f13.net

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/9425564/public-test-realm-patch-108-notes-4-8-2013

I'm getting more and more frustrated with how far they are stringing out the itemization problems. We're 8 patches deep now, and the best they've done is fix legendaries from being total shit.

The only fix in this I care about is they increased the mob density on all Acts other than 3. Outside of that, it's just multiplayer QOL changes.

It isn't news that the itemization changes weren't going to be in this one. I really like the multiplayer changes.

Yea, they had said explicitly that the itemization was more of a long term goal (I read this as "expansion").  1.08 looks fairly ho hum.  Multiplayer would be more interesting if I had more friends that still played.  I see a few people from here signed on with some regularity, but that is it.

Yeah, they're going to make you pay for good itemisation.

 :why_so_serious:

If they plan on making us pay for itemization fixes, they damn well better release that thing before Labor Day. The game will have been out a year in May.

Played on the PTR for a few minutes today.  The quality of life stuff is nice, but should have been in the game since the beginning.

The itemization fixes being in the expansion patch doesn't mean you will have to pay for them. Expansion will mean new areas, but any drop math changes will still apply to the old content as well, this is how it always works with Blizzard games. They're not going to make it so that you have 4 acts of bad drop math and then suddenly in act 5 it changes, because you still are playing through those acts to get to that 5th act, several times.

I'm not sure that's a sure thing Ingmar; Blizzard has a history of only letting the new expansion have proper itemization (see, how long it took 1-60 WoW itemization to get overhauled).

I don't know if it's actually a given. I think balance changes branched when the WC3 expansion came out, for example. It's possible they'll still let you connect to D3 and play a vanilla version of the game which may not include whatever itemization/stat changes they make in the expansion.

That said, it's an always-online game and things have changed quite a bit since D2/WC3, so I'd be surprised if they chose to service an expansion and non-expansion version of the game simultaneously. They really *need* to put the itemization/stat changes in without requiring an expansion purchase because legions of people who were burnt by D3 aren't exactly going to believe Blizzard's claims that they managed to fix everything and the game is actually fun, but only if you pay $40.

D2 patched both basic and LoD all the way up to 1.13 (the latest patch IIRC). 1-60 content changes in Cataclysm applied to even vanilla players, for free. Balance changes forking in W3 was a good thing because it meant they were paying attention to the game experience for players with different levels of access.

I know we're in paranoid delusion Blizzard is worse than Hitler land here, but surely there's a limit to that kind of thinking?

I'm not claiming that they'll leave D3 Vanilla purchasers in the dust, but they may choose to keep the versions of the game separate especially if the D3 expansion changes a lot. For example if they wanted to add Runes and Rune sockets to the expansion which greatly modify abilities and cause Blizzard to make lots of balance changes, they may keep the balance where it is and simply not allow runes or rune sockets to drop for D3 vanilla players. It's not about good/evil, it's about whether they want to preserve Vanilla D3 or force everyone to move to the new game.

In this case there is an obvious choice that will be unpopular because Vanilla D3 doesn't have many fans and people already feel like they didn't get what they were promised.

If they try to have us redeem Leah, hold the itemization to new content, and cram a $40 price point down our throats, I simply won't purchase it.

They can force me to move to the expansion, but I don't want to have to pay for it.

I fully expect them to pull a Blizzard and release the expansion in Q2 2014...


No, thanks. Not buying.

Emphasis mine, and exactly my point. 1-60 itemization in WoW was left alone through BC and WotLK; it took them THREE expansions to fix it.

It isn't really relevant, though, since you don't play through the vanilla content 4 times to get a character to max level the way you do in Diablo.

But it's a brave new era where you have to give bux to Kotick and Roper, not 2001.

Apparently some massive gold dupe just happened and they've yanked the AH and RMAH with no details and no estimate on when they will be back.

Hmm.  Odd.

New patch is ok to play.  I'm enjoying being able to play things besides act 3.

Looks like the dupe worked on the RMAH also.

Fucking hi-larious.

Ahahaha.

You've given me a belly laugh.

Awesome.  So the game is closer to how it should be. :awesome_for_real:

Things are going back online.  They're not rolling back shit, rather they're just gonna perma-ban the dupers. 

Except the dupers spent hours buying up every single item they could find on the AH, thus spreading the gold out across the community.

Yeah I'm not sure how this is a fix. They've basically inflated the economy beyond recognition. I have no idea what things will look like when I get back online today, but I can't imagine this will do enough to stop the problem.

Yea, the economy seems pretty shot.  On the plus side I've been playing hardcore lately, and this bug couldn't be exploited in HC because it involved in RMAH.

Integer overflow bug (http://gamasutra.com/blogs/MaxWoolf/20130508/191959/Diablo_III_Economy_Broken_by_an_Integer_Overflow_Bug.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+GamasutraNews+%28Gamasutra+News%29) :awesome_for_real:

I honestly don't understand how they believe they can individually attack the problem without a rollback. The money goes out into the economy already for the items. That means that items sold for real money get corrected, and the players associated get banned, but the gold itself is still swimming out there.

:awesome_for_real:

Yeah, I don't see any way out of this without a rollback.  I'm not playing any for a few days until it gets a bit more sorted out. They've fucked up big time with this, and I recall lots of people saying something like this was inevitable given the RMAH (although I was not necessarily among them).  Either way, I hope they figure out a way to fix this without leaving the economy hosed.

 I will say the little I did play was pretty good.  The new monster density is noticeably better and means all the acts are fairly similar viability.  Killing stuff in the fields of misery early almost reminded me of the D2 cow level (in which god knows how many hours I spent).  The identify all thing is also really nice and makes it worth picking up all the rares that drop again, which is nice.  They still need to fix itemization, but the game itself does keep improving, regardless of the hate.

I was fine with the changes. The delays of itemization continue to annoy me, but we're not paying them to continually update the thing month to month.

But yes, if they completely screw over the economy they are going to make the trading game worthless, which in turn will completely fuck over their expansion sales.

At least some people finally could enjoy the game.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZidgohZaws

I enjoyed lagging all over the fucking place.  Plus there are still completely bullshit monster combinations.  Hello waller+mortar.  Why yes, you are totally fair, especially combined with lag.

This is better than I could have ever hoped for.  The Schadenfreude is strong with this one.

Question :  According to that article, you'd need to have billions to generate the bug ?  Am I reading it wrong ?

Yeah, that is right.

Shee-it.  Some people have way too much time on their hands.

I would imagine that this bug, coupled with Gold Farmers, would cause much hilarity.

 :why_so_serious:

Yea, there were some screenshots floating around of people with trillions and trillions of gold.  I think the most I ever had at one time was about 30 million because I got a really nice Immortal Kings chest piece that I sold.


 I guess I have a few hundred million worth of gear between all my characters of mostly found gear.  My problem is I have a 60 of each class now, so I feel compelled to keep all the good gear I get instead of selling it to really deck out one of them.

I think i have around 700 million from ah investing-flipping-sales.

With the right knowledge of the market, i did most of that playing 30m a day

Every hour the game remains up with the auction house down and people running around with that much money probably doubles the customer service headache they're going to have when they roll things back (which is the unfortunate reality of what needs to be done here). Frankly, they're proper fucked.

The good post patch. Increased monster density was good.  The changes made to mobs and skills seemed to make Act 2 a bit easier in Inferno.  I had a decent (I think) set wand drop during my half hour of play.

The Patient Died, but the Suturing was exquisite.

FUCKING READING

? ? ?

LOL AH down till at least tomorrow. Still claiming no rollback.  These guys are idiots.  They should have just took the entire game off on patch day.  Hell most people would have bought it as the usual patch day problems.

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/8770118014

I haven't played a lick since this happened because I expect a rollback at some point. They can't believe this will work, unless they are planning on taking out the goldspammer trash with the rest of the bans.

It makes more sense if you could have seen what I typed before that.  Normally I just press the BACK button but I was feeling playful yesterday.

24 hours pass. Still down, no update.

It's somewhat of a shame because aside from this utter disaster the patch is pretty solid.  I even joined a random game of strangers and had fun - one of the key things that made Diablo 2 a lot of fun for me. 

The plot thickens.  Someone claiming their account is now active and all their loot was made boa.
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/8796660220?page=1

Most likely some troll but it would be an interesting "solution" if they do this on the largest accounts to gain on patch day.

Update:


I fail to see how keeping the AH offline for a 3 days at the minimum was a better idea than a rollback. I think at this point, they wish they could just do a rollback, but they are in too deep.

THEY SHOULD STILL DO A ROLLBACK.

JESUS.

And this company is trying to make a CCG.

lol

Oh dear, the poor AH mavens are going to be proper fucked. What a terrible shame.

What a trainwreck.

 :popcorn: :popcorn: :popcorn:

It's baaaaaack.

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/8796520380

He's gives a mostly honest answer. I say mostly honest, because I don't believe a second the reason they didn't roll back the servers is related to pissing off players who made progressions. The overwhelming majority of people are in favor of a rollback rather than recapturing what he said was 85% of the gold in play. Even that's true, 15% of literally trillions of unrecaptured gold is still a massive increase.

I believe they collected millions in RMAH fees related to this bug, and they have no way of rolling back that information, nor do they want to spend the man hours issuing credits to all the accounts. They didn't roll it back because they want to keep the money. Now they are claiming they will donate the cash from the suspended accounts to Children's Miracle network. I just want to know about the rest of the activity that day.

Porsche upgrades.

That whole thing reads like shite.  I can't seem to be objective about it, though, so I'm going to refrain from now on.

It's not like anyone could have predicted this.

I hope the RMAH was worth it.  I hope the 'always online' was worth it.  I hope all the bad will generated was worth it.  I hope the poor itemization was worth it.

I hope all of Blizzard's poor design and implementation was worth it to generate profits for them.

They made over a billion in net income in a single year. I can assure you it was worth it to them.

Everyone thinks that until their customers leave.

Yea, that's a crowd that's surely on its way out - Blizzard customers. ಠ_ಠ

Well, taking the long view, all customers of everyone are on the way out.

Also, heat death of the universe.

Me, I'll just wait, rather than fucking Be There.

dev Wyatt Cheng joins at 14 minutes.
http://en.twitch.tv/archonthewizard/b/403862132

You'll have to summarize the nine hours into a single sentence for me.

"We are working on items, promise."

Hope they're not working on them til Hex comes out.

Hope they release Hearthstone before Hex comes out.

Hex.

Sex.

Hex.

Dude, what are you going to do if you don't like Hex ?

We're worried.

I was kind of wondering about that too. And (let me know if this is selective memory talking) has Schild ever gotten this excited about a game and not ended up horribly disappointed?

Has he ever got this excited about anything and not ended up the same ?

This may end up collecting dust next to his twitch SWG edition and his copy of I AM LEGEND.

 :ye_gods:

If I don't like Hex, I might as well sell all of my Magic cards and buy a boat and get lost in the ocean.

Coming to theaters - Life of Schild

This might be useful then: http://www.worldislandinfo.com/Starting%20island%20country.html (http://www.worldislandinfo.com/Starting%20island%20country.html)

:awesome_for_real:

If schild ends up not liking Hex, I agree that he should just get out of the entire CCG genre.  And I haven't even played it yet.  But really, when was the last time ANYONE got super-excited about a game and wasn't disappointed?  Other than when I was ready to joy-puke over Borderlands 2, because that worked out for me.

I see schild IRL quite often and he only gets this excited about good pizza and Vin Diesel movies.

I was super excited about Demon's Souls.

And I was right to be.

That's the last game I got super excited about.

Ah, yeah, that's right.  Anyway, I'm sure you know what you are talking about.

I like games that I'm excited about all the time, but I still have joy in my heart.

Lies!

He lives his life a quarter deck at a time.

(http://www.sdcitybeat.com/sandiego/imgs/media.images/1928/film1-prime.widea.jpg)

Well I hit a billion gold today.

It's worth about $35 on the RMAH now, tho with inflation.  :why_so_serious:

The most unforseen of all events. :oh_i_see:

That's why I'm using it to buy more stuff. Soon I'll have a barb that can do MP10. I'm on 6.

I like the cut of your jib, Sarh.


Hex should be fine.  The only risk is shitty software.  And Wizards is way ahead of them there.  And shitty security.  That could be very bad.

Hex is shitting up more threads! Yay!

I played D3 for the first time in almost a year, I guess. What I found is that the gear my 60s are wearing can be replaced with far far far better gear for 50k or less, which is a lot better than the million each piece would have cost when I quit playing. So the gear inflation thing is weird. Top tier best in slot items goes for trillions but better gear than was available is affordable. So inflation doesn't seem to matter too much to just play through the Acts?

Inferno seems easier than when I last played, as well, but then I'm not in Act 3 yet so we'll see. My witch doctor seems to be beefed up a bit as well. As I recall, I could not get very far.

I have no idea what anything should cost on the AH or even what is considered good anymore.

I just got the urge myself recently. Yes, gear inflation is major. What was once godly, best in slot type gear can be had for a few hundred thousand gold.

If you want to catch up on the changes here is a article that goes over some highlights. http://us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/9691898/diablo-iii-the-road-so-far-5-16-2013

Worth mentioning, is that WD pets no-longer suck and die in a couple hits.


As far as gear goes. The best items are now Legendary/Set. This is because most now receive some kind of baseline stats the make them good to begin, and beyond the built in bonus they can roll good affixes just like rares.

A good example is Zunimassa's Marrow.
---
Set Chest Armor
+120–200 Intelligence
+30–100 Vitality
+71–80 Resistance to All Elements
+3 Empty Sockets
+2 Random Magic Properties

The base item is already better than 95% of the old rares we used a year ago. Then you can roll 2 more affixes on top of that. Uniques of this sort dominate every slot except gloves, bracers, weapons and jewelry, and you can get good examples for a couple hundred thousand. It's so bad I have stopped picking up rares except weapons and rings/amulets.

Another reason I stopped picking up rares is that once you have some gold to burn new recipes exist that give a guaranteed 200-230 of your main stat plus 5 random affixes for gloves, bracers, shoulders, neck, and chest (but don't craft chest armor).  The 200+ of the main stat make them better then anything that can drop. I have already made shoulders and bracers that are better than anything I could reasonably afford on the AH in about 10 tries each (A try costs a demonic essence that drops of inferno elites and about 75k gold, or some mats).

The next big patch is supposed to be the "itemization" patch that fixes the current clusterfuck of everyone using the same exact gear and 99% of all drops not even being worth picking up. In the meantime, go beat inferno, get some crazy ass gear on the AH for a pittance, and level up any classes you had been neglecting. I personally finally finished leveling my wizard and in the space of two weeks and 20-25 hours it has done from a fresh 60 to my new main. With Paragon 30, 200k dps, and an OP perma archon build that melts faces.

Fake Edit: The single biggest tip I can give you is if you are going to use the AH is sort by ending time and just bid on stuff that's ending soon. I have gotten gear worth millions for 5-10% of the cost again and again. If you want you can even be like Paelos Top Hat Monkey, and make billions doing so.

Real Edit: I am no Alkaizer. But if you have any questions feel free to ask here or on Diablo. I'm Ray#1555

Playing the AH by bids is a good way. My recent niche has hit the skids, but I also recommend finding a particular item with 3-4 skills that sell, then see if there's some major gaps at a certain stat cutoff. Then you can fill that gap with the lower items by increasing them 35-50%.

Want to echo that I've found the new crafted archon gear to be amazing as well, recommend to make those with the new Demonic Essences. My friends and I couldn't get past inferno when the game first came out, now thanks to crafted gear and auction house being incredibly cheap, we're running though monster power 5. Also: the new hellfire ring you can create with the infernal machine has no level requirement, +35% exp makes it great for alts.

It's the AH, Stupid.

This game is broken, and always will be broken, because of the AH.  There is simply no way of ever getting around that.

If the loot drops are right for the game, they're wrong for the AH.  If they're right for the AH, they make a mockery of the game.

I've been playing a little bit lately off and on and it's quite clear what went wrong :  Exactly what we all said would go wrong.   Not having 2 versions of this made it utterly inevitable.

I disagree. The problem with loot as it stands isn't the AH. It's the fact that it has so many useless affixes that will never be good no matter how big they are.

Ach, never mind.

I'm with Ironwood. Every time someone talks about getting back into D3 it starts with "I bought all these upgrades" and I just roll my eyes. This is not what I'm looking for in an ARPG.

I haven't played the game in a year. Loot drops have changed significantly in that time. I could have started with a low level to see what has changed and whether it's viable to play through only on drops; I assume that would be different now as well.

So I don't know if it's still broken in that sense or not. Since I got stuck in Act I Inferno with my current gear on my witch doctor, I suppose I could have gone back to farm Act IV hell to see if I could get drops to wear, but I didn't want to repeat that, since I spent a week or so doing that last July (to no avail).

If you haven't tried it lately, I think you ought to give it a go. I did notice that mob density is very different than it was.

I've been playing it recently.  Started my WD again last week.

It hasn't changed that much.  It's better, but 99.99 percent of the items are still vendor shite and the others aren't much better.  As ever, you get your gear from crowdsourcing :  Hit the AH and I'm finding I'm doing the damage of a level 45 at level 20 and clearing the whole shit up in seconds on MP 5.

It's a bit of a joke.  I'm having some fun doing so, but it's quite clear the whole things massively broken and will suck nuts once I get this guy up to 60 too.

It's just never been a good game.  Sorry.

Although, anyone who's on and has me in the friends list, feel free to send me all your fucking gold.

Ta.

99% of the loot in Diablo has always been crap.  The difference is that before the AH you used some of the less crappy crap because it was harder to get decent loot via other players.  It also puts right front and center just HOW crappy the crap loot is because the good loot is so easy to look at.  A far bigger issue to me is that the itemization is just terrible.  They could remove everything except average damage, crit chance, crit damage, attack speed and base stats from the game and the loot people use wouldn't change at all.

I guess it also makes twinking easier, but I always twinked in D2 as well so this doesn't strike me as having a lot to do with the AH other than it, again, being easier than it used to.

Has it always been crap, or just Crap for the particular build you were going for?

Which is the argument I've seen most often. You have ONE WAY to build in D3, meaning only a fraction of a fraction of loot can EVER be good, not just for that particular build.

Most of the loot was crap no matter what you were doing.  The fact that the current itemization is terrible and only supports a limited set of builds is pretty much the exact problem I mentioned.  How many countless blue and yellow items were vendored in Diablo 2 because they were junk.  I mean REALLY almost all of them.  The unique item itemization and design was far superior in Diablo 2, but pretty much everyone acknowledges that, including the Diablo 3 design team at this point. 

 :facepalm:

Malakili, mate, I'm not doing this with you in ANOTHER thread.

I'm sorry you didn't realize you could trade for good loot in Diablo 2 and the most of the stuff you were (apparently) using was actually trash.

Whether or not you believe the AH raped the game, it's still not enemy #1 that people want it to be.

The enemy is that they designed the game so that only 3 affixes (attack speed, crit chance, crit damage) were the main drivers of all your damage, and thus having any of those or all of them on a particular item made it great, regardless of class.

That's dumb, and that's what's caused the bottleneck and inflation in items, because so many of them are wanted for the exact same combination of skills. Find anything with anything else on it? It's crap.

The ideal goal of the itemization would be to make items that would be useful across different builds for different characters, and then have varying degrees where you could play completely independent of the AH if you so chose. Then only the min-max people looking to combine the very top end of stuff would be trading the best items. Right now, with a main stat, vitality, all resist, and the 3 damage trinity? You have zero flexibility.

Yep.  I wouldn't mind seeing them modify a lot of the less used skills in the game to include bonuses from the less important affixes.  Like Fan of Knives getting an increased radius based on your +pickup radius on items or Shuriken doing increased damage based on thorns, and so forth.  You could end up with a lot of interesting builds and ways to gear this way without even having to drastically change the loot.

Not to start up the same old argument but... I'm sorry you don't realize that some people like playing Diablo (all the versions) as freaking single players games.

So here's the thing.  Either they are deliberately making the drops worse to force you to the AH - which I flat don't think is true OR you can still play single player by just ignoring the AH.  I think the latter is true.  I have a self found Hardcore character, for example.  It is viable.  It is not ideal, but playing single player was never idea if you are power gaming and care that much about optimization.  I don't really have sympathy for "There are cheap upgrades easily available to me via the auction house and therefore the game sucks."  Especially because it detracts from the real major issues with itemization - namely the one Paelos just described.

I totally realize that. There should have been an option to play offline without the AH in my mind. I believe they didn't put it in there because they were terrified of offline dupes hitting the real servers, but frankly that logic is laughable considering the real duping already going on.

But that's a completely different point about the game. That's asking for a gameplay mode that never existed. If it ever comes to exist, then we could judge it on that merit. Currently, absolutely nothing they do other than adding that mode will satisfy that fanbase, so it's not really worth them evaluating the current game, or making changes for them in the game other than adding that mode.

Malakill : I play games for fun. Not as exercises of willpower to force myself to not take the easiest road to winning.

And with that, I'm out of here. I've no desire to read all the 10,000 reasons Diablo 3 is awesome, yet again.

Ok. Nobody said that though. In fact, I was pointing out exactly how the game needs to improve itemization. But yeah, you're making the same point from a year ago that this apple isn't the orange you wanted, and it never was.

To be fair, I did kind of say that. 

Jerk, you ruined my point. :why_so_serious:

This attitude makes no sense to me, and I am pretty sure you and I are usually on the same page gaming-wise. If you don't want to use the AH, don't use it. The gameplay is the same with or without it. If your goal is fun, and the AH makes the game not fun for you, why is there any willpower involved?

To me, making a game deliberately harder is not fun, so I gravitate toward the path of least resistance. Except in this case, the path of least resistance is buying upgrades instead of getting them via drops; this is also not fun. Met with this dilemma, I opt to play POE instead. The game would have been better without the AH, because then "use the drops you find" would be the natural way to acquire gear; exceptionally good items would still be traded, but that wouldn't be the norm.

Nope, still not doing it.  Nice try though.

I don't get the bolded part. What is fundamentally different about trading for gear/getting it all from drops vs. buying it from the AH? Why is upgrading your character through the AH not fun? On one hand, you're saving up gold to buy an awesome piece of loot then owning monsters that were giving you trouble before, and then on the other, you're getting lucky on a nice drop and equipping it to own monsters that were giving you trouble before. They're the same thing, at least to me. You earn the gold you get by selling drops, looting it from monsters, completing quests- then you trade that gold in for better equipment. This sounds remarkably like single player. If anything, the AH is so impersonal it's very very easy to pretend D3 IS a single player game.

Um, you don't see the difference between finding something and shopping ?

Really ?

Yea, I got nothing. If you don't see how those are fundamentally different, I don't know what to say.

The fundamental difference between those two things is the difference between slot machines and doing a menial job.

Infrequent, random rewards are highly addictive. This has been known to psychology and the entire gambling industry for a long, long time. Flipping burgers for minimum wage is tedious, soul-destroying and not even vaguely addictive.

Having an awesome item drop randomly from killing mobs in a game is exciting, fun, addictive. Grinding millions of mobs for pittances of gold each to be able, after hours & days, to afford a predictable upgrade from the AH is none of those things.

The AH is part of the problem with D3, the poor itemisation is part of the problem, the primary-stat-above-all design is part of the problem, the groan-inducingly bad writing is part of the problem. I don't get why so many of you seem to insist that there's ONLY ONE PROBLEM WITH D3 and then proceed to argue with each other for pages and pages and pages about which precise problem it is. Diablo 3 is fucked in several ways. If you enjoy it then that's fine, carry on playing it. Why you feel the need to repeatedly try and tell those who don't like it that they're wrong I do not know.

To defend myself, and pretty much everyone here, I don't think anyone's doing that.

What we're arguing about is the BIGGEST problem.

This game is utter shite, I think on that we can all agree.

 :grin: :why_so_serious: :grin:

But you're entirely right about the shopping thing.  Well done.

I guess I am broken then. I liken it to saving up badges in WoW.. although, you do get a chance for random drops there in addition to the vendor sold items. I see what you're saying in regards to the gambling thing.

That's an additional, rather than a substitution though.

In the case of Diablo, the gambling bit is not only hugely infrequent, but also regularly results in utter bullshit in comparison to the Shops.

With WoW, you have an actually hugely high chance to get a nice purple drop (don't start, it's comparatively a massive chance) and if you don't you get a wee token that says 'there, there, never mind, keep playing and here's a part of your guaranteed item.'

Gold is no substitution, especially given inflation.  Imagine in WoW if you got a nice token for an item and when you went to cash in you found that due to the other players, it now cost 6000 tokens rather than 30.

You'd be fucking ballistic.  And rightly so.

This is the problem with what you're saying :  I can get a 'nice item' through hours and hours of rather boring play and then instantly compare it to an AH item to be made to feel hugely inferior.  Suddenly, my nice wee drop turns out to be utter shite.  And, worse than that, it can be the case that the better item is actually about half the playtime to get in gold or, more usually, utterly fucking unobtainable except through months of grinding cash.


There's a LOT of psychology involved here which is why it fucking bothers me when utter retards just dismiss all that with 'You're Playing It Wrong, This Is How I Personally Always Played, So It's Great'.  That's hugely unhelpful, especially when Blizzard admit they screwed the pooch themselves.

It's like me going to a whorehouse with nothing but watersports available.  The Piss Fetishist is sitting wallowing in the urine and can't understand why it's not my favourite whorehouse.  Get bent.

I do admit I get my slot machine fix by finding deals on the AH, in addition to finding legendary drops in game. However, all of my gear is paid for and crafted at this point.

The game to me is different because I enjoy the economics of it. I enjoy being a trading tycoon. Plus selling stuff back on the RMAH has been paying for my steam budget now. I would recommend offloading excess gold on the RMAH on Mondays. For some reason there's usually a price spike. It had been trading around .31 per 10m, but I sold a bunch at .33 yesterday.

I'm with Ingmar. If a person doesn't want to use the AH, nobody has to. This game can be played like a singleplayer game.

Although, I do understand the itemization problem.  Too many shit drops and not enough decent ones. They should up the gold rate and drop the number of trash drops.  But I never got any fantastic drops in D2 either, which also seemed quite rare to me. I think I only played through D2 once and didn't get through the second iteration.

Compared to where this game was in July, meaning that I could not advance my character in any way that I wanted to (decent gear was out of reach even on the AH since I refuse to pay cash for gear or gold), and I hit a wall, it's fun again, because I can actually play my characters.

I tried playing my 60 monk last night. Didn't change a thing on her - didn't buy gear, didn't change spec, nothing, just started to play, and wow, what a difference. Instead of having to kite every elite and barely surviving Act I Inferno, it was fun.

My WD is stuck on Inferno Diablo at the moment. (Still using the same spec I had leveled up on - zombie bears and frogs mostly; going to have to switch out to something that kills faster/better, or group up).

Wow.

I thought I was doing good selling level 4 chest pieces for 100k.

One big difference now from a year ago is that there's not nearly as much good gear for leveling up to be found, even on the AH.

Yeah.  A surprising quote from the Accountant there.   :oh_i_see:

 :why_so_serious:

Oh, I have a question maybe someone can answer. Crafting. What is worth crafting for my heroes to wear?

I have about 20 demonic essences from playing through inferno and a bunch of tomes of secrets.  I'm not finding legendaries so far, despite what says 100% magic find (since I played for long stretches so got the 5 stacks of whatever that buff is).

Magic find is near useless until you have like 250% unbuffed and then push it over 300 with the buff stacks.

Oh, silly me; I thought 100% is as high as it could go.

I played D3 for 6 weeks and never saw a legendary or a unique.  I was in groups every time I could find one, and played with the wife as well, so there were large numbers of mobs dying.

I then played TorchlightII and saw at least 5 before hitting level 15, several of which were useful even if they didn't pump my primary stat.   

That says all it needed to about D3 for me.

Want to see my spreadsheets?  :why_so_serious:

Xanthippe, I ended up making a couple billion in gold before they exchanged the gold pricing because there was a huge gap between gems and gold price. You could sell small amounts of gold for .25 per million as that was the floor, then you could buy gems and trade them back into the system for essentially .06 per million. The key was being patient enough to get the gold to sell at the inflated price, which many weren't. At that point I had to move into my more recent venture, which is flipping items that hit a certain stat gap. Example, a chestpiece with 150 str 150 vit 3 sockets and 70 AR may sell for a ton, however there may be a 50% gold price gap by someone selling at 10 points less in str and vit. You can flip the item in that gap.

The crafting recipes which drop in Inferno all craft really solid items (gloves, amulet, bracers, shoulders).  You can buy the recipes really cheap on the AH these days if you don't have them already.  Getting a Hellfire ring is also worth doing, but that's a bit of a different story.

The problem is it can't, at least it couldn't at release.

The reason I quit wasn't because the Auction House itself, the reason was because the itemization was balanced around the auction house.  I beat the first difficulty mode rarely ever getting a drop that was the same level as me.  I would go many many levels without getting anything worth putting on, everything just ended up vendored because it was 5-10 levels below me and crappier than gear I bought 15 levels ago on the Auction house.

They balanced the game where almost all items you got were for levels lower than your current spot, unless you got crazy lucky and got 1 or 2 good drops for your level.  This meant there was zero gear progression felt, and all drops were literally there just to vendor so you can buy gear you need.  Unless you 100% neglected the auction house, and in that case you are constantly gimped for your level and have to farm lower level areas to have an easier time at higher level areas.

They balanced around the auction house, and that balance is what made the game not fun.

The only part of the game you couldn't play while ignoring the AH at release was Inferno; if I could do it with a gimped pet-spec witch doctor, anyone could do it. You didn't get drops your level because you were outleveling the content. I'm not actually sure why they did it that way, it seems to have caused a lot of confusion. I hit level 60 in like Act 1 or 2 of Hell. If they had the XP curve tuned so it roughly matched the item drops the cognitive dissonance people have over "oh no, I am level 40 but my rares are all level 30" would vanish.

It's the percent chance of the percent chance to find an item, rather than your total chance of finding something.

So 250% of a (theoretical) base 10% chance is a 25% magic find.  Or 2.5% if the base is 1%.

That was a weird way to explain it!

Magic find increases your base chance to find a magic item by <magic find percentage>. I think the base chance is variable depending on the sort of monster it is, etc.

Now that I looked it up, its significantly more complicated than that.

- It makes magic items more likely to drop
- It makes the ones that do drop better
- base chance to drop a given type of magic item varies by monster and there are several different rolls, and your magic find applies to every roll

So, thinking of it in percentage terms at all is probably a waste. You just want a big number. (300% is the cap from gear/paragon levels but you get bonuses for monster power and nephalem valor that can exceed it.)

Yes, the increase of the cap on better items is what made MP10 more attractive.

I'm sure Xan will be happy with the linear equation rather than the polynomial.

Moar good.  Less sad.

[Citation Needed]

http://www.diablofans.com/topic/57939-magic-find-and-its-efficiency-a-statistical-insight/


Go buy the plans to craft the Bracers (Razorspikes of Int/Dex/Str) and Shoulders (Archon Spaulders of Int/Vit/Dex/Str). The plans are nearly free (15-20k) and the mats will run you 75-80k + the essence. I managed to make some very good ones in like 10 tries each, you can see them on my wizard. http://us.battle.net/d3/en/profile/Ray-1555/hero/2889702

Why shoulders and bracers? In both cases you only really care about your main stat, life, and some mitigation (& crit in bracers, if you're greedy). With the main stat guaranteed, getting two of the other 5 rolls to be useful isn't so unlikely. With gloves and amulets however, you are looking for the trifecta of critical hit chance, crit damage, attack speed, plus the int/dex/str, and then hopefully some life, or mitigation or + damage. A much harder roll, and one I have not gotten after nearly a 100 goes.

I was working from http://www.diablowiki.net/Magic_find

Yeah, can I just say 'holy fuck' to that gear ?  On all the chars ?

Store bought ?

More examples, but not as nice; the shoulders, gloves, and bracers on my witch doctor are all crafted by me: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/profile/Thorgrim-1313/hero/589774

I think everything I have except the Zunimassa pieces are from drops, but I don't remember for sure - most of it is, in any case. The Zunimassa pieces all were bought with the money I made selling some demon hunter set boots that dropped.

With how Inferno is tuned now I'm certain I could have done it without using the AH, it isn't like I'm slathered in attack speed/crit stuff as it is.

Thanks. 8-) Although, I have only really put any effort into my Wizard recently. Most of the WD gear is from months/patches ago. Bought the IK set on my barb for the lulz and achievement (spent about a mil). Half of my monk is new shiny and half is old crap. DH is basically a mule.

As to finding stuff. As Sky said, bracers and shoulders are crafted, only took me 5-10 tries each to get good ones. I have been trying to craft gloves but after 70-80 goes I still can't get any damage affixes, and have run out of demonic essences. I found both the witching hours I'm using. Crafted the hellfire ring with my own keys and effort. I actually have found two rings that would be better than what I have equipped on my Wiz, but the hellfire gives xp and the zini gives the 130 int bonus, so they collect dust. Other than that, yeah I think I got most of it of the GAH. Although having gone to the Paelos school of bid sniping the whole shebang only cost me between 5-10 mil (about 300-500k a piece, plus a few over the mil mark).

I do wholeheartedly agree that buying gear is less fun than finding gear. However, it's not like diablo 2 was completely different. In D2 I found a Lightning Skiller, traded it for 5 Ists, then traded the Ists for Necro gear. In D3 I find a Dex Mempo, sell it for 3 mil, and use the gold to buy Int Rings.

One thing I have found is that the gear on my characters that are leveling up is quite good. I tweaked them out some, but I didn't spend a huge amount of money on it. Time, yes. Also, I think not nearly as much gear is available on the AH these days as most people playing are probably playing 60s paragon levels.

Jewelry seems to be lacking. It just doesn't drop much.

I suppose it's still not worthwhile to craft anything other than the level 60 archon shoulders gloves and bracers? Maybe boots?

Only the new recipes (archon gloves/shoulders of INT/DEX/ETC, Razorspikes of same, and Amulets) are worth crafting.  I guess given that you mentioned having trouble finding jewelry amulets might be something you want to go for.

It has nothing to do with being confused.  If I so easily out leveled the content then they balanced it fucking terribly.  I never farmed any areas or repeated content, and yet somehow I was too high a level to never get gear my level and never feel like any gear I got was wroth a shit.

That's terrible design

Pet Spec is Gimped ?

 :ye_gods:

I don't think so. My pets are far more buff than they were when I played last July.

Merely a joke.  Much like everything else, they didn't learn the lessons of Diablo 2 in the first iteration and it took them a while to get pets right.

My WD seems to be just fine with pets right now and needs little else.

I do remember the days of having tons of skeletons on the screen and still having to run away.  Which was why Revive was always better.

Pet spec is fine now, yeah. It was pretty well gimped until 1.06 or 1.07, I forget exactly which patch fixed it.

The loot is dropping more (as in rares and I got another legendary today) but it's still so depressing how bad the stuff is.

My first attempt at crafting the bracers and shoulders got me 'better' equipment, but I know they could be better still.

My bracers took me about 50 crafts.

The chest was about 35, the gloves were damn near 100.

I take it you had some very specific wishes on it ?

Sort of, here's a link. http://us.battle.net/d3/en/profile/Paelos-1244/hero/5141137

The gloves still aren't perfect, but they have a combo of good crit damage and crit chance on them. The bracers are awesome and I got lucky there. The chest got a rare roll of 320+ main stat with 2 sockets and good vit/AR.

I'll probably still try to get the perfect set of gloves with Attack Speed, crit chance, crit damage, but I also want to replace my shoulders at some point. Also, the rings need work.

My wife (also an accountant) is now balls deep into the AH meta-game.  She's been buying and selling all day and racked up a couple of million.

Jesus Fucking Christ, there's a limit, right ?  I can contact a lawyer now, yeah ?

Picked this back up recently.  Still fun gameplay with great graphics.  Loot is still lousy.  I broke down and bought an item from the AH.  It's like playing nickel slots. It's fun but there's not much payout.

I am now on my last character to 60 - a barbarian. Holy cow, whatever they took away from demon hunters, they gave to barbarians, it seems. What great fun to smash everything.

I've also been playing in public games instead of solo. Better loot, harder monsters, more fun, faster leveling.

For mindless smashing, this is great fun.

What sort of awesome gear do I need to get keys for hellfire ring?

I haven't yet finished inferno on any of my characters. All but one are in inferno level but only one is to Diablo, and I haven't been able to kill her yet.

Depends. Are you asking about the mechanics of the hellfire ring event/quest/thing. Or literally, "What gear do I need to survive?"

The keys just drop of off special dudes who show up in Inferno so generally speaking if you're able to survive you should be able to handle them.

If you can survive an elite pack at the MP level you're on, you can handle the keymasters. I do recommend not to bother with it unless you can do MP5 or higher, because that's when you at least have a 50/50 or greater shot at a key dropping. It's 10% per MP level that you get a drop.

Now, that doesn't mean you can handle the bosses at that MP level just because you can get keys. I've found that the combo of Siegebreaker and Zoltan Kulle is hell on my barb.

Does anyone on f13 do runs for the ring? I don't have any interest in dedicated time to it but I'd love to piggyback someone else.

(I have 4 classes at level 60 with good gear)

I don't really anymore, but Malakili plays a lot more than I do.

I wouldn't mind going on one with Mr. Pet WD myself. I have a couple keys I think.

oh man i smell a group brewing

I'm working on getting my final 60 but I'd love to (if I can keep up, that is). I probably can't quite yet, I haven't futzed at all with MP yet.

I would be willing to work on the ring with an F13 group.

Name is Longshot#1489

I'm so weak:

(http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m8xzqjlqNF1r231xw.gif)

/reinstalling

I reinstalled last week but haven't actually played yet. Also don't have anything close to a 60. But if you see my puttering around online feel free to join and shower me with goodies  :grin:

I guess I'll put this here. http://diablo.somepage.com/news/1569-items-20-revamp-in-d3-wont-happen-before-blizzcon

Link is self explanatory. No item revamp until next year. Although there will likely be other patches in the meantime.

Once we learned the xpac was being moved back, I didn't really expect it until the end of the year. That doesn't mean it won't happen then.

I guess this is a good enough place for this.  Here is a demo/gameplay from the PS3 version http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQ6NwjExeCY

Damn that 4p coop looks fun.  As many problems as this game has, I'll likely buy this to play with my kid.

I'm confused as to how it works. How does the screen actually move? Can one can only run to what one can see on the screen? Or does it work like the computer version, where you see where you go but not where everyone else is?

The screen pulls out (camera raises) as players become separated.  What they didn't show was how high the camera will raise.  Once the camera hits max height, then who knows what will happen.  Most other games force the players to come together a bit until they can move forward in a common direction.

It will likely play best if someone acts as the leader and everyone else follows.

Looked to me like the game teleported characters back onto the screen a couple of times.

Sounds similar to the lego games on the 360.