Why bother with costs if they're so low? Because it feels much dumber to go from 'free' to 'not free' than it does to go from 'cheap' to 'not cheap'.

 

Cheaper is 50% reduction. Hell, cheaper is a 90% reduction. At the last stage gems went from 20k cost to 100 gold cost. That's a cost reduction of 99.5%

If they reduced anything else by that much, it would become pointless. If an item that was previously worth 100k but with a nerf was now worth 500 gold, you wouldn't even bother selling it except to a vendor. Just as they wouldn't have a repair system in game if the gold cost was so minimal it didn't matter.

The price is so low, that it's basically non existent already.

During a normal play through, you are going to see the price of gems go from 10-100 over 7 tiers of gems and then jump to 30k.

That makes no sense.

Having no cost over 7 tiers and then a hefty price of 30k when gems start to matter makes far more sense in my mind.

It's obvious you guys don't agree. Not sure why, since the system they plan on putting in makes little to no sense, but whatever.

In the end, it matters less than the time I've spent arguing about it. The fact that you guys can't see it bothers me more than the cost of the gems now. :facepalm

 

I see your point. But you're right on the waste of time arguing over its point or pointlessness as well.

 

Having a cost associated with crafting, even if it's just a trivial cost, trains new players to expect a cost. Having that cost increase with higher tiers of crafting, even if it's just a trivial increase, trains new players to expect an increase.

If you levelled up and discovered that you had to pay 50k to unlock the last rune for each skill, you'd be surprised and pissed off because up to now getting new runes had been free. That's how new players would feel finding out that crafting gems suddenly costs gold.

 

So with 1.0.3 incoming changes, it will much more cost and time efficient to farm Act 1 with Whimsyshire unlocked.

I know several of you guys don't want to individually shell out for it, so how about this?

We select one person who is reliable on D3. We pool our money together and forge one whimsyshire inferno staff. That person is now the one we hit up for whimsy runs.

It'd be relatively easy in 1.0.3 for a 3-man to run Whimsy Inferno since all mobs are melee and there won't be any more increased damage.

Who else is okay with this?

 

ill be, once i get to inferno

in fact, I have no problem leaving my game open all day for people to farm it. even when I am at work.

 

TSN, I think you misunderstand.

2-4 of us pool gold together to craft 1 inferno Whimsy staff.

Person with Staff now opens a game for the people who donated the gold and team run all day for easy cash in 1.0.3 patch since ponies are all melee and don't have uber damage scaling any more.

This requires the person with the staff to be online a decent amount of time in order to open pony levels so they donors can recoup what they spent on it and hopefully forge their own staves at some point.

 

oh, I'm not sure if I get it even then. but just to be sure, the portal needed to be opened after every run right?.

if so, ignore me, I work at night and sleep the day, I would have been usefull if I could have just opened a whimsy portal and gone afk. not micro manage.

 

Yeah, you have to micro it.


I'm willing to be the tank if we get this idea rolling. I'm training up a Barb right now and found a build that will give me insane survivability for under 1m in gear.

EDIT: BTW, Furious charge + Rune that lowers CD per enemy hit = Spam that sprint.

So much fun to just ram enemies over and over again.

 

What would you recommend as an inferno barb build? I have been using frenzy-sidearm, hammer-thunderstrike, revenge-provocation, wrath of the berserker-insanity, ignore pain-ignorance is bliss, and war cry-impunity. I am switching out hammer for furious charge- merciless assault to try it out right now.

 

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/5594211428

This. So very much this.

 

So now we can safely farm in teams without the tanks taking ridiculous levels of damage.

Who's up for it?

 

spend 45 minutes clearing a pony land with 6 elite packs, of which five are reflects damage. One with extra health horde reflects damage even.

It's the first goddamn pinata I've seen in fifteen runs.
I get 3 people in, they pay me their 200k. I get these useless undergeared barbarian FUCKS their five FUCKING nephelam valor stacks against FOUR MORE FUCKING REFLECTS DAMAGE PACKS.
I head into the useless as shit FUCKING WHIMYSHIRE.
I open three clouds, server dies.
I'm out 45 minutes of time, with NO FUCKING DROPS but act 1 rares to show for it. And if I don't reimburse these fuckers I won't get any more business.

Fuck blizzard.

 

So barbarians:

Double Tornado build - Inferno beaten with 6M

I can't get this to work right.

I'm supposed to slap on War Cry and Battle Rage then leap into the mob and trigger sprint and run around for like 5-6 seconds while spamming sprint then FINALLY get into the mob with whirlwind.

My problem is the running around part because whirlwind always triggers. I really need to get used to a second key bind for movement...

 

Anyone else stopped playing?

I'm feeling pretty sad about this game not being up to the old Blizzard standard ("it'll be released when ready"), it feels so rushed, buggy and boring.

I don't feel attached to my characters at all, it the same as every other that are progressing inferno, everyone who plays the game at least semi-hardcore will always read forums and blogposts about the best build and use that. It takes about 10 seconds to change your build completely, in d2 it took days (playing legit before respec) and you were less inclined to make a new character. No sacrifice= no attachment for me.


I don't know how they manage to fuck up the best part of the game (hunting for items), but they did and I feel it's more of a chore than exiting. The magic is gone.


Everything before inferno is way too easy (I think I used healing potions twice..). The item scaling in inferno is weird and you're forced to grind goblins or buy stuff from ah to get going (same thing in act 2). This might get better in the upcoming patch when they introduce higher level items earlier in the game and nerf the difficulty post act 1 (they already nerfed act1). Probably not though.



Boters, spammers and dupers are still around.



I've played over 100 characters to hell in d2 and have done countless mf runs. I'm not sure what made it exiting, all I know is that thing is not present in d3.


Got 2 level 60s in d3, one in act 3 the other act 2 inferno (Barbarian and Witch doctor). Both are HC.


I'll probably try the game again when the first expansion is out.


Are you guys ignoring all the bad stuff?
Server problems, broken stats, missing features, bugs, cheaters.
Am I focusing on it too much?
I've not played for over a week and I feel no desire to do so. Why are you guys still playing?

 

Mostly waiting for patches. D3 is not up to my standards, but I just can't imagine that Blizzard would let the game and franchise die, so I have to hope that patches will improve the game.

I'm working on getting all classes through inferno, and then I'll probably work on achievements. Being a completionist makes me have plenty to do

I do find it amazing that you have two hardcore characters that far into inferno. Personally, I'd probably find that boring. I never had to grind on treasure goblins because I didn't mind risking death to progress.

Nothing is more boring than having to farm because you don't want to risk progress because of a chance of death. I, personally can't play hardcore with random chance of server lag or ISP dropping; far to annoying.

The games biggest problem is the skills in my opinion. Just hard to find a reason to use a lot of the skills. There are like 3-4 skills per class that are "Must haves' in Inferno, and then the rest are skills that are favorites. People are far to similar to each other. The difficulty of Inferno has caused people to find the best builds rather easily, and everyone is running the same thing. Maybe once people are really geared, you'll see builds being branched out, but right now everyone really is the same.

I'd love if they had some sort of proficiency involved with skills. The more you use a certain skill/run combo, the more powerful it would get. They could scale some of the crappy runes to be useful in inferno, while the more powerful runes scaled smaller.

There is always one skill/rune combo that is better than the others. They aren't balanced well.

The game play is really the only reason I've stayed. I've been a long time fan of fast paced hack n slash, and it's a genre that doesn't have a lot of games. Gaming has never been about achieving a goal for me, it's just been about having fun, and Hack n Slash is where that fun is at for me.

 

Yeah I have little to no desire to play this game anymore.

Grinding for gold doesn't feel very rewarding at all, what with the boring and often crappy itemization. Progressing further into Inferno could be fun, but it's not going to happen because I'm not going to bother grinding the gold to buy the gear off the AH.

I'll probably check out Patch 1.03, but I doubt it will make the incredibly boring loot system any better.

 

I stopped playing about 2 weeks ago. There's very little replayability. Perhaps it's unfair to compare to D2: LoD, but even vanilla D2 had a lot going for it. It wasn't the difficulty either. Long TLDR sorry.

It's the fact that the game feels like an checklist. It's like Blizzard took a checklist of all the things that were wrong or exploitable with D2, and built the game around that, and lost all the features which were awesome with D2, which is 90% of the game.

An obvious example of that is the Auction House, but I'm still on the fence about that, but it does't partially solve the website sellers. Then again, I've been a member of D2jsp since 2005 and several thousand posts there. Then, there was the hacking problem, mostly a couple of duping methods, maphack, autoaim, etc. I'm not sure the status of that kind of stuff in D3, and I have an authenticator, so I'm not worried about my character.

Then, they changed stuff that didn't really need to be changed, but they sort of had to do something so they had something to show for the 10 year wait. The D2 skill tree (with synergies) was something that should have been built upon and improved, not removed alltogether for something inferior. They fell into what seems to be the ideology of modern gaming, and that's making the game more accessible and 'catering to casuals'. I'm sorry, but fuck that. Those are just people that want the end rewards for as little work as possible. Of course, this all stems from what they thought was the problem, and that was the fact that you couldn't respec your points. That was a flaw in D2, I will agree, but the solution of removing skill and stat points altogether missed the mark by quite a bit I feel, since it diminished the satisfaction from leveling up.

D2 had end goals, not an end game, and there's a difference. In D2, you could theoretically hit 99, but less than one in a thousand did. Most people got to 90 with each character, and even that was a good accomplishment. I guess a lot of people complained about D2's endgame, but at least there were options. You could do Baal (and chaos) runs to crawl your way through the upper levels. Hitting 91 is a good feeling. hitting 95 is a better feeling,and there was some satisfaction, because you knew if you died, then you wouldn't lose any XP since you didn't have any, so you could go fuck around. There was an upside to this as well, since only Baal (and Diablo and a few super uniques) drop the best unique loot in the game, and some uniques were pretty damn good. Shako (Harlequin Crest) may not have been the best hat in the game, but it was pretty damn standard equipment for many, and if you didn't need it, you had good trade material. You also had items that were super rare (Tyrael's might anyone? It make's SoJ look plentiful in comparison. Not counting trying to get perfect itemization roles, of course.)

Then you got runewords, which are the best items in the game. There's no equivalent in D3. You don't have a bunch of crazy (or Potenially crazy weapons that are cool but have no real use) that have unique procs, or give useful auras. And it wasn't just high level runes that were in demand (although they were rare enough to be the unofficial main currency). I do like how you change the effects of your skills in D3, but I couldn't help but feel that the same thing could have been done with the superior D2 skill tree and made that even awesome, especially combined with synergies. You could have a more crazy-yet-viable builds. I won't even mention 0-skills like Teleport on Enigma or fireball on Trang-ouls, and I have the same gripe with sets, which have unique and awesome stats. +50 res, +3 all skills, +100 mf, +40% fcr, +40% faster run walk, all as set bonuses. That's a lot more appealing than generic rpg stuff of stat/stat/stat/gold/orbradius/LoH. It's just not as rewarding/satisfying.

Gold. Believe or it not, gold did have a purpose in D2, but you weren't pigeonholed into relying on it. Gems did too, and their purpose is similar. Horadric Cube recipes. Reroll charms into useful charms, or possibly jawdropping charms (+45 life +1 paladin combat skill grand charm or 3/20/20 small charm or absurd poison charms) There are desirable to any class because of their intrinsic trade value so you can trade for whatever you want and then some. D3 just doesn't feel that way, with super strong items that you can aspire to obtain. Hell, even WoW had items like that to begin with. I got Sulfuras, Hand of Ragnaros for my enhancement shaman (laugh if you want) back when 60 was the cap, and it was something I spent months trying to get, and the feeling of finally getting it was amazing. You sort of get that feeling when you kill Uber!Diablo by yourself for the first time, or you see Mephisto drop an Arachnid Mesh, of you finally managed to cube your way up to a Vex run for your Hoto flail, all great feeling. Anyways, some of the best items could only be got from gambling in game with end level npcs, such as 20% fcr +skills, 2 open sockets, or assassin claws with + 2 assassin skills, +3 trap skills, and +3 lightning trap with ias. Sure, it's a lot of work, but you weren't forced to do it, and you could get lucky enough to get the best item in the game for a min/maxer glass cannon type.

You had options. You can grind levels to get higher on the Ladder (WTF D3), you can pvp (WTF D3), you could farm bosses for items. The ladder was a huuuuge draw for me. I'd come back for every ladder season in D2, just because everyone started on an equal footing, and farming items could have satisfactory results. PVP was fun too, since every class was viable with multiple skill build, or even item builds. Hell, most people had different characters just to farm different bosses. Smiter for Uber!trist (the pinnacle of the game in terms of arbitrary difficulty) to get torch charms, a sorceress (or any other character with Enigma) for other bosses, a barbarian for gold farming. My point is, that while a lot of it could be consider grinding (I never found it boring in D2, since I enjoyed leveling up and the satisfaction of completely a character to the min requirements for the build I envisioned) there was just so many different things you could do to occupy your time. D3 is the same of that, except not even a fifth of the possibilities. Hell, you could have just dedicated all of your time to dueling in specific level brackets.

Where is all of this in D3? I want time sinks, not gold sinks, since my entertainment value comes from playing, not spending the results of my playing, and that's pretty much the end of this rant.

 

Let me start off by saying that I agree with you. Casualiziation is, to borrow a turn of phrase from 4chan; "the cancer that is killing videogames."

However, making games more accessible to peripheral audiences is not intrinsically a bad thing. It's when it's done like D3 was, in that every other part about it that made the Diablo series great suffers because of the casualization. To make an in-house comparison, Starcraft II has a casual difficulty setting, intended for people who've never played an RTS before in their lives, and it has a Brutal difficulty setting, intended for RTS fanatics. There's a world of difference between the two, and Brutal will kick you in the nuts even if you're an RTS fanatic.

That's an example of it being done well, which is part of the reason why I cannot understand why Diablo 3 feels the way it does. I do understand that Blizzard has multiple development teams, but as Gizmore said, whatever happened to Blizzard's old adage of "It'll be released when it's ready"?

Heart of the Swarm is supposed to be an expansion, yet it's so far taken about two years. How long has Cataclysm been out? Three or so years? There's no way Mists of Panderia has been in development for that long, but what I don't understand is how two of Blizzard's dev teams can say that, but the other can't. Was it a rush-job due to outside influence, like Dragon Age II? I don't think we'll ever know, and it's frustrating because Blizzard is one of the better developers out there at the moment, so to see them fail is... well, it's heartbreaking, really.

Sort of like Bioware when Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age II came out. Everyone figured that Mass Effect 2 was just them experimenting, and they were forgiven for Dragon Age II because news came to light about a rush job. But TOR? Mass Effect 3? No excuses there.

Blizzard has no excuse for Diablo 3 being shit, because Diablo 2 came out ten years ago. Duke Nukem Forever sucked ass because 3D Realms went under and then Gearbox basically picked up a half-finished product, spit-shined it, and sent it out. That isn't the case, here, and it's fucking sad that it's come to this.

Ah, well. At least we still have Starcraft. And WoW, I suppose, although that turned to shit the moment they added Dungeon Queue.

Most of this is beside the point and me rambling, but I'd like to think that I got my point across.