact it didn't make it in Mists of Pandaria, or Warlord's, and we have what's left of Titan's Path in Artifact Weapons, in Legion, a full 8 years from when it was announced in the saddest form it could have taken. Community Managers also have extremely limited information, so 99.9% of their answers to questions are just watered down crap that they absolutely have to say. "I'm not sure about that, I'll forward this information along and we'll try to get this sorted out for you shortly." -3 hours later- "Hi, how can I help you today? Oh, I'm sorry to hear that, let's see.... I can forward your information along and try and get this sorted out for you."... I'd much rather they say "I don't know. I'm not on the development team and they haven't told me the answer so I really can't answer that question." By no means am I insinuating that they don't have a tough job or that I don't respect what they do, but a straight answer is always better than the run around. Not expecting an answer, much better. The fact that Blizzard is open with the community says a lot about the image they want to convey, but it also opens the door to "is my question not good enough to get answered?" and "does my idea not have any merit?". It's a terrible place for a company that makes games to be in. It's like a popularity contest to see who gets answered and who doesn't. It causes people to be caustic for the sake of being noticed. It's created this monster that is forum trolls. I post here on Diablofans because I would never expect in a million years that Blizzard would listen to logical thought out arguments when they developed LFR in WoW and removed MMR from HotS. They have turned into the Oprah of gaming companies. You want it? You get it!! It's actually quite sad to see. Diablo, while it has some of the best lore and storyboards of all Blizzard's games, doesn't generate income. They can't think of ways to generate income that will be impactful and cause people to re-think the game they once played on Inferno to Diablo without making the game P2W. It will likely be the first of their line to fall, as WoW doesn't appear to be stopping anytime soon, Hearthstone and Overwatch appear to be amongst the top of their genres, and Starcraft still has competitive play. HotS very well may be a rip off of LoL, but it's holding it's own against it's mirror image quite well.
TL;DR: Stop. Just stop. You're not making any sense, and people are beginning to notice. You ask for game changing changes and then say they aren't game changing. Changing the number of difficulties, 'the meta', these change the game... As it would affect about what 80% of the playerbase is playing.
Well i will stop the discussion here for my part. I think this won`t stop. It wasnt my idea to change the difficulties i just said 1 sentence to it. And changing the meta is really easy. I just said that there is not much manpower needed for that and that i don`t await any revolutionizing changes....
I feel as though the old Diablo fans of yore pushed Blizzard to care less and less about Diablo. They wanted a way to make money continuously through the auction house, fans blew up about it. I'm not saying the fans were/are wrong but without a revenue stream, why would Blizzard put more than a skeleton crew on this 4 year old game? If they put a $5 a month sub with guaranteed content, I'd be all for it, but I know most of the old school fans will blow up saying they didn't have to pay to play D1/D2.
TL/DR it makes more sense for Blizz to put their efforts into WoW and other games that have paid DLC than a game that does not support them as well. Duh.
BTW, I am 35 and have been a long time fan of Diablo, but I also understand the franchise needs to evolve to get the support we all want.
Bring on D4.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
...really makes me sad about the future of D3.
At the beginning of this PTR phase we had an occasional blue post on PTR forums, for the last 2 weeks there practically was no real "conversation" with them regarding where they wanna go with items/sets/skills/classes.
Even the last 2 PTR patches (where it seems they mainly did hidden nerfs), we didn't get any patch notes...
Makes me feel, that we as players are practically not important to them anymore.
Your thoughts?
And yes, I understand it's their game and they can do whatever they want with it, however, they stated by themselves that they need to improve communication with the community, but it seems to just get worse.
My D3 armory
My Youtube Channel
I think they are busy on Necro. For everything else D3 is on life support till D4 somewhere 4-5 years later.
http://www.angryroleplayer.com/
http://www.youtube.com/c/angryroleplayer
https://www.diablofans.com/builds/105329-2-6-7-rend-bleed-whirlwind-gr130
https://www.diablofans.com/builds/105301-2-6-7-fist-of-the-heavens-aegis-of-valor-gr110
Really seems like they needed another round of futzing on primals, but I just don't think they want to devote many resources to D3. Hopefully they are at least working on D4 for sometime in the 2020s.
I cannot believe that we did not get a ptr patch for 3 weeks, or will. That is just really strange...
My thoughts
honestly, for the difficulties there is way too many. Like mannercookie and meathead Mckail said a while back when he was playing the game, re-scale all the difficulties.
I say bring it back to D3 vanilla naming convention.
Torment = T13
Inferno = T10
Hell = T6
Nightmare = T1
Normal = Normal.
The CC immunity is absurd as well. It just dawned on me reading your post why my LoN bomb build feels under whelming. It pretty much felt pointless to have Bane of the trapped on that build.
Caps are needed for sure. For Gems they need to do what they did for the Taegok. Remember that gem scaled infinitely and there was a 3 sec delay per level. Re-scale the bonus % of gems such as stricken and PE. Then cap it at 10. I remember when Stricken was first introduced EVERYONE said put a cap on stricken its too OP. 2 builds come to mind that reveals the true potential of stricken (not limited to these builds). Firebird Archon and Vyr Rasha Archon. The stacks scales infinitely with archon stacks that scale infinitely. It almost feels like it double dipping. Archon needs to be capped at 100 stacks and keep it at 6%.
IMHO everything needs a cap. But they'll never cap paragon or GRs. I think GRs needs the real cap because then solo / groups can then compete for who has the fastest time. Having infinitely will always invite power creep. In the top 100 we might see all GR100s, but not all will have 10 min runs. some will have 14min runs. You also invite more builds to become the dps. rather 3 choices (with an overwhelmingly obvious optimum choice).
Monkalicious: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/profile/OptimusPrime-12194/hero/79139477
@Kamui I agree and disagree at the same time.
GR cap: No, i don't like that. Why?
a) We will get challenger rifts that solve this problem. All players have the exact same stuff and level to compete
When i am pushing, i want to beat a higher GR than before, not the same in a shorter time. And i think this is the case for most people.
gem caps: maybe, but for sure striken is too strong for some builds and at the same time kills builds. In general each build that you
can imagine having a one punsh slow attack speed is punished by stricken.
Another idea i had was doing something similar for slow attacks "if you attack less than x-times in 2 sec, your damage to this mop will increase- until a max of xx damage".
Tornments:
I would be okay with that. At least for the low difficulties. For the higher ones i like the levels t10-t13 because at each state of your charackter one is the most efficient to farm on!
This game had lost its future a long time ago. Kripp's review of the anniversary event was very spot on. RIP Diablo. Expectations are now rock-bottom.
Man,just amazing thread,well done sir :-) Lets hope that someone from blizz. read this.
You think wrong
My D3 armory
My Youtube Channel
Remember when we got community buffs...Nuff said...this Necro Patch is just squeezing out the last dollar out of D3
Why would they keep spending energy and resources on this game when they are obviously working on a new one. We are lucky we get the necro pack for this outdated game that is barely hanging on lifesupport. There is no use what so ever for blizzard to act like this game have a future when its obvious its replaced within a fair timeframe.
1.) The Necropack is incoming and blizzard wants to have as many people possible buying it
2.) People tend to forget asian servers, where transactions are possible and blizzard can earn money
3.) This is a minor point maybe. But blizzard has had a good reputation because they cared about there games for a long time in the past.
But also without these points. We know there is a small team working on D3. And we are just asking for changes that are possible for the small team.
E.g. changing the difficulties should not be a big deal, the same goes for balancing primal ancients so they would give more motivation to farm (pls lets not discuss this again now ;D).
If people ask for like "i want 2 new acts, completely revolutionize the gameplaye" i am totally with you
I think they know the problem with D3 is at the core of it's gameplay. A game that relies on nothing but endless riftrunning needs more things to prop it up. It would take such massive investments every season of time to keep players happy, and they just aren't interested in making that investment. Even if they made every change you wanted, and I'm not sure the changes are good, it would keep people happy for one more season.
Quite frankly, you can only run so many rifts, and trying out new builds doesn't require the time investment that it did in D2. People get through with the game of D3 much quicker than they got tired of it in D2. A lot of people who have played D2 still have some build or another they want to try out, or want to mess with PvP or speedrunning or whatetever, whereas you can cycle through every major build in D3 in a season due to the high loot drop rates and the ease of switching from build to build. A lot of the things they put in for "quality of life" reasons, also reduced the amount of time people will put into the game, and they don't want to offset that with coming up with new content.
Well it seems like you did not read my post at all but just quoted it. I said we are asking for small changes, NOT game fixing changes. I am fine that diablo is a game that i played the first 2 weeks a season for many people (or lets say i accepted it a year ago).
I also played D1 and D2 as well, but please.. D2 came out at a total different time. Imagine the possibility to look up the number one build after the first few days and just copying it...But please lets not speak about that.
What we are talking about here are small changes, that can bring motivation to farm longer, again NO complete gamechanging patches.
We ask for small meta adjustments to have some rotations or better balance.
I think the lack of concept is evident here, with a side of whining about Devs not talking to us about changes they're making in 2.5. How exactly though, can you say they don't care, when they continue to ban botters, update the site, post update news, and are working on Necro?
People have said from the beginning, Stricken is too powerful, yet Trapped is still a mainstay in almost every build. Stricken was the answer to gem options and it clearly loses to Trapped in the long run, as having a scaling by level multiplier generally will. Also, Stricken takes forever to stack, so there's that. Stricken is also the answer to the ever scaling RG health pool that is well into the G's instead of the T's. I remember a build that used to basically gather 75-80% of a GR, and then explode the whole thing so it could fight the RG for 8 minutes to just barely beat the timer by seconds, it was a genius build, and RG strat, but it also highlighted the scaling problems that GRs had. Stricken was the answer saying 'don't worry, the more you hit things with me around, the closer they'll come to death'. Which alleviated most of that problem while creating new ones.
Nobody forgets the Asian servers. VyrRasha's? Came from Asian servers. Helltooth/Aracyr's Firebats? Asian servers (although, this one wasn't really all that hard because it was 'replace Helltooth with Aracyr's and go') How about Support Monk/Barb, Gen Monk... Hell anything that's been meta for the past... oh... 9 seasons? Asian servers did it first. That's a real problem too. There's nobody left on the US servers who actually takes the time and puts in the effort to math this stuff out anymore. Everybody just copies what's ahead of them, and at the end of the day, somebody always tries to take credit for it. Even though it's not the "meta" build exactly, using the VyrRasha's setup and using a different Lightning Skill to proc the Mandald Heal is still the VyrRasha's build. What about changing one of the most iconic Wizard farming builds to include the Mandald Heal? Yup, still the same build, it just does more damage with it's Signature than it used to... I bet I could find 3 builds that are the exact same on here in just a few minutes, it's hilarious. The truth is though, most of them have come from the Asian servers, and most people who post guides are just decrypting the information in front of them. Except Quin69, although his voice drives me crazy and his slang is horrid, he legit deserves props for testing, building and using some of the best and most original Monk builds ever created. I think the only build he stole from the Asian servers was the Static Shock Monk that got swiftly nerfed into the ground after it crashed the servers a billion times.
Think before you speak; do you really think that Blizz will cater to you while at the same time alienate people who play on difficulties that you're attempting to eliminate? Don't forget, a lot of the difficulties were adding to add more 'challenge' to end game players who wanted more while they were key farming because T6 just wasn't hard enough anymore. Then they kept going with that trend since the complaint was made again about T10. The simple truth is that you will never be satisfied, and to give in to every single demand immediately would be ridiculous, and wouldn't cause you to be satisfied but to find the next thing to complain about. PTR 2.5 has some major QoL changes, which should tell you that while they aren't adding anything to the game in 2.5 content wise, they do care. Even if Primals aren't what you want them to be, it still shows they care enough to add them. This isn't being spoon fed either, I realize that they'll throw D3 a bone every once and a while to keep players interested, sometimes they'll even try to pull the wool over our eyes. Fact is they care enough to try that as well, so it's not that they don't care, but where else can they go that satisfies everybody?
Paragon Problem. Who does it affect most? Why? Possible Solutions? Pro/Con Solutions list. Repeat.
Difficulty Settings. Who does this affect most? Why? Possible Solutions? Pro/Con Solution list. Repeat.
You can repeat the same steps for every single problem you perceive in D3, and you'll find that 9 times out of 10 Blizzard has had one of the better solutions. An example:
Paragon Problem. Who does this affect most? High-End players top50/class and Mid-Tier players attempting to scramble to leaderboard.
Why? Primary Stat is the only farmable upgrade after 0.1% gear, stands to reason that in perfect gear, player with more primary stat deals more damage and therefore will be better. (Also note; can farm more paragons faster because of paragon advantage.)
Possible Solutions?
Paragon cap. Pro: fair and equal playing field, reduced botting. Con: an eventuality that will have the same effect as Gear capping, causing long term players to find something better to do, imbalance classes/players that prefer Maximum Resource/Vitality to Main Stat as a paragon option, After reaching Gear, Skill and Paragon caps there is no reward for playing the game.
Reduction in Primary Stat gain. Pro: causes each paragon point to have a more impactful choice, each Cald's to mean more, and each Gear capped item to mean more. Con: not enough to cause players to shift focus, possibility of polarizing the playerbase.
Reduction in Primary Stat weight (Primary Stat means less and Ability Skill Runes mean more). Pro: causes each ability to deal varying damage increasing diversity, less focus on just paragon farming without making it irrelevant. Con: (without changing every skill based on AS and Damage) causes more 'cookie cutter builds' in that each Skill Rune will be different and players will still choose the best and most powerful ones.
Force all Ancient items to roll with 2 minimal stats (this was actually suggested by a player once) Pro: Nothing. Con: Everything.
Increase legendary affixes to dwarf paragon power. Pro: Items have more relevance, paragon farming not as effective as item farming but not irrelevent. Con: RNG in a time frame causes disparity amongst competitors, they who get the best items wins as opposed to who uses the best items best, gear capping still possible so doesn't actually alleviate the problem.
It's really not a complicated process. You also have to be able to discredit your ideas as well, and try to reduce the impact of the cons in the idea. It's a process, and most of this thread isn't well thought out. The OP sounds like a bad one-night stand answering machine message -sorry I have to- "Hey Bliz! Haven't heard from you in like, 2 weeks, just checkin in to make sure you're still, ya know, interested in my &^* $%$^ @##%^*&. Call me!"
Seriously, as an avid gamer, Blizzard is probably the worst for talking to it's community (not because they don't do it, but because they do it.) They talk to the community through "Community Managers" that have about as much power to influence the game as the Admins on Diablofans do. That aside, they continue to promise things that they couldn't possibly deliver on. If anybody remembers the WoW Wrath of the Lich King promo, you'd know what I'm talking about when I say the words "Titan's Path". Was a huge selling point for WotLK, and yet it never made it, in fact it didn't make it in Mists of Pandaria, or Warlord's, and we have what's left of Titan's Path in Artifact Weapons, in Legion, a full 8 years from when it was announced in the saddest form it could have taken. Community Managers also have extremely limited information, so 99.9% of their answers to questions are just watered down crap that they absolutely have to say. "I'm not sure about that, I'll forward this information along and we'll try to get this sorted out for you shortly." -3 hours later- "Hi, how can I help you today? Oh, I'm sorry to hear that, let's see.... I can forward your information along and try and get this sorted out for you."... I'd much rather they say "I don't know. I'm not on the development team and they haven't told me the answer so I really can't answer that question." By no means am I insinuating that they don't have a tough job or that I don't respect what they do, but a straight answer is always better than the run around. Not expecting an answer, much better. The fact that Blizzard is open with the community says a lot about the image they want to convey, but it also opens the door to "is my question not good enough to get answered?" and "does my idea not have any merit?". It's a terrible place for a company that makes games to be in. It's like a popularity contest to see who gets answered and who doesn't. It causes people to be caustic for the sake of being noticed. It's created this monster that is forum trolls. I post here on Diablofans because I would never expect in a million years that Blizzard would listen to logical thought out arguments when they developed LFR in WoW and removed MMR from HotS. They have turned into the Oprah of gaming companies. You want it? You get it!! It's actually quite sad to see. Diablo, while it has some of the best lore and storyboards of all Blizzard's games, doesn't generate income. They can't think of ways to generate income that will be impactful and cause people to re-think the game they once played on Inferno to Diablo without making the game P2W. It will likely be the first of their line to fall, as WoW doesn't appear to be stopping anytime soon, Hearthstone and Overwatch appear to be amongst the top of their genres, and Starcraft still has competitive play. HotS very well may be a rip off of LoL, but it's holding it's own against it's mirror image quite well.
TL;DR: Stop. Just stop. You're not making any sense, and people are beginning to notice. You ask for game changing changes and then say they aren't game changing. Changing the number of difficulties, 'the meta', these change the game... As it would affect about what 80% of the playerbase is playing.
Well i will stop the discussion here for my part. I think this won`t stop. It wasnt my idea to change the difficulties i just said 1 sentence to it. And changing the meta is really easy. I just said that there is not much manpower needed for that and that i don`t await any revolutionizing changes....
I feel as though the old Diablo fans of yore pushed Blizzard to care less and less about Diablo. They wanted a way to make money continuously through the auction house, fans blew up about it. I'm not saying the fans were/are wrong but without a revenue stream, why would Blizzard put more than a skeleton crew on this 4 year old game? If they put a $5 a month sub with guaranteed content, I'd be all for it, but I know most of the old school fans will blow up saying they didn't have to pay to play D1/D2.
TL/DR it makes more sense for Blizz to put their efforts into WoW and other games that have paid DLC than a game that does not support them as well. Duh.
BTW, I am 35 and have been a long time fan of Diablo, but I also understand the franchise needs to evolve to get the support we all want.
Bring on D4.