Hi guys, still working on the Crusader very hard for those who haven't been following the testing on stream.Currently I'm stuck at T4 but I've been able to breeze through the content lower than that with a variety of specs.
Your first report was pretty negative, suggesting the Crusader was far from finished. Are you feeling better about him now? What's gotten better?
I think there are two factors that we may not be considering here.
One is that you will no longer have the AH to purchase exactly what weapon you want to use. So there may be a point where you don't use Heavenly Strength because you don't have a good 2-H.
The other is that two-handers are slow to swing, and for the most part I hate that. It's not so bad with channeled spells, but for the others, I just can't stand it. So I'd see myself passing on Heavenly Strength for that reason as well.
The downside is it's the retail box version so you'll have to wait for them to ship it. I've had mixed results with Newegg pre-orders; sometimes they show up on release day, sometimes a few days after. So, I'll be passing, but I thought some here might be interested in saving a few bucks.
Frost Zealot paladin is pretty good; that was one of the best builds to start a new ladder season with since you don't really need good gear to support it. Ultimately, however, you're a slave to +skills, which are on uniques not rares.
Well...my hope is that Dane Bright stays in the game on release. Seems pretty cool. Hopefully it's legit. I have no way to tell, :-)
I do too; unfortunately, I think that if they left him in the game, people would just make games over and over until they got all the plans. He needs to be random, almost like a drop itself.
Hey guys, I was just checking out /r/diablo and someone posted this; it looks like there's a random merchant that sells Legendary and Set plans sometimes. Here's the original post:
I was doing bounties and leveling my monk and stumbled upon Dane Bright, the shirtless child merchant who loves to collect orange and green books it seems
He can be found in the Northern Highlands, not sure how rare he is. I found him in the southern corner but a little searching showed he can be in other parts of the Northern Highlands as well. If you find him, go do a couple of bounties and then visit him again, he keeps rolling new plans to sell. Happy hunting!
UPDATE: As per /u/Raticus79's post below, Dane currently only shows up for people in the RoS beta, and will always show up somewhere in the Northern Highlands zone while playing adventure mode. As others have mentioned he is most likely just a temporary measure at speeding up the acquisition of plans. Sorry to derail the hype a bit for you PTR bros
The buff to legendary drop rates was major. It helped fix that feeling of "why the fuck am I killing things?" that I previously had. Now I do feel that loot might be around any corner, and that's exactly how everyone should feel in this genre.
I'm still not thrilled with the overemphasis on +15% damage to <skill> mods on rares, though. I don't think it's added to itemization in any meaningful manner. I think all it has done is created properties which are found frequently, but rarely match up with the skills you're using... so it becomes an "enchant it or scrap it" situation.
I think these affixes will result in more novelty if not necessarily more utility. Also, I really like it when I find them for primary attacks because I feel like primaries don't do enough damage.
. Getting a legendary every 1 to 3 hours is nice but does not feel overblown Not to many upgrades even for someone who really is not heavily built for more than MP3 but I have found 3.
Curious what difficulty you're playing on? My MP2/3 barb is pretty slow in Torment I. 90K DPS but using Skorn, so very slow.
I'm really enjoying the PTR, so much so that I can't play live anymore.
The best part is easily the wizard skill revisions. It's really fun to be able to choose skills to make a particular elemental theme, without eliminating the ability to mix and match however you choose if you don't care about theme. This is something I'd really like to see extended to other classes - their skill revisions are also a lot of fun, but there aren't as many thematic options, as they usually only have a handful of elements. Maybe they could implement different schools of physical damage? I don't know.
I also think the leveling-up experience is much much better thanks to the dynamic difficulty system. It almost gives you too much control over the experience, to the point that I don't really feel like I'm overcoming anything, but I like it much better than having to play through Normal and Nightmare just to get to a mildly engaging difficulty.
The only real complaints I have about it is the fact that I'm having trouble finding upgrades for my existing level 60's. A lot of gear has great primary stat boosts, but it always costs a ton of crit - which I get they are trying to lower, but it's a total impasse for characters that already have a lot. My barbarian is only MP2/MP3 geared, so I was kind-of expecting to keep finding upgrades for a while yet.
It seems like a game like this would quickly get dominated by a small number of builds. For example, if we had this mode on live D3 today, you'd face nothing but teams of sprint barbs and WW/archon wizards. The only way to compete would be to play along.
Hmm...though, this does bring up an important point here...what stops some jacked up toon from joining public Adventure Mode games and clearing Bounties in other Acts before the remaining player(s) can do them? That'd be some serious griefing.
Dammit...hole in the plan, confirmed, :-)
Oh my god, that would be so much fun, like the D3 equivalent of PK - bounty poaching.
I think that if you don't help complete a bounty, you shouldn't get credit for it. In fact, it'd be fun to join a game and race to see who can complete the most bounties. But more importantly, I believe at some point it becomes the player's responsibility to just not abuse the game mechanics, and the devs just have to let players play how they want.
As I said in another thread, split-farming reminds me of Blood Runs and Baal Runs from D2 - easily the most efficient way to level your character, completely against the spirit of the game. Especially if you weren't one of the two or three OP sorcs carrying the whole group. I did my fair share of them, but I also spent plenty of time and got plenty of enjoyment out of playing through naturally. At no point did I feel obligated to do them because they were optimal.
There are grey areas - I think removing the AH was the right choice even though I could just play self-found because the drop rate really was abysmal; I think BoA is the right call as well even though I could just abstain from trading because I am really tired of third-party site spam (though I guess they will still sell gold and mats). People will disagree on those.
But I think the split-farming thing is a non-issue. If your characters are powerful enough that you can split up and complete separate bounties alone in a 4 player game, then mazel tov. And if you can't hack it, there's the door - go do something else until you can. Or maybe you have friends willing to carry you during split-farming, similar to Uber-carries. Or maybe the third party sites will start selling split-farming sessions. It'll always be something.
They doubled the drop rates, but reduced the chance of getting a legendary from gambling.
For what it's worth, he says the Kadala nerf is just temporary until they solve the split-farming problem.
Did they say somewhere that they were thinking of increasing it between 50% and 100% from where it was? I think all the complaining did was convince them to test down from the maximum range instead of up from the minimum range.
not everything its bad, still love the game, still im a fan and thinking in the best possitive way ill try get fun at the time the game comes out.. cheers!
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I think there are two factors that we may not be considering here.
One is that you will no longer have the AH to purchase exactly what weapon you want to use. So there may be a point where you don't use Heavenly Strength because you don't have a good 2-H.
The other is that two-handers are slow to swing, and for the most part I hate that. It's not so bad with channeled spells, but for the others, I just can't stand it. So I'd see myself passing on Heavenly Strength for that reason as well.
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Hey guys - came across this on slickdeals this morning and thought I'd pass it along:
http://slickdeals.net/permadeal/113060/newegg---diablo-3-reaper-of-souls-pre-order-pc
The downside is it's the retail box version so you'll have to wait for them to ship it. I've had mixed results with Newegg pre-orders; sometimes they show up on release day, sometimes a few days after. So, I'll be passing, but I thought some here might be interested in saving a few bucks.
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I do too; unfortunately, I think that if they left him in the game, people would just make games over and over until they got all the plans. He needs to be random, almost like a drop itself.
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Hey guys, I was just checking out /r/diablo and someone posted this; it looks like there's a random merchant that sells Legendary and Set plans sometimes. Here's the original post:
Original link: http://www.reddit.com/r/Diablo/comments/1wjpoo/meet_dane_bright_he_sells_set_and_legendary_plans/
People are saying he'll be beta-only, so people can test out more legendaries and sets, but that seems like a really strange way to go about doing so.
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It seems like a game like this would quickly get dominated by a small number of builds. For example, if we had this mode on live D3 today, you'd face nothing but teams of sprint barbs and WW/archon wizards. The only way to compete would be to play along.
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I think that if you don't help complete a bounty, you shouldn't get credit for it. In fact, it'd be fun to join a game and race to see who can complete the most bounties. But more importantly, I believe at some point it becomes the player's responsibility to just not abuse the game mechanics, and the devs just have to let players play how they want.
As I said in another thread, split-farming reminds me of Blood Runs and Baal Runs from D2 - easily the most efficient way to level your character, completely against the spirit of the game. Especially if you weren't one of the two or three OP sorcs carrying the whole group. I did my fair share of them, but I also spent plenty of time and got plenty of enjoyment out of playing through naturally. At no point did I feel obligated to do them because they were optimal.
There are grey areas - I think removing the AH was the right choice even though I could just play self-found because the drop rate really was abysmal; I think BoA is the right call as well even though I could just abstain from trading because I am really tired of third-party site spam (though I guess they will still sell gold and mats). People will disagree on those.
But I think the split-farming thing is a non-issue. If your characters are powerful enough that you can split up and complete separate bounties alone in a 4 player game, then mazel tov. And if you can't hack it, there's the door - go do something else until you can. Or maybe you have friends willing to carry you during split-farming, similar to Uber-carries. Or maybe the third party sites will start selling split-farming sessions. It'll always be something.
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