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Quote from Bagstone

Happy to see crit hit chance cap lowered to 40%. Also 250% crit hit damage cap is also good. This will make gearing more interesting as it's not just "trifecta all the way".

I don't think it will... it'll just change gearing to "hit your caps, then stack EHP". I suspect Blizzard's preferred choice is diminishing returns after a point, but avoid that approach because it's mathy, and user-opaque.

Quote from Bagstone

A bit disappointed to still see the MF cap at 300%

I assume/hope that's 'base MF', i.e. paragon-points MF + gear MF.

Quote from lalaurentide

It's not healthy to have a 70 to 80% reduced effectiveness of snares and affixes [and others] in inferno. It's not healthy for Elites to be significantly stronger than regular monsters. There's a lot of things that ain't healthy Wyatt, welcome to the monster you have helped create.

Given that full-duration CC trivializes inferno difficulty, I assume you want to see CCs nerfed for all difficulties, making them a clutch tool for getting out of the sticky situations people often find in Nightmare difficulty?

... and you're either proposing that trashmobs take as long to kill as elites, or vice versa, but I can't figure out which option is the good one.

I always thought Blizzard might do this, but I picked the odds as being so low it wasn't worth taking the possibility seriously.

Truth be told, I'm going to miss the GAH. I only really used it to plug gaps in my gear (and, not going to lie, find a pile of -levelreq gear for my alts), but Loot2.0 should take care of that nicely.

Not sure I want to know how this is going to affect the bot situation... constant streams of gold-site spammers dropping in and out of public games doesn't sound that great to me. Hopefully Blizzard has/will have some good tools for spotting that crap quickly.

We shall see.


Also, well done all the gloaters in this thread. Your bravery shall be... well... forgotten within days, I'm sure. But still, kudos.

Quote from bokkkie

I'm sad that you didn't mention maybe the most important part of the interview

"Were you tempted to scrap it entirely? I ask. Did the thought ever cross your mind?!

"We'd be lying if we didn't say yes," Josh replies after a moment's contemplation. "We saw the reaction. Again, it's a complicated matter. It's not just complicated at the team level, or even the Blizzard level."

This implies that Activison really likes the RMAH and they don't want to give up on the money

... or that the impact on the community (in terms of account comprimises and a much slower path to power) would be significant and difficult to predict. But what do I know, I'm not wearing a tinfoil hat.

Quote from overneathe

Quote from Catalept

If Lylirra didn't negotiate a clause in her contract that gives her a small bonus everytime she says "Not finalized", or "Subject to change", she's a damn fool. Those words are going to be at end of almost every declarative she utters from here until release.

It's not her fault every word she utters will be transmuted to mean something else and then stamped with a CONFIRMED! from the rumor-loving crowd.

GHOSTCRAWLER PROMISED ME A PONYYYYYYY!

If Lylirra didn't negotiate a clause in her contract that gives her a small bonus everytime she says "Not finalized", or "Subject to change", she's a damn fool. Those words are going to be at end of almost every declarative she utters from here until release.

Quote from Sabvre

The interview with the chick confirms only one xpac class.

Specifically at 9:54 onward.

I'm really in two minds about that. I would have liked more classes, but I actually pretty much only play two at the moment anyway, and if they really do nail the build-enabling legendaries, that'll add enough variation to keep me going for another holycraphowmany more hours.

Quote from titelheld

Quote from Seifa

Quote from Westy357

What happens to the paragon level you are currently @ now with your various characters, is this all gone?

I read in some interview, when talking about Paragon levels, that when they changed the system, the change would be retro active. If you have 100 levels already, you would get all the bonuses when the expansion goes live.

Now, about the announcement.... It's quite nice, but recently i said i wouldn't like a level cap increase, but i think it's the only way to clean the mess that vanilla D3 is.

At the moment i won't touch Diablo 3, until the expansion (or if a patch before it comes). I can't force myself to play if everything will be tossed away. <.<

Say I have a p100 p50 and p20 character would I end up with account paragon lvl 170?
If so wouldn't it be best to aim for as many paragon lvls as possible on all chars combined?

I am just saying the grind from p100 to p170 is probably much worse than bringing 2 characters to p35 before the addon.

I assume they'll just add all the paragon XP together and assign your account the corresponding paragon level... anything else would be badly broken.

Quote from 2gutpik

already hear someone crying "oh nooes, my 6k+ euro fury )="

I fully expect a QQstorm from people who don't understand how ARPG expansions work, and also fully expect to ignore it completely.

Quote from 2gutpik

also ok, items become useless (current items), what about paragon levels? how do you see gaining new levels, when people have different paragon levels (and some not have any at all)

Either they'll just let people keep the full effect of their accumulated paragon levels while they're leveling (it doesn't, after all, affect XP gain), or switch it off until we reach the new level cap at which point we pick up where we left off. In either case, except to see no MF on xpack gear.

Glad to see they're thinking about the Paragon Level problem, although fixing it is going to be tricky without making the 500-level people feel SLAPPED IN THE FACE

Quote from overneathe

Quote from Tybudd

Wow $74 for ps4 version of Diablo???

I hadn't seen any games listed on Gamestop yet that cost that much, why blizz gotta try to come out with the most expensive damn PS4 release date game!!

Actually those are just the converted prices that I did myself. On second thought I'll remove those as conversion is usually not accurate in video game sales and instead wait for the official listing of US vendors.

Whoa, there... we don't need your 'caution' and your 'facts'. We're discussing Blizzard's greed and short-sightedness, here.

Quote from Vulmio

So as a software engineer, you (or your company) regularly announce to your clients new features for your software, not even knowing if you will be providing them, just to communicate with them ? I'm probably not mature enough to understand, but at least I don't need more (innaccurate) communication to be reassured.

Every company I've worked for has announced new features in beta software (usually through beta-testing channels, but on occasion to the larger community, when feedback and/or advanced warning is especially important), precisely so they can be tested. On top of that, certainly the last three companies I've worked for (beyond which my memory gets a little hazy) have, on occasion, removed features from beta version because the whole idea was a bust, better functionality could be achievement through other services or it just wasn't going to be ready for release. That's one of the main purposes of beta-testing. S&M (ours and, I expect, everyone else's) always chose their words carefully to avoid making any firm commitments about beta features unless the higher-ups had locked it down as a must-have.

However, without much effort, I can also think of a few occasions where features explicitly announced for release had to be canned. Yes, there was a certain amount of backlash, but I can also state with absolute certainty that the devs involved weren't happy either (and in once case, actually angry... fun times, shan't talk about it here, lolofficepolitics). It happens, and particularly with the more technically-orientated companies, our customers understood that the announced feature-set should only be considered binding once the product actually went on sale (because, ultimately, that's also what the law says).

It's pretty much a universal truth that marketing is all about walking the fine line between amping up expectations while making minimal concrete guarantees. This is true across the board, not just in software. We just have the added fun of people forgetting that beta is beta. Blizzard, I've noticed, are particularly careful to avoid language that commits them outright to any given features, while simultaneously fueling their hype-machine with open betas, pre-release gameplay streams/demos and all manner of headline-generators. I think if you go back, re-watch their streams and re-read their press releases, you'll find a hell of a lot of "we hope to", "we're aiming at", "here's something we're really excited about" and all kinds of coy phrases carefully chosen to avoid making firm declaratives about release features. It sucks, but it's how the marketing game works.

Quote from Vulmio

Quote from Catalept

The problem is that there are too many cerebrally deficient rage-monsters out there who will misinterpret the naturally tentative, iterative and unpredictable process of game-design as a set of OMG BORKEN PROMISES when Blizzard changes their minds and BLIZZ ARE ALL MORONS when they disagree with the rationale for same, because far too many people think software is arbitrarily mutable when they don't like it, and a contract carved into adamantium when they do. Before we know it community forums are swamped with hater circle-jerks, white-knights and every permutation of troll yelling at each other about unreleased features, and discussion about the actual existing game is relegated to page 27 just under the story about the skateboarding penguin.

I was once excited by a feature anounced and then canceled by Blizzard (Path of Titans in WoW) because it sounded really nice and I was really interested in it. I haven't made any post about it at all (and you can see I am not shy about posting in forums), no rage or anything, but I felt really disappointed when they decided to cancel this feature. I haven't acted as a "cerebrally deficient rage-monster" but still I was disappointed.
What would be the point to announce tons of great stuff if then they don't release them ? Would you enjoy that ?

Oh I doubt it... but I'm getting too old to get particularly agitated about games, and as a software engineer myself, I'm used to the iterative process anyway.

Having said that, I was bummed out when they ditched PoT, too. Which I suppose clinches the argument in Blizzard's favor... the loudly disappointed will clog up community discussion, the quietly disappointed will... I don't know... listen to The National with the curtains drawn? In the end, 'more communication' will either repeatedly reassure us of what we've already been told, or leave a trail of disappointed fans like Rhianna going on tour without a working Auto-Tune.

Perhaps Blizzard should release ongoing development notes, but only to communities who are known to cope with disappointment well, like Democrats, or the English.

Quote from Vulmio

It's funny how people want "communication". People don't want "communication", they want patch notes. Blizzard is communicating a lot : about the console version, fan art, etc... check the official D3 website. But this is not the "communication" you want. You want to read "Next patch will introduce those changes : ...". So don't be hypocritical, ask for patch notes and not "communication"

I don't want patch notes... we already get those about as fast as possible, mainly because it's only really possible to make them once everything's nailed down.

What I want is "here's some crap we're working on, and here's the direction we're intending to go with it", with the full understanding that Blizzard could, and often should frequently change the former and regularly adjust the latter. The thing is that it's happened before... remember D3's beta coverage? Remember how many things we saw Blizzard employees talking about that didn't actually make it into the game?

The problem is that there are too many cerebrally deficient rage-monsters out there who will misinterpret the naturally tentative, iterative and unpredictable process of game-design as a set of OMG BORKEN PROMISES when Blizzard changes their minds and BLIZZ ARE ALL MORONS when they disagree with the rationale for same, because far too many people think software is arbitrarily mutable when they don't like it, and a contract carved into adamantium when they do. Before we know it community forums are swamped with hater circle-jerks, white-knights and every permutation of troll yelling at each other about unreleased features, and discussion about the actual existing game is relegated to page 27 just under the story about the skateboarding penguin.

So there's that.

Quote from Zeyk23

It's not complicated - all they're saying is that 100% of their patch-producing manpower is focused on the "itemization update" now, including upcoming skill changes etc. Presumably the changes they're making to loot are so drastic that it also has impact on skill balance, and skills are being tweaked accordingly, so they can't release the skill changes by themselves. It should be good news to the people who believe that Diablo 3 still needs huge overhauls to fix its problems, because that's exactly what it means they're doing. I wouldn't be surprised to see completely revamped stats, etc.

I really wish they'd do a 'WTF are we actually up to' post, because they're basically been saying "We're overhauling items, skills and the interactions between them, as well as seriously changing other other aspects of the game" for ages, and I don't know if that means they've got the most uber-awesome superpatch on the way, or just working on a "yeah, we're changing all the numbers, and that's about it... but the expansion is going to great! kekekeke" pile of underwhelming bleh.

I want to come up to the lab.
And see what's on the slab.