DiabloFans

OMG DUMBING DOWN TEH GAME! RAAAAR! ANGERFACE!!!!

/cough

I think it's one of those ideas that would make life better for a certain subset of players, and worse for another subset. It'd be great for people with limited time, but would like to play off-classes at their full potential, sure... but it would also severely truncate replayability, as boosting alts would become trivial.

Having said that (as I am seldom in possession of just a single opinion on any given topic), having a Mystic option to straight up transmute one mainstat to another (for an appropriately ludicrous fee, ofc) would be great. The RNG has scoffed at my attempts to turn a useless DEX Scourge into a shiny new STR one

There should be some analog to Godwin's Corollary such that when someone uses 'child', 'kid', or any variant thereof as a pejorative aimed at people whose opinion differs from theirs (which is an ad hominem anyway, and therefore already has no place in rational discourse), their comment should be immediately assigned to the wastebin.

That aside, if 'too many people' (whatever the hell that means) prefer Normal to any other difficulty, that's a failure of design, not a failure of character.

Quote from Photrius_Pyrelus

I find it curious you list anything other than the 1-affix column as having a probability of 100%, for this is surly never the case. It may be very very very *VERY* close to 100%, but should never actually quite /be/ 100%.

I think we can safely chalk that up to rounding, although it'd be nice to know what the precision was.

This chart is bang on, assuming all affixes have the same probability. That's a hypothesis that might need some testing, although if it's not true, that would seem kinda dickish on Blizzard's part, because there's no suggestion in the game that that's the case. Obviously, we need hard data, not "I once...", because people are really good at remembering bad luck (because it's expensive), and lousy at remembering good luck (because we expect it).

IMO, they should have scrapped 'main stat' gems altogether, and turned sockets into a secondary affix, limited them to one per item, and changed the gems to be exclusively things like runspeed, pickup radius, etc... no more CHD or mainstats.

Frustratingly enough, they didn't... so any solution to the socket problem has to be compatible with things as they currently stand

Yeah... I miss having the amounts, almost as much as the old "giant pile of treasure" graphics for large stacks. Now we've just got a few variations on the "underwhelming pile of coins"

They had to use sketched cutscenes because the ending centers around the player character, of which there are 12 variations... doing a full CGI version would have been expensive, time-consuming and bulky. It seems weird that unlike the last two D3's, the only looming threat being hinted at is the player character. It suggests to me that they're not just going to have some new bad guy popping out of Metzen's head, or they surely would have gone ahead with a full CGI ending that didn't feature the PC. After all, if they were just being cheapskates, why not just make a single sketched ending hinting at the new endboss?. Does that mean that the next expansion will have some kind of lightside/darkside thing going on? Do they dare put the RPG back into ARPG?

The AH was a quintessential mixed blessing. I miss it every bit as much as I totally don't.

With that in mind, I've never enjoyed D3 as much as I do now, knowing that genuine upgrades are out there, but also build-changing sidegrades. On top of that, the anti-RNG countermeasures really take the edge off. I just hope I don't burn out before RoS ships.

/me looks at 1000+ hours played

/me thinks that probably won't happen

Quote from Pietrak

Quote from Jack00

So what, if I don't get the xpack, I will be screwed out of 2handed weapons forever ???

I don't know. But if yes, what is your point? That Blizzard should cater to your needs for an indefinite time just because you paid them 40$ almost 2 years ago? There is a point where simply you are required to either move on (buy the expansion) or simply drop the game.

The problem is that as things currently stand, Loot 2.0 represents a downgrade for 2H users not planning to buy RoS. That's a genuine issue. Blizzard has been generous with 2.0. They could have just put D3 1.x out to pasture and put everything into RoS, so I'm not going to huff and puff about how evil they are... but for all the good stuff that vanilla players are getting, D3 is a game about killing monsters. Dramatically and permanently lowering the DPS ceiling for non-RoS players (particularly when the fix is so straightforward) is something Blizzard needs to address. Even though it's just a side-effect of a re-worked loot system, nerfing vanilla players just prior to the release of an expansion isn't a good look.

I don't think it's even necessary to show "1k-2k" ranges, just replace "450% weapon damage" with "1.5k damage", calculated from all relevant factors (i.e. everything but weapon speed). I mean, most of us could probably say what the approximate DPS of our main's weapon is, because the game shows it to us in a big bold font, but I bet not many could say what the average damage is. That's incredibly relevant information that is still not directly given in the UI.

This problem is compounded by 2.0 giving us a red/grey/green %damage metric on gear tooltips, which actually only pertains to sheet DPS, so we're encouraged by the game itself to gravitate towards high sheet DPS even though doing so could lower our actual DPS by a sizeable margin.

Having said all that, though, this could well be a case where 99% of the player base doesn't actually care about optimizing DPS, they just go with what looks cool, and the rest of us actually have the info we need, it's just a bit of a pain to crunch the numbers.

Quote from trainRiderJ

Don't forget that 2-handers are generally better for cooldown and dot based abilities since those only use weapon damage and don't factor in weapon attack speed or IAS. Unless I'm wrong?

That, I think, is basically the problem. The UI makes such a big deal about DPS, which isn't actually a terribly useful stat. With a 2H, you're sacrificing the 15% IAS boost from DW, the +dmg stats from a non-weapon OH and the protection of a shield for... something? In theory, that something is harder-hitting spenders. However, the sheet DPS doesn't factor that in at all, and the UI makes it hard to tell exactly how much harder your spenders will hit for. To keep things balanced, 2h weapons should be able to roll equal stats to any combination of 1H/OH equipment... but for their base damage, it's not so clear. Given that they're slower, their spenders will intrinsically hit harder than 1H weapons already, so their DPS advantage over 1H weapons doesn't actually need to be much at all for their total damage output (which is the only stat that matters) to stay competitive.

Perhaps the UI also needs to present a stat showing how much damage the average weapon hit does, factoring in everything but attack speed, as that gives a better indication of how hard spenders will hit.

I'm only surprised at how long this thread has managed to circle the drain without actually vanishing down it faster than guacamole that went bad at the back of the fridge.

Onyxia deep breaths more often, I'm sure of it!

I'm deeply ambivalent about that. On one hand, I really like the idea of shards as insurance against bad luck and a way to focus gameplay. I like my loot acquisition like my character advancement... grindy. On the other hand (as others have already stated elsewhere) I also really like the idea of getting a really cool legendary from a dead monster frequently enough for that to a motivation in itself... I'm not at all keen on it being an event so rare it doesn't even factor into my 'reasons to keep playing'.

Perhaps tone down the blood-shard rewards from events and give elites a chance to drop them as well? Who knows.

Locking 3rd-party spammers/botters and traders out of the game, de-emphasizing gold and getting people out of the AH and back into the game is bullshit? I do not wish to subscribe to your newsletter. I would like to see some means of insulating people from bad luck, as that was (arguably) the only good use for the AH. Perhaps a +LegFind buff that increases with every elite kill? Although I'm not sure reasonable discussion about actual issues belongs in this thread.