Locking in the hit at the beginning of a melee animation allows their animators to put in longer, cooler attack animations without wrecking the game play. Without something like it, any sort of longer attack animation can simply be walked out of, which does horrible things to game play.
That said, there should be a range on the melee hits even with the lock-in, so that they can be dodged with skills like Vault and Teleport. While being able to walk out of a melee hit due to really sensitive hit detection leads to poor game play, being unable to Vault out of a melee hit - and taking the hit when 20 yards away - is frustrating and doesn't really add to game play, and should be fixed.
Lightning hits surprisingly hard. Try to stand back a bit from the lightning elites so you don't get hit by nearly as many projectiles - max range of Arcane Blast is ideal.
The actual gameplay of Diablo 3 is phenomenal, some of the best out there, and they should be congratulated for that.
The itemization and auction house are ridiculously bad.
Since so much of the replay of the game is in the item hunt, having terrible, very linear itemization is ridiculously bad. While they wanted players to be able to branch out their 'build' in their item selection, the item balance is so poor and linear that 'branching out' doesn't even become remotely relevant until you're in the 100 million + range, and even then it's limited to a few mods.
The auction house, and particularly the RMAH, exacerbated these problems - they made decent items very accessible, but also made most drops very worthless very quickly (which is terrible in an item hunt game). The RMAH was too direct, and quite a few people lost interest in the game very quickly when they hit a wall, spent money on the RMAH just to advance a little further, then promptly hit another wall.
Throw a big gear nerf into the mix and you have the recipe for the really bad reaction we saw - the underlying game play might be good, but if the item part of the game is a massive frustration instead of lots of fun, no one wants to play.
Most items are bad because there are many more items than characters.
Let's look at a simple example. For simplicity, pretend that you never look at the auction house. You've finally hit level 60, reached Inferno, and found your first level 60+ weapon, which is better than whatever you had before and you equip it.
5 minutes later, you find another level 60+ weapon. What are the odds that this is an upgrade for you? 50/50. Half the time it's better, half the time it will be worse, not accounting for anything else.
5 minutes after that, another weapon! But is this one an upgrade? Well, it would have to be better than either of the previous weapons you have found, which it has only a 1 in 3 chance of being.
The next weapon? 1 in 4.
It keeps going like this, with the odds of any drop being an upgrade for you being proportional to 1/T, where T is the time you've been playing. This is totally without regard to the randomization algorithm or how items are generated or anything of the sorts - once you're no longer improving your drop tables, your upgrade frequency is going to drop as you keep playing, until you essentially stop finding upgrades at all.
Now take the auction house into account. What this does is redistribute items between players. Assume, for example, that there are a million players with a level 60 on the auction house. That would mean that, roughly, only the million best weapons ever found are worth much at all, with the price of weapons right on the edge of that million being exceptionally low since they're so similar to items that just miss the cut. Then add in that this is going to suffer from the same 1/T relationship as the solo play example - we're 10 weeks into the game so far, and after another 10 weeks the number of weapons found will have doubled, which means half the weapons that currently exist will have dropped from 'marginal' to 'crap'.
What does that mean for your own drops? It means the usefulness of your own drops, from the perspective of the auction house, does not depend on how long you have played, but how long *everyone* has played. The more everyone plays, access to high quality gear increases, while an increasing number of items on the edge slip from useful to trash.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with the randomization method, or even how item mods are generated; it's just the nature of picking out the best items from a random pool with a constant generator algorithm. There's nothing whatsoever Blizzard can do about this; it's baked into the game.
There are a couple things you can do. The easiest is to take advantage of the fact that pricing items is hard, and buying up high value, under-priced items to re-sell at closer to their real price. You can do this at all sorts of price ranges - I'll find pieces worth 1-2 million when searching for 50k pieces on occasion, and you can make a lot of money quickly if you can identify items offered for 10 million that are really worth 50 million (it's really difficult to distinguish a lot of items in the 25-100 million range, so unless you have a big bankroll and really know a particular market well, be careful there).
The other is an arbitrage loop between the cash and gold auction houses. There are some items that will sell better for dollars, and some items that will sell better for gold. This has tightened up somewhat, but for a while I was able to sell certain types of items for close to $5 per million, while buying other types of items for only $1.50 per million. If you can find something like that you can milk a lot of profit out of it before it dries up.
There are also some tricks you can play with socketed items and gems. The most obvious one is with magic find / gold find helms, where people who don't know better will neglect to socket their help and you can collect a big premium for doing it for them. The same principle applies to other items as well, however, and you can make big chunks of money by buying items without gems, or with the wrong gems in them, and selling them with a better gem set - for example, I've tripled the value of a dex/vit chest by pulling out the amethysts and putting in emeralds.
In any case, you need to be very familiar with the market for the type of item you are buying and selling, as you'll make more money off of the more marginal cases (2x mark-up on resale) than on the home runs (10x mark-up).
...what stats I should be looking for the ring, shoulder, belt, and bracers.
Let's go through these one at a time.
Bracers are straightforward - you want crit chance. It's the only particularly exciting roll here, everything else is forgettable. 4.5% crit chance is reasonably priced, but bumping it up to 5% instantly makes a bracer expensive, so stick to 4.5% until you want to spend 5 million or so to get a good one. Bracers with 4.5% crit, 70 intelligence, and 60 all resist will run you ~500k, and you should be able to find one with those stats and another good stat (vitality, armor, specific resist, etc) for less than a million.
Shoulders and belts are identical. There are no particularly good stats rolls you can get here, so just use these slots to round out your build with whatever you need. I'd recommend getting 60 all resist, 70 intelligence, 70 vitality, and ideally a little bit more (armor, specific resist), which you can find for less than 250k. If you want to spend a bit more, you can creep those numbers up a bit, getting 100 int or vit, or 70 all resist, or a big roll of armor, all of which can be acquired for less than a million. Sort items here by armor, and try to get a 62 or 63 with high base armor.
Rings are tricky because you can get nearly any stat in the game here. In general, getting Int + one of attack speed, crit chance, crit damage, or life in hit will be cheap, but getting two or more of those on the same ring will be expensive; the former two moreso than the latter two. You don't pay nearly as much for defensive stats, however, so ideally you want to mix and match.
You also want to look for rings that have native +damage on them; you can't search for it directly, and it doesn't move the price of a ring much, but it does wonders for the performance.
Shopping on a budget, I'm looking for a ring that looks something like this:
+12-24 Damage
+70 Intelligence
+35 Fire Resistance / Physical Resistance
+35 Resist All / +200 armor / +70 Vitality
+7% attack speed / +3.5% chance to crit
Which you can easily find for a million; grab two of the defensive stats, or tack on a bit of life on hit or crit damage if you want to spend more. Rings are hard to shop for, since there are a bunch of different combinations that could yield gold; check them all looking for a deal.
Depends an enormous amount on how much aptitude and energy goes into playing - not just in the raw amount of stats, but in where you put them. For example, you can get away with remarkably little defense with tight play and invest heavily into high DPS, but you'll need to be really tanky if you want to run over everything without even trying.
Bare minimum? ~250k EHP with prismatic armor (32k HP, 2500 armor, 500 AR before the buff), perhaps a bit less; 3 AP per tick (30% crit + 10 AP per crit, or equivalent); "some" life on hit (200 is enough if your play is tight) - after that, you just want damage to make it go faster, or more defense to let you play more aggressively.
The 'Feral Loop' ring sticks out as the most important piece to upgrade; you can find clear upgrades to that ring in the 50k range, and I wouldn't want to settle for that. Rings are pretty important slots, so take some time to find a strong replacement for it.
After that, your weakest pieces are your bracers, your shoulder, and your belt. You should be able to find very nice upgrades to each of those in the 1 million range.
I think your weapon is fine, just keep in mind it's very much a utility weapon and not a damage weapon, and getting more damage out of that slot is going to increase as importance as your gear improves. Dueling Faze and your boots are good, and your shield is fine; don't worry about those for a while. Your other pieces have a lot of room for improvement, even at <1 million, but aren't nearly the priority your other pieces are.
Lowest base DPS, yes. Wizard actually has more trouble buffing its base damage than any class in the game - they have less damage buffs, and the damage buffs they do have are much weaker than those available to other classes.
People quitting would slow down the turnover rate slightly (from it taking longer to find a buyer), but that's it. It wouldn't have a big price effect.
A ton of bots being banned, however, *would* have a huge effect on item prices, particularly on the high end - and a bunch of bots were banned recently. Abundant gold purchased from botters had massively inflated the gold auction house, and in their absence it is trying to deflate.
Things are still selling just fine, but prices are roughly half of what they were two weeks ago. A lot of items are bouncing because people don't want to take a loss on their items and are listing them at old prices; once they get sick of staring at them and lower their prices to the current levels, they'll move easily and everyone can get back to business as usual.
Aside: what are these 'really cool affixes' from Diablo 2 that you miss so much, whose absence had left the items in this game boring? The affix list in D3 is very comparable to the D2 list. The main difference is in the uniques, as D2 had some very unique properties on some of its items - though, to be fair, the vast majority of their uber-uniques didn't do anything cool as much as they just had ridiculously high stats that obsolesced everything else in the game.
I am looking forward to more legitimately different uniques coming in the next patch, and I'm hopeful that they continue the D3 feel of uniques doing something unique, not strictly better than every other item. Other than that, what's missing? Jewels? Sure, there's some value there that would be a good addition for an expansion. Charms? Terrible design, poor tension. Runewords? Those were just uniques. Honestly, if they do a good job on the legendary pass (moving the damage mods on weapons up, putting a unique property on a bunch of items) I can't see much to complain about in the itemization here.
The big difference between Diablo 2 and Diablo 3 is the auction house. The auction house has drastically increased the availability of high quality gear to players of all stripes. Hence, items that would have been 'decent' in Diablo 2, simply due to impediments to trade, are more or less tossed now without a second thought. Trading used to take a ton of work, which made it uncommon; now it is quick and easy, and is extremely common.
I think the difficulty starts to lift substantially somewhere in the 40k-50k DPS range for ranged, non-Archon builds. Before that it really feels like you're beating your head against the wall - it's possible to progress, but really slow going. Somewhere in that range it feels like breaking through the wall and enemies start dying.
Teleport is important if you're relatively squishy, and unimportant if you're rather tanky.
If you have good DPS, just wand down the ranged mobs. If you don't, but are rather tanky, just skip them and find something that will stand in the whirlwinds.
Short Fuse is strong when you're high DPS and it finishes things off when you hit the button; it's weak and you're better off with Chain when you're low DPS and will be chipping away for a few seconds.
Wicked Wind is honestly the only skill that is indispensable, as it's the utterly broken engine at the heart of it all; the rest can and should be swapped in or out depending on what you're doing and what your gear looks like.
hey guys Im wondering here how much ehp would you need to farm act 3?
Depends a lot on your micro, and remember that armor and resists are much, much more valuable than raw health. I think it's perfectly doable with ~200k EHP, but your mileage will most certainly vary.
0
That said, there should be a range on the melee hits even with the lock-in, so that they can be dodged with skills like Vault and Teleport. While being able to walk out of a melee hit due to really sensitive hit detection leads to poor game play, being unable to Vault out of a melee hit - and taking the hit when 20 yards away - is frustrating and doesn't really add to game play, and should be fixed.
0
1
The itemization and auction house are ridiculously bad.
Since so much of the replay of the game is in the item hunt, having terrible, very linear itemization is ridiculously bad. While they wanted players to be able to branch out their 'build' in their item selection, the item balance is so poor and linear that 'branching out' doesn't even become remotely relevant until you're in the 100 million + range, and even then it's limited to a few mods.
The auction house, and particularly the RMAH, exacerbated these problems - they made decent items very accessible, but also made most drops very worthless very quickly (which is terrible in an item hunt game). The RMAH was too direct, and quite a few people lost interest in the game very quickly when they hit a wall, spent money on the RMAH just to advance a little further, then promptly hit another wall.
Throw a big gear nerf into the mix and you have the recipe for the really bad reaction we saw - the underlying game play might be good, but if the item part of the game is a massive frustration instead of lots of fun, no one wants to play.
2
Let's look at a simple example. For simplicity, pretend that you never look at the auction house. You've finally hit level 60, reached Inferno, and found your first level 60+ weapon, which is better than whatever you had before and you equip it.
5 minutes later, you find another level 60+ weapon. What are the odds that this is an upgrade for you? 50/50. Half the time it's better, half the time it will be worse, not accounting for anything else.
5 minutes after that, another weapon! But is this one an upgrade? Well, it would have to be better than either of the previous weapons you have found, which it has only a 1 in 3 chance of being.
The next weapon? 1 in 4.
It keeps going like this, with the odds of any drop being an upgrade for you being proportional to 1/T, where T is the time you've been playing. This is totally without regard to the randomization algorithm or how items are generated or anything of the sorts - once you're no longer improving your drop tables, your upgrade frequency is going to drop as you keep playing, until you essentially stop finding upgrades at all.
Now take the auction house into account. What this does is redistribute items between players. Assume, for example, that there are a million players with a level 60 on the auction house. That would mean that, roughly, only the million best weapons ever found are worth much at all, with the price of weapons right on the edge of that million being exceptionally low since they're so similar to items that just miss the cut. Then add in that this is going to suffer from the same 1/T relationship as the solo play example - we're 10 weeks into the game so far, and after another 10 weeks the number of weapons found will have doubled, which means half the weapons that currently exist will have dropped from 'marginal' to 'crap'.
What does that mean for your own drops? It means the usefulness of your own drops, from the perspective of the auction house, does not depend on how long you have played, but how long *everyone* has played. The more everyone plays, access to high quality gear increases, while an increasing number of items on the edge slip from useful to trash.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with the randomization method, or even how item mods are generated; it's just the nature of picking out the best items from a random pool with a constant generator algorithm. There's nothing whatsoever Blizzard can do about this; it's baked into the game.
2
The other is an arbitrage loop between the cash and gold auction houses. There are some items that will sell better for dollars, and some items that will sell better for gold. This has tightened up somewhat, but for a while I was able to sell certain types of items for close to $5 per million, while buying other types of items for only $1.50 per million. If you can find something like that you can milk a lot of profit out of it before it dries up.
There are also some tricks you can play with socketed items and gems. The most obvious one is with magic find / gold find helms, where people who don't know better will neglect to socket their help and you can collect a big premium for doing it for them. The same principle applies to other items as well, however, and you can make big chunks of money by buying items without gems, or with the wrong gems in them, and selling them with a better gem set - for example, I've tripled the value of a dex/vit chest by pulling out the amethysts and putting in emeralds.
In any case, you need to be very familiar with the market for the type of item you are buying and selling, as you'll make more money off of the more marginal cases (2x mark-up on resale) than on the home runs (10x mark-up).
0
Let's go through these one at a time.
Bracers are straightforward - you want crit chance. It's the only particularly exciting roll here, everything else is forgettable. 4.5% crit chance is reasonably priced, but bumping it up to 5% instantly makes a bracer expensive, so stick to 4.5% until you want to spend 5 million or so to get a good one. Bracers with 4.5% crit, 70 intelligence, and 60 all resist will run you ~500k, and you should be able to find one with those stats and another good stat (vitality, armor, specific resist, etc) for less than a million.
Shoulders and belts are identical. There are no particularly good stats rolls you can get here, so just use these slots to round out your build with whatever you need. I'd recommend getting 60 all resist, 70 intelligence, 70 vitality, and ideally a little bit more (armor, specific resist), which you can find for less than 250k. If you want to spend a bit more, you can creep those numbers up a bit, getting 100 int or vit, or 70 all resist, or a big roll of armor, all of which can be acquired for less than a million. Sort items here by armor, and try to get a 62 or 63 with high base armor.
Rings are tricky because you can get nearly any stat in the game here. In general, getting Int + one of attack speed, crit chance, crit damage, or life in hit will be cheap, but getting two or more of those on the same ring will be expensive; the former two moreso than the latter two. You don't pay nearly as much for defensive stats, however, so ideally you want to mix and match.
You also want to look for rings that have native +damage on them; you can't search for it directly, and it doesn't move the price of a ring much, but it does wonders for the performance.
Shopping on a budget, I'm looking for a ring that looks something like this:
+12-24 Damage
+70 Intelligence
+35 Fire Resistance / Physical Resistance
+35 Resist All / +200 armor / +70 Vitality
+7% attack speed / +3.5% chance to crit
Which you can easily find for a million; grab two of the defensive stats, or tack on a bit of life on hit or crit damage if you want to spend more. Rings are hard to shop for, since there are a bunch of different combinations that could yield gold; check them all looking for a deal.
0
Bare minimum? ~250k EHP with prismatic armor (32k HP, 2500 armor, 500 AR before the buff), perhaps a bit less; 3 AP per tick (30% crit + 10 AP per crit, or equivalent); "some" life on hit (200 is enough if your play is tight) - after that, you just want damage to make it go faster, or more defense to let you play more aggressively.
0
After that, your weakest pieces are your bracers, your shoulder, and your belt. You should be able to find very nice upgrades to each of those in the 1 million range.
I think your weapon is fine, just keep in mind it's very much a utility weapon and not a damage weapon, and getting more damage out of that slot is going to increase as importance as your gear improves. Dueling Faze and your boots are good, and your shield is fine; don't worry about those for a while. Your other pieces have a lot of room for improvement, even at <1 million, but aren't nearly the priority your other pieces are.
0
0
A ton of bots being banned, however, *would* have a huge effect on item prices, particularly on the high end - and a bunch of bots were banned recently. Abundant gold purchased from botters had massively inflated the gold auction house, and in their absence it is trying to deflate.
Things are still selling just fine, but prices are roughly half of what they were two weeks ago. A lot of items are bouncing because people don't want to take a loss on their items and are listing them at old prices; once they get sick of staring at them and lower their prices to the current levels, they'll move easily and everyone can get back to business as usual.
0
I am looking forward to more legitimately different uniques coming in the next patch, and I'm hopeful that they continue the D3 feel of uniques doing something unique, not strictly better than every other item. Other than that, what's missing? Jewels? Sure, there's some value there that would be a good addition for an expansion. Charms? Terrible design, poor tension. Runewords? Those were just uniques. Honestly, if they do a good job on the legendary pass (moving the damage mods on weapons up, putting a unique property on a bunch of items) I can't see much to complain about in the itemization here.
0
0
0
If you have good DPS, just wand down the ranged mobs. If you don't, but are rather tanky, just skip them and find something that will stand in the whirlwinds.
Short Fuse is strong when you're high DPS and it finishes things off when you hit the button; it's weak and you're better off with Chain when you're low DPS and will be chipping away for a few seconds.
Wicked Wind is honestly the only skill that is indispensable, as it's the utterly broken engine at the heart of it all; the rest can and should be swapped in or out depending on what you're doing and what your gear looks like.
0
Depends a lot on your micro, and remember that armor and resists are much, much more valuable than raw health. I think it's perfectly doable with ~200k EHP, but your mileage will most certainly vary.