Abusing the most broken skills/passives. I can't imagine most of these abilities or passives making it past a month of retail.
quick Recap of abusive things
- vision quest for imba mana regen - blood ritual + mass healing further exacerbates the imba mana regen - big party wide support skills from WD and monk stacking team bonuses - Double mantras, +24% damage, and evasion + armor. - Tons of debuffs - Good pure damage from WD spam - Abusing best mathematical and utlity skills in the game. - Great for inferno runs with little gear.
To summarize, the monks are unkillable, working together as the main tanks accompanied by WD support minions and hex spam. The deal out tons of cripple/heals/debuffs/stuns, while the witch doctors cast their high cooldown abilities in key situations and just spam the F out of Corpse Bomb abusing imba regen, 3x regen and 15% less mana costs, offsetting the penalties with monk healing. Basically imagine a normal spammable ability that does high AOE damage, that's what the WD have ALONG with huge buffs and ultimate abilities.
This is THE solution to Diablo 3, the best party possible. As you gear up you could possibly add in a barb for a monk, but that's iffy.
I GUARANTEE every part of this build is nerfed by retail or at least within 4 weeks of release. Vision Quest is broken in terms of what it does at what cost, The rest is just stacking every abusive ability into one single 4 man team, very straightforward.
things for sure nerfed: vision quest, guiding light
guiding light doesn't even make sense as the monk has no direct heal skills.
On March 03 2012 18:34 FinestHour wrote: Aren't you tired of making theorycrafting threads by now? You can't possibly know any of this to really be true from the beta.
It's actually pretty easy for an expert to solve a system like this and find imbalanced combinations. Also it will be fun to see when they nerf this stuff.
Just about all of your Diablo 3 threads are full of pretentious statements like this. How about you take a step down and wait for release before you claim yourself an "expert" etc.
On March 03 2012 18:37 dacthehork wrote: It's actually pretty easy for an expert to solve a system like this and find imbalanced combinations. Also it will be fun to see when they nerf this stuff.
Go to any game forum to the archive section. Search for theorycrafting threads before release and shortly thereafter. Laugh at all the total bullcrap 'experts' were writing in them
On March 03 2012 18:37 dacthehork wrote: It's actually pretty easy for an expert to solve a system like this and find imbalanced combinations. Also it will be fun to see when they nerf this stuff.
Go to any game forum to the archive section. Search for theorycrafting threads before release and shortly thereafter. Laugh at all the total bullcrap 'experts' were writing in them
I remember my Beta SC2 predictions
Zerg had nothing but macro and was one dimensional, Terran had by far the biggest and most variety in it's toolset and was the best race because of this and would be a pain to balance, and Protoss relied on forcefields early, so the maps would greatly influence how good they where.
I also remember predicting that Terran would have tools taken away to balance them, loe and behold reaper was utterly nerfed to uselessness and now even the ghost is turned one dimensional. It's easy to figure out how blizzard balances, they are pretty good at getting most things "seemingly" balanced but fail when thinking about toolsets and how those work.
Vision quest is a great example, how Diablo 3 works is you don't really mind using 1-3 skill constantly without much variety. vision quest allows you to take 3 long cooldown skills, and 1 short cooldown skill that you will always use, and just by going this style you get 300% mana regen, 3x total. It's not even a bad tradeoff taking long cd skills, and you can turn that 3x mana regen and 15% of maan cost into health (this is funny cuz 30 hp is nothing now) and just destroy
If you look at passives and even stuff like guiding light they don't even make sense, this shows blizz really is not focusing too heavy of a focus on these skills. These builds are OUTRIGHT broken, thats why I'm so guaranteed they will be nerfed. The tools all combined are seriously hilarious, mass confusions, hexes, blinding flashes, serenity (5s bubble), etc are just hilariously stupid. Then a conviction aura increasing party damage by a quarter ALONE, there is just a ton of hilarious buffs that are just too good and easy to see.
Again just look at a passive like resolve and combine it with a runed crippling wave on monk. just that one passive and generator combo is nerfing enemy damage heavily, now stack those type of abilities across 4 heroes. Again the balance they have gives maybe +30% to one skill with a rune, these abilities give +24% damage to an entire party.
There are a ton of "mandatory" runes too, like ballistics to even bother taking a rocket based DH skill. It's very easy to say they have to balance the skills around the runes, meanign something like vision quest just becomes mandatory for any witch doctor, its just TOO good.
Anyone with a semi background in rpgs can look at VQ and know it's stupid.
there is also a fundamental superiority to the WD and MOnk in D3. By design they are party centric characters, with many party buffs or aoe utilility abilities that Scale heavily as the party size increases.
+24% damage taken by enemies, is amazing in a 4 person party, +15% damage to one character is not so amazing. The way the designed the semi-support classes (monk and WD) was giving them a lot of party wide tools. By stacking these supports on top of supports, and some just broken stuff like vision quest etc, you get a ridiculously broken result.
they wont specifically balance for 4 man parties, meaning the WD/Monk who excel in parties, also have to have great solo skills, dps, etc. Combining all of these into one team build the result is basically overpowered, and the design goals of the game support this. Some other classes also have some party buffing skills, but not to the extent of WD/monk.
Just so you know, there's more than one ideal party. Think of this like a formula with at least 11 different factors for each character (x5) [skills(6), passive(3), stats(2)] and 3 more factors for pvE (monsters, environment, handicap).
You basically "figured" one of the 8729110000+ combinations (based on 14 factors, there's actually more). There's a lot more combinations to review and compare before you can say this is "solved". In therms of efficiency, I'm not sure its the most efficient party because some skills overlap.
Personally, I wouldn't play a Monk (hardcore mode) in Hell+ difficulty because his primary stat is "dexterity" which convert into dodge % which makes the damage input very random and hard to deal with.
On March 03 2012 18:37 dacthehork wrote: It's actually pretty easy for an expert to solve a system like this and find imbalanced combinations. Also it will be fun to see when they nerf this stuff.
Go to any game forum to the archive section. Search for theorycrafting threads before release and shortly thereafter. Laugh at all the total bullcrap 'experts' were writing in them
I remember my Beta SC2 predictions
Zerg had nothing but macro and was one dimensional, Terran had by far the biggest and most variety in it's toolset and was the best race because of this and would be a pain to balance, and Protoss relied on forcefields early, so the maps would greatly influence how good they where.
I also remember predicting that Terran would have tools taken away to balance them, loe and behold reaper was utterly nerfed to uselessness and now even the ghost is turned one dimensional. It's easy to figure out how blizzard balances, they are pretty good at getting most things "seemingly" balanced but fail when thinking about toolsets and how those work.
Got a link to where you predicted all of this?
First off can I ask what you personally hope to get out of making a thread like this? The way you speak makes you come off as so assured of yourself that I have a hard time believing you are looking for feedback. Do you just want us all to awe at your 'expert' superior intellect?
What is your goal for this configuration? To not die? Is this a HC build?
If you think this configuration has any shot of being a fast and efficient killing group you are a real sweetheart
I mean do you actually think Mass Confusion and the rune from Blinding flash is going to speed up your killing efficiency at all? You have Resolve and Crippling Wave on your monks (it can't be correct to have these most likely unstackable effects on both monks) which lowers the damage they will deal to each other as well.
The entire configuration is defensive and you think it's going to be imbalanced that monsters around your level and gear quality won't be able to threaten you?
I don't understand how you could think this is ideal for anything other than staying in normal difficulty until the expansion comes out being that your only offensive skills over 4 characters are
2x Acid Cloud 2x Crippling Wave with defensive rune 2x Lashing Tail Kick with defensive rune And then... Zombie Dogs... And Fetishes.
Looks really boring to play, though. As a WD, I just stand there and jam the LMB over and over and then every 90 seconds I hit LMB, 2, 3, 4 in quick succession? Sweet.
On March 03 2012 18:37 dacthehork wrote: It's actually pretty easy for an expert to solve a system like this and find imbalanced combinations. Also it will be fun to see when they nerf this stuff.
Go to any game forum to the archive section. Search for theorycrafting threads before release and shortly thereafter. Laugh at all the total bullcrap 'experts' were writing in them
I remember my Beta SC2 predictions
Zerg had nothing but macro and was one dimensional, Terran had by far the biggest and most variety in it's toolset and was the best race because of this and would be a pain to balance, and Protoss relied on forcefields early, so the maps would greatly influence how good they where.
I also remember predicting that Terran would have tools taken away to balance them, loe and behold reaper was utterly nerfed to uselessness and now even the ghost is turned one dimensional. It's easy to figure out how blizzard balances, they are pretty good at getting most things "seemingly" balanced but fail when thinking about toolsets and how those work.
Got a link to where you predicted all of this?
First off can I ask what you personally hope to get out of making a thread like this? The way you speak makes you come off as so assured of yourself that I have a hard time believing you are looking for feedback. Do you just want us all to awe at your 'expert' superior intellect?
What is your goal for this configuration? To not die? Is this a HC build?
If you think this configuration has any shot of being a fast and efficient killing group you are a real sweetheart
I mean do you actually think Mass Confusion and the rune from Blinding flash is going to speed up your killing efficiency at all? You have Resolve and Crippling Wave on your monks (it can't be correct to have these most likely unstackable effects on both monks) which lowers the damage they will deal to each other as well.
The entire configuration is defensive and you think it's going to be imbalanced that monsters around your level and gear quality won't be able to threaten you?
I don't understand how you could think this is ideal for anything other than staying in normal difficulty until the expansion comes out being that your only offensive skills over 4 characters are
2x Acid Cloud 2x Crippling Wave with defensive rune 2x Lashing Tail Kick with defensive rune And then... Zombie Dogs... And Fetishes.
wrong
Mantra of Conviction +24% damage taken by enemies 2x Hex - +24% damage dealt to hexed enemy Big Bad Voodoo 1-2x - +30% damage Dealt, +20% attack speed. Mass Confusion - +20% damage taken Vision Quest passive - 300% mana regen - 3x the casting of dps mana skill Blood Ritual - 15% less mana costs for even more spam of high damage mana skill Guiding Light - +16% damage dealt
266% weapon damage - spell casted 3.45x as often with +16% damage, +30% damage, +20% damage,+24 damage + 24% damage ideally, adds up.
There is no real reason to have more than 1-2 skills to dump mana into for damage on a WD, especially with vision quest, who be casting 1/3rd the normal spells through a variety of meh stuff, just cast the best one 3x as much.
Lashing Tail Kick with stun and Acid Cloud are pretty much the only spenders you need for damage, they dont have cooldowns, so there is no real reason to have two or three spenders.
Vision Quest is a broken passive, blood ritual is pretty broken too. Also this damage is transferred to the dogs, fetishes, etc too. I mean you can make small tweaks depending on the balance of the actual game but this pretty much is abusing everything broken in the game. Also the idea is inferno is ridiculously hard, being able to reliable walk through the difficulty will be very important. Having unkillable tanks for shit like duriel is also key, Basically no downtime, less risk, etc So you can quickly rush through to inferno and farm. Pure damage or "killing" time isn't as important, you only need 1 or so damage skill a player, lashing tail kick / acid cloud. The idea is simply do the most powerful things you can in any format.
I think all three of the last passives mentioned will be revised, (blood ritual, guiding light, and vision quest)
On March 03 2012 18:34 FinestHour wrote: Aren't you tired of making theorycrafting threads by now? You can't possibly know any of this to really be true from the beta.
It's actually pretty easy for an expert to solve a system like this and find imbalanced combinations. Also it will be fun to see when they nerf this stuff.
So you think this party is ideal because you've seen what the monsters in inferno difficulty have in store for us right?
On March 03 2012 18:37 dacthehork wrote: It's actually pretty easy for an expert to solve a system like this and find imbalanced combinations. Also it will be fun to see when they nerf this stuff.
Go to any game forum to the archive section. Search for theorycrafting threads before release and shortly thereafter. Laugh at all the total bullcrap 'experts' were writing in them
I remember my Beta SC2 predictions
Zerg had nothing but macro and was one dimensional, Terran had by far the biggest and most variety in it's toolset and was the best race because of this and would be a pain to balance, and Protoss relied on forcefields early, so the maps would greatly influence how good they where.
Completely different because in SC2 beta every unit was available for use, so you could compare between players in equal conditions, it's really esay to predict like that. This is different, you don't know how stats are going to be affected in the higher difficulties, and what monsters can do to you, you haven't seen them.
The only thing is... I don't see myself playing diablo 3 to farm the best gear/pick certain skills in order to most efficiently deal with all the monsters and stuff. I'm just going to pick something that looks cool and blow shit up. I could see your point if this was a competitive game, but when it comes down to it, its just a PvE experience and doing all this research and double checking your math kinda kills the fun in it, don't you think?
On March 04 2012 04:58 TheUltraViolent wrote: The only thing is... I don't see myself playing diablo 3 to farm the best gear/pick certain skills in order to most efficiently deal with all the monsters and stuff. I'm just going to pick something that looks cool and blow shit up. I could see your point if this was a competitive game, but when it comes down to it, its just a PvE experience and doing all this research and double checking your math kinda kills the fun in it, don't you think?
you dont use much math when evaluating classes, as the best stuff is not damage over time, but rather just looking for where the devs miss valued things. VQ is a good example, they think having 3 long cooldown skills on a WD gimps it by 1/2 to a 1/3rd, but its very easy to fit in 3 long cd, 1 short cd, and always have Vision Quest up to spam 3x as much. Its such a skewed passive it's completely ridiculous.
Blood ritual is also another obviously broken passive, +1% life regen a second, and 15% less mana cost, okay. Spiritual attunement and gruesome feast are also almost up there but not quite as good, although I could see swapping the better one in for tribal rights.
The monk is more a toolset problem than broken value, Just so many "utility" skills that overlap and create a monster, also all have them have great values.
DH Marked for death +15% damage - contagion, spreads after dying Conviction - AOE - +24% damage constant, no casting.
They sort of decreed that monk and WD are somewhat support classes, the thing is in a 4 man party, you kinda just want to stack support abilities across all 4 characters for max synergy, a wizard sitting alone blasting for max damage is not going to really be what you want versus a WD also blasting away but using tons of CC/buffing skills..
When they do fix these classes a bit more I think you'll see the best parties probably more like monk/barb/wd/wd
Hey dak, can you take a break from the group comps, and turn your crystal ball on itemization at or near level cap? I'm most interested in crit scaling so I know how viable the increased crit damage runes will be on my DH.
On March 04 2012 06:19 JingleHell wrote: Hey dak, can you take a break from the group comps, and turn your crystal ball on itemization at or near level cap? I'm most interested in crit scaling so I know how viable the increased crit damage runes will be on my DH.
Better yet, turn your crystal ball on release date. Frankly I don't care if the game is broken @ release as long as it gets good patch support. Bring it on WWMM combo ftw.
On a side note, do we have information about how monsters will take damage on the higher difficulties. In D2 there were plenty of "immune to x" mobs that would cause serious problems for some chars. Is this foursome vulnerable to anything like that seeing as their damage dealing spells will likely have half of the diversity of a regular foursome?
On March 03 2012 18:34 FinestHour wrote: Aren't you tired of making theorycrafting threads by now? You can't possibly know any of this to really be true from the beta.
On March 04 2012 06:19 JingleHell wrote: Hey dak, can you take a break from the group comps, and turn your crystal ball on itemization at or near level cap? I'm most interested in crit scaling so I know how viable the increased crit damage runes will be on my DH.
Better yet, turn your crystal ball on release date. Frankly I don't care if the game is broken @ release as long as it gets good patch support. Bring it on WWMM combo ftw.
On a side note, do we have information about how monsters will take damage on the higher difficulties. In D2 there were plenty of "immune to x" mobs that would cause serious problems for some chars. Is this foursome vulnerable to anything like that seeing as their damage dealing spells will likely have half of the diversity of a regular foursome?
On March 04 2012 06:19 JingleHell wrote: Hey dak, can you take a break from the group comps, and turn your crystal ball on itemization at or near level cap? I'm most interested in crit scaling so I know how viable the increased crit damage runes will be on my DH.
Crit will not be worth it for damage.
1. A lot of abilities trigger off crit, meaning that crit is not pure a damage increase. So it will be inferior to just pure damage, although it can be a good secondary stat. Crit will mainly be key in builds with triggers off criticals like Archon Wizards who abuse high critical change and persistant AOEs to reduce the cooldown on archon to keep it up most of the time. It's not a damage attribute. There will be crit builds but you need passives or runes that take advantage of "triggered when critical" effects to make itemizing for crit worth it.
If you take a look at wizard, they have a "mega form" aka archon, and a passive that reduces cooldowns on successful crits, builds like this are what will abuse critical chance mods and increased crit runes.
Basically imagine you have a 120s cooldown uber ability
You can lower this with passives, but also take a passive (on crit lower cooldowns 1s)
then stack a ton of persistent AOEs with high crit chance like blizzard runed correctly, cast these out after using armor runed correctly for more crit chance
now you are critting a pack of mobs 2-3 times a second, reducing all your cooldowns quickly, allowing you to abuse high cooldown abilities like Archon. Builds like this are the focus of critical attacks, not really damage, although the damage is nice.
Funny, so "Your critical hits have a chance to reduce the cooldown of your spells by 1s" translates to Imba. You don't even know how high the chance to reduce the cd is. You also know, that each spell can trigger this ability more than once. So, you think blizzard just forgot that aoe-effects do exist on the wizard.
Easy now. We've seen nearly nothing of the game yet... But if you are the expert you claim you are. Why are you not working for Blizzard? I'm sure they'd want an expert like you...
interesting group setup, would replace one of them with a damage dealer though and feed the dd with gear. Since its true that they should survive with little gear. Doubt they nerf everything though, only one part of it pretty heavily. The hate here is really funny though. Better never play a rpg where you can actually decide on different builds if this upsets you x3.
On March 05 2012 20:46 FeyFey wrote: The hate here is really funny though. Better never play a rpg where you can actually decide on different builds if this upsets you .
People are hating because of the OP's attitude of "know it all" with very little information. This has nothing to do with imbalance or theory crafting. It's just someone who thinks he have it all figured it out.
Unfortunately, there's plenty of people like that around, enough for Discovery Channel to make a new "reality show"
On March 05 2012 20:46 FeyFey wrote: The hate here is really funny though. Better never play a rpg where you can actually decide on different builds if this upsets you .
People are hating because of the OP's attitude of "know it all" with very little information. This has nothing to do with imbalance or theory crafting. It's just someone who thinks he have it all figured it out.
Unfortunately, there's plenty of people like that around, enough for Discovery Channel to make a new "reality show"
On March 05 2012 20:45 Zexion wrote: I'm sure they'd want an expert like you...
Blizzard is actually saturated with high quality in-house alpha/beta testers (they said so themselves, it is partly why this beta is so tiny).
If their playtesters had even a tiny fraction of dacthehork's mighty intellect, the game would not be so obviously broken and trivially solve-able for inferno difficulty farming.
On March 03 2012 18:34 FinestHour wrote: Aren't you tired of making theorycrafting threads by now? You can't possibly know any of this to really be true from the beta.
It's actually pretty easy for an expert to solve a system like this and find imbalanced combinations. Also it will be fun to see when they nerf this stuff.
But I though if you had multiples classes, you could do triple techs like in CTrigger? (The fact you called yourself an expert took out all your credibility, sorry)
the fact is it that Blizzard is notoriously incompetent when it comes to obvious balance mistakes. Anyone that has been involved in WoW PvP and PvE should be aware of how many times really obvious stuff, even stuff that they were warned about, slipped through.
As for SC2: consider that the devs balanced timings and abilities on maps such as Blistering Sands, Desert Oasis, and Steppes of War. That by itself speaks volumes about the ability of the balance team.
From the people that will bring you the Oracle and Tempest.
On March 06 2012 12:20 architecture wrote: People being stupid because of your attitude, but
the fact is it that Blizzard is notoriously incompetent when it comes to obvious balance mistakes. Anyone that has been involved in WoW PvP and PvE should be aware of how many times really obvious stuff, even stuff that they were warned about, slipped through.
As for SC2: consider that the devs balanced timings and abilities on maps such as Blistering Sands, Desert Oasis, and Steppes of War. That by itself speaks volumes about the ability of the balance team.
From the people that will bring you the Oracle and Tempest.
Nah you have to write things like this or no one cares. Anyway the obvious offenders are very clear
Vision Quest : 300% mana regen is just hilarious like I've said a billion times anyone with half a brain could see 3x rage/mana/arcane power is broken. The drawback isn't even a drawback.
Blood ritual: 15% off all magic spells in cost, and +1% hp regen a second. If you look at it for 4 seconds you can see it's broken, 20 hp is literally nothing now and thats what most spells would cost in hp.
Monk: Just the absurd stacking nature of lowering enemy damage, dealt, dodges, blinds, cripples, bubbles, heals, etc Not to mention +24%-48% damage taken mantras, etc. His passives, etc.
It's really blatantly obvious how overpowered these builds are as they synergize so well. Just look through WD skills/runes and all the +% damage for the entire team effects. Hex/BBV/Mass Confusion all have party wide damage buffs in the range of 20-30%, not to mention the OTHER effects associated, aka disabling an enemy, the confusion effect, the +attackspeed and + movespeed. Whereas a SINGLE skill on Demon Hunter does less effect adn to one target, even runed it only spreads after you kill that target,
HEX - +24% damage to target, they are turned into chicken. Marked for Death or w.e. + 15% damage taken, no disable, must rune to make it spread, decent cooldown
4 Player is the ideal setting due to how monsters scale, only in HP % and only up to 325%. The way skills are balanced, a lot of the "party" buffs are as effective as single person buffs. Meaning just combining all the party buffs in one build and you end up with something multiple times more powerful than a single "damage dealer".
Why have 1 person dealing good damage who offers little utility and has to take a bunch of self buff skills or damage runed abilities. Just have all 4 of your party members buffing eachother up with +20-30% damage buffs, effectively making your team have insane damage, insane survivability, and insane utility.
You just have to analyze the skills a very short period of time.
Here is how it works, blizz wants each character to be good solo or good in a group. right? The thing is they put 1-2 "party abilities" on wizard, barb, and DH. But monk/wd are kind of built to support a party and have a lot more party buffing, aoe skills, etc. So just using monk/wd you get access to a humongous range of big party buffs, along with their good "solo skills". By combining 1-2 of their good abilities with 4-5 party supporting abilities you end up with a mess of destruction and power. Barbarian comes close with some shouts and utility abilities, but is slightly more focused only on buffing himself.
They want Monk/WD party skills to be good with 2 players, but with 4 they don't scale down, it's the same buffs. So they make them overpowered in groups of 3-4, just so they are useful in smaller groups and solo.
The thing is in order to account for the "scaling" of these abilities in larger groups, they need to add diminishing returns, but they haven't in any way. So the "party buffing" skills that work for 4 or 1 person are overpowered in comparison to simply buffing up your own character.
Yeah Wizard can give up a skill slot for a +20% damage buff to THEMSELVES only, but a monk can give one that buffs every member of his parties damage up +24-48%.
Example:
+20% damage buff from enhance weapon for wizard, affects wizard only +24% conviction aura for Monk - effects entire parties damage
Monk 100 dps + 350 dps from party + conviction aura =450 dps normally, (558 dps with monk aura) Wizard 120 dps + 330 dps from party + enhance weapon = 450 dps normally, (475 dps with enhance weapon)
It's very clear the way "party buffs" scale up in 4 man is so much better than a "self buff" effect, and monk/wd are full of these. WD has 3 very good party buff to damage effects, although on somewhat long cooldowns, hex, bbv, and mass confusion all buff entire party damage.
So you can imagine 2 WD's being able to just increase damage for party immensely, negating any lower inherent dps they have.
Monk has conviction mantra, guiding light, and a lot of defensive focused party buffs, not to mention having a great tanking toolset. Barbarian is close behind monk as well, I just prefer the larger utility toolset of monk.
I think you can expect changes to vision quest, blood ritual, and some toning down of party wide damage buffs. Possibly also to the stacking of monks crippling/disabling/stunning utility as well. It might be intentional that they left these party wide buffs so imba in 4 man teams, just to keep them usable in solo or dual adventuring, there is no reason not to abuse this fact though.
On March 03 2012 18:34 FinestHour wrote: Aren't you tired of making theorycrafting threads by now? You can't possibly know any of this to really be true from the beta.
It's actually pretty easy for an expert to solve a system like this and find imbalanced combinations. Also it will be fun to see when they nerf this stuff.
Good thing you're an expert at D3 then with all the playtime you've put in, not to mention the number of times you've beaten the game...
Theorycrafting like this without knowing all the facts is stupid. You have no idea if a spell stacks with another or not and this is just one example but it makes a HUGE difference. Game mechanics are verry arbitrary so until you have tested everything it's imossible to know what's op.
At least the OP has actually done some theorycrafting as opposed to a generic sheeple going DURR GAME NOT RELEASED YET HURR IT WILL CHANGE BY RELEASE and then we look at sc2 and how long it took them to change the retardation that is the ghost or khaydarin or their mappool or etc. etc.
It's really fucking obvious that aoe with scaling > single target with scaling, and so stacking aoe in a party will always provide higher gains than stacking single-target. I'm somewhat undecided as to how exactly this party will deal with bosses/elites, but I guess a respec would always be possible if needed.
This just goes to show Diablo 3 should have been released long time ago. Because else people "figures out and completes" the game even before it's out. Next thing you know, we are going to get threads on "possible patch notes to nerf XYZ class combo"
I really shouldn´t respond to much because you can´t tell 80% of all this but i will try some points you maybe overlooked.
Your group setup will possible be strong vs. random demons and smaller enemies. But what you can´t really say now or anyone is. Will the higher lvl rares/bosses even be effected by most your spells or debuffs?
-The single-target dmg for your setup seems incredible week with no really high hitting ability. Higher level mobs could just run out of poison acid cloud before 3 secs which would take a good bunch of dmg from that spell.
-Hex is on the one side random which target it takes and like i said above could maybe not work on certain rares.
-Mass confusion same as hex could maybe not work on high lvl rares or certain types.
-Monks seem to be weak "tanks" with low gear because dex does increase dodge which makes them really rng on the incoming dmg side.
-zombie dogs and fetish army could be totally useless at high aoe dmg rares/bosses.
I do not know that this is the perfect team, I don't have the skills or time to know that. What I certainly agree with is that the Monk is a fundamentally flawed class, much like the Ret Paladin during Vanilla and TBC WoW.
If you recall, the Ret Paladin was a joke, however it also was a rollface pubstomping machine because of Seal of Command, particularly after the introduction of Crusader Strike. In other words, it was balanced on the blade of a knife. The monk has many of the same characteristics: IMO it will either be a fairly weak or fairly OP class depending on item level and the numbers on its auras and skills at release.
The OP recognizes the ability of the Monk to be overpowered, but IMO with a couple of alterations to scaling it is just as likely to be a complete joke.
On March 03 2012 18:37 dacthehork wrote: It's actually pretty easy for an expert to solve a system like this and find imbalanced combinations. Also it will be fun to see when they nerf this stuff.
Go to any game forum to the archive section. Search for theorycrafting threads before release and shortly thereafter. Laugh at all the total bullcrap 'experts' were writing in them
I remember my Beta SC2 predictions
Zerg had nothing but macro and was one dimensional, Terran had by far the biggest and most variety in it's toolset and was the best race because of this and would be a pain to balance, and Protoss relied on forcefields early, so the maps would greatly influence how good they where.
I also remember predicting that Terran would have tools taken away to balance them, loe and behold reaper was utterly nerfed to uselessness and now even the ghost is turned one dimensional. It's easy to figure out how blizzard balances, they are pretty good at getting most things "seemingly" balanced but fail when thinking about toolsets and how those work.
Got a link to where you predicted all of this?
First off can I ask what you personally hope to get out of making a thread like this? The way you speak makes you come off as so assured of yourself that I have a hard time believing you are looking for feedback. Do you just want us all to awe at your 'expert' superior intellect?
What is your goal for this configuration? To not die? Is this a HC build?
If you think this configuration has any shot of being a fast and efficient killing group you are a real sweetheart
I mean do you actually think Mass Confusion and the rune from Blinding flash is going to speed up your killing efficiency at all? You have Resolve and Crippling Wave on your monks (it can't be correct to have these most likely unstackable effects on both monks) which lowers the damage they will deal to each other as well.
The entire configuration is defensive and you think it's going to be imbalanced that monsters around your level and gear quality won't be able to threaten you?
I don't understand how you could think this is ideal for anything other than staying in normal difficulty until the expansion comes out being that your only offensive skills over 4 characters are
2x Acid Cloud 2x Crippling Wave with defensive rune 2x Lashing Tail Kick with defensive rune And then... Zombie Dogs... And Fetishes.
wrong
Mantra of Conviction +24% damage taken by enemies 2x Hex - +24% damage dealt to hexed enemy Big Bad Voodoo 1-2x - +30% damage Dealt, +20% attack speed. Mass Confusion - +20% damage taken Vision Quest passive - 300% mana regen - 3x the casting of dps mana skill Blood Ritual - 15% less mana costs for even more spam of high damage mana skill Guiding Light - +16% damage dealt
266% weapon damage - spell casted 3.45x as often with +16% damage, +30% damage, +20% damage,+24 damage + 24% damage ideally, adds up.
There is no real reason to have more than 1-2 skills to dump mana into for damage on a WD, especially with vision quest, who be casting 1/3rd the normal spells through a variety of meh stuff, just cast the best one 3x as much.
Lashing Tail Kick with stun and Acid Cloud are pretty much the only spenders you need for damage, they dont have cooldowns, so there is no real reason to have two or three spenders.
Vision Quest is a broken passive, blood ritual is pretty broken too. Also this damage is transferred to the dogs, fetishes, etc too. I mean you can make small tweaks depending on the balance of the actual game but this pretty much is abusing everything broken in the game. Also the idea is inferno is ridiculously hard, being able to reliable walk through the difficulty will be very important. Having unkillable tanks for shit like duriel is also key, Basically no downtime, less risk, etc So you can quickly rush through to inferno and farm. Pure damage or "killing" time isn't as important, you only need 1 or so damage skill a player, lashing tail kick / acid cloud. The idea is simply do the most powerful things you can in any format.
I think all three of the last passives mentioned will be revised, (blood ritual, guiding light, and vision quest)
Quoted from a Blizzard employee, just as punctuation on your perm ban
Talking to Wyatt about this a little more and he brought up some good, additional points.
You will not be farming bosses. Bosses won't drop the best loot, they won't even drop really great loot. Part of Inferno and our intent with getting people out into the world and hunting and killing lots of different things is putting the best loot on rare and champion packs, and the great thing about rare and champion packs is they have random affixes. They're like a box of chocolates. Murderous, snarling, blood-soaked chocolates. You're not going up against a boss where you know "Build A" is the best way to minmax against it because it has abilities and resistances X, Y, and Z. What is the best build vs. an "Arcane Enchanted, Teleporter, Frozen, Knockback" skeleton pack? Got that figured out? Cause it's not going to be the best against the next pack you come across, and you're going to want to kill that one just as much.
You might have a specialized build that is super strong against some of these things, and not against others. Your focus is going to be on the balance between taking on all of these possibilities and surviving, and it's that balance that makes for a ton of interesting options and variance.
The one question mark for a lot of people, and maybe even us, is what stops someone from seeing a pack, backing out (or dying) and swapping out to be better equipped to handle it? We agree that shouldn't be the best way to play, but know it's something we can solve pretty easily, even if it's just making the swapping cooldown longer in later difficulties.
In any case, his point was that you could absolutely make the best build against one type of enemy, and that build could completely fail against another. It's not D2 where you pump all your points into one ability, we're going for some depth in our combat, but it's your choice of tools (and there are a lot of them) that will define your character versus another.
On March 07 2012 06:44 cLutZ wrote: I do not know that this is the perfect team, I don't have the skills or time to know that. What I certainly agree with is that the Monk is a fundamentally flawed class, much like the Ret Paladin during Vanilla and TBC WoW.
If you recall, the Ret Paladin was a joke, however it also was a rollface pubstomping machine because of Seal of Command, particularly after the introduction of Crusader Strike. In other words, it was balanced on the blade of a knife. The monk has many of the same characteristics: IMO it will either be a fairly weak or fairly OP class depending on item level and the numbers on its auras and skills at release.
The OP recognizes the ability of the Monk to be overpowered, but IMO with a couple of alterations to scaling it is just as likely to be a complete joke.
i don't see anything that indicates this, want to elaborate?
the fact that they just recently buffed monk with innate 30% dmg reduction is a good clue that they aren't unkillable as claimed in later difficulties
barb easily have the same if not better scaling abilities. I mean they have two passive that increases dmg by 30% each that practically have unlimited uptime. 60% increase on all dmg probably beats anything monk can dish out of
On March 07 2012 06:44 cLutZ wrote: I do not know that this is the perfect team, I don't have the skills or time to know that. What I certainly agree with is that the Monk is a fundamentally flawed class, much like the Ret Paladin during Vanilla and TBC WoW.
If you recall, the Ret Paladin was a joke, however it also was a rollface pubstomping machine because of Seal of Command, particularly after the introduction of Crusader Strike. In other words, it was balanced on the blade of a knife. The monk has many of the same characteristics: IMO it will either be a fairly weak or fairly OP class depending on item level and the numbers on its auras and skills at release.
The OP recognizes the ability of the Monk to be overpowered, but IMO with a couple of alterations to scaling it is just as likely to be a complete joke.
you cant compare this, wow is a game based on group play and especially vanilla wasn't balanced on a class/player level but on a group level, and compared to nowadays very badly back then^^ (for example druids got a spot in raids ONLY for innervate which they had to spec for so they where forced into that spec etc etc.)
and in wow blizzard is imo balancing weird on purpose so it keeps the player interested, one patch this class is op another patch another op class (expect warlocks lol - always op)
since d3 is somewhat single player based they need to make every class viable and dont have that many problems wow has, for example keeping 25/40 man raids balanced at the same time as pvp...
there are sooo many differences you cant compare it at all.
On March 04 2012 06:19 JingleHell wrote: Hey dak, can you take a break from the group comps, and turn your crystal ball on itemization at or near level cap? I'm most interested in crit scaling so I know how viable the increased crit damage runes will be on my DH.
Better yet, turn your crystal ball on release date. Frankly I don't care if the game is broken @ release as long as it gets good patch support. Bring it on WWMM combo ftw.
On a side note, do we have information about how monsters will take damage on the higher difficulties. In D2 there were plenty of "immune to x" mobs that would cause serious problems for some chars. Is this foursome vulnerable to anything like that seeing as their damage dealing spells will likely have half of the diversity of a regular foursome?
On March 03 2012 18:37 dacthehork wrote: It's actually pretty easy for an expert to solve a system like this and find imbalanced combinations. Also it will be fun to see when they nerf this stuff.
Go to any game forum to the archive section. Search for theorycrafting threads before release and shortly thereafter. Laugh at all the total bullcrap 'experts' were writing in them
I remember my Beta SC2 predictions
Zerg had nothing but macro and was one dimensional, Terran had by far the biggest and most variety in it's toolset and was the best race because of this and would be a pain to balance, and Protoss relied on forcefields early, so the maps would greatly influence how good they where.
I also remember predicting that Terran would have tools taken away to balance them, loe and behold reaper was utterly nerfed to uselessness and now even the ghost is turned one dimensional. It's easy to figure out how blizzard balances, they are pretty good at getting most things "seemingly" balanced but fail when thinking about toolsets and how those work.
Got a link to where you predicted all of this?
First off can I ask what you personally hope to get out of making a thread like this? The way you speak makes you come off as so assured of yourself that I have a hard time believing you are looking for feedback. Do you just want us all to awe at your 'expert' superior intellect?
What is your goal for this configuration? To not die? Is this a HC build?
If you think this configuration has any shot of being a fast and efficient killing group you are a real sweetheart
I mean do you actually think Mass Confusion and the rune from Blinding flash is going to speed up your killing efficiency at all? You have Resolve and Crippling Wave on your monks (it can't be correct to have these most likely unstackable effects on both monks) which lowers the damage they will deal to each other as well.
The entire configuration is defensive and you think it's going to be imbalanced that monsters around your level and gear quality won't be able to threaten you?
I don't understand how you could think this is ideal for anything other than staying in normal difficulty until the expansion comes out being that your only offensive skills over 4 characters are
2x Acid Cloud 2x Crippling Wave with defensive rune 2x Lashing Tail Kick with defensive rune And then... Zombie Dogs... And Fetishes.
wrong
Mantra of Conviction +24% damage taken by enemies 2x Hex - +24% damage dealt to hexed enemy Big Bad Voodoo 1-2x - +30% damage Dealt, +20% attack speed. Mass Confusion - +20% damage taken Vision Quest passive - 300% mana regen - 3x the casting of dps mana skill Blood Ritual - 15% less mana costs for even more spam of high damage mana skill Guiding Light - +16% damage dealt
266% weapon damage - spell casted 3.45x as often with +16% damage, +30% damage, +20% damage,+24 damage + 24% damage ideally, adds up.
There is no real reason to have more than 1-2 skills to dump mana into for damage on a WD, especially with vision quest, who be casting 1/3rd the normal spells through a variety of meh stuff, just cast the best one 3x as much.
Lashing Tail Kick with stun and Acid Cloud are pretty much the only spenders you need for damage, they dont have cooldowns, so there is no real reason to have two or three spenders.
Vision Quest is a broken passive, blood ritual is pretty broken too. Also this damage is transferred to the dogs, fetishes, etc too. I mean you can make small tweaks depending on the balance of the actual game but this pretty much is abusing everything broken in the game. Also the idea is inferno is ridiculously hard, being able to reliable walk through the difficulty will be very important. Having unkillable tanks for shit like duriel is also key, Basically no downtime, less risk, etc So you can quickly rush through to inferno and farm. Pure damage or "killing" time isn't as important, you only need 1 or so damage skill a player, lashing tail kick / acid cloud. The idea is simply do the most powerful things you can in any format.
I think all three of the last passives mentioned will be revised, (blood ritual, guiding light, and vision quest)
Quoted from a Blizzard employee, just as punctuation on your perm ban
Talking to Wyatt about this a little more and he brought up some good, additional points.
You will not be farming bosses. Bosses won't drop the best loot, they won't even drop really great loot. Part of Inferno and our intent with getting people out into the world and hunting and killing lots of different things is putting the best loot on rare and champion packs, and the great thing about rare and champion packs is they have random affixes. They're like a box of chocolates. Murderous, snarling, blood-soaked chocolates. You're not going up against a boss where you know "Build A" is the best way to minmax against it because it has abilities and resistances X, Y, and Z. What is the best build vs. an "Arcane Enchanted, Teleporter, Frozen, Knockback" skeleton pack? Got that figured out? Cause it's not going to be the best against the next pack you come across, and you're going to want to kill that one just as much.
You might have a specialized build that is super strong against some of these things, and not against others. Your focus is going to be on the balance between taking on all of these possibilities and surviving, and it's that balance that makes for a ton of interesting options and variance.
The one question mark for a lot of people, and maybe even us, is what stops someone from seeing a pack, backing out (or dying) and swapping out to be better equipped to handle it? We agree that shouldn't be the best way to play, but know it's something we can solve pretty easily, even if it's just making the swapping cooldown longer in later difficulties.
In any case, his point was that you could absolutely make the best build against one type of enemy, and that build could completely fail against another. It's not D2 where you pump all your points into one ability, we're going for some depth in our combat, but it's your choice of tools (and there are a lot of them) that will define your character versus another.
While dac might have gone overboard with the theorycrafting, I don't believe for a second that Blizzard will solve the min/max issues. They've been making that claim forever in WoW and they've never even gotten close to it. There will be a most efficient build for every class that covers the most number of bases, and it'll become a cookie cutter for everyone else.
On March 07 2012 06:44 cLutZ wrote: I do not know that this is the perfect team, I don't have the skills or time to know that. What I certainly agree with is that the Monk is a fundamentally flawed class, much like the Ret Paladin during Vanilla and TBC WoW.
If you recall, the Ret Paladin was a joke, however it also was a rollface pubstomping machine because of Seal of Command, particularly after the introduction of Crusader Strike. In other words, it was balanced on the blade of a knife. The monk has many of the same characteristics: IMO it will either be a fairly weak or fairly OP class depending on item level and the numbers on its auras and skills at release.
The OP recognizes the ability of the Monk to be overpowered, but IMO with a couple of alterations to scaling it is just as likely to be a complete joke.
you cant compare this, wow is a game based on group play and especially vanilla wasn't balanced on a class/player level but on a group level, and compared to nowadays very badly back then^^ (for example druids got a spot in raids ONLY for innervate which they had to spec for so they where forced into that spec etc etc.)
and in wow blizzard is imo balancing weird on purpose so it keeps the player interested, one patch this class is op another patch another op class (expect warlocks lol - always op)
Why would the situation be different? This is exactly how balancing in D2 worked.
While dac might have gone overboard with the theorycrafting, I don't believe for a second that Blizzard will solve the min/max issues. They've been making that claim forever in WoW and they've never even gotten close to it. There will be a most efficient build for every class that covers the most number of bases, and it'll become a cookie cutter for everyone else.
I dont think it is a big problem if there are cookie cutter builds. In WoW you had to spec in a certain way to get into raids, But this isnt WoW. You wont need every char minmaxed or specific group setups or even skype to beat the content.
While dac might have gone overboard with the theorycrafting, I don't believe for a second that Blizzard will solve the min/max issues. They've been making that claim forever in WoW and they've never even gotten close to it. There will be a most efficient build for every class that covers the most number of bases, and it'll become a cookie cutter for everyone else.
I dont think it is a big problem if there are cookie cutter builds. In WoW you had to spec in a certain way to get into raids, But this isnt WoW. You wont need every char minmaxed or specific group setups or even skype to beat the content.
How, exactly, do you know that for sure? This is as much theorycrafting as the OP was. We haven't done the hardest content yet, as a group or otherwise.
Bear in mind, you don't technically NEED vent or anything else to beat content in WoW, people use it to make the process easier. If everyone knew what they were doing to begin with, voice would be completely unnecesary. Until it comes out, we can't know how hard it will or won't be, and what will or won't be the best way to do stuff.
On March 07 2012 06:44 cLutZ wrote: I do not know that this is the perfect team, I don't have the skills or time to know that. What I certainly agree with is that the Monk is a fundamentally flawed class, much like the Ret Paladin during Vanilla and TBC WoW.
If you recall, the Ret Paladin was a joke, however it also was a rollface pubstomping machine because of Seal of Command, particularly after the introduction of Crusader Strike. In other words, it was balanced on the blade of a knife. The monk has many of the same characteristics: IMO it will either be a fairly weak or fairly OP class depending on item level and the numbers on its auras and skills at release.
The OP recognizes the ability of the Monk to be overpowered, but IMO with a couple of alterations to scaling it is just as likely to be a complete joke.
you cant compare this, wow is a game based on group play and especially vanilla wasn't balanced on a class/player level but on a group level, and compared to nowadays very badly back then^^ (for example druids got a spot in raids ONLY for innervate which they had to spec for so they where forced into that spec etc etc.)
and in wow blizzard is imo balancing weird on purpose so it keeps the player interested, one patch this class is op another patch another op class (expect warlocks lol - always op)
since d3 is somewhat single player based they need to make every class viable and dont have that many problems wow has, for example keeping 25/40 man raids balanced at the same time as pvp...
there are sooo many differences you cant compare it at all.
D2 was fundamentally imbalanced, particularly when you compared both PvP and PvM so thats really not a defense. The Monk is the only character with a significant healing spell. If healing spells are important, the Monk has just become essential to every team, if they are not, one of the Monk's defining features is pretty meaningless. Monk auras also seem to be stronger than most of the other characters' groupwide buffs. Basically, the Monk appears to be a very good TEAM player, but since D3 is going to be balanced around soloing (to an extent), if the Monk is on par with other characters solo, it will be ridiculous in teams. Or it could be balanced in teams, weak solo etc.
There are always balance issues at a game's launch, but IMO the monk is going to confound Blizzard years after release.
While dac might have gone overboard with the theorycrafting, I don't believe for a second that Blizzard will solve the min/max issues. They've been making that claim forever in WoW and they've never even gotten close to it. There will be a most efficient build for every class that covers the most number of bases, and it'll become a cookie cutter for everyone else.
I dont think it is a big problem if there are cookie cutter builds. In WoW you had to spec in a certain way to get into raids, But this isnt WoW. You wont need every char minmaxed or specific group setups or even skype to beat the content.
/facepalm
This doesn't make sense. You can spec a melle sorc in D2 and beat the game, that doesn't mean its a good build, or a smart build. You wont "need" a good build and coordination to beat content, but you will if you are underleveled, or undergeared. You are essentially arguing that the Hammerdin is not overpowered because its not essential for farming. Sure, you dont HAVE to take battle orders on a Barb, but if you don't you are an idiot.
*edit*
On March 19 2012 04:38 Wildmoon wrote: Who care? This is not WoW. People will play whatever class they wantas long as it's viable.
With good team work on kiting I would say a mix of 4 demonhunters and wizards with that much damage/slows/knockbacks/escapes nothing should ever touch you
This is my version of IDEAL PARTY and actually much better than orginal. I stole few ideas with the orginal. 2x Witch Doctor 1x Demon hunter 1x Wizard
Party Buffs skills: Hex 24% dmg Massconfusion 20% dmg Bad medicine 20% dmg is reduced Frost nova 15% dmg Slowtime 15% ias Marked as death 15% dmg Caltrops 10% crit + 25% dmg is reduced Sentry 20% dmg reduced
The party works as like huge protoss death ball, sticks together. Total of 65% damage reduced to party with mass confusion, buffs and area effect spells. Better things than in orginal in my opinium are. + Damage and increased attack speed buffs create better synergy than just damage buffs. + Cold wizard can controll area with distance, slowing, instead melee monk controlling close range with stun. + Damage output going to be bigger, faster, more organized. + Cold/physical/poison is better than poison/physical when we go inferno. - Relay only wd +5% healing, worse healing overall.
This doesn't make sense. You can spec a melle sorc in D2 and beat the game, that doesn't mean its a good build, or a smart build. You wont "need" a good build and coordination to beat content, but you will if you are underleveled, or undergeared. You are essentially arguing that the Hammerdin is not overpowered because its not essential for farming. Sure, you dont HAVE to take battle orders on a Barb, but if you don't you are an idiot.
The big difference is that as a melee sorc you wouldnt get invited to raids and so are unable to see the content. A problem you just dont have in diablo. The melee sorc player doesnt care if somebody else can kill things 20% faster than him as long as the build he is using is viable too. If some builds are way way stronger than others they obv will get nerfed. But there isnt the need to balance as good as in WoW.
Saying the game can't be "solved" isn't true...there will always be builds that streamroll content at some point. Blizzard wont need to rebalance skills after release if people couldn't find OP builds and stuff. I'm sure they dont want another hammerdin for example.
This doesn't make sense. You can spec a melle sorc in D2 and beat the game, that doesn't mean its a good build, or a smart build. You wont "need" a good build and coordination to beat content, but you will if you are underleveled, or undergeared. You are essentially arguing that the Hammerdin is not overpowered because its not essential for farming. Sure, you dont HAVE to take battle orders on a Barb, but if you don't you are an idiot.
The big difference is that as a melee sorc you wouldnt get invited to raids and so are unable to see the content. A problem you just dont have in diablo. The melee sorc player doesnt care if somebody else can kill things 20% faster than him as long as the build he is using is viable too. If some builds are way way stronger than others they obv will get nerfed. But there isnt the need to balance as good as in WoW.
That is just laziness. The game should be balanced. Why would you argue in favor of poor balancing? Moreover, the melle sorc differential is not 20%, it is more like 200%. In WoW you need to gear and spec properly to get invited to raids because people want to progress optimally, because people can control who raids with them.
You can bet that if there are very difficult encounters in "Inferno" that underperforming classes and specs wont be invited.
No worries, though: it was only a temp ban, so he'll soon return to enlighten us on D3 strategy!
@sizablelight -- I think we'll have to wait and see about the difficulty before we can determine if stacking party-wide defensive skills and damage mitigation gear will be worthwhile or not. In D2, for example, it was worthless unless you were playing hardcore: the occasional death would slow down your farming, but not nearly as much as cutting your DPS for survivability would. In hardcore, of course, everything changes, because players need to make enormous DPS sacrifices to cover those rare fringe cases.
That is just laziness. The game should be balanced. Why would you argue in favor of poor balancing? Moreover, the melle sorc differential is not 20%, it is more like 200%. In WoW you need to gear and spec properly to get invited to raids because people want to progress optimally, because people can control who raids with them.
You can bet that if there are very difficult encounters in "Inferno" that underperforming classes and specs wont be invited.
I think its too hard to balance all specs and all classes so they are around 5-10% difference. Of course sth like the hammerdin or sorc at the beginning of LoD will be balanced.but there is no way to get everything balanced. In WoW you could run Testruns on Patchwork for example and have a good estimation for all raidbosses. But how could you do that in diablo ? There will always be areas where some classes are better than others.
Lets take Diablo 2. So whats the benchmark to balance around ? Who clears CS the fastest ? Who can kill the waves of Baal the fastest ? Who gets through the game in general the fastest ? Hammerdins were shit in these wormholes in act 2 for example. What if a area like that has the highest density of monsters in the game and is therefore the best place to farm ? Will they balance around just who clears that the fastest ?
I wish they would make this a rly hard game, but sadly the casuals and this is a game for casuals dont like that. Blizzard said Sunwell was the badest raid they ever did. Because only dunno like 90% of the whole population ever saw anything besides the first trash mobs. Infact it was one of the best. But the direction Blizzard took with WoW and the genre of Diablo tell me that there will be nothing in this game that will be rly hard.
Average Joe and his gf want to play together with nobody else and they want to beat the game like that. And they dont wanna be told what class to roll. And around that Diablo will be balanced.
As I said, I hope Im wrong but this is my estimation.
That is just laziness. The game should be balanced. Why would you argue in favor of poor balancing? Moreover, the melle sorc differential is not 20%, it is more like 200%. In WoW you need to gear and spec properly to get invited to raids because people want to progress optimally, because people can control who raids with them.
You can bet that if there are very difficult encounters in "Inferno" that underperforming classes and specs wont be invited.
I think its too hard to balance all specs and all classes so they are around 5-10% difference. Of course sth like the hammerdin or sorc at the beginning of LoD will be balanced.but there is no way to get everything balanced. In WoW you could run Testruns on Patchwork for example and have a good estimation for all raidbosses. But how could you do that in diablo ? There will always be areas where some classes are better than others.
Lets take Diablo 2. So whats the benchmark to balance around ? Who clears CS the fastest ? Who can kill the waves of Baal the fastest ? Who gets through the game in general the fastest ? Hammerdins were shit in these wormholes in act 2 for example. What if a area like that has the highest density of monsters in the game and is therefore the best place to farm ? Will they balance around just who clears that the fastest ?
I wish they would make this a rly hard game, but sadly the casuals and this is a game for casuals dont like that. Blizzard said Sunwell was the badest raid they ever did. Because only dunno like 90% of the whole population ever saw anything besides the first trash mobs. Infact it was one of the best. But the direction Blizzard took with WoW and the genre of Diablo tell me that there will be nothing in this game that will be rly hard.
Average Joe and his gf want to play together with nobody else and they want to beat the game like that. And they dont wanna be told what class to roll. And around that Diablo will be balanced.
As I said, I hope Im wrong but this is my estimation.
Balancing all the specs for all the classes is probably impossible because some specs are supposed to suck. You pointed out a good question: What do you balanced based on?
I think that is Blizzard's biggest design challenge with the Monk. It is the only character with a reliable heal (Mantra and BOH), however healing could be more or less worthless depending on orb spawns etc. I personally think that Blizzard is going to overrate the usefulness of healing for the Monk and give him a weak overall damage-set, meaning the monk will be support-ish.
Going back to your D2 question of how we should evaluate a class/spec. A few factors: 1. Speed of clearing the main leveling area (currently Throne). 2. Speed of rushing characters through hell. 3. Both 1 and 2 when undergeared. 4. Ability to clear Ubers. 5. Survivability.
Paladins are OP in D2, not simply because they throw super powerful hammers, but because they can have super spellcaster power (even the Maggot Lair, actually not on some A3 animals) while using Holy Shield which makes even a glass cannon into a tank. Smite is the best boss-killing move in the game, auras are incredibly powerful partywide buffs. All this can be done as a paladin without good gear, and its ridiculous with good gear (a summon necro is fine with no gear but doesn't scale nearly as well, and you cant even clear hell with a sorc in a reasonable time without great gear). Its no one factor that makes the current paladin great, it is a multitude of things. I don't anticipate such blatant domination in D3, but I do anticipate that one or more class(es) will be similar to the Druid: Serviceable, but not ideal.
PVP vs. PVM is far to complex to analyze without having the finished product, so I won't.
On March 19 2012 09:13 Kenpark wrote: I wish they would make this a rly hard game, but sadly the casuals and this is a game for casuals dont like that. Blizzard said Sunwell was the badest raid they ever did. Because only dunno like 90% of the whole population ever saw anything besides the first trash mobs. Infact it was one of the best. But the direction Blizzard took with WoW and the genre of Diablo tell me that there will be nothing in this game that will be rly hard.
Average Joe and his gf want to play together with nobody else and they want to beat the game like that. And they dont wanna be told what class to roll. And around that Diablo will be balanced.
As I said, I hope Im wrong but this is my estimation.
Diablo and WoW have a very important difference when talking about casuals. In WoW you have to get to max level and do some dungeons and raids in order to experience all of the content. With Diablo you really just have to get through the game on normal. And, in fact, this is what most casual players are going to do. They will play through the game on normal and perhaps follow up on nightmare. I'd say there is a better chance of a casual player playing through normal with every character than for them to get through inferno. Average Joe and his gf are going to beat the game on normal difficulty. This he is going to quit and his gf will keep playing until halfway through nightmare before she gets bored and they both move on to something else.
The reality is that hell and inferno levels aren't made for casual players and this is where Blizzard can and will make the game difficult. Will it be hard enough for you? We won't know until it's released. But what we do know is that the Diablo difficultly levels present a unique situation where they can allow casual players to see all available content while still giving hard core (not "hardcore" necessarily) players a challenge.
Diablo and WoW have a very important difference when talking about casuals. In WoW you have to get to max level and do some dungeons and raids in order to experience all of the content. With Diablo you really just have to get through the game on normal. And, in fact, this is what most casual players are going to do. They will play through the game on normal and perhaps follow up on nightmare. I'd say there is a better chance of a casual player playing through normal with every character than for them to get through inferno. Average Joe and his gf are going to beat the game on normal difficulty. This he is going to quit and his gf will keep playing until halfway through nightmare before she gets bored and they both move on to something else.
You are around level 30 when you finish normal. Nightmare and Hell gets you to 60. I think that almost all the player want to level to 60 esp all the people who played WoW. So no they cant make that hard. You will prob get some title like in diablo 2 and that will make even the casuals try to get through inferno too in my opinion.
And how hard can you make content rly that is soloable for a group of players ?
I feel bad rading this, when i know exactly nothing about the game builds at this moment. I will just buy the game and figure out everything from scratch, while these overpowered people will be running around. Holy shit so much fun coming :DD
On March 20 2012 13:36 pallad wrote: One men with ONLY beta info vs blizzard with full game acces testers , who gonna win this battle ?
Certainly not blizzard. They lose every time. World First Muru was done by melle stacking and the raid getting incredibly lucky (like 4 or 5 standard deviations above normal rates for that raid comp) based on the inherent randomness of crits. Or what about Blizzard's total fail in preventing duping and hacking in D2 to this day? Or the real fact that Blizzard, while making incredibly entertaining games, has come out with a single patch in a single game (SC:BW 1.16) that has been balanced for over 6 months.
EPT
![[image loading]](http://images.ctvdigital.com/images/pub2upload/2/2011_12_7/canadasgreatestknowitall_arthead.jpg)
.
