It makes perfect sense that random spawn rares and champions have a better drop rate than static bosses. They want to avoid boss farming, what part of that you don't understand again?
It doesn't make sense at all, since larger efforts should bring larger rewards. Also avoiding boss farming doesn't mean to remove it as a viable option overall.
you kill bosses to progress in the game and you progress to get higher level, reach new areas and find better loots... that's incentive for you.
Thats completely in defiance of the diablo spirit. I welcome higher incentives to kill other things on par with bosses, but not instead of them.
As I said, the real reflection will be gameplay on hardcore and such a change will make bosses a 1 time event just to progress if drop rates are indeed lower and if as I suspect bosses are many times harder than those rare mobs.
This is speculation to some extent on my part and someone who has a beta key can clarify but I do believe the dangers of bossfights are incomparable to those of rare mobs.
k?
The problem, as pointed out by Bashiok and others, is that the bosses are static - they are always in the same place and always have the same abilities - if their chance to drop good stuff is significantly better than your average champion it becomes beneficial to craft a character with abilities which optimize the rate at which you can kill said boss - in short you end up with D2 - my guess is that boss drops will be no better than the drop rate for a champion - go ahead and kill it if you want. On a optimized time scale though, ignoring everything else, going straight to the boss with a character optimized to kill it will yield (on average) significantly less good loot than champion hunting.
I believe that killing the boss will not be guaranteed to get you nothing when they finally release but that it really wont be worth the time investment if treasure hunting is your thing.
Who says champions/rares are going to be easier than bosses?
You can learn how to fight a boss in the safest way possible, unless they also get random abilities in inferno, which I doubt, but champions/rares can get up to 4(correct me if i am wrong) preffixes suffixes or however you call those, some combos could be pretty deadly, even more so considering they will have the same lvl as bosses.
Imo, you shouldnt base the assumption on previos experiences, in D1/D2 champions and rares always had a lower lvl than bosses, thus making them a lot easier, but here they are suposed to have the same lvl, also the current footage its from normal, and just a few seconds of inferno during which i dont think there were any champions(?), so you shouldnt base ur assumption on those.
Btw, I want bosses to still have a good drop chance, just a bit below the champions and rares, I feel the bossfights are gona be epic and fun to re-do a few times, hopefully, but they want to stop bossruns and the best way to do so is not making them the primary source of good loot.
This is full of assumptions, some of which Blizzard has already disproven.
1) You use the word "trash". Note that rares/champions have to potential to be more dangerous than bosses. This is because they can have random modifiers. Who knows, at Inferno, a Champ might have 4 or more random affixes which, in some combination, can be much tougher than a boss.
2) Bosses are always follow the same patterns and have the same abilities. There are also always in the same place. Thus, you can design a build (takes just a few clicks with this skills system) that is optimal for each respective boss and makes such fight trivial. In fact, if you want to keep all builds more or less equally viable, then certain builds will be much stronger for certain boss fights and thus trivialize the encounter.
3) You can argue that one can simply back off if a rare/champ has a difficult modifier combo, but you can also just back off or focus on certain bosses that work with your build.
In the end, the current set up, if balanced properly, will allow (i) some players to focus on a generalist build that handles most situations well and go rare/champion farming (least repetition, least certainty), (ii) some players to pick a build particularly good for certain boss encounters and farm specific bosses (most repetition but most certainty) or (iii) allow other to do both and simply farm whichever areas they like most.
I look forward to becoming part of group (iii), at least in softcore. In hardcore, I will actually most likely focus on boss fights, as I know what to expect. And, in my experience, what kills you in hardcore is uncertainty/surprises, not simply the HP/abilities of an opponent.
This x10, thank you, english isnt my first language and its hard to expres myself sometimes, but this is exactly what I was trying to say before.
In the end, the current set up, if balanced properly, will allow (i) some players to focus on a generalist build that handles most situations well and go rare/champion farming (least repetition, least certainty), (ii) some players to pick a build particularly good for certain boss encounters and farm specific bosses (most repetition but most certainty) or (iii) allow other to do both and simply farm whichever areas they like most.
I look forward to becoming part of group (iii), at least in softcore. In hardcore, I will actually most likely focus on boss fights, as I know what to expect. And, in my experience, what kills you in hardcore is uncertainty/surprises, not simply the HP/abilities of an opponent.
This is important to note because bosses are always there and a player can easily create a strategy against their pre-set abilities. Rare and champion mobs are not always something you will find, let alone will they always drops something good. This means that you have two levels of statistical reduction in their chance to drop anything worthwhile. First is the chance they will spawn at all, and second is the chance they will roll something usable or valuable from their loot table. I think a lot of people are under evaluating the level of impact this has on chances to get items from a rare or champion. If they had the exact same loot tables and dropped items at the same rate, bosses would always be better to farm because of their static nature and because (as was said) they most likely may be easier than some rares or champions. (If you have never played D2, this definitely happened there.)
EDIT:
Also, for people that think that the rares or champions having better drops is somehow anti-climactic... doesn't it make it really anti-climatic if BOSSES are what you are farming? Literally saying that they are so easy and consistently killable that you will just do it over and over and over again for loot? In my mind, if anything, the bosses should be so hard (at least on inferno) that they will likely give you great trouble in killing. By this same token, if they are hard and time consuming to defeat, a fitting boss.. it should not be something you would consider to fight over and over again for items.
Bosses should be something you fight and finally defeat, then think to yourself, "Wow, I hope I never have to fight that again". They should be something you face for the challenge, not in a mindless bot/autopilot manner to wait until something shiny pops out the 500th time you've killed them while yawning.
Bosses should be something you fight and finally defeat, then think to yourself, "Wow, I hope I never have to fight that again". They should be something you face for the challenge, not in a mindless bot/autopilot manner to wait until something shiny pops out the 500th time you've killed them while yawning.
Which is why their current plan is so good - that first kill is greatly rewarded by the quest drop. Assuming the first fight is, indeed, epic in scope you probably don't want to repeat it - especially in hardcore.
If you can farm the boss repeatedly and easily then it, by definition, is not epic and not worthy of consistently great reward. I killed Meph in D2 last night (NM) and he dropped 2 blues.... which is about right considering it took me 30 seconds to get there and about 10 seconds to kill him - but I was there because on average that 2 minutes will return a much greater payoff than any 2 minutes anywhere else in the world even up through the end of Act 1 on Hell.
I'm guessing Inferno level champs will drop from the same "SuperShinyTableXXX" as the Act bosses - a boss might have 3 passes at the table and a champion one or two BUT you will run across and kill 5 or 6 (or more) champions in half the time it takes to get to and kill a single act boss. In short it will be multiples of times more efficient to champ hunt than boss kill. Either that or they basically say "Nope, bosses drop shit after the first kill because we will NOT reward a character build that is efficent for one boss and nothing else"... The one thing I am sure of is it will not be roughly equivalent to boss hunt vs. area clearing/champ hunting.
You summed up things well. And the issue I have here is that I don't believe giving rares better loot than bosses will leave (ii) as a viable and competitive option. As I said best case scenario = both options viable with balanced rewards based on time consumption and risk involved.
Edit: Kirby for u 2
I guess I don't understand your point of view. In D3 if you want to go straight to the boss, from what I understand, you still can do only Boss kills for better loot. There is a limit to how much they can structure the game and prevent you from doing this. The bosses don't have a reduced chance to drop great loot, they have a base chance to drop great loot.
But Blizzard want to discourage boss kills only, as we all know Meph was a classic kill the boss and then create a new game. So they introduced rares/Champions being randomly spawned through out the Act/Quest having a slightly higher chance to drop better loot than the bosses.
You now have a choice, continue to go straight to the boss, Kill the boss, and recreate a new game. Or you can go through the entire act/quest, covering all areas and probably have a higher chance to encounter a rare/champion which will might drop better loot.
Its a cost/benefit analysis. Take more time in an Act/quest to encounter all the random rare/champion (which might not appear at all) or speed through and possibly get in 2-3 boss kills in the same time frame.
There might be times where you encounter 5 rare/champions + a boss, and times where you only get a boss kill in that same level. There might even be times during a boss kill only run where you might encounter several rare/champions. If you don't like this method of play, it means you want to continue only killing bosses and having bosses be the best loot droppers in the game. Which means you want D2 style end game ... sorry but you're out of luck. Many others prefer the flexibility this new option offers. And I personally don't see a down side.
I guess I don't understand your point of view. In D3 if you want to go straight to the boss, from what I understand, you still can do only Boss kills for better loot.
Am I that bad at explaining stuff or do you guys just do wayyy more drugs than me?
I DO NOT WANT to kill just the bosses.
I DO WANT to clear all including the bosses.
I DO NOT WANT to clear all except the boss.
My primary concern is that by making rares way too valuable they will to a good extent kill the incentive to get the boss and well all run around like monkeys looking for rares only.
WTB BALANCE. Thx for the hammy
Isn't going around fighting monsters just another way of saying "playing the game"? Really, what they are trying to do is make it so that simply "playing the game" is a realistic way to get items rather than doing only boss runs. They don't want to discourage people from EVER fighting bosses, just from going out of their way to fight a boss (and often nothing else) for no reason other than loot.
As I imagine most people who have played Blizzard games know, they often change vastly after release during their life cycle. I'm sure that if the manner in which loot is dropped becomes a clear and real problem, they will not have an issue with addressing it post release. I think their logic for how they want it to be at release is sound, so I think that we will just have to see what, if any, problems actually exist in the end game content as far as loot. Obviously we're free to guess and theorize over whether or not it will work, but unless someone is in the internal testing and knows how the game functions in inferno, we really have no basis for calculating any sort of real world results for killing bosses vs rares/champions vs both.
EDIT: It should also be noted that with the RMAH they have a very real and tangible reason to make sure that items that should be rare remain so, meaning that drop rates for everything combined should be in line with how rare and powerful the items are that are being dropped. This is independent of the source that they are coming from.
I guess I don't understand your point of view. In D3 if you want to go straight to the boss, from what I understand, you still can do only Boss kills for better loot.
Am I that bad at explaining stuff or do you guys just do wayyy more drugs than me?
I DO NOT WANT to kill just the bosses. I DO NOT WANT to clear only the rares. I DO WANT to clear all including the bosses.
My primary concern is that by making rares way too valuable they will to a good extent kill the incentive to get the boss and well all run around like monkeys looking for rares only and leave the bosses behind. Because lets face it... at the end of the day its all about the loot.
WTB BALANCE. Thx for the hammy
Pretty sure that's what Blizzard wants as well...
They never said that bosses wouldn't have good loot tables/chances. They merely said that they have increased the loot tables/chances of Rares/Champions to that above bosses so that there is incentive to play more than just the bosses. This allows for replayability.
Again, I don't see people clearing an entire zone and then leaving the boss alive. I really doubt Blizzard planned for that either. They just want us to play the entire game over and over rather than rushing to and killing a few bosses in <2 mins and then creating a new game.
Am I the only one who thought in D2 that the act bosses (not uber/pandimonium etc) were easy? I see people saying that they don't want to risk their lives fighting bosses, but I never felt like there was risk there after my first run. All of the danger for me came from the enemies out in the world. This goes to the scripted-ness of bosses which will be the same and the immunities of rares that will not be the same, indicating to me (perhaps erroneously but w/e) that they are matching the difficulty of a fight with the loot potential it has. This seems to align with the desires of Blizzard and the community to a large degree. Then again, I may be completely wrong.
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If that made sense to you, Bravo! I think I even confused myself...
Am I the only one who thought in D2 that the act bosses (not uber/pandimonium etc) were easy? I see people saying that they don't want to risk their lives fighting bosses, but I never felt like there was risk there after my first run. All of the danger for me came from the enemies out in the world. This goes to the scripted-ness of bosses which will be the same and the immunities of rares that will not be the same, indicating to me (perhaps erroneously but w/e) that they are matching the difficulty of a fight with the loot potential it has. This seems to align with the desires of Blizzard and the community to a large degree. Then again, I may be completely wrong.
COMPLETELY agree. There were so many super champions that were near impossible to kill. When was the last time you lost health fighting hell diablo or baal?????
Am I that bad at explaining stuff or do you guys just do wayyy more drugs than me?
I DO NOT WANT to kill just the bosses. I DO NOT WANT to clear only the rares. I DO WANT to clear all including the bosses.
My primary concern is that by making rares way too valuable they will to a good extent kill the incentive to get the boss and well all run around like monkeys looking for rares only and leave the bosses behind. Because lets face it... at the end of the day its all about the loot.
WTB BALANCE. Thx for the hammy
Well from all the conversations I've seen the rares/champions only have a slightly higher chance to drop better loot. So we're not talking significant difference, I assume we're still talking about something like 0.01% chance like it was in D2. Can't do exact numbers cos no one has played it yet.
And if you're intending to play the game as intended and not boss killing only, you're having the best of all worlds. There is no way you would avoid killing the boss and only chase after rares/champions, for that to happen, the chance of loot improvement would have to be pretty significant. We're still talking about having to do huge number of runs to see any significant difference in drop rates.
Eg. for every 20 boss kills you get 25 magic items and 3 uniques
and for every 20 rare/champion kills you get 28 magic items 5 uniques.
This is all speculation for numbers but do you really think that rare/champions drop rates will make you skip the boss kills unless there was a definite improvement of almost double the uniques?
And remember, for every magic item dropped, there is a small chance it will be unique. Chances are that rare/champions only improve the magic item drop rate not the unique item drop rate (Eg. like magic item find).
Farming bosses WILL be useless unless they have a droprate proportional to the amount of time it takes to kill them. If bosses have, as is currently implied, a lower droprate than champions - it WILL 100% absolutely no question mean that NOBODY on hardcore and NEARLY NOBODY on softcore will ever kill a boss more than once. It's a very simple if-then statement. If bosses do not provide rewards equal to their challenge when you kill them, people will not do them. Regardless of how static they are or how predictable. If the reward is not equal to the challenge, they will be ignored.
There is NO WAY that bosses will be easier than the average champion. Yes, there will be the rare chance of getting a perfect set of modifiers on a champion that makes him nigh-unkillable. Absolutely. But those chances are much like getting a perfect item. Sure it happens sometimes, but you can't really expect it
Tekkiller that is actually the entire point of our comments. The information they've provided us mnakes it feel like they ARE going counter to the objective of increasing flexibility, so we are expressing our concerns. How is it that people cannot understand that? We're not saying Blizzard can't fix it, we're not even saying it would be HARD to fix. We're not saying that such things won't be adjusted even. Just that these are the concerns we see with the CURRENTLY DISCUSSED SYSTEM.
So final statement:
Yes, I know it's fixable. Yes I know it's EASILY fixable. But the information we have points to a situation where bosses have inferior droprates to mere champions. This leads me to the point which I will express in code:
I don't really think anyone can argue with the above statement... it's as close to factual as anything can be in this sort of a discussion.
Edit: One small thing to be aware of. Monsters like Lord DeSeis would be considered bosses in Diablo 3. They weren't 'rare mobs' they were unique mobs. They were always there, always in the same or similar spot, and always had a certain pre-set modifier set in addition to random mods at higher difficulties. There was a reason they were often referred to as 'super-rare' or 'super-unique' mobs. They're sort of the equivalent to Leoric in Diablo 3's beta. So yes, Lord DeSeis is a boss.
as is currently implied, a lower droprate than champions - it WILL 100% absolutely no question mean that NOBODY on hardcore and NEARLY NOBODY on softcore will ever kill a boss more than once. It's a very simple if-then statement. If bosses do not provide rewards equal to their challenge when you kill them, people will not do them.
Really? When they say a lower droprate than champions I and I think most people assume a few percentage points.
In D2 (and others can correct me if I'm wrong) the game checks for chance to drop an item. Then it checks to see if that item is magical, and if it is checks to see if it is unique. All these checks are also modified by creature type and game mode. So a normal mob on Inferno has a higher chance of dropping a unique then a boss in Normal.
- Chance to drop 1 item
% chance of item quality
% chance of to being a magical item
% chance of being a unique item if magical
% chance for being armor/weapon/gem/amulet/etc
- Chance to drop 2 items
...
- Chance to drop 3 items ... etc
Magic find only up's the chance that an item dropped will be magical, and if magical there is a small chance it can be a unique. I don't think anyone who's played Diablo expect rares/champions in D3 to be a 100% improvement drop over a boss. We're more along the lines of for every 50 Bosses killed you should average 5 uniques. For every 50 rare/champions killed you should average 7 uniques.
Of course the numbers are made up but its more about the expectation. In my scenario, there's no reason to skip bosses especially for every 50 games you'll meet at least 50 bosses. Not true for rares/champions.
But even if that IS the case, you're wasting your time to kill a boss. It's MOST LIKELY to be more difficult, it will take longer(absolutely - even in d2 bosses nearly always took significantly longer than champions to kill), and it will reward less loot. Why even bother?
People will do whatever it is that gets them the most gear the fastest. Look at d2: Everyone did Pindle, Meph and sometimes Shenk. Not because those were the most fun. But because they gave them the highest chance-per-hour of getting the loot they wanted with the lowest risk.
That trend will continue no matter what Blizzard implements - people will go for the highest efficiency with the lowest risk. Now, of course Blizzard wants to spread it out some. Brilliant idea, I'm glad to see it. But the current plan completely cuts bosses out of the equation because they will be lower efficiency than something you can find by turning a corner.
Edit: It makes NO DIFFERENCE AT ALL. Even if bosses had an EQUAL DROPRATE to champions and rares. 100% equal. People would still avoid them. Risk-reward. Bosses are typically harder than your average rare or champion and take longer. So higher risk for lower reward. People will ALSO avoid those rare champions that have modifiers that make THEM exceptionally difficult for the same reason. It will just be more efficient to just skip them.
I'm not saying Blizzard should implement a system that encourages boss farming - just that they should modify the system so it doesn't actively DISCOURAGE them. There are people out there who enjoy boss runs - why PUNISH them?
But even if that IS the case, you're wasting your time to kill a boss. It's MOST LIKELY to be more difficult, it will take longer(absolutely - even in d2 bosses nearly always took significantly longer than champions to kill), and it will reward less loot. Why even bother?
You do realize that rares/champions are random spawn right? So you could in theory create 20 games, and not find a single one (Unlikely but possible). Not to mention, finding them all you would need to go through most all of an area, and if you're doing that you might as well kill the boss, especially if you didn't encounter a rare/champion.
Bosses will get easier with higher levels and better equipment, (Inferno excluded).
But you're right on one point. If any of the bosses are like Dureial in D2, as a Sorceress, I'm so skipping Boss fights like that.
Even in the beta - there are typically 4-5 rares or champion sets PER FLOOR on EVERY floor of nearly every major dungeon. I doubt the numbers are going to go down in higher difficulties - I'd be very much surprised if they didn't go up.
First of all, if Bosses were worth ANY more than rares/champs that would be default make boss runs *the* best place to Item find as you get all the rare champs + Boss vs just rare champs anywhere else. Blizzard wants to deter people from farming bosses period. If you want to farm bosses you can do so and I'm sure the drops will be okay, they just won't be *as* good as just farming champs.
Second of all, I don't know where you got in your head that bosses are harder than some champs because they aren't now and never were. Where have you been? Do you remember the old MSLE? How about conviction/Fire Enchanted mobs? How about an area in hell with gloams + a conviction/Extra fast champ? ALL of these area's were extremely dangerous and the entire point of making champs the best source of loot is to force players to face these enemies that are 100% more difficult and more deadly than bosses.
And you want a D3 example? Those purple tentacle worms (Arcane enchanted bosses I think) are WAY harder than the Skelenton King. This is just another example of how champs can be more difficult than bosses and being forced to face these more difficult fights for loot is really the right thing to do.
In d2 bosses are harder than ALL champions. Because Champions have no affixes. As far as non-super-unique rares go there were really only a couple of combos that were even difficult. MSLE, con/fe/gloam+con... those are really the 3. Any other rare and there were THOUSANDS of other rares were really cake.
But no, if bosses are not at least PROPORTIONAL to rares then NOBODY will EVER kill them more than once per character. If you're saying anything else, you're foolish really.
In d2 bosses are harder than ALL champions. Because Champions have no affixes. As far as non-super-unique rares go there were really only a couple of combos that were even difficult. MSLE, con/fe/gloam+con... those are really the 3. Any other rare and there were THOUSANDS of other rares were really cake.
But no, if bosses are not at least PROPORTIONAL to rares then NOBODY will EVER kill them more than once per character. If you're saying anything else, you're foolish really.
I'm not sure if people are still missing some key points here.. But I'd like to get them straightened out anyway..
This is a quote from Bashiok a week ago
Quote from "Bashiok" »
The goal, of course, is that with Inferno as a flat difficulty (all enemies are the same level) you should be able to go anywhere you like to get items, meaning not just rushing to bosses. To encourage that further, the randomized champions and rares that appear out in the world will have the best chance to drop good items, encouraging exploration and also feeding some of that *gasp!* feeling you get when you see one, and then another *gasp!* when items drop. Bosses tend to only have that second moment, and it's generally devalued over time due to the repetition.
So I think it is irrelevant what the relative droprate on bosses is compared to champions, Blizzard intentionally wants you to have no reason to go back to them for loot (There will doubtlessly be achievements you can go back for). This is also part of the reasoning by making Inferno a flat difficulty. They want you to go anywhere and everywhere.
Blizzard has also stated in the past that if people find "the best" place to farm, then they're going to do their best to fix the droprates so it is on par with everything else, to save people from monotony.
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The problem, as pointed out by Bashiok and others, is that the bosses are static - they are always in the same place and always have the same abilities - if their chance to drop good stuff is significantly better than your average champion it becomes beneficial to craft a character with abilities which optimize the rate at which you can kill said boss - in short you end up with D2 - my guess is that boss drops will be no better than the drop rate for a champion - go ahead and kill it if you want. On a optimized time scale though, ignoring everything else, going straight to the boss with a character optimized to kill it will yield (on average) significantly less good loot than champion hunting.
I believe that killing the boss will not be guaranteed to get you nothing when they finally release but that it really wont be worth the time investment if treasure hunting is your thing.
You can learn how to fight a boss in the safest way possible, unless they also get random abilities in inferno, which I doubt, but champions/rares can get up to 4(correct me if i am wrong) preffixes suffixes or however you call those, some combos could be pretty deadly, even more so considering they will have the same lvl as bosses.
Btw, I want bosses to still have a good drop chance, just a bit below the champions and rares, I feel the bossfights are gona be epic and fun to re-do a few times, hopefully, but they want to stop bossruns and the best way to do so is not making them the primary source of good loot.
This x10, thank you, english isnt my first language and its hard to expres myself sometimes, but this is exactly what I was trying to say before.
This is important to note because bosses are always there and a player can easily create a strategy against their pre-set abilities. Rare and champion mobs are not always something you will find, let alone will they always drops something good. This means that you have two levels of statistical reduction in their chance to drop anything worthwhile. First is the chance they will spawn at all, and second is the chance they will roll something usable or valuable from their loot table. I think a lot of people are under evaluating the level of impact this has on chances to get items from a rare or champion. If they had the exact same loot tables and dropped items at the same rate, bosses would always be better to farm because of their static nature and because (as was said) they most likely may be easier than some rares or champions. (If you have never played D2, this definitely happened there.)
EDIT:
Also, for people that think that the rares or champions having better drops is somehow anti-climactic... doesn't it make it really anti-climatic if BOSSES are what you are farming? Literally saying that they are so easy and consistently killable that you will just do it over and over and over again for loot? In my mind, if anything, the bosses should be so hard (at least on inferno) that they will likely give you great trouble in killing. By this same token, if they are hard and time consuming to defeat, a fitting boss.. it should not be something you would consider to fight over and over again for items.
Bosses should be something you fight and finally defeat, then think to yourself, "Wow, I hope I never have to fight that again". They should be something you face for the challenge, not in a mindless bot/autopilot manner to wait until something shiny pops out the 500th time you've killed them while yawning.
Which is why their current plan is so good - that first kill is greatly rewarded by the quest drop. Assuming the first fight is, indeed, epic in scope you probably don't want to repeat it - especially in hardcore.
If you can farm the boss repeatedly and easily then it, by definition, is not epic and not worthy of consistently great reward. I killed Meph in D2 last night (NM) and he dropped 2 blues.... which is about right considering it took me 30 seconds to get there and about 10 seconds to kill him - but I was there because on average that 2 minutes will return a much greater payoff than any 2 minutes anywhere else in the world even up through the end of Act 1 on Hell.
I'm guessing Inferno level champs will drop from the same "SuperShinyTableXXX" as the Act bosses - a boss might have 3 passes at the table and a champion one or two BUT you will run across and kill 5 or 6 (or more) champions in half the time it takes to get to and kill a single act boss. In short it will be multiples of times more efficient to champ hunt than boss kill. Either that or they basically say "Nope, bosses drop shit after the first kill because we will NOT reward a character build that is efficent for one boss and nothing else"... The one thing I am sure of is it will not be roughly equivalent to boss hunt vs. area clearing/champ hunting.
I guess I don't understand your point of view. In D3 if you want to go straight to the boss, from what I understand, you still can do only Boss kills for better loot. There is a limit to how much they can structure the game and prevent you from doing this. The bosses don't have a reduced chance to drop great loot, they have a base chance to drop great loot.
But Blizzard want to discourage boss kills only, as we all know Meph was a classic kill the boss and then create a new game. So they introduced rares/Champions being randomly spawned through out the Act/Quest having a slightly higher chance to drop better loot than the bosses.
You now have a choice, continue to go straight to the boss, Kill the boss, and recreate a new game. Or you can go through the entire act/quest, covering all areas and probably have a higher chance to encounter a rare/champion which will might drop better loot.
Its a cost/benefit analysis. Take more time in an Act/quest to encounter all the random rare/champion (which might not appear at all) or speed through and possibly get in 2-3 boss kills in the same time frame.
There might be times where you encounter 5 rare/champions + a boss, and times where you only get a boss kill in that same level. There might even be times during a boss kill only run where you might encounter several rare/champions. If you don't like this method of play, it means you want to continue only killing bosses and having bosses be the best loot droppers in the game. Which means you want D2 style end game ... sorry but you're out of luck. Many others prefer the flexibility this new option offers. And I personally don't see a down side.
Hamster for you
Isn't going around fighting monsters just another way of saying "playing the game"? Really, what they are trying to do is make it so that simply "playing the game" is a realistic way to get items rather than doing only boss runs. They don't want to discourage people from EVER fighting bosses, just from going out of their way to fight a boss (and often nothing else) for no reason other than loot.
As I imagine most people who have played Blizzard games know, they often change vastly after release during their life cycle. I'm sure that if the manner in which loot is dropped becomes a clear and real problem, they will not have an issue with addressing it post release. I think their logic for how they want it to be at release is sound, so I think that we will just have to see what, if any, problems actually exist in the end game content as far as loot. Obviously we're free to guess and theorize over whether or not it will work, but unless someone is in the internal testing and knows how the game functions in inferno, we really have no basis for calculating any sort of real world results for killing bosses vs rares/champions vs both.
EDIT: It should also be noted that with the RMAH they have a very real and tangible reason to make sure that items that should be rare remain so, meaning that drop rates for everything combined should be in line with how rare and powerful the items are that are being dropped. This is independent of the source that they are coming from.
Pretty sure that's what Blizzard wants as well...
They never said that bosses wouldn't have good loot tables/chances. They merely said that they have increased the loot tables/chances of Rares/Champions to that above bosses so that there is incentive to play more than just the bosses. This allows for replayability.
Again, I don't see people clearing an entire zone and then leaving the boss alive. I really doubt Blizzard planned for that either. They just want us to play the entire game over and over rather than rushing to and killing a few bosses in <2 mins and then creating a new game.
COMPLETELY agree. There were so many super champions that were near impossible to kill. When was the last time you lost health fighting hell diablo or baal?????
Well from all the conversations I've seen the rares/champions only have a slightly higher chance to drop better loot. So we're not talking significant difference, I assume we're still talking about something like 0.01% chance like it was in D2. Can't do exact numbers cos no one has played it yet.
And if you're intending to play the game as intended and not boss killing only, you're having the best of all worlds. There is no way you would avoid killing the boss and only chase after rares/champions, for that to happen, the chance of loot improvement would have to be pretty significant. We're still talking about having to do huge number of runs to see any significant difference in drop rates.
Eg. for every 20 boss kills you get 25 magic items and 3 uniques
and for every 20 rare/champion kills you get 28 magic items 5 uniques.
This is all speculation for numbers but do you really think that rare/champions drop rates will make you skip the boss kills unless there was a definite improvement of almost double the uniques?
And remember, for every magic item dropped, there is a small chance it will be unique. Chances are that rare/champions only improve the magic item drop rate not the unique item drop rate (Eg. like magic item find).
And 2 hammies for you cos, their so cute
There is NO WAY that bosses will be easier than the average champion. Yes, there will be the rare chance of getting a perfect set of modifiers on a champion that makes him nigh-unkillable. Absolutely. But those chances are much like getting a perfect item. Sure it happens sometimes, but you can't really expect it
Tekkiller that is actually the entire point of our comments. The information they've provided us mnakes it feel like they ARE going counter to the objective of increasing flexibility, so we are expressing our concerns. How is it that people cannot understand that? We're not saying Blizzard can't fix it, we're not even saying it would be HARD to fix. We're not saying that such things won't be adjusted even. Just that these are the concerns we see with the CURRENTLY DISCUSSED SYSTEM.
So final statement:
Yes, I know it's fixable. Yes I know it's EASILY fixable. But the information we have points to a situation where bosses have inferior droprates to mere champions. This leads me to the point which I will express in code:
If(BossLootChance != BossChallenge) Then(BossKillPerPlayer = 1)
I don't really think anyone can argue with the above statement... it's as close to factual as anything can be in this sort of a discussion.
Edit: One small thing to be aware of. Monsters like Lord DeSeis would be considered bosses in Diablo 3. They weren't 'rare mobs' they were unique mobs. They were always there, always in the same or similar spot, and always had a certain pre-set modifier set in addition to random mods at higher difficulties. There was a reason they were often referred to as 'super-rare' or 'super-unique' mobs. They're sort of the equivalent to Leoric in Diablo 3's beta. So yes, Lord DeSeis is a boss.
In D2 (and others can correct me if I'm wrong) the game checks for chance to drop an item. Then it checks to see if that item is magical, and if it is checks to see if it is unique. All these checks are also modified by creature type and game mode. So a normal mob on Inferno has a higher chance of dropping a unique then a boss in Normal.
- Chance to drop 1 item
% chance of item quality
% chance of to being a magical item
% chance of being a unique item if magical
% chance for being armor/weapon/gem/amulet/etc
- Chance to drop 2 items
...
- Chance to drop 3 items ... etc
Magic find only up's the chance that an item dropped will be magical, and if magical there is a small chance it can be a unique. I don't think anyone who's played Diablo expect rares/champions in D3 to be a 100% improvement drop over a boss. We're more along the lines of for every 50 Bosses killed you should average 5 uniques. For every 50 rare/champions killed you should average 7 uniques.
Of course the numbers are made up but its more about the expectation. In my scenario, there's no reason to skip bosses especially for every 50 games you'll meet at least 50 bosses. Not true for rares/champions.
People will do whatever it is that gets them the most gear the fastest. Look at d2: Everyone did Pindle, Meph and sometimes Shenk. Not because those were the most fun. But because they gave them the highest chance-per-hour of getting the loot they wanted with the lowest risk.
That trend will continue no matter what Blizzard implements - people will go for the highest efficiency with the lowest risk. Now, of course Blizzard wants to spread it out some. Brilliant idea, I'm glad to see it. But the current plan completely cuts bosses out of the equation because they will be lower efficiency than something you can find by turning a corner.
Edit: It makes NO DIFFERENCE AT ALL. Even if bosses had an EQUAL DROPRATE to champions and rares. 100% equal. People would still avoid them. Risk-reward. Bosses are typically harder than your average rare or champion and take longer. So higher risk for lower reward. People will ALSO avoid those rare champions that have modifiers that make THEM exceptionally difficult for the same reason. It will just be more efficient to just skip them.
I'm not saying Blizzard should implement a system that encourages boss farming - just that they should modify the system so it doesn't actively DISCOURAGE them. There are people out there who enjoy boss runs - why PUNISH them?
You do realize that rares/champions are random spawn right? So you could in theory create 20 games, and not find a single one (Unlikely but possible). Not to mention, finding them all you would need to go through most all of an area, and if you're doing that you might as well kill the boss, especially if you didn't encounter a rare/champion.
Bosses will get easier with higher levels and better equipment, (Inferno excluded).
But you're right on one point. If any of the bosses are like Dureial in D2, as a Sorceress, I'm so skipping Boss fights like that.
Second of all, I don't know where you got in your head that bosses are harder than some champs because they aren't now and never were. Where have you been? Do you remember the old MSLE? How about conviction/Fire Enchanted mobs? How about an area in hell with gloams + a conviction/Extra fast champ? ALL of these area's were extremely dangerous and the entire point of making champs the best source of loot is to force players to face these enemies that are 100% more difficult and more deadly than bosses.
And you want a D3 example? Those purple tentacle worms (Arcane enchanted bosses I think) are WAY harder than the Skelenton King. This is just another example of how champs can be more difficult than bosses and being forced to face these more difficult fights for loot is really the right thing to do.
But no, if bosses are not at least PROPORTIONAL to rares then NOBODY will EVER kill them more than once per character. If you're saying anything else, you're foolish really.
I'm not sure if people are still missing some key points here.. But I'd like to get them straightened out anyway..
This is a quote from Bashiok a week ago
So I think it is irrelevant what the relative droprate on bosses is compared to champions, Blizzard intentionally wants you to have no reason to go back to them for loot (There will doubtlessly be achievements you can go back for). This is also part of the reasoning by making Inferno a flat difficulty. They want you to go anywhere and everywhere.
Blizzard has also stated in the past that if people find "the best" place to farm, then they're going to do their best to fix the droprates so it is on par with everything else, to save people from monotony.