Oh the sweet irony. Vivendi thinking of selling ActivisionBlizzard.
http://tinyurl.com/7rv6p68

Ventura wrote on Jun 7, 2012, 18:13:

Dev wrote on Jun 7, 2012, 09:44:
BTW, blizzard says repair costs could go up 600%.

With my Barbarian in Act 1 Inferno, I'd be fucked. I don't even think I'd break even.

I was fighting an elite last night, and he put one of those spinning beams down so close to me, I didn't see it until it activated. I went from 3/4 health to dead faster than you could snap your fingers. And I'm supposed to be a tank, if you can believe that. Cloth-wearing Wizards in MMOs last longer in combat than I do.

It's much the same with the mobs that spawn the fire on the floor, or have the fire chains that join them. Get anywhere near that shit, and if you don't move fast, you're gone. So what happens is that you end up with a game of kite and die, damaging them just a bit more each time, until you can finally take them out. If they healed up fully between each death of mine, I don't think I'd be able to get anywhere in this game.

What is it someone else said, 7 years in the making? How the hell did they miss this?

I agree. Very stupid idea and encourages skipping hard mobs and packs even more, even though they want to fix that. Blizzard logic...
Up to 30k repair costs I guess. That a few times on an evening and I am broke and might aswell quit the game because I wont be farming all day long just to pay my repair bills.

Or maybe they only do it this way because they think then more people will buy gold on the real money AH.

Dev wrote on Jun 7, 2012, 09:44:
BTW, blizzard says repair costs could go up 600%.

With my Barbarian in Act 1 Inferno, I'd be fucked. I don't even think I'd break even.

I was fighting an elite last night, and he put one of those spinning beams down so close to me, I didn't see it until it activated. I went from 3/4 health to dead faster than you could snap your fingers. And I'm supposed to be a tank, if you can believe that. Cloth-wearing Wizards in MMOs last longer in combat than I do.

It's much the same with the mobs that spawn the fire on the floor, or have the fire chains that join them. Get anywhere near that shit, and if you don't move fast, you're gone. So what happens is that you end up with a game of kite and die, damaging them just a bit more each time, until you can finally take them out. If they healed up fully between each death of mine, I don't think I'd be able to get anywhere in this game.

What is it someone else said, 7 years in the making? How the hell did they miss this?

Verno wrote on Jun 7, 2012, 14:32:
Indeed, get a pack of those little frogs in Act 1 with Jailer, Extra Health, Vampiric, Fast and they are literally unkillable even with ilvl 63 gear.

In some cases the mobs base abilities combine unfavorably with the affixes and turn them into invincible nightmares. There are some packs that you literally have to skip or resort to exploiting AI issues with environment navigation.

I'm only on hell, but as you say some of the combinations are particularly nasty. As a wizard there are some combinations where literally all I can do is run or death zerg them. I wish I could say which combos I find the hardest, but I'm normally too busy fleeing or dying to hover my mouse over them. Maybe its just me, but I'm a little disappointed in the CC abilities for this aspect of the game.

I can't help but feel these sorts of mobs could remain if CC abilities lasted more than 2 seconds, or more skillfully applied allowed you render 2 mobs incapacitated while you dealt with a single monster.

Odd move to be able to sell damaged items and get a free repair on the AH - when combined with the forthcoming dramatic increase in repair costs?

Only thing I can think of is that they want to encourage people to use something for a level or so then sell it on?

Based on my one play through I felt the AH was OP due to floods of gear on there, shouldn't this move exacerbate that?

Not sure I'll have a second play through this game. I found the game pretty shallow in all respects. "Level design", for want of a better description, was very meh. The whole loot mechanic was totally lost to the AH. I sense a lot of excellent backstory, but the actual story in the game was meh. Combat was really meh, though I'll put that down to playing Barb on normal difficulty.

OK it was about worth my time & money, but I'm not itching for another play through or anything.

http://tinyurl.com/bow3csx Reddit D3 Q&A yesterday.

URL tag function really needs to be fixed.

Indeed, get a pack of those little frogs in Act 1 with Jailer, Extra Health, Vampiric, Fast and they are literally unkillable even with ilvl 63 gear.

In some cases the mobs base abilities combine unfavorably with the affixes and turn them into invincible nightmares. There are some packs that you literally have to skip or resort to exploiting AI issues with environment navigation.

Dev wrote on Jun 7, 2012, 00:01:
The idea is to change people's behavior to go through more of the game than just the boss run.

People are not killing elite not because of shitty loot, but because they are very often impossible to kill on Inferno. On Hell and others they kill those elites all the time. Ive never been in a group that skipped elites in Hell or Nightmare. But in Inferno, skipping Elites is as normal as going to repair every 5 mins.
Just adding loot to them wont help anything.

Wallshadows wrote on Jun 6, 2012, 22:40:
Yeah, I did that too and cranked out a Demon Hunter to help gear my Barbarian. The problem was that playing a glass cannon class really made me more frustrated than getting stomped in full tank spec by Fallen.

While I can appreciate the method of burning them down first it leaves a lot to be desired when ranged mobs and certain types of melees (Herald of Pestilence in Act 3) can attack you with what often feel like guided missiles or have an incredibly huge detection box. Hell, some mobs like the Hellflyers can sometimes just pop in without an animation and kill you!

Act 2 was an annoying gear check but Act 3 is a fucking nightmare of pussy Fallen hit-and-run tactics on 50% of the mobs.

In the end, I dumped my DH because it made me want to put my face through a wall and ended up getting my Barb to Act IV and 'working on' Rakinoth...

Yeah I had those problems too once. Then the lag cleared.

briktal wrote on Jun 7, 2012, 09:49:

panbient wrote on Jun 7, 2012, 06:31:

The Pyro wrote on Jun 6, 2012, 21:46:

JohnBirshire wrote on Jun 6, 2012, 21:36:
No mention of interface changes yet?

For a game that's been in development for more than a decade I would certainly hope the interface was ironed out by now.

You would think so but how hard would it have been to implement a 2nd loadout for skills and weapons (kind of exactly like how you could have 2 weapon sets equipped in Diablo 2...)

Or maybe making potions auto-pick up.

Or better yet... how about making the Gems and Crafting Pages any other colour besides white when they drop.

Or maybe an option to not even display loot below a certain level. I think it gets kind of annoying to have to dump out white and grey loot I accidentally picked up while trying to collect gems and potions.

Nothing of what I just suggested is overly complicated nor hasn't already been done in either Diablo 2 or any of its derivatives.

From the AMA they did on reddit yesterday, they are planning on making potions/gems/pages a different color and also looking at adding options to filter out white/grey items.

I think the alt weapons/skills was intentional, so you couldn't abuse the flexibility in the skills system.
The potion change would be nice except you'd need a way to filter out lower level potions. I'd rather manually pick up the good potions, then be forced to dump the bad ones.
Gems I agree with - they are easy to miss.
The white drops I think Jay Wilson said in an interview that they thought about it, but really liked the idea of killing monsters and having a jackpot of items drop. If it was only blue or better, you'd lose a lot of that feeling. I suppose they could just add an option so that you cannot pick them up, but they could still drop.

JohnBirshire wrote on Jun 6, 2012, 21:36:
No mention of interface changes yet?

They mentioned the interface was not modular, so it wasn't something they could do easily.

Too bad - I'd like to run it on three screens, but having the interface and minimap on the right screen makes it pretty unusable. I play with a buddy who runs three and I have to be the "map guy."

briktal wrote on Jun 7, 2012, 09:49:

panbient wrote on Jun 7, 2012, 06:31:

The Pyro wrote on Jun 6, 2012, 21:46:

JohnBirshire wrote on Jun 6, 2012, 21:36:
No mention of interface changes yet?

For a game that's been in development for more than a decade I would certainly hope the interface was ironed out by now.

You would think so but how hard would it have been to implement a 2nd loadout for skills and weapons (kind of exactly like how you could have 2 weapon sets equipped in Diablo 2...)

Or maybe making potions auto-pick up.

Or better yet... how about making the Gems and Crafting Pages any other colour besides white when they drop.

Or maybe an option to not even display loot below a certain level. I think it gets kind of annoying to have to dump out white and grey loot I accidentally picked up while trying to collect gems and potions.

Nothing of what I just suggested is overly complicated nor hasn't already been done in either Diablo 2 or any of its derivatives.

From the AMA they did on reddit yesterday, they are planning on making potions/gems/pages a different color and also looking at adding options to filter out white/grey items.

Utterly amazing that they're just now figuring this out, given that D2 and other games have already done it. While I always thought the game was going to end up being pretty shallow, even by ARPG standards, I'm still amazed at how many things they screwed up in such a long dev cycle.

panbient wrote on Jun 7, 2012, 06:31:

The Pyro wrote on Jun 6, 2012, 21:46:

JohnBirshire wrote on Jun 6, 2012, 21:36:
No mention of interface changes yet?

For a game that's been in development for more than a decade I would certainly hope the interface was ironed out by now.

You would think so but how hard would it have been to implement a 2nd loadout for skills and weapons (kind of exactly like how you could have 2 weapon sets equipped in Diablo 2...)

Or maybe making potions auto-pick up.

Or better yet... how about making the Gems and Crafting Pages any other colour besides white when they drop.

Or maybe an option to not even display loot below a certain level. I think it gets kind of annoying to have to dump out white and grey loot I accidentally picked up while trying to collect gems and potions.

Nothing of what I just suggested is overly complicated nor hasn't already been done in either Diablo 2 or any of its derivatives.

From the AMA they did on reddit yesterday, they are planning on making potions/gems/pages a different color and also looking at adding options to filter out white/grey items.

BTW, blizzard says repair costs could go up 600%.

The planned patches have some welcome additions but I think the game just fundamentally lacks the depth required. The damage nerf in MP is fine, it was kind of silly when stuff was already hitting you for 10k, let alone more players making that even more difficult. It needs more loot and more to do at "end game". In this way it's not even unlike Diablo 2 was at launch, people just expected a lot more when you've had a decade and two predecessors to base things on.

What's funny to me, you look at those planned loot table updates for 1.03 and I think to myself, Isn't this what they said it was going to be in the first place? That anywhere in inferno you could have the chance to get good loot, and if one was struggling to go back to act 4 of the previous difficulty? Could have sworn I heard Jay Wilson say something to that effect more than once.

Makes me wonder if they even tested much on the higher difficulties at all.

Only Blizzard can take 7 years a game and still need a dozen patches to get it right.

The Pyro wrote on Jun 6, 2012, 21:46:

JohnBirshire wrote on Jun 6, 2012, 21:36:
No mention of interface changes yet?

For a game that's been in development for more than a decade I would certainly hope the interface was ironed out by now.

You would think so but how hard would it have been to implement a 2nd loadout for skills and weapons (kind of exactly like how you could have 2 weapon sets equipped in Diablo 2...)

Or maybe making potions auto-pick up.

Or better yet... how about making the Gems and Crafting Pages any other colour besides white when they drop.

Or maybe an option to not even display loot below a certain level. I think it gets kind of annoying to have to dump out white and grey loot I accidentally picked up while trying to collect gems and potions.

Nothing of what I just suggested is overly complicated nor hasn't already been done in either Diablo 2 or any of its derivatives.

I'm far more interested in them making the BS a more viable option. Given the existence AH for most of the game its completely useless. At least with the gems when you pay to combine them you get what you wanted.

With the blacksmith you can spend what amounts to 8k gold in mats, plus the crafting cost of the item and do it 10 times before you get something you want. Or you go to the AH and spend ~2k gold and get what you want on the first try.

For clarification on the NV + Boss drops change, it's actually a nerf. As is bosses are guaranteed to drop 2 rares in addition to extra magic items with a full 5-stack of Nephalem Valor. They're nerfing it to only one guaranteed rare drop with a 5-stack of NV. However they're also buffing rare/elite mob packs to drop 1 guaranteed rare item, right now it's just a high chance to drop 1. It works to nerf runs like the Warden/Butcher run while giving more loot for players that choose to clear the entire map.

I think they know that finding loot is one of the fun parts of the game. The auction house feels a bit like cheating, really, and it doesn't have any of that "jackpot" feeling that finding a new item that perfectly fills the gap in your equipment. I've used it when I start hitting a wall in higher difficulties, but I wish it were more organic. Too much of a "just buy it from the AH" attitude will cause a lot of people to quit early, because what's really the point of playing? Blizzard may be opportunistic, but they're not dumb.