DiabloFans

Honestly I'm fairly surprised (unpleasantly so) they are even talking about buffing Vortex. I guess if they intend to make damage less spiky and more continuous it might not be such a huge issue but overall Vortex is just about the most unfair mechanic you can think of and I can't imagine what it must be like playing hardcore with that thing around. I get it, the idea is to make people gear more defensively because they wont be able to avoid some damage. But vortex is a little too brutal. Jailer, Frozen and Waller can get you into bad spots often enough. Getting sucked into the center of an enemy pack with the game just troll-grinning at you "I dare you to survive that mofo" is something else entirely. Regardless of what other affixes the pack has, if it's a bunch of champions you are not getting out of Vortex no matter your gear. All the affix does is force people to use specific one or two skills for that class (Smoke Screen etc), which just limits diversity. Dont' buff it. Remove it.

Ok, the good, the bad and the ugly...

Barbarian
I have no clue why they would even think about removing Knockback from Bash... Way to make a generic resource generator.
Making Weapon Throw a generator seems way too cool to make it into the game. I get the feeling that I'm gonna need way more character slots...
The change to Ancient Spear is long overdue, that skill was crap in every possible way. Goes to show that this team never designed an ARPG.
Thank god they are getting rid of Thrive on Chaos. Though with that said I feel like they could have kept Into the Fray.
But they better not touch Overpower: Revel, Bloodthirsty and Ruthless.
Looking at the way they are redesigning Barbarian, they seem to want to remove as much on damage heal as they can and stick to Life per Fury spent instead. Sorry guys but that's a Monk mechanic, come up with something original. You know...something that's actually good. Healing 1650 life when I spend all my Fury is pathetic beyond explanation. Especially for a class that degenerates resource.

Demon Hunter
Gotta love all the attention they are finally giving my Engineer. Rockets and Grenades all day please.
Also Companion is finally getting some attention. The mechanics of that skill were way too opaque. They should still think about allowing the player to see his pet's stats (especially HP).
Also guaranteed crits on Vault seem kinda fun.
Don't like the change to Preparation and Supression Fire though, it's not like that combo is that great anyway, not much need to nerf it.

Monk
So they finally realized how terrible Dashing Strike was? About a year too late but at least it's something. I have no clue what they were thinking when designing that skill...
I seem to be noticing a lot of Knockback removal. And I don't like it. Kick needs it.
They still should make some changes to the Pillar of the Ancients. For the difficulty in setting it up, it sure doesn't do much more than the base skill.

Witch Doctor
This is obviously unfinished. For one they are removing Mana costs from Physical realm skills yet they leave Frog Affinity alone (a terrible skill to begin with).
Also conspicuous by its absence is any kind of change to Zombie Charger. Bears are by FAR the best rune no contest when it comes to both damage and aoe and yet no changes have been made. I'm thiking Witch Doctor will receive a lot more attention later on, possibly with some serious resouce redesign.

Wizard
I love love love the way they are changing up the elements. By far the biggest weakness I saw in the Wizard skills was that e.g. Conflagration cared about fire skills and there were barely any fire skills to begin with. Though now they are fixing that I'd like it more if they left Conflagration the way it was.
I do think however that they may have gone a bit overboard. Some skills now have so many elemental effects that if you for example are making a Temporal Flux/Disruption Arcanist many of the skills you'd like to use don't actually have a good Arcane based rune anymore. Though I applaud the return of Glacial Spike and Frozen Orb, Fire Walls and all that stuff, I feel like they might want to dial back on the elements a little bit.
Don't get the Blazing Hydra concept though. It's basically a smaller Mammoth Hydra the way I see it.


All in all about 70% of this seem promising but there are still problems and I don't think they are making as much progress as I would have hoped. One would think D3's release and the problems the game has would teach them a few things but it seems like they are still making the same mistakes. But hey, the release is still ways away so one can hope. I do think however, that even after the expansion the game will be a bit of a distance away from what it should have been on release.

Let's see how many people jump to conclusions right off the bat. "He worked on the console version, he is the embodiment of all that is evil and must be cleansed. We, the PC gaming master race, demand that he be locked in purgatory for a week before touching our game." So far we got one...

Quote from morbidlymystic

You might want to upgrade from dialup then, because thats the only explanation for your troubles.

How typically short sighted. The issue is that we even need internet to begin with to play a single player. You want to play on a plane to kill time? Tough shit, you can't unless their internet is super-stable which it never is. Are you living in a country that has a shitty internet (most Asian countries, South America etc.)? Well you might as well save yourself the money and not buy the game at all cause you won't be able to play it anyway. The simple truth that the concept of always online DRM is retarded is self-evident and the fact that people even need to discuss this is just mind boggling. Goes to show how self-centered people are. The fact that you're not having trouble with always online DRM doesn't mean thousands of other people in the world don't. Be it issue of the internet or the server, even freaking maintenance period, the simple fact is, if you pay for a game with single player, you should be freaking able to play a single player game as long as you have a running machine it's installed on. You can't even pause and leave the room for 30 minutes cause the server will kick you for inactivity. Are you serious?

Sad part is that gamers are willing to sacrifice convenience to Blizzard and other big publishers and let them pull of crap like always online DRM, launch day DLC and microtransactions in a full-priced release just so they can play their favourite franchise. It's becoming a textbook stockholm syndrome. Big companies make things more and more difficult for the customer and we still happily pay them money and then even have the balls to defend them if someone questions their business decisions.

I'm sorry but music? For realzies? There is barely any music in the game, most of it is just ambience. D2 or Titan Quest do a way better job of mixing ambience with actual music and I don't recall any of them being contenders for any such awards. In fact I'd say from aesthetic standpoint music is the weakest part of the game due to the ever repeating dungeon themes (why do dungeons in Acts 2 and 3 sound the same as the "music" we heard from the Tristram Cathedral demo years ago? Why the lack of variety?) and the often nondescript sounds lacking any melody that play during most overworld areas. There are some decent pieces of ambience for sure (Fields of Misery ambience for some reason just gets me every time) but I'd hardly qualify that as a reason to make the game a contender. As for strategy I can see that having at least some merit. Diablo 3's combat system definitely innovated the original hack and slash formula (guzzle potions until you run out, get back to town, buy more, and drink drink drink like you never drank before) and introduced a lot more strategic decisions into an otherwise pretty mindless game type.

I find this entire anti-Jay campaign ridiculous. First off, does any of you actually have accurate information about what happens behind the scenes at Blizzard? Nope, didn't think so. So how exactly are you so damn freaking sure that eeeeerrything that went wrong with Diablo 3 was Jay's fault. He's one person in an entire crowd of developers that worked on the game, and he's not even the big boss since he has supervision from above. Until we see a summary of Jay's design input on the game, which we never will, none of us will ever have a clue how much he impacted the game negatively and how much he impacted it positively. For all we know, there might have been a hundred terrible design decisions proposed to him by the team which he just shut down and instead pushed the whole thing in the right direction.

And seeing as they appear to be now looking for a new, I stress the word new, game director, you might just be wishing Jay was back pretty soon, because they can hire literally anyone, with god knows what kind of history in the game industry. They might hire a designer who has worked in the gaming industry for over 20 years yet most of the games produced by his team ended up gathering dust at the store shelves. I say better the devil you know...

As for the complaints about them needing us to give them feedback on how to fix the game, you apparently have absolutely no clue what it is to critique your own work. When I work on translating texts, it usually takes another person to read it and check if everything sits just right because of what I tend to call author-blindness. You may feel that there is something off, something doesn't seem right but no matter how much you go through the material, you just can't put your finger on it. I spent years playing Diablo 2 yet I still don't know what it is about Diablo 3's itemization that makes it worse, or rather what it is about Diablo 2's itemization that makes it feel so right. Is it the fact that it's habitual, it's something familiar that I've played around with for years, is it nostalgia and skewed view on the past, is it simply an aversion to change? I don't know. What I do know is that what worked 11 years ago will not necessarily work now, and a game that would just be a reiteration of Diablo 2, only with better graphics and an improvement here or there would not exactly be the game I, and many others, have been waiting for all these years, and hardly a game that will become part of gaming history. Not to mention of course that the best way to critique a game is to play it. I very much doubt that after programming and designing the game for so long and still working on it god knows how many hours a day, they have much time and desire to keep playing it in their free time out of the office.

Quote from Ron1n

We are need group content

Bosses for 4ppl which cannot be killed solo, something like scripted group bosses. They should make PvE challenge.

Which would help...whom exactly? The few people who actually have three more friends who still play Diablo and have free time at exactly the same periods, otherwise, they would be missing a person to do the run with? Not exactly the biggest demographic to cater to. If they make end game content, it should be available to everyone who finishes the game on Inferno.

The reason why people don't want nerfs is because many have heard and probably even more have experienced the disaster known as Wow. There was a similar process going on...people complaining that the game is too hard and that they don't get to see all the content in the game. And Blizzard started listening. Nerfs came. And more of them. By now the game is so embarassingly easy (from what I've heard, never played it before you call me a WoW fanboy) that even a guild full of morons can run the majority of the boses while hardcore players are screaming for more difficulty.

The basic problem that the game is facing is that Blizzard has to cater to two demographics at the same time. There is the veterans, who played D2 and loved every second of it (like me). Those are the people who have a lot of expereince in the genre and also a lot of expectations. They want their gaming exprience to be challenging and difficult so that there is higher skill ceiling in the game and more potential for greatness and adrenaline-filled action. Then there is the causal crowd, the ones who didn't get to experience D1 or D2. And who can blame them? The game is 12 years old and for some of them that's just too far back to have played it and coming back to it now is difficult. Those are the people who need easing into the game and need to have a good learning curve so that the game is fun and they get to develop gradually.

The issue is that catering to one does not cater to the other. If you make the game easy so the casual fan can finish everything and not throw tantrums and keyboards all around, the hardcore fan will be bored off of his ass. If you make the game difficult so that even the hardcore players and minmaxers have a hard time going through it, you will have swarms of casual fans demanding that all content be made accessible to them as well. No matter what you do you will not please everybody. The only way to do this is to have dedicated sections for each. Casual fans have normal where they can screw around without much punishment and if they feel like it they can go nightmare and hell to test their skills and improve. The hardcore fans have inferno to sink their teeth into and really get the most challenge out of their game. Nerfing inferno sounds a lot like making inferno accessible to the casual while removing this dedicated section for the hardcore players. The basic design philosophy for inferno was that not everybody will get to experience it, it's the difficulty for the elite and quite naturally it will carry elite benefits only for those who are good enough to make it there. If you remove these benefits so that the casual fan does really have access to all the gear and such, what entices a hardcore player to play Inferno when he knows he will get bugger all out of his play time and might as well just play Hell over and over again for the same benefit?

As for the one shots, they are in fact a test of skill and ability. I remember playing Titan Quest, another hack and slash game in the style of Diablo. The best feature in that game was that on higher difficulties, bosses and some mobs had skills that just simply meant guaranteed death if you didn't learn to avoid them. If you were mindless and ignored what the enemy was doing, you were dead guaranteed 100% of the time you fought to boss and could do 6000 runs and never get it. If you were skillful and kited the dangerous abilities, you were in for a fast paced, high octane fight full of near escapes and close calls and you really got a great feeling of reward out of your skill in playing the game. Would you get the boss the first time? Hell no. But through learning their tells and knowing what to do when and what's coming you could gradually master the boss and the next time you encountered him with a different character you suddenly found that it wasn't all that terribly hard if you played well.

Diablo 3 has been out for a week and a half. How can any of you expect to have mastered the game so that you can tell what needs nerfing and what is balanced? Nobody has the experience with the game necessary to judge anything. I'm not 100% defending what Blizzard has produced and that it shouldn't never ever be touched. All I'm saying is, it's just too damn early to try and think about balancing the game when the feedback they get is from people who have a whooping 10 days of experience in the game. So hold your damn horses and don't go all nerf this nerf that balance this class and this needs to be buffed when we know bugger all about the game at this point. If anybody thinks that they have the perfect build that should be able to beat inferno and they are unable to pull it off, think about this. The game doesn't necessarily have to be broken, it's just that maybe your knowledge of the possible builds and gear isn't good enough after 10 freaking days.

Another thing. People wanting better gear. I repeat whe have had exactly 10 days to farm the items. There's no way anybody is geared up well enough to think they can progress through inferno as if it were hell difficulty. What happens in the long run? After year or two when people will be all geared up with the best of the best items in the game through constant farming, just playing the game or buying stuff through the AH? Suddenly with the ideal gear inferno will not be so hard anymore, people will start progressing through at some slow pace. If they make gear better and/or nerf Inferno now, what will people be doing on year from today? Being bored of the game cause it's too damn easy.

Funny how people have become these days. I don't remember id Software thinking about nerfing Doom 2's Nightmare difficulty even though it was unreal how hard it was. There are just difficulties that are not meant for everybody, deal with it.

Alright maybe I'm just going to fuel the fire here just because I haven't played D3 yet (not by choice I assure you, it's killing me), but if what the blue tracker shows is a representative sample of what the official forums are like then I'm sorry but how anybody can compare the official forums with Diablofans is beyond me. No matter the substance of the message, whether it is negative feedback or feedback that is entirely positive all the time as some of you claim here, the way the message is formulated matters. The amount of flaming, hate and bile coming out of the official forums is disgusting, and it does not benefit anybody. People are just voicing their rage without expressing any valid opinion, suggesting solutions to given problems etc, they are just pointing at Blizzard yelling "look what you did wrong during development, look what I'm really angry about and now watch me rub it in your face". Posts saying Bliz should have given more content for testing so that ballance is better are not only going all "what if" on the issue but provide completely unreasonable feedback (giving inferno for testing would mean either providing pre-geared characters or giving out the entire game in the beta...useless either way). I'm pretty damn proud to say here at Diablofans the feedback is mostly constructive and believe me when I say that the PR people are just humans, and flaming does them as much harm as it does anybody else. If you cannot voice constructive criticism and do it in a polite manner then it's better to just shut up and let others voice their concerns instead of just mudding the waters with hate and rage. Also for those saying how non-critical Diablofans are, I suggest you look at some of the updates we had on game development. Believe it or not positive feedback helps as well...there's a difference between seeing a thread where everybody is criticising how bad the game is and a thread where the feedback is split 60/40. It's the positive feedback that might in the long run save us from D3 ending up as easy and nerfed to the ground as WoW.

Quote from Benegesserit

Change skills/runes then swap gear. Besides muleing for extra space, or if you just have to have a female and male version of each class, why in the world do you think you have to create more characters? You can have 100+ characters builds and still only need up to 5 characters (1 for each class).

Oh yeah that's totally convenient. Just change up all your skills and traits, swap out all or most of your gear, resocket your items if you're keeping some, re-rune all your skills and change/respec your hireling and you're sorted. A real improvement from D2 singleplayer where I could store as many characters as I wanted as long as I had disc space. Now I would not only have to do all the abovementioned but also write down somewhere which items, runes, traits, hirelings and skills I'm supposed to use for each build that I'm using because there's no chance I'm gonna remember all of it for each build plus for PvP as well. Convenience galore right here. Not to mention of course the fact that what you're saying doesn't give me any replay value at all. There's a freaking universe of difference between playing the game once with a class and then end-game respeccing to see how other builds would work and actually playing the entire game, from level one all the way to level sixty with a whole different build. If you wanna play the game once go right ahead. I'd like to experience what it's like to play a build from start to finish and not respec only when I'm done or midway through or something. Plus more characters means more gold total among your characters which results in more opportunities to skill up artisans, craft, combine gems and socket items, salvage crap for materials etc. Need I continue? Them noobs man...sigh.

Quote from maka

You know what would be better? Not having that stupid 10-char limit. When I reach 10 chars (and want to create a new one), I have a really shitty decision to make: delete a character or play with high ping. Yay for blizzard indeed...

Oh don't get me wrong, the whole situation definitely doesn't give me a permanent boner, but at least it's better than what I thought it would be. Sucks either way, just the scope of suckage is different. As for the ping, we'll see how bad it is.

Yeah I just can't even comprehend why they have added this in the first place. Constant cinematics in an ARPG game where you run through the game for hunderds of hours?

Goes to show that Blizzard Irvine had absolutely no idea how to built an ARPG game. Which is explains the whole story with Diablo 3.

Quote from reclaimer3235

I'd like them more to address the issue that the PS4 version is allegedly supposed to have an offline mode, something PC gamers have been screaming for since the release

People just dont get it, The game gets an offline mode > The game gets taken apart by pirates > Nobody will buy a game you get for free > Blizzard loses ALOT of money they worked for. < FACT

Want more landsilde? Game gets an offline mode > Game becomes hackable > Noobs cheat and get maxed out toons then just quit > Amount of people playing the game overall dies < Also FACT

Ive seen this happen.
Its not like getting internet now a days is a massive requirment, If you dont have or cant aford internet, you got bigger problems than bicthing about a not being able to play a game.

ye, in the same way diablo2 who had all this from launch. It died so fast...oh wait, it didnt, and no games does. There are thousands of ripped games on piratebay etc. People still buy those games.

Its not about not having internet or afford it. Its about lagg issues, error 37, problem with the isp, being able to play when and where you want. Always online is never ever a good idea. A seperation of online and offline is no problem. Not being able to play a SINGLEPLAYER game you payed for for reasons beyond your control, is just stupid.

I like the fact that rares are once again the top items. This was the case in D2 before LOD.. only a few uniques were really good (soj, tarn helm, iceblink...) for certain purpouses but you could always replace them with an excellent rare.

Super good uniques(legendaries) are not very interesting, everyone will end up with same set of items because they are the best and they have the same stats (Arreats helm on every barb etc).

It is always a thrill to identify a rare, not very much interesting to identify a Legendary with fixed stats because you already know whats it gonna be.

It is true that Legendaries like the Bow explained above should have dex and vita on them.. Maybe even fixed stats. You would know that thats the weapon I'm gonna get at lvl X. But still a rare should be better since it would be harder to roll the right item with right stats anyways.