DiabloFans

Quote from Molster

Twice, (three.. but ... read)

It's ok, I forgive you. I realize that Act 1 will be easy content, but I was just curious if there was anyone that actually died a lot during the beta. Nobody has. This basically tells me that nobody has any real evidence that health globes are a successful mechanic yet.

I set some time aside today to watch a playthrough or two from Jarune's thread after getting some feedback from this thread to see if my opinions on health globes were dumb and misguided.

After leaving them running off to the side while doing other things, I only found one segment where I felt the whole health globe + cooldown based potion marriage thing was a big disaster.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iuCfbrWAzw

24:50 - 25:50

It looks like poison is going to rape us if this is how health is going to work in this game. lol.

I was happy to see that they have a few leaper type mobs in Act 1, at least in this playthrough. I wasn't happy to see that the player had to walk in a straight line in one direction for almost a minute because of the circumstances. Other than bringing his barbarian into a pack of mobs at melee range, he didn't really make any mistakes. He also wasn't presented with an opportunity to eat a health globe either. He was forced to just aimlessly run in one direction because of the potion cooldown.

I'm starting to wonder if there is any way we could petition to have some Act 2 gameplay thrown together and have them release it to us or the fan sites. It would give the CM's an actual job to do if you ask me. Anybody have any ideas as to how we could ask for some?

It's worth mentioning that we also had phenomenal communication from the SC2 team over those few years. There were a few times where they held back a little bit to prevent information overload, but still. It was a long haul but it was a lot more managable. We got everything from Karune's constant Q&A's, to receiving constant feedback from players that helped theorycraft for the devs and finally a decent number of gameplay videos being released to us. Those battle reports were solid too. I can't remember the last time they added background information on the beastiary of Diablo 3 on the website.Outside of Blizzcon, did we ever see videos of a little PvP action? hell, even some recent PvE stuff?

Setting all of the new gameplay system changes aside, why haven't we seen any extra gameplay videos from, let's say, Act 2? It wouldn't kill them to show some gameplay from Act 2, seeing as though it's still probably the desert setting people like me played as far back as Blizzcon 09.

I'm happy that some players are getting what they want, but I think it's laughable how we still need a 30 second cooldown in the first place. This is a PvE game, why exactly am I being pigeonholed into 6 skills in the first place again? What's the purpose? is the issue because they want to encourage their runes system and using 6 runed skills?

Now in PvP, I completely understand why you should have a system where you have to pick and choose 6 skills before a match. That makes all the sense in the world to me.

I mean, honestly, am I playing Guild Wars here or am I playing Diablo? If they are going to take a page from GW, they could just emulate what GW does and be done with it. All of the groundwork has been laid down.

Quote from CasmX

People that are arguing D2 whites are the same as D3 whites are making an invalid argument. In D2, white items still had value.

D2 whites could be imbued into quality rares. D2 whites could be socketed to make god-tier runewords. D2 whites (armor especially) could often times be sold for the vendor gold cap sale price, paying for repair bills and gambling. In D3, this won't be the case. Bashiok has already stated that white and grey items are not meant to be picked up and even went as far to say that if players started picking them up, they would be devalued even further to ensure they no longer will. They're just loot confetti to make other items more compelling.

Your post depresses me. Because it's all true. So much wasted potential, I swear to god. lol

Imagine how hillarious if they patched WoW and they suddenly made it so gray and white items in WoW were suddenly not worth money at vendors. Hello? Ridiculous much? Are you even thinking about the economic implications? Or maybe they are and this is just a pathetic fix in response to lazy economy design. "Oh, we're scared of gold inflation and can't design our way around it, Eliminate vendor trash!"

After replying to a few people in another thread talking about health globes and potions, I'm just curious to hear how many beta testers have had their characters die in beta.

You can mention how many times you have died, what you think your general skill level is and even what classes you think are most susceptible to dying.

Quote from afkalmighty

stuff

The difference between you and I is this.

I simply provided very specific changes to the current game in very general broad terms. I did this to do something constructive as opposed to just saying "Hai guys! I think this game sux!. bai bai!"

You, on the other hand, sound somewhat offended that I actually proposed changes to their game, simply based on a number of posts either devs or other players have made. You act like I'm offending their intelligence by disagreeing with their opinions.

I've already wrote enough in my OP and I honestly don't feel like writing more to directly counter-argue the posts your talking about. If you think that i should write even more than what I wrote already, you are daft. I purposely didn't quote anything BECAUSE I had to write a lot and some people have lives and I understand that they didn't have enough time to read it all as it was without quotes. I'd be a hell of a lot more interested in hearing why YOU disagree with what I've put on the table. I have no interest in you being a mouthpiece for the people I personally disagree with.

Just by you saying "But this guy wrote a post about this! He's right! You're wrong!" is a waste of my time. Also you saying "You are obligated to respond to this post that you already told me that you disagree with!" is a waste of my time. I posted plenty of great ideas that could be in the game or could already be in the game. I didn't even say my way was the right way. I just clearly stated how my vision of Diablo 3 would be.

I apologize for reading in between the lines. Some people are capable of doing that.

Quote from Azjenco

Wow, good read. You've thought about all of this quite thoroughly. I'm not going to reply to everything, only the things I strongly agree or disagree with. If I don't reply to it then I don't feel strong enough to have anything to add.

You make some good points and I appreciate you throwing your opinions in a similar format like mine.

To be honest with you, I completely forgot that they had a campfire. That was pretty awesome in a number of little ways. I also found myself being really interested in the old D# website. The presentation and the lore too. Refering to the static towns, I would be also interested to see some phasing in cities and fights as well. I mostly refering to the physical layouts of cities with regards to where the exits were and how the npc's and graphics were always static. Act 1's camp had a random exit path but it still had the camp in the same layout.

I can see where you are coming from what you talk about health globes. You almost see it as a pacing mechanic and an incentive to reposition in the middle of a fight. I just see getting to them more of an problem for ranged classes than melee ones. I mean If I kill a mob as a monk by punching him in the face, and he drops a globe, it's right in front of me, isn't it? Still, it's my understanding that if you're in a party, and one guy picks one up, everybody gets health.

As for potions, I just think having random luck of depending on globes to drop to get health back is bad design. I didn't bother to explain this correlation later on when I spoke about dodge, but dodge is in the exact same boat. It's why at some points in WoW, healers hated how it was harder to heal, let's say, a Druid Bear Tank (was previously a very dodge dependent tank) as opposed to paladins or warriors. Why? Because Druids would sometimes take random large spikes in damage.

But hey, since this isn't my OP, I'll talk about an 800 pound elephant that I alluded to in my post, but didn't want to mention for a number of reasons. League of Legends. The game has MANY MANY MANY players and is very popular for the casual crowd and it's hardcore scene is pretty healthy as well. They recently completely REMOVED dodge from their game. There's just too many design reasons as to why dodge is a bad concept. Now, you could argue that, obviously, League of Legends is a PvP game and D3 is a PvE game, but luck should be a very small factor in determining a player's death. In Diablo 2, dodge was NOT a big deal. Diablo 2 was fine with having dodge play a minor role. I can see what they are doing by trying to make Barbs armor heavy and making Monks dodge heavy, but don't be surprised if Monks just end up being better tanks than Barbarians later on. It will be because of exponentially increasing your tanking capabilities with high dodge stats.

I agree that my stats system isn't perfect, But I would play it over the current system. Mostly because loot is too boring now.

1. Be a certain level
2. Wait for loot to drop.
3. Equip it
4. .....

The only hurdle is item level. There's no other hurdles to cross to use badass stuff. This monster slaying game just become too much like WoW. In fact, it's going to be a smaller dumbed down version of it in every facet.

As for GW2 and micro-transactions, that game will probably be more clean and more fun as well, ironically. lol. Too bad we don't know when neither game is coming out.

Quote from italofoca

Even in normal and in the veyr begnning of the game, health globes is one of the coolest features of the game. There many cool situations and strategies evolving the globe mechanic that occur even in the first atc and in the easiest mod.

Every stream I've seen can be described pretty generally in one sentence. "I'm watching a guy mow through monsters in mostly 1-2 hits with no sense of urgency."

I'm not disagreeing with you. Maybe I'm just wrong about health globes. I'm just not feeling the excitement or seeing the urgency at all in the beta. Hopefully by act 3 there will be some sort of urgency, because I find myself being more interested in the rest of the game's presentation,like the art assets. :/

Would it kill Blizzard to release some footage of act 2? I mean honestly?

I guess the better question is "How many times have you guys died in beta?" I'm going to go post a thread asking that question right now. I'm very curious to hear answers about that now.

Yes.

I explained a little bit about why white are important in my wall of text thread. It's a pretty common thing to have in games like this. Not sure why they would think of re-designing the wheel.

Quote from Mac_an_tSaoir

would cause +3 more months of delay. Fuck it.

I lol'ed.

Well OP, not to sound sarcastic or anything, but you have to realize that there's a good chance a good number of people on the Diablo dev team probably didn't play LoD very much. Lesser known features from that old ass game such as weapon swapping probably won't make it into D3.:(.

i don't see a problem with bringing it back though. it's not like people would solely use it just to store another weapon/off-hand combo without using inventory space. It could probably add to the combat and gameplay as opposed to detract from it.

I'll respond to a few posts because they put the time in to give their two cents on my two cents. I just finished the damn thing. lol

Quote from Azjenco

Quote from asfastasican

The least I can do is post what I posted in under a day to give my opinion on something that's supposedly taken 5 years to make.

To be fair, suggesting a few ideas is a whole lot faster than developing an entire game. And the process of implementing said ideas also takes quite a while to get into game.

Agreed. I perfectly understand it takes a lot of time to design the game. Hell, my beef is really with the gameplay design. The audio guys, the art guys and the cinematic guys are phenomenal. Very professional too.

I just facepalm extremely hard when core gameplay systems get thrown up for redesign SEVERAL years after being put in. There's a number of very successful games which started developement after Diablo 3's was started and have since been released and have made great money. They are already pretty big successes. This game needs to get out the door!

Quote from Iccuwan

Thank you for this interesting post, you have some good ideas like class specific potions. Looking forward to reading the rest of it.

However I don't think having stat requirements on items is a good idea. Wizard get nothing from strength, but are forced to invest on it to be able to wear armor. Or would intellect armor have very low strength requirement? Same with dexterity, wizards need it for hit only while barbarians and demon hunters get the hit for ''free'' with the weapon requirement investment. In this model spell hit should come from intellect.

I agree with your opinion on my stats system. I literally spent one minute asking myself "well what should strength do? what should dex do? well if that's like this, tehn we would have to have three damage ratios... ap sp and weapon... and..." I'm perfectly fine with you seeing flaws in my one-minute shake-and-bake design philosophy. lol

My beef with the stats system doesn't come from being being a pompous ass. I really don't understand what was wrong with the current system and why they put an even worse substitute in. Diablo 2's system is just superior in every way. That's just my honest opinion.

Quote from afkalmighty

I first intended to write what I didn't like about it but then changed my mind and just slapped in some mild humor but if you insist...

1. I read those so-called well written posts. Doesn't make me any more confident that the stats system will be even semi-interesting for me. Now if the combat looked more fun than it currently is, I wouldnt worry about not worrying about stats, but yeah.

2. There's a reason why you're not seeing any of this" content" and why players like me and designers alike would make these assumptions. It's not because they are story-related and that they would be spoilers. Sorry. It's just because the game is not ready for release when it should have been. I'm fully aware that I'm "making assumptions" but then again I'm mostly going on subjects that Blizzard has brought to our attention as problems for no good reason. Half of the things they bring to our attention are very easy design problems. They shouldn't be using it as excuses as to why the game isn't out yet.

3. I realize I could have been more civil and more objective, but I purposely didn't go that route. I've been a hell of a lot more respectfully to Blizzard and other companies that have made games that I've played in the past. Not to toot my own horn or anything, but I believe that you, and the other passionate players that play games religiously even just for 6 months after a game's release should be listened to VERY CLOSELY. It's a respect thing. I realize that I'm posting to the Diablo Fans community, some random internet passerbys, the mods and MAYBE the Diablo devs. If the Diablo devs so read some of this, I hope they read it with a grain of salt and at most, take my negative tone as a slap on the wrist. Trust me. Good developers know how to take their lumps. Sometimes you do yourself a lot of good by realizing your shortcomings and just laughing at yourself.

Quote from italofoca

I took the time too read the full post. I know this is a forum and everyone is here to give his opnion. But you're sounding really arrogant in some points

...

Health globes requires more strategy and skill then using potions. You simply didn't got the system and criticized it harshly.

Oh, you better believe I'm acting arrogant. Just like I said to the last guy, I purposely didn't sugar coat this for anybody. I'm not on anyone's payroll. This is probably the first time I felt the need to jot something this arrogant down on an internet post about game design. Respect is earned, especially when you already have a game like Diablo 2 thats been polished for around ten years to work on as a foundation. Other companies do great things with less. Starcraft 2 is a good game as well. You take it or leave it.

Still you could just not take me as seriously, seeing as though I mocked myself in my post probably as much as I scolded the devs. Just read a few sections with some cool ideas I had and move on.

And about health globes, they are just as automatic as collecting gold is. The difference between automating gold and automatically picking up globes is that one directly affects your combat performance and one is just a chore. The act of clicking a potion has more "Strategy" than picking up a red blob of whatever from the ground anyday. Why is that? Because they drop at random and you accidently run into them anyways! lol

Even the devs have mentioned that players sometimes feel like they get screwed when they "get a string of bad luck" and don't pick up any globes. Enough said.

Reading this makes me feel like they are going to bring back the Necro for a D3 expansion just for the shock factor. That guy was just so damn popular and a badass in general. I believe you could havea WD and Necro fighting side by side, even if they are similar classes.

To most players, Druids felt like the odd man out. Not really sure why. I know I feel that he was, at least.

Quote from Trombone

It's a bit scary to see how much a bit of text hurts peoples eyes in here, people really are illiterate. When a guy like you who clearly has a lot of passion for something, and put a lot of work into writing this, you get shunned and mocked for it. The things people have already replied here are embarrassing. Thankfully there are one of two people in here that have (mentally) matured past the age of 14, so you might get some serious response. I wish I could tell you where to actually start a good discussion and get constructive response, but all I can say is that it wont happen here.

Quote from speedloader1

I'm desperately looking for a good reason to read all of this.

Really?

It's pretty funny to see some people troll after I've posted possible balance changes for previous games (Team Fortress 2, Starcraft 2, WoW, etc) on their respective forums, just to hear nothing from them when my suggestions silently make it into the game. Most of this stuff is really just common sense put into very simple English.

It really didn't take me long at all to write this, but it doesn't matter to me if anybody reads it either. If you don't want to read it, no big. I wouldn't have put everything in spoilers tags or mocked myself in my own post if it did matter to me.

And on the subject of me applying for a Blizzard job, I doubt any Blizzard job outsider of being me being an major stockholder or owner would be more profitable for me at this point in my life. The least I can do is post what I posted in under a day to give my opinion on something that's supposedly taken 5 years to make.

Quote from Kanhe

Christ...
You have too much free time, me thinks.

Every single point I wrote took about 10 seconds of thought, each.

Writing it all out is what took time. I'll get around to finishing the last parts soon I'm sure.

He's just incompetent as a CM. He knows better than to hint at big developments then troll everybody, while acting as if he's not trolling. It's just unprofessional.

Did any of you honestly think those two things were going to actually be apart of the game? I honestly thought they were just quick little additions for beta testing only.

They don't add anything to gameplay. As much as some of you guys hate it, the choice between vendoring trash and not vendoring trash is a decision you make as a player. Do you want to spend a little extra time to make a little extra gold, or not? Having these items would remove that decision completely. You would get bored of the game faster.

I'm done with waiting. I have other games to tide me over, so besides me coming to this site to read on news and post, I'mmostly playing another game that's in beta and having a blast.

I guess in a long term sense, diablo 3 will help me determine if i just skip Heart of the Swarm or not. It will help me come to terms with whether or not buying future Blizzard releases will be mandatory.