I started with a full defensive CM build with Crystal Shell, Prismatic Armor, and the CD reduction rune on frost nova, as well as Cold Blooded, CM, and Evocation as passives that were unchanged throughout. I took the fight time and my char sheet dps to compute the DPS Multiplier, which is the effective dps gain of the build. For example, at 100k dps using the full defensive build I would expect an effective dps of 247k. I also computed relative DPS of each spec meaning switching from Prismatic to Storm Armor increased dps by about 36%.
And in case there's any confusion, 'x' in the table means that skill was used.
| Storm Armor | Shocking Aspect | Pinpoint | Shards | Prism | DPS Multiplier | Relative DPS |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2.47 | 1 | |||||
| x | 2.78 | 1.13 | ||||
| x | 2.99 | 1.21 | ||||
| x | 3.01 | 1.22 | ||||
| x | 3.36 | 1.36 | ||||
| x | x | 4.06 | 1.65 | |||
| x | x | x | 4.25 | 1.72 |
The interesting information is that Storm Armor is about a 36% dps gain over prismatic armor. When you add Shocking Aspect it's a 65% dps gain over prismatic armor and about a 36% dps gain over pinpoint barrier. Adding Diamond Shards further increases the dps gain but it's only about a 4% dps gain by itself when you use Shocking Aspect. The dramatic decrease in survivability for the fight makes it very not worthwhile, but that could easily change depending on the fight. Rak for example, would probably be just fine with DS or prism.
I also expect the values for Shocking Aspect to be dependent of crit and attack speed, since it only procs on crits and higher attack speed should lead to more procs from WW, so with 50% crit, I'd expect the damage to increase by about 16%, or I'd expect the total dps gain to be about 90%, for a relative dps of 1.9. With a crit % of 52% I would expect Shocking Aspect to double your dps over prismatic armor, roughly speaking, with the same APS of 1.965 or so.
For reference, my stats at the time of the data collection were 104k dps buffed (110k with pinpoint), 1.965 attacks per second, 20 APoC, 1298 LoH, 1.5% Life Steal, 641 resist all and 4588 armor unbuffed, with 40.5k hp and 43% crit with Scoundrel. I also had about 400 life per second regen, just to complete the stats.
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Anyways, Blizzard already hinted that it's not an option. In short: if four acts aren't even balanced out as of now, how will you make sure that the endless dungeon is balanced compared to the game? Because whatever they introduce must not draw players away from the regular game (they don't want a cow level 2.0).
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Thank you for your input!
I don't give a rat's ass about these three features. But that's just my opinion.
None of these three addresses itemization, which is priority #1 for most people I've seen posting here lately.
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Hm, everyone is free to use the RMAH or not, but even if you don't, you still get the patches. How is that not free content for me then?
Any money that is put in by anyone at some point makes patches "paid" instead of "free"? Wow. That is certainly a strange way to see it. However, if you put it that way, PoE isn't free either - I should remember this point next times it comes up in a discussion, might be useful.
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Holy crap. If IncGamers can't come up with their own stuff and need to steal ideas from DFans' users, they should at least to it RIGHT. Terribly, terribly phrased survey.
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Originally Posted by Lylirra (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
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Guys, just browse threads from ~1.5-2 years ago; sure, you'll find some people who saw it coming. But you'll also find people who predicted the world would come to an end or Michelle Bachmann would become president.
What annoys me most about this is that if Travis Day had brought this news, everyone would be like "YAY THIS GUY IS AWESOME HE KNOWS WHAT HE'S TALKING ABOUT MAKE HIM PRESIDENT OF BLIZZARD", but if Jay Wilson says the same everyone is just going crazy and turning into an ignorant holier-than-thou...
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D3 was also not a failure in terms of quality of the game. It's still among the top 20 highest rated games (technically even top 10 because there are 5 titles sharing #10). The average user score however indicates why people tend to talk about "D3" and "failure":
D3 did not live up to its expectations. To be fair: it was impossible. Some people wanted D3 to be a "D2.1" with updated graphics; not gonna happen. Some people thought they would revolutionize the genre; unfortunately didn't happen either. What happened instead was a terrible launch which failed on several levels - there's no way to sugarcoat this. Since then, Blizzard has done their job to provide a number of patches to fix the issues. But sometimes forgiving is difficult, and as such the failed launch is still in people's mind and causes them to say "D3 was a failure" (and the user ratings on Metacritics will never go up, so forget about that). Maybe the expansion will give everyone a new, fair shot at evaluating the state of D3.
D3 is not a failure as such, but it's not quite a match for the high expectations that come with games produced by Blizzard. Yet. Right now it's a close call, and I'm confident that with the expansion we'll be there. And if not? Well... there are always other games. Like Torchlight 2. If you play them for a couple of days and go back to D3, you'll realize how great D3 is compared to every other game in the genre (at least it was like that for me). And if this is not the case (i.e., you think TL2 or PoE are better), then congratulations! Just play this other game and be happy.
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So you never got into D2 endgame, I guess?
Doing countless Baal runs with guaranteed unique items (there were no "legendaries", just uniques)? An hour of D2 gave you way more unique items than you will ever see in an hour of D3. The amount of rares was smaller, yep; they're gonna fix that in D3, btw. However, it's not like every rare or unique was an update, hell no.
Even Baal on hell difficulty could drop "normal" uniques that were pure crap (remember the three levels of quality for uniques - normal, exceptional, elite). And the fact that rares felt like "yay" and not like "meh" as in D3 is because they weren't just worth 2k-3k gold at the vendor, but if they had this one single affix that everyone was looking for (+x to skill level) you could sell them for up to the gold limit and go to Gheed to have another shot at gambling. Rares without the skill level attribute were crap for 99% of players.
Look, I'm actually really frustrated that the console gets a lot of things I would've wanted to see on the PC version. And due to work reasons I'm on a D3 break, but to be honest, I'm also not motivated to come back right now; might be waiting for 1.08 or a later patch. But I had the same ups and downs with D2, too, and I really don't think we should romanticize D2 to a game it never was. When you say "legendary items were really legendary and both useful and wearable"... well, that's just not true; you would find unique items (sometimes even set items) within the first hour of a new game and they were crap, going right to the vendor.
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That's the only reason why they're not entirely removing it - some people like it and probably no one wants to fall back to cumbersome D2 trading through 3rd party websites and potential scams everywhere.
However, since it was so annoying in D2, many people never used trading and played entirely self-found. In D3, it's only a small minority playing self-found; the overwhelming majority gets 90% of their gear from the AH.
Blizzard needs and wants to find a middle ground. "Refocus the game away from the AH" will not impact your trading experience, but it will bring back the joy for many players who feel that their character is like a foreign entity and not really "myyyy precioussss" (read this in Gollum voice).
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