For anyone who missed the blog post this morning, Blizzard has posted more information on patch 1.0.5 dealing with defensive skills for all classes and nerfing how much damage monsters do. Make sure to check out the blog post for all the information on this big change.
Scheduled Maintenance - 09/18/2012
Looks like a long maintenance on Tuesday.
Originally Posted by Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
(We will be performing scheduled maintenance on Tuesday, September 18th. Maintenance will begin at 3:00 AM PDT and is expected to last for 8 hours. During this time, all servers and many web services will be unavailable.
Thank you for your patience.
Thank you for your patience.
Puzzle Ring - So Many Goblins The Puzzle Ring might be just a tad bit too effective when used in odd ways.
Diablo III Inferno Booster Pack Giveaway
Our weekly Inferno booster pack giveaway is currently going until Monday. Make sure to check out the official contest thread for information on the prize on how to enter.
Build Diversity & Skill hotswapping
Bashiok hits the forums in reply to a post wanting to be able to use more skills. A good topic is brought up, that of the old hotswapping of skills. Now that the game has been out a few months is this something you would like to do without losing your NV stacks or do you like it how it is? Vote Below the blue post!
Originally Posted by Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
(Allowing you to have more skills would reduce the amount of choices to make. That's the opposite of build diversity.
they punish you for swapping skills after you kill an elite because developers forbid changes in tactics
NV stacks are removed when you swap skills because in beta a large majority of people hated the idea of an open skill system where you could freely swap skills around. It was felt that the lack of build permanence would ruin the game, and so we listened and added some build permanence by 'encouraging' people not to swap skills mid-run through the loss of NV stacks. At the time it was almost unanimously applauded as brilliant!
Now, after release, that tune seems to have changed and a lot of people would rather be hotswapping skills. It's something we continue to talk about internally. I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts on the matter.
Allowing you to have more skills would reduce the amount of choices to make. That's the opposite of build diversity.
To clarify, the median of a set of choices will always yield the most combinations. So having 50 options and only being able to pick 25 gives you the most possible combinations. More than if you could pick 24, or 26, or 27, etc. We broke class skills down to approximately 12 general types of skills (single target damage, aoe, CC, buffs, etc.). Half of 12 is 6, so there you have it.
People want a higher degree of build versatility by having access to more skills. They want permanence but only in so much as if builds are versatile.
The 6 skill limit is in direct competition with the desire to have identity through permanence.
Where in the previous installment, for example, if you were a Barbarian, and you wanted signature abilities like Battle Orders and Leap (Attack), you only needed to invest one point in them. You could also get cool and useful stuff like Shout, Find Potion, Iron Skin, and Natural Resistance. These were often one-point investments (out of a pool of 100+ points) but still made the skills available and provided a great deal of versatility and strength to the character. They could be made stronger still by the availability of skill increasing affixes on gear (+skills).
Now, in D3, this is not the case. The investment associated with picking up such things is huge, as those choices are not 1 point in 100+, but 1 passive out of 3 or 1 active skill out of 6.
Yes! Absolutely, and it's completely understandable everyone wants every ability all of the time, and as game designers (not me, of course) it's our job to decide what's best for the experience. People may want to fly around a open 3D world, death-touching things, outfitting themselves with laser-armor, and building castles out of molten lava (and actually that sounds pretty cool), but are those the freedoms and/or limitations this specific game should have? Those are the fundamental questions of what defines the experience.
That may be overstating it a bit, but hopefully you get what I mean.
they punish you for swapping skills after you kill an elite because developers forbid changes in tactics
NV stacks are removed when you swap skills because in beta a large majority of people hated the idea of an open skill system where you could freely swap skills around. It was felt that the lack of build permanence would ruin the game, and so we listened and added some build permanence by 'encouraging' people not to swap skills mid-run through the loss of NV stacks. At the time it was almost unanimously applauded as brilliant!
Now, after release, that tune seems to have changed and a lot of people would rather be hotswapping skills. It's something we continue to talk about internally. I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts on the matter.
Allowing you to have more skills would reduce the amount of choices to make. That's the opposite of build diversity.
To clarify, the median of a set of choices will always yield the most combinations. So having 50 options and only being able to pick 25 gives you the most possible combinations. More than if you could pick 24, or 26, or 27, etc. We broke class skills down to approximately 12 general types of skills (single target damage, aoe, CC, buffs, etc.). Half of 12 is 6, so there you have it.
People want a higher degree of build versatility by having access to more skills. They want permanence but only in so much as if builds are versatile.
The 6 skill limit is in direct competition with the desire to have identity through permanence.
Where in the previous installment, for example, if you were a Barbarian, and you wanted signature abilities like Battle Orders and Leap (Attack), you only needed to invest one point in them. You could also get cool and useful stuff like Shout, Find Potion, Iron Skin, and Natural Resistance. These were often one-point investments (out of a pool of 100+ points) but still made the skills available and provided a great deal of versatility and strength to the character. They could be made stronger still by the availability of skill increasing affixes on gear (+skills).
Now, in D3, this is not the case. The investment associated with picking up such things is huge, as those choices are not 1 point in 100+, but 1 passive out of 3 or 1 active skill out of 6.
Yes! Absolutely, and it's completely understandable everyone wants every ability all of the time, and as game designers (not me, of course) it's our job to decide what's best for the experience. People may want to fly around a open 3D world, death-touching things, outfitting themselves with laser-armor, and building castles out of molten lava (and actually that sounds pretty cool), but are those the freedoms and/or limitations this specific game should have? Those are the fundamental questions of what defines the experience.
That may be overstating it a bit, but hopefully you get what I mean.
now going to new acts certainly should stop clearing stacks...that's just plain silly...also they should just remove the timer on the buff and leave it on until you leave your game
also a 5m grace period should keep the buff on you in case of disconnects...if you start a new game or remain disconnected for more than 5m...then clear it
No offense but you don't have any idea what you are talking about. You say this because it's a popular sentiment and convenient outlet for blame. You should admit that you don't have any facts relative to the actual demographics of this game and even moreso what those players "want".
i like my builds and i don't change them
Blizzard: "Ok here's NV. It's a buff if you don't swap skills but you're unaffected if you do jump to town and swap skills all the time."
Players during live: "Now let us swap skills."
Blizzard: "If you want to swap skills again, you will lose the ability to get NV."
Players: "No we want full NV all the time and skill swapping."
Blizzard: "... I want a toilet made of gold."
This is ridiculous. They should just start every character at level 60, paragon 100, and allow us to map every skill to hotkeys. Oh and NV is permanent once you get a 5 stack ever and doesn't get wiped for any reason, it stays between games. And if you kill an elite it drops every legendary with max rolls. Oh and followers can be with you in multiplayer games and 1 shot everything and pick up loot for you so you don't even have to click on anything except to move.
No wait, all of this will occur in town at the waypoint so you don't even have to move.
But regarding NV stack reset, let's ask the proper question: does it matter? Sure, NV stack reset locks you in a build for a session. But then again, if you want to farm efficiently, you're locked in a build, because you don't want to make breaks to mess with your talents (assuming the 1 min cd after skill swap stays). And if you died because you couldn't handle an elite using your current skillset, you don't farm efficiently. So NV stack reset doesn't matter when the game is on farm. You want to stick to a build anyways.
Where it actually matters is progress, and with the new and hard bosses/modes we'll be wiping a lot again. And what happens when you get to a boss/elite you can't kill it with your current skillset? You either skip it before you loose your stacks, or you wipe until you've lost your stacks, and only start changing skills after that because you don't want to loose your rewards (or if you can't skip it you just quit because of the loose-loose situation). Of course, the clever choice is to swap skills as soon as you realize you can't beat the boss with you currents skills. You'll find an efficient, universal build quicker if you forgo the unnecessary wipes and skips. NV reset currently punishes being clever by removing the loot and MF bonus when you start to experiment and fine-tune your build, and it kills a major incentive of defeating a new boss.
Now, just to be clear, I want NV reset to stay. It makes getting fast loot a bit harder (during progress period), and I'm fine with that, because I'm pro, and it's a big advantage to have the endgame inaccessible(or unfeasible) for most of the players. That makes my loot more expensive and I can make more money on RMAH (my only incentive to play this game). But the arguments above are very strong against NV reset on skill swap. I think it's clear that Blizzard has to remove it one day.
Feel free to discuss, but please read carefully what I just wrote and think before you post.
True, but: Without NV-reset, people would just switch their brains off until their character dies to a monster-group and then respecc. It isn't hard to know which skills are better against specific monster-types or amounts (single target vs. group, melee vs. ranged, burst vs. sustain dmg, ...), but it is hard to come up with a build that doesn't suck in any of these situations (now, apart from doing the completely brainless build-copying).
X is a problem. Something must be done.
Y is something.
It must be done.
The discussion of "X being a problem" is completely foregone. Is losing NV stacks a problem at all? Or just a made up problem, that is a symptom of something else.
It's obviously the latter. A symptom of a larger problem. The problem is the loot drop system, which is simply awful.
Switching skills while farming is not effective, it'd be a very bad and slow way of farming. NV reset simply prohibits that kind of gameplay, but even without that, most people would realize very soon that they need a constant build to farm effectively.
And that kind of experimenting is punished by the current NV reset system. People want to start with a copied cookie cutter build, instead of developing one for themselves, because with the current system they barely get any loot while experimenting. Of course not all people copy, and some people will always copy. But we're talking about what kind of gameplay is encouraged or discouraged by the game rules, and currently, experimenting is discouraged with the vastly inferior rewards.
Thoughts?
It seems like they have 2 systems in place to discourage skill swapping. I'd rather they removed the cooldown penalty than the NV stack reset because at least the NV stack reset doesn't render me useless for 2mins while my primary skill is on cooldown and I can't fight back.
I think the NV stacks resetting is probably ok. So you lose some bonus magic find, gold find and experience, so what!? It takes 5 mins to get it back up. Its a mild inconvenience at most. Talk about first-world problems...
EVERYONE had those points. If i ever saw a 80+ barbarian without battle orders, i laughed at them. A necromancer without curses? You might as well reroll. Those didnt increase build diversity. This is the exact same as every barbarian using Warcry Impunity or every wizard using Energy Armor.