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.
It's pretty good right now, maybe not for all classes, but take Wizard:
They have choices between Archon builds, Arcane Orb builds, some Arcane Torrent builds surfaced lately, then there's Hydra/Blizzard builds, and Critical Mass builds (of both the Blades/Meteor and Twister variety (despite the fact it was slightly nerfed) )
Sure, Disintegrate never see daylight beyond leveling, but i wouldnt say that diversity isnt sucessful.
Before Diablo 3 was released, I was excited about NV and how skill changes wipe the buff. Well, after playing the game a few months I feel it's not the final compromise. I believe skill changes should either remove one NV stack or put all existing stacks on a short cooldown.
If i ever get tired of it, I can swap it ( which is less likely i get a sudden change of heart to do so in the middle of battle)
There's also another reasons, of course. People like using the skills available, and with the way NV works currently, you build around a skill set that is a "jack of all trades", which leaves speciality skills unused, regardless of how powerful they are, solely because they don't perform well in as many situations as other skills. Instead of building around certain affix's or boss encounters, you build around what works best for everything, and that pigeon-holes build diversity across the board. There are a great number of skills I'd love to play around with on certain affix's and bosses, but I'll never touch because they are useless past that and they kill my farming having them on the bars.
Or we can go with the low IQ part. I'm sure that's it. /sarcasm
Currently I'm "bound" to it for the whole evening (or at least 1-3 hours depending from which quest point you start) and have no way to gather my AH-earnings or put this new found VERY nice ring to the AH or to check the prices for something that someone wants to sell via the common chat.
Of course it would be ok to add an AH-NPC to every act if this is easier ...
I agree... I have a hard time getting to sit myself to play Diablo 3, for I know I have to be "locked for 1-3 hours to be somewhat effective in having a chance of an item upgrade dropping for me.
Indeed, you're "locked" the whole evening if you want to do some progress, wich kind of beats the whole "many checkpoints" thing.
Even if you vendor 98% of the rares you find, you keep the best 2%. When you do find a Legendary, you're comparing that to the top 2% of a large sample size of rares, and suddenly you realize, the Legendary doesn't hold value, and nobody desires it. I find it hilarious that people complain "I can't sell anything on the AH", yet at the same time want further increased drops.
To the point: allowing skill swaps for NV will put a final nail in the derp coffin. It's easy to determine which skills to use against which elite pack. If Blizzard allows this, the next "community demand" will be "I want buttons F1-F5 to automatically save my builds". Might as well just allow players to use all skills at once with any rune.