DiabloFans

Quote from Ghost_Sanguis

I remember them saying that it would take about the same time to get to level 60 in Diablo 3 as it did to get to level 99 in Diablo 2.

They have never said anythin like that. They only claimed that length of playthrough 1-4 act is approximately the same, therefore you beat hell in d3 in the same time you do it in d2 - and it's far from 99lvl.
About difficulty - you are probably too skilled. I played HC from day 1 in pretty fast pace, so i couldn't find any item upgrades for my lvl on AH. And it wasn't easy on Hell. Normal is pretty easy, NM lets you taste some challenge, Hell is painfull, and now i'm stuck on 2nd act Inferno. That's exactly what they said before release...

Quote from Kungen

I'll decide after finishing Inferno on normal. By then I probably know what class I wanna play.

Inferno on normal? That's nonsense.

Quote from Snaks42

@Bidmal;
Ask yourself, why do you care so much that i can swap skills when i want? Why do you want to put such a penalty on it? There's no good reason because it's a control issue; For some reason people with your mindset have a seriously hard problem thinking that someone else in a different game that you'll probably never meet is able to switch skills. In my opinion the system in place now is awesome, and it bugs me that you want to control how I play the game. Nothing is stopping YOU from keeping whatever build you want, and in all actuality the majority of players will end up sticking with one build. But If they wanted to change, there's the option.

Did u read the thread? We are talking about uniqueness of characters. There's nothing bad about it. So far there are only 5 possibilities - 5 classes. We want there to be more, so every class could have different builds, not just 30 skills between which he can swap with no penalty (30sec cd doesn't count).

Quote from Doomscream

True hardcore fans spit in the face of death animations simply because they do not plan on seeing them.

It's useful to read the post before posting stupid things. They talk about death animations for bosses not players.

Quote from xdarkker

A beta key would be really nice. Signed up on facebook also now

LOL!!! u are here since early 2006, and your first post is after 5.5 years and not even in Diablo thread, that's hillarious

Its funny when people are defending free-speccing, they say that the game will have endless combinations of equally balanced skill selections.
But as soon as respec costs are mentioned, then suddenly the game will have optimal builds everyone would go for.
Does not compute.

If the game has wildly optimal builds people would go for them with or without free-specs.
However, the likelihood of the game having optimal builds is A LOT higher with a free-speccing scenario.

The reason: The shorter a challenge (=killing enemy X) your selection of skills has to overcome, the more likely is it that you can find 6 skills that are best for it.
Such as selecting 6 skills optimized for killing boss A, and 6 other skills for killing boss B.
If you 'have to' pick 6 skills which are decent for both boss A and boss B, you have to find a compromise between the optimal builds.
If you then add boss C, D, E and random mob X, then we reach the point that there will be many 'equally good - but not optimal' builds to go for when you can't respec all the time.
Bbut there will much more likely be a few optimal builds for any given situation, when you can respec for all of them, because the challenge the build has to be perfect against is much narrower.

If free-speccing does anything, it is reducing freedom since its increasing the benefits of going for an optimal selection of skills at any given moment.
It wont add more experimentation to the game, people will just have similar chars with 25 skills, which they change around whenever they need to re-optimize.
How awesome is that? Not much.

TLDR: It is easier to be great at one thing than to be great at everything. Freespeccing allows you to be great at everything though, where you otherwise would have needed to find a balance to be decent/viable at "everything" (depending on the respec cost).

It just struck me that when people criticize the deeply flawed character system in DIablo 3 and are met with the standard retort of how many possible "builds" there are and how they do not want to play the same character again, they are COMPLETELY MISSING THE POINT.

There is a huge difference between a character that is unique and a character that can switch to a huge number of builds.

DIablo II had dozens and dozens of character archetypes within each character class. If you replayed an Amazon and went for Bowazon, it was a very different experence form a Furyzon or Jabazon. Playing the different archetype was like playing a completely different class. The experience was completely different and it was fun to play different characters through many of which were from the same class.

So Diablo II had a much much larger set of classes than D3 does.

D3 gets away with this entirely. in favor of a bunch of possible builds. But at the end all Demon Hunters are pretty much exactly alike and the game experience is the same. No one will want to play the same character twice.

This is the fatal flaw in Diablo 3

I've been following Diablo III beta since it's announcement, grasping at every change and piece of information they would throw my way, and I just got my beta invite a few days ago. I've been playing the heck out of the beta and have beat it with several classes and I'm left with a feeling that none of my characters are unique. It may be just because this is early game and the addition of runestones may completely change my mind on this matter, but it feels like all of the characters I make have no differentiation from anyone elses characters. They FEEL the same.

I've never been a fan of getting rid of manual stat points and after having played the beta, I must say that it furthers my beliefs that this was a mistake. I understand that they want the game to be accessable to people who are new to the Diablo universe, or to Action RPG's in general, but at what point does it become too simple?

I also feel that there won't be much of a meta-game at the end of Diablo III. In Diablo II, you would make use of the meta-game because there were so many potential builds that you could keep making new characters and every single character could be unique, even if it was from the same class. As of now, once you make one of each class, you have to reason to make any additional characters because they can be so easily changed to a completely different type of build with no consiquence.

I'm not saying that bringing back manual stat points is the answer, but something is missing. There needs to be something more to individualize my character from anyone elses, and some incentive for me to make more than one character of each class. After all, there is no raiding and virtually no end-game content (inferno aside) for them to fall back on. Leveling, PVP, and MF'ing is what Diablo is about, and that's fine, but to me it feels like by allowing characters to change so easily, and having very little uniqueness, leveling is eliminated once you've been playing the game for say a year, and that drops one of your end-game options off the table.

Hi all,

Got in the beta last week. Went to 2 Blizcons just to play Diablo III and really enjoyed them at the show.

I will post more specific and in-depth thoughts later after work, but I just wanted to give a quick overall feel for the game I have so far.

Unfortunately, I do not get how Blizzard can completely ignore 10 years of history with Diablo II, a game that to this day still sells for almost full retail and produce the game that they have.

Diablo III is not a Diablo game in my opinion. Basically all RPG elements have been completely removed. Stats auto level, all skills open to the player and level automatically. You have to go to a completely ridiculous "shrine" to swap out skills. From what I can see, the only RPG element left is a choice of 3 total passive skills you get over the complete lifespan of you character.

It is a pure action game now with some RPG-lite features. The re-playability of Diablo II and it's long term success was built around the RPG elements not the gameplay (certainly addictive) or the items. Choice mattered in Diablo II. For every choice you made you gave something up. Each character you played was ultimately unique, even if eventually there were so called "cookie-cuter" specs. You were a Furyzon, not a Bowazon and could never be. If you decided that you wanted a bow wielder you made one, and the roguelike features made it FUN to develop a new character. The horrible skill system that has basically infinite respecs kills that. On a non-hardcore setting you will only play one of each character ever. There is no replayability. Blizzard seems so concerned that the game will be even a little complex and people might make a mistake (they should be able to, and in fact is the attraction of the game) that they have basically eliminated any choice or any interesting character development elements of the game. They have ignored the fact that the underlying complexity of Diablo II IS WHAT MADE IT SUCCESSFULL. It's like the chess saying, a minute to learn a lifetime to master.

I know why they have done what they have done - probably some focus groups or surveys that suggest that they will sell more copies as a pure action game than as a RPG. And it will sell a bazillion copies so they will point to its success as the validation of this change but that is facile. Diablo III will not have the longevity of Diablo II now way.

Even worse than that though is that the game mechanics have been changed a lot too from the betas and the actual gameplay itself is not as fun. It was actually a much better game as an alpha than it is now. I am a huge Diablo fan and with the beta installed on my PC I basically have no interest in playing. I will so I can give Blizzard reasoned critisisms but I know that they will ignore them as blue themselves have created this adversarial relationship where they call the Diablo II players "hardcore" and diminish their opinions.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcc0ThGLijs&feature=channel_video_title

Listen to this. You will probably hate it, but just know it was made in about an hour and not taken seriously in hopes that the fine folks at Blizzard will take notice and send me a beta key.


EDIT:

https://rapidshare.com/files/2305997085/All_I_Need_is_a_Beta_Key.mp3

there's a download link for whoever would like it.