First another comment for those that haven't tried the newest patch yet. It appears that all mini-bosses are now guaranteed to drop at least 1-3 blue magic items when killed. Golden chests also seem to drop at least 3-5 magic items when opened. So if you hunt down every boss in the game rather than going straight to the end, you can end up with more magic items than in prior patches.
Crafting still doesn't become hugely overpowering (still a bit though), due to the whole range of crafting items being re-tuned. Less stats overall, and +health regen is extremely rare just as with items drops. Crafted weapons for all classes are also relatively low power. So at least in the first 13 levels, dropped weapons will almost always be better than crafted.
I never PVP'd with D2 so it's not an issue for me. I'm more annoyed with the 30% dmg mitigation they're throwing at the melee classes with this latest update. Because to me that smacks that they're out of time to iterate the defense skills with trying to hit hte Q2 release date.
I've mixed feelings about that personally. But after playing 4 of the classes (monk, barbarian, demon hunter, and wizard) extensively (without twinking items) with the newest patch and hardcore mode, the melee classes needed something to bring their survivability up on par with the ranged classes.
For example, it's extremely easy, at least in normal, to kite even the hardest enemies. Even the skeleton king poses no problem for undergeared ranged classes due to this. An undergeared melee class on the other hand would have no choice other than to stock up on a ton of health potions and spend half the combat running away from the skeleton king while waiting for the potion CD with similar levels of gear.
In prior patches this was masked to a great extent by how much damage most people could dish out by the time they got that far, combined with how easily you could find health replenishing items. That combined with easily craftable gear to more than double or triple your available health pool.
Perhaps defensive skills could address this, but with only 4 skill slots and 1 passive slot unlocked in those early levels, that would restrict the melee classes far more than the ranged. If we compare somewhat similar current defensive skills, we can already see they greatly favor ranged over melee. Demon Hunter with snares makes kiting even easier. Wizard with Frost Nova again makes kiting even simpler. Monk with Blinding flash gains 3 seconds of free attacks after which he's getting pounded in melee again.
Even with the 30% damage reduction, I've switched to Wizard being my favorite farming class now due to superior survivability. Gear and healing skills may make me switch back to monk as favorite farming class due to superior mobility. Although by that time Wizard shoudl have teleport which will be far superior to dashing strike. Can't cross chasms or low barriers with dashing strike anymore unlike Barbarian's leap attack.
For non-HC mode, the lower survivability of the melee classes isn't a problem. You die, you respawn. In HC, something was definitely needed to give melee players a chance. However, even with the 30% boost to DR for melee, it's still far easier to survive with ranged classes which means not only reduced chances of dying, but also greater DPS as you aren't having to spend as much time avoiding combat waiting for health to regen or heal potions to come off CD.
They cut out at least 4 big system 'to not delay the game' [that was at least 6 years in production].
Pvp arenas they've actually introduced us two years ago on Blizzcon in playable form and told that they wont balancing a game for pvp at all, so how is that delaying a game? They've also rebalanced the skills 3 times lately and when they were doing that they werent taking pvp into account? It sounds horrible at least.
This is the problem with BETA's without NDA's. Prior Diablos also went through frequent balance changes. We'll never know for sure how much or how often but at least with regards to balancing, Blizzard has always constantly rebalanced skills, classes and units leading up to launch. This happens not only for Diablo but Starcraft, Warcraft, and probably WoW as well. I don't really follow WoW, so can't speak for that.
Regards,
SB
)), OR Blizzard can set the minimum difficulty bar SO LOW that any build of character can get through the game, regardless how bad/non-optimal it is.
