DiabloFans

Quote from "Bellend" »

How about giving WOTLK a try before you make any judgements on the game, since you haven't played the game yet. :rolleyes:

Eh, it is pretty much true though. As a casual friendly game, wow is exploding. There is so much you can accomplish with low skills and low playtime now that it is turning into just another regular game, except that it will never end. As a hardcore player's game, it has all but died.

The disconnect created by the "hard-mode" feature is quite disappointing as a former HC player. The loss of the connection between encounter difficulty and storyline was just too much for me. If i'm going to put 20+ hours a week into a raid, I want to beat different shit than joe who puts in 8, not the same content just harder. Granted some of the hardmodes changed the fight so drastically that it really was a whole different encounter, but those were few to the whole. The new colleseam seems to be a step in the right direction with completely separate instances, but I'd have to see two different raids for each content patch to bring me back.

PvP has almost always been muffed up in wow. One of my favorite things to think on, is how a blue touted that they had an employee with a PhD in math who wrote his discertation on ratings systems in video games, and yet we've seen the many failed iterations of the arena ranking system. What school did he write this paper for? Arena Balance has also always been whacky. Twos has never been quite right, and it is probably good they're starting to discourage it. If they can create more parity in the class balance I might come back to the game just for arena, because it is a cool concept, but rerolling over & over to get an edge sucks.

I was PvPing in wow way back in the Tauren Mill / Southshore days, and the early days of waiting outside the wsg queue to get into a game. I also participated in every season since S1, except for the most recent one S6 (Quit after S5) Nostalgia aside, the best time I can rememer is just after they implimented cross-realm battlegrounds. I participated in some truely epic Premade Vs Premade games, that still have me wishing for those times back. The last I knew of Premades in BGs, there were retardedly long queue times, which made it impractical to play. If they can get a GOOD matchmaking & rating system up for BGs (at least WSG & AB, the other ones can fuck off) they'd have an awesome player retention feature.

For me, wow is kind of like looking at a cardiogram. From a distance it looks fine (Casual) but as you get closer and closer - linearization - it starts to look more and more like a straight line and dead (Hardcore view). I'm really interested to see what they do with the next gen MMO. Start off right where WoW left off with a super casual friendly game, or begin where WoW began, sort of catering to a specific type of player.

Quote from "PhrozenDragon" »

I meant that if I go to the Sorceress teleport page and look at it, there will be a list at the bottom showing what items come with teleport on them (in this case, that's just enigma). Likewise if I go to Summon Skeleton, I will find a complete list of all unique, set and runeword items that have +to Summon skeleton. That way you can easily see what items will benefit your build.

Ok, that makes a lot of sense. I'm thinking it would be better to leave off class specific item bonuses from the skill pages, IE like wands giving potential bonuses to skeletons. With the exception of skills like Holy Shield, that only appear very rarely on items, I think that might deserve a small note. I don't know if there are any other skills that do that, HS is the only one I know of off the top of my head.

Quote from "Seth" »

Where is this skill progression table-type-thing?

Edit-

I'll go check the Summit I guess

You probably already have something similar, but I found a small tool that let me Copy-paste a table from The Summit, and it returns the data but separated by pipes, nice and simple to throw into a table: http://excel2wiki.net/ I'm not a fan of having to insert large amounts of formatting manually so that seems pretty useful to me, and let me build a table quickly and easily.

I threw together a test/sample table in a few mins on my Talk Page (Wasn't sure where to do a test/sample page.) Obviously color standards would help, but I don't think it looks half-bad. Can maybe split it into two groups of 10 like Seth has on the older Hydra page, but I don't think that's necessary. If it goes towards the bottom of the skill page, the long 20 table shouldn't interfere with anything.

Phrozen, for the +skills items, do you mean things like Enigma adding to teleport or Bloodletter adding to sword mastery & whirlwind? It might be good for the few skills that can cross classes via runewords to have a special note signifying this, with the item page linked of course.

The only other thing I can think of, is if you're doing a template is to include fields for whether a skill is Active or Passive, and the damage school. (School is actually already used on the new hydra page.)

I plan on picking up Win 7 when I build a new PC this winter. I don't really have the need or the patience to set up a linux system. From what I've gathered from a friend who works for MS (Quality assurance dept, not dev) is that 7 supposedly is closer to a "Ground up" build than any other recent OS release. As evidenced here and from what he's said, they've also cut out a lot of the useless frills that plagued Vista.

I've messed around with Visa on other people's rigs, and my god is that a system hog. I've seen it consume about 700 megs of RAM just in self-maintenance. My XP uses somewhere around 100 with no additional software running. I know that you can "Shell out" vista and manually turn off a slew of useless features to decrease mem usage, but thats obviously not an ideal trait in an OS. I like things that work out of the box, so thats what i'm hoping I'll get with 7. If not, my friend is going to have a fun time answering his phone for a while

What constitutes a diminishing return cap for a skill page though? For conviction it is easy because it hard locks at 150, but most other skills continue to increase at much lower rates.

For example, critical strike, every point below 7 increases the value at least 3 percent, between 7 and 13 is 2-3 percent, and every point after 13 is 1 or less. For all practical purposes, the skill caps out at 77% at level 42. What parts of this information should be on the wiki? For this skill it seems to have 2 split points, through the second is much harsher.

Info came from http://www.d2items.com/skills.php so it may be flawed, but i doubt it.

Another one that abuses a game bug (I'm assuming that grush is a bug?) is when ethereal armors get an additional 50% armor when you socket them using the cube. Only really useful for mercenaries, but giving them armors with > 3.5k defense can make them pretty beefy. This is used an absolute ton on ladder games, especially for exile shields.

I don't really approve of cheats, when they're left in the game for so long they just sort of become part of the game, since everyone is doing it. Its sort of like driving 5 mph over the limit and not getting tickets. Its not right, but it is sort of socially accepted because of its widespread use.

I'm looking forward to some more technical information about the game. Such as some more info on just how item drops are going to work, what system they are planning to have a more stable and newbie friendly game economy, and of course more info on the classes and their skills and resource systems.

Lets not forget about d2 either. We haven't really seen much at all on the 1.13 front besides news of delays. I'm personally hoping that they release at least a partial patch-note listing for 1.13 but I don't really see that being very probable.

It will be interesting to see how slashing strike, double strike and whirlwind interact with each other. If they're all cumulative you could end up with a nice little chance to destroy everything with one swing. I doubt that will be the eventual case, but we'll probably see it for a while in the beta or early versions of the game.

There is a lot you can do in D2 to keep from being trapped. A lot of it has to do with slowing monsters and/or being proactive about it. I hope that D3 can still make monsters surround and overwhelm you, it makes it a bit more challanging.

I liked how in D1, you could actually use a corner as a tactical point, Sun Tsu "Death Ground" style. Of course, part of the strategy was that only 3 monsters at a time could attack you

One thing that I would like to see remain out of the runes is flat damage/defense enhancers. It just sort of smacks of a lack of ingenuity and creativity.

Something that I think would be cool, would be runes that link certain skills together.

Hammer-Cleave link. Links your cleave and Hammer of the Ancients abilities, Making your hammer ability strike two targets, but it's damage is reduced. The amount reduced decreases as your cleave skill increases.

That is sort of a dull example. Its sort of like a selective synergy. I was thinking of the D1 elemental spell when i thought of this, and how it took the fireball spell, and gave it a homing mechanic. Something that does that, either by linking skills or just adding effects would be pretty awesome.

Quote from "italofoca" »

Thats pretty simple to resolve.
One form is calculate the lifesteal amount based in the weapon speed. For exemple, when the player use a maul and have lifesteal it gets something like +100% bonus in the aritmethical lifesteal value. In other hand when the player uses a dagger (fast attack speed) and have lifesteal it gets something like -20% penalty in the aritmethical lifesteal value. I know attack speed bonus would still imporve it, but as long is it's balance i don't see the problem.
Another option is put delay im the lifesteal proc. For xemple, the lifesteal can only proc from 5 and 5 seconds, so no matter the speed you hit you only get it in a certain period of time. In this case the attack speed will not modify it.

I think you hit on a good idea with your first point. Having your life stealing capabilities scale with weapon speed would be a good idea. However, what if it is changed to be a percentage of your HP that is stolen, not of the damage you deal? That would make balancing it much easier, and would even be easier to balance that fixed amounts of life stolen.

The delay idea.... I really don't like it. It would be a mix of too complicated or underpowered to have it on an internal cooldown. It is much simplier to have it be on every hit, but for very small amounts. Life Stealing shouldn't make or break your character, what it should do is add a little flavor to the gameplay.

What I would like to see Life stealing turn into, is it steals ~1-2% of your total hp each hit (Possibly less than 1% if attacks are really fast, or even scale the % to your attack speed) and to keep it to High end or "Rare" gear. That should keep it a pretty interesting but non mandatory item mod.

There are a few very old (1 yr) threads here about this, but I was interested in a discussion of it, and didn't think necromancing the old ones was appropriate.

It looks like Bashiok said in an interview with incgamers that:

Well, health and mana leach may not come back. There's balance issues, and they may not make it into Diablo III

I have mixed feelings on this. In D2, life leach was absolutely mandatory for almost any melee character to have a chance in hell. Without it you just get torn to pieces. This wasn't the most fun part of the game, but it actually doesn't work all too poorly. In D1, it was far more optional, and only served to lesson your dependency on the pots. I much preferred how it worked in D1 to D2.

I'm pretty enamored with the idea of stealing life from your foes. It is just such a cool concept. It really adds to the whole "hero" feeling, where not only do you smash many times your number of foes, but you increase your power from their lifeforce. I hope it makes a comeback in D3, but more of an optional stat that is just kind of fun to play around with.

Quote from "lurked" »

You can't simply say: "They have tons of money, they can work faster!" The more people work together, the more complicated it gets to manage, and you end up having less control over it. Too many people working on the same game wouldn't necessarily make the game ready earlier, and it would probably generate more bugs, since too many people works on different parts of the game.

Injecting money in a game wont make it better... Hiring tons of developers isn't really a solution either.

Yea, this is true. There is also an interesting effect that comes with software development where if you increase the number of people working on an overdue project, you actually increase the time it takes to complete. It has to do ramp-up time to get new devs up to speed, which drastically decreases the production of people working on the project already because they have to share info. Its covered by Fred Brooks' "The Mythical Man-Month". It's an interesting read.

The thoughts in this thread of the next wow-expansion kind of scare me. I completely forgot about that. It would fit the timeline of other games to have that released in Q4 of next year. It scares me because that would put D3 off until probably spring/summer of 2011, seeing as they would probably give 6 months or so between titles.

I guess we'll find out in a few weeks at Blizzcon what we can expect. I wonder if they'll announce their next gen MMO. If they do, I wouldn't expect another wow expansion unless they announce that at the same time. Blizzcon will be interesting, thats for sure.

I'd just like to say that I'm not sure that I like how the item suggestions worked out on the savior page. They're sort of large and obtrusive. If we put them horizontal, it looks a bit better, but setting up the items gets to be a bit more of a pain that way. Another gripe, is in the time It took me to set up the items, i think that I could have made the regular wiki page for the item. Is there another way to do the items that is a bit easier? (I'm a bit of a wiki editing noob so i pretty much copied the info box from the savior, and filled it in with data from arreat summit)

I guess if the wiki were more complete it would be a bit easier to write, since we could just link to the corresponding pages, but that lacks an element of interactivity. I guess that I just found it kind of cumbersome to write a guide with wiki formatting. I wrote the Frenzy Guide but I think that my inexperience and clunkyness of the wiki show through.

Quote from "tmgongaw" »

So if I were to use a partizan which has a max of 5 sockets what are the odds of getting 5 sockets? I would like a fast weapon with 5 sockets so I can make a decent weapon for a while in SP mode in NM. I'm just not sure what the best way to go is... I know the only 100% way of getting 5 sockets is to pick up an item that dropped with that many sockets, but that isn't very likely either.

The act V quest for adding sockets always adds the max sockets an item can have. So if you're playing LoD you can use the quest if you really want a 5 socket weapon. Not sure what else you'd want to use it on for single player.