They seriously need to add more types of bounties...I'd be satisfied with around 10-20...
I can agree with you, Elendiro. At the very least, I see Bounties as a kind of stepping stone. Even if that particular feature is rather shallow at first, just being added to the game means they can be added to later on. Kinda like the Mystic. Her services are great, but if it turns out she could be doing one or two more things later on, like adding a property to blue items or creating magic or rare items from white items somehow, another feature that isn't hard to add later on.
So yeah, a little more variety would be nice, but...I'm glad Bounties are going to be there at all. I'd rather have the variety of environments, enemies, and challenges of randomized targets and clearing dungeon floors than farming via "hey, there's this one dungeon that has insane drop rates, let's only go there over and over to generate mountains of loot, because FUN!"
I think it's great the devs are being proactive in reducing cheese tactics such as "split farming" for bounties. I'm sure there will be more loopholes, so to speak, that will be discovered after launch as well. After what a disaster D3 was I'm hoping the expansion will be a lot more polished when it comes to things like this.
I think it's great, too. It's one of the things that really keeps me having a lot of faith in the D3 devs. They clearly don't want people to exploit the game, and I appreciate their dedication in fixing areas where that can be stopped. Though, when I think about it, not only are they curbing exploitation, they're also changing how an activity like "farming" goes in a game like this.
Peoples' routines have been so strictly held to the idea that in order to get the best items, one has to identify the zones and enemies that generate the most/highest quality loot and "run" them as many times per hour as possible. Which is why boss runs in D2 were so common...because players knew that bosses dropped the best stuff, and since they were easy to repeat, they'd jack up their characters to the max, run bosses over and over, and be drowning in loot. Fast forward to D3, players are suddenly confused why such an allegedly "fun" thing was eased out of the game.
By leveling out loot generation, and spreading it out across the game, running certain spots over and over isn't really the way people will go about getting loot and XP anymore. And I'd rather play a game like that, that has me jumping around the game and compels me to go all over the place, than have the devs suddenly tell me that drop rates on bosses have been quadrupled or some such bull.
By leveling out loot generation, and spreading it out across the game, running certain spots over and over isn't really the way people will go about getting loot and XP anymore. And I'd rather play a game like that, that has me jumping around the game and compels me to go all over the place, than have the devs suddenly tell me that drop rates on bosses have been quadrupled or some such bull.
QFT.
As I mentioned in another thread already, I really don't get why some people feel it's an absolute necessity to identify the one difficulty, the one zone, the one class, the one spec, the one gear set, to maximize efficiency. Go full DPS WW barb MP10 Crypt farming in full group only, or you're a stupid inefficient noob. Sigh...
D3V has given us "some" choice and variety, at least since 1.08's mob density fix, and with the new itemization, re-balancing of classes, removal of OP builds, the introduction of bounties and rifts no one should ever feel like being pushed into this one-size-fits-all way to play D3. Maybe that's why people say there is no "end-game", because if things go well, RoS will never be like D2 ("kill Baal over and over and over and over"). I get the feeling some people don't want this freedom, they want robot-like monotony with many locked-in features.
My only current wish regarding bounties is that I'd like the "rare" events of each act (like the Wheel of Fortune on Act 2 and those less common Act 1 dungeons/towers) to be more frequent in that particular game-mode.
After doing Bounties on the beta for I don't know, 15-20 hours maybe, I felt like I was doing the same ones over and over again (like the 2 Festering Woods events, War of the Ancients and the Hill one), and it was kinda boring after a while.
Having played 350+ hours of D3V (that's not even a lot by some people's standards) and played multiple characters, going from Normal -> Inferno at least 12 times, I'm growing a bit tired of the "common events", and really wanna see more of those rare ones.
My only current wish regarding bounties is that I'd like the "rare" events of each act (like the Wheel of Fortune on Act 2 and those less common Act 1 dungeons/towers) to be more frequent in that particular game-mode.
More events, period.
There are plenty of places off the top of my head that could have events added:
- Caverns of Areneae - Tower of the Cursed/Damned - Weeping Hollow - Cathedral 3 - Old Tristram (they could get really inventive here, even if it's very small, it has tons of potential) - ZK sub-zones - Sewers/waterways - Keep Depths - Most of Act 4
And, honestly, some of the larger zones (Fields of Misery, Dahlgur Oasis, Desolate Sands) could use a few more events randomized in.
My only current wish regarding bounties is that I'd like the "rare" events of each act (like the Wheel of Fortune on Act 2 and those less common Act 1 dungeons/towers) to be more frequent in that particular game-mode.
I'm growing a bit tired of the "common events", and really wanna see more of those rare ones.
Well shaggy, I think what Zero was saying was that, as a way to spice up what types of Bounties of appear to break up all the "kill 50 mobs + this guy", they should include more of the rarer Events from the Campaign Mode. Which is why I think they threw Events in as Bounties to begin with. There are likely people who have never done hardly any of those Events, so adding those as Bounties alone increases the variety. However, very often, as Zero was saying, they're not really enough.
Though I can agree on both accounts, more variety in Bounties AND Events would be great. More of both, I'm all for that.
I was saying to Elendiro before that I feel like Bounties are a good intro point. The "Bounties" feature is being added, and if people aren't satisfied with the variety, it's not hard to add more types, more styles, even some with multi-tier objectives. I mean, they're just simple randomized mini-quests, it's easy to write in more. But the main purpose of them, I think, seems to be working. People are doing them, getting rewarded, and not running the same zones over and over.
Truthfully, I'm looking forward to completing Bounties, but when I get a bit tired of them, or I find myself running into certain dungeons, I'm just gonna go off the trail a bit. Bounties in Adventure Mode are definitely going to be profitable for both XP and loot, however part of their purpose is to send you all round. Which means, Zero, that even if they don't include more occurrences of the Wheel from Act 2 or the Tower from Act 1 as formal Bounties, I want to say you can still visit those zones to see if they spawned. Even if they're not offering Bounty rewards for completing them, you're still bound to get a bunch of enemies and maybe a Resplendent Chest.
By leveling out loot generation, and spreading it out across the game, running certain spots over and over isn't really the way people will go about getting loot and XP anymore. And I'd rather play a game like that, that has me jumping around the game and compels me to go all over the place, than have the devs suddenly tell me that drop rates on bosses have been quadrupled or some such bull.
QFT.
As I mentioned in another thread already, I really don't get why some people feel it's an absolute necessity to identify the one difficulty, the one zone, the one class, the one spec, the one gear set, to maximize efficiency. Go full DPS WW barb MP10 Crypt farming in full group only, or you're a stupid inefficient noob. Sigh...
D3V has given us "some" choice and variety, at least since 1.08's mob density fix, and with the new itemization, re-balancing of classes, removal of OP builds, the introduction of bounties and rifts no one should ever feel like being pushed into this one-size-fits-all way to play D3. Maybe that's why people say there is no "end-game", because if things go well, RoS will never be like D2 ("kill Baal over and over and over and over"). I get the feeling some people don't want this freedom, they want robot-like monotony with many locked-in features.
In case I didn't say this, Bagstone, I think part of the problem is that people have been so used to various routines from D2 that anything that goes against that model is seen as "bad." Plus, since so much "fun" was had from that kind of model, which involved repeatedly bulldozing the same zones and enemies, no one ever thought to question why such a model was unhealthy or flawed.
Love 'em or hate 'em, the D3 devs are some brave souls. They're taking a community of people spoiled on the mountains of loot they were getting from repeatedly facerolling bosses, and saying, "you have to work for your reward. No more handouts." I grew up rather spoiled by my parents, so I suppose in a subconscious attempt to make up for that, I at least like to work for imaginary loot in a game.
And ya know, I like the last line you say there the best, because it really highlights how contradictory people in this community can sometimes be. I'd be willing to bet there are some people still wondering why bosses aren't dropping better loot...yet, most of those people are also the folks who are saying there isn't enough content. So they want bosses to drop the best loot, but in the process, those bosses will become farming spots, and the amount of content will become less.
In regard to efficiency, my best guess is simple...Ladders. Many D3 players were active Ladder players in D2, and in Ladders, efficiency is a key factor. Honestly, in a Ladder scenario, or in Races like Path of Exile has, I totally understand "efficiency." However, when not in a Ladder or Race scenario, efficiency shouldn't be a factor.
I probably won't partake, but I do hope Ladders show up in D3 ASAP, for the sake of those who want to compete. It's a good PvPvE stepping stone, and lets the people looking for a reason for efficiency have a purpose. Meanwhile, folks who want to kick back and enjoy the slow progression to godliness can enjoy the game the way they want it as well.
Quote from Bagstone»As I mentioned in another thread already, I really don't get why some people feel it's an absolute necessity to identify the one difficulty, the one zone, the one class, the one spec, the one gear set, to maximize efficiency. Go full DPS WW barb MP10 Crypt farming in full group only, or you're a stupid inefficient noob. Sigh...
Sadly, I think this is more an evolution of the internet and the Information Age than a reflection on games.
Ghostcrawler talked a lot about it regarding early WoW versus later WoW. People always claimed the game got "dumbed down" over time - it's a cliche phrase on the internet like "slap in the face" - and, while certain aspects of the game had been streamlined, it's hard to argue that MOST people in WoW still aren't clearing the hardest content which mostly deflates that whole train of thought. But there is that undeniable aspect that comes with social changes. When I first started playing WoW there was no armory. There was no wowprogress.com, there was wowjutsu.com which was infinitely less accurate. There was no twitch.tv, there was no Elitist Jerks, there was no noxxic.com, there was no Icy Veins.
The resources (websites, and even in-game addons) that we used in Burning Crusade circa 2007 were much more rudimentary and much less accurate than the resources I used in Mists of Pandaria. I remember for all of Vanilla and most of Burning Crusade the only way to measure "threat" on a mob was for people to test various abilities and figure out what threat values they generated. KLH threat meter was basically giving you an educated guess as to your threat on a monster, and it wasn't always right. Then sometime in BC they decided to let the API open up and report threat. In comes Omen Threat Meter and it's giving 100% accurate, very responsive, threat calculations.
You could argue that Blizzard "dumbed down tanking" by making this change, but I'd argue that all they really did was give us access to more accurate information that prevented us from wiping due to an addon making an incorrect guess... and that dying in that manner is decidedly not fun for the average gamer anyway, and even the hardcore gamer.
I think this applies to D3, and every other game out there. The information I can go and find about D3, particularly character builds and items, is significantly more than I could ever find about D2. To that point, it's not that the game is dumbed down, it's that there's such a ridiculous proliferation of information that the players are simply more educated (even the uneducated).
With that massive spread of information comes that level of min/maxing, though. In vanilla and even in BC, there was less emphasis on having the "perfect" spec. We didn't scrutinize players quite as much over that stuff. There was never a feeling of "if Joe Blow spent those two talent points differently then we'd win, but he didn't so we wiped all night." At some point, though, people who didn't take the absolute 100% best cookie-cutter talent build became "noobs" because the information became so available. It became expected that anyone with a pulse could google "WoW Death Knight specs" and eventually find some information that would make them successful in a raid.
And I think that's exactly what's happened with D3... and PoE... and most games. Hell, I remember playing TL2 and checking some sites, and reading about how "this is really the only viable spec for X class in Y difficulty" and such. That mentality pressures developers to balance choices on a pinpoint. If you're 1% behind in farming speed... why bother? Just take the best path then blame Blizzard for not making EVERY SPEC IMAGINABLE have the same efficiency as a WW barb.
I can agree with you, Elendiro. At the very least, I see Bounties as a kind of stepping stone. Even if that particular feature is rather shallow at first, just being added to the game means they can be added to later on. Kinda like the Mystic. Her services are great, but if it turns out she could be doing one or two more things later on, like adding a property to blue items or creating magic or rare items from white items somehow, another feature that isn't hard to add later on.
So yeah, a little more variety would be nice, but...I'm glad Bounties are going to be there at all. I'd rather have the variety of environments, enemies, and challenges of randomized targets and clearing dungeon floors than farming via "hey, there's this one dungeon that has insane drop rates, let's only go there over and over to generate mountains of loot, because FUN!"
I think it's great, too. It's one of the things that really keeps me having a lot of faith in the D3 devs. They clearly don't want people to exploit the game, and I appreciate their dedication in fixing areas where that can be stopped. Though, when I think about it, not only are they curbing exploitation, they're also changing how an activity like "farming" goes in a game like this.
Peoples' routines have been so strictly held to the idea that in order to get the best items, one has to identify the zones and enemies that generate the most/highest quality loot and "run" them as many times per hour as possible. Which is why boss runs in D2 were so common...because players knew that bosses dropped the best stuff, and since they were easy to repeat, they'd jack up their characters to the max, run bosses over and over, and be drowning in loot. Fast forward to D3, players are suddenly confused why such an allegedly "fun" thing was eased out of the game.
By leveling out loot generation, and spreading it out across the game, running certain spots over and over isn't really the way people will go about getting loot and XP anymore. And I'd rather play a game like that, that has me jumping around the game and compels me to go all over the place, than have the devs suddenly tell me that drop rates on bosses have been quadrupled or some such bull.
QFT.
As I mentioned in another thread already, I really don't get why some people feel it's an absolute necessity to identify the one difficulty, the one zone, the one class, the one spec, the one gear set, to maximize efficiency. Go full DPS WW barb MP10 Crypt farming in full group only, or you're a stupid inefficient noob. Sigh...
D3V has given us "some" choice and variety, at least since 1.08's mob density fix, and with the new itemization, re-balancing of classes, removal of OP builds, the introduction of bounties and rifts no one should ever feel like being pushed into this one-size-fits-all way to play D3. Maybe that's why people say there is no "end-game", because if things go well, RoS will never be like D2 ("kill Baal over and over and over and over"). I get the feeling some people don't want this freedom, they want robot-like monotony with many locked-in features.
My only current wish regarding bounties is that I'd like the "rare" events of each act (like the Wheel of Fortune on Act 2 and those less common Act 1 dungeons/towers) to be more frequent in that particular game-mode.
After doing Bounties on the beta for I don't know, 15-20 hours maybe, I felt like I was doing the same ones over and over again (like the 2 Festering Woods events, War of the Ancients and the Hill one), and it was kinda boring after a while.
Having played 350+ hours of D3V (that's not even a lot by some people's standards) and played multiple characters, going from Normal -> Inferno at least 12 times, I'm growing a bit tired of the "common events", and really wanna see more of those rare ones.
More events, period.
There are plenty of places off the top of my head that could have events added:
- Caverns of Areneae
- Tower of the Cursed/Damned
- Weeping Hollow
- Cathedral 3
- Old Tristram (they could get really inventive here, even if it's very small, it has tons of potential)
- ZK sub-zones
- Sewers/waterways
- Keep Depths
- Most of Act 4
And, honestly, some of the larger zones (Fields of Misery, Dahlgur Oasis, Desolate Sands) could use a few more events randomized in.
Well shaggy, I think what Zero was saying was that, as a way to spice up what types of Bounties of appear to break up all the "kill 50 mobs + this guy", they should include more of the rarer Events from the Campaign Mode. Which is why I think they threw Events in as Bounties to begin with. There are likely people who have never done hardly any of those Events, so adding those as Bounties alone increases the variety. However, very often, as Zero was saying, they're not really enough.
Though I can agree on both accounts, more variety in Bounties AND Events would be great. More of both, I'm all for that.
I was saying to Elendiro before that I feel like Bounties are a good intro point. The "Bounties" feature is being added, and if people aren't satisfied with the variety, it's not hard to add more types, more styles, even some with multi-tier objectives. I mean, they're just simple randomized mini-quests, it's easy to write in more. But the main purpose of them, I think, seems to be working. People are doing them, getting rewarded, and not running the same zones over and over.
Truthfully, I'm looking forward to completing Bounties, but when I get a bit tired of them, or I find myself running into certain dungeons, I'm just gonna go off the trail a bit. Bounties in Adventure Mode are definitely going to be profitable for both XP and loot, however part of their purpose is to send you all round. Which means, Zero, that even if they don't include more occurrences of the Wheel from Act 2 or the Tower from Act 1 as formal Bounties, I want to say you can still visit those zones to see if they spawned. Even if they're not offering Bounty rewards for completing them, you're still bound to get a bunch of enemies and maybe a Resplendent Chest.
In case I didn't say this, Bagstone, I think part of the problem is that people have been so used to various routines from D2 that anything that goes against that model is seen as "bad." Plus, since so much "fun" was had from that kind of model, which involved repeatedly bulldozing the same zones and enemies, no one ever thought to question why such a model was unhealthy or flawed.
Love 'em or hate 'em, the D3 devs are some brave souls. They're taking a community of people spoiled on the mountains of loot they were getting from repeatedly facerolling bosses, and saying, "you have to work for your reward. No more handouts." I grew up rather spoiled by my parents, so I suppose in a subconscious attempt to make up for that, I at least like to work for imaginary loot in a game.
And ya know, I like the last line you say there the best, because it really highlights how contradictory people in this community can sometimes be. I'd be willing to bet there are some people still wondering why bosses aren't dropping better loot...yet, most of those people are also the folks who are saying there isn't enough content. So they want bosses to drop the best loot, but in the process, those bosses will become farming spots, and the amount of content will become less.
In regard to efficiency, my best guess is simple...Ladders. Many D3 players were active Ladder players in D2, and in Ladders, efficiency is a key factor. Honestly, in a Ladder scenario, or in Races like Path of Exile has, I totally understand "efficiency." However, when not in a Ladder or Race scenario, efficiency shouldn't be a factor.
I probably won't partake, but I do hope Ladders show up in D3 ASAP, for the sake of those who want to compete. It's a good PvPvE stepping stone, and lets the people looking for a reason for efficiency have a purpose. Meanwhile, folks who want to kick back and enjoy the slow progression to godliness can enjoy the game the way they want it as well.
Ghostcrawler talked a lot about it regarding early WoW versus later WoW. People always claimed the game got "dumbed down" over time - it's a cliche phrase on the internet like "slap in the face" - and, while certain aspects of the game had been streamlined, it's hard to argue that MOST people in WoW still aren't clearing the hardest content which mostly deflates that whole train of thought. But there is that undeniable aspect that comes with social changes. When I first started playing WoW there was no armory. There was no wowprogress.com, there was wowjutsu.com which was infinitely less accurate. There was no twitch.tv, there was no Elitist Jerks, there was no noxxic.com, there was no Icy Veins.
The resources (websites, and even in-game addons) that we used in Burning Crusade circa 2007 were much more rudimentary and much less accurate than the resources I used in Mists of Pandaria. I remember for all of Vanilla and most of Burning Crusade the only way to measure "threat" on a mob was for people to test various abilities and figure out what threat values they generated. KLH threat meter was basically giving you an educated guess as to your threat on a monster, and it wasn't always right. Then sometime in BC they decided to let the API open up and report threat. In comes Omen Threat Meter and it's giving 100% accurate, very responsive, threat calculations.
You could argue that Blizzard "dumbed down tanking" by making this change, but I'd argue that all they really did was give us access to more accurate information that prevented us from wiping due to an addon making an incorrect guess... and that dying in that manner is decidedly not fun for the average gamer anyway, and even the hardcore gamer.
I think this applies to D3, and every other game out there. The information I can go and find about D3, particularly character builds and items, is significantly more than I could ever find about D2. To that point, it's not that the game is dumbed down, it's that there's such a ridiculous proliferation of information that the players are simply more educated (even the uneducated).
With that massive spread of information comes that level of min/maxing, though. In vanilla and even in BC, there was less emphasis on having the "perfect" spec. We didn't scrutinize players quite as much over that stuff. There was never a feeling of "if Joe Blow spent those two talent points differently then we'd win, but he didn't so we wiped all night." At some point, though, people who didn't take the absolute 100% best cookie-cutter talent build became "noobs" because the information became so available. It became expected that anyone with a pulse could google "WoW Death Knight specs" and eventually find some information that would make them successful in a raid.
And I think that's exactly what's happened with D3... and PoE... and most games. Hell, I remember playing TL2 and checking some sites, and reading about how "this is really the only viable spec for X class in Y difficulty" and such. That mentality pressures developers to balance choices on a pinpoint. If you're 1% behind in farming speed... why bother? Just take the best path then blame Blizzard for not making EVERY SPEC IMAGINABLE have the same efficiency as a WW barb.