Diablo III - It's official

[RobertR1]

They can be relevant to your class but not necessarily in line with your play style. BS should be competing against AH for your gold.

I rather something like that it being a money pit with the slightest chance of something useful. Gold is much better spent at AH for now.

 

[Grall]

Ok, I officially hate this fucking game. The difficulty balance's completely wacked. Half of the random named mob packs I've encountered have been vampiric, and/or spewing fire all over the place. First vampiric boss pack I ran into (on my way up to the graveyard) cost me about five deaths and chased me clear back into new tristram before I managed to kill them. The damn buggers run faster than I do and gain back nearly as much health as I shoot off them. Even trying to kite them with chain gang-runed slowing arrows does me fuckall lot of good as the slow's so short. When I run out of discipline I die, every time. Then when I ran into a second vampiric and desecrating boss pack while I was still trying to kill another desecrating boss I just gave up. Now seriously considering just wiping all my characters and washing my hands of this piece of crap.

I've had enough.

Oh, and yeah. It's just a long fucking grind anyway. Why bother?

 

[Rodéric]

I stopped playing already, even though I have 3 friends still playing.

 

[KKRT]

Ok, I officially hate this fucking game. The difficulty balance's completely wacked. Half of the random named mob packs I've encountered have been vampiric, and/or spewing fire all over the place. First vampiric boss pack I ran into (on my way up to the graveyard) cost me about five deaths and chased me clear back into new tristram before I managed to kill them. The damn buggers run faster than I do and gain back nearly as much health as I shoot off them. Even trying to kite them with chain gang-runed slowing arrows does me fuckall lot of good as the slow's so short. When I run out of discipline I die, every time. Then when I ran into a second vampiric and desecrating boss pack while I was still trying to kill another desecrating boss I just gave up. Now seriously considering just wiping all my characters and washing my hands of this piece of crap.

I've had enough.

Oh, and yeah. It's just a long fucking grind anyway. Why bother?

Are You talking about Nightmare? If yes, You cant even imagine how bad game is in Inferno. Actually i found Nightmare really easy, i've started to get some problems with Elites in Hell, especially in Act 4, but Inferno is just crap.
Dunno if they have even tested it at all, its that bad. And itemization? Omfg what a joke.

Just to give You an example, i can tank almost any pack in Act 1 Inferno, but in Act 2 i can die after 5 hits of normal mobs and in Act 3 i die after one or two hits, with 33k HP and damage reduction around 70%.

Thousands possible builds my ass, You cant even make two viable ones for inferno, You have to stick to all the same skills or almost the same, and same items.

 

[Grall]

Yeah, I'm talking nightmare... I only just finished normal mode, so that's where I am.

What irritates me enormously is how spiky incoming damage is, and the crappyness of itemization. Boss packs, how much more health do they have, really? 5x surely. 10? A lot, anyway. Increased speed, much more health, much more damage, 4-5 of them at a time. If I can't tank them - which I certainly can't - and I can't avoid them due to discipline running out when I jump away and their speed... Me the mighty prime evil-killing nephalem hero, I just get squished, by some damn overgrown rat-like creatures. Very anticlimactic.

And regarding itemization, why is there even strength and intelligence on demon hunter crossbows? Or why don't I get ANYthing from these stats? Strength could give me more hate, int could give discipline, or SOMETHING at least! But nooo, I get nothing.

And not a single cape worth a damn throughout all of normal. NOT ONE worth wearing even for five seconds. If it even had dex on it it was like 5 points. Really, why is the span 1-65+ of a stat on something dropped in act 4? Getting drops with ONE of something, it's ludicrous.

Yeah yeah, it's to encourage collecting more stuff, I get it. But NO, it doesn't work like that, I just get irritated.

 

[AlphaWolf]

Normal = ridiculously easy
Nightmare = really easy (there are times you might need to pay attention)
Hell = easy just pay attention and think about survival with skills and gear
Inferno = you may die 14x trying to kill the same mob and regular spawns will kill you often, rare packs will kill you and have you trying to figure out what killed you so fast.

The scale up is a bit out of whack but the idea is that you spend time grinding for gear at each level. If you think the jump to nightmare is giving you problems you'll love the jump from act I to act II on inferno. Once you're geared properly the difficulty level goes down dramatically. Trying to kill the first packs on inferno with only 8000dps was quite the chore, but now with better defenses and 16000 dps they aren't too difficult. Act II is still well beyond my ability (unless I just wanted to graveyard rush my way through the story line)

 

[blip]

The AH interface is so clunky right now that I can't find what I want, anyway. I took a look yesterday, and all it had listed for me for weapons were Daibos. Because I happened to have a Daibo equipped at the time, but it's not what I want to be using. The lack of even a rudimentary Search function is just stupid.

Seriously man WTF are you talking about?

Maybe my version is different.

In my version of the auction house, I can do the following -

Search for Weapons and Armour

Search for Specific kinds of Weapons and Armour

Search for Specific kinds of Weapons and Armour with specific level requirements, specific bonus stats, and at a specific buyout price.

So WTF are you talking about "the lack of even a rudimentary search engine"?

It seems some people are playing a different version of the game than I am!

 

[Jedi2016]

After digging for a while, I found the options you're talking about. Bear in mind there's no guide for this game.. God knows what else I'm missing out on as far as gameplay goes.. there's probably a dozen different buttons on my keyboard that I don't even know about yet, and it'll probably be the same thing when I find them.. "Geez, man, why wouldn't you use that?!?!" "Because I don't KNOW about it".

As I mentioned, I also find the business model behind the AH to be completely counter to my way of playing the game, so it's not like I've spent a lot of time digging through it. Frankly, it's very presence pisses me off, and I don't expend a lot of time figuring out the details of things that piss me off.

 

[RobertR1]

Having read up on feedback from multiple places, I'm going to stop at beating Hell until Inferno is balanced better.

I'd love to know how many inferno play throughs were completed as part of QC with the final balance changed before release.

 

[Grall]

They said around the time of the end of the stress test that exactly NOBODY had beaten inferno.

So that'd be zero playthroughs...

 

[RobertR1]

Fuckin amazing!

 

[Grall]

Normal = ridiculously easy

Ridiculously easy depending on what class, skills and runes you use, and what drops you get. If all you get is shit gear then it's not going to be easy regardless, and quite possible too considering the extreme randomness of diablo drops.

The scale up is a bit out of whack but the idea is that you spend time grinding for gear at each level.

Can't do that though if commonly encountered boss packs are lethal. And I don't feel like running through act 4 normal 30 times either by the way in the odd chance I'll get some better drops. It's more fun to actually be able to progress through the game, gearing up as I go along rather than have to gear up first and only THEN go along. It takes away the mindless grinding that way.

If you think the jump to nightmare is giving you problems you'll love the jump from act I to act II on inferno.

Yeah, I'm quite sure I'd "love" it. As in, not. But at least inferno should make the forum whiners that complained incessantly about how easy the betat test was shut the hell up. That's always something I guess.

I was really hoping inferno would have been a skill level that was completely neutral throughout all the acts as far as difficulty's concerned, but again it's only the final act (which is tiny btw and quite repetitive visually) that is going to be interesting for the truly best of the best gear. What a disappointment!

 

[blip]

Ridiculously easy depending on what class, skills and runes you use, and what drops you get. If all you get is shit gear then it's not going to be easy regardless, and quite possible too considering the extreme randomness of diablo drops.

Auction House.

I was doing so bad before the auction house. I could not beat the Skeleton King on Normal. Mind you I am also trying to play the game on a Pentium 4 that is below min spec on both CPU and GPU so the game routinely drops into single digit framerates, which I blame for most of my deaths.

That being said, once I started using the Auction House, and have my character equipped with pretty much all Rare items that I picked up for less than 1,000 gold a piece, I'm not doing so bad.

Can't wait for my i5 2500k build to be done....

 

[Dooby]

I'd love to know how many inferno play throughs were completed as part of QC with the final balance changed before release.

The official party line was [not verbatim]: "We tweaked Inferno until the QC team were being killed on a regular basis. Then we doubled all the health and damage of the monsters."

At the time, no one on the QC team had cleared Act1, let alone the game.

 

[pcchen]

On difficulty, I think one important point is to understand those attribute numbers. It can be quite confusing to new players.

For example, when I first played in the open beta, I tried to stack those "primary stat" (i.e. int for caster, str for barb, and dex for others), with less than stellar results. Then I found out that actually the most important stat (for dps) is weapon damage, because almost all skills do damage based on weapon damage. However, if you don't enable "detailed tool tip", there's no way to know about it, as normal tool tip only says something like "do some damage in a certain fashion" instead of "do 150% weapon damage..." etc.

So, for example, a ring with "1-2 damage" looks tiny compare to a ring with "+10 int" for a caster, but actually 1-2 damage is much better than +10 int, at least for early levels. Another example is armor. Armor actually reduces all damage (magical and physical), but it's not entirely clear from the tooltip.

Blizzard did make one thing right: they decide to introduce more attributes in later difficulty modes. This provides a somewhat more smooth learning curve. Imagine that if one can get "+10 physical resist" or "reduce CC time by 5%" early in the game, it'd only be more confusing.

 

[I.S.T.]

The official party line was [not verbatim]: "We tweaked Inferno until the QC team were being killed on a regular basis. Then we doubled all the health and damage of the monsters."

At the time, no one on the QC team had cleared Act1, let alone the game.

That is amateurish design at best.

 

[pcchen]

That is amateurish design at best.

I guess their thinking is "it's better to nerf content than making something harder." One should note that there are already some people beat Inferno Diablo, that's within 2 weeks from the release of the game.

If Inferno is too easy and Blizzard has to tune its difficulty up, that would create a problem: people beaten Inferno early may have "unfair advantage" of being able to farm some items before it's buffed. Right now there's already a "mini" problem like this because some classes are better at farming Inferno than others. Obviously, class balance is probably more important right now.

Of course, the huge disparity between Hell and Inferno is not ideal. The idea was that Inferno's different acts provided different "tier" of difficulty, i.e. after Hell, one should farm Inferno Act 1 for a while, then progress to Act 2, farm for a while, then progress to Act 3, and so on. But right now, at least for some classes, it's difficult to farm Act 1 even if they already are face rolling Hell. That's a problem.

 

[AlphaWolf]

Ridiculously easy depending on what class, skills and runes you use, and what drops you get. If all you get is shit gear then it's not going to be easy regardless, and quite possible too considering the extreme randomness of diablo drops.

Normal is a joke, if you're finding problems with normal you should probably read a guide or something or check to make sure you've bound a primary skill to your mouse button.

Can't do that though if commonly encountered boss packs are lethal. And I don't feel like running through act 4 normal 30 times either by the way in the odd chance I'll get some better drops. It's more fun to actually be able to progress through the game, gearing up as I go along rather than have to gear up first and only THEN go along. It takes away the mindless grinding that way.

Nightmare isn't that big of a challenge, 1 or 2 pieces of gear and maybe a slight retool of your spec to be a bit stronger defensively should get you through it without much trouble. You do need to consider adding things other than just dps. You won't see a big increase in difficulty in the acts through nightmare, if you can kill the butcher you'll probably be able to clear through diablo with only a few minor upgrades to gear.

Yeah, I'm quite sure I'd "love" it. As in, not. But at least inferno should make the forum whiners that complained incessantly about how easy the betat test was shut the hell up. That's always something I guess.

It's a game about gearing up, they need ways to force that. I think the biggest issue (outside of their network and auction house issues) that the increase in difficulty doesn't really flow. The challenge should increase more consistently throughout rather than large leaps at certain points. There's a bit of a jump from normal to act 1 nightmare, but not really much again till hell, hell ramps up a bit in act IV and then there's a large jump to act I inferno. Act II inferno is a bigger jump yet as a normal pack of mobs seems like elites from act I.

Supposedly blizzard is going to release some information this week about what they have planned.

 

[Malo]

Why isn't item required level linked to the actual power of the item? It seems the actual stats of an item are absolutely nothing to do with its required level at all. I got a lvl16 req ring with +1 dex and that's it.

 

[cjo]

Why isn't item required level linked to the actual power of the item? It seems the actual stats of an item are absolutely nothing to do with its required level at all. I got a lvl16 req ring with +1 dex and that's it.

The stats on an item are random. I imagine that the item level determines the maximum value each stat can have.