Yifes wrote on May 21, 2012, 17:10:
I don't think any of the loot is worthwhile until you hit lvl 60. It's like wow, where a high level uncommon item will beat any low level rare/legendary item. Seriously, who will pay money for an item that will be replaced 10 levels down the road with a better one?
Responding to this one bit and also just adding some general complaints about D3. The loot is really boring at 60 too. The modifiers are boring, the procs are very small percentile chances and there don't appear to be things that give abilities beyond stuff like "bleeds target for 15-17 dmg over 3 seconds". Diablo 2 had much better loot quality even at release, let alone with the 1.10 stuff. The lack of runeword loot is especially telling, most classes basically just stack their main stat/vitality and this rarely changes regardless of what level you are. When you get to Hell you start adding resist as a filter to the AH and thats about it. Most legendaries are worse than moderately rolled blues with main stat/vit which is really discouraging for people who like finding rare and interesting stuff. I've amassed a huge pile of gold already and have little to spend it on.
It makes doing Inferno a very tedious grind. All of the hoopla about how much more flexible this skill/rune system was overplayed, each class has less than a handful of builds that work in Inferno, everything else lacks the survivability. A friend of mine is a Wizard who came up with a specific Force Armor build that depends on low Vit but we expect it'll be counted as an exploit and nerfed shortly. This isn't apparent on Normal/Nightmare since you can DPS everything down before it can touch you. The harder difficulties aren't really harder per se, just more unforgiving in that mobs hit so hard you can never get really get hit so that becomes the metagame. It's a bummer because the new skill system has really interesting combos but most only work in Normal and Nightmare.
The maps were a lot smaller and more linear as well, I was a bit let down here as I was expecting the game world itself to be much more engrossing after this long wait. Sure that's partly my expectations but still, acts 3 and 4 were pretty damned short. The zone repetition between this and D2 was also a bit confusing. I thought I was having deja vu when I revisited a desert, some sewers, an oasis, a keep under siege and so on.
Anyways I enjoyed D3 but its going to need a lot of changes to have the sort of replay value D2 did. I think the decisions to balance around the AH are what is screwing them. Diablo is all about collecting crazy and interesting loot, if you remove that you're just basically left with the bare skinner box. Given the lack of PvP right now I'm not sure why anything needs to be balanced like an MMO anyway. I've gotten my moneys worth and then some so I have no regrets but I am really disappointed they have missed out on so many of the basics.
q[Regarding the graphics: it's a Blizzard game. After seeing WOW and Diablo 2, were you expecting something better?
Graphically I had no complaints, I thought everything was stylish and interesting in that regard. The levels really come alive with the physics engine too, they did a great job. The soundtrack was totally forgettable though. It'll be interesting to see what the first content patch brings about, I hope they drastically redo the loot tables and add the ability to skip their silly cutscenes before bosses (thats a Chris Metzen WoW thing if I ever saw one).
This comment was edited on May 21, 2012, 17:37.