And if you want to level up a new character just for the fun of it, nothing is stopping you from doing that.
That's just it: it's not fun in D3. I wish it was, but it's not. I even got into Hardcore to try to make it more fun; it only worked slightly, but it's still not fun.
Could this just be a change in taste on your part? I mean, do you still go back to D2 and say, "Yeah, this is the stuff?"
Because I know I can't. I always hated having to ignore skills I'm not planning to use long term, and being able to use them at "full strength" on the way up, until something new unlocks, is just awesome. I couldn't go back to to the skill-tree method.
First, You were much more heavily invested in characters in D2. You actually had to use a build, you couldnt easily flip flop specs without investment. This meant a hardcore player had many characters of the same class all playing differently with their own gear.
Second, In D2 levels meant something, you leveled up, placed points into your attributes and skill tree. It was much more important than paragon skills...
Third, D2 had ladders, PVP, Classic/Expansion modes and mods in offline mode. You had many, many more options. Build a pvp character, work on classic or expansion ladder characters, each class had 4-5 builds that required investment (if u didnt power level). in D3 you have one option. level a class and thats it.
I played the shit out of D2, I was being faceteous. My point was that there's really not much you could do in D2 that you can't do in D3, D3 is just much smarter about it.
You can make a new character every time you want to try a new build in D3 if you want. I don't, and I appreciate not having to, but I can. And I do routinely make new characters, both hardcore and softcore, because I enjoy leveling new characters. I try out different skills as I level, and if I get tired of them I just change them out for a few levels instead of never finishing the character, because God forbid I spend any skill points outside of my build, effectively wasting them. And I'm still plenty invested in my characters, I just don't define them by their main attack. I also can't be bothered to trade gear between active characters, so they all have their own sets.
Levels in D3 unlock skills and gear, which is all they did in D2. Neither game lets you use Whirlwind, for example, until you get to the right level. The difference is that in D2, you had to sit on your stat points until you could spend them in the skill you wanted to use, and everything along the way was underpowered because again, God forbid you put an extra point in a skill you weren't going to use long-term. I have plenty of fond memories of sitting on 10+ skill points; how meaningful is that? Stat points were no better - with a small handful of exceptions, it was enough STR and DEX for gear, rest in VIT, no points in Energy, with plenty of sitting on 50+ points if you didn't have your end-game gear sitting in your stash and, as a result, didn't know exactly how much STR/DEX you needed to wear it.
It's true D3 doesn't have ladders, but all the ladders really do is rank you - there's nothing stopping you from starting fresh in D3. As I said above, I do it all the time. Which is not to say I wouldn't like ladders in D3 - but it's not some distinct D2 playstyle that's extinct now. I don't think anyone still played Classic if they had the Expansion; you're just reaching there. For PvP, I'm not well versed enough to understand the complaints. The only PvP I did in D2 was the occasional free-for-all in Act I with friends, which is the same as brawling except you could run far away.
Not for me. Runs were a total pain, I hated having to reload the game over and over after 2 minutes of action. D3 is way better in that regard, although I thought they really handicapped themselves when they forced you to follow the story and made it so you can't go between Acts easily. With that changing in Adventure Mode, I'm super excited. The bounties add a good layer of direction on top of the free-roaming aspect, so I think that's also great. I think the real reason people remember runs very fondly is because they were very rewarding, which I think RoS will solve as well.
I also think Rifts are looking great, and I think all of the things that I would recommend changing for them are just what they were planning for the Nephalem Trials. So, I was disappointed to see that delayed/scrapped.
One thing I've never really understood is the attachment to "builds" in D2. I mean, for most of them, all you did was pick the same 1-point wonders and then 2 or 3 main skills to max out. What's the difference between a Meteorb sorc and a Lit sorc? One casts Meteor and Frozen Orb, the other casts Chain Lightning. Both take one point in Warmth, Static Field, Teleport, and Thunderstorm, and the rest just goes into pre-reqs and synergies you never cast. You have to make a whole new character just so you can cast Chain Lightning instead of Frozen Orb. How is that better than simply going to town, opening your skill menu, and switching one for the other?
No, but there sure was a lot more to do than get all classes to end-game and then farm farm farm forever. D2 had infinitely more replayability than D3, and I have some doubts RoS can change that. But I'll be here to see.
What else was there to do in D2 other than farm for items or experience?
The story is enough incentive to play the campaign.
The what?
The story in Diablo 3 is more of a series of consecutive facepalms and wtf moments. I really hope that the story of Act 5 will be better.
Haha, I'm certainly not saying it's a good story by any stretch, but even if they had Adventure Mode in from the beginning, I still would have started in the Campaign and played it through a few times before switching to Adventure Mode.
Not everyone pours 200+ hours into video games (in general, let alone into a single video game). I have plenty of friends who only played through Normal, or only played one character up to 60, etc. As a justification for Campaign mode, the story is plenty. I mean, take yourself for example - you certainly sound like you're going to play the Campaign for Act V at least once before you switch over to Adventure Mode.
I'm excited about adventure mode, but I can't help but wonder how they will give players incentive to actually play the game (campaign), instead of just doing bounty runs.
The story is enough incentive to play the campaign. You won't find many of them here, but tons of players just play a game like this through once or twice and then move on to the next thing.
Are they just going to exist until you find a legendary to replace it?
More or less, this. It depends on what the final drop rates are like - I am sure they are much higher in the beta than they will be for release.
But ultimately in D3, damage is king, so no matter what novelties they put on legendaries, if they don't do the most damage, nobody will wear them.
I am interested to see how the 'primary' and 'secondary' stats work out. Theoretically, you could have a blue and a yellow have similar 'primary' stats, and then it's just the secondary stats that differentiate them. As I said though, orange will always be best.
I'm not even sure how much gold matters now. It seems like most everything has material costs that are the bottleneck. Enchanting at least has a scaling gold cost so eventually you'll run out of money if you re-enchant long enough.
That's because there's so much of it - gold is a decent bottleneck on the console, because you can only get what you find or vendor. You actually have to decide whether to disenchant for the mats or vendor for the gold. I've certainly run out of gold first when trying to craft the Archon stuff (not that I was sitting on a mountain of mats).
I think the bounties are going to be a great addition because I, speaking for myself, like having something to hunt for. The item drop game is totally random - there's no where specific to go to increase your odds of getting one specific item or another. So I don't feel like I'm "treasure hunting," just rolling around and treasure-hoping. Now, bounties don't change that randomness, but I like knowing I can head to some specific areas to get a guaranteed reward.
There's only so much I'm willing to worry about people feeling "compelled" to skip through to the bounty monster as quickly as possible, or whatever "most efficient" thing develops. As with all the ridiculous changes to magic find that all began because some idiots felt "compelled" to carry around a separate set of MF armor to put on for killing blows and treasure chests, if your attitude is such that you'll go to that ridiculous length, there's no help for you anyway. At some point you have to just let people play the game the way they want to play it. It's not a job.
I do hope they keep the overall game-density high, though. I like bounties and rifts, but I wouldn't trade high density in the game world for them. Especially now that we have adventure mode. Exploding Palm: Essence Burn + high density is the best thing that ever happened to this game.
I think they are going to tune costs to the rate players acquire gold in-game (effectively assuming no one has any gold saved), and the people who have a ton saved up will simply enjoy having the padding until ladders are implemented, at which point it'll become moot.
Agreed, this "problem" would occur with bind-to-game or not. Bind-to-game just makes it a more-imminent threat with the two-hour restriction. I'm still not sure what they are thinking with this. The reason they implemented a very very similar system (bind-to-people-saved-to-the-boss) in WoW was, in particular, so GMs could spend less time dealing with mis-assigned loot. But this was loot that was already BoP and untradable, so this change actually gave more flexibility to the players, not less.
So in WoW you're not attempting to make an item-for-item trade with this system. You are just given a two-hour window in which you can re-assign items to the proper recipient. Instead of making a roll or a master loot decision set-in-stone and only reverseable by a GM, for two hours it's fixable by the players themselves, thus saving the GMs a lot of tedious work.
In D3 you are actually looking to make item-for-item trades (Hey, Cardinal, I found this monk item that I think you would really love, do you have a sweet WD item for me?) which means we both have to find something appropriate for each other within two hours and that seems unlikely to me, even with Loot 2.0. If you don't find that WD item, I have two choices: give it to you anyway and hope that you'll repay the kindness to me one day, or be a greedy douchebag and not give it to you. Neither of those is particularly good for me, and only one of them is good for you.
So, unfortunately, I feel that this system will actually "force" people to find 2-3 other friends with whom they can form some kind of regular group where they just give items they find to the person who needs them most - where everyone is going on the "good faith" system because this gives them the greatest exposure to items, but keeping it between friends removes the "must repay one item with one item" aspect. And, to me, that seems like it circumvents the rules just as much as anything else.
Actually, the 2-hour window trade window is intended for something similar to WoW's "easy loot re-assignment", as you put it, and not item-for-item bartering.
The idea is that if you are playing with a friend of yours, and you find a legendary he could use, you can give it to him. The underlying rationale is that, like WoW, the two of you more-or-less earned the item "together" because you were playing together, so there's a chance to re-assigning it, if you want. That's why in WoW, you can only trade the item to another player that was also eligible for the drop (i.e., was in the same instance or raid with you), rather than anyone at all.
If you are able to strike a bargain with another player in the game within the 2-hour window and do an item-for-item exchange, that's just gravy in the eyes of the developers. It's not what they're actually trying to support.
The big problem in teamgames is the 4 player cap. You wil always have leechers, or just passive players in your games. You had that in D2 also. But the difference was that even with 4 people afk there would still be 4 other people killing mobs and so on. In D2 you werent as vulnerable to AKF'ers/leechers as you are in D3. If just 2 people are afk, your killing speed is heavily limited compared to D2.
The difference was that you could still pretty easily blow away the entire game solo, even with 7 people sitting in town. With any more actually playing, shit was dead before it even loaded on the screen.
I had a small group of friends (3 of us in total) who used to play on /players 8 all the time.
1) I believe Scholarly Writings are crafting materials. Somewhere out there is a screenshot of the item itself, and the description suggests it's for crafting. I'm sorry, I can't find it.
2) Nephalem Glory Globes look like Health Globes, but they're yellow, and they give you offensive bonuses (like an occasional blast of yellow chain lightning, or a very obnoxious column of light that looks too much like the legendary beam for my heartrate's liking). They are in the console version, and they are fun.
Sounds like a non-issue to me. As it is now, players dilly-dally around all the time in public games. Frankly, I'd prefer to know it was because they were actually engaging in something Diablo 3 related rather than standing idle in the inn taking up space.
I'm not that attached to my gear, my gold, my gems, my mats or my characters. I think the fun bit of this game is 'getting there'; once you're 'there', the fun decreases by a factor 10 (warning: arbitrary number). That's why I think it would be "pretty fun" to have a full wipe, but I'm not making it a "thing".
This is my philosophy as well. I'm always at a little bit of a loss when I hear people complain about D3 having no end-game, because the leveling up is the fun part. Even on console, where you can actually find good legendaries, it loses its charm once you have 3 or 4 and finding upgrades is a pain in the ass again. I think the new paragon system will help out a bit, but for the most part I always prefer starting from scratch and making my way up, which is why I always end up playing HC sooner or later.
I picked "no" on the vote just because I don't see any reason to impose it on anyone else, but I'm probably going to start all new characters for the expansion once I've played trough Act V once or twice.
0
Could this just be a change in taste on your part? I mean, do you still go back to D2 and say, "Yeah, this is the stuff?"
Because I know I can't. I always hated having to ignore skills I'm not planning to use long term, and being able to use them at "full strength" on the way up, until something new unlocks, is just awesome. I couldn't go back to to the skill-tree method.
0
I played the shit out of D2, I was being faceteous. My point was that there's really not much you could do in D2 that you can't do in D3, D3 is just much smarter about it.
You can make a new character every time you want to try a new build in D3 if you want. I don't, and I appreciate not having to, but I can. And I do routinely make new characters, both hardcore and softcore, because I enjoy leveling new characters. I try out different skills as I level, and if I get tired of them I just change them out for a few levels instead of never finishing the character, because God forbid I spend any skill points outside of my build, effectively wasting them. And I'm still plenty invested in my characters, I just don't define them by their main attack. I also can't be bothered to trade gear between active characters, so they all have their own sets.
Levels in D3 unlock skills and gear, which is all they did in D2. Neither game lets you use Whirlwind, for example, until you get to the right level. The difference is that in D2, you had to sit on your stat points until you could spend them in the skill you wanted to use, and everything along the way was underpowered because again, God forbid you put an extra point in a skill you weren't going to use long-term. I have plenty of fond memories of sitting on 10+ skill points; how meaningful is that? Stat points were no better - with a small handful of exceptions, it was enough STR and DEX for gear, rest in VIT, no points in Energy, with plenty of sitting on 50+ points if you didn't have your end-game gear sitting in your stash and, as a result, didn't know exactly how much STR/DEX you needed to wear it.
It's true D3 doesn't have ladders, but all the ladders really do is rank you - there's nothing stopping you from starting fresh in D3. As I said above, I do it all the time. Which is not to say I wouldn't like ladders in D3 - but it's not some distinct D2 playstyle that's extinct now. I don't think anyone still played Classic if they had the Expansion; you're just reaching there. For PvP, I'm not well versed enough to understand the complaints. The only PvP I did in D2 was the occasional free-for-all in Act I with friends, which is the same as brawling except you could run far away.
0
I also think Rifts are looking great, and I think all of the things that I would recommend changing for them are just what they were planning for the Nephalem Trials. So, I was disappointed to see that delayed/scrapped.
One thing I've never really understood is the attachment to "builds" in D2. I mean, for most of them, all you did was pick the same 1-point wonders and then 2 or 3 main skills to max out. What's the difference between a Meteorb sorc and a Lit sorc? One casts Meteor and Frozen Orb, the other casts Chain Lightning. Both take one point in Warmth, Static Field, Teleport, and Thunderstorm, and the rest just goes into pre-reqs and synergies you never cast. You have to make a whole new character just so you can cast Chain Lightning instead of Frozen Orb. How is that better than simply going to town, opening your skill menu, and switching one for the other?
2
What else was there to do in D2 other than farm for items or experience?
0
Haha, I'm certainly not saying it's a good story by any stretch, but even if they had Adventure Mode in from the beginning, I still would have started in the Campaign and played it through a few times before switching to Adventure Mode.
Not everyone pours 200+ hours into video games (in general, let alone into a single video game). I have plenty of friends who only played through Normal, or only played one character up to 60, etc. As a justification for Campaign mode, the story is plenty. I mean, take yourself for example - you certainly sound like you're going to play the Campaign for Act V at least once before you switch over to Adventure Mode.
0
The story is enough incentive to play the campaign. You won't find many of them here, but tons of players just play a game like this through once or twice and then move on to the next thing.
Because the rifts look like a lot of fun.
I swear, it's like people seem to forget that this is a game, not a job.
0
More or less, this. It depends on what the final drop rates are like - I am sure they are much higher in the beta than they will be for release.
But ultimately in D3, damage is king, so no matter what novelties they put on legendaries, if they don't do the most damage, nobody will wear them.
I am interested to see how the 'primary' and 'secondary' stats work out. Theoretically, you could have a blue and a yellow have similar 'primary' stats, and then it's just the secondary stats that differentiate them. As I said though, orange will always be best.
0
That's because there's so much of it - gold is a decent bottleneck on the console, because you can only get what you find or vendor. You actually have to decide whether to disenchant for the mats or vendor for the gold. I've certainly run out of gold first when trying to craft the Archon stuff (not that I was sitting on a mountain of mats).
2
There's only so much I'm willing to worry about people feeling "compelled" to skip through to the bounty monster as quickly as possible, or whatever "most efficient" thing develops. As with all the ridiculous changes to magic find that all began because some idiots felt "compelled" to carry around a separate set of MF armor to put on for killing blows and treasure chests, if your attitude is such that you'll go to that ridiculous length, there's no help for you anyway. At some point you have to just let people play the game the way they want to play it. It's not a job.
I do hope they keep the overall game-density high, though. I like bounties and rifts, but I wouldn't trade high density in the game world for them. Especially now that we have adventure mode. Exploding Palm: Essence Burn + high density is the best thing that ever happened to this game.
0
0
Actually, the 2-hour window trade window is intended for something similar to WoW's "easy loot re-assignment", as you put it, and not item-for-item bartering.
The idea is that if you are playing with a friend of yours, and you find a legendary he could use, you can give it to him. The underlying rationale is that, like WoW, the two of you more-or-less earned the item "together" because you were playing together, so there's a chance to re-assigning it, if you want. That's why in WoW, you can only trade the item to another player that was also eligible for the drop (i.e., was in the same instance or raid with you), rather than anyone at all.
If you are able to strike a bargain with another player in the game within the 2-hour window and do an item-for-item exchange, that's just gravy in the eyes of the developers. It's not what they're actually trying to support.
0
The difference was that you could still pretty easily blow away the entire game solo, even with 7 people sitting in town. With any more actually playing, shit was dead before it even loaded on the screen.
I had a small group of friends (3 of us in total) who used to play on /players 8 all the time.
0
1) I believe Scholarly Writings are crafting materials. Somewhere out there is a screenshot of the item itself, and the description suggests it's for crafting. I'm sorry, I can't find it.
EDIT: Found it: http://diablo.incgamers.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/ros-plan-archfiend-arrows-labels1.jpg
2) Nephalem Glory Globes look like Health Globes, but they're yellow, and they give you offensive bonuses (like an occasional blast of yellow chain lightning, or a very obnoxious column of light that looks too much like the legendary beam for my heartrate's liking). They are in the console version, and they are fun.
0
0
This is my philosophy as well. I'm always at a little bit of a loss when I hear people complain about D3 having no end-game, because the leveling up is the fun part. Even on console, where you can actually find good legendaries, it loses its charm once you have 3 or 4 and finding upgrades is a pain in the ass again. I think the new paragon system will help out a bit, but for the most part I always prefer starting from scratch and making my way up, which is why I always end up playing HC sooner or later.
I picked "no" on the vote just because I don't see any reason to impose it on anyone else, but I'm probably going to start all new characters for the expansion once I've played trough Act V once or twice.