Thoughts on Diablo III?

[Disgustipated]

Besides magazines there wasn't really any way to keep up on gaming news back then.

D2 came out in the 2000's. I haven't really read gaming mags since the 90's. Back in D2 days I read Gamespot (which I know longer read) for tips about games and such.

 

[Heretic_Cata]

Besides magazines there wasn't really any way to keep up on gaming news back then.

There was also a 20 minute show on the national tv network that aired once per week ! It had news and reviews of games !

 

[Maniacal]

That's 20 minutes more than we had in Canada. Especially when all you can get is 2, maybe 3 channels if you moved the TV and rabbit ears around enough.

 

[Wolfbeckett]

Come on man, the internet sucked when Diablo 2 came out but it did exist, the clever Web Ferret user or whatever could find info on games!

Why I remember back in my day I was playing D2 with an onion tied to my belt cause that was the fashion at the time...

 

[carmen510]

This is only somewhat related to Diablo 3, as it concerns my Battle.net account.

So I get an email from Blizzard stating my account was locked, and I tried to follow the steps to unlock it. Unfortunately, my account only has the old games (Warcraft 3, Diablo 2, and Starcraft) registered to it, so I can't authenticate with CD keys, as the process only accepts the new games (WoW, D3, and SC2). My security question has either been changed (What was the last name of your first boss?), as I've never had a boss, or I had put something in there and had forgotten the answer. I can't contact support, because support is tied to a Battle.net account, and the account has been locked. How should I proceed?

 

[Matthew.]

Are you sure it has actually been locked? Scam e-mails are very common to try and get access to people's WoW account to sell off items/gold for money. Same thing for Diablo 3 now. My WoW account hasn't been active for several years, yet I still get the random scam e-mail fairly often.

 

[Maniacal]

Yeah, apparently I have quite a few Battle.net and WoW accounts that I never made.

 

[Disgustipated]

I wouldn't believe any email that said my account was locked. I still don't like the WOW/Battlenet merger. I wasn't sure if it was registering that I owned BC and Cataclysm (both which I bought digitially) where as Lich King I had a hard copy. I also had problems I think installing WOW from my 2004 CD's. I was afraid that when I started, I wouldn't have access to BC stuff. But apparently, during that massive pach download, it downloaded BC and Cataclysm in there. But it still doesn't show my CD keys for Diablo 2. Sigh.

 

[carmen510]

No, it definitely was locked. I tried to log in on the Battle.net website.

 

[Thrawn]

You should be able to phone support.

 

[Disgustipated]

bump. I'm not back, I just want to see if anyone is playing this game.

New patch is out, and new expansion soon. The patch changes a decent amount. I'm still not sure I like enemies scaling to my level. But I like playing on a harder difficulty level from the start. Looks like they nerfed normal level. That's a joke. I bumped it up to master, but I had no good gear, and so I settled on Expert. Takes a while to kill enemies, but at least there is challenge (with the elites at least).

But I'm already kind of burned out on it. I can't say what this game is missing exactly. I like a lot of things about it, but I stopped playing before I finished Act 1 Expert. I do have to say, I was enjoying my monk. Didn't think I'd like him, but I do.

I think the game play may be too repetitive (although you could say that about Diablo 2 as well). Act 1 expert is probably the same as Act 2 expert. I don't really have any motivation to continue on.

Just want to hear other people's thoughts. Anyone going to play this now the gameplay patch is out and expansion coming soon? The expansion adds a Crusader. Which might be interesting, I liked Paladins in D2. But I'm probably not going to get the expansion unless they reduce the price (and Blizz doesn't like reducing prices, Mists of Pandaria is still at full price I think).

 

[Rub'Rum]

Yeah, Blizzard rarely has sales. I've been tempted to try the new patch... But it's too little too late. I'm not giving them any full-price money so I guess I won't be playing the expansion pack until 2018.

I've heard a lot of good things about the patch. Supposedly makes item drops and looting useful again. But you're right, there is something missing from the game and I can't put my finger on it either. I should try it again to make sure I still have that feeling. But there was a soul missing. It felt tiny, hermetic, claustrophobic. It felt like going through the same game tiny corridor over and over again because the randomization wasn't strong enough and the random level designs created by the engine were ... compressed and contrived? The story and clown-esque villains constantly interrupting you... were terrible.

Anyway, everytime I think I should try D3 again, I just fire up Path of Exile. It has its flaws, but it's decent.

 

[SewerStarFish]

I stopped playing D3 after just a few months and haven't gone back, though I did go through the trouble of loading the patch.

It simply falls short of the mark, and doesn't measure up to what I was hoping for in a sequel to D2. It has a very linear and soulless (I'll go with that) feel. Fun the first time through but just no joy in replayability.

And nope, once bitten--twice shy. Blizzard has some work to do with me: the reviews from people I know would have to be amazing at this point.

 

[TheDanish]

I've had the same feeling, SSF. It was fun the first playthrough, but I got bored halfway through the second and have hardly touched it since 2012. I find Torchlight 2 to be more interesting and customizable, closer to D2. But it's not quite the same.

TBH I haven't really -loved- any Blizzard games like I used to, not since WoW's release. SC2 has a great competitive multiplayer but that's about all.

 

[Birdjaguar]

I loved D2, but am glad I skipped D3.

 

[GAGA Extrem]

Originally I received a copy via my WOW subscription, played it for some time - and then quit after I had reached level 60 because it was just terrible.

I decided to check out the new D3 patch and must admit: With the 2.0.1 it is basicially a completely new game. Not perfect, but actually a good hack'n'slay.

The loot system is now MUCH, MUCH better. The number of drops has been reduced, so you will end up with much less stuff on the ground. In return the overall quality of the items has increased significantly. Much more important you will only very rarely find items that are not useful for your class. It seems that the game will always grant you the primary stat (STR/DEX/INT) for your class instead of a random one. No longer will you find INT as main stat on a sword while playing your Barb or STR while playing your DH.

Even more important, the drop rate of legendaries has been increased significantly. I think my drop rates have been one legendary every other hour or so. Even better, they can now drop below level 60 (with scaled stats), so you will also find a lot of legendaries as you level your character. I played a barb from 1-60 with a friend a few days ago and found more than a dozen items in the process.

Apart from loot, crafting is now useful. My demon hunter had pretty decent equipment, but thanks to the new receipes I was able to get a bunch of pretty strong items (e.g. gloves with 500 DEX) that replaced my old stuff - and for a reasonable cost.

Of course there is a catch to that:
Now that the AH is shutting down, all items you find will become "bound to account", so you cannot trade them anymore. HOWEVER, if you play in a party, you have a 2 hour window to trade any legendary drops with other party members, so you are not completely screwed over while playing with your friends.

Apart from the loot thing they added a lot of quality of life improvements. For example, there is now an option to auto-skip cuscenes. The screen will just go black for a few seconds and then drop you right into action - which improves the flow of the game significantly. You can also abort any in-game dialogue with ESC (not sure if that was the case before?), so you don't have to listen to Asmodeus or Diablo rambling like a little child anymore.

Lastely you now farm Paragon levels for your account as a whole (instead of per character). Every level grants you 1 point in one of 4 different categories, which you can use to improve certain stats (basicially like the D2 stat system, but with more choise). You can also reset these stats at any time, no cost involved.


So, in short:
If you hated D3 on launch give it a try now. It is much, much better and actually fun to play. And I am saying that as a person that HATED D3 so much that I uninstalled it and went back to D2 and TL2.
...and remember you don't need to buy their overprized addon to have fun!

 

[PhilBowles]

Just returned to it with the new loot system.

Then went back to D2.

In fairness, I didn't mind the new system once I realised that the difficulty level descriptions are completely wrong and that you need to play on Master to get something close to the old Inferno difficulty, but this alone is symptomatic of the issue: the patch seems designed exclusively with competitive long-term players stacked with legendary gear in mind, and completely wrecks balance everywhere else in the game.

Personally I find Diablo a bit tedious once you hit level 60 and like to start new characters and accumulate new gear. It was already hard to start from scratch with artisan levels and gold being pooled between characters; rather than add an option to disable this feature, they've now forced
pooled paragon levels on you if you dare to exceed level 60 (as I have with one character) - starting with a 'blank slate' is gone for good. Fine to have the option to pool these levels if you want it, but they really should offer an option for those who don't (or who just want the challenge of an all-new character without infinite funds and instant access to stat bonuses and advanced crafting recipes).

I'm getting about one piece of legendary gear per session per character, and rare items are anything but. Almost all are precisely tailored so that they're either direct upgrades of what I'm already using, or something I can replace existing stuff with. After only a few hours in two sessions I have a level 17 Demon Hunter with a legendary crossbow and nearly all her other items rare.

I can see that for players with full legendary kits who want to find upgrades, well, occasionally, this is a very good change, but at lower levels it kills the whole feel of exploration and indeed most of the point. Let's make no bones about it: Diablo is a game that requires essentially no skill beyond deciding on initial ability selection; it's not even important to be that fast at button-pressing since most abilities at higher levels clear the room for you. It's all about the character's gear. If I can rely on pretty much always getting the best gear I need from any random fight, where's my incentive to carry on?

I used to relish the challenge of fighting through dungeons with suboptimal equipment in a quest (in a meaningful sense of the word) to find a valued weapon upgrade or a new class-specific item I can use. Indeed it was basically the point of the game. It also kills variety when you hardly ever see items belonging to other classes, or ones with abilities you can't use (my wizard is already tired of getting Reptilian X of Focus after Reptilian Y of Focus after Reptilian Z of Focus). Going back to my level 60 character, the very first rare drop I got upgraded his hard-won bow, while a drop or two later I was able to give his Enchantress a weapon that dealt five times as much base damage as the one it replaced.

Yes, the old D3 system was a bit too stingy with useful gear, and returning to D2 I found that that system too gave more useful drops more frequently, but the new one goes too far in the other direction - in my view, further from the mark in its overgenerosity than vanilla D3 was in its miserliness.

Since you have to play on such a high level for a challenge even with a new character (a brand new Normal Wizard killed the Chancellor with Ray of Frost before he ever had a chance to teleport. I finished Act IV with my Hardcore Wizard also on Normal - she got careless and was both hit by fireballs and punched by Diablo a few times, taking no detectable damage), you also uplevel ridiculously quickly (sure, there's an experience boost at the moment, but levelling should not be that quick - my new Demon Hunter hit level 3 on Master before even getting inside Tristram's gates); you very soon get to a point where you hit your desired abilities and stay there.

This is a particular shame since the patch has really bolstered the actual variety of available drops and added the much-missed ability-specific bonuses of past games' items (boosts to Hydra, Ray of Frost etc.). Although in a game where all abilities give meaninglessly high damage multipliers (4200% etc.), getting a further 11% boost to damage output from an item doesn't cause you to treasure it quite as much as in D2. It's also made class abilities more interesting and I suspect distinctive. Feature-wise it's now almost exactly the game it should be, but particularly with an expansion around the corner they really shouldn't have made the game nearly unplayable for anything less than highly-optimised, max level characters.

On top of all that, for some reason there are a whole bunch of new 'easy-mode' additions - you can now upgrade artisans to level 10 with no crafting materials required, there are new semi-permanent experience wells, and power globes dropping all over the place substantially boost characters' abilities.

No longer will you find INT as main stat on a sword while playing your Barb or STR while playing your DH.

This speaks to a design flaw with the stat system - there should be more incentive to "off-stat", rather than loot rewards than reduce the chances of doing so. As any class, I want INT items because they improve my resistances. But Strength and even Dexterity is essentially useless as a secondary stat - I basically never want Strength items when not a Barbarian (which is why the Crusader is a good choice for a new class - someone else who uses Strength is much more important for the game than someone who uses Dexterity or Intelligence).

You can also abort any in-game dialogue with ESC (not sure if that was the case before?), so you don't have to listen to Asmodeus or Diablo rambling like a little child anymore.

You could always both do this and skip the cutscenes the same way.

 

[GAGA Extrem]

This is a particular shame since the patch has really bolstered the actual variety of available drops and added the much-missed ability-specific bonuses of past games' items (boosts to Hydra, Ray of Frost etc.). Although in a game where all abilities give meaninglessly high damage multipliers (4200% etc.), getting a further 11% boost to damage output from an item doesn't cause you to treasure it quite as much as in D2.

Are you sure that the modifiers are additive to the weapon damage %?
From what I have noticed, they seem to be a multiplier for the final damage. I used a 50% boost on my boulder toss (which deals fury * 20% wpn damage, so it has ~3000% wpn damage on my barb) and the results suggested that the final damage was increased.

As for the system flaw:
I still think that their biggest mistake was using weapon DPS for all calculations in the first place. That might be easier to balance skills around, but in the end it means that weapons are by far the most important slot of a character and everything else is just secondary.

And yes, the fact that you still ignore any stat except for your primary one + vitality is another huge problem. But at least the loot does now take it into consideration.

the patch seems designed exclusively with competitive long-term players stacked with legendary gear in mind, and completely wrecks balance everywhere else in the game. [...]
Feature-wise it's now almost exactly the game it should be, but particularly with an expansion around the corner they really shouldn't have made the game nearly unplayable for anything less than highly-optimised, max level characters.

I don't really understand that.
From what I have seen, the difficulty levels seem to scale much better on all levels. When I levelled my barb with my friend we started on "normal" and switched to "hard" after we had some decent equipment for our level. Once we had reached 60 we bought a cheap weapon from the AH (25k gold cost, which you can get from vendoring ~25 dropped items) and went to "master". Now we are decently equipped and can play Torment I, maybe even II. I tried Torment VI with my DH for noticed that it is indeed brutal (got one-hit by big mobs that have 40 mio HP), so I guess the Torment levels should scale well with high level gear?

If anything it seems that casual players now have a much easier time while "veteran" players can just use the higher torment difficulties to play.

One thing I noticed, though: The new loot has much higher stats across the board, so there has been a bit of number inflation/power creep in that direction that leads to a false sense of improvement when upgrading your old characters (and fades quickly once you have equipped a new item in each slot).

 

[PhilBowles]

Are you sure that the modifiers are additive to the weapon damage %?
From what I have noticed, they seem to be a multiplier for the final damage. I used a 50% boost on my boulder toss (which deals fury * 20% wpn damage, so it has ~3000% wpn damage on my barb) and the results suggested that the final damage was increased.

As for the system flaw:
I still think that their biggest mistake was using weapon DPS for all calculations in the first place. That might be easier to balance skills around, but in the end it means that weapons are by far the most important slot of a character and everything else is just secondary.

And yes, the fact that you still ignore any stat except for your primary one + vitality is another huge problem. But at least the loot does now take it into consideration.

Yes, it multiplies the final damage - my point is that the damage calculation itself is arbitrary and disconnected from what you actually equip beyond "more damage is better". It removes all connection with the character, who just becomes a stat carrier rather than an identifiable individual whose kit and equipment have identifiably discrete effects. An extra % modifier to an effect I'm always going to spam where possible anyway is just another stat boost - it doesn't feel any different whether the boost is to a hydra or a ray of frost. Linking everything to DPS is a big part of that, but I don't think it's the whole story.

I don't really understand that.
From what I have seen, the difficulty levels seem to scale much better on all levels. When I levelled my barb with my friend we started on "normal" and switched to "hard" after we had some decent equipment for our level. Once we had reached 60 we bought a cheap weapon from the AH (25k gold cost, which you can get from vendoring ~25 dropped items) and went to "master". Now we are decently equipped and can play Torment I, maybe even II. I tried Torment VI with my DH for noticed that it is indeed brutal (got one-hit by big mobs that have 40 mio HP), so I guess the Torment levels should scale well with high level gear?

If anything it seems that casual players now have a much easier time while "veteran" players can just use the higher torment difficulties to play.

One thing I noticed, though: The new loot has much higher stats across the board, so there has been a bit of number inflation/power creep in that direction that leads to a false sense of improvement when upgrading your old characters (and fades quickly once you have equipped a new item in each slot).

If the above was the case, it should be that a new, unequipped character should struggle just as much as on the equivalent pre-patch level. It's not an artefact of higher loot stats that Diablo can hit a level 30 wizard multiple times without causing serious damage, that the same Wizard in Archon mode can kill Rakanoth before he can jump, or that a Normal Wizard with new gear should be able to wade into close combat with hordes and kill them (unless monster stats haven't scaled with the weapon stats); pre-patch, my non-melee characters would have to run around quite a lot to evade the Chancellor while trying to kill him on standard difficulties, not stand next to him and fry him. Since Diablo characters' power is entirely determined by character level and equipment, not player skill, it simply shouldn't be possible to start a brand new character on Master and perform well, any more than a level 1 character would be able to survive on Inferno pre-patch (not that a level 1 character could have got to Inferno).

EDIT: As above, however, the difficulty issue is easy to fix - certainly the higher difficulties are, indeed, difficult. But upping the difficulty comes at the expense of accelerated levelling (hence less time to enjoy a varied skill set, and less time overall before hitting the level 60 plateau). The core of the problem is the reduction in variety in drops, and the simple fact that when you have good gear and all the relevant skills, there just isn't any gameplay left to Diablo. Getting the gear and skills as easy handouts leaves ... what, exactly?

 

[PhilBowles]

bump. I'm not back, I just want to see if anyone is playing this game.

New patch is out, and new expansion soon. The patch changes a decent amount. I'm still not sure I like enemies scaling to my level. But I like playing on a harder difficulty level from the start. Looks like they nerfed normal level. That's a joke. I bumped it up to master, but I had no good gear, and so I settled on Expert. Takes a while to kill enemies, but at least there is challenge (with the elites at least).

But I'm already kind of burned out on it. I can't say what this game is missing exactly. I like a lot of things about it, but I stopped playing before I finished Act 1 Expert. I do have to say, I was enjoying my monk. Didn't think I'd like him, but I do.

I think the game play may be too repetitive (although you could say that about Diablo 2 as well). Act 1 expert is probably the same as Act 2 expert. I don't really have any motivation to continue on.

Just want to hear other people's thoughts. Anyone going to play this now the gameplay patch is out and expansion coming soon? The expansion adds a Crusader. Which might be interesting, I liked Paladins in D2. But I'm probably not going to get the expansion unless they reduce the price (and Blizz doesn't like reducing prices, Mists of Pandaria is still at full price I think).

I plan on getting the expansion mainly for Act V, even though it is drastically overpriced. Sure Blizzard stories are poor and the characters caricatured, and I tend not to play melee characters, but the extra game environments and character levels (with associated skills) should aid playability. A disappointment looks to be "Adventure Mode", billed as the expansion's big sell, if all it's going to do is unlock waypoints - it seems it adds no new maps to the existing Acts to support adventuring, and the 'bounties' are described as being taken from existing story quests, again without new content (such as 'kill Queen Areanae').

Though returning to D2 I found the lack of randomness a big issue, strangely - I remembered the exact encounters, in exactly the same parts of the map, with the exact suites of monsters, and always the same unique monster in the same place, even though I haven't played the game for a decade or more. There's certainly a lot of that in D3, but I think monster spawns are at least somewhat more randomised.

Blizzard's RTS's were okay, I liked them to some extent because, again, they were the few games that were available at the time and I played it with my friends, but I generally dislike RTS in general. Age of Empires II was better than Warcraft or Starcraft.

Blizzard's success, and business model, is based on one thing: taking other people's games and simplifying them to the basics. Diablo (and its clone World of Warcraft) is what you get if you take an old-fashioned isometric RPG and remove everything except combat.

Warcraft is like an Age of Empires game with heavily reduced tech options (and no harvesting etc. techs), few units, fewer resource types and those at fixed points on the map where you can set up bases (no trading posts or settlements just for harvesting and military buildings here), the removal of harvesting buildings, and towers as the only form of fortifications. You need this sort of simplicity for an 'e-sport: basic rules with few moving parts; Starcraft and WCIII became competitive sports, AoE and Cossacks never did.

Blizzard has built an empire on a combination of this accessibility and nostalgia (no one else makes 'traditional' RTSes, and who else makes isometric RPGs?).