Honestly out of all things to be worried about, itemization is the least of my concerns... this is a beta test which is not representative of their vision.... they kept everything out of the beta for good reason, and I'm sure they've spent a lot of time looking at itemization and how it should progress. Way too early to criticize this, wait for release...
I dont understand your post. This isnt the beta items, these are the full game items and they are listed on the official website. I am sure things will be tweaked here and there, but they ALL seem to be wrong. Like, every single elemental damage is extremely low (about 5% of weapon damage), and every single legendary is just like a rare item. I hardly saw 1 interesting item.
To me that is a bit worrying, it wont meant I aint gonna get the game, hell Ive been waiting only 10 years.
The "Random" properties has got to be where the butter is on some of those, as far as crazy modifiers.
The reason I raise the issue of the low magical damage is because in D2 we had a lot of physical immunes/resistant monsters and it was often useful to have magically imbued weapons that did high levels of magical damage.
I think it would make more sense if the modifiers were %fire damage or %cold damage. So for instances:
Ice Sword X:
200-250 physical damage
25% of your physical damage is added as cold damage
rather than:
+25 cold damage.
I know its early days but why would blizzard put items up on their site when they are drastically wrong (+20 fire damage on an axe that does 500dps? come on....)
Hey guys, is it just me or do the items all seem samey? I mean, every weapons and armor that I've looked at just seem to be scaled up versions of the previous weapon or armor.
These are my issues so far with the items listed:
1.) There don't seem to be any "uniqueness" to them. In diablo 2, each unique weapon or armor usually added something that wasn't available on the rare version of that item.
D2 example: Corpsemourn armor gave charges of "corpse explosion" spell. This gave the item a unique meaning and coolness.
2.) The magic damage on the weapons seems to be extremely low as a percentage of the overall damage. Am I missing something?
Example:
Avalanche (Legendary 2 handed Mighty Weapon) 431.6–447.8 Damage Per Second +11-22 Cold Damage
+23-24% Damage
+0.35-0.39 Attacks Per Second
+68-75 Cold Resistance
This equates to the cold damage being only 6.9% of the weapons damage. This same theme occurs for every item I have seen so far. This doesn't make any sense to me.
Where is the incentive to create a new character for a class you've already got up to level 60?
This is a good point actually. Remember in D2 you could make a fury barb... then replay the game again making a WW barb. Each had their own play styles.
The downside of the D2 approach was that you *had* to replay the entire game and grind to hell just to play a different style of the same character. I am not sure which approach I like better.
I agree also I think there should be some sort of limits to swapping. More so in pvp but in pve I don't think people will do this often.
This is why I am also kind of liking the idea of Runes binding/attuning to the skill they are socketed in. Sure at first it seemed like, "oh that sucks now I can't reuse my uber rune in different skills", but I like the idea as Bashiok said, it provides a "soft" reward for investing in certain skills rather than swapping at a whim, since once you find good runes for your spells you will be less likely to want to swap them out. It also provides the "Diablo-ness" of random reward and mystery.
I actually like the idea of the new skill system because it means I can actually use the low level skills without worrying about wasting points (or wasting my respecs later), however I am concerned as others have said that this might lead to "hot swapping" of skills based on dungeon/area/monster packs, which is an alien idea and really anti-diablo.
An easy way to avoid this pitfall to the new system is any of these restrictions:
1.) Skills can only be "swapped" (i.e. made as an active skill from the pool of available skills) upon leveling up OR;
2.) Once every X minutes (e.g. every 30 minutes) OR;
3.) Upon loading into a game, then every x minutes afterwards.
The system doesn't need to be too complicated, just have some restriction to allow players to change their skills without allowing them to hot-swap them as they approach different type of monsters or dungeon areas.
All in all I think it is great that I no longer need to hoard all my points so I can dump them into the high level skills. This, added with the cool down system means all builds should see a fun mixture of low level and high level skills without boring early game grinding.
I created an account just so I could reply to this topic. I am a long time reader first time poster and I feel I need to state the obvious!!!
I wanted to point out something VERY important regarding the follower system: I believe Blizzard is taking a big shortcut in order to release the game sooner. Why? Think about it:
1.) No one sets out to design and develop a complex system (such as this) only for 1/3 of the game (much lower % of game time)
2.) Act4 of Diablo2 was obviously shortened so the game could be released (hence they've done it before!)
3.) Balancing nightmare and hell and end game with mercs is a huge task, think about it: Remember D2 mercs with high level runewords that gave negative magic resist auras etc. that broke magical immunities in hell? Basically what you end up with is REQUIRING twinked mercs just so you can do hell. I personally DO NOT WANT to rely on my merc if I dont want to. If it dies I dont want to be stuck not able to progress until it resurrects.
In effect Blizzard has decided it is just too hard to balance mercs end game such that they are a.) useful and b.) not a necessity. They want to release this year and BETA soon... so they have taken a shortcut and resigned this system to normal only, and invented some nice "reasoning" for the news media and websites to consume.
Cant wait for D3 and hope to see ya'll on bnet!
Good post. Might very well be the case.
Thanks. I just cant believe Blizz would set out through all these months of design (years?) to come up intentionally with something JUST for normal difficulty. To me it wreaks of something that is being short-circuited now that they are in balancing phase, "hey about that follower system...mmmmm yeah it just aint gonna work end game". It smells of a compromise to me!
I created an account just so I could reply to this topic. I am a long time reader first time poster and I feel I need to state the obvious!!!
I wanted to point out something VERY important regarding the follower system: I believe Blizzard is taking a big shortcut in order to release the game sooner. Why? Think about it:
1.) No one sets out to design and develop a complex system (such as this) only for 1/3 of the game (much lower % of game time)
2.) Act4 of Diablo2 was obviously shortened so the game could be released (hence they've done it before!)
3.) Balancing nightmare and hell and end game with mercs is a huge task, think about it: Remember D2 mercs with high level runewords that gave negative magic resist auras etc. that broke magical immunities in hell? Basically what you end up with is REQUIRING twinked mercs just so you can do hell. I personally DO NOT WANT to rely on my merc if I dont want to. If it dies I dont want to be stuck not able to progress until it resurrects.
In effect Blizzard has decided it is just too hard to balance mercs end game such that they are a.) useful and b.) not a necessity. They want to release this year and BETA soon... so they have taken a shortcut and resigned this system to normal only, and invented some nice "reasoning" for the news media and websites to consume.
0
I dont understand your post. This isnt the beta items, these are the full game items and they are listed on the official website. I am sure things will be tweaked here and there, but they ALL seem to be wrong. Like, every single elemental damage is extremely low (about 5% of weapon damage), and every single legendary is just like a rare item. I hardly saw 1 interesting item.
To me that is a bit worrying, it wont meant I aint gonna get the game, hell Ive been waiting only 10 years.
0
The reason I raise the issue of the low magical damage is because in D2 we had a lot of physical immunes/resistant monsters and it was often useful to have magically imbued weapons that did high levels of magical damage.
I think it would make more sense if the modifiers were %fire damage or %cold damage. So for instances:
Ice Sword X:
200-250 physical damage
25% of your physical damage is added as cold damage
rather than:
+25 cold damage.
I know its early days but why would blizzard put items up on their site when they are drastically wrong (+20 fire damage on an axe that does 500dps? come on....)
0
These are my issues so far with the items listed:
1.) There don't seem to be any "uniqueness" to them. In diablo 2, each unique weapon or armor usually added something that wasn't available on the rare version of that item.
D2 example: Corpsemourn armor gave charges of "corpse explosion" spell. This gave the item a unique meaning and coolness.
2.) The magic damage on the weapons seems to be extremely low as a percentage of the overall damage. Am I missing something?
Example:
Avalanche (Legendary 2 handed Mighty Weapon)
431.6–447.8 Damage Per Second
+11-22 Cold Damage
+23-24% Damage
+0.35-0.39 Attacks Per Second
+68-75 Cold Resistance
This equates to the cold damage being only 6.9% of the weapons damage. This same theme occurs for every item I have seen so far. This doesn't make any sense to me.
What do you guys think?
0
This is a good point actually. Remember in D2 you could make a fury barb... then replay the game again making a WW barb. Each had their own play styles.
The downside of the D2 approach was that you *had* to replay the entire game and grind to hell just to play a different style of the same character. I am not sure which approach I like better.
0
This is why I am also kind of liking the idea of Runes binding/attuning to the skill they are socketed in. Sure at first it seemed like, "oh that sucks now I can't reuse my uber rune in different skills", but I like the idea as Bashiok said, it provides a "soft" reward for investing in certain skills rather than swapping at a whim, since once you find good runes for your spells you will be less likely to want to swap them out. It also provides the "Diablo-ness" of random reward and mystery.
0
An easy way to avoid this pitfall to the new system is any of these restrictions:
1.) Skills can only be "swapped" (i.e. made as an active skill from the pool of available skills) upon leveling up OR;
2.) Once every X minutes (e.g. every 30 minutes) OR;
3.) Upon loading into a game, then every x minutes afterwards.
The system doesn't need to be too complicated, just have some restriction to allow players to change their skills without allowing them to hot-swap them as they approach different type of monsters or dungeon areas.
All in all I think it is great that I no longer need to hoard all my points so I can dump them into the high level skills. This, added with the cool down system means all builds should see a fun mixture of low level and high level skills without boring early game grinding.
0
Thanks. I just cant believe Blizz would set out through all these months of design (years?) to come up intentionally with something JUST for normal difficulty. To me it wreaks of something that is being short-circuited now that they are in balancing phase, "hey about that follower system...mmmmm yeah it just aint gonna work end game". It smells of a compromise to me!
2
I wanted to point out something VERY important regarding the follower system: I believe Blizzard is taking a big shortcut in order to release the game sooner. Why? Think about it:
1.) No one sets out to design and develop a complex system (such as this) only for 1/3 of the game (much lower % of game time)
2.) Act4 of Diablo2 was obviously shortened so the game could be released (hence they've done it before!)
3.) Balancing nightmare and hell and end game with mercs is a huge task, think about it: Remember D2 mercs with high level runewords that gave negative magic resist auras etc. that broke magical immunities in hell? Basically what you end up with is REQUIRING twinked mercs just so you can do hell. I personally DO NOT WANT to rely on my merc if I dont want to. If it dies I dont want to be stuck not able to progress until it resurrects.
In effect Blizzard has decided it is just too hard to balance mercs end game such that they are a.) useful and b.) not a necessity. They want to release this year and BETA soon... so they have taken a shortcut and resigned this system to normal only, and invented some nice "reasoning" for the news media and websites to consume.
Cant wait for D3 and hope to see ya'll on bnet!