And if I could actually get into the PTR without 8+ hour queues, this would mean something.
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- thatFPGAguy
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Member for 11 years and 26 days
Last active Mon, Apr, 17 2017 13:02:27
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Jul 8, 2015thatFPGAguy posted a message on PTR Season Ending, Small PTR Patch, How Fast Can a Monk Attack?Posted in: News
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Jun 23, 2015thatFPGAguy posted a message on D3's Biggest Problems?Posted in: News
I like that the game has a strong loot/RNG component. I simply don't have enough time to do "gated" content like raids in MMOs. With Diablo 3, i can log on, do a rift, and possibly find an upgrade in five minutes.
The problem is that legendary powers on items in D3 are too macroscopic. You have the legendary, you have the power. Done. Yes, you want a legendary item with good rolls as well. But in some cases like a Condemn crusader, even a "meh" Blade of Prophecy can be better than a good any-other-weapon. If you don't have the item, the build is severely hobbled and sometimes even unplayable past T4~T6 (depending on your gems, rings, paragon level, spec, etc.)
I definitely don't want to make this game a clone of PoE. But i do like in PoE that you equip many many gems which each give a relatively minor bump to a stat, skill, etc. Thus, you've lots of room to make small upgrades to your character as you play. And if you're still missing that one optimal gem (or have one item with slightly less than ideal coloring/linking), you're only a few percent DPS below optimal. You're usually not crippled.
I like the idea of items/equipment directly buffing skills (as opposed to skill points). The issue is that everyone needs access to "Item X" in order to not be locked out of a build. But not everyone should have instant access to "Item X +9" with nice extra stat modifiers. Those extra modifiers should come from playing the game. I think both PoE and Diablo 3 have taken different approaches to this problem and it will be interesting to see how both games evolve/tweak their concepts over time. -
Apr 16, 2015thatFPGAguy posted a message on Trials will be removed in a future patch!Posted in: News
Is it just me or does the annoyance of trials vary a lot with spec? (I'm speaking as a solo crusader.)
As a vacuum/condem crusader, trials were pretty quick and doable. In contrast as a vacuum crusader, grifts and particularly grift bosses got annoying.
But as the new Rolands fire shield bash spec, trials are very annoying and noticeably more time consuming. But grift bosses in particular seem more manageable. (Granted I don't have nearly as much play time with Rolands as I did with vacuum crusader.)
Its like trials are about AOE and grifts are about bosses (single target DPS). It's like I'm rated on one skill, but then tested via another.
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Jul 18, 2014thatFPGAguy posted a message on 2.1 PTR Patch datamined - 2H Weapon Changes!Admittedly, I played Wizard a lot in D3V and almost none in ROS. (Not because I didn't like it but because I had lots of fun with the Crusader.)Posted in: News
I'm probably in a minority but I enjoyed playing Ray of Frost/Disintegrate builds back in D3V. I was only rolling MP5/6 but I had fun. I was not a huge fan of the CM playstyle. With the channeling spells, I liked my Skorn (for many reason). So in RoS for Wizards, I could see that channeling could favor 2handers and straight casting could favor 1handers. There's already a built-in mechanic to differentiate their uses. Maybe 2handers still suck, but with enough buffs there's a reason.
For monks and barbs, I guess tempest rush and whirlwind could make a comeback? These channeling mechanics could certainly be accentuated to benefit most from 2handers. But there are other issues to balance like effective moment speed and survivability that would have to be worked out. -
May 20, 2014thatFPGAguy posted a message on Diablo II Ladder Reset – May 27, Anniversary Buff Not Ninja Nerfed, Lightning Monk Build, Full 6 Marauder Set Bonus: Rift RunsI've been doing solo T1 rifts and my leg drop rate has been noticeably higher. However, I might be biased as I've probably had about 8~`10 plans drop thus far which has been neat as the recipes are way easier to make now. I've also found two shards of hate so the excitement over that has overwhelmed the piles of junk that I've salvaged.Posted in: News
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Crazy thought: I think Diablo is going to have to pick up more MMO-style features in order to keep replayability high. But I don't see it becoming a WoW clone. If anything, I'd imagine a World of Diablo to be much more akin to Guild Wars. That said, I'm not super crazy on the idea of a GW clone. I got bored with GWs way faster than I ever did with WoW. But maybe that's me.
Just my $0.02.
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To me, it's clear that Quin and MrLlama don't know anything more about the future of Diablo than just your average player. In hightsight, Quin and MrLlama were flown out there to make up for the lack of Diablo content. Not to hype the supposedly amazing Diablo content.
Until theres an official page on the Blizzard website, I wouldn't hold my breath for D2HD. Project Titan and Starcraft Ghost were widely known "secrets" and much development went into them. Only to have Starcraft Ghost cancelled and the project Titan MMO morph into Overwatch.
Nothing is real to me until there's an open beta.
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Rather than trying to have all specs be equal in DPS, it would probably be better to balance each spec around a different role: single target DPS, multi-target DPS, CC, tanking, and maybe even support/healing. But that would likely require a major change in monster mechanics, game play, CC abilities, healing, etc. Essentially, the game would have to become more MMO like.
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None of stuff that came in RoS is perfect, but it feels like Blizzard was trying to add more stuff to do without getting to far away spiritually from the diablo feel and play style. Maybe they weren't totally successful, but on the whole, I'm having more fun in RoS than D3 Vanilla.
I guess I'm just guessing that D4 would need to be a big shakeup. Maybe it would be fun. Maybe it would feel less and less like D2 and D3. And maybe that's ok.
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For instance, Diablo games tend to be characterized by (feel free to disagree with this list in comments below):
- Isometric graphics
- Mouse-directed movement and auto-pathing
- "Fast" combat and movement (relative to MMOs)
- Comparatively fewer spells/skills at a time (relative to MMOs)
- Medieval gothic battle between angels and demons
- Procedurally generated levels
- *User controllable* difficulty settings
- "Bosses" are relatively "simple" (compared to MMOs)
- Instanced combat with no more than 8 people
- Highly randomized item stats
- Very few if any "guaranteed drops" or "fixed loot tables"
- "Efficient" play is characterized by farming a specific area/zone/feature(rift) over and over and over again with no lockout/penalty.
I guess what I'm saying is that Grifts are just another facet to the Normal/Nightmare/Hell difficulty curve. If you cap the difficulty, how to you still make the game fun, interesting, and rewarding after a few weeks or months of play? Make good items really hard to find? Make MMO-style bosses/raids? Have timed lockouts on good zones or content so they can't be over-farmed?
I don't know what I'd specifically switch up in the Diablo formula to make it more fun without making it feel more and more like an MMO. Not that I have anything against MMOs. I love MMOs. I just like that Diablo isn't an MMO.
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I don't even see the point of D2 HD. I don't want to play a game where I have a crapload of potions in my inventory. I don't want a game without a shared stash. I don't want to gear up by doing endless Baal runs. D2 is a dinosaur by modern gaming standards. If they update the graphics without updating the game play, it will be a novelty. If they update the gameplay, then it's a whole new game. (And if they were successful with such a gameplay update, they'd just be cannibalizing the Diablo 3 player base, which is currently their marque Diablo game.)
The longer D3 goes without another expansion pack, the more I believe they are working on D4. But I can't figure what they'd do in D4, that they couldn't just do in a D3 expansion. Moving to D4 would allow them to a) eliminate all the legacy of people with thousands of non-season paragon levels,
allow them to reintroduce characters like necromancer without stepping on the novelty of existing characters, and c) ???. I'm drawing a blank here.
I'm just not certain what would be "different" enough to warrant a whole new game. Sure, new classes and new story and new items. But those could be done in an expansion, right? Would the gameplay be different? Could they make it truly open world rather than 4-man (or 8-man) instances?
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The question is whether a thief/rogue would result in sufficiently diverse play style from a Monk. (There's no doubt Monk is different from Thief/Rogue lore-wise.) One could argue that punching something really fast with your fists is mechanically similar to stabbing something really fast with your daggers.
While I think there are ways to differentiate Monk and Rogue/Thief, my guess is that Blizzard would start with the most unique concept (relative to the other available classes) and go from there. At first glance, Druid seems like the obvious choice. But whether something like Druid Shapeshifting is sufficiently different from Archon or Akarat's Champion is definitely up for debate IMO.
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Blood Brother is probably better but I would try and make sure you have +% Block Chance on your shield to get the maximum advantage.
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Even RAM is questionable now in terms of upgradability.
I didn't mean to imply that laptops had many practical upgrades. What I should have said is that many of today's popular laptops have even fewer upgrades than 3~5 years ago.
From what I hear, 8.1 is much better than 8.0. I'm hopeful that 10 will get Windows back on track. Still use Windows 7 all the time.
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The upgradability of the laptop will be very manufacturer and model dependent. Apple has definitely leaned towards the "Ultrabook" model meaning that their laptops have very little upgradability. But, for example, comparable Dell Ultrabooks also have very limited upgradability (mostly due to the formfactor).
My basic $1300 13" MBP w/ Retina Display runs Diablo 3 ok. Not at super high settings, but more than satisfactory when I'm traveling. It's a solid machine if you're going to do other things beyond gaming. But if you're just looking for gaming, you can likely get more graphics horsepower for less money with a Windows laptop. (Not that I'd be thrilled with getting Windows 8 but that's a personal preference.)
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Also, we can't confuse art style with graphical quality. Yes, I'm not exactly the biggest fan of Blizzard's cartoony style. But I think games shy away from "realism" because if you go for realism and fail (or just reduce the polygon count), it looks awful. But if you go for cartoony and then reduce the polygon count, it still just looks cartoony. No big loss.
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I think Blizzard could design higher resolution textures. But I get the sense they're not going to devote resources towards something that only a small fraction of the player base can realistically enjoy.
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I think Blizzard's (new? 2.1.2?) philosophy is "Pets are cool. It's cool if pets make up significant part (majority?) of your DPS. But they should not be your only source of DPS. Or at least, you should be actively working to support/buff/coordinate with your pets. Not run away from them."
However, I've not really played witch doctor in 2.1 so I don't know how their current design philosophy stacks up to how Sentry DH is currently being played.
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Reporting zombie networks takes time, particularly if they're in a foreign country and that countries' ISP are uncooperative. Then you have to go to the ISP where that traffic enters the US and see if you can get those IPs black listed there. Again, all this investigation and reporting takes time.
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Secondly, handling DDoS attacks is something you want to handle at the data center level, not at the individual server level. If all this bogus traffic hits your server, you're SOL. You want to use the network switches and firewalls to contain and drop the bogus traffic. Chances are Blizzard rents space at a top tier data center. So you have a combination of Blizzard's equipment and techs, the datacenter's equipment and techs, and the equipment and techs of the ISP feeding the data center. All three have to work together to analyze the attack and build an effective strategy against the DDoS. There's a reason why entire companies exist to audit and help prevent DDoS. If this was easy, Blizzard would have beaten it a long time ago.