Diablo III Wild Speculation and Rumor Mongering Abounds

[Phred]

Did they bring back xp loss at higher difficulty levels? I always found that to be a pretty un-fun mechanic.

I don't think so.  It never bothered me personally, but I understand we are in a different era now and it would be almost universally rejected.  Death seems pretty trivialized in D3.  You don't drop anything, you just come back at the previous checkpoint, or if you are in multiplayer you can wait for someone to come over and res you.  I am not 100% sure, but I just did some poking around and I couldn't find anything that says this changes in higher difficulties.

Durability hit that probably gets pretty costly.

Ya there's a new repair panel on the vendors so I imagine that's what it's gonna cost to die.
In the current beta dying is almost impossible though so it's hard to tell.

[SurfD]

Durability hit that probably gets pretty costly.

Ya there's a new repair panel on the vendors so I imagine that's what it's gonna cost to die.
In the current beta dying is almost impossible though so it's hard to tell.

Actually, I believe Diablo MAY work similar to the current WoW durability model in that using abilities / getting hit actually eventually degrades your gear over time, not just dying.  I am fairly certain that in the beta I actually had a repair cost to pay a few times when i went to the vendor guy without ever having died.   More importantly, if I remember the tooltip from the "damaged equipment" icon that pops up, I believe that the effectiveness of gear DIRECTLY degrades linearly with it's durability, meaning that if your Sword is 50% damaged, you are only actually getting 50% of it's stats bonus / DPS boost.  Which means that keeping your carefully assembled Hell / Inferno gear set fully repaired is probably going to be one of their big money sinks (repairing gear early on or in normal not so much, since you will be replacing a lot of it so quickly it wont really matter).

[Malakili]

Actually, I believe Diablo MAY work similar to the current WoW durability model in that using abilities / getting hit actually eventually degrades your gear over time, not just dying.  I am fairly certain that in the beta I actually had a repair cost to pay a few times when i went to the vendor guy without ever having died.   More importantly, if I remember the tooltip from the "damaged equipment" icon that pops up, I believe that the effectiveness of gear DIRECTLY degrades linearly with it's durability, meaning that if your Sword is 50% damaged, you are only actually getting 50% of it's stats bonus / DPS boost.  Which means that keeping your carefully assembled Hell / Inferno gear set fully repaired is probably going to be one of their big money sinks (repairing gear early on or in normal not so much, since you will be replacing a lot of it so quickly it wont really matter).

I've never seen anything that indicates gear degrades in effectiveness with durability. I can confirm that that you do lose durability on items through use though (confirmed by checking my hardcore character's items, who obviously hasn't died).   If those items WERE operating at less than 100% effectiveness there was certainly no obvious indication that it was happening.

[SurfD]

Hmm, you could be right.  I just took a character and deliberately died a few times to see if it would change my stats, and it didnt seem to.  Still, I could swear that the wording on the Damaged Gear icon tooltip that pops up the first time for new characters with Damaged gear indicated that any durability damage would impact gear effectiveness, not just it being fully broken.

[Kageru]

It seems unlikely they would do that. It breaks the flow of the game in encouraging people to constantly run back and repair when all they really want is a gold sink / death penalty.

[Musashi]

Months for the first time through is okay with me.  We all know that this kind of stuff is the bargain we make for ongoing content.  Also the second time through everything gets quicker.  And so forth.  Ideally, months is too long to finish a game.  I get it.  But really, if you're venturing into the highest level of difficulty in Diablo, you've implied poop in your sock.  Don't even try to deny it.

[Malakili]

Months for the first time through is okay with me.  We all know that this kind of stuff is the bargain we make for ongoing content.  Also the second time through everything gets quicker.  And so forth.  Ideally, months is too long to finish a game.  I get it.  But really, if you're venturing into the highest level of difficulty in Diablo, you've implied poop in your sock.  Don't even try to deny it.

It isn't the time frame that I take issue with so much as the fact that they are probably naive to think someone won't blow the doors down in under a week, if not a few days.

[Malakili]

Beta patch 16 coming up tomorrow

http://www.diablofans.com/news/1148-patch-16-information-and-official-patch-notes/

I love this gem in the patch notes:

Being hit with a knockback ability while using Tempest Rush will no longer disconnect you from Battle.net

[murdoc]

Looks like a bunch of 'beta' invites went out, as I and a few of my friends all got them last night. I know it's more of a demo than a beta, but it makes me happy that I can try out a couple of different characters since I'll probably only be focusing on one once it releases.

[Merusk]

Anyone else feel the Barb and Witch Doctor are just a little weak on DPS? Maybe I'm just doing it wrong.  I certainly have more fun as Mage and Demon Hunter.

[kildorn]

Oddly, a large chunk of the low level witch doctor damage is via the grasping hands AE Slow.

The classes that feel weak to me in Diablo 3 were all based around when you got an effective way to deal with crowds.

[Nija]

Witch doctor definitely seems to be a late bloomer. It's also been on the receiving end of a bunch of skill rearrangements. Haunt at one time was a left mouse button skill, an 'auto attack' if you will. Now the jar 'o spiders is an auto attack.

Anyways. It seems to be a tanky class, of all things, with a bunch of drains and debuffs. It might turn into a power house after level 13, but my game sessions with the witch doctor is always spent hanging around watching things die in my aoe pools.

Unless, of course, you're playing multi. Then you set up a nice aoe pool and the things are slowly dying and then a barb leaps onto them and everything dies instantly. Or an arcane orb wipes out the entire room in one hit.

[Merusk]

  Arcane Orb

I still miss disintegrate but I'm glad I listened to everyone and went back to give that a shot runed-up.  Definitely my class at release.

[SurfD]

Witch doctor definitely seems to be a late bloomer. It's also been on the receiving end of a bunch of skill rearrangements. Haunt at one time was a left mouse button skill, an 'auto attack' if you will. Now the jar 'o spiders is an auto attack.

Anyways. It seems to be a tanky class, of all things, with a bunch of drains and debuffs. It might turn into a power house after level 13, but my game sessions with the witch doctor is always spent hanging around watching things die in my aoe pools.

Unless, of course, you're playing multi. Then you set up a nice aoe pool and the things are slowly dying and then a barb leaps onto them and everything dies instantly. Or an arcane orb wipes out the entire room in one hit.

My current build for beta Witchdoctor does not seem to be lacking in damage.   Grasping hands AOE + Fire Bat breath attack (the non runed one that spews out a cloud of bats) + keeping stacks of Soul Harvest for the insane +Int buff tends to rape things pretty fast.

[Nija]

My current build for beta Witchdoctor does not seem to be lacking in damage.   Grasping hands AOE + Fire Bat breath attack (the non runed one that spews out a cloud of bats) + keeping stacks of Soul Harvest for the insane +Int buff tends to rape things pretty fast.

I can't get close enough to a group of mobs to use Soul Harvest - a monk or a mage or a barb has already wiped out that group of mobs. Sure, I'd do damage to them if I got there first. But that's incredibly rare.

Then again I've played nothing but public games where the objective is to run through everything as fast as possible, apparently.

[SurfD]

Well, yeah, against a monk or barb you arent going to have much chance, since they both have very nice gap closer abilities that let them jump right into the middle of a group of mobs.  Witchdoctor suffers in that respect i guess.

[Sjofn]

Fuckity, the demon hunter seems pretty fun and my choices are a terrible skank or a scarf wearing douchebag. ><

[Paelos]

Fuckity, the demon hunter seems pretty fun and my choices are a terrible skank or a scarf wearing douchebag. ><

I thought after Belfs, scarf wearing douchebag wouldn't be much of a stretch?

[apocrypha]

Fuckity, the demon hunter

That's a good name.

[Sjofn]

Fuckity, the demon hunter seems pretty fun and my choices are a terrible skank or a scarf wearing douchebag. ><

I thought after Belfs, scarf wearing douchebag wouldn't be much of a stretch?

The male wizard is more blood elfy. The male demon hunter has terrible posture and stupid hair and a scarf. Although the scarf is even weirder on the female demon hunter. She's in a bustier, little go-go shorts, thigh high spike heel boots ... and a scarf. Too keep away the chill, I guess?

Leveling up feels kinda bland with how pared down building a character is now, but I'll probably get over it, since as I said, I don't really play Diablo to LEVEL. At least this way when I level I'm not going to make Ingmar, proudft, and mrs. proudft all stand around and wait while I try to remember what my leveling plan was.  Not as much, anyway.

[Ingmar]

Yeah I think the choice pendulum has swung a notch too far towards the 'no choices' end of the spectrum here. I don't miss the gotcha of putting points into stats at all, but there's really nothing to choose at all here other than 'what do I want my left and right click to do', at least not until pretty far into the game - in some cases you don't even get to make choices about things until you've actually finished the game once. The runes as drops was a much better system from that standpoint, since at least then you could be picking from 5 different modifications applied to your powers from a relatively early stage, and there was some interesting 'make things fit' gameplay around which runes you had dropped and where you should slot which ones.

[amiable]

On witchdoctor:  I love zookeeper classes (the D2 skellymancer being my favorite class), my impressions from beta from my skeletal dog build is that I am most likely going to lose my job and wife after this game releases.

Killing mobs is for the proles and little people, I have minions to do that for me.

[murdoc]

Just played a Monk up to 9 and the end of the demo - a little disappointing that there really isn't any choices other than, as Ingmar said, what I want left and right click to do.

[Ragnoros]

Just played a Monk up to 9 and the end of the demo - a little disappointing that there really isn't any choices other than, as Ingmar said, what I want left and right click to do.

To be fair, the situation is basically the same in Diablo 2. By level nine or so you have a few points in fireball, smite, or whatever for right click, and a couple in one or two passive or utility spell(s). This principle holds true for most games really, final fantasy, gears or war, command and conquer, etc. The first hour or two you will be having the game hold your hand and show you how to accomplish the core mechanic of killing stuff; be it selecting the attack command, pointing at dudes and holding r-trigger, or box selecting guys and pressing attack-move.

Now whether Blizzard should have shown more gameplay in their "beta" is, of course, arguable. But I don't imagine it would have changed anyone's mind in either case. People are going to:
A. Like clicking mobs and plan to buy the game already.
B. Not care because it is not Madden/Halo/Draw Something.
C. Be waiting on word of mouth/reviews.

Of course a fine derail could be made arguing the premise that games should give you more options to start with. Fallout and the like have you fine tuning a character as soon as you click start, and a good 4x will throw options galore in your face from minute one as well. Consolization, meaningful choices, yada yada.

[MrHat]

Newegg.com has the preorder for this -$10 off.

Use promocode EMCNFJC22 in the cart if you can wait a few days to play it.

[amiable]

Newegg.com has the preorder for this -$10 off.

Use promocode EMCNFJC22 in the cart if you can wait a few days to play it.

This is pretty much the only game in the world that I can absolutely guarantee that I will get far more then 10 dollars worth of enjoyment by having it a few days earlier.   I would literally beg Blizzard to take my money to play this game.  I would buy this game if it were only offered on Origins.

[schild]

I wouldn't. I would skip Diablo 3 if I had to install Origin.

[Merusk]

Good news then, all you have to do is create a battle.net ID which you'd have for Multiplayer anyway.

Goddamnit I was sure I'd hate this game and I'm really anticipating its delivery now, even to the point of being annoyed with some decisions. Curse you, Diablo bug.

[amiable]

I wouldn't. I would skip Diablo 3 if I had to install Origin.

Yeah, that is a tough one.  I would literally prefer to pay 150$ for this game than have to download it via Origins.  But I have a pretty strong Diablo addiction.

[Draegan]

I wouldn't. I would skip Diablo 3 if I had to install Origin.

It's a shame we can't test this theory.

[Paelos]

I wouldn't. I would skip Diablo 3 if I had to install Origin.

Yeah, that is a tough one.  I would literally prefer to pay 150$ for this game than have to download it via Origins.  But I have a pretty strong Diablo addiction.

I'm in the same boat with you. It would be putting one of my biggest loves with one of my biggest hates in odds with each other.

[Phred]

Who stickied this in single player? Can their be any argument that this is not a mmo at this point?

[Paelos]

Who stickied this in single player? Can their be any argument that this is not a mmo at this point?

I can, but it's a stupid argument.

[schild]

The subforum is going to be down here also. The MMOG forum is almost as obnoxious to me as politics.

Haha.

Seriously though. Things that bring joy belong in here.

[Malakili]

Who stickied this in single player? Can their be any argument that this is not a mmo at this point?

If this is an MMO then pretty much every multiplayer game that comes out from here on out is an MMO.