Diablo III Wild Speculation and Rumor Mongering Abounds

[Mosesandstick]

The link said something like stacks of 10. Even if mobs dropped stacks it's still a huge waste of time. The one area I hoped D3 would improve over D2 would be the amount of time it takes for loot.  At the very least people should be able to get a reasonable set of items without grinding constantly.

[K9]

I think this is a problem they didn't really address in D2 between online vs offline play. Discovering players = 8 (or whatever the setting was) in D2 made the single player a lot more enjoyable and less frustrating, although boss fights got quite hairy.

[Malakili]

I think this is a problem they didn't really address in D2 between online vs offline play. Discovering players = 8 (or whatever the setting was) in D2 made the single player a lot more enjoyable and less frustrating, although boss fights got quite hairy.

I kinda wonder if there is even going to be a distinction in Diablo 3 between single player and battle.net characters.  I assume not.

[Mosesandstick]

If Blizz does what they did with SC2.... no. In which case I think they really need to get loot sorted. Depending on which patch, D2 required some pretty damn good gear.

[Paelos]

Diablo was all about the grind, though. The endless quest for better levels and ridiculous loot dings.

[Musashi]

Diablo was all about the grind, though. The endless quest for better levels and ridiculous loot dings.

Yes.  Exactly.  Thank you.  I've been a good boy so far for the past few pages of this discussion.  But anyone who wants Diablo to be less grindy is missing the point entirely.  I hope Diablo 3 grinds your noobery into a puddle of tears.  If you don't want to grind for stuff, then you should still be able to play through the game on normal difficulty.  But after that, prepare your inner nerd for min-maxing, spread-sheet analyzing, farm farm farmin'.

[rk47]

The way I see it, Blizzard is going to implement the same thing for Diablo III what they did with Starcraft II. Tying CD key to your Battle.Net account, limiting character slots per box installation.

This way, you can't just ditch an account easily.

[K9]

Did D2 have limited character slots? It's been a while.

Also, the SCII "limited to a single character" wailing and gnashing is retarded; the only use of a secondary character would be for better players to fuck with newbs on the ladder, which is a bad thing. For the single player the notion of character slots is utterly moot.

[Mosesandstick]

8 characters per online accout. You can make as many account as you want, they're not tied. Most of the people I know would use at least 2/3 accounts. Most of them being mules.

[K9]

Ah right, did that include hardcore characters too?

The need for mules highlights the bigger problem with D2 though.

[Mosesandstick]

As far as I remember, you could have as many hardcore as you want as well. I respect Musashi's opinion, but I think there needs to be some sort of baseline for items which allows you to at least compete or have fun. Having to grind items just to be able to play is not fun for people like me, and I think quite a few others as well.

With things like set items, runes and jewels D2 was obviously a loot whoring game, but it had a pretty poor implementation in a lot of areas. My friends and I used to spend hours just transferring items and sorting shit out.

[Malakili]

I think one of the things that made Diablo loot runs fun, even though they were grindy is that you had an immensely powerful character that was laying waste to hordes of monsters at a time.  Even on your 50th mephisto run of the day there is a bit of enjoyment in that.  Genuinely fun/kick ass gameplay is something that most grindy MMOs lack in a major way, but something that kept me going on Diablo 2 for a long time, even when I had high level (but not maxed, incidentally, I never hit 99 on a single character, but ha dplenty in the high 80s/low 90s, and that was OK not to be maxed *gasp*) characters of each class.

[Paelos]

Whirlwinding through legions of monsters is a kickass experience I haven't seen matched in other games yet. I loved my barbarian. It will be the first character I make when D3 comes out.

[rk47]

All this item crunching is not a bad idea, but what about breaking down items into essences that are stackable and takes up 1 slot in the bag only?

Once you get back in town you can trade green essences, blue essences, purple for higher tier items.

5 green > 1 blue item

8 blue > 1 purple etc. Just an idea.

[Typhon]

I think you need to watch the crafting video more closely

[K9]

Also, from what I read there's supposed to be enchanting. I'm going to guess this will be vaguely parallel to enchanting in WoW, which could be fun. Being able to add enchants akin to mongoose or executioner could make for more fun gameplay I think.

[WayAbvPar]

Whirlwinding through legions of monsters is a kickass experience I haven't seen matched in other games yet. I loved my barbarian. It will be the first character I make when D3 comes out.

I am all about AoE magic. I love that shit.

[Musashi]

As far as I remember, you could have as many hardcore as you want as well. I respect Musashi's opinion, but I think there needs to be some sort of baseline for items which allows you to at least compete or have fun. Having to grind items just to be able to play is not fun for people like me, and I think quite a few others as well.

With things like set items, runes and jewels D2 was obviously a loot whoring game, but it had a pretty poor implementation in a lot of areas. My friends and I used to spend hours just transferring items and sorting shit out.

The first part, agree to disagree.  I'm not going to try to shit on your picnic. 

The second part, yea that needs help for sure.  On your end of it, the inventory system was silly.  Town portaling every eight or ten minutes is weak.  It will be helped by the addition of the ability to turn your blues and whites into crafting components.  On the poopsock end of it, the muling system was mega-retarded.  I'm sure they'll address that.  I know how I felt the couple of times I went to mule something and fucked up, only to lose it forever.  That shit's gotta go.  Overall, inventory management was designed to be a fun part of the game - which I think it mostly is.  But I really don't think they imagined how the game would evolve from an RPG to a procession of loot pinatas when they were designing the inventory system.  And so in D2, the inventory system was not really up to par.

[K9]

There is a fundamental problem when you have sets which take up most of the inventory space you have or more, but individually aren't worth it. On top of all the other crap you needed to hoard or carry (quest items, gems, runes) there simply wasn't enough inventory space. Supposedly they are adding bags which expand your inventory, and there is a separate tab for quest items. More importantly though, the stash is supposed to be bigger and better in D3.

[Shrike]

As far as I remember, you could have as many hardcore as you want as well. I respect Musashi's opinion, but I think there needs to be some sort of baseline for items which allows you to at least compete or have fun. Having to grind items just to be able to play is not fun for people like me, and I think quite a few others as well.

With things like set items, runes and jewels D2 was obviously a loot whoring game, but it had a pretty poor implementation in a lot of areas. My friends and I used to spend hours just transferring items and sorting shit out.

There was a baseline: it was called normal difficulty. Just about any silly thing you could do would enable you to see and complete the game on normal. If your character was reasonbly well focused and had some decent gear (and you knew--more or less--what you were doing) then most of nightmare wouldn't be inordinately hard, either. However, the rubber would meet the road in act5 Nightmare. If you weren't hitting on eight cylinders and/or didn't know how things worked, then hell diff was going to be a very rough ride. One you probably wouldn't make past Duriel. If you wanted to solo in eight player games in hell, then you'd better be at the absolute peak of your game.

The game really did need shared stash space. Most of my mules were around to keep track of crafting materials. I kept a lot of loot on hand, but not really THAT much. 75% of my mule space was for runes, socketed armor, gems, and extra trinkets.

[Malakili]

Adding shared stash and unlimited stash space mods were part of what made me go back to D2 years later.  I really hope Blizzard gives us loads of stash space in D3, limiting is sort of sounds ok on paper, but in reality, when you're an item collection games, don't make people jump through hoops to collect items.

[dusematic]

They should just do what they did in WoW and make the acquisition of more stash space cost gold.

[Malakili]

They should just do what they did in WoW and make the acquisition of more stash space cost gold.

They probably will, but most people still have mules in WoW, it really just delays the problem to have like 5 pages instead of 1, what you need like like 50.

[K9]

Yeah, I have about a 2:1 bank alts to mains ratio in WoW, with full banks. I haven't quite made the jump to getting my own banking guild + vault though. I do know a bunch of people who have done that though.

[dusematic]

Even at my most hardcore point in WoW during my college days when I was raiding with a top end guild, I never needed a mule.  Sure, space could get a little tight but I don't know what kind of packrats play the game.  I'm not saying it's wrong or condemning it or anything, I just don't understand why, if you have the biggest bags and all the vault spaces unlocked in your bank that someone wouldn't have enough room to support one character's items.  You can only have two professions per character.  I don't get it.  Are people just stockpiling shit or what? 

[Ingmar]

Certain crafting professions require an insane amount of space if you're running even a moderately sized AH business - inscription in particular.

[dusematic]

Yeah but not everyone runs a "business" on the AH and tries to corner a market.  Most people just sell shit as it comes, do dailies, or maybe grind out some mining or something.  I have a feeling most people's bags are probably just cluttered with old armor sets like some bizarro episode of Hoarders.

[Malakili]

Even at my most hardcore point in WoW during my college days when I was raiding with a top end guild, I never needed a mule.  Sure, space could get a little tight but I don't know what kind of packrats play the game.  I'm not saying it's wrong or condemning it or anything, I just don't understand why, if you have the biggest bags and all the vault spaces unlocked in your bank that someone wouldn't have enough room to support one character's items.  You can only have two professions per character.  I don't get it.  Are people just stockpiling shit or what?  

Having stockpiles of enchanting mats and herbs is pretty space consuming. combined with the fact that with dual spec I now have 3 sets of gear of my character at any given time (healing, feral DPS, feral tank) + situational trinkets and idols, another set in the bank for the other spec, buff food, pots, consumables in general, and even with big bags I'm pretty strapped for space on my main, and I only have like 2 bags of nostalgia/gimmick gear.

I've generally assigned the character I feel least likely to spontaneously continue leveling up to be my mule and just hold all overflow, and thats usually enough.

EDIT: Throw in Diablo where all the loot you get above a certain quality is worth keeping, and it piles up quick.  In WoW you don't really have any loot except what you yourself plan on using on that character.

[dusematic]

Nah I'm with you on Diablo.  Especially since a full set of gear would take up like 1/5 of your stash.

[Ragnoros]

Nah I'm with you on Diablo.  Especially since a full set of gear would take up like 1/5 of your stash.

Try 5/5ths. Frankly, as awesome as the new classes, skills, items, zones, crafting, etc. all are; the one thing I am looking forward to in D3 the most is a (hopefully) much revamped inventory management and trading system. I am getting slightly perturbed that they have released nothing on either system, besides the wow style one slot one item change.

[waffel]

Diablo was all about the grind, though. The endless quest for better levels and ridiculous loot dings.

Yes.  Exactly.  Thank you.  I've been a good boy so far for the past few pages of this discussion.  But anyone who wants Diablo to be less grindy is missing the point entirely.  I hope Diablo 3 grinds your noobery into a puddle of tears.  If you don't want to grind for stuff, then you should still be able to play through the game on normal difficulty.  But after that, prepare your inner nerd for min-maxing, spread-sheet analyzing, farm farm farmin'.

Pretty much this. 

[Lantyssa]

Wardrobe.  (And a tiny amount of crafting stuff.)

When I was playing I would have made my own guild vault if it didn't require me to leave the guilds my friends were in.

[Yegolev]

Since we are waiting around bullshitting, I'll tell you what's eating up my inventory.

Set items, for one, where I don't have the full set and until then I have non-set equipment which is better.  This is in Titan Quest and LotRO both.

Items for other characters.  Also Titan Quest and LotRO both.  Because I am not actively playing D2LoD right now.  This is worse in LotRO because it's crafting materials and recipes.

Potions/food.  This isn't a huge problem in either game but those are still slots I could use for monster loot.  In both games I have to run back to town too much to sell shit.

If these issues are mitigated in D3, I'll be ecstatic.  I mean the trading part as well.  I can't even efficiently hand over materials to my own wife in LotRO and we play together.

[dusematic]

Um.  Let me float something.  I kind of DIG going back to town to sell shit.  The thing is, as so often with life, is a question of balance.  And that's going to be different for everyone.  I don't dig town portaling every 5 1/2 minutes.  But every 30 minutes or so of hard dungeoning maybe feels right.  It's a nice change of pace.  There's a satisfaction involved with selling your spoils and realizing the fruits of your labors.  Of identifying all those tasty magic items.  Of girding yourself once more for battle via repairs, food, new equipment, and whatever else you need depending on the game you're playing.  

[Malakili]

Um.  Let me float something.  I kind of DIG going back to town to sell shit.  The thing is, as so often with life, is a question of balance.  And that's going to be different for everyone.  I don't dig town portaling every 5 1/2 minutes.  But every 30 minutes or so of hard dungeoning maybe feels right.  It's a nice change of pace.  There's a satisfaction involved with selling your spoils and realizing the fruits of your labors.  Of identifying all those tasty magic items.  Of girding yourself once more for battle via repairs, food, new equipment, and whatever else you need depending on the game you're playing.  

I actually made a similar comment in a thread on the Torchlight forums a few months back about.  The thread was about Identify scrolls and how people hated needing to spend the time to individually indentify the items in their inventory.  While its a fair point of criticism, I also have to admit that I do like that it makes me slow down and take a short breather.  Most people disagreed with me quite a lot though, simply saying if they wanted to stop playing the game they'd just, stop playing the game, which is a fair point I guess.    I do like to have those short breaks in the action though, and trips to town in Diablo 2, especially when playing with friends, were always a nice break from the action to chat, check out our loot, and so forth.

Maybe I'm just old fashioned though.