f13.net

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/6018173

Quoted for people at work or whatever:

Edit: Nevermind.

Two things make me rage in that post.

1) Hell damage is also too excessive compared to the gear available yet they see that as proof that people aren't at "Inferno" yet.
2) They actually think you can farm for gear in Act 1 to do Act 2.

The whole item system of a diablo game is not that hard to figure out.   It's easy to see what CAN drop even if you aren't lucky enough to get it.

What?  They said Inferno damage is a little on the spiky side, and that as a separate issue, many people are trying to do inferno without sufficient gear. Also, Inferno also ramps up differently than the previous difficulty levels, so farming act 1 inferno so you can do act 2 inferno actually DOES make sense. 

They suggested farming Hell for gear to do Inferno. As a monk, that suggestion is ridiculous.  Simple hell gear isn't good enough to survive in Inferno, at least not as a melee. I'm not sure what gear I have, and have been buying, but I'd imagine it is a lot of Act 2 gear which allows me to barely do Act 1 without dying half a dozen times.

Exactly, you can't do act 1 inferno in hell gear you need act 2 inferno gear to do act 1 inferno.  And it is the same for the lower difficulties too, just less pronounced.

The sufficient gear bit is the problem here.


You can't do that.   Everyone who's ever set foot into inferno agrees on this.   Lots of people think the difficulty is good.   Nobody thinks the gearing makes any sense though.

Damn, 1.9% of characters have unlocked inferno?  That is a fuckload.  That suggests a whole lot of people are playing quite a lot.

As others pointed out you can't really "farm for gear" the way D3's loot system is set up. Which is annoying even when you start Nightmare.

It really screws trying to stay with friends too. If you want to join them and they are an act ahead of you then you're going to be REALLY squishy.

It's basically a "trickle down" economy using the AH where you buy leftover gear from people a few acts farther ahead than you.

People think Hell is too difficult too now?  :uhrr:

If you can only ever beat Inferno by farming later Inferno gear then how are people progressing in Inferno?  Someone needed to beat it with normal gear to start the ball rolling then.  I decided to try and finish Hell and start Inferno last night, I beat up through Skeleton King Inferno with very little issues and only a few deaths.  I'm also up to about 45k hp, 200 all resists and 20k dps because I spent time improving my gear.  I joined an Inferno game with a Monk who had about 10k health, he died, a lot.  I think too many people just expect that they beat Hell so they should now be able to beat Inferno.  If your gear is so bad that you can't farm far enough to get better gear, use the AH and get some upgrades.  If you refuse to use the AH, that's your problem, not Blizzards.  Although the fact that it's about a 50/50 crap shoot if the AH will be working at any given time is certainly Blizzards problem.

Inferno damage spikes in crazy ways sometimes, and some elite packs are almost un-killable and gear drops for you that is way too far behind where you are at sometimes - I agree with that.  But I think the majority of the people upset (not in this thread, in D3 in general) are just upset because they can't beat it yet and not because of the few real issues with it.

I'm surprised there's so much attention being given to Inferno. I thought it was supposed to be like hard mode raids in WoW, as in: if you aren't crazy hardcore about the game you should ignore it.

People initially progressed in Inferno by using broken survival builds.

What class are you?

2 things I'd like to comment on from that info post.

First:

So we have to check the FORUMS every time we play a hardcore character to see if any of our key skills have been nerfed? WTF is wrong with the Breaking News box in-game or the launcher? I thought one of the key design goals was to remove the necessity to access information outside of the game!



Second:

Way to crash the market in Legendary items.

But.. but.. but... they'll be ULTRA RARE LEGENDARY ITEMS.

Barbarian, resists are counting the 50% improved shout.

I have 450 resists, 55k life, 5000 armor, ~45% dodge and %20 block.   Trash mobs in act 2 face roll me if I try to melee.  You did fine in act 1 because your gear is pretty good act 1/2 stuff.   You are also a barb which means you can restore your life fairly easily.   Come act 2 none of that is going to matter.    Everything will near on 1 shot you making any life restore meaningless.   Nothing you farm in act 1 will be an upgrade either.    Don't forget simply killing the boss doesn't help either.   You have to kill the boss with 5 stacks of neph which means no spec switching.

Welcome to inferno btw.  :why_so_serious:

So who wants to combine gems right now if they are just going to lower the cost soon? Might as well just get all your gems from the AH until then? Haha too bad fuckers, the commodities AH has been down for days now.

Lol with prices ranging from 30k to 200 million I think the players can take responsibility for that. Besides isn't the consensus that legendaries are currently useless? How do you crash the market in useless items. Just sell it as pre-patch as if that adds some collector value.

I read this of course as I just hit Act 2 and logged off for a bit before I did anything in it.  :oh_i_see:

I'm starting to wonder why exactly this game is supposed to be fun in inferno.

It's not. It's for the e-peen crowd, the obsessive ADD types that ruin normal gaming.

Item level returns!

Edit: Having to introduce item level is symptomatic of a larger problem, and if you are constantly getting level 60 legendary items and level 63 non-legendary items while that may explain why the non-legendaries are better it doesn't explain why the game is deciding to give you better non-legendaries.

The reality is what Baishok admitted a few days ago.   They overtuned inferno on purpose to ferret out the broken powers.

On the EU servers gems of all tiers have, so far, always been cheaper on the AH then just the gold cost to combine 3 lower tier ones.


Yeah good point. Maybe if he prices drop massively some of them might actually be worth buying  :awesome_for_real:

Yeah, I noticed that myself and didn't really understand it.  All the gems I've bought out so far have just been dirt, dirt cheap.

I think it follows from the fact that gems keep entering the system but never get destroyed due to the unslot system.

Well, sure, but to enter the system there's an initial cost.  And a recurring cost for every upgrade.

We're eating this cost every time we upgrade, and yet it's just being 'lost' in the system.

This is bad economics.


 :why_so_serious:

What tier are you buying at? In act I of hell square and radiant gems drop with good frequency. Almost any rare/champion pack or radiant chest offers a shot at one or two gems. If you just stockpile them rather than combine them up then there'd be plenty to drop on the AH for instant profit. I imagine by later acts of hell you are seeing the T9-10 gems dropping often enough to keep the market going.

Not having an outlet for gems is going to cause the price to crash in the long run; which may or may not be a good thing or a bad thing depending on your point of view.

How do I enlarge this thing ?

 :why_so_serious:

Until Bliz decides to make some super gem that requires an ass load of lower tiered gems, some book/recipe (one time use), and a wizard.

The highest tier gem requires 531,441 chipped gems to make.   Or 243 Flawless Squares which are probably the highest level gem that drops.

Do tell!

 :oh_i_see:

So then they need to make that gem a one-time socket use (or destroyed if unsocketed) in order for gems to have any meaningful cost down the road. I am just thinking out loud, I like the dirt cheap prices right now. But really don't see gems being worth anything if they are so easily unsocketed. Hell, just make them lose a tier level on unsocket just to give them some importance.

Have you checked the price of unsocketing a gem? It's more than you can buy gems for on the AH.

The gem issue is the same as the whole AH issue.  Without any form of destruction or soulbind or no resell, you're going to use gear you buy and then sell it on when you've outlevelled it.

I think they've created a fucking monster, fixable only by a fundemental change.

Good gear will live forever, which means the market will be glutted and prices will fall after the initial sky high cost.

Crafting is a money sink.

Any expansion released, assuming new gear, will start the chase over again.

I'm not clear what the problem is though. How is this a problem?

The AH has no death on it.

It will just grow. And grow.  And grow.

And, by the looks of it, be utterly fucking useless to find anything on.

You don't see the problem here? That the jeweler/blacksmith npcs and other gameplay methods of obtaining loot will become increasingly useless as an infinite number of better cheap items enter the AH?

The only time working towards items yourself outside of the AH will actually be a worthwhile will be Inferno. Coincidentally, blowing through 1-60 with over-leveled loot you bought in the AH for ~4k gold every few levels will reduce the difficulty of the leveling game, making the transition to Inferno even more jarring. There are plenty of reasons the AH, especially without soulbound items, is bad for the game.

On a timeline longer than the period we are in right now (immediately post release, maybe a few months long) Inferno is the only thing that is going to matter anyway. For the casual player who will never get to inferno, I don't see the problem with filling in gaps in your gear using the AH, it isn't like you require top end twinked gear to get through to Inferno anyway.  I got through Hell with relatively little AH use - mainly just keeping my weapon up to par. 

I have all 5 classes in Nightmare now without using the AH.  I keep my crafting skills maxed and plan to do so ongoing.  I'm voluntarily playing the game rather than the AH.  I'll see how far that gets me, but so far I have no regrets.

Bouncing items/components/jewels between characters evenly has made leveling a non-issue.  I can produce my own "AH" in my shared chest without a need for other people's stuff.  I do use my crafting at times to fill in gaps in my gear, but that is rare.  Mostly I just burn through components at the odd chance I get a really nicely balanced item.

I haven't needed to "farm" yet either.  I do explore 90-100% of every map including side dungeons as I go thorugh the normal quest line though.  I guess you can call leveling alts "farming," but I get the added benefit of another character at equivalent levels.  I have not taken a character back through a quest yet.  Not once.

Changing anything about sharing items or upgrading jewels will ruin my game experience.  It will force me to use the AH at some point, which is just really not why I play this game.  I'm perfectly fine with the AH being useless.

If I was going to play this game like a monthly subscription type of a game, then it would be a problem, but it's not an mmo.

Anyone starting out faces the same problems everyone else does (lack of gold). Now, allowing people to buy things using real money may be a problem. I'm interested in seeing how that will play out. I won't spend real money for a game, so it shouldn't affect me. Maybe it will, I don't know. Maybe they'll never implement the RMAH, I don't know.

Once my character has gold and can buy items to make leveling to 60 on another character, after having already been through it once, I will appreciate being able to blow through earlier levels a little easier (after having taken a WD to hell level already). Glut of high end items? So what. Enough of a glut to lower prices? Remains to be seen. I know there's enough cheap, non-top tier items to buy.

Maybe I don't see a problem because I see it as a single player game, not an mmo. It's something I can jump into with friends or strangers, and jump out of again. I don't plan on playing the AH. I'm having fun with my little piece of game that I have. How is my fun going to go down?

I don't really see it as "fundamental" change. It just needs BoE items like the AH in WoW. Perhaps that is fundamental to some, but I remember when I first put on an item in D3, and saw I could then sell it later? That seemed wrong to me as a player. Frankly, why they tried to reinvent the wheel on this issue is ridiculous. The WoW AH model was there, battle-tested, and player approved. I very much imagine that by the time we see patch 1.1, we'll see the move towards BoE, the inability to unsocket without destroying the gem or the item, and the buff to gear that needs to take place.

I wonder how much their DB admins make. There's no amount of hookers and blow you could pay me to take care of the AH.

Pull it, dump the items back on the players, and retool all the new drops as BoE over a week period.

Then open for biz again.

If you want to experience a functioning economy you really need to play HC.  Gems are outrageously expensive there (especially Amethysts).  Low level rares still sell for a goodly amount.  There is a total dearth of high end gear on the AH (no one has made it past A1 inferno). The best gear in the game continually cycles out as players die.

Example:  There are 10+ pages of the "string of ears" legendary in the SC auction house (one of the best legendaries and incredibly useful for any class, that and stormshield are considered end game items for many folks heading into later stage inferno).  There are zero up on the HC AH as of this morning.

Screw gear binding. Just do periodic ladder resets like in D2 imo.

fake edit: yeah, or just do hardcore. Which would be my preferred method if I weren't holding onto a vain hope of making a couple bucks on the RMAH.

There are probably more interesting solutions than BoE.  Sadly they'll probably just take the path of least resistance.   At least for now inflation is keeping the truly valuable items really expensive.

I really don't think their are more interesting solutions. The idea of an economy endlessly producing items with no actual usage or breakage is ridiculous.

The only solutions I see are:

1 - Having obsolesence/breakage stats on each item, except for legendaries. That way they break down over time and need replacing.
2 - Incentivize the deconstruction of items with bad stats by making crafting more interesting. For example, allow higher level crafters to make trophies that vendor for substantial gold from some of the mats as you go. Thereby establishing a salvage market.
3 - Create drops that allow stat conversions on items (ie - reforging in WoW).
4 - Bind on Equip itemization

I was thinking the same thing, and also wondering if their real DBA superstars are working on the new MMO team, because the AH has some serious design problems.

And a wacky as hell schema, why would you even allow anything but blues+ to be sold at all?

They won't make gear bind on equip, that's pretty antithetical to the whole Diablo "thing". I'd venture to say that I'd just stop playing if they did, being able to pass gear out to alts/friends is core to the entire experience.

The main problem with this discussion is you're assuming the economy outside of HC even matters to Blizzard much. I suspect it doesn't.

I agree with this.

RMAH - Blizzard cares a LOT about the economy.

If the gold AH gets completely bloated with really cheap high end gear no one has any reason to use the RMAH.  The RMAH has potential to make a lot of money for Blizzard so they won't just ignore all of that.

I don't think the potential is really all that high. I still think the RMAH is far more about killing the secondary sites (and all the hacking, griefing, and customer service complaints they indirectly generated) than making significant money for Blizzard.

I suspect the RMAH is just an odd experiment at this point. It's likely less targeted at D3 and more seeing the reaction and seeding the idea for future MMO #3921.

I am amused at the people wanting BoE gear though. While I agree that the D3 economy is doomed to be fucked, I don't think anyone really cares about the D3 economy.

Comparing the D3 economy to the D2 economy, I don't see how it's broken. It seems the same to me. There's a glut of best items but they're horribly expensive. There's a glut of almost best items, which are very cheap.

While I would prefer a more interesting economy/crafting part of the game, this one doesn't strike me as terribly broken because I wasn't expecting it to not be, I guess. I was expecting D2 only updated. D3 is that, it seems to me.

D2 did not have an economy.

Of course it did. Any time you played a public game, there would be some guy popping in selling shit.

I know what you meant.

D2 did have an economy, in fact it had a fairly huge one. It was just all on 3rd party websites.

I too stopped using the auction house, playing the gold game can be fun but really I'd rather be playing the game game. It felt increasingly obligatory and onerous to have to pop on the auction house every time it seemed there may be something I could upgrade, not to mention the technical issues. I rolled a new HC character and stopped using the arms and armor vendors as well, now everything my character has is either found or crafted, am enjoying things much more this way - the crafting is useful and significant upgrades from drops are much more common.

I could care less about the economy myself.   What bugs me is they've admitted they nerfed drop rates to compensate for the AH.   Which means if I try to play without the AH it's going to be damn painful.

Yep!  Even logging in to the chat area you would see people spamming stuff.

Diablo to me is great because of the over abundance of gear!  I want to use it, then sell or pass it on, or give it away!  I hate the bind on pick up or bind on equipment that MMOG's have taken, I liked how UO originally didn't have the problem of passing gear on, and wish Blizzard had the balls in WoW to do it too.

Plus I've tried to level and kill w/o the AH and it didn't work, my girlfriend is trying to kill Diablo now, and she is having problems, and she will probably have to get upgraded gear so she can finish him.  This sucks that you can't get appropriate level gear that lets you continue playing on your own.

And it sucks with no off line play!  Bastards!!!  Not all of USA has decent high speed internet.

You do realize that all forms of gems drop right? Not just cracked.

It doesn't yet. If it never takes off, they won't cry about it, but don't get it twisted on their objectives. They still very much consider transactions and usage on Battle.net to be a backbone of their future operations pyramid.

ladder reset

How many jah ith ber did you find yourself?

This is always going to be an issue, you are never going to have equivalence between a guy relying on his own drops and a guy relying on all the drops in all of North America.

In D2 I had trouble killing Duriel normal (more due to loading lag than anything else, but my gear sucked balls too) and I never found any sets/uniques in the one single player run I did. At least here normal is so faceroll that you don't need any gear from anywhere else to do it.

All forms ?  Every type of gems drop ?  Because that's not what I had read.  Hmmm.

I continue to be amused at the rage on this issue when I was told I was being unreasonable for bitching about it when first announced.

I think RMAH at this point is a fucking pipe dream.

Everything but the top 2 tiers out of 10.

I don't care about some other guy.   The point was that the drop rate is far worse than D2 was.   They did that to compensate for the AH.

I don't know if it is *all* types but certainly they drop pretty far up the chain - I've seen as high as square and I'm in act 1 hell.

I keep hearing this but is it actually true?  The drop rate for useful gear in Diablo 2 was pretty abysmal.  I just played through with my friend the couple of weeks before D3 came out as a last hurrah and the drops were utter shit to the point where I was gambling to try and get a reasonable bow to use as an amazon in act 3/4.     I doubt the drop rates are precisely the same, but at the same time there is a large amount of randomness in what you get, whether or not it is useful, and so forth and it doesn't strike me that, having just played through D2 normal mode prior to D3 release, there is a great deal of difference in terms of drop rate.

Blizz admitted it in a blue post.  It's not so obvious while leveling because you keep finding higher level gear.   When you actually get down to farming 60 stuff though it's painfully obvious.

Alright, fair enough I guess, but i'm not really sure how in practice I see much difference at this point.  Over the years I got almost total crap in D2, so far in D3 I've gotten also mostly crap at level 60 also, with a few good items between my friend and I that have been playing together.  My feeling is that despite drop rates and loot issues, a huge amount of the problem has to do with the fact that people are remembering their D2 experiencing really really wrong. It isn't like D2 boss runs were regularly spitting out high end items, even in Hell.

My beef with the AH and balancing around its presence is that advancing in Inferno pretty much requires a decent understanding of the economy and an ability to evaluate the gold value of items for all five classes.  Either that or an insanely unreasonable amount of grinding.

All these well rolled items will stick around forever as well so as the game matures I see the AH becoming the primary source of gear rather than drops.

I remember the drop rate as being horrible as well.   The problem was mitigated in D2 though as you'd just jump to act 5 and leech xp until you were strong enough to start getting serious about farming.   With Inferno you're basically forced to start farming crappy gear on purpose.   After you've farmed you're crappy gear you can move to a place where you can farm slightly less crappy gear.   Do that four times and you can finally farm for real.

Doing that with a drop rate even slightly worse than D2 is a nightmare.   Thus ignoring the AH is pretty impossible.

What's the difference between farming in a fake manner and farming for real..?

Results.

I think he means fake farming is farming gear so you can farm other gear while farming for real is farming the gear you actually want.

Easy!

Even if you're farming gear that lets you farm better gear, it's still progress and something to be happy about. It's like, I have to get to level 2 to get to 3 and onwards all the way to 60, but I'm still happy with each level I attain.

The irony here is just mind-fucking-blowing.

Bind on equip is a recent 'innovation' unique to MMOs. No ARPG that I am aware of has ever had BoE or even vaguely equivalent systems (though I haven't played them all, I guess it wouldn't surprise me if some more recent ones have adopted it for the same reason it feels 'wrong' to you as a player.)

Anyways, presumably the hope is that gear inflation will somehow match up with gold inflation in a perfect balance. The comment about how new players will still need to get gold ignores the fact that if gear never cycles out of the game -- and therefore gets cheaper over time for identical gear -- then the amount of gold a new player needs to get in order to buy ideal items will get lower over time. In some theoretically eternally-played version of the game, the lower bound on prices would presumably be the smallest price somebody would bother posting to the AH at all -- i.e. if a 95th percentile rare is worth 500 gold, nobody will bother selling them, or even identifying them.

They were when it was a SP game and I could mod the drop rate to something that gave me a remotely pleasant experience playing the game by myself.

D3 is an MMO

Oh Lord.

Calling D3 an MMO stretches the term to the point of uselessness.

Thought that was the point?

Yall really are dumb enough to fall for this are you.

ARE YOU?

Not trolling with that.  Take out the first M if you want but diablo is an online game from the ground up.  Yes you can only play with four people at a time but how many people did any of you actually play swtor with or guild wars with? sure wow could be the exception but D3 is as persistant as any modern day mmo, if anything its like mmo-lite with less systems and more monster bashing.

...except the higher level you get, the less monster bashing and more "chip away at health and EVENTUALLY bash a monster" it is.

It's funny, this. Not just in regards to AH and binding, but lots of small things that have been in WoW for ages yet they manage to reinvent and screw up in some small way. Like item linking, that works badly and sometimes not at all. Chat system, same deal - replies don't work the way they do in WoW. Multiple stacks of potions do not combine in the action slot. No way of purchasing multiple items (like potions, or dyes) at once.

Why didn't you copy these features literally from your most popular game? To me it seems like they didn't dare do things the WoW way precisely because it is WoW.

Then there are inconsistencies, like the salvaging using left mouse button, rather than right (that has cost me quite a few items.) Interaction with dyes is not consistent with gems, eventhough you're trying to do the same thing - use an item on another item. The AH displays stats differently in the tooltip than in the listing (one includes gems, the other doesn't.) Followers can't be respecced without resetting them entirely (and from a weird place, the right-click menu of their portrait.) Several panes and tooltips and frames overlap with eachother in awkward ways (like the AH tooltips).

The UI in general seems to have been programmed by a thousand different monkeys, all with a personal (or no) idea of how it's supposed to work.

Yeah, they're all really minor quibbles, but rub me in that thoughtless, "amateur hour" way.
Not necessarily. It might be a progression in survivability, but early farming in Inferno feels like a regression in power. I have no hard data (obviously), but I wouldn't be surprised if early Inferno characters (melee in particular) are superficially less powerful than late Hell ones simply because of the rather hard turn in priorities you have to make. It leads to dumping a lot of abilties that explode shit for abilties that make you take x% less damage and it's a long, boring way to make up for it so you can go back to exploding shit. Inferno isn't a good case for your Average Joe but that's where the farming starts. Normal through Hell can be done pretty much straight on with brief pitstops in the gold AH.

trolling is a art

Some of those monster affix combos are beyond ridiculous. Had fast, arcane, invincible minions once and vortex molten vampiric.

They should have blacklisted certain broken combinations.

But ... but that's the point.

Every time someone complains about those being broken it's a different set of modifiers. They're supposed to kill you.

Also, D3 has less persistence than most single-player games.

To add to the UI complaints, they should have copied more liberally from WoW. It's annoying how many things are worse than in MMO.

I can't select single gems to unsocket so I always have to for example unsocket 3 gems on a chestpiece just to upgrade one gem. AH in WoW is orders of magnitude better and they should at least copied that feature verbatin if nothing else.

In fact they should have used the whole WoW backend code. Load balancing, chat system, AH system and interface, item linking and budgeting, net code. just redo the design to make it not look like WoW for the user visible parts.

They also need to explain to me why the Diablo 3 game launcher urges me to go and buy Diablo 3, I thought I already did.

No, they are supposed to be challenging. They are not supposed to be next to impossible to do for certain classes. (Yeah L2P I know, my point still stands)

This is so delightfully true. <3

I can't remember the combo of the boss pack I kited for like a half hour, crying the entire time, but it wasn't even that mean. It just happened to be a combo that I, personally, suck against (it was like ... illusionist/vampiric/plagued or something on a naturally fast mob type). What's sort of a bummer is when the mob type is already fast on its own, so sometimes it's like it has a bonus thing to go with its other bullshit.

Maybe because the programmers for D3 are different people than the ones for WoW? Some of them may even never have played WoW. Was D3 even made in the same studio where WoW is maintained?

For me it was shielded arcane decorating burrowers. They would drop shit all over creation, burrow, then shield, and you were left with major 5s of actual damage time as they leapt about. Then, when they shielded, you had to dance the dance of life to keep out of the whirly balls of doom and the red glowing pockets of doom.

Well the sensible path would be to use as much of the code base of your massively multiplayer game as possible. You know because the code base is proven to be able to handle > 10 million players online at the same time, has most of the backend and social features you want already integrated, is tested and "battle-proven", has gone through countless iterations so that it has most of the features people want and has most of the kinks ironed out.

It would also save you man-decades of work that you would otherwise need to spend to implement and test something that is essentially already there and finished.

If I were project lead for Diablo I wouldn't think twice and try to get my hands on that code base if political infights or other corporate bullshit isn't preventing me from using it. Even if it took some indecent proposals.

WoW's development team needed two or three years after release until they had server spanning auction houses down pat for example, so that they ran without item dupe problems, had no bandwidth and latency issues and it even handles the load from auction skimming add ons like auctioneer. That's a few millions off of your development and maintenance budget that you could save just on that feature. The suits like that.

In fact copy even more. Copy and adapt the maintenance workflow, copy the patch roll out strategies, have workshops with the security and anti-cheating teams from WoW.

I would book people of the WoW team as consultants for as much as I could get away with or until several leads complained if it could save me literally decades of work on back-end issues that I could then spend on game design or content.

I tend to doubt that WoW's concurrent numbers are anywhere near 10 million at a time, that's just subscribed people. If I had to guess I'd say D3 concurrent users are probably blowing away the norm for WoW.

WoW has had well over 3 million PCU during its heyday.

Back when my fresh monk entered Inferno, 50+% of all combinations would destroy me. Trying to farm anything was damn near impossible. So I did Hell (and discovered I could stack gold find, run a section of Nightmare and make nearly 300k an hour) and bought better gear. Mind you, I didn't farm that gear. I farmed the gold for that gear. By doing this, the experience was a lot, LOT less enjoyable than it should have been. Every single item that dropped in nightmare/hell I knew would be absolutely worthless to me (and mostly other people)

So I got better gear, stacked resists, and was slowly able to pull off some defensive skills for offensive skills. I can now farm Act 1 pretty easily and most minion packs/elites don't cause a problem. All because of gear and trying new specs.

However, now it's time for Act 2. Farming Act 1 nets me SOME useful items I can use or sell, but its still tedious. I don't know if i can do this again for Act 2, 3, and 4. I just want to fucking find exciting loot, not items that turn into gold.

Right now, it honestly feels like I'm a Chinese gold farmer. But, instead of farming gold, getting paid real life money and doing whatever I want with it, I'm farming gold to buy in game items. It makes me feel like a tool.

Not anymore but they had huge concurrent numbers at one point during the heyday of WoW. They also managed to restructure their backend systems and code so that it scales reasonably well now (something that the server side code didn't at launch). Another point off of the "necessary backend features" list.

Because it shouldn't be up to the programmer, is the point. Someone should be on top of it, providing specifications for how things are supposed to work.

Virtually everything seems like a one-off:

- Need a tooltip? Cut and paste that code from somewhere else, bugs and all (then don't fix the bugs in that copy when they're discovered, I guess.)
- There's even things like how the globe shows rounded HP values (so 1014.9 is rounded to 1015) and the overhead HP bars show truncated values (1014.9 -> 1014).
- The buyback tab occasionally forgets about half the items you've just sold.
- Comparing a two-hander when you have two one-handers equipped doesn't take both into account, so the stat changes are useless.
- The AH calls life steal just that, the tooltips call it "% damage converted to life".
- The minimum value for movement speed in the AH is expressed as fractions (+10% -> 0.1) yet the textbox doesn't allow more than three characters so you can only filter whole tenths (0.1, 0.2 et c), yet +%damage is expressed as percent. Maybe you skip the leading zero, I haven't tried that.
- Half the places you expect a tooltip (like the quick-access menu when you right-click the potion slot, or most of the AH) don't give you one.
- Recommended items in the AH can't be sorted. At all.
- Why am I seeing sold items in the AH? I guess it's the cache, but why aren't they just filtered out when displayed?
- Why does the "the game is NOT paused in a multiplayer game" text linger after I've closed the menu? I'm not expecting it to be paused any more in any case.
- How come I can't read the aggregated stats of someone I inspect in-game, yet I can see the last time they clipped their toenails if I look at their profile from the character screen?
- The same screen also displays what the game calls "damage" as "DPS" for no reason (other than being synonyms in this case.)
- At that, why are there two ways to look a character from the character screen, one of which offers no information other than the appearance of the toon?
- Edit: Oh, and the FPS meter is pointless, since it shows the timing of the last frame and updates (and varies wildly) every frame, rather than frames rendered the past second.

Finally, why do I get a button to join each of my three friends who are inside the same game? Shouldn't there be one button per game? Also, that tooltip you get hovering those join buttons is the least helpful ever - it doesn't help knowing he's playing with a barbarian and a demon hunter, I want to know if I know them. NAMES!

No, really, the UI is all over the fucking place. There are barely two seemingly identical functions in the game that actually behave the same way.

/rant

Play alts, farm easier content just for fun?  It sounds like you don't actually like PLAYING the game very much, which is the core of your problem if I had to guess.  If you actually enjoyed playing for the sake of playing you wouldn't care so much when the drops didn't come.  That has actually why the Diablo series has been more or less the holy grail for me - I like the loot stuff, I like skill stuff, but I like that in tons of games, what sets Diablo apart for me is that it is just plain fun to play, so all that grinding has never felt like grinding to me in a Diablo game.  Even if I get jackall, I had fun blowing up monsters.  That has been a rarity for me in RPGs in the last say, 7-8 years.

- If the buyback doesn't forget items it sorts them in any odd order it likes. The last item sold is never at the top or at the bottom of the list.
- There is no way to easily see what you have equipped when you browse the AH, you have to switch to the "sell" tab and hope that all of your items are repaired to 100% (otherwise you won't see the stats but rather a hint that you need to repair items before you can sell them).
- You can't reset your search parameters you have to quit the AH to do that
- If you look for certain stats, the AH interface adds the stat of a socketed gem and displays you the results accordingly (so a +40 dex item with a +28 dex socketed gem comes up if you look for +68 dex items)
- The AH tooltip doesn't show stat changes even though all other tooltips in the game do.
- I have to skip cutscenes even if it's my 100th attempt also all tutorial hints and tooltip still show up on Hell difficulty.
- the game doesn't pause during in-game engine cutscenes so the mob train you brought with you will kill you while you watch deckard cain being ominous. (That was a WTF moment for me)
- If you kill bosses too quickly they will sometimes execute all of the actions that they're supposed to do before the next scripted event all at once

If I go on this will turn into another complaints post but for a game that has been in development for the better part of 6 years (and had a cancelled predecessor) it seriously lacks polish.

I'm sorry, that is hilarious.  :heart:

I think you can turn off all tooltips and tutorials in options but everything else I agree with.
Still a fun game though.

I'd sort of agree if the gear felt like an "upgrade".   What happens is your damage goes down and your defenses try to keep up.   Increasing damage has some pretty weak yields too.  In general mobs don't have a lot of HP in Inferno they just hit you like a truck.

Yeah, my rants aside, I'd just like to point out I really do like the game, as in the gameplay, it's just that it's horribly fucking shoddily put together in almost every other regard.

Really, really agree on the cutscenes bit though. Jesus, just remove them altogether from nightmare and up. Play normal to get the story. Or add a checkbox to the quest selection screen, "story mode".

No you must watch them all every time. Metzen worked hard on this!  :why_so_serious:

The story is the worst fucking cheese. It lacks the gravity of Diablo 1 and the brevity of Diablo 2 (and let's be honest, neither of those games had a stellar story). It bothers me to think that someone - anyone - thought it was anything other than fucking stupid, let alone wrote the damn thing for a multimillion dollar production.

It's just a setback.

I don't play Blizzard games for the story.

I enjoy the little mini-stories much more than the main stories. (Lyndon's, for example).

There's a story?  I thought the cutscenes were meant as a respite from the constant button spamming.   :why_so_serious:

I like how you know everyone is going to screw you over, but the other NPCs are like, "We don't have a choice!"

I agree, except maybe the enchantress. But I liked the other two followers, Covetous Shen and Haedrig!

I like Covetous Shen because he makes my Witch Doctor suddenly seem like a subtle portrayal of ethnic diversity and tolerance. Once the racism knob gets stuck at 11 there's really not much to complain about.

Yeah when we first picked up Shen, Ingmar was like "I think this guy might be offensive." Which is how I feel when I see the witch doctor.  :awesome_for_real:

That's just James Hong.  Roll with It.

Yeah, have any of you watched ANY Kung-Fu Panda or even Big Bang ?

That's what the guy does.  Chill.

I don't get upset at the UK voices in there.  Mostly because they're done by proper British people who are actually all AWESOME, but that's no excuse. 

 :why_so_serious:

I'll always see him as Lo Pan.

Every line uttered by the templar is like a spike in my ears.

I'm sure for non-Uk people its fine, but hearing a broad Yorkshire accent constantly is infuriating. It's really, really horrible.

(and I lived in Leeds for 8 years!)

I eventually came to the conclusion that he wasn't, but it wasn't evident at first which direction they were going to go with him.

Nah, he's that terrible. Even my deaf friend hates him!

I find his accent hilarious.

I'm from California, we don't have accents(!).

All accents sound exotic to me, even bad ones. (Except Mexican accents. )

You're both nuts.  After pretty much every single fucking fantasy game EVER goes straight to Glasgow (do not pass go, do not collect $200) with the worst American dragged out a bin to put on Springburn Dwarvish, I'm finding an actual proper accent to be a refreshing change.

Patch 1.0.3 Design Preview
by Wyatt Cheng Jun 6, 2012 7:00 AM PDT 1658

Last month we gave you a glimpse into how we were taking in initial feedback on the game, and ideas for some potential system changes we could make. Today we wanted to follow up and provide concrete info on some of the changes we’ve been working on, and give everyone a heads up before the 1.0.3 patch hits later this month.

Bridging the Item Gap
The ilvl (item level) of an item determines the statistical budget for its power. The way the game is currently set up, Act I drops ilvl 61 gear and below, Act II drops ilvl 62 gear and below, and Act III and IV drop ilvl 63 and below. Unfortunately this has caused two main issues. The first is players who find an Act too difficult feel compelled to use the auction house in order to progress. The second is that certain classes, skills, and play styles are less gear dependent than others, so although great items are making their way into the game economy, people feel pigeonholed into a handful of viable strategies. For a lot of people they would rather do something frustrating or boring in Hell Act IV (such as having Tyrael fight for them or breaking vases) for a chance at a "top-tier" upgrade, rather than fight hordes of monsters in Inferno Act I. We’re shifting to a philosophy where the best items in the game can drop from many different places, so a wider variety of play styles are viable.  If you would rather chain-pull elite packs in Act I rather than 3 minute cat-and-mouse in Act IV, we'd like you to be able to do that and know you can still find the best items in the game.
Nothing would explain it as well as just sharing the intended drop rates coming in the next patch, so here they are. Note that the drop rates vary slightly by item type; the table below represents an approximate aggregated rate of all item types:
New drop rates for 1.0.3
Item

ilvl	Hell Act III and IV	Inferno Act I	Inferno Act II	Inferno Act III/IV
iLvl 61	9%	18%	19%	24%
iLvl 62	2%	8%	12%	16%
iLvl 63	0%	2%	4%	8%

As you can see, players who would rather murder monsters 4x as fast in Inferno Act I can do so knowing they have a chance at amazing items, and players who want a challenge can kill in Acts III and IV in Inferno and be rewarded with a higher drop rate.

You Keep Using That Word
As previously mentioned, we’re going to be reviewing Legendary items in a future patch. Legendaries won’t change in 1.0.3, but it’s still something we’re actively working on. When we’re done, high level Legendaries should be flat out better than blue items, they’ll carry a good amount of power with them, and they should also be distinctive or memorable in the benefits they provide. We’ll be able to share more information on the specific changes we’re making after 1.0.3 launches.

The Nephalem Difference
It’s no secret that our goal for the end-game item hunt is players hunting monsters packs, building to five stacks of Nephalem Valor, and then killing a boss. While we’re seeing a lot of that occurring, what we’re missing is people feeling like it’s worthwhile to continue onward after killing a boss. To help hit that goal we’re lowering the number of guaranteed Rare items on bosses when you have your full five stacks of Nephalem Valor from two guaranteed Rares to one guaranteed Rare (you still have a very good chance at multiple rares, it's just no longer guaranteed). In exchange, all champion and rare packs will now drop a bonus guaranteed Rare item when you have your full five stacks of Nephalem Valor. The change benefits players with more overall drops, and a reason to push to continue progressing.

You Into the Group Thing?
We’re removing the bonus monster damage per additional player in a coop game. Our design goal is for players who prefer to play solo to be able to play solo, and players who prefer to play in groups to be able to play in a group. We feel the bonus monster damage per additional player is one of the biggest inhibitors to wanting to play with your friends. In a perfect world, single player and co-op would be absolutely equal, but that’s not attainable when you consider item properties such as “Life on Kill” or skills such as Archon which simply scale better when you are solo. Since the variety and breadth of game mechanics essentially dictate that solo vs. group play will never be 100% equal, our goal is to make them as close as possible but err on the side of coop in cases where we need to make adjustments. The inherent logistical requirements when forming up with other players and attempting to work together effectively warrants some added benefits.

Oh Yeah!

Inferno balance right now has a difficulty gap in which Act I feels about right, but Act II feels like trying to bust through a brick wall. In patch 1.0.3 we’re going to be lowering that wall by adjusting the damage and health of monsters in Inferno Act II, III and IV. We feel like Act I Inferno is in a pretty good place. Our design goal with Acts II, III and IV is to keep them challenging, but smooth the difficulty ramp out a bit. If a monk or barbarian is geared well enough that they can use a heavily offensive build and murder everything in Act I, they should be able to swap to a more defensive build and do okay in Act II. As they gear up they can begin adjusting back to becoming offensive in Act II, at which point they can jump into Act III with a focus on defense, and so on. Difficulty certainly ties into itemization, encounter and enemy tuning, and class balance, and all of these things together are going to paint a more reasonable difficulty curve as you hit Inferno in 1.0.3.

Paying for Your Mistakes
Current repair costs at level 60 are barely noticeable, and because of that we see a lot of people wonder if “graveyard zerging” tough enemies or “chain rezzing allies on a boss” is intended gameplay – it definitely is not. To help solve the issue we evaluated a number of new death mechanics, such as just allowing the resurrection timer to increase even higher, disallowing resurrection during boss fights, or putting a debuff on you when you resurrect (such as reduced combat effectiveness). Ultimately we felt that increasing repair costs was the best solution that preserves the fast paced style of the game. Repair costs on level 60 items are going to go up a lot. Our goal is the next time a player is graveyard zerging a boss, it should occur to them that “this is probably not an efficient way to go about things”. We’re currently evaluating repair costs between 4x and 6x their current values. In the face of increasing costs, we recommend listening to the Hardcore players out there as they probably have some helpful advice on how to minimize repair costs. Following this change zerging a boss will still be possible, but our intent is that it won’t be optimal, and players who are seeking to be as efficient as possible will adjust their item hunting routes accordingly.

Whoa, Whoa, Nice Shootin’ Tex
We’re fixing a number of bugs with Attack Speed, mainly related to the stat not working on some items, but we’ve also decided we need to reduce the effectiveness of Increased Attack Speed overall. Many players have commented that Increased Attack Speed is such a dominant stat they feel it’s required. While we don’t have an issue with there being important stats, Increased Attack Speed in particular has secondary effects on mobility in combat, resource generation and resource consumption. We want there to be options and considerations for how you gear up, and one uber trump-everything stat can really work against choice and options. There are two different solutions we’re considering to reduce the effectiveness of Increased Attack Speed. The first is to simply reduce the value on all the items to their desired values. In general our desire is to never change items as that makes them feel less concrete, but the upside is you would still be able to look at an item and know exactly what you are getting. The other approach is to change the formula used for attack speed aggregation so that stacking attack speed from multiple slots suffers from diminishing returns. The downside of that approach is that it introduces yet another hidden modifier on an item property (and many people dislike hidden modifiers), and complicates the already difficult decision of item gearing. We’re currently leaning toward the first solution, to simply reduce the value on items, but we’d be interested to read people’s thoughts on the problem.

Just Three Two Easy Payments
We previously hinted that Blacksmith and Jeweler costs are coming down, and overall it will be far more reasonable to train them up and craft items. The most dramatic reduction is on the combine costs for tier 2-8 gems.

Gem Quality
Previous Cost
New Cost
Flawed
3 Chipped + 500 gold
2 Chipped + 10 gold
Normal
3 Flawed + 750 gold
2 Flawed + 25 gold
Flawless
3 Normal + 1250 gold
2 Normal + 40 gold
Perfect
3 Flawless + 2000 gold + 1 Page
2 Flawless + 55 gold + 1 Page
Radiant
3 Perfect + 3500 gold + 2 Pages
2 Perfect + 70 gold + 2 Pages
Square
3 Radiant + 7500 gold + 1 Tome
2 Radiant + 85 gold + 1 Tome
Flawless Square
3 Square + 20,000 gold + 2 Tomes
2 square + 100 gold + 2 Tomes

The gem combine costs for Perfect Square and above will remain unchanged.

Nerf Them, Buff Me
Class tuning is not a major focus for 1.0.3. There will be a small number of skills changes, but for the most part we want people to continue experimenting and enjoy their skills for a while. Our goal was and continues to be build diversity, and though we see quite a bit of build diversity, we think we can do much better. Class tuning will be an ongoing process, and we’re targeting the 1.1 patch for most class tweaks, with a focus on punching build diversity up a few more notches.

But What About…
While these are a few of the larger systems adjustments we’re making, the 1.0.3 patch will include many fixes, quality of life enhancements, Auction House improvements, and other changes. We hope you look forward to the patch as much as we do getting it out there, and again we appreciate your continued feedback. See you in-game!


Wyatt Cheng is a Senior Technical Game Designer for Diablo III. He kindly requests that if you see him in Development Hell you spare his life and move on.

:yahoo:

Just about everything in those notes looks like a great change to me that says Blizzard is paying attention.

But I'm sure someone will come and point out why it's all bad and it's a terrible game.  :oh_i_see:

I think these are good notes that will hopefully re-ignite my interest in the game until 1.1 hits. Very interested to see the class changes in the longer run as well.

Still don't get how 6 years of development and no-one thought "Hmm, the legendaries are a bit shit and dull aren't they?". Still feels like something wasn't right with this game which is a first for Blizzard.

I feel bad for those of us that dumped gold into jewelcrafting. I am banking a ton of it and have never made a square anything, but did quite a few radiants. :(

Yeah they weren't kidding when they said they were lowering costs...

I've probably spent ~600k leveling JC, blacksmith, and combining gems. I stopped short of Rank 8 on my blacksmith once they announced price reductions were coming, but I still feel like I got ripped off by trying to play the game in what was clearly a beta state.

The combine costs were simply ridiculous with the AH right there.  This is what happens when you beta test only 1/4 of the features of your multiplayer game.  Shit breaks in a  "oh, fuck we didn't realize that" way.  (Although this is one they SHOULD HAVE realized.)   

There was absolutely no reason - none - to combine a gem below the Tier 8-10 levels in non-HC mode.   Vendor that shit then buy off the AH for a fraction of the level-up cost of your JC.  With the ability to remove all gems from equipment all gem investment is a one time deal per character.   So the Tier 10 gems would have had to be what, a few hundred-thousand per gem to ever bother leveling him up.  That wasn't going to happen, either.

Great changes, that will keep me playing as Im at the Act II roadblock and having to AH farm to move forward.