Why are people surprised they cut Titan? The MMO market sucks, it has sucked for quite sometime now. Every MMO is struggling to keep players, they cost a ton of money to produce and upkeep. Look at every MMO out right now that is just a few years old, all of them didn't do nearly as well as they hoped.
The time of the MMO has passed, I think Blizzard saw the writing on the wall that the genre just isn't nearly as healthy as it was back in 2004.
Also, we can talk about why buff healing when the bigger issue is that GR eventually get to the point of being 1 shot. What is the point? Healing is a stat that will always be last on the totem pole when your only difficulty measuring stick is more mob hp and damage.
More dps= faster mobs die, the less healing is needed. I was stomping T6 without healing, less than a month into RoS. Your healing doesn't scale up to the point to mitigate the insane scaling of higher GR's. No amount of healing is going to deal with the massive spike in damage, healing is a mechanic that only works if you don't have instances of massive spike damage.
One of the big things we want to focus on is making sure items that feel like they are rare and powerful are actually powerful . . . instead of just rare. The first and most obvious place for improvement here is Legendaries.
By design, Legendary items are going to drop far less often than Rare items, and we want that rarity to be reflected in their power. When a Legendary drops, the question that goes through a player's mind should never be "is this a good item?" It should be "how awesome is it?" For example, if you are playing a Demon Hunter wielding a Rare crossbow and a Legendary crossbow drops, we want your reaction to be "Holy crap, YES!" not "*sigh* another Hellrack." It's a problem if players don't want to bother identifying their Legendaries, let alone pick them up. We want to change this.
Not only is this the same in the current game. I see an amulet, I instantly say, "Not another Flavor of Time, or Blackthorns, or the Litany of other crappy amulets. The same could be said for all 2h staves and many other items we could name off. Nobody can sit here and tell me this had ever been delivered to the degree it was stated in this blog.
Several things they did get right in the blog, but the biggest offender is still way too many bad legendary items where you know its an instant soul and you don't even have to ID it. In fact, I would call it an egregious amount of bad legendary items still exist.
Sorry but I disagree, Mr. Day spearheaded loot 2.0 and honestly, it wasn't nearly what was promised. You need to take the fan glasses off, you can go back and look for his posts about his vision of 2.0 loot and how he talked about how the game must move away from:
Stacking Crit hit chance, Crit Hit damage, fixing loot to not be auto salvaged before the item is ID'ed were all stuff he planned to address with loot 2.0.
All three of these still happen on a regular basis. Itemization is only marginally better than what it was in Vanilla, this is fact.
Wyatt Cheng has been out of touch since day one, it is clear to see that he plays a much different Diablo 3 than the players do. I would even throw Don Vu's name into the hat as well as being out of touch.
Maybe calling these guys out is what is needed, nobody is saying these guys aren't talented game designers, what is being said is they're grossly out of touch.
I was very much looking forward to Legendary Gems. I do not like the new upgrade rules. It's taken something I really was excited for and made it such that I'm completely indifferent about them. Such a shame.
Wyatt is quickly becoming one of my least-favorite people out there. He's so fucking out-of-touch it's not even funny.
He is by far the Dev I come to dislike the most, I don't think he plays the game higher than Torment II. He often admits to being a "math guy" but the biggest issue with D3 balance is the lack of synergy. Adding a 0 or dropping a 0 is kinda meaningless in the grand scheme of things, items and skills need a ton more synergy.
I don't think Travis day did a good job with loot 2.0. The music department, gameplay and art direction has always been great with D3, however, the meat and potatoes have been lacking. Yoyo balance continues to be a big problem with this game but I believe this is more of a Blizzard problem company wide than just a D3 problem.
Blue Post : This month
So... Couple weak+ This month = August 19 or 26
Really hoping for the 19th. But doubtful. I guess 26.
Diablo is dead atm. Ive been playing nonstop the last 6 days to get ready for 2.1 and there is no activity. My clan is dead. All the communities im in is dead. General chat is dead, cept the the disease ridden assspammers. And public games hardly got peeps in it
Most people on Reddit believe that the PTR isn't even close to being ready.
For example, Blizzard recently asked the players how they would scale difficulty without simply making massive HP/damage increases. If they were serious about that for Greater Rifts, which most posters had hoped they were, there's no way they could overhaul difficulty scaling in GRifts and still release it "this month." But if they aren't serious about that then we get something that people are NOT excited about: ridiculous HP/damage scaling. Eventually you will reach a GR level where, without an arcane (or lightning) immunity neck you will simply get one-shotted by jailer or thunderstorm. To me, and many others, that sounds pretty fuckin stupid. Getting one-shotted by something you can't avoid doesn't sound fun. It sounds like an asinine "and then we doubled it" gone even more wrong than Jay's Inferno.
Monks are still not exactly in a good place.
There are still numerous sets that need attention. Helltooth, Nat's, and Slayer's come to mind immediately.
The most recent PTR build made legendary gems bad enough that many people won't even use them now. There's tons of backlash about their touted "design philosophy" and how they promised infinitely-upgradable gems and now they are literally hard-capped based on what GRift level you can get to. There have been dozens of suggestions as to how to fix this, but none of them will ever be implemented if they are seriously considering pushing 2.1 live in August.
Be prepared to be disappointed then, there is still one PTR build that we know of before it goes live, this is why I believe it will come either by the 26th or the 2nd.
The PTR build is probably going to be fairly small finishing touches, number tweaks to certain things. If release is at the end of the month, this build has to go live this week which will tell a whole lot. Wyatt Cheng pretty much said they're not touching "Helltooth" because they're not satisfied with Wall of Zombies in general, "Helltooth" wasn't even in the initial plans for a redesign. Invoker set was, it sounds like they'll just tack on a 0 or two and call it a day.
This is probably going to come off very harsh but I just feel the need to rant about Diablo 3. Diablo 3 is a good game but its not managed very well. Some might wonder what I mean by that, well, it is a good game, it plays well but its hampered by severe incompetence by the dev's. This game reminds me of Final Fantasy XI back in 2004-2005, another good game for its time but out of touch dev's prevented the game from ascending to greatness.
I'm going to speculate on a lot here, so take it with a grain of salt.
I believe the reason why the dev's are so out of touch, Wyatt Cheng in particular, is because the dev's don't play the game past Torment I and II. Every nerf and buff to skills has been done under the veneer of "Diversity." The higher a player climbs in torment, the more diversity begins to shrink from both items and skill choices. What I find truly fascinating is the amount of "Double Think" displayed by the dev's when these topics of "diversity" arises. If you only play on Torment I and II, you'll find "diversity" everywhere, if you play on Torment V and VI, you'll find very little "diversity." All of the balance problems from both itemization and skill choices all center around the fact that mob damage and hp scaling is extremely bad in this game.
Why is this?
Well, it is the only difficulty Blizzard knows regarding D3. The more hp and damage mobs have, the more "diversity" shrinks, the current game is all about getting to x or y DPS number and getting x or y toughness number, very little strategy is involved. You can either burn the mobs down before they kill you or you're in the wrong difficulty level. There is no additional effects added to elite affixes that are only present in higher torments. There is nothing different about higher torments other than hyper inflated damage and hp numbers with higher gold/exp/magic find/gold find rewards.
If the dev's consistently played D3 on higher torments, they would quickly realize its the HP and Damage scaling as the only difficulty being at the root of the problems of game balance.
Another major problem with this dev team is they simply don't understand "The middleground." Items are either good or extremely bad and the same could be said about the constant nerfs. I often refer to the scalpel vs sledge hammer analogy, a scalpel is a very precise tool to make small, precise incisions. A hammer is a tool to smash things, what do we see in D3? We see hammers instead of scalpels when it comes to nerfs.
One playstyle on x or y character is absolutely fine in one patch and completely gutted beyond uselessness by the next patch. This has lead many players to hoard items because of the balance musical chair syndrome of blizzard. Players have no idea if their playstyle is going to be viable between each and every patch. What was once salvaged in the past becomes the futures biggest regret in D3.
You might enjoy pew pewing mobs with a lightning build. You might spend 2 months collecting the perfect gear to make your lightning build T6 viable only to have Blizzard come in and say, surprise, this rune is now fire.
You might find an incredibly rare item only to have Blizzard come in and say, surprise, the item is out of line with our development ideas and as a result, the items become instant soul fodder. To add further insult to injury the dev's couldn't come up with an interesting, build changing idea to keep said items relevant and interesting to match their rarity.
I don't have any hope in this dev team, which is a shame because the game they created is a good game, it is just managed horribly. The flaws seem to be so obvious to the players but so oblivious to the dev's. Two years later, we're still having conservations about why 2h weapons need more work. Two years later, we're still right where we started with game balance, only difference is that the goal posts were moved for certain classes. Two years later, we still have critical hit damage and critical hit chance being stacked on every item, even when it was a design goal to move away from this with RoS. Two years later, we still have a game where difficulty is conflated to more damage, more hp, which is even expressed worse in Greater Rifts.
Blizzard needs to really remove all the lame methods of leveling. I don't think they intend people to be lvl 70 in 1.5hrs after a seasonal reset. This is just an oversight by Blizzard.
But if Blizzard were smart they release the great patch before gamescom in germany
Absolutely 100% impossible, the patch is way too far from being done. Many items not yet implemented, monk is still completely broken, Crusader is actually really weak in Greater Rifts, class balance completely off. Just gonna happen. Releasing the patch before Gamescom would not be smart, it would be a disaster and the second biggest mistake ever (after the AH).
I disagree, I watched Modz blowing up g.rifts on a monk, they're getting better and have many buffs in the pipeline. Crusader is fine, the condemn build with the seasonal shield is nasty. The next build should give a very good indication of how close it really is to going live.
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The time of the MMO has passed, I think Blizzard saw the writing on the wall that the genre just isn't nearly as healthy as it was back in 2004.
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More dps= faster mobs die, the less healing is needed. I was stomping T6 without healing, less than a month into RoS. Your healing doesn't scale up to the point to mitigate the insane scaling of higher GR's. No amount of healing is going to deal with the massive spike in damage, healing is a mechanic that only works if you don't have instances of massive spike damage.
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Not only is this the same in the current game. I see an amulet, I instantly say, "Not another Flavor of Time, or Blackthorns, or the Litany of other crappy amulets. The same could be said for all 2h staves and many other items we could name off. Nobody can sit here and tell me this had ever been delivered to the degree it was stated in this blog.
Several things they did get right in the blog, but the biggest offender is still way too many bad legendary items where you know its an instant soul and you don't even have to ID it. In fact, I would call it an egregious amount of bad legendary items still exist.
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Stacking Crit hit chance, Crit Hit damage, fixing loot to not be auto salvaged before the item is ID'ed were all stuff he planned to address with loot 2.0.
All three of these still happen on a regular basis. Itemization is only marginally better than what it was in Vanilla, this is fact.
Wyatt Cheng has been out of touch since day one, it is clear to see that he plays a much different Diablo 3 than the players do. I would even throw Don Vu's name into the hat as well as being out of touch.
Maybe calling these guys out is what is needed, nobody is saying these guys aren't talented game designers, what is being said is they're grossly out of touch.
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I don't think Travis day did a good job with loot 2.0. The music department, gameplay and art direction has always been great with D3, however, the meat and potatoes have been lacking. Yoyo balance continues to be a big problem with this game but I believe this is more of a Blizzard problem company wide than just a D3 problem.
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The PTR build is probably going to be fairly small finishing touches, number tweaks to certain things. If release is at the end of the month, this build has to go live this week which will tell a whole lot. Wyatt Cheng pretty much said they're not touching "Helltooth" because they're not satisfied with Wall of Zombies in general, "Helltooth" wasn't even in the initial plans for a redesign. Invoker set was, it sounds like they'll just tack on a 0 or two and call it a day.
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Or do you think they won't go live in its current iteration.
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I'm going to speculate on a lot here, so take it with a grain of salt.
I believe the reason why the dev's are so out of touch, Wyatt Cheng in particular, is because the dev's don't play the game past Torment I and II. Every nerf and buff to skills has been done under the veneer of "Diversity." The higher a player climbs in torment, the more diversity begins to shrink from both items and skill choices. What I find truly fascinating is the amount of "Double Think" displayed by the dev's when these topics of "diversity" arises. If you only play on Torment I and II, you'll find "diversity" everywhere, if you play on Torment V and VI, you'll find very little "diversity." All of the balance problems from both itemization and skill choices all center around the fact that mob damage and hp scaling is extremely bad in this game.
Why is this?
Well, it is the only difficulty Blizzard knows regarding D3. The more hp and damage mobs have, the more "diversity" shrinks, the current game is all about getting to x or y DPS number and getting x or y toughness number, very little strategy is involved. You can either burn the mobs down before they kill you or you're in the wrong difficulty level. There is no additional effects added to elite affixes that are only present in higher torments. There is nothing different about higher torments other than hyper inflated damage and hp numbers with higher gold/exp/magic find/gold find rewards.
If the dev's consistently played D3 on higher torments, they would quickly realize its the HP and Damage scaling as the only difficulty being at the root of the problems of game balance.
Another major problem with this dev team is they simply don't understand "The middleground." Items are either good or extremely bad and the same could be said about the constant nerfs. I often refer to the scalpel vs sledge hammer analogy, a scalpel is a very precise tool to make small, precise incisions. A hammer is a tool to smash things, what do we see in D3? We see hammers instead of scalpels when it comes to nerfs.
One playstyle on x or y character is absolutely fine in one patch and completely gutted beyond uselessness by the next patch. This has lead many players to hoard items because of the balance musical chair syndrome of blizzard. Players have no idea if their playstyle is going to be viable between each and every patch. What was once salvaged in the past becomes the futures biggest regret in D3.
You might enjoy pew pewing mobs with a lightning build. You might spend 2 months collecting the perfect gear to make your lightning build T6 viable only to have Blizzard come in and say, surprise, this rune is now fire.
You might find an incredibly rare item only to have Blizzard come in and say, surprise, the item is out of line with our development ideas and as a result, the items become instant soul fodder. To add further insult to injury the dev's couldn't come up with an interesting, build changing idea to keep said items relevant and interesting to match their rarity.
I don't have any hope in this dev team, which is a shame because the game they created is a good game, it is just managed horribly. The flaws seem to be so obvious to the players but so oblivious to the dev's. Two years later, we're still having conservations about why 2h weapons need more work. Two years later, we're still right where we started with game balance, only difference is that the goal posts were moved for certain classes. Two years later, we still have critical hit damage and critical hit chance being stacked on every item, even when it was a design goal to move away from this with RoS. Two years later, we still have a game where difficulty is conflated to more damage, more hp, which is even expressed worse in Greater Rifts.
TL:DR: Good game, managed by fools.
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We'll probably see WD seasonals in this patch.
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Don't expect them to stop.