Diablo III Wild Speculation and Rumor Mongering Abounds

[Sheepherder]

Fixed for how absurd some stat math arguments are. As much as I love them, it IS a silly way to play a game.

His original number was pretty close for that game.

[LK]

My dirty little secret is that I've equiped stuff because it LOOKS COOL, not because of stats.

For this very reason I like Fable's equipment system. How you look does not affect numerical gameplay. Maybe some perception issues with the populace, but eh.

[Murgos]

Shameless copypaste from another forum:

http://forums.battle.net/thread.html?topicId=27795769376&pageNo=1&sid=3000#0 posted:

    Not too long ago we decided to make some changes to how our core player character attributes work. We wanted to share with all of you what problems we ran into, how we want to fix them, and what our new attributes are.

    This is a fairly info-heavy write up and takes into account that you're well versed in core attributes of Diablo II, as well as what has been previously shown in Diablo III. If you're not, you'll still get some good information, just keep in mind that this isn't intended as a comprehensive guide, but a design-heavy explanation for those already following the game very closely. (And if you're one of those people you just got real excited.)

    Attribute problems:

    Damage increase confusion: Willpower increased damage for casters (wizard, witch doctor), and Strength increased damage for weapon users (monk, barb, demon hunter). This is inherently confusing, because many monk abilities, and some barb abilities, look like spells, and the demon hunter seems like she should be affected by Dexterity instead of Strength - - at least logically.

    Build diversity: It’s always been our goal that the core attributes were valuable for all classes in an effort to encourage a broad set of builds. The method we used for this, and the attributes we chose, accomplished this goal under the hood (more or less), but perception was that certain attributes were much more desirable depending on your class. Ultimately the split of damage between willpower and strength meant that despite those abilities having secondary functions that were useful, most ignored the stat that did not apply to their class for damage purposes. This meant each class really only had three attributes they cared about, at best, which was a bit narrow.

    Resource (Fury/Mana/Spirit/etc.) tuning and progression: Diablo is a progression focused game, all about getting more powerful. This makes us want to design systems like resources to scale over time. However, we had no resource attribute. So as a player if you are frustrated by the amount of resource available to you, there wasn't an obvious enough and analog enough method for making your situation better. Regardless of Diablo II balance issues (i.e. energy not being effective relative to other stats, mostly due to mana steal), if you wanted more mana you knew that energy was the place to fix this. Without something like this resources are difficult to tune, especially given that our goal is to tune them so that it's a nice progression from start to end.

    So, to solve these issues we’re changing our core attributes from Strength, Dexterity, Vitality, and Willpower to:

    Attack: Increases damage
    - This stat will be a universal damage increasing stat for all classes to prevent confusion about what you should increase to do more damage.
    - We realize that ‘Attack’ is less flavorful than ‘Strength’ and ‘Willpower’, but we feel the pros of understanding clearly how to build your character outweigh that con.
    - This stat has no secondary effects.

    Precision: Increases crit chance
    - This will be tuned to be comparable in power to Attack increases for the most part.
    - So why have Precision? Mainly so we can play into it with affixes, runes, and traits. Linking effects to crits gives us another hook for designing skills and gives the player options to create ‘crit builds’ that play different than normal attack builds. Examples of the kind of crit effects we 'could' do (not saying we are, these are examples):
    - - Cleave crits cause monsters to explode and do damage to those around them.
    - - Lifesteal could be an ‘on crit only’ affix.
    - This is a more finesse stat, and we’re fine with that. Most people will want Attack by default, but they won’t mind getting precision.
    - This stat has no secondary effect.

    Vitality: Increases health
    - And it's staying that way!
    - This stat has no secondary effect (seeing the pattern here?).

    Defense: Decreases all damage taken
    - This stat is separate from armor and resistances, each of which effects different damage types. This stat effects ‘all’ damage.
    - This stat will allow players to control incoming damage rather than increasing health capacity, which is useful to reduce the need for health globes and pots, and allows players to double down on defense for survival focused builds.
    - This stat is also useful for PVP, and likely will be valued in the arenas, but isn't tuned to be a 'PVP' only stat.
    - This stat has no secondary effects.

    Willpower: Affects resource in class-specific ways
    - The effects of this stat will change from class to class. It will be our goal to make it roughly equivalently valuable across classes and versus other attributes.
    - Basically this stat will give you more access to whatever restricts your resource by default: capacity, regen rate, degeneration rate, generation rate, etc.

    This will change and affect several item affixes, but specifically we’ll be making the following changes to address issues with casters under-valuing gear (more below in Q&A), and to clear out attributes that are going away:
    - Removing +spell damage affixes
    - Adding Bonus % damage for wizard skills (wizard only)
    - Adding Bonus % damage for witch doctor skills (witch doctor only)
    - Removing Strength
    - Removing Dexterity

    Q&A

    Q: Why do none of the core stats have secondary effects?
    A: To focus their intent, making them simple and straightforward to understand. Your core attributes boil down to: damage, crit, health, damage mitigation, and resource.

    Q: Since the attributes mostly only have one effect why not name them for that effect? Why not have ‘Damage’, ‘Crit Chance’, ‘Health’, etc.?
    A: The main reason is so that we can value the attributes against one another. If you see one item with +15 health and another item with +3 Damage, and those are both core attributes, the general assumption is that the health is the better choice, because the number is bigger. But that may not be the case. By having representational core attributes we can play with the math under the hood so that +3 Vitality is roughly equal to +3 Attack, which makes assessing loot more straight forward.

    Also, because common terms like ‘damage’ and ‘health’ are used in a variety of ways, re-using them for core attributes is potentially more confusing than going with symbolic attributes.

    And finally, it sounds cooler to make a ‘Vitality’ barbarian than a ‘Health’ barbarian.

    Q: Why is +spell damage going away as an affix?
    A: Same reason we combined Strength and Willpower into Attack, it was inherently confusing as an attribute.

    Q: Why add wizard and witch doctor only damage increase affixes?
    A: Casters who don’t rely on weapons need a reason to care about their weapons. The monk, barb, and demon hunter all have the DPS stat that has a big impact on their damage. This was the purpose of +spell damage, so without it the wizard and witch doctor will be missing a damage modifier stat to make up for their lack of need for weapon DPS. We’re adding these stats as weapon focused affixes that will make wizard’s and witch doctor’s care about their weapons. This specifically addresses issues that Diablo II had where some classes could more effectively stack magic find gear than others without hurting their damage output or survivability.

    This is one of many, many possible solutions we considered. This one ultimately felt the cleanest and most straightforward.

    Q: How will items work that get these new wizard and witch doctor affixes? Will only class specific items get them? In general what’s the philosophy behind class specific items?
    A: It is not our intent that classes always use their class specific items, specifically in the weapon department. But, class specific items will be predictable sources for stats good for your class, as we’ll restrict them to only carry affixes your class could want.

    However, all affixes you could want will still appear on any weapon your class can use. So Wizards can get swords with '+% to Wizard Skills'. Such items will be more rare, so more melee oriented classes aren’t always getting their weapons ruined by wizard only stats, but it will happen.

    Q: But I hate getting items that say ‘Wizard Only’, or ‘Witch Doctor Only’ on them when I could have used them otherwise!
    A: Please re-phrase in the form of a question.

    Nobody likes getting items that aren’t for them, but it’s the core of the game. Lots of class specific, weird, or flat out crappy items drop in Diablo. That’s part of what makes the really good items, good. Yes, seeing ‘this item is not for you’ effectively written on an item sucks, but it’s a con worth the pro of the class balance it promotes.

    Q: Isn’t this a big scary change to make so late in development?
    A: It’s not as scary as it sounds, assuming you, gentle reader, aren't frightened. The core of game balance is going to happen approaching the final stages of development. Most of this is a re-structuring of how things work, not a reinvention, so impact is somewhat predictable. Many of these changes actually make the balance process easier and more straightforward. We had also already been planning to go over, tune, or improve many of the parts and pieces that this change affects.

    Don't misunderstand, this is a fairly big change, but it’s work worth doing for the most important reason of all: we believe it will make the game better.

[Tebonas]

So they are dumbing it down because people were too stupid to see the difference between Strength and Willpower?

I hate gamers.

[Sheepherder]

More viable stats is more complex than fewer viable stats for everyone who isn't retarded.  Stop being a douche.

[Malakili]

So they are dumbing it down because people were too stupid to see the difference between Strength and Willpower?

I hate gamers.

Stuff like this always confuses me, I've seen developers (on variety of games) say things like this during beta that always take me off guard.  "Such and such has been changed to be less confusing"  Well...it was only confusing if you're a complete idiot...  I don't know how big a deal this change was to make, but totally revamping your attributes system seems less than trivial (I could be wrong?).  So they probbaly didn't make the decision lightly.  But geez.

In the end it'll end up playing just fine, but I still think its goofy.

[Typhon]

I agree with Sheepherder, I think this has the potential to make more attributes viable on more classes.

Odd that they didn't steal from the WoW playbook and use something like "mastery" instead of "% increase to Wizard spells".  Seems like there would still be room for class-specific weapons that augmented class abilities (either a specific ability or +1 all Wizard spells).  Items would be usable by more classes that way.

[Tebonas]

There we have to agree to disagree. This is not more complex. This is calling things differently because supposedly people couldn't understand the old terms.

No, this will not be a problem for the game. I'm not lamenting Diablo 3, but the intelligence of the people making this (seemingly) necessary.

[kildorn]

It's because a lot of completely casual players like to play games. Blizzard has basically seen the light that if they make the game both very accessible from minute one and deep enough to have theorycrafters, they vastly increase their potential sales base.

Basically, this closes the gap again between "I just like playing this to click and have things explode" and "I like doing shitloads of math to find the best way to make things explode"

[apocrypha]

Kildorn beat me to it. You're seeing this change from the viewpoint of an experienced gamer. Blizzard try to see things from the point of view of the millions of people they want to sell their games to who aren't experienced gamers.

[Malakili]

Kildorn beat me to it. You're seeing this change from the viewpoint of an experienced gamer. Blizzard try to see things from the point of view of the millions of people they want to sell their games to who aren't experienced gamers.

You're probably right, but I still think this is a stupid v. not stupid thing as much as an experienced v. inexperienced thing.   There are plenty of things I am inexperienced at, and I can still understand the basic terminology if given a quick primer. 

[Paelos]

And yet, Blizzard will never go broke pandering to the LCD. Short of azzraping the thing with horrid DRM or RealID, they aren't going to dissuade anybody from buying the game, AND they bring in more folks who don't like thinking about their games.

[kildorn]

Kildorn beat me to it. You're seeing this change from the viewpoint of an experienced gamer. Blizzard try to see things from the point of view of the millions of people they want to sell their games to who aren't experienced gamers.

You're probably right, but I still think this is a stupid v. not stupid thing as much as an experienced v. inexperienced thing.   There are plenty of things I am inexperienced at, and I can still understand the basic terminology if given a quick primer. 

In this case, it's because we've been playing this genre of game forever.

I mean, from an outside totally logical point of view, a bow user would need STR. From a gamer point of view, they're probably an agi/dex based class. Then we get into abstracts from reality, and stop anyone on the street and ask them what statistic Merlin needed to be a better wizard, and you'll get puzzled looks and random gamers who would know the answers (int, wis, wil, depending on the game system)

When I say casual gamer, I don't mean "plays games 5-10 hours a week and solos a lot in multiplayer games", I mean "finds popcap games addictive, kinda likes the pretty graphics on the other games they see banner ads and TV ads for"

[Sheepherder]

There we have to agree to disagree. This is not more complex. This is calling things differently because supposedly people couldn't understand the old terms.

No, this will not be a problem for the game. I'm not lamenting Diablo 3, but the intelligence of the people making this (seemingly) necessary.

com·plex

–adjective
1.
composed of many interconnected parts; compound; composite: a complex highway system.

A more complex problem is, by necessity, composed of more parts, or with more interconnections, or with each variable having greater relevancy.  Three is not greater than five, in fact it fails to be equal.  QED.

I can't help the fact that you want a neckbeard long enough that the newbies trip on it.

[Tebonas]

This is getting a bit like kindergarten and it is beside the point, but 2 (Strength and Willpower) is indeed greater than 1 (Attack).

I think Kildorn has a point here. You, on the other hand just argue for arguments sake.

[Lantyssa]

Basically, this closes the gap again between "I just like playing this to click and have things explode" and "I like doing shitloads of math to find the best way to make things explode"

Was anyone really confused by it in Diablo 2 though?

I'm also unsure why they couldn't have tied magic user damage to their weapon, but whatever.  I do wish the person would learn when to use 'affect' and 'effect' though.

[Ratman_tf]

Was anyone really confused by it in Diablo 2 though?

I don't remember it being much of an issue in D1 or D2. Personally, I tend to just click on shit that looks cool and exciting.

[Shrike]

Was anyone really confused by it in Diablo 2 though?

From what I saw from my fellow travelers, yes, they were.

Not many of my friends played D2, but enough did that the refrain I heard continuously was, "I don't want to think about math". So they'd just ask what was good--to which there usualy wasn't a simple answer--then they'd just go with whatever you told them without much further thought. This worked well in normal, OK in NM, and generally would get you roflstomped in hell diff. The corolary was then they'd ask, "How can you do that?" or "How can you live through that?" Then you'd tell them, and get, "I don't want to deal with math" and 'round you'd go again. Or people that didn't know you would just accuse you of cheating in broken English or lolspeak.

So, yeah, I can see why Blizz might want to do this.

[Lantyssa]

I'm guessing they'll still have that problem of not balancing health, damage, defense, energy, and crit if they didn't want to do the math on four stats.

[Sheepherder]

This is getting a bit like kindergarten and it is beside the point, but 2 (Strength and Willpower) is indeed greater than 1 (Attack).

I think Kildorn has a point here. You, on the other hand just argue for arguments sake.

And how much willpower did you anticipate (purposefully) stacking on your Barbarian?  How much witch doctor or wizard damage boost do you figure would be optimal for a Barb?  Because I think you're pretty much the one arguing the indefensible here.  Especially since a quick search of your post history tells me that your main bitch ten pages ago was how D2 made you grind for gear.

[LK]

Mass audience doesn't want to think about its games. They want to do cool shit and win. Only dedicated gamers care about the numbers of it to figure the system out.

[Paelos]

Not many of my friends played D2, but enough did that the refrain I heard continuously was, "I don't want to think about math".

That's a very important point about this game. Your average person (see: NOT just your average player) has no desire to take a leisure activity and complicate it with higher cognitive skill, unless the desire is to test said skill. When I sit down to a chess match, I know I'm going to have to think. When I sit down to complete a crossword puzzle, I know I'm going to have to use my vocabulary. However, I fire up a hack'n'slash RPG romp I don't want to theorycraft about statistics.

I'm a CPA. I do numbers for a living. I have no problem operating in complicated spreadsheets and financial models that would make the normal person's head explode, and even I don't want to constantly deal with math in my games to be successful. Transparency and simplicity in stats for video games is a good thing. Also, developers need to get over the "we'd like to make all our specs viable" bullshit. You can't. You can make some good things, and you can make some bad things, but unless you revolve the specs around differing weapon styles someone can just run a sheet to find the best dps, declare that spec awesome, and move on.

[Typhon]

This is getting a bit like kindergarten and it is beside the point, but 2 (Strength and Willpower) is indeed greater than 1 (Attack).

I think Kildorn has a point here. You, on the other hand just argue for arguments sake.

I think I'm unclear on why you liked the old system so much.

I'm not arguing from a "is it easy for newbies" perspective, I'm arguing from the perspective of what attributes a character actually used.  A gross simplification of a D2 build was - get enough of X to get the equipment I want, enough to cast the spells that I want, put the rest into maximizing my health.  X was either Strength or Willpower, based upon the character.  There were a bunch of different thresholds for those attributes depending upon what equipment you wanted to equip in the end game - which you had no way of knowing without actually having played through or gone online and read shit.  I dont' think that games should have some required level of "people need to research their characters to learn how to min max so they aren't fucked at the endgame".

What did X being different for the sorc and barbarian add to the game?  Were there any (non-stupid) builds that had sorcs putting a lot into STR?  My take was that there weren't.  If you think that having Str and Will significantly added to the diversity of builds, then we disagree there.  I think a sorc got only as much Str as absolutely required by the equipment, and not one iota more.  For the sorc Str was a cockbock.  A waste of atribute points that would otherwise go into damage, health or mana.  And again, without doing research the sorc has no way of knowing what the number needs to be prior to getting an item that she would otherwise want.

What it (Str + Will) added was a "oh fuck" to people who hadn't mapped out their character in excruciating detail to know exactly how much Str they needed to equip an endgame item that they hopped to eventually get.  "You need to be this tall to wear this equipment" didn't feel "realistic" to me, it felt like a cockblock.  If the amount of defense you received from an item was modified by your strength, then I'd say that was a richer system - but D2 didn't have that.

My assumption is that this rework will address issues like that, and it will allow the player to adjust their attributes on the fly as they are playing the game to try to make themselves hit harder, tougher, etc., rather then plan everything out ahead of time (and researching via the internet as a necessary part of play... a game).  If you think that negatively impacts the game then we disagree there as well.

[Tebonas]

I play these games as roleplaying games. I don't minmax them, I always keep some stat points in reserve for items I want to qualify for, but other than that I just go with what feels right for that particular character.

Sorcerers need Strength to carry some items, because these items would be too heavy otherwise. That makes sense from a roleplaying perspective. If they are too weak for a particular item, I take another one that doesn't have that drawback. And once in a while I develop a character in a particular direction because an unlikely item is too good to pass on.

Thats why I liked the old system. It gave me naturally growing characters, dictated by the randomness of the game. But still growing naturally out of imaginable attributes. My Barbarian was a dumb clumsy brute, now he is what, an inprecise goodattacky person? Which is the same as inprecise attacky spellslinging person, but with other weapons. That is diversity?

[Ingmar]

This is getting a bit like kindergarten and it is beside the point, but 2 (Strength and Willpower) is indeed greater than 1 (Attack).

I think Kildorn has a point here. You, on the other hand just argue for arguments sake.

You're wrong. Now every class has 5 stats that it needs to work with rather than 3. This de facto makes character building more complex for all characters. You're getting caught up in the terminology changes and missing what the implications are for character builds.

[Lantyssa]

People wouldn't have cared about the math if placing that point hadn't been an irrevocable decision.  They could have played with the +/- button until their character stopped dying.

Getting an editor to reset points required even more work than going to research whether mages should put points into energy or not.

[Sheepherder]

Sorcerers need Strength to carry some items, because these items would be too heavy otherwise. That makes sense from a roleplaying perspective. If they are too weak for a particular item, I take another one that doesn't have that drawback. And once in a while I develop a character in a particular direction because an unlikely item is too good to pass on.

Every single stat in every RPG ever made is an arbitrary abstraction.  No, being strong meaning you wear heavier plate does not, in fact, make any fucking sense.  Because a fucking child is physically capable of bearing the entire weight of a set of combat plate, notwithstanding the difficulty they would have with fit.  It's all just Gygax wank.

[Tebonas]

Yes, and there are arbitrary abstractions we grew up with and are therefore comfortable with and other arbitrary abstractions that rub us the wrong way.

For roleplaying purpose combining the stats for melee damage, ranged damage and magic damage makes no sense at all. They even admit that with "We realize that ‘Attack’ is less flavorful than ‘Strength’ and ‘Willpower’, but we feel the pros of understanding clearly how to build your character outweigh that con."

Flavor is one of the most important things in these games for me. Therefore I am pissed that it is removed to make the game "more accessible". In the industry more accessible means dumbing down to sell more units. And Diablo wasn't complex to begin with.

[Sjofn]

Also, developers need to get over the "we'd like to make all our specs viable" bullshit. You can't. You can make some good things, and you can make some bad things, but unless you revolve the specs around differing weapon styles someone can just run a sheet to find the best dps, declare that spec awesome, and move on.

What a fucking stupid thing to say. You're basically asking for all the classes to have one spec each, because only one is going to be "viable" in the spreadsheeter's view. Generally, when they say "we want them all viable" they mean "we don't want any of them to suck so much ass you can't play the game with it," which is a good goal if you're going to have more than one spec to start with.

[Paelos]

Also, developers need to get over the "we'd like to make all our specs viable" bullshit. You can't. You can make some good things, and you can make some bad things, but unless you revolve the specs around differing weapon styles someone can just run a sheet to find the best dps, declare that spec awesome, and move on.

What a fucking stupid thing to say. You're basically asking for all the classes to have one spec each, because only one is going to be "viable" in the spreadsheeter's view. Generally, when they say "we want them all viable" they mean "we don't want any of them to suck so much ass you can't play the game with it," which is a good goal if you're going to have more than one spec to start with.

It never works. Speccing doesn't work. They all boil down to the same shit. There is no system where people have unique specs when we're tied to the classes right from the get-go.

[K9]

I think this is just a semantic point, but when I read this explanation, I see Blizzard using 'confusing' when perhaps unintuitive or unclear might be better words. The skill system in D2 was somewhat arcane, and just because you could learn how to optimise it, that doesn't mean the optimisation was obvious from the get go. I'd happily wager that most people here fucked up their first D2 character beyond belief, as a product of the mechanics of skills and abilities being less intuitive than you might hope.

I think this change is fine, and disambiguates some of the more arcane mechanics without removing any of the depth. This is only a good thing.

With respect to the developers, I think this sort of discussion is helpful and improves the game. Now on the other hand, if you want to start talking about mechanics which are "un fun" (I'm looking at you Ghostcrawler) then you can politely go fuck yourself.

[Ingmar]

Also, developers need to get over the "we'd like to make all our specs viable" bullshit. You can't. You can make some good things, and you can make some bad things, but unless you revolve the specs around differing weapon styles someone can just run a sheet to find the best dps, declare that spec awesome, and move on.

What a fucking stupid thing to say. You're basically asking for all the classes to have one spec each, because only one is going to be "viable" in the spreadsheeter's view. Generally, when they say "we want them all viable" they mean "we don't want any of them to suck so much ass you can't play the game with it," which is a good goal if you're going to have more than one spec to start with.

It never works. Speccing doesn't work. They all boil down to the same shit. There is no system where people have unique specs when we're tied to the classes right from the get-go.

It worked fine in D2, there were multiple viable builds for most if not all classes.

[dusematic]

This is just them realizing "oh fuck, how are we going to scale balance" and then coming up with modifiers that lend themselves to scaling/balancing stats.  That's all. 

[Sjofn]

Also, developers need to get over the "we'd like to make all our specs viable" bullshit. You can't. You can make some good things, and you can make some bad things, but unless you revolve the specs around differing weapon styles someone can just run a sheet to find the best dps, declare that spec awesome, and move on.

What a fucking stupid thing to say. You're basically asking for all the classes to have one spec each, because only one is going to be "viable" in the spreadsheeter's view. Generally, when they say "we want them all viable" they mean "we don't want any of them to suck so much ass you can't play the game with it," which is a good goal if you're going to have more than one spec to start with.

It never works. Speccing doesn't work. They all boil down to the same shit. There is no system where people have unique specs when we're tied to the classes right from the get-go.

Speccing works fine, unless you're one of those assholes who thinks "this spec is slightly less efficient than this other spec, USELESS ZOMG." It just requires the developers to give a shit about balance and not listen to morons crying that balance in impossible so stop trying zomg.

[Paelos]

Speccing works fine, unless you're one of those assholes who thinks "this spec is slightly less efficient than this other spec, USELESS ZOMG." It just requires the developers to give a shit about balance and not listen to morons crying that balance in impossible so stop trying zomg.

Balance is impossible with a class game.