Diablo III: Game and Class Discussion

[Krent]

I was able to make a melee wizard build work all the way up to inferno. Tanking Diablo in Hell makes you feel so boss mode. The problem is, Inferno spikes the game's difficulty dramatically, and I'm starting to feel really bored with the end-game content. I actually share Grak's feelings about the loot system, but because I bend easy to peer-pressure, I ended up buying the game anyway.

I hate farming. I hate it with all my being. Having to spend hours upon hours grinding down mobs to get a slight percentile chance of getting an item that you might be able to use bores me. That, and with Inferno, the game isn't really challenging, it just gets...stupid. The only thing that changes is blue mobs end up with more prefixes and all the numbers get inflated waaaaaaaay bigger. Enemies do more damage and get gigantic HP bars and are resistant to more things, which is the reason why melee becomes ineffective come inferno. I know a lot of pissed off Monks and Barbarians right now, and it seems like Demon Hunter / Wizard are kings.

I'm also kind of meh, as I had to re-spec my wizard to play like an actual wizard. And that involves a lot of kiting. I'm not a fan of having to kite things. I'd rather be all flashy and up in a mob's grill then run around a dungeon spamming blizzard. But, Blizzard said that they're working on all these issues so....yeah.

That, and you aren't exactly supposed to enter into Inferno until you farmed up a good bit of stuff in Hell. Which I don't want to do because Farming is so lame and aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa why did I buy thissssssssssssss?

For anyone who's interested in my melee wizard build, here http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/wi...afg!YYaYZc

[Ebenezer]

Actually, I can't find any way to acutally set one of my skill buttons to "melee". So that I can swing my weapon without any other things happening. I just want to play through the game swinging my weapon around, not spitting on stuff.

---

Wait, I found out. It appears I am able to simply throw away one of my spells to get my melee attack back.

[Xigo]

I feel disappointed that this game is as successful as it is.

Now because of Blizzard's success, more and more companies will make single player games that require you to be online to game. I don't even care about this for pirating purposes - this stuff's really annoying when you can't play a game because you're not online. With the apparently growing bandwidth problems, this will severely limit our ability to 'game' within the decade.

Sure, I don't deny this game might be fun. I won't comment on the gameplay, though I've played through and beaten Diablo 2 and its expansion and thought that was pretty fun as a trap assassin (with OP shuriken). But this game will probably set a precedent for other companies to do similar.

While I do like the games Blizzard produces, and have no grief with its programmers, I do not like the choices they make at an executive level.

[Grakor456]

To be fair, though, this is hardly a new trend. The rise of MMOs and the fall of single-player RPGs was pretty much the result of this line of thinking.

Really, folks will buy any game if it has the Blizzard name on it, and go all rabid fanboy over it. Take a look at games like Diablo 2 and Starcraft that were so overwhelmingly popular that, even in the face of games that were by all accounts objectively superior to them that came out after, they were still the most played games of their respective genres for a long, long time. This ended up having little to do with how good the games themselves were, but instead because of the Blizzard name on it.

Blizzard does these things because they know they can get away with it. Same deal when the made the announcement of Starcraft 2 essentially being split into three games and the first only having the Terran campaign. For any other company, this would have been the equivalent of financial suicide.

[Xigo]

Personally, I think this belief that 'Blizzard' can do no wrong is a big problem. Certainly they make fun games, yeah. But the length of time it takes them to make a single game is ridiculous.

How long has it been since Starcraft 2 came out? How long will it be until the expansion for that comes out?

They're milking their IPs. Any other company would have had to release an expansion pretty quickly after release. Any other game that wasn't Blizzard created would have been forgotten within two years time. These expansions aren't even usually that big! Let's look at what the expansion for Wings of Liberty will net us.

-Another campaign. Probably the same length of Wings, so about six to twelve hours, depending on how you rush through it.
-A few more units for each faction.
-Some multiplayer maps.

It's not even like their graphics are amazing (outside CGs). Don't get me wrong, Blizzard has excellent artists with unique style (which is considered generic because of their success, go figure). But the games themselves don't technically blow me away, except perhaps for how optimized they are.

They take a lot of time to make sure their games are stable when they're released. That they're polished.

However, as Grakor said, no other company would get away with this kinda crud and still be as incredibly successful as Blizzard (save Valve, but they do a lot of interesting stuff too).

It's a shame that companies who try new things and bring different, unique stuff to the table like Atlus (Dark/Demon Souls, Persona, Catherine) are overshadowed by companies like... well everything that works for Activision. While well polished games that are the pinnacle of an established genre are great, I would much rather put my money down for things that tread new grounds.

[mimloopen]

I like this game lots of flaws but I dun mind cause its addicting. Act 2 inferno monk 120 hours played hit a wall but working on it ~_~

[Anski]

BACK ON TOPIC:

Demon Hunter is getting difficult. Very difficult. Inferno Act II is at the point where I can't kite any rare or elites without dying at least twice. Snare caltrops are the only thing saving me from certain death most of the time. My attack speed is getting harder to stack with any critical chance and dexterity, and it's keeping me from being able to fire and continue kiting without getting hit once or twice, which can mean certain death. It's at the point where i'm not even having fun anymore because of the intense difficulty.

[Ebenezer]

I've just gotten to Act 3, and I must say the Witch Doctor's DoTs are very effective against big guys. Insects and haunt, then I can spend my next ~eight seconds regenerating mana while I evade bad things. Been switching around on the skills a little, and I think I have these skills at the moment.
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/wi...S!ab!.aZZa
If I remember correctly, I am level 25 or 26 at the moment.

I was shocked when I found out Azmodan had pierced his nipples. I'd be more surprised if he had a handlebar moustache though, which I am sad glad he does not have.

[Piroska]

Still continuing to play when I'm able and still enjoying the fun. The barbarian is currently halfway through Act II on Nightmare and I'm starting to run into a little more issues than I was before. I swapped over to a two-handed weapon, since I finally managed to snag a weapon that was both higher initial DPS and provided the most beneficial stats. I swapped around my gemming (Vitality predominately) as well as snagged gear that has a balance of DPS-centric stats and Vitality; the reason for this is because I've selected abilities and complementary skill runes that allow me to regen a percentage of my health when utilizing them. This is resulted in a higher overall regen than I was getting with the more damage percentage-based regen build that I was utilizing before.

As long as I am able to utilize my attacks (not frozen, feared, or otherwise CCed), I am generally able to rush into the fray and keep myself alive.

I'm currently doing quite a bit of research on the mechanics of combat and gear and how to optimize performance. Since the game is still fairly new, there isn't a lot of empirical data and the community of mulling its way through.

There are two things that I found particularly intriguing. One, weapon speed has a definite impact on your character's abilities. In fact, pretty much every stat somehow affects your abilities, though not always in foreseen ways. Two, there is no normalization of procs within the game. If a piece of equipment has a chance on hit proc, it can happen any number of times within a minute. This is contrary to World of Warcraft since sometime around The Burning Crusade. Around that time devs introduced Procs per Minute (PPM) as a way to limit how frequently weapon enchants and trinket abilities could be used. This can be beneficial or detrimental depending upon which gear is utilized and playstyle.

A couple of random thoughts:

1. Story: It's not bad, but it definitely has its inconsistencies with the Diablo universe. If you disregard the prior games and focus entirely on the lore of the current, it's actually quite interesting. I wish, however, that the latter two Acts didn't feel so disjointed. I realize that this is the result of a time crunch (and community supposition is that they're leaving content for future expansions), but it still can be fairly jarring.
   
2. Companions: I would have loved to see more development in the companions. They're generally strictly archetypical characters that rarely stray from their initial presentations. Furthermore, hearing the same conversations between my character and the companions has grown tedious and redundant. I feel like it's something where the game could have benefited from a little more attention, but it's admittedly a minor thing.
   
3. Add-ons/Customization: I would have loved to see a little more customization in the game and its UI. I don't need anything as expansive as World of Warcraft add-ons, but it would be wonderful to have some sort of system similar to the game's auras (blatantly mimicking popular add-ons like PowerAuras). It wasn't as much of an issue before, but now that I'm focusing more on the environment than my abilities, I find that I miss opportunities to use Revenge immediately or the reduced cooldown on other abilities whenever I crit/whatever.

[Ebenezer]

1. Add-ons/Customization: I would have loved to see a little more customization in the game and its UI. I don't need anything as expansive as World of Warcraft add-ons, but it would be wonderful to have some sort of system similar to the game's auras (blatantly mimicking popular add-ons like PowerAuras). It wasn't as much of an issue before, but now that I'm focusing more on the environment than my abilities, I find that I miss opportunities to use Revenge immediately or the reduced cooldown on other abilities whenever I crit/whatever.

Such as turning off the yellow and blue colour of rare mobs? When my Templar friend shouts "A WORTHY ADVERSARY LIES BEFORE US!", I'm completely .

[Piroska]

So, after having issues with my computer for a while (which has severely limited my ability to play any games as of late), I managed to play Diablo III again last night with boyfriend. My only thought right now is that I hate that the most recent patch automatically turns on General when you enter the game. There is no corresponding option to prevent this from occurring.

The only people in General at this point are people who don't know how to (or even that they can!) leave General and people (most likely bots) spamming advertisements for items and gold. It didn't happen a lot initially, but, man, those gold sellers were quick to jump on that opportunity within forty-eight hours of the patch going live. I turned off General within fifteen seconds and still managed to be spammed with three or four of those messages.

Bad form, Blizzard. Bad form.

[Ebenezer]

I love this game. I played with another guy who actually was really nice, and now he has to be on my friends list. Rolled a Barb to see how that was. Died twice in Act 1, before I got any gear to stack up on. Now I'm in level 30 with 4k health and 370-460 damage, depending on how much fury I have.

But that is not the best part. This is the best part. Didn't bother resize it, though.

Spoiler:

My helmet. IT IS PINK.

[Piroska]

Snag some dye, man! Haha.

And I loathe General. I haven't been able to log into any games due to computer issues, but I'm hoping that they have -- or will -- provide an option that allows you to choose to be automatically added to General. Drives me bonkers to see all of that nonsense pop up when I initially log in.

[Ebenezer]

Pink Dye is from Inferno, I think, so I'm happy that helmet was pink when it dropped. Dyed my new armour, minus helmet, purple. Looks sillier.

[Roxas65]

I love your character names. Can't think of a name? Name him after a random food.