DiabloFans

Quote from phoulmouth

D3's difficulty is hugely increased compared to D1 and D2.
D3 did away with the need to haunt trade channels for 3-4 hours a night.
D3 did away with "all4SoJ" trade games.
D3 did away with the 3 boss farm and repeat.
D3 made a better MF system with NV.
D3 made better graphics and a destructible environment that is actually pretty cool.

So true.

Quote from VegasRage

I hear what you are saying, the thing I think a lot of people (including Blizzard Irvine) seemed to have forgotten was a lot us played Diablo simply because it was just entertaining. The story line, the NPC dialog humor, the eerie feeling of the game, being able to dungeon crawl, and just being the hero was all it took to keep a lot of us happy. I never had an interest at defeating hell mode or ever bothered playing in hardcore mode. Diablo and Diablo2 was highly successful as a stand alone game, I never liked playing it online, too many ass hat griefers in D1 and too many jerks in D2. Blizzard totally lost sight of that fact in D3.

Well, I never played Hardcore either - the idea of working hard on a toon and then losing it completely due to a tiny misstep just never sounded fun to me. Plus it was just more levelling which got pretty old after the first couple of times. I never heard of anyone who didn't want to complete Hell but to each their own

I think the major problem with having a two-mode game is how confusing and frustating it would be to new players. Imagine launch week when the servers would go down a lot - all those players would be "oh ok then I'll just play offline" and then later on they find out that their offline mode character can't be played online and they'd be like WTF THAT SUCKS!!! Which yeah, it does but that's how it has to be so the game doesn't become a haxxfest like D1. So a huge proportion of the base would wind up "marooned" in offline mode which runs counter to the whole intent of the game, it's really supposed to be played online with friends.

Plus of course they'd have to maintain both simultaneously and that's just a waste of their time. I think ultimately having it online only was the right choice.

Quote from VegasRage

I totally agree they didn't aim for people like me, the massive outpouring of displeasure shows just how many of Diablo's base they've angered. It's no secret the WoW developers of Blizzard Irvine basically kicked Blizzard North to the curb, injected their own new direction will into the game pissing on many of the Diablo fan base.

Well, the last version of "Diablo 3" they were working on was an MMO so...

She deep breaths more.

Players 8 was a great feature in the offline mode, it made leveling an alt through Normal and Nightmare slightly more bearable (seriously, people forget how ridiculously miserably unchallenging D2 was, the fact you could easily faceroll solo through to late Nightmare at least with the monsters set to levels intended for EIGHT PEOPLE is pretty freaking telling). But you couldn't use it on Battlenet which kind of sucked. I used to find open games with as many people in them as possible in other Acts and solo through until they all left LOL. Ah, the "social" aspect of D2...

Some kind of personal difficulty setting could work I guess. Something better than that though

Quote from Sikk

D2 had ladders, pvp and pandemonium events. How about that for complexity? Compared to D3 ofc. Your turn.

Oh yeah ladders, that was so awesome, every now and then you could re-level all your toons from scratch. Such compelling gameplay. And by the way, even if they put ladders in the game it'd probably be 6 months to a year before there was a ladder reset so it'd hardly make a difference now would it? According to blogs they're trying to think of something better this time around. I hope they do.

Uber Diablo was added like 4 years after release as a cheap way of giving people something (anything!) to do at max level without creating any new game assets. The other "pandemonium events" were added later (I forget when). All non-canon of course because it was just levered into the game at the end of its lifecycle purely for gameplay reasons. About the worst excuse for "content" I can think of.

And PVP is coming, duh.

Quote from cw30000

If you have played Diablo 2, you will see how complex the D2 system is, yet everything is balance.

As someone who played D2 for like 5 years or so, this post is fucking hilarious.

I dunno, that 25% EHP probably makes a lot more difference than you think.

Still, if you get to PL 100 and aren't swimming in good gear by then you're a pretty damn unlucky person lol.

Quote from madmaxII

A paragon level is obviously much weaker than a skillpoint and 5 stat points in Diablo 2, but it feels rewarding to earn one of them. And having more rewarding things in the end game was something that D3 has desperately needed.

All depends where you spent that skill point

I will be interested to see how they handle it in PVP, I was sort of expecting your PL to not count for PVP but Blizzard has a history of trying to keep PVE and PVP identical even when that causes massive problems so we'll have to wait and see

Quote from Gnarf

dont really see what's the big fuss about it except it being less useless than before patch

Isn't that the whole intention of 1.0.4? To make everything more viable, and not just replace OP choice X with OP choice Y?

I think BoE in any form in D3 is a crap idea. If you don't like short-circuiting gear progression don't use the AH.

Didn't take long for this kind of thread to pop up lol.

I wasn't totally keen on the Paragon level thing but reading and thinking about it it kind of grew on me.

I sure hope they don't do what they did in D2 with LoD when the expansion comes out. Creating a new Act in all three (four now) difficulties just meant a longer grind through to Hell on every new alt... yuck.

Quote from Doez

If this is true, I do not like those changes one bit. I like the randomness of kiting mortar mobs and the risk of dying. If you see where they are going to land, it trivializes everything. I also liked the old molten explosion effect, I knew to get the hell out after it died.

LOL how does it trivialise it? If you play the game for more than 5 minutes you memorise the radius of those abilities. The indicators on the screen allow me to play close to the bone and move as little as possible, I love the idea.

I got caught by the explosion all the time fighting normal mobs with a racial explode just because I was too busy looting and not paying attention

Quote from st0rmie

The blessing NPC (at least the one in Act 2 Hidden Camp, haven't tried others) now has one less click to get healed - you just click on him to talk, and bang! healed. Used to have to select a conversation option "give me a blessing".

That's a plus, maybe I'll actually use his services for once.

I'm sort of torn between concern that this Jay guy (who is apparently some lead developer? I don't know why you people cyberstalk the devs, I just play freaking games I don't care who made them) made a post like this in a place where obviously everyone will see it and the forums will go nuclear with raging scumbags and everyone will get personal and laughing because it's kinda funny. Assuming this is real.

It's pretty unprofessional but on the other hand this Brevik guy was pretty much saying haha you fired us and now you suck to the people he used to work with so kind of understandable. Also some pretty unfair digs, like blues being more powerful than yellows (which was no more true of D3 than it was in D2, he obviously didn't actually play D3 and is parroting this crap which was on the forums on release night), the fact your DPS works off your main weapon (I assume he means for casters, which is a departure but personally I think it's more fun than when they were just stat sticks like in D2). And something about things would be better if everything was BOE? What the hell is he even talking about there, nothing has ever bound on any Diablo game, and that was hardly a change the community would've welcomed back in D2, I remember those discussions on the forums. The guy clearly is getting his info on D3 from forum whine.

I feel kinda sorry for him, has to suck making a really successful game and then getting fired (or quitting? I don't freaking know it's none of my damn business) and then trying to make your own studio with visions of complete creative control and it not really working out (sadly never does). Maybe if he'd made D3 it would've been awesome, maybe better than the one we have maybe worse, nobody will ever know. Honestly though people are greatly exaggerating the original Diablo creative teams, I don't think any of them have been amazing perfect games, that goes for D1-D3. They're good games, I played D2 for years and D1 has a special place in my heart but they weren't the work of genius or anything. And making D3 a reskinned D2 would've been a terrible mistake. D3 has to move on from D2 just like D2 did from D1.

On the other hand funny though it was Jay Wilson's post was pretty foolish

Quote from st0rmie

Good stuff. Few thousand more permabans and the official forums might potentially become a place where people who play Diablo III can gather to discuss Diablo III. Radical idea, I know.

Wordpress and blogger.com are over that way if people want to post spittle-flecked rants. That's why they were invented.

So much this. Bring on forum eugenics!

Quote from Azidonis

Quote from KageKaze

Quote from Azidonis

What Jay meant to say: "We know you all wanted to work on leveling to 99 while looking for lootz, but we dropped that ball. So here's 100 more levels for you! Also, we have no earthly idea how the team at Blizzard North made their magic find system work so flawlessly, so here's some MF with those levels, so we can remove MF from items, because we are clueless of how to make it work."

The D2 magic find system was far from perfect for a very long time. There was even a bug untill 1.08 fixed it where the MF system would punish you for having over 149% MF.

Honestly it feels like everyone who posts that D2 was so much better in so many ways tends to forget that it wasn't like that at the start.

Addition: Looking back at patch notes, Magic Find might not have even worked on chests and items found by barbarians with their find item skill. It's funny the things we forget.

It's funny how Diablo 2 was released June 29, 2000.Diablo 2: LoD was released June 27, 2001. Diablo 3 was release May 15, 2012.

That the same (or similar) "issues" exist at the release of the game, 11 years later, is laughable. It shows a lack of experience with the genre. Look, if I knew that 11 years ago we put out a game that had "X, Y, and Z" problems, the last thing I would do would be to reproduce "X, Y, and Z" problems.

You mention the "MF fix" with the diminishing returns and what-not. Let me ask you, if you knew that before the MF fix there was a problem, necessitating a fix, then why would you re-create that problem on purpose? It's asinine.

It's like saying you know movies were in black and white when they first came out, but we learned how to make them color, so we went back to black and white on purpose, only to turn right around and put it into color.

Dunno what you're talking about there kid, D3 addressed a horde of problems from D2. Like the whole game consisting of Baal runs (which in 11 years of D2 they never succeeded in stopping), the primitive talent trees, the immunities in Hell, the fact you couldn't transfer items from one toon to another, the fact gold had no worth in the game...

The whole MF "issue" was not even considered an issue back in D2. The fact that it is now is really a sign of how much more sophisticated games have become - and the gaming audience as well.

People talk about D2 taking time to become "polished" but hell, that game was never polished. By modern standards it's a broken unplayable piece of crap with 0 difficulty and no endgame...

Quote from st0rmie

I don't want to exacerbate a slagging match - and I've never played DH endgame so my comments aren't intended to be about specific DH skills - but surely the goal of "build diversity" is well-served by giving you a choice between high-damage high-resource-cost and lower-damage lower-resource-cost skills?

IKR.

Some of the DH's high Hatred abilities didn't really do enough damage given their cost, I think some tweaking was called for. But yes Cluster Arrow is supposed to be "high damage high cost" versus more spammable hatred consumers.