DiabloFans

Yeah this build and gearing for it can be found for well under a million gold and can get you through act 2 rather easily. Cyclone is just so good and mantra of evasion is probably one of the best defensive abilities in the game (with hard target and nice dex, which is ofc a primary attribute).

Great post.

extremely interested to see some long term YTD charts come the fall. Also keep an eye on when patches or major hotfixes happen. Not all game changes necessarily could be demarcated by major value fluctuations, but if a major ability change happens we could see more gold being bought as new gear becomes more relevant (or legendaries).

Quote from antrodax

Quote from KiriONE

A massive sweeping class balance/tweak patch implemented without any sort of preview? I think you should set your hopes on an actual no-nonsense response from Blizzard on its status rather than the patch itself.

That's 1.1, as far as I know.

Bunch of legendaries and tweaks, don't expect more. Remember 1.0.3...

That's how it works... 1.0.X tweaks; 1.X major changes

I was referring to the many ability changes in 1.04 Morhaime mentioned the ability changes in the same paragraph he discussed 1.04 and legendaries so we could assume that those ability changes while it might look like "tweaking" abilities, I'm sure the engineering behind changing all of those abilities is rather intensive on a back end. I'd also assume that's why we haven't seen this phantom developer blog that was promised "in the near future" back in June.

A massive sweeping class balance/tweak patch implemented without any sort of preview? I think you should set your hopes on an actual no-nonsense response from Blizzard on its status rather than the patch itself.

Awesome idea, US!

this is a great idea! good luck to everyone!

Quote from Harmonica39

gotta love how ppl still cry about endgame in this thread after mike morhaime said that they are working on it.

I think you also have to consider the fact that "end game" doesn't come out over night. If it wasn't in release, and they only acknowledge that it wasn't well after the game came out (http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/6019511928#17) it's safe to say that we probably won't be seeing something for at least a few more months. They needed to make this move to help assuage concerns of the community before they completely write htem off.

Interesting that we're seeing a response from him. As someone else pointed out we don't really see much of him. While I appreciate the gesture I have to scratch my head at its motives. Why wouldn't Jay Wilson make this? Why wouldn't it just come in the form of a developer blog? I'm guessing that the developer blog is still a ways off and that's why we're getting this.

This must be an olive branch to let players know that they are listening, Morhaime has a lot more stock than Jay Wilson and Bashiok right now. It's getting closer to that point where the next thing out of their mouths needs to be a concrete developer blog or the community will revolt.

What I really get from this post is that "wink wink, yeah we know the game wasn't exactly finished". But hey, that's the digital age.

Still a nice gesture to see the heads of state acknowledge us mere mortals!

Quote from shaggy

Anyone who thinks the game has had 10 years of development is simply misinformed.

The original Blizzard North team left in 2004. Blizzard replaced them in 2005 with the current D3 team. The original design of D3 was to be an MMO so it's pretty obvious that in 2005 the new team was starting from scratch. So, instead of this 10-12 year figure that some people cite, it's much more like 7 years. I agree that D3 could have been better, but it irks me when people wrongly inflate numbers like that to make a point.

The difference between 7 years and 10 years on a project is signficant. The difference between 7 and 12 years is chasmic.

I agree, I mention the 10 years because that's how a lot of people look at as you said. Even if they started from scratch there was probably a lot of concept work that was still kept, after all Blizzard owned all the work that Blizzard North did as any company would. At the end of the day you would think that whether it be 5 years or 7 years or 12 years, sweeping changes to classes shouldn't be happening as it should have been tested by someone on the staff -- again that's just conjecture given the fact they've said 104 will have many many changes. Of course there are however many permutations of builds and they all seem to work at most levels (albeit with different difficulties).

There's no doubt in my mind that Inferno wasn't actually tested for more than a few days and it wasn't tested with all the classes either. The changes wizards and monks saw was clear of that. The WD, and I speak just because I personally played him first, and the most, certainly doesn't feel as robust as the other classes. The problem with this is of course the fact that there is no end-game and with more and more people getting to inferno they are just simply shrugging their shoulders saying "what's the point"

Regardless of what theory you buy into, it's not unreasonable to have reservations about this game. As people have said, the game doesn't look like it's been in 10 years of development. In fact it's continuing to develop and while we haven't seen the 1.0.4 changes yet, we can assume they will be rather sweeping. If they are it goes to show that testing wasn't as extensive perhaps as it should have been. Also, if we see sweeping changes we'll see a break in the mantra of Blizzard balancing as generally in the past things have been slowly adjusted over time until they hit their mark while saving the drastic changes for expansions.

We all like to compare it to D2 because aside from it's namesake it's very similar to D2 in a lot of ways, which is part of the reason I think we all have an issue letting it go so to speak. Some of us had our hands turn into partial claws in college dorm rooms while running out Nth Baal run, or crunching numbers debating whether we wanted to save all our points for when certain abilities unlocked in the skill tree. Getting to 99 is a drastic difference to getting to 60 now, and Inferno I feel is actually a little easier than D2 hell in some cases, but I don't harp because I'm not playing D2 and the world has moved on (at least some of us hehe)

Some have said that this game is a test run for the AH which will be a driving force of the Titan project and that it's a lackluster product for what we've come to see from Blizzard. I give credit to all the people who worked on it because they know doubt did, and still continue to do so. But no matter how big the changes of this game are in coming patches and expansions, it is still just something to pass the time until people go back to WoW for Panda or move on to other games. Blizzard knew the expectations and this game feels as though it was given enough polish to look like 10 years was spent on it, when that number is realistically a lot lower. The changes are going to be organic to say the least.

If this game wasn't by Blizzard it would be a cult classic, but because it is, it's just something that will never meet the expectations of fans who have been a fan of the company for 15 years.

Quote from TheDFO

Okay, so my love of Firebomb got the better of me. But I think that either needs the 100% base, or to hit more than once (maybe not all six, but at least twice)

Also, I think it's a multiplicative reduction. Otherwise it'd be doing negative damage on the last hit (as it stands now, starting at 85%)

And the point with increasing range on LS and FB isn't because we have trouble hitting with it, but because we get hit when we do hit with it. Also, they have to compete with longer ranged skills (such as dire bats) that do just as much damage, and in the case of LS, they do it much faster.

I still think that Firebomb suffers like the rest of the WDs abilities his animation is way too long and he's caught looking at the bomb. Sometimes it feels like an NBA star taking a jumper and waiting for it to drop rather than following it up for the rebound (just in case). Not a bad ablity otherwise, and all the runes are acceptable.

Quote from Derwiv33

Somewhat unrelated but:
In 2008 Diablo 3 gameplay video the Witch Doctor was able to:
- Summon dogs one by one
- Sacrifice dogs one by one (by placing cursor on top of the one you wanted to sacrifice).
- Apply Locust Swarm on the pets to enhance their effectiveness.


Obviously I didn't count features such as "no cooldowns" and so on, but I really wonder why those features were removed in the 2012 release version we got (Even horrify had a better animation).

PS: Even the auction house was better in 2008. You could search by 6 stats and you could even sort the items by "time left". Another weird decision, but I believe it might have something to do with database-problems.

Thanks for bringing that up I remember this now. I imagine the locust swarm was scraped in favor of poison dogs and probably once they saw how stupid the dog AI was it became more annoying to chase after them with the 5 yard range of locust swarm.

And I constantly shake my fist to the skies at not having just ONE more field to search by on the AH.

The discussions I see about the WD tank or melee-caster make sense to me, compared to the wizard or DH the true range classes at least. The WD I always pictured as walking amongst the creatures he was fighting reaping decay and destruction. Walking amongst creatures in this game however will get you killed. At least not without spending millions of gold to get perfect gear. They have sort of given us tools, but I'm thinking more and more that they really didn't test them and relied on community feedback after the game was released. Whether or not that's an acceptable game-making process is an entirely different discussion however.

Quote from xMantasx

Apart from what people wrote about mana system and pets scaling or immune from aoe which i agree i'd like to see shorter cooldowns on some abilities. 60 or even 120 sec cd in dynamic game like D3 is just meh. Mass Confusin should be on 20 sec cd with 5 or 6 sec duration. Also Voodoo and Fetish Army. Why 120 sec? Its sometimes feels like forever? 45 sec i'd say is enough i think that people use it on elites only anyway.

I've thought about this as well, and you're exactly right. D3 is supposed to be "constant action" anything longer than 30 seconds is far too long. I think that it's in part due to the fact that Vision Quest exists. The WD has far more CDs than any other class, and the CDs themselves feel eternal. I think that's what leads to overall pretty boring gameplay.

I like your suggestion about a "tiered" regen for VQ, this way you aren't forced to use 4 (or 5) of your 6 abilities to basically be on cooldown all the time. There's a thread in this forum about the short cd VQ build keeping 5 abilities with CD is probably the closest to how VQ was intended to be used.

Additionally, I think all of the WD's primary attacks are pure rubbish. Spiders/Toads/Firebombs are too long of an animation and they spend a resource whereas every other class GENERATES their resource. And darts are just boring, as a skill I think it makes sense for what it does -- a ranged attack based on weapon speed -- it's just dreadfully boring.

Quote from danpaladin

I had to facepalm when I read this quote in regards to resource management. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, since you say you have played WD, Wizard and Monk, and have no clue about resource management for barbarians. I will simply point out for you, that nearly all of the viable builds for inferno barbarians (excluding those running around in tens of millions of gold worth of gear) have barbarians using absolutely zero resource spending abilities. I am literally at full rage at all times during combat. Virtually no barbarian uses any resource spending abilities whatsoever. This is why the Berserker's Rage passive, which grants a 25% damage increase while at full rage is so popular; we are always at full rage!!!

Sorry, that point I made got a little off target in that section. It's true what I know of Barbs is only what friends tell me, and they all play HC barbarians in Inferno, so I'm going off conjecture. My point was that just barbarians seem to be able to do a lot with a lot less gear than WDs do. Just based on my own philosophy of the game, a class that has more options with less gear is a class that has well-thought out abilities.

Let me first premise by saying Witch Doctor was the first class I leveled, so it's near and dear to me! But alas, I've decided to explore other aspects of the game after hitting a wall with him. Now I haven't been back since 1.03 other than an hour or two here and there, I feel it's a bit of an uphill battle when playing him. Currently I have a Monk with a Wizard on the way.

But with 1.04 and developer blogs soon to come out, I'm hopeful that I'll have good reason to come back and visit the WD as I think it is probably the most interesting class to play. Here are some things that I'm looking forward to, and I'm looking to see what other people are hoping to see Blizzard acknowledge about this class overall.

Animations: While the witch doctor has some of the neater animations (raining toads anyone!??) they're all far too long, even with a ceremonial blade or fast 1h. In inferno I feel sometimes that while running from Fast affixes or just faster moving creatures, stopping to cast grasp/wall of zombies runs a risk of taking damage sort of defeats the purpose of casting the abilities in the first place.

Mana: At this point after playing a monk fully through inferno and a wizard into hell (I actually play and not farm Leorics manor for each difficulty). Resource management on those classes just feels so much more natural. Diablo 2 felt like resource spending game, Diablo 3 feels like resource generation game. This point has been argued so heavily that if Blizzard doesn't make some kind of change -- whether it be in skill mana adjustment or a buff elsewhere -- I'd say it's clear that they don't play WD nearly as much as Barbarian (which seems to be the most well thought-out.

Pets and summoning: For a class that has 3 passives dedicated to pets, 1 of which is unlocked at level 45, this is lacking. Where the witch doctor has so much potential in the pet department it certainly falls short. But this has been acknowledged by Blizzard during their AMA (I think, if it wasn't there it was a blue tracker). Especially considering that the promotional video for the WD in the days before release featured "foul beasts" at your disposal, it would only seem right for this to be buffed. As it is, having sacrifice and zombie dogs on your bar is close to pointless at most difficulties.

Overall build variety: The truth is that you can get through this game with pretty much any build no matter how crazy. I'm sure somewhere there's someone angling to prove that pets can work with a toad of hugeness/spider queen build and will be posting within the next few days a youtube of them soloing various champion packs. There's just simply a lack of variety and at the end of the day most people are just increasing the amount of splinters they've shot. WD may be the least played class, but he's got the best lungs -- you don't blow that many darts through 4 acts and 4 difficulties without having nice lung capacity.

These are actually pretty general things that I would imagine Blizzard will be looking at and I hope they do. The class is really fun with some really cool abilities they just seem all over the place. I would really like to start playing him again and seeing more people doing the same.