Thoughts on Diablo III?

A little old now (obviously), but I ran across this for the first time and it pretty much hits the nail on the head re the expansion:

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/03/28/wot-i-think-diablo-3-reaper-of-souls/

I'm now a good part of the way through Act V with my Crusader (up to a point with the unfortunately WoW-esque sight of a boss angel with a rocket launcher). Act V has very pretty maps that will be good for adventure mode, but the Act itself feels a bit lazy and more like an add-on to Act I than anything - moreso than any other act, the majority of monsters are reskins of Act I undead (which I like thematically, particularly as there are a few necromacer-type monsters about) and few offer any new abilities or types of attack. The Act even has few unique destroyable item graphics: mostly a mix of barrels, vases and crates taken from previous Acts, as well as the same styles of chest and rack (very trusting place, Westmarch - you can find weapon racks on every street corner, and chests lying about).

It's larger than the truncated Act IV, though having met the first big boss and I suspect being close to halfway through as a result, I suspect it's smaller than the others - the maps are large but there don't seem to be many of them. On my first runthrough I can't comment on the level of randomness, but there are a great many events and most of these appear to be scripted since they tie into minor story points, add bonus objectives to main quests, or add peripheral characters who turn up in town once rescued. So far there are no secondary full dungeons like the Khazra Den, or apparently random caves.

The follower quests are a nice touch, but even by Diablo standards the voice acting for the new characters is terrible and the sketchy story filled with 'kill them just because' characters (remember Zoltun Kule, the guy you got a random instruction to kill after finishing the quest he was part of for no terribly obvious story reason? Well, here you get stereotype peasant revolutionaries who decide that, just because you disagreed with their philosophy, it's a smart idea to attack the most powerful hero in the realm. Or thieves populating an empty dungeon for no terribly good reason other than to sneer at you and then die).

The Mystic's a nice if rather odd touch (and again with terrible voice acting, and not much better script. Didn't play the female Monk? Never mind, you can enjoy an excruciating fake Russian accent anyway, without ever needing to load Company of Heroes 2!) and provides the only really novel thing D3 can claim to have done with its loot (since Shen's just a talking Horadric Cube and you could buy random-property magic items since Diablo I), however with 'loot 2.0' I've yet to find much need to have my items' properties tweaked substantially and the crafting material requirements can be onerous - usually I either get the piece I want or one with too few properties than can be switched for anything more useful. I suspect she's good to obtain and then play with starting/low level characters in Adventure Mode more than anything else.

So, no experience with adventure mode yet but the rest of the additions are all welcome but as an aggregate not worth anywhere very close to the asking price of the expansion. Incidentally, those 10 extra levels are in practice only 8 aside from the experience requirement - at least for the Crusader, but since all classes presumably have the same number of skill unlocks the same will apply there: seems no one told Blizzard that a total of one new skill, five new runes for it, and two new passives do not add up to 10. In the Crusader's case, this means no new goodies at levels 66 and 68.

EDIT: It seems that Westmarch Heights at least is randomised, as are the events - the bonus objective monsters will just show up on the streets if the right events don't trigger. I've also found a full Plague Tunnels dungeon with its own monster types.

One annoying apparent bug, however: if you log out after dying to Uzrael, unlike other bosses you don't start again with a portal to the immediately adjacent room, and unlike most bosses there's no adjacent waypoint - you have to go through the whole Westmarch Heights level again (also all the conversations reset to the point before you got to the Heights, leaving lots of annoying silver stars floating around at camp).

Further update: I beat Malthael eventually - a core issue with D3 is its boss fights: the absurd health and extra 'lives' big bosses like Diablo and Belial have and the overall length of the battles makes replaying them over and over - and indeed playing them the first time, with its repetitive running backwards and forwards around a room - an excessively tedious experience, especially with a character like the Crusader who has a typically low damage output. So after losing to a boss a couple of times I rarely have the motivation to try again for a while. I'd rather have meaningful penalties for being killed, if only the older games' need to recover your body and kit, that have being bored to death as the game's major challenge.

I really didn't feel a lot of incentive to go to Adventure Mode, though it has nice touches like a merchant with randomised items missing from the campaign. Starting with a new character it can be fun, but there's a lot of tedium to get to that stage. Act V has its moments, and is indeed as long as the other Acts, but a full third of it - the Blood Marsh and attendant dungeons - consists mainly of three or four monster types reskinned and repeated, one of which is a swarm type that pops up regularly and serves no purpose other than to allow you to run through the level swinging Blessed Hammer or your class equivalent; the swarm things rarely drop anything useful. The boss fights are exceptionally dull (and apparently poorly-balanced for the difficulty of the rest of the level - playing against Maltheal on Master, I repeatedly lost while paired with a character outfitted to win on Torment), and two of the three work in much the same way, spawning a life-draining floor that roams around the small room while they teleport about.

Now I've unlocked that adventure mode perhaps starting afresh in a few months will appeal, with something closer to the 'classic' Diablo experience, but I see little point to running around with a max level character and the bounty system doesn't appeal - clearing a whole lot of set dungeons and monsters I've beaten during the campaign is, once again, another tedious rinse-and-repeat to get to the randomised reward dungeon (which I haven't played enough to get to yet).

I stopped playing when they announced the auction house would be closed. The only new feature of the game? Gone, because Blizzard fans are the most obnoxious, unpleasable, foul human garbage on Earth. Completely oblivious to their own nostalgia filter, they demand games which are new and exiting while also being exactly the same as the last game.



The point of having a currency is that it serves as an intermediary between transactions. I find a good item that a wizard can't use so I trade it for gold and trade the gold for a wizard hat. If there is no market where the players can get together and collectively decide how much gold an item is worth, it doesn't have a value because noone knows how many of an item are in circulation or how how much other people value similar items. Now to trade, I need to find someone who not only happens to have something I want, he also needs to want something I have, AND we need to want each other's loot the same amount. PLUS there is no way for people who have things they'd like to trade away to find each other.

I will say that as of September of last year, it felt like good gear was easier to get than in Diablo 2. Part of what makes Diablo fun is finding a good item and being like "hey that's better than what I have now" and putting it on. Obviously, it happens alot in the early game and then happens less and less. But in 3 it happened often enough that playing the game felt like playing a game. In 2 you could kill hell act bosses for days straight and get the same gear from opening a chest in act 1 normal. It was exhausting and frustrating and made me feel helpless, like a bad-day-at-work simulator.


Other game opinions of mine which are unpopular with loud people on the internet:
Seiken Densetsu is a better series than Final Fantasy
I enjoyed Skyward Sword
Spore was pretty good, but could have been great with a month or two of additional development time

You make valid points, but your opinions would be more interesting if you didn't start your post by trashing other people and end it by flaunting how unique you are. Everything doesn't have to be "me" vs "the sheeple". At this point I almost didn't read your post because of how annoying it sounded at the start, then it got better, then it cascaded into more grating stuff at the end.

Not mentioning unrelated and irrelevant opinions would help too.

Magma_Dragoon said:

I stopped playing when they announced the auction house would be closed. The only new feature of the game? Gone, because Blizzard fans are the most obnoxious, unpleasable, foul human garbage on Earth. Completely oblivious to their own nostalgia filter, they demand games which are new and exiting while also being exactly the same as the last game.

Spoiler :

18-wheeler carrying reasonableness and measured analysis crashes into ACC during BlizzCon, thousands are dead

The point of having a currency is that it serves as an intermediary between transactions. I find a good item that a wizard can't use so I trade it for gold and trade the gold for a wizard hat. If there is no market where the players can get together and collectively decide how much gold an item is worth, it doesn't have a value because noone knows how many of an item are in circulation or how how much other people value similar items. Now to trade, I need to find someone who not only happens to have something I want, he also needs to want something I have, AND we need to want each other's loot the same amount. PLUS there is no way for people who have things they'd like to trade away to find each other.

I will say that as of September of last year, it felt like good gear was easier to get than in Diablo 2. Part of what makes Diablo fun is finding a good item and being like "hey that's better than what I have now" and putting it on. Obviously, it happens alot in the early game and then happens less and less. But in 3 it happened often enough that playing the game felt like playing a game. In 2 you could kill hell act bosses for days straight and get the same gear from opening a chest in act 1 normal. It was exhausting and frustrating and made me feel helpless, like a bad-day-at-work simulator.


Other game opinions of mine which are unpopular with loud people on the internet:
Seiken Densetsu is a better series than Final Fantasy
I enjoyed Skyward Sword
Spore was pretty good, but could have been great with a month or two of additional development time

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Frankly, even if had remained the auction house would have been pointless with the rate at which legendaries, including higher-level duplicates of legendaries you've previously found, drop at present. Add new random dungeons with even greater rewards, and what's the point of trading for or buying something you have a reasonable chance of getting with a couple of hours' looting?

Yeah sorry, that thing at the end was stupid. I have this visceral urge to be a dick when posting about Blizzard games, due to years spent on the battle.net forum. I'm not backing down from the first paragraph.

Just got reaper if souls and I am liking it. The crusader is fun and gives a nice holy warrior feel, digging the captain America shield move. The loot drop is far better and now that the auction house is gone if feel much happier playing then searching for deals which just felt like being at the office.

I understand why they tried an auction house seeing as it works in wow, and I applaud their hard decision to go back on such a large investment if it fixes then fun. Seeing as it was also a revenue stream it could not have been easy.

Not at act 5 yet but looks looking forward to the more random maps of it and adventure mode.

I also notice the difficulties have been tweaked. Maybe it's because the crusader is such a tank, but I have been running into throngs if rare baddies and murdering them by the dozens at a swing. I upped to hard and it's still pretty easy (yet remains fun). I suppose this is good because it means I can get to act 5 faster, but when done I will definitely up the difficulty a beat or two. (can't do that now as I would have to restart)

I'm playing on torment at the moment however I find that whenever I try to do a timed chest or kill a treasure pigmy its impossible. Recently I've started trying to leave them to the end of a play through and then lowering the difficulty.

I'm playing as a demon hunter with a decent amount of damage so for instance in my latest play through it reasonably straight forward to kill the level boss in maybe a couple of minutes whilst I could only take half the health off a pigmy before it escaped. I've run into similar issues with level bosses so I couldn't kill the butcher on torment as it took too long so the fire was constant.

Fabio1701 said:

Just got reaper if souls and I am liking it. The crusader is fun and gives a nice holy warrior feel, digging the captain America shield move. The loot drop is far better and now that the auction house is gone if feel much happier playing then searching for deals which just felt like being at the office.

I understand why they tried an auction house seeing as it works in wow, and I applaud their hard decision to go back on such a large investment if it fixes then fun. Seeing as it was also a revenue stream it could not have been easy.

Not at act 5 yet but looks looking forward to the more random maps of it and adventure mode.

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Only some of the Act V levels are random - in fact the only one I can be sure of is Westmarch Heights.

Act V has a good first part, which is however mostly a mix of Act I monsters, and a good third part with some actually novel monsters in Pandemonium, but the second part (Blood Marsh) is drawn out and tedious. No given map has more than 4-5 monster types, one of which is a pointless swarm-type thing that exists only to be killed without much in the way of loot or experience for doing so. Oh, and it's got Murlocs.

The bosses also seem to scale badly with a given difficulty setting - Act V bosses are much, much tougher than the surrounding minions (relative to the disparity in past acts). None are very interesting and all are very similar (all three teleport, two have Asmodan-type damaging floor effects), and tedious to return to from the start following death.

I also notice the difficulties have been tweaked. Maybe it's because the crusader is such a tank, but I have been running into throngs if rare baddies and murdering them by the dozens at a swing. I upped to hard and it's still pretty easy (yet remains fun). I suppose this is good because it means I can get to act 5 faster, but when done I will definitely up the difficulty a beat or two. (can't do that now as I would have to restart)

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Normal and Hard are no challenge at all - you can start a basic character on Master (as I did with my Crusader) and still be challenged early on only by bosses.