The actual D2 players:
The gamers from that era are no longer 18 or 19 years old, we're more like late 20s even 30s - we know how the world works, we've lived with absolute rubbish games back in the day and we appreciate the up and downsides of D3. We also know that Blizzard generally still provides the best quality and content when compared to any other game developer out there.
I think to this layer of gamers the game is ok. It's not brilliant yet, but it's definitely not something to cry about every day before sleep. 40-50 bucks is not something to cry about either, hell - beer for one night could cost way more than that. D3 is a potentially fantastic platform, give it some time and it will possibly develop into superb game, just like D2 did with LOD release - because lets face it original D2 was pretty damn boring.
The i played D2 gamers:
Yep they are early 20s or even below that, yet somehow despite the simplest calculus they played D2 for many years, even the original... These guys want INSTANT GRATIFICATION. They want to whine and cry and demand things - because lets face it - the modern society rewards whining and crying and demanding - that's the only thing they know and that's the only thing they will ever do.
They are the one and only mistake Blizzard ever made - listening to QQQQqqqQQQqqqQQqqqQQQ. Back in the day Blizzard never did bother with as much 'community management' or even really reading forums. They just released content and it was a simple decision - play it if you like, if you don't - there are many other games to choose from.
Today, because of all these QQs Blizzard actually made a step forward towards community and started working with the community (unlike any other game developer out there), and the only result of them trying to 'satisfy' the 'instant gratification generation' is the incessantly increasing amount of QQ. Because now...the QQers feel empowered! Blizzard did react to them a few times and that was their biggest mistake.
Hence there will always be 2 sides to this argument, and this argument is not based on the game itself, it is rather based on the perception of the world in general and the gap between generations. There will never be any agreement about it or any solution. If 'instant gratification' is not achieved = it's shit. End of story. Screw waiting, screw everything. I paid 40 bucks i want it NOW. While the rest of us are thinking 'wdf have we done to our younger generation? Should've sent them out to work at the age of 16 like we did instead'
This is the biggest self-gratification post I've ever seen. You generalize people by age groups, which proves you don't have the tiniest of an idea of 'how the world works' because if you would then you would know age is not a factor in personality, nor is it in maturity. If you want to make yourself feel better because you're older and therefore 'a superior gamer' than go right ahead, but don't expect people to buy that load of shit you're trying to peddle.
I can't believe somebody out of High School could even come up with such a theory, haven't you learned you're not a unique snowflake anymore?
Regardless, given communication or not from the devs you will always have the people who complain and those who do not... and before forums there were STILL people who complained and those who did not - because that is how we operate as a fucking consumer. So it has absolutely nothing to do with 'instant gratification' nor does it have to do with the dev's communicating with us, because none of it will shape our opinions more than the game itself already is, and will always.
The game design is flawed. The devs made some real obvious errors, and are not fixing them. The fixes they are making don't really fix the core problem of the loot. (oter than the legendary fix, but still needs work. 80% of legs are garbage).
The two biggest issues are the itemization and the skill system. Itemization can be fixed with a patch... all they have to do is either get creative or look to other games like D2, TL2 or PoE for ideas on how to add complexity. Skill systems on the other hand is going to require either an expansion or a very.. very large patch to fix, simply because it requires an entire new addition to the system. While the game design is flawed, I think they are at the very least extremely aware of the itemization issues.
Ego's out of the way, I think Jay and his team are working very hard to work out the itemization issue. I have my personal suspicions that the reason patch 1.1 was delayed by *so* long wasn't only because of PVP. They know that patch 1.1 is either going to make or break the interest of a lot of people who've had wavering faiths about the future of D3, so they have to make it come out with the bang. No matter how popular PVP is, it's not the 'bang' they need to spark renewing interest in the game... and they KNOW. They know because we know. So with that being said I'm looking forward to seeing if my suspicion is right about 1.1.
THAT BEING SAID THOUGH, it's going to be interesting to see how they do it... since the skill system directly connects to itemization and affixes in general.
Thanks for your support again, guys. I actually added the public games one yesterday because that feature means the most to me. Of course it'd be nice to have more social chat features... but I think a big part of Diablo 2's success was named games, 8 player max, and dueling. That way, the game becomes a hangout. You're always meeting people and that keeps you coming back. Who knows if they actually planned that or not, but back then, no one was complaining about Battle.net the way that we are now.
Putting aside itemization (or w/e other) issues with Diablo 3 that may exist, if your only public interaction is auto-matching quest runs, that puts a lot of pressure on the game itself to be endlessly entertaining, rather than people creating their own entertainment. It also seems to lead to "zero talk" runs. Games like Super Mario, Half-Life, or even mobile games like Tiny Wings, are games that you go nuts on for a while, and then stop. However, games like Diablo 2, Counter Strike, and Warcraft 3 keep you coming back because of the community (in the latter 2 cases, custom maps did it for me!).
The auction house has also had profound effects. I think it's very cool having one, but man, the one time (in D3) I had to do a real trade with someone made me realize how much I miss that interaction.
My conclusion is that all of these slick technologies and efficiencies have made the game so streamlined that it hampered the community/social aspect, and so the game didn't build as much culture around it, in the same way older Blizz games (including WoW) did. But these are just my opinions... maybe I'm becoming a cynical grumpy 24 year old lol.
I completely agree - community is what holds games together. I remember back to the days of Socom and the amount of community there was on that game. There were no forums, and not much for chatrooms.. and the gameplay was your average run of the mill counter strike gameplay but the fact that you and your friends could play together constantly finding new lobbies, and your clans could make clan lobbies so you could all hang out while you enjoy the game you bought.. it made it so much more appealing to want to come and play for years. Diablo 3 needs a community, and the practically solo experience they have running right now isn't working. The chatrooms are nice but the way Diablo 2, and Warcraft 3 had it set up allowed for a presence of population that really made you feel like you were part of a larger place. From the lobby chat rooms that had 50 different characters staring you in the face, random stupid chats and of course the public named games, where you saw hundreds of people enjoying the game you bought, all in different parts of the game.
That is really what makes the world feel alive. Sure the auction house takes away from the very personal trading and bartering (which I feel is a very strong part of Diablo) but if we had public games a lot of high end traders would be making FT games because they wouldn't lose the ridiculous cut that the auction house takes.
I really hope your screenshots spoke to them, because I know that even the starcraft community has been complaining about the overall dead feeling of their lobby since 2010, and here we are doing the same thing with no change. Even if they don't take it part for part here's hoping they'll at least consider it.
Is this an attempt to elicit pity? "Oh no! don't not post!"? I would have said the same thing regardless of who posted it, because I looked at the post, not the poster - like any reasonable forum reader should do. I didn't even realize it was a cm rep until you got quoted by someone else. If you're getting flak because of who you are/what you represent (site admin.), then it's time for some banhammering amongst the rabble. Especially considering for what I can recall of your posts they're mostly interesting, informative, or amusing. (And yes, I am aware of the irony considering the opening of this paragraph.)
What, you think this was personal? No, sorry, I'm just sick of being one of the 3-4 people defending anything related to Blizzard. At first I thought "well some of these people aren't right, so I'll just correct them and/or describe my point of view". Sigh, it doesn't work that way and it wont.
Let's just go on with the thread.
Also no, I can't ban people for having different opinions than me.
The problem is the rose colored glasses effect goes both ways. You have people who think Diablo 3 did nothing right and it was a total failure and you have people that think Diablo 3 is 100x better than Diablo 2 in every aspect. One facilitates the reaction of the other and both parties don't realize that they are both wrong. People tend to try and think in absolutes when the truth of the matter is Diablo 3 did some things right, so did Diablo 2, and while Diablo 3 excelled in its ability to improve parts of what was wrong in Diablo 2, it failed to carry over the key technical characteristics of what made Diablo 2 so popular in the first place.
So you can't be the 'white knight' of Blizzard if you want people to act rationally when you view yourself as "the 3-4 people defending anything related to Blizzard" - the truth is Blizzard did flub up an essential part about the Diablo series and people have the right to be disappointed.. Just because you don't think their viewpoint is 'right' doesn't mean they will see it your way when you're done explaining. you shouldn't expect that.
REAL CHAT ROOMS and LOBBIES (akin to d2).
More diverse affixes on normal gear and legendaries)
More uniques (but only after affix addition)
More sets
Make lower level gear diverse to make the leveling up process more interesting
More curses and elemental effects.
Ladder system and resets
More gems with jewel like random effects
Extremely challenging boss that drops things that you can trade, that only drop from him (like torches). Make it so only the best geared players can kill them, even on lowest MP.
Everyone complained about Leggi items being horrible (which it was) now everyone just leaves rare on the floor(farming Leggies) when they do runs because 99% of all rare items is absolute garbage, i mean a wichdoctor ceremonial knife that drops with 300 dex ? But then agian there is that 1 in 10000000000 chance that a rare can be godly and be a 1bil or 2bil item. and not to mention everyone has vile ward shoulders..there is no real custimization for each player. but the game will only get better not worse Blizzard is doing a good job trying to get to everyone's needs. 1 step at a time. i can assure you when pvp gets released it will be unbalanced as hell and with time it will get balanced but that is (when) pvp arrives
That is one of the major problems of Diablo 3 at the moment, and was mentioned in the OP's video. Blizzard is treating Diablo 3 like an MMO, where they worry about completely balancing each class, and catering to each classes needs specifically. What they need to be doing (and for the most part what was done with D2) is to add systems, items and affixes into the game and let players decide what is useful to what. That is how we discovered such weird builds like WWsins and enchantresses. It isn't because Blizzard North catered to those builds, it was because they put out the options to create such a thing and worried about fixing game breaking issues. While Blizzard has also focused on fixing game breaking issues like the CM wizard, and the DH SS builds, for the most part they have heavily focused on trying to 'fix' the game through a massive amount of class and ability changes instead of just putting out items that might improve upon less used skills.
Unfortunately adding new items or changing the way current affixes work won't fix the problem... because the problem is diversity. That problem in itself compounds with the other problem which is that there isn't really much room for movement without introducing new systems in the game. Right now all the systems they have in place already cover everything you could cover in a consolidated way. AR and defense completely cover damage reduction, and the quidfecta/quadfecta/trifecta equipment already covers every modification to skills you can possible have.
I can't even think of a single affix they could add that isn't already covered with the current way the skill, defense and monster systems work.
Your show brought up a lot of good points, but I truly think it was a mistake to avoid comparing Diablo 2 to Diablo 3. When players look at the Diablo franchise they have expectations built around already established game mechanics, and when Diablo 3 came out they decided to go in a completely different direction when it came to itemization. It would be akin to buying a PC and getting a mac instead.
Itemization is the lifeblood of any ARPG and Blizzards choice to reinvent the wheel was probably their biggest blunder. Simply put, itemization is the foundation of how the game will play out. It dictates every variable a character is able to change, and change promotes choice. Looking at the base itemization comparisons between Diablo 2 and Diablo 3 any person with half a brain can see that there is a seriously large difference in the amount of affixes and variables available to the player. These problems were created largely by two major changes to the way that Diablo 3 interacts with the player.
Weapon DPS and Skill Damage and Defenses
Weapon DPS and Skill Damage: The correlation between the two has been devastating the item pool of Diablo 3 since the beginning. Diablo 3 focuses heavily on a simple formula that even a child could understand: Skill Damage = weapon damage + class stat + IAS + Average Damage + Critical Chance + Critical Damage. Any way you look at it all you have to do is stack these affixes and your damage will go up, and not only will YOUR damage go up but EVERYBODY'S damage will go up because Diablo is a game about using skills, and because every character uses skills... every character will follow that formula.
Diablo 2 on the other hand had a handful of affixes that were completely essential to one build and completely essential to another. Take druid for example: an elementalist had little use for crushing blow, but was utterly essential for a Lycan. At the same time Lycans REQUIRED lifesteal and IAS, but what was the point of it for elementalists. in contrast FCR and +fire skill damage was seen as one of the most desirable stats for a elements druids, but not a Lycan. Just a SINGLE class could find use in almost every single affix there was, but it completely depended on the build. The only affix that followed the Diablo 3 philosophy of 'one size fits all' is the +skill affix.
Defenses: Hit recovery, DR%, AR, and resistances. These are what made up the majority of how a character chose to stay alive in Diablo 2. If you couldn't hit a monster you upped your AR. If you were getting hit and died because you couldn't cast a spell, or were getting recovery locked, you found gear to up your hit recovery. If you bumped into Diablo with 40 fire resistance on hell chances were you'd be dead in seconds, so you looked around for pieces that would increase your resistance to that... and last but not least was DR%, which was the end all be all of defenses. It was the stat you saw on a piece of gear and KNEW it was good.. but at the same time it wasn't oversaturated in gear.
Diablo 3 decided to do away with the chance to miss. It got rid of any kind of hit recovery and let your character be a beast tank who could take hits but keep on the move. They consolidated resistances and DR% by trivializing elemental damage with the introduction to +all resist on EVERY SINGLE PIECE OF GEAR. There is no more CHOICE left - only +all resist.
I'm not trying to be a downer here, but ultimately the changes seen in Diablo 3 have consoladated and simplified the game so much that there literally aren't affixes that they can introduce that would make a substantial change to the game unless they changed the way the character interacts with its environment and skills... and I just don't see that happening. I haven't lost completely faith in Diablo 3 but I just don't see Blizzard calling their failure and re-reinventing the wheel to allow for such a change.
People playing doesn't mean its a good game. People not playing doesn't mean it's a bad game. CoD isn't a good game, yet millions buy that every installment. Company of Heroes was an extraordinary RTS, yet it had practically nobody playing it. There are probably still 100K concurrent users on Diablo 3 but that doesn't mean it isn't lacking severely in the depth department, but don't confuse that for why the masses will stick with a game.
Welcome to basic human behavior - we go where the crowd is.
So I posted this on Diablo 3's official forums but it got completely buried in seconds, so lets see what Diablofans thinks of it.
1.0.5 introduced a lot of extra variants in the way Diablo 3 can be played right from the beginning, but there is plenty left in the game that can be added or tweaked to really bring the game alive. Here are some things can be tweaked or added to bring more life and variance into the game:
Elemental What?
Elemental affects have been completely removed from the game on weapons (except cold) and it’s a real shame because now we have all these fancy effects that might as well be categorized as +physical damage instead of the elements themselves. While the damage is still around, the effects of those damages are all that remains from the system that could really help differentiate the bonuses from each of the element types and assist in skill synergies (on weapons only). Here are some suggestions:
Fire – On critical hit has an X% chance to set your weapon ablaze, increasing weapon damage by % of current weapon damage.
Lightning – Fires a chain lightning effect that randomly hits 4-5 targets for X% weapon damage instantly.
Poison – Creates a poison cloud at the point of impact that deals X% (highest) weapon damage over <8-10 secs> while the enemy is in its effect (synergizes with slowing skills and tank style classes)
Holy - % Chance on strike to be granted a physical damage shield (damage absorbed set by level)
Arcane – % Chance on strike to create a single arcane orb that revolves around the target and explodes on contact for X% (10-15%) damage to enemies in a 8 yard range. If after 10 seconds an orb doesn’t strike an enemy, they will implode on the orbiting target for X% (45-55%) damage. Orbs stack up to 3.
Of course these changes would increase the overall damage a player will be able to output, so DPS could be adjusted depending on the effect granted to the weapon itself, so the damage wouldn’t receive any kind of additional damage, but instead would be balanced so the only benefit is the effect itself, instead of the increased DPS.
The Existence of the Auto Attack
Whether we use it or not, the auto attack is going to be in the game, so I say we put some use to it. While the UI may not support adding other classes abilities into the game, the auto attack (which all classes have) takes up an icon space when we don’t have an ability equipped to that slot. So let’s change it and add class abilities instead.
The change will focus on a new affix added to unique, or set items (as a set bonus or an individual piece) granting the ability to use another classes skill. The skill itself will properly translate to another classes resource system and the skill itself will be rune specific… but here is the catch: the rune will be the randomized property, and so would the assigned damage. You can have as many pieces of gear that grant you another classes ability as you want, but you may only use 1 at a time (as it takes up your auto-attack.. and you’ve only got one of those).
For example: The Azurewrath legendary sword would give the user the wizard skill Spectral Blade, but there would be a chance on drop that the sword gives you Deep Cuts, Impactful Blades, Siphoned Blade, Healing Blade, or Thrown Blade, and for each of those rune abilities the amount of damage it would give you would vary. So if it rolled Deep Cuts for example, the damage allocated would vary on Spectral Blade ( 140-165% weapon damage) and also the rune property (30-45% bleed damage.)
How will we work out the resources requirement?
The resource requirement (or granted resource) will translate on a % based system depending on the cost of the skill compared to the BASE amount of resource the owning class has, and it will reflected by the amount of total resource (augmented or not) the receiving character will get. For example:
Resource Spender: Impale costs 25 out of 125 Hatred, which means it will costs 20% of a resource pool to cast. If a Witch Doctor has 950 Mana and uses an item that gives him Impale, it will cost him 190 Mana to cast. If a Barbarian has 100 Max fury it will cost him 20 fury to cast. (so and on so forth).
Resource Generators: Will follow the standard 3-6% resource generation depending on the class. For example if a Monk uses cleave (which generates 5 Fury out of 120 fury, that is 4% total generation), it would generate 4% of 150 spirit (not affected by passives or gear), thus generating 6 spirit a hit. If a wizard would use cleave however, it would cost nothing and gain nothing due to the nature of the class itself.
Although specific animations for each of these skills would be nice, it is not realistic to expect it and therefore all abilities translated from other classes would use the basic auto-attack animation to cast that ability.
There are other idea’s I have but I think these are two of my best, so if it goes well I may post others to see what other people think. In the mean time, tell me what you think of these changes and maybe what you would add to the game to spice it up for you.
I can understand where you're coming from Kintner as I do remember the days of Vanilla Diablo 2 but here's the issue.. as you already said. You don't expect those problems to exist and we as the community should not have to endure a lackluster game for a year before it gets good. It's called learning from you're mistakes and Blizzard is doing a damn good job at doing quite the opposite. When you've had a game that (after some work) is critically acclaimed for it's insane depth of gameplay and replayability, and combine that with 10 years of observations of the players opinions and how the game evolved to suit needs... just to go and make another game and take 10 steps backwards. I for one refuse to lower my expectations and look at it in retrospect as something we should have expected from the beginning. When you go out to the store and buy something, you expect a product that was created for TODAY'S market, with TODAY'S innovations and technologies, not the late nineties.
Sometimes it's acceptable to make these kinds of mistakes when a new company takes over a franchise and tries to reinvent the wheel but this is not the case. This is Blizzard taking the userbase for a ride in their nostalgia-mobile and dropping us off in the ghetto 20 blocks from home hoping that we'll last long enough to make it back to where we should have been right from the beginning. We deserve better.
A lot of people have already given up - that is a fact and Blizzard knows this. They've acknowledged that they made a mistake and thought the content they had for the playerbase was sufficient but proved not be. Sure the game has it's good points.. you would have to be a completely bias fool to say that Diablo 3 doesn't have a good foundation TO BE a good game. Problem is that there is a fairly large group of people that have the opposite bias that can be seen on most game forums, and is evident even in this thread. The type of person that looks at a game they like and are so blinded by their zealous defending behaviors to see fault in what they are defending, and instead trying to poke holes in people's expectations and memories to try and make their precious game look better. Even late into the production of D3 Jay Wilson was saying "We went back and played the game and a lot of the things people remember never really happened" but you know what? I played the game religiously for 3-4 years, and even a week ago me and my friends decided to go do a complete playthrough and my memory seems pretty fitting.
So lets do this, instead of (no offense) making posts like Kisho's and Mormolyce trying to look at the negatives to try bringing Diablo 2 DOWN to Diablo 3's level, lets remember Diablo 2 and Diablo 3 AS THEY ARE NOW and make subjective comparisons because frankly I'm tired of the excuses people make for Diablo 3's lack of meat and potatoes when even Blizzard has acknowledged that fact.
d2 didn't have inferno. you could get away with crazy builds and gear choices because the content was so easy. this was amplified by having the option to join a game with 7 other people who would carry the weight of your bad choices.
there was nothing better about items in d2. if hell was the end of d3 with no inferno then it would be the same thing.
I'm curious, if Hell was the end of D3 what item affixes would you see players looking to get other than their main stat, vitality, crit, crit damage and IAS?
I have over 400 hours logged into the game and I can't think of a single affix that is more useful at the end of hell then at the end of Inferno, and this is coming from a guy who's killed inferno D.
I think you're wrong. Diablo 2's item affixes were much more diverse not to mention there were over 160 more uniques in the game to compare to. Difficulty doesn't change the way people gear when there is no other choices to make. Sure specs would be different, but items would not.
1
This is the biggest self-gratification post I've ever seen. You generalize people by age groups, which proves you don't have the tiniest of an idea of 'how the world works' because if you would then you would know age is not a factor in personality, nor is it in maturity. If you want to make yourself feel better because you're older and therefore 'a superior gamer' than go right ahead, but don't expect people to buy that load of shit you're trying to peddle.
I can't believe somebody out of High School could even come up with such a theory, haven't you learned you're not a unique snowflake anymore?
Regardless, given communication or not from the devs you will always have the people who complain and those who do not... and before forums there were STILL people who complained and those who did not - because that is how we operate as a fucking consumer. So it has absolutely nothing to do with 'instant gratification' nor does it have to do with the dev's communicating with us, because none of it will shape our opinions more than the game itself already is, and will always.
1
The two biggest issues are the itemization and the skill system. Itemization can be fixed with a patch... all they have to do is either get creative or look to other games like D2, TL2 or PoE for ideas on how to add complexity. Skill systems on the other hand is going to require either an expansion or a very.. very large patch to fix, simply because it requires an entire new addition to the system. While the game design is flawed, I think they are at the very least extremely aware of the itemization issues.
Ego's out of the way, I think Jay and his team are working very hard to work out the itemization issue. I have my personal suspicions that the reason patch 1.1 was delayed by *so* long wasn't only because of PVP. They know that patch 1.1 is either going to make or break the interest of a lot of people who've had wavering faiths about the future of D3, so they have to make it come out with the bang. No matter how popular PVP is, it's not the 'bang' they need to spark renewing interest in the game... and they KNOW. They know because we know. So with that being said I'm looking forward to seeing if my suspicion is right about 1.1.
THAT BEING SAID THOUGH, it's going to be interesting to see how they do it... since the skill system directly connects to itemization and affixes in general.
1
I completely agree - community is what holds games together. I remember back to the days of Socom and the amount of community there was on that game. There were no forums, and not much for chatrooms.. and the gameplay was your average run of the mill counter strike gameplay but the fact that you and your friends could play together constantly finding new lobbies, and your clans could make clan lobbies so you could all hang out while you enjoy the game you bought.. it made it so much more appealing to want to come and play for years. Diablo 3 needs a community, and the practically solo experience they have running right now isn't working. The chatrooms are nice but the way Diablo 2, and Warcraft 3 had it set up allowed for a presence of population that really made you feel like you were part of a larger place. From the lobby chat rooms that had 50 different characters staring you in the face, random stupid chats and of course the public named games, where you saw hundreds of people enjoying the game you bought, all in different parts of the game.
That is really what makes the world feel alive. Sure the auction house takes away from the very personal trading and bartering (which I feel is a very strong part of Diablo) but if we had public games a lot of high end traders would be making FT games because they wouldn't lose the ridiculous cut that the auction house takes.
I really hope your screenshots spoke to them, because I know that even the starcraft community has been complaining about the overall dead feeling of their lobby since 2010, and here we are doing the same thing with no change. Even if they don't take it part for part here's hoping they'll at least consider it.
1
0
The problem is the rose colored glasses effect goes both ways. You have people who think Diablo 3 did nothing right and it was a total failure and you have people that think Diablo 3 is 100x better than Diablo 2 in every aspect. One facilitates the reaction of the other and both parties don't realize that they are both wrong. People tend to try and think in absolutes when the truth of the matter is Diablo 3 did some things right, so did Diablo 2, and while Diablo 3 excelled in its ability to improve parts of what was wrong in Diablo 2, it failed to carry over the key technical characteristics of what made Diablo 2 so popular in the first place.
So you can't be the 'white knight' of Blizzard if you want people to act rationally when you view yourself as "the 3-4 people defending anything related to Blizzard" - the truth is Blizzard did flub up an essential part about the Diablo series and people have the right to be disappointed.. Just because you don't think their viewpoint is 'right' doesn't mean they will see it your way when you're done explaining. you shouldn't expect that.
Just sayin.
0
More diverse affixes on normal gear and legendaries)
More uniques (but only after affix addition)
More sets
Make lower level gear diverse to make the leveling up process more interesting
More curses and elemental effects.
Ladder system and resets
More gems with jewel like random effects
Extremely challenging boss that drops things that you can trade, that only drop from him (like torches). Make it so only the best geared players can kill them, even on lowest MP.
0
0
That is one of the major problems of Diablo 3 at the moment, and was mentioned in the OP's video. Blizzard is treating Diablo 3 like an MMO, where they worry about completely balancing each class, and catering to each classes needs specifically. What they need to be doing (and for the most part what was done with D2) is to add systems, items and affixes into the game and let players decide what is useful to what. That is how we discovered such weird builds like WWsins and enchantresses. It isn't because Blizzard North catered to those builds, it was because they put out the options to create such a thing and worried about fixing game breaking issues. While Blizzard has also focused on fixing game breaking issues like the CM wizard, and the DH SS builds, for the most part they have heavily focused on trying to 'fix' the game through a massive amount of class and ability changes instead of just putting out items that might improve upon less used skills.
0
-Could only have 1 ability at a time
-Ability would vary from % damage and rune effect randomly on thw affix
-Would be properly converted to the right resource system
0
I can't even think of a single affix they could add that isn't already covered with the current way the skill, defense and monster systems work.
1
Itemization is the lifeblood of any ARPG and Blizzards choice to reinvent the wheel was probably their biggest blunder. Simply put, itemization is the foundation of how the game will play out. It dictates every variable a character is able to change, and change promotes choice. Looking at the base itemization comparisons between Diablo 2 and Diablo 3 any person with half a brain can see that there is a seriously large difference in the amount of affixes and variables available to the player. These problems were created largely by two major changes to the way that Diablo 3 interacts with the player.
Weapon DPS and Skill Damage and Defenses
Weapon DPS and Skill Damage: The correlation between the two has been devastating the item pool of Diablo 3 since the beginning. Diablo 3 focuses heavily on a simple formula that even a child could understand: Skill Damage = weapon damage + class stat + IAS + Average Damage + Critical Chance + Critical Damage. Any way you look at it all you have to do is stack these affixes and your damage will go up, and not only will YOUR damage go up but EVERYBODY'S damage will go up because Diablo is a game about using skills, and because every character uses skills... every character will follow that formula.
Diablo 2 on the other hand had a handful of affixes that were completely essential to one build and completely essential to another. Take druid for example: an elementalist had little use for crushing blow, but was utterly essential for a Lycan. At the same time Lycans REQUIRED lifesteal and IAS, but what was the point of it for elementalists. in contrast FCR and +fire skill damage was seen as one of the most desirable stats for a elements druids, but not a Lycan. Just a SINGLE class could find use in almost every single affix there was, but it completely depended on the build. The only affix that followed the Diablo 3 philosophy of 'one size fits all' is the +skill affix.
Defenses: Hit recovery, DR%, AR, and resistances. These are what made up the majority of how a character chose to stay alive in Diablo 2. If you couldn't hit a monster you upped your AR. If you were getting hit and died because you couldn't cast a spell, or were getting recovery locked, you found gear to up your hit recovery. If you bumped into Diablo with 40 fire resistance on hell chances were you'd be dead in seconds, so you looked around for pieces that would increase your resistance to that... and last but not least was DR%, which was the end all be all of defenses. It was the stat you saw on a piece of gear and KNEW it was good.. but at the same time it wasn't oversaturated in gear.
Diablo 3 decided to do away with the chance to miss. It got rid of any kind of hit recovery and let your character be a beast tank who could take hits but keep on the move. They consolidated resistances and DR% by trivializing elemental damage with the introduction to +all resist on EVERY SINGLE PIECE OF GEAR. There is no more CHOICE left - only +all resist.
I'm not trying to be a downer here, but ultimately the changes seen in Diablo 3 have consoladated and simplified the game so much that there literally aren't affixes that they can introduce that would make a substantial change to the game unless they changed the way the character interacts with its environment and skills... and I just don't see that happening. I haven't lost completely faith in Diablo 3 but I just don't see Blizzard calling their failure and re-reinventing the wheel to allow for such a change.
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Welcome to basic human behavior - we go where the crowd is.
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1.0.5 introduced a lot of extra variants in the way Diablo 3 can be played right from the beginning, but there is plenty left in the game that can be added or tweaked to really bring the game alive. Here are some things can be tweaked or added to bring more life and variance into the game:
Elemental What?
Elemental affects have been completely removed from the game on weapons (except cold) and it’s a real shame because now we have all these fancy effects that might as well be categorized as +physical damage instead of the elements themselves. While the damage is still around, the effects of those damages are all that remains from the system that could really help differentiate the bonuses from each of the element types and assist in skill synergies (on weapons only). Here are some suggestions:
Fire – On critical hit has an X% chance to set your weapon ablaze, increasing weapon damage by % of current weapon damage.
Lightning – Fires a chain lightning effect that randomly hits 4-5 targets for X% weapon damage instantly.
Poison – Creates a poison cloud at the point of impact that deals X% (highest) weapon damage over <8-10 secs> while the enemy is in its effect (synergizes with slowing skills and tank style classes)
Holy - % Chance on strike to be granted a physical damage shield (damage absorbed set by level)
Arcane – % Chance on strike to create a single arcane orb that revolves around the target and explodes on contact for X% (10-15%) damage to enemies in a 8 yard range. If after 10 seconds an orb doesn’t strike an enemy, they will implode on the orbiting target for X% (45-55%) damage. Orbs stack up to 3.
Of course these changes would increase the overall damage a player will be able to output, so DPS could be adjusted depending on the effect granted to the weapon itself, so the damage wouldn’t receive any kind of additional damage, but instead would be balanced so the only benefit is the effect itself, instead of the increased DPS.
The Existence of the Auto Attack
Whether we use it or not, the auto attack is going to be in the game, so I say we put some use to it. While the UI may not support adding other classes abilities into the game, the auto attack (which all classes have) takes up an icon space when we don’t have an ability equipped to that slot. So let’s change it and add class abilities instead.
The change will focus on a new affix added to unique, or set items (as a set bonus or an individual piece) granting the ability to use another classes skill. The skill itself will properly translate to another classes resource system and the skill itself will be rune specific… but here is the catch: the rune will be the randomized property, and so would the assigned damage. You can have as many pieces of gear that grant you another classes ability as you want, but you may only use 1 at a time (as it takes up your auto-attack.. and you’ve only got one of those).
For example: The Azurewrath legendary sword would give the user the wizard skill Spectral Blade, but there would be a chance on drop that the sword gives you Deep Cuts, Impactful Blades, Siphoned Blade, Healing Blade, or Thrown Blade, and for each of those rune abilities the amount of damage it would give you would vary. So if it rolled Deep Cuts for example, the damage allocated would vary on Spectral Blade ( 140-165% weapon damage) and also the rune property (30-45% bleed damage.)
How will we work out the resources requirement?
The resource requirement (or granted resource) will translate on a % based system depending on the cost of the skill compared to the BASE amount of resource the owning class has, and it will reflected by the amount of total resource (augmented or not) the receiving character will get. For example:
Resource Spender: Impale costs 25 out of 125 Hatred, which means it will costs 20% of a resource pool to cast. If a Witch Doctor has 950 Mana and uses an item that gives him Impale, it will cost him 190 Mana to cast. If a Barbarian has 100 Max fury it will cost him 20 fury to cast. (so and on so forth).
Resource Generators: Will follow the standard 3-6% resource generation depending on the class. For example if a Monk uses cleave (which generates 5 Fury out of 120 fury, that is 4% total generation), it would generate 4% of 150 spirit (not affected by passives or gear), thus generating 6 spirit a hit. If a wizard would use cleave however, it would cost nothing and gain nothing due to the nature of the class itself.
Although specific animations for each of these skills would be nice, it is not realistic to expect it and therefore all abilities translated from other classes would use the basic auto-attack animation to cast that ability.
There are other idea’s I have but I think these are two of my best, so if it goes well I may post others to see what other people think. In the mean time, tell me what you think of these changes and maybe what you would add to the game to spice it up for you.
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Sometimes it's acceptable to make these kinds of mistakes when a new company takes over a franchise and tries to reinvent the wheel but this is not the case. This is Blizzard taking the userbase for a ride in their nostalgia-mobile and dropping us off in the ghetto 20 blocks from home hoping that we'll last long enough to make it back to where we should have been right from the beginning. We deserve better.
A lot of people have already given up - that is a fact and Blizzard knows this. They've acknowledged that they made a mistake and thought the content they had for the playerbase was sufficient but proved not be. Sure the game has it's good points.. you would have to be a completely bias fool to say that Diablo 3 doesn't have a good foundation TO BE a good game. Problem is that there is a fairly large group of people that have the opposite bias that can be seen on most game forums, and is evident even in this thread. The type of person that looks at a game they like and are so blinded by their zealous defending behaviors to see fault in what they are defending, and instead trying to poke holes in people's expectations and memories to try and make their precious game look better. Even late into the production of D3 Jay Wilson was saying "We went back and played the game and a lot of the things people remember never really happened" but you know what? I played the game religiously for 3-4 years, and even a week ago me and my friends decided to go do a complete playthrough and my memory seems pretty fitting.
So lets do this, instead of (no offense) making posts like Kisho's and Mormolyce trying to look at the negatives to try bringing Diablo 2 DOWN to Diablo 3's level, lets remember Diablo 2 and Diablo 3 AS THEY ARE NOW and make subjective comparisons because frankly I'm tired of the excuses people make for Diablo 3's lack of meat and potatoes when even Blizzard has acknowledged that fact.
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I'm curious, if Hell was the end of D3 what item affixes would you see players looking to get other than their main stat, vitality, crit, crit damage and IAS?
I have over 400 hours logged into the game and I can't think of a single affix that is more useful at the end of hell then at the end of Inferno, and this is coming from a guy who's killed inferno D.
I think you're wrong. Diablo 2's item affixes were much more diverse not to mention there were over 160 more uniques in the game to compare to. Difficulty doesn't change the way people gear when there is no other choices to make. Sure specs would be different, but items would not.