DiabloFans

My friends and I took a leisurely lunch off-campus which consisted of delicious burritos. Upon returning, I rapidly maneuvered to the library's bathroom. Moments after becoming comfortable there I whipped out my iPhone and hit refresh on my perpetually-open diablofans.com tab on safari. Between the announcement and being status-post burrito lunch, it was probably one of the most satisfying restroom experiences of my medical education.

The next day I matched into my #1 program, so it's been a legendary week.

Ironically, monday after finding out that I had matched--but not yet knowing where I would be going--I wanted to update my status on diablofans.com to reflect that I was excited to have matched and hoped that D3 would be released prior to the start of residency. My computer was glitchy and wouldn't let me change my status, but regardless, I got my wish!

Hey thanks for making the stream. I enjoyed it--you guys were pretty entertaining (watched till you guys were hitting the skeleton king with the useless bells for the first time).

^^Do hope they either remove that skill or optimize it

Cheers

Not having played the beta and stayed away from the news for quite some time I may be dated in my understanding. I am curious how the individual drops have been integrated because I see this as an important component in the mf/loot/farming group vs solo play discussion.

As I understand, each player gets and sees their own drops, without being able to see the drops of the other players in the group. What I don't know--and everyone else might not know this yet as well--is how the quantity of monster drops scales with the number of players in a game... I realize this is unclear so let me propose an example.

Say a solo player kills 500 monsters which inhabit an area and each monster has a 2% chance to drop some wearable loot. On average said player should find 10 items every time he clears said area (these numbers are all used for ease of mathematics as I have no idea what actual drop rates and monster populations will be). So: one player, 500 monsters, 2% drop rate => 10 items

Now imagine a group of 4 players kills the same 500 monsters, how many items does each player find? Are four times as many items drop so each player gets 10? Does each drop the same number of items so each player gets 2.5? Somewhere in between?

My understanding from D2 was that the number of players in the game improved the quality of the items which were dropped fairly considerably while not having such a strong effect on the number of items dropped (per monster)--Hell Baal dropped 4-6 items almost every time he died (maybe 1-2 fewer items soloing vs a full 8 player game), but in the game of 8 he tended to way better gear. Will the opposite be true in D3?

As far as I understand, the skeleton king is the "boss," if you will, of the beta and reliably drops decent loot. I don't know the exact details and hope someone can fill me in, but assume that a solo player killing him receives one rare, one magic item, and two normal items. My question to the community is: if a pack of 4 players kills him, how much decent loot does each player get? Does each player get a rare, a magic item and 2 normal items? Are the same 4 items split between the players so everyone gets one? Does he drop 6-8 items so everyone gets 1 or 2 items?

I feel that the answer is hugely significant in this discussion because if he drops the rare, magic, and 2 normal items for each player, then it is advantageous (from an efficiency standpoint) to MF in groups if he can reliably be killed faster by a team of 4 than one player soloing.

How dropped loot quality and quantity [as well as game difficulty] scales with player party size is highly significant to this discussion of how MF sharing or calculations will effect the viability of magic-finding in groups vs alone <-- My point

Can anyone share their observations from the beta or information known from blizzard representatives?

Trebek

Here's my PvE Barbarian build:

http://us.battle.net...XSRj!aZe!bZZccZ

If I planned this correctly, this barbarian should be able to go toe-to-toe with large groups of enemies and mitigate damage received through life leeching and armor increasing skills. Life gained from Rend/Blood Lust, Revenge/Provocation, and Pound of Flesh will hopefully keep up with the damage sustained. Also, superstition and war cry/impunity will help with reducing damage taken.

Ideally this Barb would operate within a group composed of some glass cannon types who can stand behind him and really lay some hurt on the enemies while he keeps them distracted.

My worry with this build is that it lacks any movement skills. I wonder if I am letting my nostalgia factor too heavily into my inclusion of Call of the Ancients at the expense of something more tactically useful.

My MacBook Pro will hopefully run Diablo 3 well enough... And long ago I decided to not even attempt to obtain a D3 beta key (unless the game will release after July 1, 2012) because I'd rather just play the final, polished product.

So I'm mostly using Xbox 360 for game-playing at present.

The flavor of the month is Dark Souls with occasional "vacations" in Arkham City when I need to play as a hero who isn't so damnably vulnerable/helpless... Still need to finish off AC Revelations if I can. Recently completed Battlefield 3 but still enjoy helping out friends or a casual game now and again. On that note, if anyone needs assistance/advice/etc. over xbox live, I'd be happy to help out a fellow Diablofan.

So much tension and all this before we have any confirmation on how this issue will be handled in game. I read about 65% of this thread which I think was enough to conclude that Equinox is against people being able to examine another player's gear without their permission (not trying to call you out, or flame you, just noting that it appears that you are championing the side of hidden gear).

Among the points raised for being opposed to gear visibility is the concept of players with non-cookie-cutter/-mainstream/-uber gear having their game experience negatively affected. This is a bunch of worry and stress over nothing. Allow me to ramble.

Some people act like assholes in life and in online games. Diablo III is supposed to have cooperative online PvE. If the people you are playing with don't have any interest in cooperating with and helping you and the team move forward in the game and/or as characters, simply don't play with them! If someone joins a game, sees that another player has what is in their opinion sub-optimal gear and then leaves: that's great, now nobody has to play with that jerk! Also, trolls will give everyone shit for nothing; it's just something to expect when one enters the interwebs. I don't advocate putting up with them, instead, avoid them.

Lots of fuckwits play online games. Blizzard appears to have already taken away a number of ways that they can be obnoxious (separating PvE from PvP, for example). I really think that hiding gear for the sake of avoiding discrimination, rudeness, etc. is bizarre especially in a "mature" game for adults. If someone is so shallow, stupid, and close-minded that they wouldn't try to participate in cooperative play with someone because the person had "bad gear," I would so much rather figure that out before I started playing with them. Why not let those who aren't going to be fun people to play with naturally select themselves? Hiding one's gear so that one has the opportunity to spend more time playing with dicks is kinda silly...


It appears that in playing through normal and maybe nightmare, the difficulty will be such that suboptimal or even crappy gear will be just fine. Even if one is forced to play with random strangers, it shouldn't be impossible to then make friends with the people who are there to have fun and treat people nicely. With millions of players and good fansites like diablofans with genuine people who are there to enjoy the game and help everyone out, a normal person shouldn't find it impossible to find up to 3 others who can act and treat others like adults and enjoy playing a video game together...

To summarize, something which could potentially allow assholes to reveal themselves earlier than they otherwise would is not necessarily bad on the basis of that trait.

Any chance I can run this game on a Late 2008 Mac Book Pro using Boot Camp / Windows? I think the minimum video card is the 8800 and the one in this machine is either a 9600 or a 9400... Sorry it's just the first game I've considered playing that is in the league that might not run on my machine.

Big ups to the tomb viper for throwing out the Shocker! "Two in th--"

Oh wait I forgot, I'm not that big of a douce bag.

But seriously, the whole facebook "likes" thing is getting absurd (<--or almost any other adjective for stupid or ridiculous). Bribing people to advertise your game by rewarding them with little packets of data which effectively function as advertisements in and of themselves... I really hope they are actually making a good game when they need a break from trying their hardest to generate hype...

I didn't read any of this, but I think Mystic (or just being in a neutral area, like town) without a fee should be fine. Or maybe have a nominal fee (that scales with rune level, not with the number of uses) to remove a little bit of gold from the economy.

I worry that socketing or desocketing runes might get so expensive that players are discouraged from doing so... which means they are less likely to experiment and figure out what is most fun for them. I remember in WoW being really neurotic about figuring my talent spec out way before I even started a character for fear that I would incur the increasing fees of the talent respecs by making mistakes. I don't think that sort of increasing fee system feels like it fits in a Diablo game, especially in the beginning when everyone (who didn't play beta so they could only play the finished product) is just experimenting and trying stuff out because it's cool. Also keep in mind that in games like WoW, one can reasonably expect to obtain certain items which almost allows an entire character's leveling progression to be planned in terms of skills, items, and talents. Diablo has a lot more randomness built in and I feel like skills and skill runes to some extent may be the player's way of balancing their character and the random gear that they have found.

I can understand having things like adding sockets and removing gems from sockets be a little bit more expensive because gear is essentially a way to confer passive bonuses to the player (especially if the prices are scaled by the quality of the gem and item). But discouraging players from experimenting with all the iterations of their currently owned skills and skill runes seems like it's the opposite of what Blizzard is all about...

Sorry if this made no sense, I am so tired. Goodnight!

Quote from Jamoose

I gotta say that Torchlight was a shitty game. Yes, that game was shit. I admit that i played it and was somewhat excited about it but only for 2 days really.

I couldn't agree more. Thank you for putting that so cleanly.

On topic: I knew going into playing Torchlight that it was a game which was created to profit from the announcement of D3 and the universal knowledge that there would be a huge gap between D3's announcement and release. The game seriously felt like a cheap bootleg of the D3 gameplay trailer except that I had the added bonus of being able to control the character on-screen.

This thread is ridiculous, it is clear that most if not all of the similarities mentioned in the OP between torchlight and D3 were shown in D3 before having existed in TL.

I think for the next topic we should discuss how much the movie Fern Gully stole from Avatar...

When I tried downloading the beta client, my max download rate was 30 KB/sec. This was ridiculous so I decided to see if I could torrent it. I succeeded and achieved minimum download rates around 400 KB/sec. I am almost certain that this is legal because I was downloading from the frogster servers...

If anyone else is interested in trying for a much faster download: http://burnbit.com/t..._GER_101223_exe is the site where I got the torrent from.

I'll be online a bit this evening as a seeder with unlimited upload rate if anyone wants to get the client really fast.

If any part of this topic is not allowed, I apologize in advance. My goal was really to help the other Diablo Fans get online and using their beta keys much faster than they would have otherwise been doing. Cheers

Most Recent Blue Post: Bash suggested that we shouldn't rule out a 2011 release. Even still...

My schedule allows for me to be very happy with a D3 release that occurs before May 2012, and I think it has a good chance of being "done" by then. If it comes out after that, oh well, I'll still enjoy it when I have time.

I think we are down to the home stretch for this game's release (like the last year or so of waiting)... And as we've waited so long as it is, it's not really that much more time.

But if you sit around and bitch and moan all day about the lack of release date or beta; or if you can't handle the thought of a Q1 2012 instead of a Q4 2011 release, you're doing it wrong. Many of us have waited for D3 for a decade or more, another Quarter(!) is insignificant especially if it means that they will be that much closer to putting out a product worth the wait and the Diablo franchise logo.

My suggestion to the true Diablo Fans, many of whom are probably like myself and working at careers and succeeding at adulthood: spend the next year working hard to improve your life. Blizzard will reward you with Diablo 3 before you know it and you'll really enjoy it after having worked so hard...

Oh yeah and video games are supposed to be a fun diversion. So if you get your panties in a wad and throw a temper tantrum because "Bwizzard won't rewease D3 soon enough!" I think that you have personal problems. Maybe try to prioritize your life and work toward that antiquated virtue of delayed gratification.

It chuckles me that G4 lists the release date of D3 as April 1, 2011.

And I am not sure if any of the PvP footage was new, I could have sworn that I saw most of those scenes in various videos released around Blizzcon '10. Though I imagine if they were playing the same build and only had 3 playable characters without rune spell effects... probably a lot of similar-looking combat sequences.

Quote from Zhar

I play Battlefield Bad Company 2, not BF2 though.

What platform?

I play on Xbox 360

And do actually respond to the OP; no I do not play.