DiabloFans

Quote from overneathe»

Just tremendous passion about both Diablo and DFans. Not sure I've actually replicated it anywhere else since.

Quote from overneathe»

edit: Registered before all of you, MWHAHA.

Well, the news hit the frontpage, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who's shocked, surprised, and extremely saddened by it. I can sort of understand aspects of it - traffic has gone down, and from a mod view I can say that I have to remove more spam posts each day than I can enjoy reading new posts. Nevertheless, I thought this could've been a nice place to hang out even if the franchise is going downhill (is it though?). But well. Ain't gonna happen.

But instead of endless complaining about things we can't change, why don't we all revisit our past, share our memorable DFans moments, and take a look into the future? Look at your post history to go down the memory lane. So, I'll start:

=================================================

I joined Diablofans about six and a half years ago because I had a stupid question about making an Inferno tank barb to support my two DH friends. That kind of didn't go anywhere, so I switched to my other main char (Archon wizard) which should soon become my passion. To share some of the insights I gained from reading up and theorycrafting some of the wizard stuff, I wrote a guide which maybe some of you remember (RoS edition as the old one was from the old forum software and looks ugly, but the first one was written over Christmas 2012). I continued to make a few guides (see thread history, some I didn't even remember like an 1-70 leveling guide, lol) and also my small website (http://d3resource.com/), I think the reason for making D3Resource was that I needed a domain to host my CHD vs CHC calc.

I don't remember when I became mod, because that really didn't matter; what I do remember is the lot of awesome people that I met on Diablofans, ingame, or on both channels. Some of those have sadly long gone, like Jaetch and Loroese - the two best wizard theorycrafters Diablo had (pre-RoS). I also have to mention overneathe, who introduced me to the DFans mod world (without him I wouldn't be here), and his successor Zero(pS). We didn't just play DIablo - do you guys remember the Terraria times? That was fun! There are so many more names I can and probably should list, but many of them were unfortunately purged in the recent transition phase when Fandom took over, and many don't check this forum anymore. But if you do please say high in here!!!

Unfortunately over the years the forum became more and more inactive, and I prefer old-school forums much, much more than Reddit (I just can't deal with the strange thread style, makes it impossible to read "all new posts") and even worse all the video-based info (I'd rather read a long, well-written guide than watch a 10 minute video on Youtube). But I guess that makes me a dinosaur, I dying breed, one that doesn't like to play games on phones ;-)

So, what's up next? I will maintain D3Resource, at least for now. I might lag behind with some updates, honestly, but the best way to contact me is shoot me a Reddit message. I think I'm still behind on the S16 season overview but honestly... not in the mood right now, given recent events. Also, work. If I ever were to abandon D3Resource, I would probably zip all the source code and throw it to someone, so no worries, it won't magically disappear. But it's a static website and I host a lot of old stuff (like a forum that has a much older community, founded in 1997, with less than 10 posts over the last 10 years ;-)). No worries.

I'm not sure about my personal future in Diablo. To be honest, as I expressed here, my view on Blizzard/Diablo shifted. I literally played 8-10 hours for the last 4 seasons each (went online, got a power level, rushed to get Guardian done as fast as possible, delete). S16 took me a bit more than 7 hours to finish Guardian. I'm not sure it's gonna be more given that D3 feels a bit stale to me and PoE looks so much more exciting. I just recently started (~2 months ago) but If someone has a place for a noob (I just played up 3 builds and tried to learn as much as possible, but only tried Shaper once and no kill yet) let me know, I'm sort of looking for a guild, preferably with Discord (and potentially forum, haha, you know me). What a cheap plug, but well, gotta seize the opportunity! I'm also occasionally playing SC2 co-op which I really enjoy (and watching WCS). Once Dfans is gone, I'll continue posting on Reddit, I'm regularly in the chat channel of svr's Discord (where we discuss D3, PoE, and SC2),and maybe we meet elsewhere. See my battle tag in my forum profile (bagstone#2613) or PoE (bagstone).

Thanks everyone for making this a nice home for so many years! <3

Quote from Spewnami»

The layoffs are mostly PR and advertising/public works. It's not a big cut to anything Diablo programmer wise, but HotS took a big hit.

EDIT: It's kinda a "healthy" cut back. It's not core people. Activision takes care of most of the marketing.

Quote from Abob»

The layoffs dont have anything to do with development, and Diablo development is actually recruiting, this is just a consequence of no major releases planned for 2019

Source

I find a bit dangerous to call it "healthy cutback". Also, Activision taking care of marketing is making me scared to the max - Activision has some of the most unhealthy, bad, and unsustainable business models in the industry (see Call of Duty). I'm not sure we want to let Diablo slide into that at all.

Also, while we're Diablo fans, some of us also care (or used to care) about Blizzard as a company. And while Diablo seems to not have seen as many cuts in this round of firings, this might be more because there isn't much to cut. The people that were let go were mostly non-developers, and Diablo doesn't have many of those (maybe one, in Nevalistis?). But the issue is a bigger one: Activision Blizzard decided that a record win was "not enough", they need more. That is unsustainable growth, built on short-term profit gains, and therefore the opposite of "healthy cuts".

What made Blizzard so great over the past 3 decades was the fact that they cared about their community. Their games were good, sure; but it was the support around the game that truly made some of them stand out. With the deafening silence about Diablo since Blizzcon that is already not the case anymore for our franchise, and it might now be equally silent for others. To understand the magnitude of some of those firings and why I think they're absolutely unhealthy and essentially confirm what we've already been talking about for a while - Blizzard as we knew it is gone - please watch this week's part from the Pylon Show where inControl and especially Artosis (bottom right), who's "one of the faces" of StarCraft 2, talks about the significance of some of the people that were let go:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sbu7pqk1QO0

As he says - the people making the decisions are "out of touch". Basically, community managers, people who improved the quality of the games and the support for it were let go; Blizzard is hiring, on the other hand, tons of developers. They're not paying above industry standard anymore though, they're have a ton of internships out (super low-paid short-term programming jobs), and they outsource development (NetEase collaboration). All of this points to a really dark future - maybe not necessarily for Diablo, if you just want a random hack'n'slay game; whatever comes next, some people are gonna love it. But the unique feel of a Blizzard family cannot possibly be maintained in this atmosphere of faceless programmers, working under the whip of a corporate overlord for average salary (living in SoCal is RIDICULOUSLY expensive, like you cannot imagine), and constantly in fear of losing your job if your short-term goals might fail. All of Blizzard's big achievements would not have been possible under such atmosphere.

All of this is really, really concerning, if you care about more than just the business. Again: if you just want a cool short-term Diablo game to play in between your Fortnite and LOL sessions, this is awesome news. But please understand that many of us aren't like that.

I think your best bet is to submit a ticket to Curse account service...

https://curseweb.zendesk.com/hc/en-us

Just noticed this interesting discussion:

https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/akgtke/quin69_hcssf_shaper_with_zdps/

Some good points made that D3 is actually more mechanically demanding. PoE is more or less just about the patterns. As everyone always stresses, the games can't be compared, but if you do, you notice they're just very much different, there's no better or worse. (I currently enjoy PoE more, but simply because there's nothing to do in D3 other than paragon farming and getting better rolls on my gear; in PoE you still have items to farm after hundreds of hours. Season 16 took me 7:20h, thanks to powerlevel and boost, to complete to Guardian, in PoE that's the time needed for a knowledgeable player to reach endgame.)

Anyways, didn't really know where to put this, and it seems like the last thread was 5 y/o, so I made a new one. Still breaking into PoE and enjoying it, but don't think it's gonna ever rival my close to 5k hours in D3...

I second Impale. In early HC seasons when powercreep wasn't as ridiculous and I had no clue about anything I always went for Impale for the high GR clears for journey etc, tried several specs of several classes but Impale was by far the one that was safest. You can beef up the defense indefinitely without sacrificing too much and be almost unkillable for GR70-80, so I think it will still be quite tanky on GR90-100, especially after this recent patch added some more power.

Quote from FEIF»

so much hate in the respons from the twitter

Is it hate? I think it's just sarcasm to deal with recent events. Blizzard has a history of "keeping us waiting". It used to mean that they deliver better quality work, and the wait was worthwhile. Recently (and I'm talking years, not just since Blizzcon) the wait just results in even bigger disappointment. I wish they'd go back to the old standard of delivering quality - then there'd be no sarcasm/hate (or whatever you wanna call it). There was none of that even a few years ago, so this problem is entirely their own fault, and they can fix this, by giving us clear signs of addressing their consumers' concerns

We're the consumers, they want our money, so that's just my 0.02$ ;-)

Some rollout issues on PC:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Diablo/comments/agc9vd/patch_is_live_on_console/ee56fal/

Quote from sikeone83»

When they launch the patch for the season? Only Friday with the season start, or today but later? Anyone knows? Thx

https://www.diablofans.com/forums/diablo-iii-general-forums/diablo-iii-general-discussion/237328-eu-maintenance-starts-in-like-4-and-half-hours

Interesting, so they have patches now on all servers at the same time. Must be confident to not break anything

Thanks for the heads-up, time to log in and enjoy all the free stash space from a tab full of keys moved to the materials tab, yay!

Please everyone watch their language and behave properly - if this thread doesn't get back on track I'm gonna have to delete some of the borderline comments (already did with one; please whatever you post and whatever opinion you have, bring it up constructively and in a civilized manner). Thanks!

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Imho trading is so limited in D3 that it doesn't really have much of an impact; and I think for a solo play only mode the botting is way too rampant, so I think cracking down on that issue would be way more powerful (like some sort of fatigue mechanic that makes you weaker if you play for too many hours over the past 7 days or whatever). SSF works in PoE but that's an entirely entirely different game.

Locking this to keep it all in one thread.

[table]Header 1 | Header2 | Header 3
Cell1 | Cell 2 | Cell 3[/table]

Context: This thread was "necro-ed" by a spam bot. However, zooheaded's reply was legit. And honestly, it's not like we have a million posts these days such that we need to shut down any activity... ;-)

Also: Happy New Year!

Quote from vinnehehe»

All this makes me wonder though, maybe we're slowly getting to old for this busniess or something. or simply being to nostalgic about our games.

I thought so, too. But then I started playing PoE very recently, only a few dozen hours in and not even in the real endgame, and a lot of faith is restored that there *are* developers out there who still have what it takes to make games I'm interested in. Torchlight was also great, so I'm looking forward to that expansion as well. I guess we just have to look for new stuff and can't trust old names anymore, whether it's a franchise or a developer. And it's tough, because when I look at Steam there is a million shit games, so finding the rare gem takes a lot of time...