f13.net

Runic Games announces plans for Torchlight II, coming out in 2011 (http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/29735/Runic_Announces_Torchlight_II_FollowUp.php)

(link goes to Gamasutra article)

Sounds good. They're promising multiplayer along with more customization, etc.

I'm now officially more excited about this than I was about the MMO.

Biggest draw for me is customisable character creation. If Torchlight had had that at the outset, I'd have picked it up in an instant. As it is, a hack and slash RPG where I have to choose a prescribed character just doesn't hold much interest for me; so it went alongside Borderlands as 'interesting idea, fun game, just can't fall in love with it'. Never got a chance to check out the modability of the game, though. If it's anything like as intuitive as Neverwinter Nights was, and they're improving it with II, then that'll be another reason for me to keep an eye on it.

Bring on 2011, I guess.

Multiplayer! Woo!

This makes a whole lot more sense to me than forcing the game into that nebulous 'MMO' title and saddling it with what would probably be a ridiculous pricing scheme.  A wise plan.

The question would be why? If you are doing a multiplayer Torchlight, is there a reason we would want an MMOG as well?

...because some people like MMOs? The market for a Diablo-style game and the market for an MMO are not 100% overlapping after all.

I dunno if I'd get too excited over the words "more customization." I basically took that to mean "you can probably play a girl in whichever class you want this time." Won't mind being wrong though.

I am also more excited by this than the vague MMO whatnot. I have an MMO I am perfectly content with. But I really liked Torchlight aside from the GIANT GLARING FLAW that Torchlight 2 is addressing: No multiplayer was seriously silly. Fixing that? Well then, that is fucking sweet!

Yeah, but what does the MMO offer that multiplayer dungeon crawling doesn't in this instance? Crafting? Auctions? Housing? One would have to imagine the gameplay would be fundamentally the same. I mean, assuming they keep it microtrans, I don't really see the point of doing both when you could just throw all your assets into a proven sequal with the big thing that everyone wanted.

Without a feature list or more information from the devs about what would be involved in either, I don't see how we can really say.

As far as throwing your assets at one thing or another, they talked about an MMO well before they talked about going down the multiplayer a-la Diablo route AFAIK, so they probably have a lot of costs sunk into the MMO development that they're not willing to walk away from.

I guess, but I just get the feeling that the MMO is going to die because of this decision.

Don't be daft.

First hit is free dude.

Frankly, I'd be fine with that.  I think the important thing though is some sort of "closed" server.  If Torchlight 2 multiplayer is effectively open, then its immediately less desirable because 1/2 the people you play with will have all sorts of custom items, etc, all the persistence that made D2 appealing for a long time would be missing, and it would be more similar to Dungeon Siege or Titan Quest multiplayer, neither of which ever caught on.

Give that mods were one of the big features of TL1, and TL2 will likely sport a similar feature set, I think it would be hard to square a "closed" server for multiplayer with that large amount of modability.  Of course, they could have both open and closed ways of playing.  If TL2 doesn't have something like that, then the MMO still has some separate appeal.

True, open multiplayer would be effectively worthless. I assumed they wouldn't go that route, but who knows.

Excellent news!

Torchlight II: What the First One Should Have Been.
It might even get multiple full-price sales from me instead of 1x $5 steam discount bin sale.

also, fuck another shitty MMOG.

It wouldn't surprise me one bit to find out they were looking around at what they were building and decided it just wasn't an MMO.  We know that at least Baldree wasn't sounding too keen on cash  shops.  It's more likely that they just decided that if they were going to really sink the kind of development money needed for an MMO that it probably isn't a bad idea to build their brand a little more by releasing another low cost improvement on the original.  So we'll definitely see an MMO.  But the only question is how far down the line.  And quite frankly, who cares?  As long as they keep putting out Torchlight quality diablo-likes, they can take as long as they want to perfect TorchlightCraft.

At least until Diablo 3 comes out.  I'm sure people like me who get all giddy over good ARPGs will just play both, but there are a lot of people out there who will abandon Torchlight (1,2,MMO, whatever), as soon as D3 hits the shelves.

For myself, it'll be whoever makes the funnest dungeon crawler. And given Blizzard's wonky performance lately, I wouldn't call them a sure thing anymore. Maybe 99%.  :awesome_for_real:

I wouldn't be too sure about that.  Runic has dudes that made Diablo 2.  And although the loot in Torchlight made me want to slap them in the face with my limp dick, I still wouldn't count them out.  I'm as excited about D3 as it is possible to be - impending Facebook debacle notwithstanding, but it's two years out at least.  With this announcement, the Torchlight MMO is possibly pushed back further than that?  Who knows what happens in that kind of time.  I think there's room in this genre for both.  Actually, there's probably more room than that.  Given that the rest of the people in the universe that make games like this are either at Runic, Blizzard, or Crate, it's not like the market is saturated.

Good idea.  Runic Games is the former Flagship, who invented the the schizophrenic Hellgate's suscribtion model (we are a mmo, no we are not).  It looks like they still have an hard time making out their mind.

Well, a lot of these guys were from the "North" team that didn't have much to do with HGL, though I think some of them are?   I can't remember, but I think it has a lot more to do with the fact that the MMO section of their forum is mostly people asking for features that are actually better off in a normal multiplayer game.  If they had never said Torchlight MMO was in development and just said a sequel with multiplayer is, no one would have been thinking "boy I sure wish they'd go the free to play MMO route." 

Now, the MMO is hypothetically still coming, but more Torchlight + expansions would be way more to my liking anyway.  I can't help but think they should've stayed away from perfect world entertainment as their publisher, but until it actually goes south, I guess I can't complain too much.

So what does customizable characters mean? Do I get a nostril slider?  :oh_i_see:

My money is on penis/no penis.

PC Gamer interview. (http://www.pcgamer.com/2010/08/04/torchlight-2-interview-with-runic-games/)

 :heart: pants in the monocle lady art :heart:

Highly likely, the gender mods are some of the most popular in Torchlight as it is.  Who doesn't want to play a destroyer with the vanquisher model?

Well, snagging a line from that interview for those who didn't read it:

I am assuming at least a Mythos level of customization.  Which is great.

As one of the resident dickhead purists, I'll just say I couldn't care less about character customization.  You customize your dude with your min/max mojo on his skill screen.  Torchlight II could use a few more robust options in that department when compared to its predecessor.  They didn't really go over that exactly in the interview.  But it seems like they're trying to address the shortcomings of the original, so I'll keep my fingers crossed.

I'm hoping the work on quests and overland will also include more interactive and interesting dungeon layouts.

I also think that cribbing ideas from Link to the Past's dungeons would be keen for Diablo-a-likes.

I hope they work on loot to make it more integrated into the game. Grabbing a high level POS and enchanting the hell out it pretty much beat anything else I could find in the dungeons, but I'm not sure if that was everyone's experience. I'd like to see less emphasis on the enchanting side as the great equalizer of gear, and more involved in making cool sets and items.

Yeah I would agree with this. It always seemed kind of messed up that I was rooting for white items to drop because of the enchanting system.

I happen to agree but am less optimistic.  I think I saw the word "accessible".  At the very least, I can assume we won't be seeing the Fate skill system.

Yea, I'd be happy if each class had at least two viable playstyles.  I know 'Accessible' usually means 'For Halo Retards.'  But don't crush my dreams yet.

Is there a good central depository for TL mods somewhere?

I don't know how you can get much more accessible than Torchlight 1 :-/. 

Also, I know some people around here didn't like that shared passive skills, but I think they were actually a really good idea and achieved just what the developers wanted, in that you could really choose to play any of the classes multiple ways, and without those passive abilities, I don't think it would have been possible (example: A melee alchemist, or Vanquisher with lots of pets/minions).  Add on the fact that a melee vanquisher played different from a melee destroyer played different from a melee alchemist, and there is a LOT of variety to be had in Torchlight. 

I will grant though, that I only tried most of these builds on Very Hard Hardcore, so you really have to play to the strengths of the build  and on hard and lower you might be able to just faceroll through the game with little variety in how you play between the classes.

This is what worries me.

Meanwhile I will forget about this and play Castlevania: Harmony of Despair.

Deathspank.

Get Torchleech (http://torchleech.runicgamesfansite.com:7000/) and browse its mods for high-rated stuff that looks interesting. It automatically downloads, installs, and uninstalls mods for you, warning you of any conflicts.

http://forums.runicgames.com/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=6610

Thanks guys, I'll check them out!

Looks like no closed server system:

http://forums.runicgames.com/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=14451#p122389

I actually really like that idea myself.

Yeah, its really not the worst possible scenario, and with the tools to segregate by clan/community, we should be able to set up an f13 server if we want to, which would be pretty  :drill:

I'm not really pleased by the decision. Then again, I understand their points.

Gamescon trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejqCZw4Mua4

Lookin' good so far.

http://www.gametrailers.com/video/gc-10-torchlight-ii/703546

5 minutes of gameplay.  Kinda peeing myself.

 :grin:

Looks like Torchlight, and that means it looks fun. Also, was that a pet ferret?

Pet ferret mod was added to Torchlight by Runic Games not all that long ago, I believe.

I'm hoping they improved the loot to make more sense.

More interesting/useful stats, less +1% damage to 2 random elements and like 4 of two resistances.

(http://www.torchlight2game.com/page_attachments/0000/0004/BanditXMas.JPG)

New Dev Diary: http://torchlight2game.com/news/2011/05/20/making-the-world-of-torchlight-ii/

Talks a good deal about the new outdoor zones and some about dungeons, also 8 new screenshots.  Looks like the big zones will be a lot bigger than the biggest levels of the Torchlight dungeon.

I'm still looking forward to this a lot, even with Diablo 3 on the way.

Bigger zones aren't necessarily better, but it sounds like they're trying to fill them with fun stuff. So that's good.


Considering how Activision/Blizzard has been acting, I'm kinda looking forward to TL2 more.

I want to know if they are going to do anything to the Enchanter dude and the way he works to give you some incentive to use his services on a specific item more then once or twice.

Nothing killed my urge to play more then getting that awesome weapon or piece of armor, sticking it on the enchanter, and having him turn it into a statless piece of garbage after the second click.  Having the items actually have "base" stats might be nice.  Currently, EVERY stat on an item is considered an "enchantment" so if the enchanter flubs the item, you get back a "glove" or "sword" of nothingness.

How you say... wonk woonnnnk.

When the game was brand new you could enchant things endlessly, and people just ended up enchanting the first thing they got forever and never "upgrading."  The disenchant thing was put in to counter act that and make you actually use loot you picked up.  I'm pretty sure there is a mod around that restores the enchanter to his original functionality.  I think scaling up the cost really high would probably do just fine as a limiting mechanism, sure you CAN enchant that level 10 sword once more, but you may as well upgrade to the level 30 one that dropped because its about as good and doesn't cost 100,000 gold, or whatever.

Ahh, never new about the "unlimited enchanter" thing.  It just sucked that items dont have "base" stats.  I wouldnt mind it so much if the enchanter flubbing my Rare or Legendary quality item returned it to base stats on the 6th try or something, but losing the item completely because it gets wiped back to a completely blank statless item just made me completely paranoid about Enchanting anything even remotely valeuable more then two times.   The Risk Vs Reward ratio was just way out of whack.

Yeah, it definitely had its desired effect.  It also made enchantment shrines especially awesome to find, because they didn't ramp up in terms of disenchant chance.

Actually the biggest problem with the enchanter was that the "enchantment" was based on your character level instead of the item level.   Since you're character level was often far above even the best items you'd find this was plain ol overpowered.   Eventually they fixed this for the in-town enchanter but I don't think they ever got around to fixing the shrines.   Thus after you figured out where a bunch of shrines were you could just grind the levels repeatedly.

Hopefully they'll fix all this for the second one.

I'll let the you're part slide, but does anyone else think this is just wrong? Not really specific to this game but in general... I never could wrap my head around why on earth at say level 10, I could loot a lvl 10 mob and find a green lvl 7 sword. Why not just up the level of the drop to be even with the player instead of always finding shit that would have been great 4 levels ago?

I obviously know how to use it correctly (since I did it the first time :P).   It's just a phonetic typo.

In general Torchlight's loot needs improved. It was good but you really couldn't look at most later pieces of loot (especially weapons) and be able to easily figure out what was better if the DPS/Armor values were similar.

They could definitely make what the bonuses do far more clear.   There was wayyy to much nonsense like %casting speed would affect physical dps abilities.    Plus a lot of stuff that you'd expect to be really good like swing speed was in fact mostly worthless.

Ooor....it could be that you had no idea, so using it twice with different spelling in youre sentence gave you a 50% chance to get it right at least once!  :oh_i_see:

(unlike me...)

http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/06/09/e3-2011-torchlight-pirated-over-5-million-times-in-china-runic-ceo-thats-fine-with-us


Hell, even if I didn't like the first one I'd consider buying Torchlight 2 just for this interview.

Looks like even Torchlight 2 is a ramp-up to Mythos 2.

Yeah, they've been saying that, more or less.  Also, for the sake of clarity, I don't think they'venamed it yet.  Another company picked up the old Mythos and it kind of sucked after that, so they aren't really going call it Mythos X for sure, just wanted to make sure people realize they weren't responsible for the version of Mythos that actually got released, because it was kind of crap, especially compared to how good Mythos was during its beta.

Edit also:

Here is some  info from e3:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bV-yjSUMSY8 (Armor Sets Video)
http://www.g4tv.com/videos/53439/Torchlight-2-Floor-Report-E3-2011-Live/ (General Interview/info)
http://www.gamefront.com/e3-2011-torchlight-2-hands-on-berserker-class-reveal/ (Berserker class Reveal/info)

I actually didn't like Torchlight but I will buy Torchlight 2 because of that attitude. And in the hope that they fix the things that made me not like 1.

Ugh. Some of those armor sets are BlizzardBad.

I hope the sets are leveling items. It really sucks to be putting together a set, and outlevel it in mid-collection.

30 minutes of gameplay and developer commentary:
http://www.gamespot.com/shows/now-playing/?event=now_playing_torchlight_ii20110629

Looks good!  The guy playing is a bit frustratingly bad to watch play, but oh well. 

A few notable things for people who can't/don't want to watch - some of which is already known

1.  They've spent more time on "late game" itemization this time around. 
2.  Multiplayer supports up to 8 people
3. You can join/drop multiplayer games at will (sounds like D2)
3.  LAN play included
4.  Full dev tools released with the games again
5.  In multiplayer loot is dropped per player - so loot everything you see without worrying about stealing loot or your loot being stolen.
6.  There will be 3 Acts

Looks good but the loot attributes look the same with the bunches of random resists and questionably useful attack speed increases. :(

Well assuming they actually fix attack speed that wouldn't be useless.    It's not like they can make all the attributes useful though.   There have to be a bunch of bad ones to make "optimal" gear rare.

Link. (http://www.torchlight2game.com/news/2011/08/26/torchlight-ii-price-announcement/)

So, do we make the Torchlight II subforum now or?

"You have 18 Friends who play Torchlight"
16 of them are from f13.

Really like it has drop in and out with up to 8 people.

These chaps are real smart.

Super excited about this, I love these guys.

All I need to know is WHEN.  2011 is getting very short.

And D3 looms ever closer. Among other things.

Still, $20, I'll have a look regardless, but sooner is better...money is already tightending up with Deus Ex, Space Marine, Rage, Diablo 3 and ToR in the offing.

I don't give a toss about D3.  I never enjoyed the first 2 Diablo games* but enjoyed the hell out of Torchlight.  Odd, I know.

* I also have very little to like about the direction D3 is taking on a lot of issues.  Voting with my wallet there, though I know it to be futile.

I'll buy both.

I'll be waiting to see if they give Torchlight II any degree of actual depth before buying. I found the first one really lacking in that personally. Classes weren't different enough, the loot was boring, etc. Was fun for a playthrough, but if 2 isn't a good leap ahead from that I probably won't bother.

If they can capture a roguelike a bit better whilst throwing in multiplayer and real-time iso play... then they win the prize.

I found Torchlight to be lacking when compared to Mythos, if that tells you anything.  I don't know that I'll ever get to play a cigar-chomping gnome with a shotgun again, but I'm secretly hoping for something almost as cool.

Also:  WHEEEEEENNNNNNN?

I dunno, you can play a dapper monocle-sporting combat-engineer who beats things with a gigantic flaming spanner.

:uhrr:

I feel the same as Yeg. Mythos beta had quite a bit of charm, and I preferred the shooty class to the Vanq from Torchlight

It does? Beta hasn't even started yet. I don't think we'll see it until early 2012.

Mythos classes were very "love em or hate em".   Torchlight's classes were fairly bland but perhaps more suitable to a wider range of people.   In either case the second seems to have that problem fixed.

I never played whatever ended up getting bought out, finished, and made, but in beta I thought it was a lot of fun.  I was far more depressed for the loss of Mythos than the loss of Hellgate when Flagship went under.

Yes, Hellgate was tripe but Mythos was awesome.

Me three.

With the glut of games out right now, I'm pretty ok with this.

Well, I guess they've decided D3 release isn't something they care about then.  Fair enough.  I'm a huge fan of Torchlight, but if i'm full in the swing of D3 when it comes out, i'll likely just wait for a Steam sale and then play it later.

Pretty much that.  I understand they can't release the product until it is ready, but now they need to make sure they launch well after the D3 stuff has died down.  Provided D3 launches in early 2012, that is.

I really, really do love the attitude these chaps have.  I'll be buying it for that, no matter what.

It's like Blizzard used to be!   :grin:

Yes.

If D3 hits first I will forget I ever heard the words "Torchlight 2".
D3 will probably make me forget about SWTOR.

I'll take that bet.

I like Runic and Torchlight way too much to forget about it.  Combine it with the fact that D3 beta and some of the lag I've experienced has made me very wary of playing Hardcore mode in D3 (i'll  still try it, but I'm nervous about it) and Torchlight is at the very least going to serve a purpose as an offline HC ARPG for me.

My objection is slightly different here.  I think d3 might just dissapoint a lot of people long term.

I'm putting my money on T2 being the better game, but D3 getting much more sales. Y'know, Blizzard.

No matter when Torchlight releases I'll be picking it up. I had too much fun with the first one and I just kinda dig what these guys are doing and how they go about it.

See, I didnt really like the first one and the only reason the second one was interesting to me is the multi-player aspect that would have fed my need for all things Diablo.
But if D3 comes out first problem solved.

I'm half with Sand here. Torchlight was pretty and all, but I think I only got a few levels down that first mine before losing interest. These games are all about the MP for me, and TL1 didn't have any. If TL2 does have LAN play as they've stated before, I'll get it, but realistically, it'll be a steam-sale-4-pack somewhere down the line.

Delayed again, now it's a 2012 release.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/244242/hey_torchlight_ii_take_your_time_well_wait_for_you.html


I'm no sales genius here but literally telling people to go play other stuff isn't a great strategy even if it's honest.

Not to mention none of those games he mentioned seem to be in direct competition with TL2, while the obvious D3 will be in a few months.  I think Runic thinks they have a solid enough fan base and good enough reputation that people will buy their game regardless of when it comes out.  I think they are probably right, but D3 is going to cut into their sales in some way, its impossible for it not to.

Peanut Butter and Jelly.  The games he listed aren't going to be the competition if T2 is coming out some time after D3.

Also, we're doing it anyway (playing those games), whether they tell us or not.  So it's more of a "remember to come back, y'hear?" than a "go away."

Yeah, I'm not sure you can classify this as 'Go Play Other Stuff'.  It's just about knowing your customers.  The people who would play Torchlight aren't people who have 1 purchase and that's it.

Nor are they catering to the Granny crowd who wonder what to buy little Timmy.

They can't compete in that sphere, so they're not trying and come off as 'cool' on one of the weaknesses they have.  It's a good play, actually.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SydtaKnawVs

Torchlight 2's opening cinematic. Interesting art style.

I think that would have been better without the narration.

I think that would have been better with a GOD DAMNED RELEASE DATE.  Those fuckers have hit five months past the initial release date at this point.

That didn't do a whole lot for me. Kept waiting for Samurai Jack to show up and save the day.

Christmas

The first torchlight was so boring. There was no fun experimenting with different builds and finding the gear to support it or responding to differences in the mobs. So it seemed like endless attack (or alt-attack) for drops that generally sucked. I liked the spirit of the creators and wanted to like it, but no luck.

Hm, this looks to be the same. The skill tree with no dependencies, lots of variant attacks and passives so you'll pick the most OP, max it, and basically use that a couple of thousand times.

Yay, I'm not alone in never understanding all the hype for Torchlight.  :oh_i_see:

On THAT note - Torchlight II is up for preorder on Steam. Release date of 'Summer 2012'.

Well, at least that's sort of like announcing a date.

Hmmm, summer is an odd choice.

Man, I'm a huge Torchlight fan and I like Runic, but even I am going to wait for a steam sale when release is this close to Diablo 3.

It's $20!? 4-Pack makes it $15.

Why pay full price for it if I know I'm not going to get around to playing it for 4-6 months anyway?

Buy it for the inevitable Battle.net outages.

I think I'll be waiting for the 4-pack for $15. Or $20 even. :oh_i_see:

I'd imagine they would release around end of July or some time in August. Give people time to get over Diablo 3, see how they react to everything post Act 1.

I would delay until christmas. Unless I was confident it was a better d3.

I would've released it on the same day and again, collect that "BATTLE.NET IS DOWN" money.

Excellent idea.

Probably doesn't mean much, but when I pre-ordered the game on Steam one of the pages (either the one where I confirmed the purchase or the one showing the confirmation) said "July 2012".

I'm almost certain there's some weird setup in Steam where they have to give a title a date, which is why there have been some accidental releases in the past.

I go to the Torchlight II page on Steam and all they seem to say is that they heard from their customers that the only thing missing is multiplayer.  Everything else was just fine.  So, I got the impression Torch II will be more of Torch I, but with multiplayer capability.

Looks like I'll buy this on a future Steam sale again like before.

I know, those skeeving bastards charging an ENTIRE $20.  Who the fuck is going to buy this piece of shit game at full price?

iOS culture hooooooo! :drill:

Maybe.  It's just frustrating to see millions of people throw $60 at shit after shit Bioware games, then these guys at Runic are shooting for a $20 game and lots of people are waiting for a "sale".  Chalk it up to another "why we can't have nice things" idea.

People have different tastes in games, shocking I know.

Also, timing matters. I'm not going to buy this at release not because I don't think it is worth $20 (although I felt the first Torchlight was kind of pushing it), but because I'm going to be busy playing other things when it comes out (assuming July 2012 is the date.) Why not wait for a sale in that case?

I will probably but it in September or something.

I've got 234 games on steam. I've only played a handful of them for more than, say, 30 minutes or an hour. (Torchlight 1 has clocked 32mins, but that includes being idle at the options screens etc). So I'm in no rush to buy the sequel, especially since I have a 1-year WoW pass, free D3 coming in a week and a half, a fuckton of co-op 360 games for my wife and I to play, and my friends just wanna play LotRO.

Also, it's on Steam. My Steam policy these days is not to touch anything until it goes on sale. Unless I've gotten some kind of boxed CE and it comes with a steam registration. (Space Marine). Toy Soldiers looks good - I played the demo on XBL. I'll wait till that is $5 or under, since I know I'm unlikely to actually play it much. I also don't pay $60 (or AU$100!) for Bioware games on release.

I will buy it day one, or maybe even pre-order.  I'd like to see a persistent Torchlight world come to fruition, and that's not likely if they don't turn a profit on Torchlight 2. 

Also, Torchlight is the only serious competitor to the Diablo series and I feel that supporting Torchlight should help Blizzard make a better game.  Blizzard tends to thrive on taking other people's ideas and fleshing them out.  $20 seems like a small investment to me for the potential outcome. 

Ultimately, I feel that Runic is one of the developers that deserves support, and if people don't support them then it's one more indie shop closed and that much more going to EA/Activison. 

Someone made the point on the last page that Torchlight 2 would be worth buying for when Battle.net is down.  That is a good point and I'm considering doing that now.

I'm buying. I don't know about Day 1, but I don't care about waiting for a sale, it just depends on if I'm in the mood when it comes out. $20 isn't much given that it's supposed to be much bigger than TL1.

$20 for TL1 was a little on the high end but it did help Runic get on their feet so who cares.

I like to support game devs who make products that I enjoy, in hopes of encouraging them to make more games for me to enjoy.

But then, I have only a few steam games, most of my gaming budget going toward MMOs the past 10 years, and I'm staying away from mmos for now. I'd likely wait for a sale if I had 200 steam games.

I'm gonna buy it because I think it'll provide a different enough experience that it'll be fun to play even in the presence of D3. Also it'll be a lot less "srs bzns" in regards to patching/class balance since it's not tied to a real money AH and "always online" authentication. If their mod tools are decent we'll hopefully see some cool shit out of that.

I will buy it and pretend it is Mythos.  Fuck Bill Roper in his zug-zug.

Don't ever wait for steam sales if you get a large number of games. It makes buying stuff a habit and less of a decision. It's the reason I have 185 games on Steam and I feel terrible.

Da fuck?

Dude...stop buying games!

What Nix says, I'm at over 300 games now (Steam only, not counting GoG or boxes) for exactly that reason. "Hey, 75% sale. I might want to play this game in a few years or decades."

"This game is well respected, I guess I should play it one day even though it's old".

That's fine. I have no issue there at all. I really liked Mythos, and if Torchlight 1 had multiplayer (even just LAN) then I would have gobbled it up. Now though, that ship has sailed. With WoW, D3, and plenty of other stuff to do when b.net is down - and those gaming friends on the lotro train, it's not worth the $40-80 to me when I know I'll barely play it. (1 each for me and wife at minimum, plus 2 more for the other 2).


 :awesome_for_real:

I've finally come to peace with the idea that there are a lot of good movies and games I'm just never going to get around to experiencing, let alone re-experiencing some classics.

Oh, I know that as well. I'll never play all my games/watch all the TV and movies I want to/paint all my miniatures. Doesn't mean I'll stop buying them though.

I used to do that. Then I realized they're just too old to be enjoyed by me.

Agree.  I'm not finishing Fallout again.  Or Darklands?  Forget that!  Although I did buy it again on GOG.

I'll buy this when I buy it, if it's on sale when I randomly decide YES THE TIME FOR TORCHLIGHT 2 IS NOW, cool, if not, whatevs.

Beta for this has started. Keys are floating around from public outlets.

I have one!

Gonna see if there's an NDA.

I got in too. It's really very good.

They fix the loot? That's about my main beef with the original.

I've only played a couple of hours, but it seems much better. I don't see any enchanter which is good news, and you get less random piles of stats thrown at you. The main issue so far seems to be way too many low level socketed items, and almost nothing to put in them.

Weapons are very cool, they swing in different AoE arcs depending on the type. Dual wielding two same weapons gives you a chance to execute. Obviously this stuff matters more for the berserker (which I'm playing) than the other classes, haha.

My number one issue is no respec past level 10. No respeccing is just :uhrr:, it really doesn't add anything to the gameplay that's worth the annoyance except some hidebound notion of RPG-makers honor. Oh well, game is moddable.

Just got in this morning, downloading now.

I can confirm there is no NDA per the e-mail I got:

Welcome to the Torchlight 2 Beta.

Don't mind if I do.

There's no NDA.

Hmm...my beta download just tanked at 15 MB remaining. WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY

EDIT: Ok, download finally finished that was weird.  Initial response is favorable, plays very smooth I was pleased to be shooting things with a shotgun within 2 minutes of starting.  I'll play more later.

Also, my account name is the same as my name here: malakili - if you want to friends list me.

I'll just leave this here:

damn you all, registered a couple days ago but still have to get my invite :(

I wish they'd give out beta keys to people who preorder.

I didn't get a key, but I'm kinda wrapped up in schoolwork anyways.  IGN posted a 15min video of some beta play.  It looks really, really fun.  I'd link the video, but frankly the VO was a tool and spent most of the video fiddling with menus and being an obnoxious fuck.

Seems like a no-brainer for $20, and makes me wonder how they're profitable that that price point.  The whole overworld aspect looks really good, and I think it will go a long way to curing the "funnel" feeling of the first game.

mmorpg.com has beta keys right now. I'm sure they're going fast.
http://www.mmorpg.com/giveaways.cfm?offer=343&val=1&uh=2EF9252B97F0A7F3E93E417BE55ED879 (http://www.mmorpg.com/giveaways.cfm?offer=343&val=1&uh=2EF9252B97F0A7F3E93E417BE55ED879)

They didn't license an engine, don't have a ridiclously overbearing publisher, already had the original engine developed for the most part, ditto with the tools. Small-ish team for the scope of the game. At least that's what I'm guessing makes the $20 mark profitable.

Truthfully, I wish we'd see more developers doing this.  Smaller scale everything, but just execute it really well.

The trick is eating catfood while you do it.

 :oh_i_see:

Got my beta invite - now just need some time to play.

My lifestyle is not conducive to beta-key campouts.

Mine came in my e-mail this morning.  I don't recall ever having signed up, but I was extremely active on their forums for a while, so I suspect I may have made it onto some list at some point.  Either that or there was a sign up a really long time ago that I did and forgot about.  My point being keep an eye on your e-mail just in case.

If you can't get your own key and are jonesing to play, you can have my account. Just let me know and I'll PM the info. I played ten minutes and sort of confirmed this is still not my kind of game.

If you make an account on the Runic Games website, they are randomly picking people to send beta keys to.

Twitter is where I found my beta key giveaway (searched for #Torchlight 2 beta key).

I am very impressed with this; bought a 4pack and gifted some friends. Really well done game.

I had signed up for s Runic account at some point and they just sent me an invite.

I like this game. I like this game a LOT. Having said that, I knew I would and had already bought a 4 pack.

Bigger budgets certainly don't make games any better. And small developers tend to be more willing to do fun, quirky things. (For Blizzard to copy.  :awesome_for_real:)

Just pre-bought the game on Steam since doing so gives you a copy of the first one for free (I didn't have it) right now. If you're in the same position, that deal seems a total no-brainer to me.

Also, for anyone on the fence or not in the beta, the Yogscast (as ever) have started a series of beta videos so if you enjoy good old British Ineptitude, check them out from here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6exWP9632k).

Wow, it looks really good actually. Monsters aren't exploding into piles of useless shit, the gems seem to be more varied/interesting, the combat looks fun, and the interface is pretty good.

The combat is really good.  I've only played, I think its called Outlander, right now, but shotgonnes (for some reason they didn't choose to spell it shotgun, but whatever) and cannons are amazingly satisfying.  I found a unique cannon off the first boss too, that thing is badass.  The interface is actually probably my least favorite part right now actually, but it certainly isn't bad, just a tad on the busy side to my mind.  Definitely superior to Torchlight in pretty much every way, and I really love the fact that there are side dungeons now.  For some reason I just love coming across optional side dungeons.

I want a gem transmuter!

This will be my Diablo 3, I'm really looking forward to it.

I basically wanted to play it instead of Diablo 3 just as a "Fuck you" to the Online for Single Player policy Blizzard forces through, but the more I see about it, the more excited I get.

Even if at the very least it's simply Torchlight with added multiplayer, I'm seriously glad I decided to pre-purchase it. The first game is way more fun than I'd hoped it would be, the loot system is surprisingly deep (if a little overly trashy) and the action is extremely well balanced so far (I'm playing a Marksman Vanquisher). It feels like everything Diablo is not, despite being so close in structure.
That said, I might have spit a few bullets on my first disenchanting. My Golden Fusilade Hyper Rifle of Untold Pwnishment was reduced to the Golden Mantlepiece Dustgatherer in one fell swoop. :cry:
Somehow, though, I don't think the game would be the same without that element of upgrade danger.

At the beginning that wasnt there so the best way to play was to spam upgrade the first stuff you found.  Cost was based on item level even after enchanted a million times.

I would go so far as to say the enchanting system nearly ruined the whole experience for me.

This is 1/10th the game that is Diablo 3. Shame, really.

But its infinitely more playable than a Diablo 3 with dead login servers.

God, how I wished Torchlight 2 was out already yesterday.

C'mon with my beta key already  :tantrum: :sad_panda:

based on hours of gameplay deep into both games i'm sure

Heh, I doubt D3 will last me 30 hours. I didn't play that much in D2 cause it seemed kinda boring just farming for items in the same environment. I took a few char builds to 40-50 and played some Hell difficulty before deciding, it isn't worth the trouble. Blizzard games will rarely drop in price, so yeah, I'll just settle for a $20 clone to kill time while waiting for something more emotionally engaging to come out. Have fun, folks.

And mentioning Torchlight II while a bunch of friends talked about 'queueing for 8 hours to grab their boxed pre-orders' got me a few funny stares. 'Are you stupid' kind of questioning looks. Not even gonna bother to argue. And not succumbing to the peer pressure. There's hardly any pull to grouping in most hack and slash either, so you kill shit faster. Big whoop. Really reminds me of Hellgate days. I know I won't end up having the last laugh this time, but I doubt I'd regret sticking with a $20 clone and dropping it after 12 hours of fun.

You are some kind of space alien, right?

Made with 1/100th the budget, 2/3rds cheaper to play and with 100% less Blizzard 'singleplayer online' server bullshit. Shame? I call that something to be proud of.

Yeah, people have different tastes. Shocking, I know.

That's all I wanted from the first one... :heartbreak:

Got an invite for the beta weekend (no NDA), running from Friday 18th May at 11am PDT 'til Tuesday May 22nd at 11am PDT  :heart: .

Check your mail if you have registered a Runic account but still have to get your beta ticket!

I am honestly and sincerely curious: let's pretend they can both be played offline, or they both need for you to be online to play, what are your (people in this thread) reasons to play Torchlight 2 instead of Diablo 3? I haven't betatested this, but I played enough Torchlight 1, so I really would like to know your angle on this cause personally I can't see it. As I said, this is not a mock. I am really interested.

I'd take D3 any day if it's offline play capable. And it doesn't have crap lag for a single player component. Or ...server full...for a solo run game. I wasn't a devoted player in D2 and the price point disinterests me.
If both are online-only, I'd skip both for better buys in the future.

At the current shape, T2 is a better buy for me, cause I can't be assed with lag and login queues when I'm interested in just running the game mostly in private, plus it's $20 for some quick diversion. Easy to let go and pick up. I just didn't care enough about the hack and slash genre to spend $79.99 of local currency due to the SEA distribution being a stupid monopolistic cunt.

Let's not pretend that.  Let's pretend that most chaps like a single player experience that they can play all the time, for now.

My concerns about D3 are about the simple fact of offline/online.  You put Torchlight into the same system and I probably wouldn't be happy about it either.

Bearing in my mind that my views on this one are not generally held due to the asstastic Internet Experience I am subjected to daily.

Online/Offline capability, hands down. Otherwise Diablo 3 would likely be Lootpinata heaven.

Yes, I tried Diablo 3. While I was alt-tabbed out of the game to do something else (looking how you can identify that yellow axe that dropped), Diablo 3 lost the server connection. With that I lost all the progess till the last checkpoint. This is simply not acceptable for a single player experience.

Jay Wilson has come out on several occasions now and basically said "We intend this to be a multiplayer game, so if you don't like it, too bad" which I think is kind of stupid.  They've been sidestepping the issue with "We think always online is the best experience, so that is why we did it" line for a while now, and it seems like an absolutely terrible argument.  Runic is going to sell a lot of copies just to people who are bitter about it. 

That being said, if TL2 was always online like D3, there would be no advantage of it unless you have a huge hardon for the setting.  Prior to playing D3 retail I would've said that Torchlight 2 beta comapred favorably to D3 beta, but having played through all of D3 normal mode now, I have to say that I don't expect Torchlight 2 is going to be able to compete on a pure gameplay level.

Yeah, that's why it kinda balances itself out with the much lower price point, I am genuinely surprised at it. $20? Wow. If it's double that, I'd probably think twice and might settle for D3, but 20.00 - that's perfect.

I'm a videogame addict, I'll play both  :drill:

Currently playing the beta. (very) First impression: I love those BIG icons and the art style, which, on the other hand might be a turn off for someone. Polish of this title seem top notch.

Playing the beta for this weekend; this game is really good and stands apart from D3.

The loot is improved; weapons have more interesting/less pointless stats, while armor is a bit more interesting but still heavy with tiny amounts of resistances. Sockets are ridiculously plentiful and the gems/skulls/etc are a lot more random/plentiful. The skills in Torchlight 2 are better thought out than the utterly random mishmash of stuff from the first, and they syngerize better but they unfortunately don't really encourage branching out into other talent trees. It's also obviously less deep than Diablo 3's system, but ironically it feels more like D2.

Monsters are very swarmy and the dungeons/areas feel bigger/more random/more interesting than D3 to me but I'm only a way into Act 2 in D3. Combat feels good and...I dunno, meaty/impactful as an engineer.

It's really a shame they couldn't get this out before D3 because if they had, I think we would've had a lot of people and reviewers comparing it favorably to D3.

$20 wins for me, I played original Diablo and liked it enough to finish it but not enough to replay it or buy D2.  Based on playing Torchlight I figure I'll get $20 of fun out of Torchlight 2 and I doubt that I'd get $40 more fun by buying Diablo 3.

Battle.net is offline. And I have a pet ferret called Sausages.

That's all I can think of.

15 bucks vs 60 is a huge one.  Could easily be 5 vs 60 if you wait until christmas.

That's enough.

...and a disconnect from the US servers and I'm standing at the beginning of the cemetery of the forsaken again after almost being to the crown.

Thats why Torchlight 2 is superior, even not taking awesome pet ferret into account.

When's this thing coming out anyway? There's a niche to fill for Diablo clones right now.

Dammit, did everyone go for a ferret?

How could you *not* go for a ferret?

This is really well put together.  Between D3 and TL2, I fear other games won't get played this year.

I didn't care for the Outlander much, and the Mage was pretty bland.  The engineer was fun.  But the Berzerker is flipping awesome.  It really feels like a berzerker should, just flying around the field smashing all in the path.  The fact that all the abilities are based around wolves is just that much cooler.

The ferret has flying goggles.

Flying goggles!

'Nuff said.

This.

The outlander felt like it took way too long to build charge, and they get a lot less bang for theirs than the other classes do. Engy skills do more damage and look cooler with charge, Berserkers become nearly invincible, embermages fill their charge really fast and can cast for free for quite a while when they max out, Outlanders...uh, crit a bit more and shoot a bit faster if they can find enough shit to shoot for like 5 minutes to max it out and keep it filled.

(http://www.staciwilson.com/animalmovies/AnimalMoviesImages/BEAST_MASTER-2.jpg)

Double ferrets all the way.

It must be said that you can get ferrets in diablo 3 if you are a demon hunter.

Does it have goggles?

There is another thing that TL2 does a lot better than D3, now that I've read some more of the D3 forum and that's randomness.

The one-off dungeons and quest areas of course pop up in the same areas but their arrangement and the general arrangement of the zones/dungeons in TL2 can be pretty dramatically different. You can recognize some chunks like "Oh, that bridge is usually in here somewhere", but it's WAY the fuck more random than D3.

I jumped for the weekend event and I really like the game, probably more than D3, but I'm sticking with my thought that random easy group matching in D3 is a killer app. The big list of games isn't a substitute and I missed playing with other people. I think this is like the LFD in WoW. Now that it's out in the wild, it's something that you really have to have.

The Friend system in D3 is fantastic. I have no need for randoms.

The problem with random matching in TL2 is that everything is client-side so public games would just be an insane mess of cheating, hacks, etc. Like a worse version of the original battle.net for Diablo 1.

Damn, an authenticator is what we need to prevent it!

f
The problem isn't even cheating/hacks.  Runic openly supports and encourages modding the game.  There is simply nothing to stop someone from creating whatever item they want and just giving it to themselves using the dev tools for that matter.  I can't recall what they've said so far about mods and multiplayer in terms of what games you'll be able to join.  I recall something a while back about them saying they wanted to make it so you could download the mods running on the fly so you could join a game without having to log out, find the mod on some website, install it, etc.  But I don't know what they have actually implemented at this point.

Something I did not expect to say, given how much I actually like the art style: I do not like how TL2 looks. Grant you, I only had a very little bit of time with the game this past weekend (it was a busy weekend :( ) but the monsters just weren't standing out to me. It was too bright/busy/SOMETHING in the beginning and it bugged me enough that I decided I'd rather do something else for a while.

Ferret pet goes a long way, though. I like the papillon too. :P

I actually liked the art style in the game, but the cinematic was not good.  It's a shame they wasted any amount of time on it.

I've been kind of enjoying D3. Not amazingly, but decently. The battle.net servers dropping and general annoyances make me think that T2 (with LAN play!!!) is definitely going to be a go. Though probably not immediately on release, due to too much stuff to play.

Yeah, it's really busy and some of the critters fall into the background a bit too much. I adjusted, though, and then it was awesome. Prefer it to my (limited) D3 experience.

I felt it was too bright as well. Something just not right about it. I like the TL1 art very much though so I don't know.

The art feels pretty good to me. I think some of the cave dungeons obscure your view too much however. Yeah, enemy outlines glow when obscured but that's not 100% helpful.

I would have to agree the D3 grouping/friend system is so slick and well designed its probably the best feature of the game. It really is amazingly well done.

Yeah exactly, I really liked the TL1 art style a lot, and in a vaccuum I also really like the TL2 art. There's just something off in the actual game, though, and I hope either my brain adjusts to it or they fix it or something, because whatever it is was not ... right?

I think I know that Sjofn means. I had trouble keeping track of enemies once or twice due to how well they sometimes blended in with the rest of the scenery. I adjusted to it after a while, but it'd sometimes creep back up on me, especially if I had the mid-screen automap up and going.

Had the same sort of feeling like getting tunnel vision when driving.

Yeah, that's a good way of describing it I think, I had trouble keeping track of dudes.

Welp, I dunno where the info is coming from since I didn't see it on their official website and haven't seen it on any of the regular gaming feeds, but following Runic's conversation with some random fans on twitter I guess they're delaying the game another 2-3 months.

They STILL don't have all of the skills nailed down. Starting to wonder what degree of polish they're going for here, or if they're having some sort of technical/internal issues.

I found it - from this article from E3.

http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/06/07/e3-2012-torchlight-ii-getting-closer-to-launch (http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/06/07/e3-2012-torchlight-ii-getting-closer-to-launch)


Too bad they didn't actually launch a month after Diablo 3. I suspect they'd sell more copies - I'd be playing now if I could.

In this instance I actually approve of the delay.  Several of the skills were lackluster feeling; taking the time to spice them up is a good investment, I feel.

How are they dealing with the loot issues of the original?

In the weekend beta test I noticed that they moved away from the loot having like 200 shitty properties like +2/5 of every resistance and +0.2 cast speed and so on. The loot can still have resistances of course but base stats are WAY more common than they were in TL1 and in general the affixes seem to be distributed in more interesting ways.

Enchanting can still be done but it has a cap based on the enchanter you use to do it. In the first chapter I rescued an enchanter who came back to town permanently but he could only do a single enchant to an item (and each item counts how much its been enchanted; failures count btw). I found enchanter NPCs in random dungeons and in the wild that could do 3-5 but they were pretty infrequent and the cost goes up exponentially. Also, some enchanters you find can only do specific things, like enchanting for fire damage/resist.

Sockets are plentiful, and you find ember pieces by the boatload. They can't be combined anymore however. I think they're trying to break the "HORDE ALL GEMS FOREVER" thing and make them far more disposable. You can still destroy gems in items or destroy items for gems if you wish. I had to break myself out of Diablo-aspergers mode with gems, but once I started treating them as disposable conveniences and started just throwing gems into everything at a whim it was pretty nice. Also bosses/mini-bosses commonly drop unique and powerful gems.

I dunno if I'm interpreting it right, but it appeared there were "common" sets and more powerful "named" sets. Like, I'd find these 2-3 piece sets of items with semi-random set bonuses all over the place as both drops and from vendors pretty regularly, but I also found named sets that were bigger and had what looked like more hand-set bonuses like "twinfire rods" which were a set of wands meant to be duel-wielded.

Edit: To clarify, I think there's "sets" that are like random suffixes, and hand-tuned sets. The random sets use the "generic" armor graphics, and the hand-tuned stuff seems to have unique models.

Unique items dropped fairly rarely but more like D2 rare than D3's hilariously shitty legendary rarity. They are also far more useful and often have class-specific bonuses.

New News (http://www.torchlight2game.com/news/2012/06/21/post-beta-changes-and-updates/), with some very welcome changes.

This can't release fast enough.

^^

After spinning my Barbarian on my D3 screen for 5 minutes, I fired up a new toon in Torchlight 1 and had a shit ton of fun. 3 hours later I was tired but wanted to keep going.

TL 2 needs to be out NOW :)

Some of that list is a direct slap in the face to D3.

Good Show.

(http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/17tqglcjgjd86jpg/original.jpg)

I don't care! I JUST WANT THE DAMN GAME! :mob:

Torchlight 1 had 83 monster models? I'm not sure I buy that.

Probably includes npc's

+1

This would be a dumb thing for them to get wrong/inflate, a lower number here would make the ad better.  I like the ad, it made me smile and want to find the "shut up and take my money!" pic.

Comes out Sept. 20th.

http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/08/31/torchlight-2-release-date-announced-its-out-in-three-weeks/

Talk about horrible timing.  I'm going to be stuck playing Borderlands with friends at that point.

Rejoice!

I likely can't play Borderlands 2 until I upgrade my PC, so I'll have to pass on it for the time being. 

Oh good, although bad timing with Borderlands 2, too.  Also.  I'll have to give up sleeping and housework. 

Oh.  No.  Not the housework.   :awesome_for_real:

Actually, it might be okay.  I'll know soon if I need to get my knee sliced open by strange foreign people and, if so, sleeping won't be an issue.  Who can sleep after traumatic surgery?  I plan to have it done using no pain meds at all... only herbal remedies.  Like heroin.

Ouch. My knees hurt just thinking about that.

I never played Borderlands, so I'm clear for Torchlight II as long as I can tear myself away from Minecraft.

Was hoping this would come before GW2, but now it looks like a Christmas buy for me.

It has more stuff, but will it be more fun?  I'll play it... but the original didn't really do much for me.  Expectations are low, but I'm certain to get my $20 worth. 

It so mindless that it takes my mind off my worries but still enough that I have to concentrate a bit.  Well, in very hard setting, anyway.  I can't get myself to do the last mode.  I get too fond of my pets to start over. 

From the weekend beta I played of TL2, I thought it was a lot more fun than the first, and I say that as someone who really like TL1.

September 20th. So competing with Borderlands 2. Hope it does well.

The original came out the same month as Borderlands 1 and did fine, I expect the same with this.

Isn't the new WoW expansion coming in around the same time?

September 25th.

For the first time ever, I could not give a damn about a WoW expansion. I have a feeling I'll still be playing GW2 and Torchlight 2 etc rather than buying another Blizzard product.

I'm wondering if I'm alone in just not caring about the MMO giant any more.

Nope, you're not the only one.  I was such a WoW fanboy and I'm not picking it up.  If I get desperate, maybe I'll snag it in Jan/Feb when I don't want to go outside anymore.  For the time being, GW2 and TL2 will be great.  I think it's mildly telling that both games are from ex-Blizz people. 

Not alone at all.   SWTOR, TSW, and GW2 have all ruined me in various ways.  I have beefs with all 3 of them but collectively they've killed WoW for me.  I'm certainly not going to shed any tears over that fact either.

I haven't given a shit since Wrath. I bought Cata, played it for a few days, and then promptly took a few months off of playing WoW.

I haven't played WoW in a really Really REALLY long time but every time I install a new product on my computer, there's a free trial.  It just never goes away!

Nope, you're not alone. I've bought every collector's edition of each expansion (2 of them actually), and D3 as well, but I'm done with WoW. Cataclysm, and then D3 convinced me that my love affair with Blizzard is over.

Minecraft and TorchlightII for me.

Sept 20, jeez.  I'll be joy-puking my face off, but probably will buy this now as a show of support.

You can preload this now if you pre-purchased.

Just re-subbed to WoW and UGH.  After GW2 I'm not sure if I'll get MoP.  It's just an old ass game now with some changes I disagree with. 

Really looking forward to TL2.  D3 got me excited for isometric action gaming again, but it was a disappointment.  I never finished the original TL, but really enjoyed it.

Dad took his character to level 160 (end encounter was at level 50? I think, and you run out of skills to upgrade) and then managed to overload the computer (power supply & RAM fried).

Y'know.. I think this is the first time I've prepurchased a game on Steam.  I now understand the twitchy anxiety that comes from having the game sitting there, waiting, but not unlocked.

10 hours to go... if I get up at 3am I'll be able to play this. It's sad, I'm more excited about this game than I was about Diablo 3... couldn't they just move the release forward 10 hours?

3am? No, 1pm, sure.  Release time is 1pm est.. I was disappointed I couldn't play a bit before heading to work this morning.  Curses.

Three hours to go (http://freeemoticonsandsmileys.com/animated%20emoticons/Activity%20Animated%20Emoticons/jump.gif)

<--- Aussie

Within the first hour of playing I had:

-made interesting decisions about how to spec my character
-made interesting decisions about what loot to use
-collected a few pieces of set gear that made me want to rerun the dungeon they came from to complete it
-picked from a surprisingly large list of pets, skins, and character options
-picked a starting difficulty that matched the experience I wanted from the game
-was able to start the game immediately (offline play) even though the login servers were getting slammed

These guys get it.

One last thing that I love about this game.

(http://i.imgur.com/LvL8y.jpg)

Finally got the chance to start it up but I'm confused.  None of the classes really look visually like what I remember in the previews.  Did they cut some classes or completely change the models?

Delicious game  :Love_Letters:

I want the settings and items from Torchlight, with the look and feel of Diablo 3.

Yeah.

I'm liking the game, but damn, do I ever miss the incredibly satisfying sense of impact from my attacks that was in D3.  In T2 I can't really tell what monsters I'm hitting with some of my attacks.  Alas.

Yea, there's absolutely no ferocity to your attacks in this. It's just lines hitting boxes as far as I'm concerned. I'm going back to Borderlands 2 for now where at least when you hit something people say things like OW OW OW OW OW OW and MY BALLS.

I felt the same about path of exile, i liked everything about it except the actual gameplay.

I'm not having this problem on my 2H engineer. Attacks feel like they have a surprising amount of weight. D3 does it better, but Torchlight 2 combat feels pretty good too.

My 2H engineer has that 'impact' feel.  Loving the game, especially, especially the loot always showing up! Plus I can actually use the loot that drops.

Runic's beating Blizzard at its own game. 

I slightly disagree with this; after you get some points in a few skills it feels pretty weighty as an engineer or berserker. Embermage in the beta just felt like shooting sparklies everywhere then stuff sorta died. I didn't really get the "I'm blowing shit up" feeling despite covering half the screen in fire after getting a few of the fire spells. The outlander class is a bit of a mess honestly and is like, "welp, we give up trying to figure out a real distinctive idea for the sneaky ranged/daggery/dark class and ninjas are kinda played out so you're a rogu~...outlander!".

Everything else about the game is everything I liked from D2 and wanted in D3 but didn't get. It's a bit weird how fast you are compared to D3/Path of Exile/Borderlands. You haul some ass in this game.

I've played embermage a bit, and I'm a tiny bit underwhelmed.  I'll try an engineer next.

The Embermage seems kinda on the opposite end of the awesome-scale compared to the Ember Lance-wielding Alchemist in Torchlight 1 :P At least in the first few levels. Then again, you didn't get access to the Ember Lance in Torchlight 1 until level 10. Hmmmmm.

It's been an expensive day, and Torchlight 2 dropped on top of that.  :awesome_for_real: Thank god I had an overtime paycheck.  :grin:

Only played a bit, but I'm liking it so far. I went straight for veteran hardcore. I've come to appreciate hardcore mode after doing it a fair bit in D3.

This game is wickedly fun. My Level 11 engineer is mowing down enemies with a unique cannon that looks like a lightning gatling, which I could equip almost as soon as it dropped.

You actually feel like playing a game and not climbing a mountain of shit while the developers stand at the top and piss at you. Fuck you Blizzard, for all intents and purposes this is Diablo 3.

It's too cute.  It makes me giggle insanely.

Low levels have sucked. I hit 14 last night before hitting the hay and the later skills were more impressive.  The problem is the meteor you start off with is as impressive as a default attack, which means isn't very impressive.  I want to try out prismatic spray and the 3rd ice skill but there's so many nice passives, too.

I'm clearly going to have a problem of not picking a few skills and maxing them the fuck out.

The game is a lot more fun than D3, though.  Probably because I'm getting shitloads of loot.  It's loot overload and I feel bad sometimes when I get an upgrade because, "aw.. I just upgraded that.."  A tiny, cynical part of me wonders how much of that is because D3 came out first and they saw the failure there.

Came across the enchanter before I logged off.  It's much improved over the 1st Torchlight in that the upgrades it adds are much smaller for a lot more money.  Plus it's not in town , taunting you to blow all your gold on it.

You can rescue an enchanter that returns to town at least in the first act but they can usually only add a single enchantment. Also, enchanters you find in the wild can have specializations; like I found one that only adds fire enchantments.

It's also nice to be able to find unique items, sets, and the sorta pseudo-set items right off rather than you know...having to literally get to cap to find anything nice.

Just in case some of you is still undecided, you can now download the demo, either from Steam or the official  website.

Ooooo.  You can ?

Fucking awesome.  I'll be in my bunk.

The game is fun.  They do a great job with loot which is a nice contrast from that other game.

My shotgun outlander is pretty boring skill-wise though.  I'm level 20 and I've finished act 1.  I'm really, really hoping that the next tier of skills gives me something more fun to play with.  I may have just made a poor choice for my first character.  If the next few skills aren't fun I may reroll, no big loss.

I love the fact that I during normal gameplay can actually find loot that is at or above my current level.

Yes, this!

I got two gold items (unique) in the first 20 minutes and felt like something was wrong.

The loot overload is almost...unbearable!!!  :ye_gods: I'm only in the Temple Steppes and piles of stuff keep dropping, but beasts are everywhere and I DON'T HAVE TIME TO CHECK MY INVENTORY  :uhrr: :uhrr:

I agree about a certain lack of the feel of "impact" (compared to the awesomeness of the Monk or Barbarian in D3), but I only tried the Berserk so far, and only up to level 9 (but first impressions are important).

Good when you are doing criticals (as it should be) but otherwise not really satisfying, especially if you consider that you can already meet a high number of mobs that early in the game. I also acquired that "shadow wolf" ability but it seems boring to me (yeah, useful for the healing but otherwise pretty meh). I'll see what happens with the other classes; but the gameplay is very addictive: they got it just right  :heart:

I got my berserker using stormstrike (makes your hits arc electric damage to 2/3/4 enemies), the cleave/bleed thing, and howl. Put up stormstrike, charge in and alternate clickspam with the cleave/regular hits while keeping the roar debuff up. Big groups of exploding mobs.

Level 21 Embermage, just into act 2.

Likes:

• Loot - plenty of it, lots of uniques & sets, and it doesn't soul-bind so your alts are gonna be twinked.
• Skill trees - lots of variety.
• Environments - again very varied and not bad looking for such a low-tech engine.
• Side quests - things like Phase Beast Challenges and mini-dungeons with a quest giver outside.
• Pets - transforming with fishes and sending them to town to loot. Very nice.
• Addictive - distribution of quests and dungeons is just right to keep you going "I'll just do this one more thing..."

Dislikes:

• Still can't do multiplayer. Something borked when I linked my Steam account and now I can't log in and the password reset email never gets sent. Hopefully they'll sort it soon.
• Combat feels lacklustre. It's very unresponsive, almost like playing with heavy lag but not quite.
• No monster health bars. Needs a mod to enable this.
• Art style. Not my cup of tea, just personal preference. Looks cheap to my eyes.
• FIshing is a bit zzzzzZZzzZz. Easy enough to ignore though.
• Identify scrolls. Stupid and pointless mechanic, especially at 200g each - more than the item sells for most times.
• No stat changes listed on item comparison tooltips. Minor, but annoying omission.

My dislikes are mostly minor, temporary or easily modded I hope. Personally I strongly disagree that this is what Diablo 3 should have been. I think it gets some things right that D3 got wrong, but it's unlikely to have the longevity for me that I suspect D3 is going to have. I can see me playing this for a couple of weeks probably. D3 I think I'll be going back to for short bursts every now and again for years.

You may now commence with metaphorically burning me at a stake for heresy.  :awesome_for_real:

I downloaded this overnight, and got to play for just a few minutes this morning, but, I seem to recall seeing health bars, at least on enemies that lasted longer than a couple attacks.

Or do you want the health bars to be visible all the time, not just on mouseover?

For those complaining about combat feedback and not knowing whether attacks hit, try changing Combat Text to Normal from the default (sparse).

Edit: looks like Steam account linking is now working, at least until people break it again.

Monster Health bars are at the top of the screen on mouseover. There doesn't seem to be an option to have them in the world, which is a little weird.

Played for an hour or so today; got back home too late last night to really do much besides look at the char creation options before the need to GW2 set in.

First impressions:

While the game doesn't seem much higher tech than the first iteration, it's so pretty! High res cartoon textures on low polys really is a win-win situation, everything has a chunky charm to it and it all feels hand painted. Lovely.
I rolled an Outlander first as it seemed the closest to Vanquisher and for the most part, it is, really. It's missing the outrageous out of the box overpoweredness but the general style of play is pretty similar. Going to try all four classes of course but remains to be seen which is stickiest.
Targetting is iffy. I could really, really do with a reticule when I mouse-over a mob; half the time I seem to be missing even when I'm directly aiming and the range during the early game is hard to guage. I end up running into big packs of mobs because the game doesn't register my aim.
Loot pinata - I got a decent gold rare within about 15 minutes of play but it took another 45 to be able to wear the damn thing, heh. I like that ember is now plug and play; though part of me might end up missing the save and combine game. Yet to find an enchanter.

Regarding targeting:  Control click is your friend.  It keeps you in your current position unless you actually click on a mob, in which case it will move if you need to get in range to attack it.  Makes the game much more playable.

Playing Demo :

Oh, wow, so good.

It's impossible for me to not compare it to my experience in D3, and I'm not sure an argument would be valid for which is the better game.  However, I am having more fun with TL2 than I did D3, and I think the reasons come down to three things.

1.  The world feels more open and less on rails than D3.
2.  The skill trees are (for the time being) relatively permanent, which creates an attachment to the decisions I've made about my character.
3.  I'm getting upgrades from the game, not the Auction House. 

I understand the 'impact' complaints, though my 2hd engineer is decent. 

I found 2 so far (only lvl 11).  One in an outside area and one inside a dungeon.  Theres mobs around the enchanters so you have to clear them out first before you can make use of the enchanters.

I promised my wife I wouldn't buy any more games after GW2 and Borderlands 2, you bastard.

I have only found one golden key but 3 golden chests that I cannot open. What's the deal with the golden keys? Rare drop off purple mobs? I've killed every mob in the zones I've seen the chests in.

It's $20, cheapskate. :P

Not rare in my experience. Every chest I've found has had a key drop somewhere in the vicinity of it.  In some cases I've even had the key before I found the chest.  You've got to have missed picking something up or there was a hidden turn somewhere you missed. 

I'll note I'm playing on "Normal" and don't know if the rules are different on other difficulties.

They only drop from bird/mosquito looking enemies called Bitter Sprites. If you mouse-over them, you will see "drops golden key" listed under their attributes. In my experience they are usually found on the same map as the chest.


$15 if you organize or join a 4-pack purchase.

Get TL2 from Gamefly for $15.99 with coupon code. Only pain is you have to install their client to get the key. Then you just activate on Steam and never use the Gamefly client again.
http://slickdeals.net/permadeal/80318/gamefly.com-torchlight-ii-pc-digital-download

I came. I clicked on things. I made them die.

Playing engineer and this is some good shit.

What stats do engineers use? All of them?

On my embermage, I'm putting points into mostly focus, some dex and a little vit.

I seem to remember the stats being weird in the first one.   Focus would raise magic damage stats on your weapons for instance.

Everyone uses all of them. Torchlight doesn't use blizzard primary stat bullshit. But as far as I can see strength and vitality will be most important for an engineer.

Yep, all stats are important with some just being less important than others. Well; an embermage doesn't need strength much if they're not meleeing at all outside of what's needed to equip some stuff but other than that they're all alright.

Account password reset emails finally went out, I got 12 of them in my mail overnight.  :awesome_for_real:


Yep, health bars above their heads, in the game, all the time. Baffles me that there isn't an option to enable this.


Done that, still feels unresponsive. I've worked out what it is - it's the combat animations. The actual attack happens some frames into the animation, so there's a delay between hitting the button and actually firing/hitting/casting. Abilities should either have a casting time (and therefore a casting bar) or actually be instant. The way it is now - short cast times on everything but no indication of the progress of that cast time - feels slow, unresponsive and clunky.

Also... you can only respec the last 3 skill points you spent. No other option to respec at all. This is retarded.

Games! :drill:

Lol  :awesome_for_real:

That's why I always favour giving people the choice - we all have different likes & dislikes, we all play games differently. Still, as with most of my other quibbles I'm sure it won't be long until I can install a respec mod. :)

Ran out of demo.  Found 4 set items and 3 uniques.  Lots of fun was had and things were blown up.

Now to make another char.

Or you could spend $20 and continue on.

They don't have $ where he comes from.
He has to go out into the hills, sing to the sheep, gather their enchanted wool, and bring it back to his village.
Then the weavers there will spin the wool into cloth, which is then pressed, dried, and inked until they have Scottish money.

Then he robs a bank to pay for the game  :awesome_for_real:

FIFY

Regarding loot, I either have spectacularly bad luck with my Outlander or there is something somewhat borked with the loot table - I simply never get any weapon drops I can either use or are upgrades. I'm still using the first quest reward pistol as a main hand weapon. At level 12. I just fought Mordrox and it took me 10 minutes and about 25 potions to whittle him and his fucking army down.

I'm pretty sure every weapon is useable at some level, even if you don't meet the stat requirements.

At level 20, I've gotten 14 uniques.  Long story short, your luck sucks and never go to Vegas.

On the other hand, my Berserker and Engineer chars are going to be pimped.

I just found a whole section that I somehow didn't go through in Act I. Either that or I was sleep-playing through it. (The northern icy part out of the first town). Now I know why I'm too low for where I thought was the next place to go.

Three questions:

1) Can you replay zones/dungeons?

2) Is the loot much better in veteran mode?

3) How many characters can a person make?

Check the vendors, who can actually have good stuff in this game.

I was about to suggest the same thing. All of my armor and jewelry are drops but I bought both my weapons from the blacksmith.

I'm in Zeryphesh, level 28. I went from Ossyean Wastes (level 23/24) to the Salt Barrens (level 29/30). Am I missing something?

Is there a way to reset the map in Ossyean Wastes? I joined an online game and maybe that screwed it up?

I found a way. I joined a public game, and then quit. Then went back to playing single player. Map was reset.

I'm enjoying the Berserker far more than the other chaps.  The Engineer is fun, but loses a lot when shielded and both the Outlander and Embermage just don't work for me.

I think the whole 'stand at range' thing just isn't how I play my ARPGs.

I'm playing a build I like to call the 'lazy 'zerker' which is basically only ever using fist weapons like the one you start with and taking nothing but passive abilities.  The only skill I even use is the lightning aoe buff on melee.  Playing on veteran it's a surprisingly solid build. It might be boring for some but for me I just run around shouting "berserker barrage!" and it's awesome.

This game is much more pleasing to me than I expected by a large margin.

There's like 3-4 minidungeons in the area and 2-3 overland quest things in the wastes. I think there's a command to reseed your areas too.

A couple of questions:  Can you un-socket gems?  Is there a giant map I'm missing?

I mentioned that it was $20, and she wanted to know why if I was going to not buy a game, I'd not buy the $20 one.  I, of course, said that when I bought GW2 I wasn't not going to buy a game.  She only told me not to buy another game after she saw GW2 on the card, near to my PSN annual fee and the $90 oil change/air filter maintenance I did on my car.  Suddenly I looked like I was spending all of our cash, I suppose.

Really, though, I'm balls-deep in Borderlands 2.  I'll grab it on Steam soon enough, and if she complains I'll just give her cash on the spot.  Maybe I'll stick it in her mouth, I don't know.

Nah, that's not sanitary.

That screenshot of the loot filter, now THAT is how you raise the bar.  I was playing D3 and thinking maybe these assclowns didn't play Titan Quest and think "Hey, this loot filter is neat but I bet we, the Mighty BLIZZARD, can improve on such a simple idea! Mua-ha-ha!"  But no, it came down to Travis Baldree and the guys who invented Diablo.  Which I suppose isn't surprising.

Yes, you will unlock it at some level (10?) where you will have 2 guys, one who unsockets and destroys gem/keeps item and the other unsockets and destroys item/keeps gem.

They will appear in town.

They don't show up right away but there are a couple guys in town who unsocket ember (destroying the item) and destroy ember (unsocketing the item).

Someone needs to make a mod to let me import the music and sound effects from D3 to Torchlight II. 

Yeah, the loot filter is pretty cool, but I loot everything.  A bent copper wedged in that dragon's ass?  MINE.

This is such a fun game. Also, gambling can give unique/set items and has done so for me with reasonable frequency.

The 4 uniques alchemy gave me a hell of a unique set piece.  I'm collecting 4 more just to see if it always does it.

In act2 there's a Djinn dungeon you can repeat with a Chimera at the end that will always drop a legendary, lots of chests along the way too. I think I ran that place about a dozen times tonight, good stuff.

One of my legendaries is almost game breaking for me, which is awesome. it's a claw that gives a 45% execute chance, combined with my passive that increases my rage bar on execute I was in near constant berserker mode....



...and then a second one of those claws dropped  :why_so_serious:

Been playing a while with an Embermage, going with Prismatic Bolt as my major attack, using Elemental Attunement to synergize with it. It's really fun and keeps my Charge bar filled around 40% of the time. All the extra added status effects also really wallop bosses, and I can't wait to get other stuff that meshes well with it, like Elemental Boon or Death's Bounty.

One thing I really like is that a lot of spells with fixed damage (as opposed to working off weapon DPS) scale up with your level and not more points invested, which I find neat and can lead to some interesting one-point wonders.

Drat and Blast.  Steam won't give me my activation key until I download the whole game again.

That's fucking lame.

Why do you need an activation key? Did you buy it somewhere other than Steam or something?

The Demo I downloaded was from the main T2 site.  It says 'hey, don't worry, just pop in a key and I'm good to go'.  So I bought the full thing on steam, thinking I could just use whatever key it would give me and register it on steam that way.

No Dice.

Ah.  There appears also to be a shared stash bug.  If I was you, I'd get your stuff out there right now.

Before you lose, for example, just off the top of my head, 4 uniques and a shitload of gems.

 :oh_i_see:

What's the bug?

A legendary or a unique? (legendaries are red, uniques are orange).

I think that's the dungeon I just got an amazing unique staff from.

Torchlight II is everything D3 should have been. It's lootastic and that spells F-U-N.

I wouldn't worry much about the gems. I have way more than I can use in Act 2 now - I'm going to have to sell them or something.

My embermage is using Prismatic Bolt and that Blizzard thing, plus Elemental Boon and Elemental Attunement. So so so so so fun.

Uniques then(which is odd to have a pair of them) but yeah, they are all kinds of game changing. 

Yeah, I'm not that bothered, though I'm given to understand you can transmute later.  It's more the uniques that chaps my ass, especially the fucking awesome Hammer I was saving for my engineer later.

Annoying.

If you;re getting too many gems, the transmuter does a deal where you hand in three gems for one better gem. I find most of my gems get processed that way because not enough stuff has sockets.

You can also add a socket to an item by combining an unsocketed item with 2 gems.


I pushed hard to get to that Djini dungeon only to have "just" uniques drop.  I was coming to see if I'd done something in error and see you all figured it's uniques not legendaries. Curses!

In other news, the "combine 4 uniques" does seem to give better quality uniques than you find otherwise.  Just got a killer staff I can't use for a few more levels.

The transmuter doesn't give better gems I think, I think you just get a gem of a different type than you put into it. Basically for getting rid of the piles of similar gems you need to hopefully get something with more USEFUL stats rather than higher ones.

So I unlocked the gambler.

This is the very first thing I got from him:


Welp.  :oh_i_see:

Did you check both chests that contain your stash?  Each chest stores stuff separately.  I did that last night.  I rolled a new character and looked in one of my stash chests and found nothing.  Looked in the other and found it all.

Also it sometimes (frequently) defaults to the Consumables tab of the shared stash and not the actual tab with gear in it.

Three of the same type will give a different one. Four of the same type will give you back one of a higher quality.

Also, has anyone else found those "upgrade this weapon by getting kills with it" drops?

I've found two so far: some claws I'm saving for a Berserker, and a unique bow that levels based off of champion kills.

Yes, I found a 2h sword around level 15 that needed 20 kills.  When I did that it turned into a pretty unremarkable item.  Sold.

Cool - I was wondering what the result would be (or if it was like TF2 where you just racked up kills on it to show off).

Btw, I think I was wrong about the gems. Three gets you a random one, four of the same type gets you a blue gem, iirc.

So a neat little cameo

For some reasons item names have toggled off and I cannot for the life of me toggle them on permanently again, any help?

Green mag glass (probably red now) at the bottom left.

Yeah, I lost my floaty names somehow and had to toggle the magnifying glass a couple times to get them back.

holy shit....I just found notch's mine..



spoilered for awesomeness.

also found in it.

What, no screencaps?

Gave the demo about an hour. Doesn't look like a purchase to me, but I'll give it some more time to be sure.

Things I like better in T2:

- Loot is more interesting.
- Pet.

Things I like better in Diablo 3:

- Everything else.

Having to allocate stats on level up and having to tote identify scrolls around can both fuck right off. I'm also having a really hard time with the colors and distinguishing what is what at times. Game looks too garish for me I think.

I just got a Shotgun with 4 Gem sockets which was an upgrade my Outlander could use right now and now she rapes everything in her path.

"Everything else" is irrelevant in games that are just about amassing interesting loot. I feel like Diablo 3 is punishing me for playing it, and Torchlight 2 is rewarding me.

Yeah, Diablo III made me feel like a janitor who was clearing a messy world of monsters and sub-par items.  Monsters get killed, items get cleared away to the vendors. 

Very nearly everything you loot doesn't need to be ID'd, for what it's worth. The only things that typically do are uniques. I've got a good 20 or so ID scrolls sitting in my inventory, and I haven't bought a single one.

I mean, besides, your fucking pet can buy them for you, in whatever quantity you want, at any time.

Then why have them at all?  I'm not sure I get the point, except maybe that nethack did it, so diablo did it, so torchlight did it?  Seems like a vestigal game mechanic at this point...

You people realize that items selfidentify when you reach a target level for that item? Or you take a shortcut by spending 200 gold prior to that. Its the couriosity tax, and I'm completely fine with that. Also its more immersive than rightclicking on the item and suddenly knowing everything about it because the game says so. We forget that with all the streamlining, but these are still role-playing games.

Yeah.  There's also some respec bitching going on, despite that being a game design choice that, actually, you can use the console or mods to overcome.

Some people just like moaning.  Hell, I should know.  Installing this game has given me nothing but a weekend of pain.

Worth it though.

Man, it's too bad Runic didn't know that. They could have saved a shitload of money and time invested in all those models, effects and animations.

I'm dual wielding pixelated diamond swords, all other arguments are invalid.

Because it's like opening a present.

I really liked D3 until they started 'fixing' things that broke my enjoyment. And the end game. Hated that. Also hate the clueless devs - the more they tried to explain, the stupider they sounded to me.

As much as I liked D3, I like Torchlight II far more. The more I play it, the more I like it.

My outlander got some fun abilities at level 24.  Poison daggers and sandstorm.  I am now pleased with my class selection, and this game has become very fun.  Now I just need to get that leap ability asap.

The bosses are awesome.  Just the right difficulty so far on veteran, visually impressive, lots of stuff going on.  One boss felt like zoltan kulle mixed with the first phase of belial in D3.  Which was pretty damn hectic and fun.

If there is one thing they didn't really expand on in this game are the weird secondary spells. I mean, I really like the +Duel Wield, +Pet Power/Travel Time, +Elemental Resist, -Snare Time spells I have slotted but it feels like something more creative could've been done with it. Hell, why not go with the original version of D3's runes? Droppable runes you have 3-4 slots for max that modify one of your abilities to do something extra/different?

A quibble really; I can't wait to see how people modify the game. I'd be interested in seeing someone take a shot at adding the PoE potion system too.

I know you're being a snarky cunt, but I have to remind you of Nethack and all the other rogues that are still massively popular.

 :why_so_serious:

I hated my Outlander until I realised that I should have taken tangling shot from the start.

 :oh_i_see:

Fair warning for anyone who hasn't gotten to it yet: Act III will beat the stuffing out of you, at least on Veteran. My Embermage can still kill shit with a quickness, but I can get pasted just as fast.

I was actually sort of thinking of nethack when I wrote that, since if you write off all the bells and whistles of D3 as irrelevant, then that kinda means all the fancy shit in TL2 that distinguishes it from ascii roguelikes is irrelevant, too.  But clearly it isn't.

(and yeah, also being a snarky cunt. I will admit I find the D3 hate and accompanying TL2 worship to be a little ridiculously extreme)

((but yes, TL2 is a good game that I am recommending to friends))

The only gripes I've found so far are respec thing, and the 'hold left mouse button' function could work better, I find I have to reclick whenever a thing dies, also I'd like hold-clicking to pick up loot. Things die a lot and my finger hurts from the clicking.

The respec thing seems especially incongruous in a game that is so clearly set up around having continuous fun. Feels as if every possible corner has been rounded off in the cause of keeping it fast and fun. The fast part seems important, and it feels like Runic figured out that this is not a serious genre, it is really just one step up from a flash game, we will all get bored inside two weeks - so the game goes hell for leather with the noise and explosions from the first minute.

I can understand that, but look, from my perspective, Diablo III fundamentally failed to deliver on almost every level as a game.  It looked great, yeah, and had the required level of 'polish', but beyond that it was utterly soulless and, FRANKLY, unplayable for enormous periods of time due to the always on BULLSHIT.  The AH made it utterly pointless and from what I've heard about the endgame, well, tbh, I gave up getting there.

Thus far in Torchlight, I have kicked up the LAN with the wife, had fun as fuck despite my SHITTY internet connection and found more loot and fun in 8 hours than I've had with Diablo III since I bought it.  It's that simple for me.  Almost every single design decision in D3 sucked for me and sucked hard.  Almost every single one in Torchlight 2 brought it back to the Diablo 2 roots that I was looking for.  It's not perfect, natch, but there's simply no comparison in what it actually IS.  It was also a third of the fucking price.

For me.


Your opinion.  May.  Vary.

I don't agree that the loot is the #1 thing ARPGs are about, which is probably the reason for my disconnect from people on this one.

For me, I want a fun game. Detailed description, I know.  :awesome_for_real:
D3 was stolid. Poor design choices led to poor gameplay. The usual suspects, the AH, always online, poor items, and for me, uninteresting levels and things to fuck with.

T2 has better items, and lots of crazy shit going on. It's simply an amalgamation of good design choices that Blizzard failed to make with D3.

I don't hate on D3. For a single playthough, it's fun enough. But as the third installment of the Diablo franchise, it's simply disappointing.

See, I (with the caveat that I'm only a little more than an hour in to T2) find the actual act-of-playing-the-game stuff in D3 to be far better. Abilities feel more awesome, visually I find it a lot easier to tell what is going on, I find I really prefer the freely respec any time/rune system a lot better than T2's version, the game looks prettier, sounds better, etc.

I do think the genre is 'refined' enough now that a lot of this stuff is matter-of-taste more than black and white THIS ONE IS BETTER though.

Curious what class you are playing. I rolled a berserker and liked it so much that I benched my engineer. The pace of combat and the movement speed on the berserker (especially when enraged) is great.

For me character progression is the heart of an ARPG, not combat, so Torchlight 2 is the best recent entry to the genre.

Berserker.

For me Diablo 2 had two primary "sticky" factors - the Pavlovian response to cool loot, and trying different skill combos. I had fun trying to make a Teeth Based Necro work. Diablo 3, while it was a really pretty and polished experience, took those factors away. Instead of me restarting the game five times to try different builds, I got to try all five on my first play through. And the loot - yea, I played roughly 25 hours of Diablo 3 and I could not describe a single piece of loot I found to you. I had perhaps one moment of "Cool Shiny!" from a rare drop in Diablo 3, and it was obsolete 40 minutes later due to leveling.

Is TL2 the Tits and All That? Not sure yet, I've only played a few hours. I appreciate the fact that I have to pick a skill route and stick to it. If it turns out that I picked a shitty build, I can look forward to to trying something else with the reroll. D3 gave you no reason to reroll ever. I like rerolling. I had eight characters in WoW before I broke 50 with one of them.

Just a few hours in, I killed the first Boss with an Engineer, and I got a cool looking rare sword. It does significantly more damage than anything else I've found - one might even say its overpowered and unbalanced. This is a good thing. Who cares if its overpowered, it won't be in ten more levels, at which point I'll be looking for the next shiny. In D3, I never found anything that felt like more than a 5% improvement. In D3, I stopped picking up white gear after level 2. In TL2, I was using a white sword until I killed that boss, because with an ember slotted, it was the best sword I'd found. I was still picking up white stuff at level 11 - because it actually has a sell value. Why the hell do white items even drop in D3? At level 11 in TL2 I'm having to pick between two different Set Armors I've found (entire sets). Never found a single set item in D3.

Ok, enough rambling. TLDR: Rerolling is fun, "balanced" loot drops are not.

I had fun in D3, the gameplay was pretty solid and the music and graphics were second to none.  But the loot was disappointing and I really didn't care to get to Inferno to get the 'good drops'.

Guess I expected Robot Jesus.

T2 is just as fun, but also has great items I can use, no AH and, oh costs 1/3 less than D3.  If I had known T2 was going to be better than D3, I'd have waited.  

D3 is one of the reasons I'm not getting MoP Day One.  Blizzard has lost their shit/mojo/Force.  Think I'll wait and see what other folks here think of MoP.  I have T2 and GW2 to tide me over.  

Class design figures into it quite heavily for me, which was one of the main issues I had with D3. The only really interesting character was the Wizard, and that was because they finally dropped the 'elemental' caster archetype and went back to the D1-styled caster, with a varied repertoire. The other classes ranged from ok (Witchdoctor) to ohgodkillmenow (Daemonhunter).

It remains to be seen if the TL2 classes have interesting (and deep) design, as I've only played the Engi so far - and it has been awesome.

Someone on the Penny-Arcade forums found this, and I really really want it:

I got more time to play finally and I'm liking it.  I think it's fair to say it falls far short of D3 in a couple area's though.  Like abundance of abilities for one.  D3 was constantly throwing new abilities/runes at me.

TL2 gets the important things right though.

Minecraft area is the hidden zone in Borderlands 2 also. Good times. Minecraft in all the things.

I prepurchased and didn't even realize the game had gone live until I read this thread last night.  It scratches my just one more thing and then I'll go to bed itch quite nicely.  About the only problem I have is that it will be eating into my GW2 time.  I'm playing an outlander and the rapid fire ability combined with a nice shotgun drop is just crazy fun.

Christ, Shockbolts suuuuuuuuck. Low damage (25% of weapon DPS by default), huge mana cost (even more than the already costly Prismatic Bolt spam), and don't even build your Charge bar. I couldn't respec out of that quick enough.

My staff wielding melee embermage smacks things around in quite a satisfying way.  Putting points into staff -> reduces resists, elemental aura that inflicts statuses, plus elemental brands, and of course the magma mace.  Will pick up the flame aura that reduces incoming damage.

My problem as well, I just finished Fall of Cybertron a bit ago, and between games and overtime, my attention span is taxed. Slyfeind was all "Are you still playing Guild Wars 2?"  :oops:

How was Fall of Cybertron ?

I JUST noticed today that TL2 is only $20, why did no one point this out to me?  I was going to wait for it to go on Steam sale for like twenty bucks or less.  :grin:

May pick up a copy for me and my wife since TL1 is one of the very, very few "real" games she ever really got into.

This game has the perfect amount of Jay Wilson.

(http://cache.g4tv.com/ImageDb3/306317_S/torchlight-2-will-be-almost-four-times-larger-than-torchlight.jpg)

Plus a few comments in this very thread about the $20 price tag.  :grin:

Beat the game with my level 52 Prismatic Bolt Embermage, and started on the New Game+ while fiddling with the random dungeons. Only gripe so far is that my mage is so squishy. Even with 400+ armor across all resistances, 25% block chance (I use a shield), 24% dodge chance, and 3200 health, I die way too quickly. Large enemies can do more than 1700 damage per hit, with certain champions (Varkolyn brute champions especially) can do more than 2500. The Embermage doesn't have much in the way of defensive cooldowns, and sometimes you just can't Frost Phase in time.

I still kill quickly enough, but I wish I had more tools to deal with incoming damage.

Abandoned my Embermage until there's non-flagging respec available. Messed around a bit with an Outlander and some console commands/respec potions until I'd kind of picked a spec, then deleted and remade from scratch properly.

Glaive Throw is awesome. Elemental damage weapons - currently dual wielding wands - with Elemental Mastery and Cursed Daggers as an opener. Don't know how it'll survive in higher difficulty levels but at level 30 it's a totally overpowered spec.

I'm given to understand you can make a character called 'MacCheaty' and have him spawn respec potions, shared stash them, and then use them with no flagging from another Char.

Just a thought.

Yeah I saw a post about that over on the Runic forums. Apparently it does actually work.

Yeah I read that too, been meaning to test it. I've even made a couple of test characters (called "Potion Maker" and "Test Dummy") but then whenever I'm online and playing with any of my friends I forget because we're all too busy killing things.

I just tried this last night and I absolutely did not get a better gem back when I tried putting 4 of the same quality, same type of gem into the transmuter. It just ate 3 and spat out a different one of the same level, and left the 4th in the slot I put it in.

edit: also, I'm already wishing for more shared stash space. 20-something uniques and 3-4 nearly complete item sets are choking it up for the characters I plan on starting after I finally finish the game on my berserker. This game is actually surprisingly long. You don't really notice it since it doesn't divide the "overworld" sections up real neatly like D2/etc did and just makes them one massive fuck-off map.

I'll admit that I thought the space, particularly the shared stash, was rather pokey.  I think they'll probably end up patching in a growth mechanic.

Or someone will mod extra stash in, or you can just make item mules and REALLY relive your D2 experience.

What's the flagging do when you respec?  I did it the other night because I realized I had too many points spread across too many skills and it was killing me.  I'm not knocked off of any steam achieves or anything now am I?  I could give less of a crap about being kept from MP items.

From what I saw over at Lum's where one of the Torchlight devs posts, getting flagged for cheating doesn't turn off the characters access to shared storage.  I think that all it does is flag you as a cheater in multiplayer games so you might have problems getting into public games with strangers.  I don't ever do that so I'll respec whenever the hell I want.  :awesome_for_real:

Yeah, screw that then. I could give two squirts about random multiplayer.  I did it in D3 for achieves, no real reason to here.

And there goes $20...

Oh, is that all it does? Right, respec time for the Embermage then!

I'll second the need for more shared stash space. Like 10x as much!

Couple of links:
Transmuting recipes (http://torchlight.wikia.com/wiki/Transmuting_%28T2%29).
Skill planner (http://torchlight2armory.com/skill-calc).

Is there any sort of random online game? I thought it was just join a game you choose through the lobby, then you get plunked wherever you started rather than the instant teleport to the team thing in D3.

The only people I mostly ever play online with are you guys and all of you already know I cheat.

Just so people know :

Last night had an issue where I killed the manticore and wife had died at the start of the fight.  It hadn't flagged her as completed and her game was then borked due to, well, dead manticore.

What to do is start a LAN game and tick the 'randomise map' tickbox that repopulates the world.  Then you'll be able to rekill the beastie and get back to the same stage.

It's a little bit of a nuisance, but not too much so.

No idea, I haven't tried it at all. Hell, I haven't even done the online registry thing yet.

In other news the cable crapped out last night due to a lighting storm hitting the local relay.  I was pleased to be able to play my game while the internet was totally unavailable while I would have been fucked with D3.  It's the little things, sometimes, and fuck the folks in the old D3 thread who said "Online all the time" wasn't a big deal.  You know who you were.

On the upside, the Manticore will still drop good loot because bosses in this game don't stop dropping good shit after you kill them the first time!

Yes.

Two uniques, in fact.  One each time.

Suck on my big erect cock, Diablo III.

I'm getting together a 4 pack, PM me if anyone wants in.

Will be trying this tonight!

Finished the end of the main quest with my engineer, for some reason the last encounter seems to be based on the last mission of Freedom Force.

It all continues to be fun. Playing with the random dungeon-o-matic at the moment.

For those interested in specs, some thoughts on building a 2H melee guy with lots of pet support....

As a level 40-ish cannon engineer, I can definitely say that Spider Mines are not terrible. Quite the opposite in fact.

Do you just spam them for DPS or is there some nefarious purpose they serve that I'm missing?

Shock Grenade is thoroughly mediocre (but not useless!) and Fusillade is, in my opinion, one of the flat-out worst skills in the entire game, across all classes. The way its projectiles travel means it'll never hit bosses, and Blast Cannon outperforms it for every other task. Thankfully a cannon Engineer has more than enough really good toys to play with that Fusillade won't be missed.

I toyed around with a tank Engineer a bit, and I really dig it. Shield Bash (which can do crazy damage) for champions/bosses combined with Dynamo Field, either Overload or Tremor, and the Fire & Spark passive can make for a very hard to kill character that can dish out some surprisingly high damage. Get Med Bot up to at least tier 2, Force Field up pretty high, about 10 points in Aegis of Fate, 10+ points in Bulwark, and 5+ points in Charge Reconstruction, and you're pretty set. You can probably even get away without Overload/Tremor, but they're both quite nice for clearing huge packs.

I can't remember exactly how many I have, but with around eight points into it, they have a 50% chance to stun for 3 seconds, and a 50% chance to deal 33% more damage. Per mine. They have a 3 second cooldown, low mana cost, and hang around for ~20 seconds, and you can have up to nine out at once. Oh, and unless I'm mistaken, they are affected by +Minion Damage bonuses. So, DPS and crowd control both. Plus you know, SPIDER MINES! (I played a lot of Starcraft)

 * Edit: I guess what this actually translates to, is that you can pretty much keep a constant stream of them out while playing, so they work as a "tank" for you, in addition to your pet. The 50% aoe stun plus Coup de grâce is retardedly good when combined with the cannon blast ability thing, because it passes through multiple targets as well.

Berserkers are just kinda brokenly powerful in your first playthrough. I imagine they become squishy as the elemental attacks ramp up crazily, but I attack so fucking fast it's disgusting. I wish there was a high level version of The Haymaker unique claw, because it has a 45% execute rate and with my current stats I have 85%+ chance to execute (hit with both hands), and the execute animation for claws at least (I don't know if other dw weapons use the same animation) is really really fast and hits easily 3-4 times per second with both hands.

And it's usually a crit every single time since I have bonus charge rate from Battle Standard and 30-40% more from gear so I spend most of my time with my meter maxed out.

To give you an idea of how fast I attack, you can take a passive that lowers an enemy's armor and gives you extra armor for 3 seconds with every hit. This stacks and at about 5-6 points in at my level I get like 45-50ish armor per hit. On enemies tough enough to last more than 3-4 seconds (bosses and tough champions) I've gotten up to about 800 armor. Combine this with stormstrike (regular melee hits arc electric damage to other enemies, up to 5 jumps at tier 3), roar (debuff, slows/raises damage by x%), and the frenzy passive (a separate "berserk" that gives you a chance to move/attack 25% faster after killing something), everything kinda explodes.

Yeah, but the downside on higher level difficulties is that you can get swarmed and die quite quickly.

OK I experimented with Spider Mines and they are in fact, good.

Also found out that the transmuter will take two spell scrolls and return one random one. Which is an effective way to roll the dice more times for the spell you actually want.

I found more and better loot in 30 minutes of the Torchlight II demo than I did in a week of D3.

So apparently some numbers have been crunched, and it's been found that skills that use flat damage that scales up as you level as opposed to scaling off of weapon DPS can easily eclipse weapon-scaling skills in damage, even with shitty gear.

http://forums.runicgames.com/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=38358

I ran through a phase beast challenge in my early 20s and literally had 3/4 of my screen fill up with gold and loot, well before we even opened the newly spawned chests. Here's a screenshot from another player that played the same encounter, minus a few chests a little bit up on the screen:

http://imageshack.us/a/img685/6957/2012092800001.jpg

I realize that the vast majority of that is just gold, but it was still a wow moment for all of us playing.  I don't even think there was a champ that spawned in that encounter, and we still walked out with a few useful rares and enchanted items.      

Going back a few pages: nethack had identify scrolls because you had cursed stuff and equipping unidentified things was thus a huge risk.

What do you mean even with shitty gear?  Isn't it always the case that flat damage skills outperform weapon scaling with crappy gear?

I meant to say even with good gear.

Yeah I was getting a feel for that when I was playing with console-command leveled test Outlanders, which is why I ended up going with Glaive Throw. As far as I could work out (just by eyeballing the numbers coming off of the test dummy in town) the only things that made any difference to GT damage were character level, GT rank and things like +% poison damage/all damage.

I think the numbers and balance in this game are probably way out of whack, with things like Outlander Glaive Throw and Embermage Prismatic Bolts being head and shoulders more effective than anything else, but at the end of the day who cares? There's no RMAH, it's a super-casual game, all classes are capable enough to complete the game and the higher difficulty settings make no difference to loot or XP.

Don't forget the infinite summon time spider mines(a bug) for engies which keeps me from having to lift a finger if that's what I want to do.  What it boils down to is that it isn't balanced around anything - and I'm having fun with it.

So much of this game is utter fucking WIN.

It kinda makes Borderlands 2 look pitiful as a game honestly. I practically had to force myself to start BL2 up again a bit ago and I quit after doing like 2 missions since I sorta wanna start my other characters in TL2. I think I might play a bit more Borderlands here in a minute though and hope it gets more interesting.

I get that people loved borderlands but I couldn't beat the first one, it just felt like an mmo except without all the people.  maybe multiplayer is more fun? didn't feel right solo.

Looks like there's a gambling bug that's incredibly tempting to abuse:

1. Grab an item from the gambling pane (you need to have enough money to buy it to drag any item from a vendor)
2. Drag it over to the buyback window and carefully click the tab (accidentally bought an item and dropped it into my pet's inventory a couple times)
3. Drop the item on a free space in the buyback tab. This doesn't buy the item, but it identifies it, and you can buy it for the buyback price.

Tested it with rings since those are sorta low-impact items and yeah it works. Got like 4-5 unique rings. I think I won't abuse it further but that's kind of a headslapper.

Odd, that doesn't work for me.  Clicking on the buyback tab clears the item...

EDIT :  Ah.  Hold the button.  That worked.  And gave me unique gloves.  I'm NOT gonna use that ever again.  Game breaking methinks.

Gambling in general is a bit broken. You can use the fact that items show a red X on them before being identified to increase your unique hit-rate significantly. Just gamble with a class other than the one you want the item for.

Yeah, the item really should only roll up when you buy it. Wonder why they have unidentified items in both the gambler and the world itself rolled before you identify them?

I have to say, I'm the complete opposite and don't think TL2 makes BL2 look any better or worse on a whole. If it did anything it made BL2's loot seem weak and TL2's combat mechanics seem really, REALLY fucking dated which I'll call a wash between the two.

What I do think TL2 did is it made D3 look like D3 had combat responsiveness and controls were done right while everything else in D3 looks to be done poorly now even more so than before (name loot and skills). However, in TL2 I'm bored and forced myself to try a 2nd character to make sure it wasn't just the character I didn't like (for reference: 1st was an Outlander 2nd was a Berserker). I think TL2 has loot right (arguably too much loot right from the beginning even) and I still love the pet system, and the skill system is ok (I'm also someone who's torn on stats being tied to loot, it's fun when it doesn't go against your desired stats to use the best weapon you have in your inventory which bugs me). Beyond those things I was just bored to a point where I didn't even care about how much I wanted to play with the skills at later levels and how fun that could be potentially, and controls and responsiveness had a big part of that (such short range on guns also doesn't really help when there's so many damn jars and no damage numbers from mobs from regular melee attacks made the Berserker feel really weird but that could be a UI setting I didn't have set)

I guess TL;DR would be it's better than D3 as long as combat isn't someone's main draw to a game, and it would be equal to BL2 depending on the type of loot whore mob slaughtering a player wanted to do.

I got to the end of the demo and didn't come to any new conclusions - pretty much all it made me think was, 'too bad D3 doesn't have this loot style'. Might get it on sale later, it's certainly not a bad game.

Game still needs to add a reticule graphic on the cursor when I'm hovering it over mobs so I can tell if I'm actually fucking shooting/hitting it.

Game also needs a setting between Normal and Veteran. Normal is far too easy (I've died once, from simply not paying attention); Veteran is ludicrous if you don't have a shit-ton of super gear stashed to ease the pain. Starting a Berserker on Veteran is basically how you teach small children about death and its horrible inevitability without needing to buy and feed hamsters etc.

Really? I admit that all of my Veteran Hardcore dudes have died, eventually, but my latest Berserker got to level 30 or so before that happened, without significant twinking (my previous highest had only made level 20 and died with all the good stuff, as is Right & Proper.)

I do like the dual-tiering of items (level and stats) but it also tempts me too much to put stats in stuff I don't necessarily need, and the lack of Vitality might have something to do with all these Hardcore deaths...

Strangely, Wife and I are at 38-42 level range.  Her embermage is getting fucked up almost every time while my Engineer seems utterly invulnerable.  It's really a stark contrast - She has the exact same health as me, oddly, and her resistances, while lower, don't suck the root so we're a bit confused as to what's going on.  I suspect the mushroom forest is just doing for her with poison and that my automatic engineer shield is helping out a ton.

For those who haven't tried the Engy yet, he's massively fun.  Especially once you get the just unbelievable overpowered spider mines.

I've made it up to 24 on my Elite/Hardcore Engineer...  The thing I love about Engy's is there are just so many ways to go...

Currently my hardcore build focuses on pets for damage (lol spiders with + minion damage gear!) with everything else being sunk into defensive and support abilities.  I split stats between dex and vit and run a pistol/shield build (1 point in into shield bash to get out of trouble if I am stupid and get swarmed). 

Pistol and shield.

That hadn't even occurred to me.  I was still stuck in 'shield or two handed' head mode, even though I know they have skills for big guns in there.

See, this is the thing - If I wanted a mage running around with GUNS, I could.  Awesome stuff.  Even Wife unit had some pretty pointed things to say about this vs Diablo III.

I still haven't quite 'got' the Outlander yet tho.  He's not really working for me no matter what I do.  The Embermage I'm running just shoves points into magic Missile (prismatic bolts) and pumps up the elemntal passives to help.  It's great.

I've started an outlander and I think I'm going pistols on this run despite the fact I have like a baker's dozen of unique shotguns. Maybe I'll sneak myself a respec potion once I start getting in the range of the first unique shotty stat-wise since I played a pistol Vanquisher in the first game.

You can also go for a shield bash build splitting points between focus/vit and wielding a wand.  Little known fact:  shield bash gets its modifier from focus, so you will do a ton more damage than a strength/vit shield bash build.  The problem you run into is that shields have strength requirements which locks you out of the good shields until you level into them.

My Outlander goes with Shotgonne. Wickedly fun, with Rapid-Fire for Bossfights damage output.

Changed my Engineer from Big Cannon (which was easy mode) to Two-handed Tank (different easy mode) because he was too similar to my Outlander otherwise.

I love that I can replay each of my characters with completely differen skills. Looking forward to it.

Finished first playthrough with Outlander and had a bit of a play with the dungeon generator thing.

Don't have any urge to continue, either with subsequent playthroughs or alts. I dunno, it's fun and all but I'm not getting the same awesome robot Jesus vibe some of you guys are. I think the loot is a bit boring tbh. Yeah, there's lots of it, but rares & uniques don't feel particularly special. They just have more stats on them. There's nothing game-changing about anything I've found. Even complete sets give mediocre bonuses, there's no flavour for want of a better word.

I'm not entirely pleased with any of the 3 recent lootaholic games we've had released. Torchlight 2 has tons of rare/unique/set loot but it's all really dull. Borderlands 2 has tons of white/green loot which is 99.9% useless and almost no rare/legendary loot. Diablo 3 has the same issue as Borderlands 2, but was kind of ameliorated with the AH until the RMAH and rampant botting destroyed those as a source of decent loot. None of them have a story worth a shit, although Borderlands 2 is at least funny and full of superb characters. TL2 has no story at all, Diablo 3 has the worst story & writing EVER.

Out of them all I think D3 is the one most likely to get eventually patched to a state where it has some longevity and TL2 the least likely to reach that point.

I probably won't play it all that much more either.

But I have never understood why people expect these dungeon crawlers to last more than a few weeks and maybe replay every now and again. This doesn't mean I haven't had fun.

It isn't really a very deep genre.

You were all much younger when you played D2.

I'm also completely fine with a game providing me just a few weeks of enjoyment, especially at that price.

Too many games to play to worry if one of them will still provide me with fun in years.

There isn't much you could do to D3 to get me to play it again. Borderlands has no real randomness to it outside of the loot so it likely won't get past a single playthrough with a couple characters with me. I feel I've more than gotten my money out of BL2 however, so I'm satisfied with it whereas D3 I still feel pretty ripped off.

Playing an embermage now and oh god engineer was easy mode by comparison.

So, mucking about with skills, apparently the only skills that activate Staff Mastery's armor debuff are:

Magma Spear
Magma Mace
Icy Blast
Shockbolts

Which is kind of disappointing since the way Staff Mastery's tooltip is worded suggests that any skill that does damage based on Weapon DPS would activate it.

And the only Embermage skills that build Charge are:

Magma Spear
Blazing Pillar
Infernal Collapse (HUGE Charge, can almost max out the bar in one shot)
Icy Blast
Frost Wave
Prismatic Bolts

Just thought that'd be nice info to have in one spot.

If anyone's on the fence, I have a couple copies sitting at 4-pack price ($15 USD), just toss me a PM if interested.

My Embermage just uses Prismatic Bolt and the elemental boosts thus far.  Apart from one point in frost teleport, haven't needed anything else.

Wife is still getting one shotted.  It's a little sillly.

So your embermage is doing OK but not your wife's?  Sorry, only played Eng. so far so don't know the problems of the 'lesser' classes.  :drill:

Well, in fairness, mine is level 25 or so, and she's up at 41.  When we play together, I'm an Engineer who seems almost utterly unstoppable. 

But when the mobs turn their attention to her, she gets utterly sodomised.  It's very strange.

Don't be mean Ironwood. Give her one of your respec potions!

I did, but what do you respec into ?  I don't think there are any real survive skills for the embermage ?

I don't know about embermages. I guess she could look it up but that takes the fun out of it, IMO.  I just messed around with my Berserker until I had a survivable build that could live through the Salt Barrens in Act 2. Before I found that build I'd gimped myself so badly (by spreading skill points into far too many skills)  that I probbly would have had to grind myself up to 35 before I could do it.

You pretty much have to stick to a few skills and pump the hell out of passives that work well with them to be powerful so far from my experience.

My Berserker pretty much only uses the charge, cleave, Battle Standard, and stormstrike skills. Charge to get in/out, cleave to lay out bleeds or kill stuff right next to me, stormstrike to blow up chains of minions and smaller mobs outside of melee range. Battle Standard is just nice, but particularly for huge mobs and bosses so you can resist their stupid knockbacks. Works pretty well actually. The armor-stealing passive is pretty obscene with fast weapons as I mentioned; I could see you getting into the thousands of armor against bosses with it maxed out.

I did waste some points on howl however; don't do that. Howl is pretty nice but it doesn't last long enough IMO to be worth it.

I respecced into 'having my high level engineer ship hundreds of red potions to the mage'.

All the 'chance to freeze' abilities seem to help until the bosses. For the bosses I just run away and toss prismatic bolts over my shoulder.

Embermages are squishy, you have to dodge and back off and keep out of the melee.  It's not kiting as you can take a hit or two, but you can't let the elites and bosses say close or you're dead.

If you're terrible at that, pump Immolation armor as high as you can for more survivability since it grants 5% absorb at each tier.   I also keep the Hailstorm skill at 5 pts since that gives a nice chance to freeze or stun and debuffs mobs to elec/ ice.  A few points in Frozen Fate (chance to freeze enemies when one dies) doesn't hurt.

I haven't given death's bounty a try to see how that helps survivability, though.  Hailstorm & Frozen Fate have worked fine for me thus far.

ed:  Oh, I've also been pumping Elemental Attunement. Embermage seems very DOT based and that one ability does a ton of damage for me.  The increase to % of "Burn/ poison/ freeze.. etc" alone is worth the points, but tack on the increased chance for secondary effects and sometimes you just have to tag a guy once for him to DOT to death.  DOT, DOT, run.

Got bored of my Ember, so I ran an Outlander up.

I only put points into the poison corpse explosion and the shadowbats on death.  Two passives.

Seems fun, but that's because I've bee lucky with drops.

Death's Bounty was the skill that turned my Embermage into an unstoppable immortal.

Who was the braintrust at Runic that decided to make your limited skill buybacks cost so much money? Super fucking obnoxious.

It's stupidly expensive and you can't buy back enough points to save a truly botched build - which is why I just went for the cheat mode.

Frost Pillar. If you've got a squishy Embermage who's having surviability issues (as you probably will on most difficulties at 60+), Frost Pillar is a godsend. I swapped out my 11 points in Astral Ally for Frost Pillar, and I don't regret it even a little bit.

If you have a build with the points to spare for it, getting tier 2 or 3 of Immolation Aura isn't bad either, if only for the % damage reduction, which is far more powerful than flat Armor.

Speaking of Tier 3 in stuff, I wish they all didn't require level 92 to get the final one.

By Frost Pillar, do you mean Ice Prison?  I have had a tough time getting into my embermage and would like to have a focus with him before really investing time.  What starter abilities did you use?

Ice Prison seems to be a bit of a good 'un.  It manages to keep them back and can trap the big chaps.

As to the respec screaming, just get some respec potions.  I have a shared stash file full of them which I can swap in and out as I need them.  It was a bit of a silly idea and it's a shame you need a cheat, but even Diablo II took years and years to patch in a full respec option.

I meant Ice Prison, yeah. I don't know why I keep thinking of the wrong names of things.

For starter abilities, I went with Prismatic Bolt and it's basically been my only attack since.

Couple of links:

Respec mod (http://forums.runicgames.com/viewtopic.php?f=48&t=40603) - potions available on general goods merchant for both stat and skill respeccing. Doesn't flag you.
Increased item stash mod (http://forums.runicgames.com/viewtopic.php?f=48&t=40418) - allows you to put items in the spells/consumables tabs. Bit buggy.

It's early days for mods yet so these are a bit rough, but it's a start.

I do like the way the enchanting works.  I've found a socket chap and an electrician in the dungeons who have made one of my maces massively overpowered for its level.  Downside is that gems have level restrictions, so I can put better gems in the item, even though it outperforms almost everything I've found since.

Electric damage with an engineer is just mega overpowered, given the ability that increases your damage to stunned targets.

Just finished the game with my embermage (level 52? 54? something like that). Died 4 or 5 times since hitting the last town.

Used Hailstorm and Prismatic Bolts as main attacks, added Elemental Boon and Prismatic Rift, got a 1point Ally, and 1point Blazing Pillar (for charge).

Also used 2 scrolls: Elemental Overload and Elemental Protection

Very squishy but mostly ran from everything, while storming and bolting. Used a lot of potions (ended up buying 20 or so toward the end).

Had amazing luck on drops in the second Act and crap luck since.

Now I want to play something where I can smash things and take hits - suggestions? Berserker or Engineer? Builds/skills?

Definitely Engineer.

Personally I went for Heavy Lifting and Coupe-de-Grace for maximum consistant damage output with Healbot, Bulwark and Aegis of Fate for Survivablity.

Ugh, I really want to slip into the Hexenjaeger (http://torchlight2armory.com/search?i=hexenjaeger) armor pieces on my Embermage, but the slightly-lower-level 7/10 piece Sentinel (http://torchlight2armory.com/set?i=SENTINAL) set I'm sporting happened to be rolled with nearly two thousand health in enchantments on it.

Not sure what to do with this one.

Also:

 :awesome_for_real:

Class.

Well after some gemming shenanigans, I managed to get the Hexenjaeger armor stuff I had along with the few pieces of the Emberweave (http://torchlight2armory.com/set?i=U_EMBERWEAVE) set done up in such a way that I only lost about 700 HP instead of the 2000+ I lost before, and now I have much higher mana and damage to boot. Now I just need to find some fire ember and shore up my now-hideous Fire armor stat. And I look fucking rad to boot:


I normally use a wand+shield, but that doesn't make for a good character shot.

Not sure if I posted in here yet, but my girlfriend and I are enjoying the game greatly. Have 30ish Berzerker and I have focused mainly on Raze and the Wolf Shade skills (with some points in basically all the passives). I use a mana on hit gem in my offhand Axe that allows me to spam Raze. Been focusing lately on crit/execute. I just switch between Axes, swords, claws depending on when I get a big upgrade. Keeps it interesting!

All my fiancee seems to do is walk around and machine gun everything with rapid fire. Works for her, I guess!

So anyway, i love the loot in this game. I like the stat juggling. I've found uniques (unlike D3) and it feels.....GOOD  !!!

It's basically a gigantic lootfest with some questionable balance, which is fine by me. As long as I get pleasantly surprised by the rng on a semi-regular basis and alternate between fighting tough enemies and feeling like a god as I slog through weak enemies it's all good.

Still having immense fun with this.

Just thought I'd let you all know.

Didn't want xcom to unlock until the 12th anyway.

Still fun. My emberdudette is starting to cruise through the forties. Prismatic bolt kills non-bosses in 2 hits and charge mastery provides endless mana. Starting to get into the stock of uniques my engineer stashed away, plenty of +plus elemental damage% goodness.

Ice teleport is proving an amazing survival skill. As is the prison thing.

My Engineer uses Seismic Slam (aoe) which stuns enemies.  Then I use Coup de Grace on the toughest enemy which drops great electrical damage to stunned enemies.  I also add in Fire and Spark which adds even more damage to fire and electrical damage.  This is more than enough to cruise through normal enemies.  My Spider Mines also benefit from these fire buffs with their fire damage.  I also have Heal and Gun bot, and Blast Cannon for my ranged needs.

The only downside to this spec is that bosses take a while to kill, they seem immune to stuns.  I do feel very tanky though, so I just stand there and wail away on them with Gunbot summoned to add firepower.  The passive skills rock.

So yes, I love the Engineer.

No they do not, they are considered a "companion" and only benefit from +minion damage, same with gun and sledgebot.  Actually that's wrong, the dot does benefit from fire and spark!!!!   Actually that may be wrong as well, focus and +fire damage definitely do not work, but fire and spark is untested.  I'm a dedicated engineer myself but I am getting a bit frustrated with traps ending the career of my hardcore elite engy's!

My Spider mines stun like hell, and I've added a metric shitton of electric damage, so I suspect the mines benefit from this...

Man, my pistol outlander is getting the shit owned out of her on Veteran. My guns are reasonably up to date and my equipment is good and I just do shit for damage and take tons myself. Rune vault works okay on some mobs but it seems to not work on bosses which is well, not helpful at all.

Not sure if I want to take tangling shot or the wall...

It's also not 100% clear what stats I should weight heavily; Dex is absolutely required of course since all the good weapons/equipment require it, but strength/focus are often secondary requirements on Outlander-specific uniques as well, and of course vitality is key.

http://forums.runicgames.com/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=35599

I've been doing this.  You can use a pistol or a wand.  I haven't put a single point in anything but focus.  It's kind of glass cannony.  But with Repulsion Hex, you don't get meleed alot.  And when you get into trouble drop down a Stone Pact and it's usually enough to even tank a little of the damage and then run around until you get your health caught back up.  I'm up to level 60 something and I'm having virtually zero trouble outside of the occasional accidental gib here and there from being silly.  Glaive Throw scales very well even with only 5 points.

Once you get enough points into Venemous Hail it starts to feel like a Meteor Sorc ala D2.  Albeit VH doesn't really feel like it hits that hard.  But it's still enough to put damage in places you don't have line of sight.  Then just mow down the oncoming traffic with Glaive Throw which is the build staple.

What turned me off in Torchlight II is that all the builds in the end need lots of focus, and not really anything else. If you try to melee or shoot, you just get gibbed after about level 50. It's all about skills, and they scale off focus better than anything else.

Found a red! Wife is so jealous.

http://torchlight.wikia.com/wiki/Two_Thousand_Maniacs! (http://torchlight.wikia.com/wiki/Two_Thousand_Maniacs!)

deadlink - the ! in your link is not part of the URL and needs to be. 

Oh, and grats!

Fixed, and thanks!

I wonder if that's what's killing my Outlander. Things are getting mighty fucking obnoxious in Act III, and I'm starting to dislike playing.

I'm playing my Embermage now and I'm actually capable of killing stuff pretty easily focusing entirely on fire (with Death's Bounty as the only outlying active ability), but I have ridiculously good equipment and I can still get nearly instagibbed on veteran. I have like 360+ armor and 200+ resists for everything early in ACT TWO and I can still get owned if I get cornered.

Edit: I just scored a pretty ridiculous necklace so I'm even more powerful now.

http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/1137419435243144878/D761FE8A03C10780DB9B0C712905E807E240959B/

Finished the campaign on normal. I've decided that I hate allocating stats and skills. I wasn't fond of it in D2, and I've grown to hate the various iterations of the system in games over the years. If D3 did one thing right, it was ditching the retarted stat and skill allocation garbage.
The game got pretty grindy towards the end of Act III for me, and I hate having movement critical gameplay in a game with click-to-move. Clicked on a monster instead of an open area? TOO BAD!  :uhrr:
But aside from that it rocked.

And the story was way better than D3.  :awesome_for_real:

Still in act 2, with armor in the 400+ range and 300+ resists and I still get instagibbed off and on. Wowzers.

Also I now have so many fire spells I can pretty much set the entire screen ablaze. I was getting framerate issues in the Luminous Arena for some reason too.

Try investing in some summon spells for you and/or your pet. I find that having some Imps or Zombies or whatever to give some space helps tremendously.

I found that a lot of use of the aoe ice stun spell kept me alive, but I don't think I was playing on veteran.  Do the mobs become stun immune on higher difficulties?

I have a strong suspicion that it actually depends on how much hp they have. I went through Veteran with my ranged Engi practically stunlocking everything with Spider Mines, Stomp, and a cannon, yet the bosses had a much lower stun rate even with some skills having a 80%+ percentage. You could still stun them but much less frequently. Oddly enough, Blind abilities worked much more often.

 * Edit: that is to say that some bosses could also be stunned more often, but they were also the more glass-cannon types; high damage output but low hp. Conversely, the high-hp ones seemed to get stunned less often.

$10 today. Pay $10 and get a better game than Diablo 3 which we all were dumb enough to pay $60 for.

THIS.

Does it improve vastly after the demo? Because the D3 I have installed is a vastly more entertaining game to me than at least that part of Torchlight 2.

EDIT: Whoops, I thought this was the Steam sale thread. Feel free to disregard any derail this might have caused.

D3 demo is the best of D3, it doesnt get any better, imo TL2 does get better.

Yeah, that's how I look at it too.  I haven't actually played the Torchlight 2 demo, but I would imagine if it's the first couple of missions, you're losing out on a game that actually does get better in pretty much all areas.  Character Development, Monsters, Loot (though even I won't try to tell you the story is anything to write home about.)

I bought Diablo 3 on the strength of the demo, since up to the Skeleton King, it's interesting and looks like it might go somewhere.  It didn't.

I'm with Ingmar on this one, I played D3 all the way through on 4 folks, have 3 of them to paragon 5ish.

Could get past the desert in T2, just got terribly bored, not sure why.

I could maybe understand getting bored by it, if that type of game bores you.

Being bored of it while still playing Diablo 3 is nuts tho.

I left D3 when TL2 came out and haven't been back to D3. I go back to TL2 whenever I get a Diablo itch.

Torchlight isn't BRUTAL and METAL enough and clearly is the inferior game for it.  Goddamn carebear color-fest with its awful cartoon-like graphics and useful item drops.  I actually completed a set before hitting the level cap and grinding for 60 hours! How the hell can you call that a game!:?!

 :why_so_serious:

Thing is, I LOVED the D3 aesthetic, I enjoyed the brutal and metal but in the end, it's substance over style for me.

ADOM is better than TL2 -and- Diablo3! /troll

Anyway, I think D3 vs Borderlands2 would be a more fair comparison. Similar price range and all that.

I agree.

Is this like D3 in that once i finish a difficulty i move on to the next one, or is my character "finished" once i beat the game with him in any difficulty?

You can either consider the character "finished" and stop him there, or you can move on to New Game+, where enemies start at a base level of 50 and loot is scaled up accordingly. There's also New Game++, New Game+++, New Game++++, and so on.

The difficulty you pick on character creation is the one you're stuck with. You can get around that by either cheating with the console to swap difficulties, or make a LAN game by yourself, which lets you choose the difficulty.

Also an area called the mapworks opens up after you complete the campaign if you want to stay on the current difficulty level and not do the campaign in order again. You buy randomized maps from a vendor in a system that's sort of like the one from Path of Exile; completely randomized maps that can be selected from any of the tilesets in the game, with stats (like better/more loot/gold, but mobs do more damage/a specific type of damage/have more HP/etc).

Easily worth the ten bucks.  Very easy to play small bits and make progress.  Worth the standard rate if you really enjoy this style of game.  Well done Runic.

1) I didn't like the choice of characters.
2) I didn't like the ability selections.  I could see how to make a decently powerful character, I just didn't feel like I could put something thematically and have it work.  Best path was gaming a bunch of different abilities that had little to do with each other thematically.
3) I didn't like way the 'tree' worked. Not a big gripe here, really, but since I already disliked the ability and character selections, this is just more to not like.
4) It bothered me that auto-attack was not something that was productive in anyway at all.  Honestly it probably wouldn't be a big deal if I liked the abilities.

So 'bored' was a poor choice of words.  I love Diablo-likes, loved T1, was put off by the T2 design decisions and ended up not getting any further than the desert.  Y'all seem to love it though, so apparently it's just me (Guild Wars 2 and Secret World left me flat as well, maybe I'm just in a game-loving slump).

1 - Ok.  Because Shaky McParkinsons was a great choice in D3
2 - I'm not even going to ask what the 'theme' was that you managed in D3 either.
3 - Wat.
4 - :psyduck:

I'm going to stick with the 'nuts' theory.  Diablo 3 was either exactly the same or worse, depending on your point of view.

Also, the Democrats are just as bad.

My thoughts mirror yours Typhon (GW2 and TSW also).

Still playing, now on my 3rd character which is a 2h Engineer.

Unlike Embermage and Berserker which were pretty easy for me to find a small set of skills to focus heavily on, Engineer seems to have just a shitload of good passives so I'm all over the place. Fire and Spark, the Armor bonus passive, supercharge passive, 2h buff passive, charge->HP passive, etc are all great. The melee tree actives however I've been a lot less impressed with so far.

For 2h though I noticed that slow weapons suck. I mean, the front-loaded damage is great but when stuff has huge knockbacks (i.e. all the fucking bosses and most champions) I've gotten knocked away before I could swing over and over and over again when rocking a slow two-hander.

What is ADOM?

Ancient Domain of Mysteries.

It's a roguelike and it's awfully good though awfully hard.

I never cared much for ADOM.  Nethack, Moria, or Angband were much more my style.

I'm also enjoying the game more on Casual.  I can play on Veteran or Elite, it's just that making enemies giant tubs of health that can sometimes gib you isn't terribly fun for me anymore.

 :oh_i_see:

We all get old and have 'other shit to do' eventually.  Welcome to the club.

Just got this, fired up an Embermage on Veteran. This is the Diablo 3 I was looking for.

I picked up the 4-pack during the Black Friday sales and now I've been playing this in 4P-LAN mode with my wife and our friends in few-hours at a time sessions over the past few weeks. We've played 3 or 4 times, have gotten to ACT2 and killed the Manticore and are having a good time. The three of us who bothered with D3 are finding this a lot more fun and interesting.

The respec thing is a bit stupid, but I've just decided to summon potions instead.

The respec thing is so bad. Also horrible? If you drop an item out of your inventory other players wont see it and therefore can't pick it up. Instead you have to use a trade every time you want let someone have a piece of loot.

I just got into the console and so I've spawned respec potions on Cheaty MacCheat into my shared stash. The trade thing hasn't bothered us. I guess we're used to that sort of thing via WoW etc.

Yea this is what I ended up doing; it's silly but not a huge deal. I've only had to do two respecs so far anyway.

I switched from my Embermage to an Engineer pretty quickly as I wanted something more melee oriented; made a female named Winry (pet: Owlphonse) because the random appearance I got looked perfect and now I get upset whenever I have to upgrade to a non-wrench. Got her to the 30s but kept finding a ton of Berzerker gear; I didn't like the look of the 'zerker skills at first glance but rolled one up anyway. Holy shit, I'm an unstoppable killing machine. I almost wish I'd turned the difficulty for the 'zerker up to the one above Veteran.

There are so many things about this game that I love: plentiful oranges, the phase beast portal things, hidden rooms in dungeons, etc. aside from things brought back from D2 but absent from D3 (gambling, transmuting, sets). Haven't tried multiplayer yet but I'm pitching it like crazy to my buddies.

One question: how does dual wielding work vis a vis skills: do they go off your main hand weapon's DPS or the average of the two?

What are you doing with that Berserker that really clicks for you? I've tried them a few times but couldn't really get into them.

They alternate attacks, unless you get an Execute, in which case you attack with both weapons.  They have to be similar types, such as two melee or two pistols, to do so.

I dropped the starting skill and went with the first skill in the third tree.  The charge is just fun as hell.  Putting points into the second skill on the same page which summons a badass looking spirit wolf that heals you.  Then the rest of my points go into the passives, but I actually hate having a lot of active skills in these games.

I'll go with whatever paired claw or melee weapons I find that are best, although I heavily favor Vampiric as the primary stat.

My pet is a badger.  It's the only reasonable choice for a Berzerker.

Like Lanty it's a lot of passives: I keep Eviscerate and Shadow Burst at max, with 1 point in Raze for bosses and a few in Chain Snare to help keep the mobs packed up. Eviscerate is my primary attack, I just use SB for healing. Blood Hunger and Executioner are the two passives I've got the most points, and I've got 1-2 points in most of the others. Rampage is awesome but doesn't need a lot of points because you're killing tons of things at a time and extra points just make it happen sooner.


I can't tell if Ice Cold Steel is useful for my build or not; does it add ice damage to my melee attacks, or only improve existing ice damage?

When I made my zerker I went with almost all passives and only leveled eviserate, stormstrike, the knockback charge skill, and battle standard with a few points wasted in the debuff shout.

Duel-Wield claws with the passive duel-wield, crit, and weapon expertise spells. Pop stormstrike and just wade in, hitting eviserate to bleed tougher enemies and the charge to move around within clumps. When your attack speed gets high you're just obliterating groups of mobs with stormstrike.

It's kinda cool how you can end up with pretty cool looking characters without any sort of farming. These are all my characters with their actual equipment, I'd say 60%+ was found by the character wearing it, and the rest are uniques shuffled into the shared stash.

Still waiting on the tools. Have a feeling I'll be waiting a long time, then be disappointed.

I can't really figure out a good skill build for the Outlander; mine is a shotgun/cannon user just using passives with a point in the jump away skill. I'd planned on focusing on the Shadow minions but the poison breath seems to suck. I'm thinking a cannon Engineer is closer to what I want to play, but I'd still like to know what I can do to make Outlander fun.

My GF didn't like Outlander at all, then tried the engi and fell in love. FWIW

My enigneer got a blue cheapo pet tag at lvl 34 that has a 25% chance to stun.  I can't say enough about how overpowered this thing is; the damage I can do to bosses in 2 seconds uninterrupted is amazing.

Outlander frankly seems to kinda suck. Now that I have a bunch of points into passives that boost my weapons of choice (dual pistols) and two enchanted, gemmed, fairly powerful uniques I can kill shit but I'm super squishy EARLY in Veteran which does not bode well for the latter half of the game where some of my other characters have had ridiculously broken equipment in every slot + huge armor/resistances and STILL got obliterated at a moment's notice.

Mob balance just seems a bit off at the end. The endless hook-spamming dwarves that hit like trucks are fucking irritating. The penultimate level where the dwarves give way to the netherim things has usually been easier barring some bad luck.

My Outlander has been fine.  I use dual pistol, Glaive, and pump up my Shadowlings and other passives.  My pet I give all kinds of minion abilities.

Genuinely fun game, this. ARPGs aren't really my cup of tea, I only really played D3 because my friends did, but TL2 "gets it", as it were. I only wish it were a little more responsive in combat. Waiting for animations is as annoying here as it is in LotRO.

And yeah, mob damage stacks a little unintuitively. Occasionally I get smeared in an instant, having done fine for several dungeon levels. Just bad luck with cast timers and shit, I expect, but it can feel a little unfair.

Also agreed on it graphically being very consistent. Class-suited gear just seems to fit together. This isn't even close to a proper set, yet looks nice together:

That's a good look.

+elemental % damage is broken as hell on embermages. I have something like +130-140% fire damage on my fire-only embermage and I am the definition of a glass cannon.

It gets better if you start to add in the staves skill that lowers resistances and ranks in elemental attunement.   EA seems like such a small damage tick but you can have ALL of those effects land at once.   At 10% chance to burn/freeze/poison/shock plus -26% to their armor even elites health burns down quick.   You just have to understand you're not alpha damage but relying on DOTs.

Plus Thunder Locus is fucking OP on single targets and only gets more so as its able to hit more.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiLSOUHIQl4
Incredible build to xploit spell procs on gears

Difficulty seems to spike in Act 3; my Berzerker used to be an unstoppable killing machine but now I get gibbed all the time, even by normal mobs.

There is something weird about this game visually. When I am outside in the above ground area (I'm only in the first chunk, mind you), the mobs just do not pop out enough for me, which is driving me a little crazy. Also, the stupidest thing in the world that bugs me: They let me pick what my cute animal friend gets to look like, then they add the fish thing and imply my pet should never NOT have a stupid fish buff on. :heartbreak: My engineer wants her ferret to look like her ferret at all times, dammit!

Otherwise I like it pretty well, although I don't super love how building a character works (I don't really like assigning stat points, and I especially don't like how respec works in TL2, so I'm paranoid I'm fucking myself up, etc).

Mobs blending into the background in outside areas aside, though (I didn't have that problem when I was in a cave, for example), I really love the art style. A lot!

I almost never use potions for my pets.  Give them a heal spell and they're pretty much unstoppable.  They won't be winning the game for you, but they're not going to die before you do.

The only one I like to use is the mimic one, really.  :why_so_serious:

Somehow I have a level 30 character but never realized I could give spells to my pet... Do you just throw a spell scroll in their inventory?

On a side note at 30 with an engineer and still can't decide if I like melee or canons better and my build is all over the place as a result. Leaning toward melee though. If I ever decide I'll suck down one of those respec potions from the mod someone mentioned.

And while I can't walk by a fishing hole without drying it up, my ferret has never not been himself, so I sympathize with "it's my ferret and he's a ferret dammit"

To have your pet learn a spell, put a spell scroll in its inventory and right click it.

Also yeah, most of the pet transforms suck anyway. The unique ones are great. I haven't found any elementals yet though...in the original transforming your pet into an elemental was awesome.

So it's mostly just that first chunk where I have the blendy-mob problem, I guess, once I got into the snowy areas and the desert and stuff, it's been fine. So that's good!

I keep waffling between outlander and embermage, I don't know why. So I have two characters at roughly the same level as a result. I need to try out the canon thing on my engineer, I might like that better than the meleein'. The GAME wants me to make a berserker, I have a bunch of oj's restricted to that class. :P

And CaptainNapkin, I am pretty much the same as you. I see a fishing hole, I MUST FISH IT ALL UP. But it's pretty rare that I actually transform my pet. Because my pet is perfect as s/he is, dammit!


EDIT: I should probably add that right now I'm just dicking around on Normal difficulty while I figure out what I like, so I haven't had the "my outlander is squishy" issue yet.

AUGH

I TAKE BACK EVERYTHING NICE I THOUGHT ABOUT THIS GAME

ROACH DUNGEON

WORST DUNGEON

ARGHGHGHGHGHGHGHGHGHGHGH

Hahahaha.  I was the same way.  There wasn't enough fire to give it a proper scouring.

Ingmar kept laughing at me because I kept going "AUGH FUCKING ROACHES ARGHGHGHGHGH" every two seconds.  :heartbreak:

Just got the game today, was on a steam sale and it is awesome!

Are the dev tools out yet? Runic has been deathly silent since release. Last I heard there's a new patch coming that actually adds more content, including new tilesets, armor, etc.

I've seen no sign of G.U.T.S. though any time that Runic reply to the question of when it will be released, they say that it is one of their major priorities, so we're hoping for the big patch you mentioned.

I want it so that SynergiesMOD will be more stable and so I can add more recipes.

I wonder what the deal is. Maybe they're decoupling whatever bits deal with their netcode or something? Because as far as I know they literally didn't license any middleware for TL2; the engine is an even more modified OGRE3d I think which is an open source engine.

I get the feeling they're missing the boat here.

Its already missed. PoE is just a better game for everyone but the most casual of casual but the thing is you don't get buzz or word of mouth from those players so when they get around to releasing something nobody will care at this point. People are already accepting how bad d3 is and going back to it at this point and having the fun there is to have.

Most people I know outside of here have pretty much uninstalled D3 and written it off as shit, hoping the first expansion unfucks the game as much as possible.

TL2/PoE are great, but man Runic kinda disappeared off the face of the planet right about at release outside of their pretty quick bugfixing. PoE's devs are doing it right in that you stand a reasonable chance of being able to talk with the actual Devs or at least their CMs in general chat if you're on at a reasonable time in NZ's timezone.

What ?

-POE is best for those who miss d2 days with no respecs, complex builds, complex items, items that make builds etc. Its d2 with more d2. It has a good following of very hardcore audience that create some hype and word of mouth with streams and the races are a great draw to.

-D3 has omg Blizzard factor the bigger budget so it can create its own hype and is the prettiest and most casual friendly of the 3 games.

-This leaves TL2 with no niche to fill and therefore no reason it will pull players away from the other two games.

It still fills the "I can play it offline" and the "When I log in I am at exactly the same place as when I logged out" niche.

Which is a damned important one to some of us.

Also, PoE: Grimdark for the sake of Grimdark.  *yawn*

Indeed, I usually play PoE until I get disconnected for the first time, then I play Torchlight 2 for the rest of the evening if I have a day where my Diablolike itch wants to get scratched.

I couldn't get into T2 at all because I found the world so bland.

I have no idea how anyone could find TL2 'bland'.

Needs more blood and pointless skulls and halfnaked chick and monsters with boobs!

Fuck me, I've just had a wee glance at PoE and that talent tree.

Wheee.  That talent tree.  Because what I really need is a second job.

PoE takes bland and grey to a new level.

I would have given it more of a chance, but the fiancee couldn't stomach the inventory system after being spoiled with TL2. She is OCD about picking up and selling whites and shit. And PoE's inventory does kinda suck.

TL2 just seems more fun. Maybe I'm just not the gamer I used to be...

I'm okay with PoE's inventory (yeah, it could be better...) because they give me four pages of real stash.

Its not fun because standing in a corner shift clicking would feel the same as hitting mobs does with most weapons/attacks/skills. Its a very "floaty" for lack of a better term game and that makes it pretty shit.

But I think once art direction and offline mode become the complaints I've proven my point. TL2 most popular ARPG in old folks homes with no internet. Good for them I guess.

Its simply the most distinguishing feature that immediately springs to mind.

But choice is a good thing, so good for everyone that there are both Torchlight 2 and Path of Exile for interested parties.

Diablo 3 is still my favorite of these games because it gets the fundamental mechanics of using skills and fighting monsters right.  I do think the loot in PoE is better in some ways.  I'm not sure what Torchlight 2 has to offer -- it might have the best level design in terms of compromising randomness and aesthetics.

This basically sums up my feelings.  Path of Exile has the most interesting character building and loot (which are combined to a degree).  But actually playing Diablo feels snappy and responsive and has that level of polish in terms of actual gameplay that I really like, and which blizzard tends to do better than almost anyone (including WoW and Starcraft 2).  Torchlight II is solid, but doesn't do anything "the best" in my opinion.   Offline is nice, but in practice this isn't a feature I care a lot about. 

Every time this thread is bumped I read more discussion about which one of these games is better, or whatever.  It reminds me of days of yore when I was forced to reinstall Diablo 2 every six months because there wasn't anything else in this genre worth playing.  And then I think:  First World Problems.

You want us to chat about how our radiotherapy is going and if we think we're going to lose a lung or manage to pull through ?

'Cause I'd rather talk about Torchlight 2 and how much better it is than Diablo 3.   :why_so_serious:

Yeah.  I talk about the games 'cause discussing my dad would be one hell of a downer.

PoE > TL2 >>> D3

To be fair, I haven't played D3, but nothing I've heard makes me curious about it.  PoE feels like the illegitimate child of D1 and D2, which is all I really need.

PoE is pure sperg-bait and renders D3 pointless IMO. I know, it "feels" better DBZ punching hordes of enemies in D3 as a monk and watching the corpses fly end over end through the air in waves but that is literally the only redeeming feature of the game left.

I think TL2 fills a niche.

-PoE is what people really wanted from D3, being pure spergbait with build-defining uniques and just allowing wacky builds in general. Plus the grimdark stuff.

-TL2 is lighter fare, much more plentiful loot that while less interesting than PoE is still far more interesting than D3's, offline play, LANplay, and moddability which neither D3 nor PoE has. Also I think TL2 does the best job at randomizing areas; PoE is pretty good at that though.

-D3 has the most crazy, brainless visceral combat where you sometimes feel so bad ass, this alone can almost carry the game. Unfortunately there's the rest of the game being really bad.

Plenty of room I think for everyone. PoE has become my ARPG for basically having a "Goal" which is to get my build fleshed out enough to see if it holds up to tougher content, and to get loot that supports it (and I don't browse wikis looking for uniques so I can be surprised when I find them!). PoE is depressing/frustrating however when your rolls come up bad and you waste a few orbs.

TL2 is when I wanna log in and mash tons of stuff and satisfy my loot OCD since upgrades come super frequently and it's fun to twink out new characters. Outside of a few pretty set areas TL2 is random enough it doesn't get stale as quickly.

I don't have D3 installed anymore but I have to say when I hit seven-sided strike as my monk and obliterated a group of mobs or a champ, and when my characters taunted after getting a great crit and literally fucking exploded everything it felt pretty good. Again, shame about the rest of the game.

TL II is my current go to game for wasting 15 minutes if I happen to be near the computer. If PoE does a better job with unique builds and such though, I'll probably give a try.

My 25th level Engineer in TL II right now is um, a guy who uses weapon and shield, and shield bashes and stomps and swings and zaps and other stuff and has a bunch of passives and stuff. I put almost no thought in to how I built it and have skill points spread through about 15 skills. I was shocked last night when a fight actually required me to down a health potion. Maybe it gets hard later, or maybe I'm out leveling content, but right now I'm running around with 61 big health potions, and not picking any more up.

D3 is an icon on my desk top that I pause to stare at on occasion.

The one thing about D3 I did like was that when you hit something, it felt like you really HIT something.

TL2 is my go to game right now too - running hardcore with friends is both frustrating and crazy fun. It's an easy game to just pick up and mash my mouse button with buddies while we make fun of each other for a couple of hours. I tried PoE and just couldn't get into it for whatever reason.

There's pretty much nothing I like better about TL2 than D3, except I do occasionally get a little lag in always-online D3 land, and the pet is convenient, just as it was in TL1. Not even going to try PoE - ugly, no full respecs, free for all looting. It isn't for me.

OMG! Don't Die!  You're my favorite!

Um, thanks.

Can't love life too much.   :awesome_for_real:

Has anyone tried SynergiesMOD (http://www.synergiesmod.com/)?

I got bored of TL2 fairly quickly but I just read an article about that mod on Eurogamer and it sounded very impressive.

GUTS is finally out, and integrated with the Steam Workshop!

I completely derped out and forgot about Steam Workshop as a possibility since Runic distributes the game in a few different ways. That's what made GUTS take so long to come out.

Yay- hopefully the modkit is good. With steam workshop taking the trouble out of managing/finding mods we'll hopefully see some really cool stuff.

I tried Synergies over the weekend. I liked it quite a bit. LOTS of baddies,tweaked but not overpowered skills,a few new classes (still WIPs on those). Just waiting for it to show up on the Workshop now...

Heh, there's a red panda skin for the new panda pet already.  :grin:

http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197975093066/myworkshopfiles/?200710

Yeah, it's been getting multiple daily updates too.