On a related note (and someone else posted it already, but I can't recall who or where right now), a big problem with "gearing" is the requirement for most classes and playstyles to run with All Resistance. It severely hinders variety in itemization, and eliminates a huge portion of otherwise good items from being valuable to anyone.
I'm in the same boat you are on fixes; I'm sure if I sat down and spent multiple hours brainstorming I could come up with something, but that's also not what I'm paid for. I can appreciate people who have rational arguments for or against game changes, but I can also recognize when people are being unrealistic, even if I don't have an alternative solution.
I don't doubt the game will eventually work itself out over the coming months (because the same uproars were taking place when D2 released and was first being patched up, yet where is it now?), so I'll probably stick around for a while, even if it's in a 'play 'til I'm bored then play something else for a while and come back' capacity.
I think this is partly due to the fact that usually your choices in the resistance department comes down to (1 to X) to a single resist and/or (1 to Y) resist all. If X is not sufficiently bigger than Y then single resistances are relatively weak and not valued the same way, despite eating up like 6 different affixes.
Unless you're a monk, individual resistances just don't work so well and really are entirely wasted itemization unless they occur in tandem with resist all.
Also, the general amount of resistances required to make attacks (both physical and magical) hit for a reasonable amount versus our HP pools is still too much. I'm working on making the jump to Act 3 and I have 625 resist all. Stuff in Act 2 still hits me decently hard. I've sunk a good bit of itemization into resistances and I still take a good beating.
D2 was "balanced" around the fact that we could shotgun healing potions. We can no longer do that and health globes are woefully inadequate on most champ/rare packs because they're simply not plentiful enough. If we got more health globes over the course of killing champ/rare packs we probably wouldn't be so drawn to resist all as a statistic. I don't know, that's probably not a good idea for other reasons, but I'm just brainstorming here. I know the main difference is that our ability to self-heal (outside of some pretty wild LoH scenarios) has gone down drastically since D2 and yet the incoming damage has probably gone up significantly. That, alone, is a problem.
I definitely don't want to be back to shotgunning potions... but I just don't feel that the game was ever balanced around potions on a CD.
EDIT
Also in terms of itemization. For the love of God, just remove LoH and buff Life Leech to be adequate. We have FOUR affixes for increasing healing - +health globe healing, +life from damage, +life on hit, +life per second. Do we really need that level of diversity? It's such a waste of affixes to have four dedicated just to increased healing. It's just totally unnecessary. I'd rather have almost anything than that many choices for increased healing.
EDIT 2
I actually forgot +life on kill. That's a *fifth* form of regenerating life. Four is bad, five is worse. This is a ton of dead weight in terms of itemization. I do not get excited for +health globe gear or +life on kill gear, and I'm only marginally impressed with high levels of Life Leech.
I think part of the problem is we're 2 months in, and people have this expectation from so many other games that they should be geared to the teeth right now, when that's exactly what this game isn't.
I can obviously only speak for myself, but as a D2 player for the last decade I have no expectation to be anywhere near geared out from just drops at this point. I for one am all for the keeping of Inferno as nerf free as possible although I don't forsee that as a real possibility based off it already seeing one de-clawing. The thing that I just can't seem to pull myself away from however is that, as I perviously explained, the loot at the top-end seems very generic to me..so much so that I find it almost a waste of my time to pursue. In D2 I could farm for items for months on end because there were entertaining gear drops, even if i never saw them the understanding that I could was what kept my attention. Conversely, in D3 I feel like the gear I have now is just a slightlly more watered down version of the gear I'm hunting for and personally that is nearly the kiss of death. I really wish I could add anything constructive but the truth is I really can't think of a good fix for the problem without overhauling secondary stats which would essentially take gearing in a totally different direction and alienate a large chunk of the user base, obviously a poor idea.
Current gear is watered down versions of upgraded gear. They dropped the cool +skills from D2, but didn't replace it with decent affixes (the +skills are marginal, at best). Possibly because they thought (correctly, IMO) that +skills had become too important. And then they dropped all the cool stuff from the runes because just about all the cool runes where incredibly overpowered. Personally, I'd like to see more +class skills (only actually worthwhile, like 20% mana reductions instead of 3%), or adding new skills (give the WD the ability to enchant weapons, or the barb a three hit combo bonus like the monk has).
*snip*
EDIT
Also in terms of itemization. For the love of God, just remove LoH and buff Life Leech to be adequate. We have FOUR affixes for increasing healing - +health globe healing, +life from damage, +life on hit, +life per second. Do we really need that level of diversity? It's such a waste of affixes to have four dedicated just to increased healing. It's just totally unnecessary. I'd rather have almost anything than that many choices for increased healing.
EDIT 2
I actually forgot +life on kill. That's a *fifth* form of regenerating life. Four is bad, five is worse. This is a ton of dead weight in terms of itemization. I do not get excited for +health globe gear or +life on kill gear, and I'm only marginally impressed with high levels of Life Leech.
Eh, I think the 5 affixes works, they just need to be spread out better. Say, +globe only works on boots, bracers, and helms, +regen only works on chests, shoulders, and shields, life per second only on jewelry and pants, and LoH and vamp only on weapons/class offhand/gloves.
Life on kill should either be removed forever, or buffed up to be a % on kill (that isn't nerfed in Inferno). % on kill could be cool if you new that it'd give 50% boost. It'd add a "oh shit, these champs are almost dead. Do I risk the pack healing and find a white to kill and get my hp back?" But they have it like 600, which is just meaningless.
Well I think the problem is largely in player perception. People progress linearly through Normal, Nightmare and Hell and then in Inferno (Act II-ish) they suddenly hit a brick wall and wonder what gives. It's kind of a drawback of Diablo's basic structure, the whole do-the-same-thing-three(four)-times thing.
Personally I don't mind if they leave things the way they are both in terms of difficulty and items. Remember that there's nothing new coming to the game until an expansion gets released, so don't be in a hurry to finish it.
To me, one of the big problems is the lack of diversity of useful affixes. If you look at D2's items, there were many 'paths' towards the desired 'end'. What I mean is that there were many affixes that pretty much ended up doing the same thing (like increasing your damage, or giving you +max life), so even if you didn't happen to roll affix A on that bow, you rolled affix B, which does a similar thing; and I could go on until affix Z, because D2 was wonderful in that respect, it had loads of different affixes. And diversity is key to avoid boredom. If you look at D3, different things are affected by very few affixes. So if your bow happens to not roll Dex, it's almost useless (at least in high level play). This is a clear contrast with what happened in D2.
Just wanted to throw this out there.
I think people have selective memory of Diablo 2. Remember some of those affixes like, for example, +light radius? +Stamina? There were heaps of junk stats in D2. The other thing is that you probably didn't notice the relative viability of stats in D2 because (a) DPS wasn't visible and (b ) the game was so easy that being sub-optimal was no problem at all.
*snip*
EDIT
Also in terms of itemization. For the love of God, just remove LoH and buff Life Leech to be adequate. We have FOUR affixes for increasing healing - +health globe healing, +life from damage, +life on hit, +life per second. Do we really need that level of diversity? It's such a waste of affixes to have four dedicated just to increased healing. It's just totally unnecessary. I'd rather have almost anything than that many choices for increased healing.
EDIT 2
I actually forgot +life on kill. That's a *fifth* form of regenerating life. Four is bad, five is worse. This is a ton of dead weight in terms of itemization. I do not get excited for +health globe gear or +life on kill gear, and I'm only marginally impressed with high levels of Life Leech.
Eh, I think the 5 affixes works, they just need to be spread out better. Say, +globe only works on boots, bracers, and helms, +regen only works on chests, shoulders, and shields, life per second only on jewelry and pants, and LoH and vamp only on weapons/class offhand/gloves.
Life on kill should either be removed forever, or buffed up to be a % on kill (that isn't nerfed in Inferno). % on kill could be cool if you new that it'd give 50% boost. It'd add a "oh shit, these champs are almost dead. Do I risk the pack healing and find a white to kill and get my hp back?" But they have it like 600, which is just meaningless.
That's a fair statement, but that would essentially condense five different affixes into one general "health gaining" affix that varied in function based on the item it was on. Either way, though, I think it's just ridiculous to have five separate life-regenning mechanics (when at least two of them are terrible) on most, if not all, items. It's total overkill and all it does is contribute to clutter and TONS of gear that people don't want. I realize that this game is based around finding that needle in the haystack when it comes to AMAZING loot, but I think part of the problem is that there's too much ATROCIOUS loot and not sufficient "GOOD BUT NOT GREAT" loot if you get what I'm saying. Too much gear in D3 is either fucking amazing or total trash, and very little in between.
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I think this is partly due to the fact that usually your choices in the resistance department comes down to (1 to X) to a single resist and/or (1 to Y) resist all. If X is not sufficiently bigger than Y then single resistances are relatively weak and not valued the same way, despite eating up like 6 different affixes.
Unless you're a monk, individual resistances just don't work so well and really are entirely wasted itemization unless they occur in tandem with resist all.
Also, the general amount of resistances required to make attacks (both physical and magical) hit for a reasonable amount versus our HP pools is still too much. I'm working on making the jump to Act 3 and I have 625 resist all. Stuff in Act 2 still hits me decently hard. I've sunk a good bit of itemization into resistances and I still take a good beating.
D2 was "balanced" around the fact that we could shotgun healing potions. We can no longer do that and health globes are woefully inadequate on most champ/rare packs because they're simply not plentiful enough. If we got more health globes over the course of killing champ/rare packs we probably wouldn't be so drawn to resist all as a statistic. I don't know, that's probably not a good idea for other reasons, but I'm just brainstorming here. I know the main difference is that our ability to self-heal (outside of some pretty wild LoH scenarios) has gone down drastically since D2 and yet the incoming damage has probably gone up significantly. That, alone, is a problem.
I definitely don't want to be back to shotgunning potions... but I just don't feel that the game was ever balanced around potions on a CD.
EDIT
Also in terms of itemization. For the love of God, just remove LoH and buff Life Leech to be adequate. We have FOUR affixes for increasing healing - +health globe healing, +life from damage, +life on hit, +life per second. Do we really need that level of diversity? It's such a waste of affixes to have four dedicated just to increased healing. It's just totally unnecessary. I'd rather have almost anything than that many choices for increased healing.
EDIT 2
I actually forgot +life on kill. That's a *fifth* form of regenerating life. Four is bad, five is worse. This is a ton of dead weight in terms of itemization. I do not get excited for +health globe gear or +life on kill gear, and I'm only marginally impressed with high levels of Life Leech.
Current gear is watered down versions of upgraded gear. They dropped the cool +skills from D2, but didn't replace it with decent affixes (the +skills are marginal, at best). Possibly because they thought (correctly, IMO) that +skills had become too important. And then they dropped all the cool stuff from the runes because just about all the cool runes where incredibly overpowered. Personally, I'd like to see more +class skills (only actually worthwhile, like 20% mana reductions instead of 3%), or adding new skills (give the WD the ability to enchant weapons, or the barb a three hit combo bonus like the monk has).
Eh, I think the 5 affixes works, they just need to be spread out better. Say, +globe only works on boots, bracers, and helms, +regen only works on chests, shoulders, and shields, life per second only on jewelry and pants, and LoH and vamp only on weapons/class offhand/gloves.
Life on kill should either be removed forever, or buffed up to be a % on kill (that isn't nerfed in Inferno). % on kill could be cool if you new that it'd give 50% boost. It'd add a "oh shit, these champs are almost dead. Do I risk the pack healing and find a white to kill and get my hp back?" But they have it like 600, which is just meaningless.
Personally I don't mind if they leave things the way they are both in terms of difficulty and items. Remember that there's nothing new coming to the game until an expansion gets released, so don't be in a hurry to finish it.
I think people have selective memory of Diablo 2. Remember some of those affixes like, for example, +light radius? +Stamina? There were heaps of junk stats in D2. The other thing is that you probably didn't notice the relative viability of stats in D2 because (a) DPS wasn't visible and (b ) the game was so easy that being sub-optimal was no problem at all.
That's a fair statement, but that would essentially condense five different affixes into one general "health gaining" affix that varied in function based on the item it was on. Either way, though, I think it's just ridiculous to have five separate life-regenning mechanics (when at least two of them are terrible) on most, if not all, items. It's total overkill and all it does is contribute to clutter and TONS of gear that people don't want. I realize that this game is based around finding that needle in the haystack when it comes to AMAZING loot, but I think part of the problem is that there's too much ATROCIOUS loot and not sufficient "GOOD BUT NOT GREAT" loot if you get what I'm saying. Too much gear in D3 is either fucking amazing or total trash, and very little in between.