The memories you give me...

Last summer. Maybe the summer before. Worked at UPS. Girlfriend and I went to the beach. Sat out all day. Got insane sunburn. The blisters were so bad that if I rubbed my bicep, the blister-water would drip down my fingers like I was under the shower. To keep my mind off the intense pain I'd pop the little packs of water as I worked. By the time the skin started peeling, it was bad. She tore off full sheets of paper sized skin off my back.

I wouldn't wish that on a jerk. And thats what Blizzard is here. Greedy jerks. Not much we can do about it.

I've not had the chance to play D3 because I don't own a system that will run it (my desktop just goes click when you try to turn it on, and yes I've troubleshot it, so don't ask).

I have however watched someone else play it.

And I have to say, it's not Diablo. Not *my* Diablo anyway. It just doesn't look right. It's too smooth. Historically, Starcraft, Warcraft and Diablo all looked very different. Warcraft was cartoonish and exaggerated on proportions and everything. Starcraft was spacy and semi-real with some exaggeration, and Diablo went for the gritty, grimy, bloody gorefest type of realism. I *loved* that about it. Now it's the generic cell-shaded smoothness that Blizzard has settled on with some details added here and there. The interface is stupid-bright, compared to what I'd expect.

And that alone will keep me from playing it. It's sad, because I was looking forward to it. But after watching gameplay videos, I was worried. But I waited until I could see it in person before rendering judgement. It sucks that I'll miss out on what is likely a good game because I can't stomach how they decided to make it look this time around. It's one thing to change voices or other things. But if I'm going to sit playing something for hours, I'd best be able to enjoy what I'm looking at.

I do honestly hope those who chose to play it have fun. I've truly always enjoyed Blizzard games. It sucks that I'm choosing to bow out because of the art choice. Oh well.

Wow. How many times did I repeat my point in there? Jeez. Enjoy the game, guys.

Realism?
It's true that they finally added a little bit of color beyond red, black, white, and brown. Having playing hundreds of hours of D1 and D2, I don't find the slightest incompatibility, but clearly it's a personal thing. I do like that the skills are all spectacular now (instead of only for spellcasters).

I'm hearing a lot of issue with D3 characters feeling more... one dimensional? than the D2 skill trees offered. As if there are far fewer choices available. The person speaking of it said it felt like you played the character how Blizzard says you play it, instead of having a few different options for advancement and development. How are your thoughts on that?

Hm. If anything, there are too many skills to choose from, and 'free respec' means you *can* choose them. In D2, you were stuck. In fact, you had to actually plan ahead for your perfect cookie-cutter build. I'd say D3 is significantly less constrained than D2.

I'm not sure it's possible to play the Demon Hunter as anything but an archer, though; AFAIK, there's no equivalent of a spear amazon option. Certain classes have certain weapons unavailable, but this seems minor (e.g., monk can have 2h staves, but not 2h swords). Not that it really happened in D2, but you can't really play non-DH classes as archers, either. You can equip bows, but your skills do what they do regardless.

One thing they could do better is be more explicit about 'Elective Mode' (like, that it exists!). By default, you have 4 skills per button (1-4, click, right-click); if you check Elective Mode, you can assign any skill to any button. This totally changes the game, even though the non-Elective Mode is a good tutorial.

Servers are down

BURN!!!

It's funny because we've all been there, amiright?
...
Right guys?
...
Anyone?

If you wanted to be a dick, you could use nothing but traps, knives, pets and grenades. I mean, everything is going to be a projectile, but theoretically, you could avoid using an arrow or a bolt. It's also theoretically possible to never equip a skill, and therefore use the default melee option that you get at level 1.

I love my DH though. I've never had as much fun with another Diablo class, and that's saying alot, I <3 my d2 druid.

Seriously Mike? How much did you know about D2? It sounds like not very much. If you think the online auction house is a gimmick than you really don't understand the amount of trading that went on in D2. You wanted Azurewrath? Sit in a chat channel spamming WTB Azurewrath or wait for something to spam WTS Azurewrath. Then you join a game with the guy and hope he didn't skip out with whatever you were trading without dropping the Legendary. The online auction house provides a significant quality of life improvement over D2 by removing the active element of the seller and adding protections for both parties in the transaction. Granted, the trade function was implemented inside a game, however that has less protections than the AH such as that someone could quickly change the value of currency offered right before you hit accept in order to get away with paying significantly less or nothing at all.

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Competitive gaming. If you can't keep the environment reasonably hack free then it undermines the credibility of the competition.

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They've made significant quality of life improvements over D2 and a lot of them are aided by having the battle.net online play.

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Alright, so you won't mind when some chinese gold seller keylogs your account information, logs in, pilfers everything from all your characters and leaves it naked? You're right! Hackers are Blizzards problem, that's why this question....



...makes much more sense. Since it's Blizzard's problem, they store your account information on their servers. Information which they make backups of at intervals and are capable of restoring what you lost to you. That is their solution to hackers. That and providing authenticators to aid in preventing YOUR characters from being exploited and hacked.

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One can look at this multiple ways.

Your guild leader can see you're online playing SC2 or D3 instead of raiding in WoW. Or your friends in the other games can harass you to come help them in the other game.

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It helps push towards a healthy economy.

D2 economy.

Get Rare. Rare is shitty. Sell Rare. Gamble. Sell most of what you just gambled for because they're shitty rares. Gamble some more.

In D3 there's an actual item economy with multiple paths. You get a shitty rare? Well, is it decent enough for another class? And you are benefited by that economy if you choose to use it. Otherwise, you can sit on your arse and farm crap all day long just like in D2 and end up with a bunch of worthless junk.

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It may. The real money AH will make Blizzard exactly $0 from Hardcore players.

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Most people's battle.net account username is exactly identical to the display name they have for Diablo 3. This causes issues and enables a dictionary style attack against the account.

I'm also not inclined to believe that just "being in a game" with one of these hackers is sufficient to get hacked. I have an open mind so if you have some credible evidence showing how this supposed hack works and that it is not most likely a matter of a keylogger I would be interested in reading it.

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One dimensional? The D2 skill trees were one dimensional. D2 was idiotically one dimensional for character. The trees were fluffy. Stat allocation was fluffy. What did D2 boil down to? Figure out which ability you use to try to roflstomp everything, put 20 points in that, put 20 points in every skill that synergized it, put points enough to meet those requirements. That ate up about 86 of your 105 (?) skill points. Attribute points? Even simpler. Enough strength, dex, and int to meet equipment requirements and then you stack vitality.

There are a few little changes I think would be more fun. I'm avoiding the big issues here (difficulty balance, item drops/item composition, AH issues), but it would be nice if health potions had a purpose (for example, #1). The main thing is the insane 30sec cooldown on using them. I don't understand. Not only are they not enough to fill (even half-fill) your life, but you literally find them faster than you can drink them (1 per 30sec). So, once per 2 fights, you can partially refill your life. :/ They even sell the potions in the the shops, as if you weren't finding more than you could ever use. So… why not make this cooldown much shorter? It used to be 0, and I don't see a big problem with that (you're tearing through your resources quite quickly in that case). But let's say we do want a cooldown: what's wrong with 5 or 10 sec? That's letting you use this partial heal a few times per fight (random packs, not bosses), and you're using up your resources (potentially gold, if you had to buy them).

#2: So, after going through the game on Normal, NM, and Hell, times 5 characters, I've found a grand total of 1 Legendary, 0 Set, 0 Plans, etc. This also seems like a huge problem with the game. Surely you should be able to find a few Legendary, Set, and so on, in *at least* one full run through the plot? It's not like the Legendaries are even any good (at all), so why not let us find a *couple*? This is a huge departure from D2.

#3: While D2 used to have stat requirements to use your armor and weapons, D3 is just level. Which means you have exactly 2 stats to dump everything on: (primary) and Vitality. Strength gives a minor bonus to armor, Int gives a minor bonus to Resists, and Dex gives a minor bonus to dodge, but these are all much to small to bother with while you try to maintain armor, resists, DPS, and HP in a balance that keeps you alive. It seems like a simple tweak could make these other stats more useful when they're 'non-primary': increase that minor bonus a small amount. Make it 1.5% instead of 1%, I dunno (that's why playtesting exists), and only do this for non-primary stats of a given character. I'm sick of finding Monk-only items that have big Strength bonuses, or DH-onlies with tons if Int, etc. It feels like a giant waste.

I agree, the potions bit is quite dumb. I see most people in Inferno running around 20-30k hp though I have seen a ridiculous resist barbarian with 14k hp. The best potions are pretty much useless in Hell if you're doing some Inferno. There's also the ridiculous difficulty gap between Act I and Act II of Inferno. The potions are one thing and there is at least a justifiable reason for the fact that they restore a fixed amount. D2 had Rejuevenation potions that were, IIRC, 30% or 100% of your HP healed. No, the ridiculousness of healing is best represented by monk. They have a fixed value heal that only rises with level. In a world where basically every skill's potency is based off weapon damage you have a skill that quickly falls behind in effectiveness.



Legendaries are getting buffed, so be glad you haven't found any. All the ones that have already spawned are staying as they are. Blizzard has admitted that their too weak. There are lower than level 60 legendaries (I have three) and those are really the ones you're most likely to find on Normal-Hell. I'm not sure if there's any set pieces that require a level lower than 60. That means you need to get iLvl 60-63 drops to get set pieces and the latter three are only available in Inferno. I think iLvl 60 items can be gotten in Act IV Hell.

It's also not a huge departure from D2. The frequency, perhaps can be considered a departure, but that's about it. Overall, rares can be a lot better than most set or unique items. The problem, of course, was getting one that was better. Top end rares should be better than legendaries only because they're much hard to obtain than to get a legendary that generally has the same stats, but with ranges.



I just want to make sure you're on the same level. Attributes in D2 had one purpose. Meet equipment requirements. Once those were met, for all intents and purposes there was really just one attribute. Vitality.

Not, 'just frequency' really is a gigantic departure from D2 if I haven't found any Unique or Set items in something like 15 first-run plays through the entire game. In D2, you'd find a few per Act, on every difficulty rating. If the game is only meant to be played on Inferno/Level 60, that's bad. I'm not talking about 'legendaries should be better than rares', I'm talking about 'legendaries should *exist*'. That goes double for Set items… are they seriously Level 60 only? That's just shocking.

Right, but they don't have that purpose in D3, and it was a *huge* deal in D2. Meeting reqs was half the reason to do anything.

2 things. One, no I won't mind, because I don't have anything in my online account with Blizzard, the same as other people here. We don't care about online, that's the point. The hackers aren't our problem. Two, oh noes, the horror, a Chinese haxx0rrzed my account with "keylogs". Seriously?

… You have to have things on your account; he specifically said 'pilfers everything from your characters'. Diablo characters have things.

This seems circular. "You must have an online character. But what if scary Chinese!!1! hackers steal your stuff? Then you want things secure, right? Hackers are your problem!"

Maybe I'm misunderstanding his point...in D2, you could totally have an offline experience.

Oops, I didn't realize we were talking about counterfactuals. The fact is that you do have online characters in Diablo 3, so they have to be secured. The argument for having online characters is for the integrity of the whole game (which apparently many D2 players wanted), not the individual characters. So, it's everyone's problem, because everyone's online. You might wish for a non-online D3, but you might also wish for unicorns.

I think the original idea was that it was said "Hackers are everyone's problem". But they weren't everyone's problem in D2. Yes, I guess hackers ARE everyone's problem now in D3, but only because Blizzard chose to make them everyone's problem.

That's a little silly, to equate wishing for what we already had in D2, to wishing for unicorns. There's a latin expression for that kind of argument...

Presumably, there's a Latin phrase for literally everything.

It goes like this: apparently D2 players asked for a secure system with no hacked/duped items, which included an in-game auction house that you could actually use safely. To do that, you can't have offline play. Done. You can argue that you don't agree with the premise, but it's hardly a fallacy.

Again, I didn't realize anyone argued that hackers were everyone's problem in D2; I thought we were talking about how things actually are in D3. If I'm misreading everything, sorry for the trouble. The fact is that D3 is online, period. A non-online D3 is a unicorn, regardless of what D2 was. Someday, they might release an offline mode (like they eventually released NOCD patches), but given that all monsters and everything are processed server-side… it seems unlikely.

Yeah, there's probably a latin phrase for almost everything. Probably not for ideas like computers and current day tech? I thought it was interesting, in a language like Sinhala, they just take the English word ("television") and add an ending sound ("televisionecka"). Anywho...

Well, I thought the idea was "Hackers are everyone's problem, that's why D3 needs to be always online". Implying that hackers were a problem for everyone before D3, and that D3 solves this problem. If not, then I'll apologize for the trouble

Ha! Well I'm glad we got that straight: one or both of us was confused. Oh well.

Another interesting thing about D3 is that they seem to have invested all of their plot-and-dialogue effort into the hirelings (leaving none for *anyone* else). Those 3 actually have personalities and backstories, and their voice acting is actually *acting*. I can't imagine why they made all the bosses, Cain, Adria, etc. say such wooden, boring, and stupid things. Surely it wasn't their intention to make the Lords of Hell sound like whiny children? :/

You could fix it. Just separate online and offline characters. Online characters are 'hack-proof', but require you be online constantly to use them. Offline characters ... don't.

Diablo 3 sounds fun, but I'm going to wait until the hacked version that permits offline play. I really don't have a choice.

But you can't do that. First, the *premise* is that you want a secure system including an AH. That's the premise; again, you can disagree with it, but you can't say it's not there. They already did the half-and-half method with Ladder/Realms, and (apparently) it wasn't acceptable. (I played 100% Open chars, so I'm not talking about myself here.)

Second, you'd have to not only remove the AH and all the online features (which, like it or not, are core components of the game), but apparently also basically run a D3 server at home. It seems a huge part of the game is run server-side, as I said. At best, this notional hacked version will be more like a private server than D2-style offline.

I'm not saying 'it's impossible for a game like D3 to be offline'. I'm saying that D3, as designed, is fundamentally online. Today in reality, they can't just flip a switch and give you Open characters. The new VW Beetle comes with different color paint and interiors, and you cannot get the blue paint with the beige interior; *that* is an arbitrary limitation (and I think it'd look good, hehe).

I'm not doubting you, but do you have any references to the gamers that were asking for a secure online-only game? I'm seeing the move by Blizzard as purely aimed at maximizing profit through the AH, and not really in any response to player requests.

No, I'm just taking it as given for the discussion. Like I said, I only played Open (and 95% offline) myself. Their motivation really doesn't matter, though. Whoever wanted it, the system is fundamentally designed around a secure system w/ AH, which includes major server-side processing and requires online play. Given that fact, a) you can't just 'enable' offline-only play, and b) hackers are everyone's problem. I'm saying you can argue that these are *bad* motivations and bad decisions, and/or that it's all Blizzard's *fault*, but A and B are still true.

Regarding D3, what's the deal with Thorns? Why do they keep including this wholly worthless power? Even in D2, it was still wholly worthless, and there were a lot more ways to leverage the effect (auras and things). I can only assume there's one dev who just loves it and they're afraid to sadden him.

I think, in all this "discussion", that most people (including me), realize we're not going to change anything - D3 is what it is.

Having said that, to me, their motivation does matter. This change doesn't appear to be a "responding to customer demand" change. This change appears to be a "Spaceballs 2: The search for more money^*, our customers wishes be damned."

^*Yes yes, I know companies exist to make money.

Thorns may be annoyingly weak but it at least has AN effect at lv60. Seeing as how Lv55+ gear can be decent for inferno, nothing is more frustrating than getting +xp gear on what you're using in Inferno.

Ha, true. There are actually several effects that do 'nothing', but that one is at least literal.

Thorns, though, is not useful at any level. At the very lowest levels, things have little enough HP that it could hurt them (probably not kill them), but you don't need it then. You're already killing them easily, because all of Normal is 'No Fail Tutorial' difficulty.

Moving forward, suffix balance is probably the issue that bothers me the most. Life leech, which was basically mandatory in D2, is all but useless in D3 (maybe that's a good thing, but still). % chance to Stun/Chill/etc. is not bad, but tends to be a very low percentage. And so on. It's not a huge problem, but it pokes me every time I find an item.

Real Money Auction House is up. Wonder if I can make enough to pay for my WoW subscribtion and basically play both games for free.

I've only sold like 4 things in the gold one so far. There really is nothing in the AH below level 50. I'm not wild about the fact that the game *starts* at level 60/Inferno. I preferred D2's 'unattainable' 99.

On the other hand, IAS, as expected is ridiculous. It's bad that Magic rings with IAS are better than any possible rare ring that does not have IAS. I have a legendary bracer that is okay but not great, but since it has 8% IAS it provides a huge boost to my DPS compared to anything else I could put in the slot.

They're fixing IAS in the next patch, though. Yes, it's crazy good now.

Which is annoying.

Annoying that it's crazy good? Yes, the ideal is definitely balance in all things. Annoying that they're patching? *shrug* Constant balance tweaks are now the norm for games, be they MMO, FPS, whatever. I'm pretty fine with it (within reason, obviously). Given that we can't go back in time, I'd rather they keep making progress… than no progress.

It's annoying in the sense the this "balance" is probably going to end up with the opposite effect of what they're intending to do with inferno, which is to lower the difficulty gap between Act I and Act II.

Presumably they're doing multiple things. You'd think it wouldn't be *that* hard to make everything stop one-shotting everyone. It wouldn't have kill them to make Normal, NM, and Hell challenging either. At the very least, they could just give things more HP; everything I meet in the game is either dead in 1 hit, 3 hits, or … oh-god-TPK-x5.

For those of us who A) don't have D3 yet and B) don't obsess over statistical minutiae, what's IAS?

Increased Attack Speed.

The primary reason Blizzard doesn't like is the resources that have generation based on making hits and specifically Hatred generation for Demon Hunters. It's pretty bad when a Monk can spam Mantra of Healing to keep up the elevated HP regen without running out of spirit because of attack speed except for the fact that this is the sort of junk you have to pull to survive on Inferno.

What they should do, rather than nerfing IAS, is to change how resource generation works and make it a X/second cap on generation that way IAS helps resource generation, to a point, before no longer helping it or do some sort of diminishing returns. IAS would still be very valuable as a damage increase, it just wouldn't be as broken for Demon Hunters as current.

Of course, IAS was a huge deal in D2 as well. It's even more so in D3 currently, though.

I find it a necessary part to survive inferno as a monk but meh. I went the resistance stacking route and I didn't have enough gold to support buying equipment for every slot that had +All Resistances and +X Resistance where X is the same on each piece. Best I got was 52% resists overall with 50k HP and I was getting murdered in Act I.

I switched to IAS and instead of getting murdered by trash I was able to go toe to toe. Elite and Champion packs still kicked my butt though...

Unless you play a wizard in D3, where IAS is not only more or less worthless (unless you use signature spells) but it causes you to eat up AP faster with ray spells. Of course, all most wizards do is run around spamming blizzard and hydra anyway, neither of which benefit at all from IAS... unless you want to cast them that fraction of a second faster.

Interesting, they chose not to use IAS in any of those spells? That's kind of odd. You'd think the blizzard would just snow faster, the ray would 'ping' more often, and the hydra would spit faster.

Either way: IAS is currently even more important in D3 than it already was D2… if you're the 4 other classes. I wasn't saying it's not (for monks), and I didn't know about those exceptions for wizards.

The rays MIGHT tick faster, but on inferno I generally have just enough time to drop hydra (not affected), Blizzard (also not affected) and maybe a single tick from ice ray. The spectrazards, before they nerfed force armor, made good use of IAS, however.

Like I said, it won't be long before someone figures out how to hack it, even if it's only for an 'offline' mode. This game is too popular for it not to happen, and setting up a server is sufficiently trivial that I don't think it'll be a real road block.

I doubt it. WoW is a perfect demonstration of why it will be a long time and nowhere near what the real game offers. In fact, most private WoW servers are quite imperfect and the first ones had tons of things missing.

People want to play Diablo 3 now, not in a year, and certainly not a crappy version of it.

Diablo 3 is not WoW. A lot of people are still playing D3 in single-player only. I don't think you CAN play WoW single-player. What I'm waiting for isn't a 'play online with your friends' D3. What I'm expecting is I set up some virtual server that just saves my character to dark corner of my hard disc, and when I boot up the game it runs. Just like my (functional) version of Starcraft 2, and my (functional) version of GTA IV, which are both hacked because the legitimate version crapped out when my Internet hiccuped.

Sounds pretty suspect, but whatever.

No one is playing Diablo 3 single player. There exists no such thing. They are playing Diablo 3 and set up barriers so that it appears like they are playing it single player.

Diablo 3 is WoW for the purpose of this argument. Diablo 3, unlike Starcraft 2, has server side code that is required to play the game. Starcraft 2, as it was released, had a single player game embedded in it that just required you to authenticate once to Blizzard and stay up to date to play it. All the data, code, and necessary files to run Starcraft 2 are already on your computer. Starcraft 2 only required that the mandatory one time login to battle.net (to prove authenticity) and updates are disabled in order to create the hacked version that you use. That is a far cry from what is required to make a single player version of Diablo 3.

Diablo 3, like WoW, has significant amounts of code that is server side. Essentially everything important is server side with the Diablo 3 client acting as nothing more than an install that contains all the pretties for running game. All of this code must be reverse engineered, which is no small feat. That is while I say it can take a year or more before there's a hacked single player version of Diablo 3 and why I say it will suck when it is released. It is because of this server side code that Blizzard is able to significantly cut down on hacking. It permits them to check and see if the client side cache has been altered (neon sign indication of a hack). To "hack" a single player of Diablo 3 will require significant amounts of playtime datamining data that comes from the server to try to reverse engineer that code. Guess what. That whole process needs to be repeated for each and every content patch or expansion pack.

What is your source for this? Because my understanding is that, after the authentication (and update process), the content stored online is your social media account and your character. Are you suggesting that things like the game levels are run *solely* on the server, and so functions like monster-generation, etc. are handled server-side and all I am running on the client is image and sound rendering? Because that sounds crazy resource intensive, especially if you want things like say, cool graphics and smooth action (for your single-player experience).

Like most broad sweeping statements, That's completely false.