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[nenjin]

It's not as bad as it sounds in practice. If you want the scale to be less forgiving, play a higher difficulty. Generally though, Act 1 will be easy, Act 2 will get rough and Acts 3 and 4 are the real test of where you're at vs. what each difficulty level is throwing at you.

And yes, WD can face tank with Firebats (because the damage is so consistent and fast), lots of life on hit, Jungle Fortitude and a couple other tweaks. It's just once you get into torment, each difficulty level is going to stress the benchmarks (life on hit, HP, resists and armor to some degree) more and more. I'd say balance is pretty irrelevant until you hit Torment, but I say that having gone straight to it.

Also, when I say face tank, I'm not really talking whites. It may be all fine and dandy to tank whites all day, but when the real test is if you can survive 5 blues with Plague, Desecration, Ice Pulse, and possibly a couple shots of Fire Chains and/or Arcane, all surrounding you and pounding on you. If you can tank through all that w/o major problems, you're a tank. If you can't, you're just a guy DPSing some before he has to GTFO of there like everyone else. And there are easier classes to do that with than the spell casters, they just don't DPS as fast.

[Toaster]

I went through and read it again.  Honestly, it just seems to make it worse.  Blasting to level 60 in 8 hours?  All that does is destroy progression and turn it into a lootfest*.  Turning the difficulty into an option instead of another progression is a step in the same direction.


*Yes, the game is a lootfest by design, but at least there's a sense of progression beyond loot.


Essentially, it's changing the entire progression structure of the game.  Some may like it; I don't.

It's not as bad as it sounds in practice.

This may be true, but it doesn't describe well.

[nenjin]

I got to 60 in 8 hours with a lot of help from people, because I'd already leveled 3 characters to 60 and wanted to play a Wizard, now.

Going solo, at solo rates, it will take you much longer and you'll experience the granularity in the lower difficulties that veterans have blown past. You will notice the progression from Act 1 enemies to Act 4 enemies. It's just after your first, second and third games, you're going to notice it less. 

But yes, the game is a loot grind, from top to bottom. Paragon adds a little xp grind in there but the benefit is incremental rather than dramatic.

Still, what keeps it fun for me is the elites and boss fights. You gotta dance like a butterfly and sting like a bee. There's not a lot of consequence to dying, other than the repair cost and losing your accumulated bonus XP. But just surviving the madness that is illusionist/mortar/arcane/vortex/ice pulse without dying, as a point of pride and skill, is a decent self-imposed goal that has kept me playing. (I don't have the time or inclination for a hardcore character.)

There are also end-game grinds, like doing Ubers with Infernal Machines, which can get you a Hellfire Ring, to at least give more context to your activities besides pure loot farming. When the expansion comes out, you'll be able to accept missions to go kill act bosses and monsters, made harder, for large rewards. The entire story will be absent from this mode.

If that's not your bag, there's not much else I can say that I think would change your mind.

[Darkmere]

I went through and read it again.  Honestly, it just seems to make it worse.  Blasting to level 60 in 8 hours?  All that does is destroy progression and turn it into a lootfest*.  Turning the difficulty into an option instead of another progression is a step in the same direction.
*Yes, the game is a lootfest by design, but at least there's a sense of progression beyond loot.
Essentially, it's changing the entire progression structure of the game.  Some may like it; I don't.

Well, I did also say I played at a higher difficulty level (more XP) during a permanent XP buff (for the RoS launch event, buff ends next week), and it was an alt I was leveling with a friend for kicks, with another 50% bonus XP on a ring/helm socket. So it's not the best gauge I could have used, but it's the only number I have on hand. All said and done it was quite a bit faster than baseline would have been.

There is a level-based difficulty progression regardless of game settings, too. Somewhere around level 20 elites start spawning with two attributes, then later they get three, finally four, and near 60 (or at 60, I'm not sure) the mob density doubles on average, from what I could tell. I'm not terribly familiar with the new mechanics, as I've only seen them once and have zero desire to level more of anything except a crusader when they're available.

It's not as bad as it sounds in practice. If you want the scale to be less forgiving, play a higher difficulty. Generally though, Act 1 will be easy, Act 2 will get rough and Acts 3 and 4 are the real test of where you're at vs. what each difficulty level is throwing at you.

And yes, WD can face tank with Firebats (because the damage is so consistent and fast), lots of life on hit, Jungle Fortitude and a couple other tweaks. It's just once you get into torment, each difficulty level is going to stress the benchmarks (life on hit, HP, resists and armor to some degree) more and more. I'd say balance is pretty irrelevant until you hit Torment, but I say that having gone straight to it.

Also, when I say face tank, I'm not really talking whites. It may be all fine and dandy to tank whites all day, but when the real test is if you can survive 5 blues with Plague, Desecration, Ice Pulse, and possibly a couple shots of Fire Chains and/or Arcane, all surrounding you and pounding on you. If you can tank through all that w/o major problems, you're a tank. If you can't, you're just a guy DPSing some before he has to GTFO of there like everyone else. And there are easier classes to do that with than the spell casters, they just don't DPS as fast.

I agree with most of this save the last bit of just soaking every bad affix. Barring certain gear concerns (outgearing content or having the immunity pieces), there's at least an argument to be made for crowd controlling elites enough that they don't toss all the irritating crap out there in the first place. I'm a big fan of mirror images/frost nova to keep things stunned and the total number of desecrates/arcane beams/plague puddles/poison blobs to a minimum. That said, every control style seems to have one hard counter, so it's working as it should.

[nenjin]

CC cuts down on it for sure, but again, it comes down to your preferred level of difficulty. A bit of CC and applied damage might get packs down in a minute or so on Torment 1 or 2, but soloing Torment 4 those packs can start taking 3 or 4 or more minutes to kill safely. If you want to face Tank in a full group of Torment 4 as a caster...you need to be seriously beast, or your party needs to be doing enough damage that Torment 4 isn't a challenge.

Also, if you're soloing....bring the Enchantress. Her Polymorph spell is awesome and cuts the noise from elite packs in half, regularly. I gave her a legendary 2-hander that summons a pet demon....and between the two, I can happily nuke all day long from behind them, or get them stuck in doorways and rip 'em apart.

[Lord Snow]

But in all this time, it never occurred to me to even THINK about DII having any mods. Dunno why.
You guys are blowing my mind with all the talk about them mods. o.o

There even used to be servers running the mods. Must have all leaked at some point. Blizzard took a looong time to shut the servers down, when they eventually asked everyone to stop their private servers, weirdly enough everyone just DID quietly and that was that.

I don't think they ever expected modders to work on Diablo. They left them to their own devices entirely, and still some amazing results came out. For Diablo 3 they actively discouraged modding, sad thing really. And inconsistent, SC2 has custom maps, why can't we have custom diablo 3? :|

[Zangi]

I don't think they ever expected modders to work on Diablo. They left them to their own devices entirely, and still some amazing results came out. For Diablo 3 they actively discouraged modding, sad thing really. And inconsistent, SC2 has custom maps, why can't we have custom diablo 3? :|

Cause Auction House

[Dutchling]

Greetings,

Thank you for purchasing Diablo III! Your payment has successfully processed and your account now has full access to all game features. You are now able to use the following without restriction:

* Auction House
* Matchmaking
* Global Play
* In-game Chat
* Friend Requests

Wait. So I could have played the whole game for free? I mean, I'm not even considering using any of those features listed Dx

[Biowraith]

Wait. So I could have played the whole game for free? I mean, I'm not even considering using any of those features listed Dx

From what I can tell, you'd also have been capped at level 13 and couldn't progress further than Leoric.

[pedrito]

What's with all the hate and boycott talk?

I think the game is worth every penny.

And I don't get the complaints from the OP. None of the things you mentioned are being hidden from you before you buy the game. If non-moddability, etc, is a turn off for you - dont buy it.

I think the last patch was spot on too. Monsters scaling to your level is a nightmare in Skyrim for example, but in Diablo it works fine. Crafting is finally fixed and fun.

90% of my gaming time goes into strategy games. But whenever I don't feel like thinking too much, I fire up Diablo 3 and have a bash at some randomized bosses.

You don't like D3, OK. But this thread is just pure nonsense.

[The13thRonin]

What's with all the hate and boycott talk?

I think the game is worth every penny.

And I don't get the complaints from the OP. None of the things you mentioned are being hidden from you before you buy the game. If non-moddability, etc, is a turn off for you - dont buy it.

I think the last patch was spot on too. Monsters scaling to your level is a nightmare in Skyrim for example, but in Diablo it works fine. Crafting is finally fixed and fun.

90% of my gaming time goes into strategy games. But whenever I don't feel like thinking too much, I fire up Diablo 3 and have a bash at some randomized bosses.

You don't like D3, OK. But this thread is just pure nonsense.

On the one hand YOU think it's good...
On the other hand the entire sane population of the little blue and green planet we like to call Earth disagrees...

They completely ripped out the heart of the game and repeatedly stomped on it. What made Diablo I and II great was its sophisticated RPG system, dark/mature story/themes, excellent musical score and solid writing. Diablo III is all about THE EPIC LOOTZZZ!111!!11 which I guess is OK if the player is an impulsive frothing-at-the-mouth eight year old (and we know that's who Blizzard want playing) but those of us actually old enough to have played the other Diablo's have expectations that are a little higher than that.

In Diablo 3 there IS NO COW LEVEL because you're the cow, getting milked for all you're worth through the auction house. That's all Diablo 3 is... An auction house with a game (and not a particularly good one at that) attached to the side. The level of blatant **** that developers try to shovel down gamers throats these days makes me physically ill. And to add insult to injury to have an always online requirement is ludicrous... Some of us don't live in urban centers where we have access to reliable internet connections.

[Zangi]

Holy heck, game becomes massively unfun when some high geared guy comes in and melts everything without you having to do anything.

[alexandertnt]

I don't like this "If you don't like something, keep quiet and just don't buy it".

If the lack of modding (for example) was a serious issue affecting purchases, how would Blizzard know this unless people were actually criticizing the game for its lack of modding?

[Darkmere]

Well, I think the two pages of near-civility we had going was a thread record. It was nice while it lasted.

[The13thRonin]

Well, I think the two pages of near-civility we had going was a thread record. It was nice while it lasted.

I assume this is directed at my EPIC LOOOTZZZ!111!!!!1 comment.

Are you denying that's the target audience that Blizzard were going for and that the series has completely changed in tone/game-play/direction when compared to previous installments?