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On August 29 2013 06:55 dmfg wrote:Show nested quote +On August 29 2013 00:50 crms wrote:
i like a lot of these suggestions but itemization and character development are by far the most important issues. paragon system 2.0 is a nice baby step but the items and character interaction needs an overhaul.
while the writing is harsh and I wish better written and a bit more comprehensive, this 'info-graph' highlights the major issue with D2 vs D3 loot itemization. While doing my re-play of Diablo 2 this week, I've run Nightmare Meph about 10-15 times and found ~12 uniques (legendaries). Including some nice niche uniques that are great for certain builds on other classes. Stuff like that just doesn't happen in D3. It won't happen because you'll never spend 15-20m doing quick boss runs to obtain ~12 legendaries, and the legendaries you would find in ACT3NM wouldn't be worth IDing. When characters have no depth of customization, the items are boring and undesirable.
I think there are 2 separate issues that this infographic is trying to pass off as one. The stat allocation issue is completely separate to the diversity of gear issue. If you couldn't allocate stats in D2, the exact same gear would still be desirable to the exact same builds (the only difference being the number of str/dex charms required to equip it). Character stat allocation did absolutely nothing for gear diversity; having unusual and gamechanging affixes is what did it. As for what makes gear "interesting", every single item from D2 that I would call "interesting" has one thing in common: they grant unique spells that are normally locked to one class. Whether that be Enigma, Andy's visage, Insight, Passion, Chaos, Atma's scarab, Demon Limb, Wolfhowl, etc. Yes, there are other powerful items like BotD, but there is nothing interesting about BotD other than it being really really powerful. These items were interesting because they let you make (effectively) cross-class hybrids. They did nothing for itemisation - maybe you aimed for a different IAS breakpoint but that was really it. Some of them changed nothing at all about how you build or played your char (2x CTA in alt weapons anyone?). I don't think these are an answer to "the loot problem" - you get a few interesting items, but you won't really add any depth to gearing. And I think that is my problem with analyses like the one in that image. D2 had a lot of pieces of gear which were interesting in isolation (all of them added after LoD, and almost all of those added in 1.10 or beyond when LoD had already been out for years). But they didn't make building a gear set interesting, because by and large it wasn't. What it came down to was meeting some caps (resist all and IAS, and IAS was almost entirely based on weapon IAS so the rest of your gear hardly mattered) and calling it a day. Yes you could stack different things, like going for pure weapon speed (enchantress, firebear, tesladin), stacking CB, stacking DS, whatever. But none of those things really changed anything about how you played the char, or how combat felt. They were just generic DPS increasing affixes that happened to use different mechanics. They were (to use the phrase in the infographic) toast. I think Blizz needs to be very careful, because if they give in and just give D2 patch 1.10-style loot in D3, we might have fun initially until the clear cookie cutter builds come out, and then we will be in the exact same situation as we are now, where after you decide you are going Monk + claw that lets you use whirlwind, the gearing is just as uninteresting as it is today (and as it was in D2).
You are so backwards that I'm not sure any further explanation would even help, but let's just bang my head against a wall anyway...
You do get that in D2, that allocated stats points and gear had a pretty big determination on the effectiveness of your character based on how you set it up (what main skills you wanted to use). Therefore, a melee sorc would want high dex for that shield and just enough mana to keep their enchant skill rolling. You absolutely CANNOT do this type of shenanigans in D3. If you're a barbarian, your damage in D3 is absolutely tied to strength and the dps in your weapon slot. That's it. Who am I kidding? It's really just tied to whatever is in your weapon slot.
On top of this, you're forgetting the other widely used and fairly awesome stuff like straight up % damage reduction, life steal and mana steal before they nerfed it (was based on percentages before nerf iirc). There was also shit, like deadly wounds, open wounds, +% elemental damage, chance on striking/hit to do randomness, etc. Yea, there were also really cool runewords that let you do some cool crap, but you didn't have to use them. Some people actually tried fun stuff for, you know... fun. Hell, some of the runes were just useful as runes. The best part about all of that is that, you weren't locked into looking for the same fucking stats on every piece of loot that dropped. Right, now if it doesn't have your main stat (strength/dexterity/intellect), vitality and maybe 1 or 2 minor improvements in D3 (crit chance, crit damage %), then you don't give a flying fuck. Whereas in D2, you could do max block sorceress with a shield or try going all out into energy shield into whatever else. Synergies in skills made it even more interesting.
There were some builds out there that were popular in D2. No one can deny that, but they were not the only ways to be successful (killing hell mode). How you can sit there and say that having an assassin claw that let's you whirlwind is just as "uninteresting" as it is today? That, sir/madam, is mindblowing and greatly saddening. To get to my point, it has been noted several times over how few skill-rune combos are used in entire population subsets (barbarians/witch doctors/etc) in numerous places (chat with the devs topics while they lasted, blue remarks on blizzard forums, several polls on diablo.incgamers.com). The level of customization a player can hope to achieve in this game is saddening. Plain and simple. I really hope the expansion fixes these problem to a great degree, but I'm not holding my breath either. [And no, I'm not buying the expansion unless there's a worldwide orgasm on release day based on how awesome it is]
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A lot of what you said was mainly because of how powerful items were in D2. You could literally have any spec out there and still kill anything.
Not that it would be bad but skill specializations hardly had any meaning outside PvP.
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I'll stick to Path of Exile.
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On September 01 2013 15:28 chaos021 wrote:Show nested quote +On August 29 2013 06:55 dmfg wrote:On August 29 2013 00:50 crms wrote:
i like a lot of these suggestions but itemization and character development are by far the most important issues. paragon system 2.0 is a nice baby step but the items and character interaction needs an overhaul.
while the writing is harsh and I wish better written and a bit more comprehensive, this 'info-graph' highlights the major issue with D2 vs D3 loot itemization. While doing my re-play of Diablo 2 this week, I've run Nightmare Meph about 10-15 times and found ~12 uniques (legendaries). Including some nice niche uniques that are great for certain builds on other classes. Stuff like that just doesn't happen in D3. It won't happen because you'll never spend 15-20m doing quick boss runs to obtain ~12 legendaries, and the legendaries you would find in ACT3NM wouldn't be worth IDing. When characters have no depth of customization, the items are boring and undesirable.
I think there are 2 separate issues that this infographic is trying to pass off as one. The stat allocation issue is completely separate to the diversity of gear issue. If you couldn't allocate stats in D2, the exact same gear would still be desirable to the exact same builds (the only difference being the number of str/dex charms required to equip it). Character stat allocation did absolutely nothing for gear diversity; having unusual and gamechanging affixes is what did it. As for what makes gear "interesting", every single item from D2 that I would call "interesting" has one thing in common: they grant unique spells that are normally locked to one class. Whether that be Enigma, Andy's visage, Insight, Passion, Chaos, Atma's scarab, Demon Limb, Wolfhowl, etc. Yes, there are other powerful items like BotD, but there is nothing interesting about BotD other than it being really really powerful. These items were interesting because they let you make (effectively) cross-class hybrids. They did nothing for itemisation - maybe you aimed for a different IAS breakpoint but that was really it. Some of them changed nothing at all about how you build or played your char (2x CTA in alt weapons anyone?). I don't think these are an answer to "the loot problem" - you get a few interesting items, but you won't really add any depth to gearing. And I think that is my problem with analyses like the one in that image. D2 had a lot of pieces of gear which were interesting in isolation (all of them added after LoD, and almost all of those added in 1.10 or beyond when LoD had already been out for years). But they didn't make building a gear set interesting, because by and large it wasn't. What it came down to was meeting some caps (resist all and IAS, and IAS was almost entirely based on weapon IAS so the rest of your gear hardly mattered) and calling it a day. Yes you could stack different things, like going for pure weapon speed (enchantress, firebear, tesladin), stacking CB, stacking DS, whatever. But none of those things really changed anything about how you played the char, or how combat felt. They were just generic DPS increasing affixes that happened to use different mechanics. They were (to use the phrase in the infographic) toast. I think Blizz needs to be very careful, because if they give in and just give D2 patch 1.10-style loot in D3, we might have fun initially until the clear cookie cutter builds come out, and then we will be in the exact same situation as we are now, where after you decide you are going Monk + claw that lets you use whirlwind, the gearing is just as uninteresting as it is today (and as it was in D2). You are so backwards that I'm not sure any further explanation would even help, but let's just bang my head against a wall anyway... You do get that in D2, that allocated stats points and gear had a pretty big determination on the effectiveness of your character based on how you set it up (what main skills you wanted to use). Therefore, a melee sorc would want high dex for that shield and just enough mana to keep their enchant skill rolling. You absolutely CANNOT do this type of shenanigans in D3. If you're a barbarian, your damage in D3 is absolutely tied to strength and the dps in your weapon slot. That's it. Who am I kidding? It's really just tied to whatever is in your weapon slot.
If you were a sorc, you either had 156 str and 222 dex for 75% block with SS, or you put every single point into vit and didn't care about block. Didn't matter if you were melee or not. Turns out you can do these shenanigans in D3 - if you don't care about block, you can use an orb instead of a shield and get more DPS. The difference is you do it with gear instead of clicking on a menu.
On top of this, you're forgetting the other widely used and fairly awesome stuff like straight up % damage reduction, life steal and mana steal before they nerfed it (was based on percentages before nerf iirc).
These are still in D3 except for mana steal, which has been replaced by spirit/hatred/mana regen, AP on crit, fury on crit.
There was also shit, like deadly wounds, open wounds, +% elemental damage, chance on striking/hit to do randomness, etc.
There was no +% elemental damage (you might be thinking of -enemy elemental resists?). OW was only ever useful for the PMH aspect. All the others could just as easily have been replaced with a single "increases damage by X%" mod since they provided a generic DPS increase in a way that did not interact with skills or other affixes on gear.
There were lots of different affixes that increased your DPS, but you didn't really care which one you got. The only interesting one was CB, and it was so scarce it just came down to "get as much as possible".
When LoD came out (1.07 I think?) random procs were worthless (although very pretty). Remember Guardian Naga, how awesome that poison nova was? No? Just like D3 legendary procs on launch, then. The only useful proc I can think of on LoD launch was Lava Gout, and even that was only because of Enchant's huge +% AP and not because of the fire damage. I'm sure even D3 has one or two procs that you'd consider useful though.
Yea, there were also really cool runewords that let you do some cool crap, but you didn't have to use them. Some people actually tried fun stuff for, you know... fun. Hell, some of the runes were just useful as runes. The best part about all of that is that, you weren't locked into looking for the same fucking stats on every piece of loot that dropped. Right, now if it doesn't have your main stat (strength/dexterity/intellect), vitality and maybe 1 or 2 minor improvements in D3 (crit chance, crit damage %), then you don't give a flying fuck. Whereas in D2, you could do max block sorceress with a shield or try going all out into energy shield into whatever else. Synergies in skills made it even more interesting.
Not sure what point you are making here. You've gone from complaining about gearing in D3, to talking about skill choices in D2, which aren't really things you can compare.
Energy shield is another example of something in D2 that looked like it had depth, but didn't really. You ended up with a % conversion of life to mana that means that there is one, single optimal ratio of life:mana and that was it. Maybe the serious duellers have some magic point allocation in TK that makes good things happen, but I don't know of any.
There were some builds out there that were popular in D2. No one can deny that, but they were not the only ways to be successful (killing hell mode). How you can sit there and say that having an assassin claw that let's you whirlwind is just as "uninteresting" as it is today? That, sir/madam, is mindblowing and greatly saddening.
I think you misunderstood me. Using WW as an assassin is great and fun. I said in the bit you quoted that these unique skill runeword items are interesting. However, it doesn't make gearing interesting. A WW assassin wants exactly the same gear as a dragon tail assassin, wants exactly the same gear as every other melee out there.
And that's why I think this is a big deal - not because I want to rip on D2, but because I don't want reaper of souls to blindly copy these popular elements of D2, since if they do that I think they'll end up with a pretty shallow game (again).
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Double post, please remove
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On September 01 2013 20:54 dmfg wrote:Show nested quote +On September 01 2013 15:28 chaos021 wrote:On August 29 2013 06:55 dmfg wrote:On August 29 2013 00:50 crms wrote:
i like a lot of these suggestions but itemization and character development are by far the most important issues. paragon system 2.0 is a nice baby step but the items and character interaction needs an overhaul.
while the writing is harsh and I wish better written and a bit more comprehensive, this 'info-graph' highlights the major issue with D2 vs D3 loot itemization. While doing my re-play of Diablo 2 this week, I've run Nightmare Meph about 10-15 times and found ~12 uniques (legendaries). Including some nice niche uniques that are great for certain builds on other classes. Stuff like that just doesn't happen in D3. It won't happen because you'll never spend 15-20m doing quick boss runs to obtain ~12 legendaries, and the legendaries you would find in ACT3NM wouldn't be worth IDing. When characters have no depth of customization, the items are boring and undesirable.
I think there are 2 separate issues that this infographic is trying to pass off as one. The stat allocation issue is completely separate to the diversity of gear issue. If you couldn't allocate stats in D2, the exact same gear would still be desirable to the exact same builds (the only difference being the number of str/dex charms required to equip it). Character stat allocation did absolutely nothing for gear diversity; having unusual and gamechanging affixes is what did it. As for what makes gear "interesting", every single item from D2 that I would call "interesting" has one thing in common: they grant unique spells that are normally locked to one class. Whether that be Enigma, Andy's visage, Insight, Passion, Chaos, Atma's scarab, Demon Limb, Wolfhowl, etc. Yes, there are other powerful items like BotD, but there is nothing interesting about BotD other than it being really really powerful. These items were interesting because they let you make (effectively) cross-class hybrids. They did nothing for itemisation - maybe you aimed for a different IAS breakpoint but that was really it. Some of them changed nothing at all about how you build or played your char (2x CTA in alt weapons anyone?). I don't think these are an answer to "the loot problem" - you get a few interesting items, but you won't really add any depth to gearing. And I think that is my problem with analyses like the one in that image. D2 had a lot of pieces of gear which were interesting in isolation (all of them added after LoD, and almost all of those added in 1.10 or beyond when LoD had already been out for years). But they didn't make building a gear set interesting, because by and large it wasn't. What it came down to was meeting some caps (resist all and IAS, and IAS was almost entirely based on weapon IAS so the rest of your gear hardly mattered) and calling it a day. Yes you could stack different things, like going for pure weapon speed (enchantress, firebear, tesladin), stacking CB, stacking DS, whatever. But none of those things really changed anything about how you played the char, or how combat felt. They were just generic DPS increasing affixes that happened to use different mechanics. They were (to use the phrase in the infographic) toast. I think Blizz needs to be very careful, because if they give in and just give D2 patch 1.10-style loot in D3, we might have fun initially until the clear cookie cutter builds come out, and then we will be in the exact same situation as we are now, where after you decide you are going Monk + claw that lets you use whirlwind, the gearing is just as uninteresting as it is today (and as it was in D2). You are so backwards that I'm not sure any further explanation would even help, but let's just bang my head against a wall anyway... You do get that in D2, that allocated stats points and gear had a pretty big determination on the effectiveness of your character based on how you set it up (what main skills you wanted to use). Therefore, a melee sorc would want high dex for that shield and just enough mana to keep their enchant skill rolling. You absolutely CANNOT do this type of shenanigans in D3. If you're a barbarian, your damage in D3 is absolutely tied to strength and the dps in your weapon slot. That's it. Who am I kidding? It's really just tied to whatever is in your weapon slot. If you were a sorc, you either had 156 str and 222 dex for 75% block with SS, or you put every single point into vit and didn't care about block. Didn't matter if you were melee or not. Turns out you can do these shenanigans in D3 - if you don't care about block, you can use an orb instead of a shield and get more DPS. The difference is you do it with gear instead of clicking on a menu. Show nested quote +
On top of this, you're forgetting the other widely used and fairly awesome stuff like straight up % damage reduction, life steal and mana steal before they nerfed it (was based on percentages before nerf iirc).
These are still in D3 except for mana steal, which has been replaced by spirit/hatred/mana regen, AP on crit, fury on crit. Show nested quote +
There was also shit, like deadly wounds, open wounds, +% elemental damage, chance on striking/hit to do randomness, etc.
There was no +% elemental damage (you might be thinking of -enemy elemental resists?). OW was only ever useful for the PMH aspect. All the others could just as easily have been replaced with a single "increases damage by X%" mod since they provided a generic DPS increase in a way that did not interact with skills or other affixes on gear. There were lots of different affixes that increased your DPS, but you didn't really care which one you got. The only interesting one was CB, and it was so scarce it just came down to "get as much as possible". When LoD came out (1.07 I think?) random procs were worthless (although very pretty). Remember Guardian Naga, how awesome that poison nova was? No? Just like D3 legendary procs on launch, then. The only useful proc I can think of on LoD launch was Lava Gout, and even that was only because of Enchant's huge +% AP and not because of the fire damage. I'm sure even D3 has one or two procs that you'd consider useful though. Show nested quote +
Yea, there were also really cool runewords that let you do some cool crap, but you didn't have to use them. Some people actually tried fun stuff for, you know... fun. Hell, some of the runes were just useful as runes. The best part about all of that is that, you weren't locked into looking for the same fucking stats on every piece of loot that dropped. Right, now if it doesn't have your main stat (strength/dexterity/intellect), vitality and maybe 1 or 2 minor improvements in D3 (crit chance, crit damage %), then you don't give a flying fuck. Whereas in D2, you could do max block sorceress with a shield or try going all out into energy shield into whatever else. Synergies in skills made it even more interesting.
Not sure what point you are making here. You've gone from complaining about gearing in D3, to talking about skill choices in D2, which aren't really things you can compare. Energy shield is another example of something in D2 that looked like it had depth, but didn't really. You ended up with a % conversion of life to mana that means that there is one, single optimal ratio of life:mana and that was it. Maybe the serious duellers have some magic point allocation in TK that makes good things happen, but I don't know of any. Show nested quote +There were some builds out there that were popular in D2. No one can deny that, but they were not the only ways to be successful (killing hell mode). How you can sit there and say that having an assassin claw that let's you whirlwind is just as "uninteresting" as it is today? That, sir/madam, is mindblowing and greatly saddening. I think you misunderstood me. Using WW as an assassin is great and fun. I said in the bit you quoted that these unique skill runeword items are interesting. However, it doesn't make gearing interesting. A WW assassin wants exactly the same gear as a dragon tail assassin, wants exactly the same gear as every other melee out there. And that's why I think this is a big deal - not because I want to rip on D2, but because I don't want reaper of souls to blindly copy these popular elements of D2, since if they do that I think they'll end up with a pretty shallow game (again).
Meh. Itboils down to the unique vs. rare paradigm.
Or getting endgame items in nm vs. not even in hell. The current system is frustrating to have to look for new items for nearly every slot at all times. Sometimes its fine, like if it was weapons only, but fir every slot is tiring.
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On September 01 2013 20:54 dmfg wrote:
There was no +% elemental damage (you might be thinking of -enemy elemental resists?).
Sure there was; eschuta's, death's fathom, griffon's eye etc.
OW was only ever useful for the PMH aspect.
Except OW and venom are how WW assassins actually did damage in pvp.
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On September 01 2013 20:17 mbsupermario wrote:
I'll stick to Path of Exile.
So would I, if the characters would be ANY exciting...
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Love the description of that " Pride of Cassius " Belt.
It will be one of the best barb belts, this Josh guy seems like he knows his buisness...
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On September 02 2013 03:44 cLutZ wrote:Show nested quote +On September 01 2013 20:54 dmfg wrote:On September 01 2013 15:28 chaos021 wrote:On August 29 2013 06:55 dmfg wrote:On August 29 2013 00:50 crms wrote:
i like a lot of these suggestions but itemization and character development are by far the most important issues. paragon system 2.0 is a nice baby step but the items and character interaction needs an overhaul.
while the writing is harsh and I wish better written and a bit more comprehensive, this 'info-graph' highlights the major issue with D2 vs D3 loot itemization. While doing my re-play of Diablo 2 this week, I've run Nightmare Meph about 10-15 times and found ~12 uniques (legendaries). Including some nice niche uniques that are great for certain builds on other classes. Stuff like that just doesn't happen in D3. It won't happen because you'll never spend 15-20m doing quick boss runs to obtain ~12 legendaries, and the legendaries you would find in ACT3NM wouldn't be worth IDing. When characters have no depth of customization, the items are boring and undesirable.
I think there are 2 separate issues that this infographic is trying to pass off as one. The stat allocation issue is completely separate to the diversity of gear issue. If you couldn't allocate stats in D2, the exact same gear would still be desirable to the exact same builds (the only difference being the number of str/dex charms required to equip it). Character stat allocation did absolutely nothing for gear diversity; having unusual and gamechanging affixes is what did it. As for what makes gear "interesting", every single item from D2 that I would call "interesting" has one thing in common: they grant unique spells that are normally locked to one class. Whether that be Enigma, Andy's visage, Insight, Passion, Chaos, Atma's scarab, Demon Limb, Wolfhowl, etc. Yes, there are other powerful items like BotD, but there is nothing interesting about BotD other than it being really really powerful. These items were interesting because they let you make (effectively) cross-class hybrids. They did nothing for itemisation - maybe you aimed for a different IAS breakpoint but that was really it. Some of them changed nothing at all about how you build or played your char (2x CTA in alt weapons anyone?). I don't think these are an answer to "the loot problem" - you get a few interesting items, but you won't really add any depth to gearing. And I think that is my problem with analyses like the one in that image. D2 had a lot of pieces of gear which were interesting in isolation (all of them added after LoD, and almost all of those added in 1.10 or beyond when LoD had already been out for years). But they didn't make building a gear set interesting, because by and large it wasn't. What it came down to was meeting some caps (resist all and IAS, and IAS was almost entirely based on weapon IAS so the rest of your gear hardly mattered) and calling it a day. Yes you could stack different things, like going for pure weapon speed (enchantress, firebear, tesladin), stacking CB, stacking DS, whatever. But none of those things really changed anything about how you played the char, or how combat felt. They were just generic DPS increasing affixes that happened to use different mechanics. They were (to use the phrase in the infographic) toast. I think Blizz needs to be very careful, because if they give in and just give D2 patch 1.10-style loot in D3, we might have fun initially until the clear cookie cutter builds come out, and then we will be in the exact same situation as we are now, where after you decide you are going Monk + claw that lets you use whirlwind, the gearing is just as uninteresting as it is today (and as it was in D2). You are so backwards that I'm not sure any further explanation would even help, but let's just bang my head against a wall anyway... You do get that in D2, that allocated stats points and gear had a pretty big determination on the effectiveness of your character based on how you set it up (what main skills you wanted to use). Therefore, a melee sorc would want high dex for that shield and just enough mana to keep their enchant skill rolling. You absolutely CANNOT do this type of shenanigans in D3. If you're a barbarian, your damage in D3 is absolutely tied to strength and the dps in your weapon slot. That's it. Who am I kidding? It's really just tied to whatever is in your weapon slot. If you were a sorc, you either had 156 str and 222 dex for 75% block with SS, or you put every single point into vit and didn't care about block. Didn't matter if you were melee or not. Turns out you can do these shenanigans in D3 - if you don't care about block, you can use an orb instead of a shield and get more DPS. The difference is you do it with gear instead of clicking on a menu.
On top of this, you're forgetting the other widely used and fairly awesome stuff like straight up % damage reduction, life steal and mana steal before they nerfed it (was based on percentages before nerf iirc).
These are still in D3 except for mana steal, which has been replaced by spirit/hatred/mana regen, AP on crit, fury on crit.
There was also shit, like deadly wounds, open wounds, +% elemental damage, chance on striking/hit to do randomness, etc.
There was no +% elemental damage (you might be thinking of -enemy elemental resists?). OW was only ever useful for the PMH aspect. All the others could just as easily have been replaced with a single "increases damage by X%" mod since they provided a generic DPS increase in a way that did not interact with skills or other affixes on gear. There were lots of different affixes that increased your DPS, but you didn't really care which one you got. The only interesting one was CB, and it was so scarce it just came down to "get as much as possible". When LoD came out (1.07 I think?) random procs were worthless (although very pretty). Remember Guardian Naga, how awesome that poison nova was? No? Just like D3 legendary procs on launch, then. The only useful proc I can think of on LoD launch was Lava Gout, and even that was only because of Enchant's huge +% AP and not because of the fire damage. I'm sure even D3 has one or two procs that you'd consider useful though.
Yea, there were also really cool runewords that let you do some cool crap, but you didn't have to use them. Some people actually tried fun stuff for, you know... fun. Hell, some of the runes were just useful as runes. The best part about all of that is that, you weren't locked into looking for the same fucking stats on every piece of loot that dropped. Right, now if it doesn't have your main stat (strength/dexterity/intellect), vitality and maybe 1 or 2 minor improvements in D3 (crit chance, crit damage %), then you don't give a flying fuck. Whereas in D2, you could do max block sorceress with a shield or try going all out into energy shield into whatever else. Synergies in skills made it even more interesting.
Not sure what point you are making here. You've gone from complaining about gearing in D3, to talking about skill choices in D2, which aren't really things you can compare. Energy shield is another example of something in D2 that looked like it had depth, but didn't really. You ended up with a % conversion of life to mana that means that there is one, single optimal ratio of life:mana and that was it. Maybe the serious duellers have some magic point allocation in TK that makes good things happen, but I don't know of any. There were some builds out there that were popular in D2. No one can deny that, but they were not the only ways to be successful (killing hell mode). How you can sit there and say that having an assassin claw that let's you whirlwind is just as "uninteresting" as it is today? That, sir/madam, is mindblowing and greatly saddening. I think you misunderstood me. Using WW as an assassin is great and fun. I said in the bit you quoted that these unique skill runeword items are interesting. However, it doesn't make gearing interesting. A WW assassin wants exactly the same gear as a dragon tail assassin, wants exactly the same gear as every other melee out there. And that's why I think this is a big deal - not because I want to rip on D2, but because I don't want reaper of souls to blindly copy these popular elements of D2, since if they do that I think they'll end up with a pretty shallow game (again). Meh. Itboils down to the unique vs. rare paradigm. Or getting endgame items in nm vs. not even in hell. The current system is frustrating to have to look for new items for nearly every slot at all times. Sometimes its fine, like if it was weapons only, but fir every slot is tiring.
Does it? To me it boils down to having meaningful options (in gearing).
It's something they have struggled with endless not just in D2, D3 but also in WoW with talents. People are so good at theorycrafting now that every "choice" boils down to some theorycrafter saying "this is the optimal choice, and if you don't do it you are factually wrong", followed by everyone on the internet screaming at Blizz that they don't have any options because they are "forced" to do what the theorycraft says.
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On September 02 2013 07:42 dmfg wrote:Show nested quote +On September 02 2013 03:44 cLutZ wrote:On September 01 2013 20:54 dmfg wrote:On September 01 2013 15:28 chaos021 wrote:On August 29 2013 06:55 dmfg wrote:On August 29 2013 00:50 crms wrote:
i like a lot of these suggestions but itemization and character development are by far the most important issues. paragon system 2.0 is a nice baby step but the items and character interaction needs an overhaul.
while the writing is harsh and I wish better written and a bit more comprehensive, this 'info-graph' highlights the major issue with D2 vs D3 loot itemization. While doing my re-play of Diablo 2 this week, I've run Nightmare Meph about 10-15 times and found ~12 uniques (legendaries). Including some nice niche uniques that are great for certain builds on other classes. Stuff like that just doesn't happen in D3. It won't happen because you'll never spend 15-20m doing quick boss runs to obtain ~12 legendaries, and the legendaries you would find in ACT3NM wouldn't be worth IDing. When characters have no depth of customization, the items are boring and undesirable.
I think there are 2 separate issues that this infographic is trying to pass off as one. The stat allocation issue is completely separate to the diversity of gear issue. If you couldn't allocate stats in D2, the exact same gear would still be desirable to the exact same builds (the only difference being the number of str/dex charms required to equip it). Character stat allocation did absolutely nothing for gear diversity; having unusual and gamechanging affixes is what did it. As for what makes gear "interesting", every single item from D2 that I would call "interesting" has one thing in common: they grant unique spells that are normally locked to one class. Whether that be Enigma, Andy's visage, Insight, Passion, Chaos, Atma's scarab, Demon Limb, Wolfhowl, etc. Yes, there are other powerful items like BotD, but there is nothing interesting about BotD other than it being really really powerful. These items were interesting because they let you make (effectively) cross-class hybrids. They did nothing for itemisation - maybe you aimed for a different IAS breakpoint but that was really it. Some of them changed nothing at all about how you build or played your char (2x CTA in alt weapons anyone?). I don't think these are an answer to "the loot problem" - you get a few interesting items, but you won't really add any depth to gearing. And I think that is my problem with analyses like the one in that image. D2 had a lot of pieces of gear which were interesting in isolation (all of them added after LoD, and almost all of those added in 1.10 or beyond when LoD had already been out for years). But they didn't make building a gear set interesting, because by and large it wasn't. What it came down to was meeting some caps (resist all and IAS, and IAS was almost entirely based on weapon IAS so the rest of your gear hardly mattered) and calling it a day. Yes you could stack different things, like going for pure weapon speed (enchantress, firebear, tesladin), stacking CB, stacking DS, whatever. But none of those things really changed anything about how you played the char, or how combat felt. They were just generic DPS increasing affixes that happened to use different mechanics. They were (to use the phrase in the infographic) toast. I think Blizz needs to be very careful, because if they give in and just give D2 patch 1.10-style loot in D3, we might have fun initially until the clear cookie cutter builds come out, and then we will be in the exact same situation as we are now, where after you decide you are going Monk + claw that lets you use whirlwind, the gearing is just as uninteresting as it is today (and as it was in D2). You are so backwards that I'm not sure any further explanation would even help, but let's just bang my head against a wall anyway... You do get that in D2, that allocated stats points and gear had a pretty big determination on the effectiveness of your character based on how you set it up (what main skills you wanted to use). Therefore, a melee sorc would want high dex for that shield and just enough mana to keep their enchant skill rolling. You absolutely CANNOT do this type of shenanigans in D3. If you're a barbarian, your damage in D3 is absolutely tied to strength and the dps in your weapon slot. That's it. Who am I kidding? It's really just tied to whatever is in your weapon slot. If you were a sorc, you either had 156 str and 222 dex for 75% block with SS, or you put every single point into vit and didn't care about block. Didn't matter if you were melee or not. Turns out you can do these shenanigans in D3 - if you don't care about block, you can use an orb instead of a shield and get more DPS. The difference is you do it with gear instead of clicking on a menu.
On top of this, you're forgetting the other widely used and fairly awesome stuff like straight up % damage reduction, life steal and mana steal before they nerfed it (was based on percentages before nerf iirc).
These are still in D3 except for mana steal, which has been replaced by spirit/hatred/mana regen, AP on crit, fury on crit.
There was also shit, like deadly wounds, open wounds, +% elemental damage, chance on striking/hit to do randomness, etc.
There was no +% elemental damage (you might be thinking of -enemy elemental resists?). OW was only ever useful for the PMH aspect. All the others could just as easily have been replaced with a single "increases damage by X%" mod since they provided a generic DPS increase in a way that did not interact with skills or other affixes on gear. There were lots of different affixes that increased your DPS, but you didn't really care which one you got. The only interesting one was CB, and it was so scarce it just came down to "get as much as possible". When LoD came out (1.07 I think?) random procs were worthless (although very pretty). Remember Guardian Naga, how awesome that poison nova was? No? Just like D3 legendary procs on launch, then. The only useful proc I can think of on LoD launch was Lava Gout, and even that was only because of Enchant's huge +% AP and not because of the fire damage. I'm sure even D3 has one or two procs that you'd consider useful though.
Yea, there were also really cool runewords that let you do some cool crap, but you didn't have to use them. Some people actually tried fun stuff for, you know... fun. Hell, some of the runes were just useful as runes. The best part about all of that is that, you weren't locked into looking for the same fucking stats on every piece of loot that dropped. Right, now if it doesn't have your main stat (strength/dexterity/intellect), vitality and maybe 1 or 2 minor improvements in D3 (crit chance, crit damage %), then you don't give a flying fuck. Whereas in D2, you could do max block sorceress with a shield or try going all out into energy shield into whatever else. Synergies in skills made it even more interesting.
Not sure what point you are making here. You've gone from complaining about gearing in D3, to talking about skill choices in D2, which aren't really things you can compare. Energy shield is another example of something in D2 that looked like it had depth, but didn't really. You ended up with a % conversion of life to mana that means that there is one, single optimal ratio of life:mana and that was it. Maybe the serious duellers have some magic point allocation in TK that makes good things happen, but I don't know of any. There were some builds out there that were popular in D2. No one can deny that, but they were not the only ways to be successful (killing hell mode). How you can sit there and say that having an assassin claw that let's you whirlwind is just as "uninteresting" as it is today? That, sir/madam, is mindblowing and greatly saddening. I think you misunderstood me. Using WW as an assassin is great and fun. I said in the bit you quoted that these unique skill runeword items are interesting. However, it doesn't make gearing interesting. A WW assassin wants exactly the same gear as a dragon tail assassin, wants exactly the same gear as every other melee out there. And that's why I think this is a big deal - not because I want to rip on D2, but because I don't want reaper of souls to blindly copy these popular elements of D2, since if they do that I think they'll end up with a pretty shallow game (again). Meh. Itboils down to the unique vs. rare paradigm. Or getting endgame items in nm vs. not even in hell. The current system is frustrating to have to look for new items for nearly every slot at all times. Sometimes its fine, like if it was weapons only, but fir every slot is tiring. Does it? To me it boils down to having meaningful options (in gearing). It's something they have struggled with endless not just in D2, D3 but also in WoW with talents. People are so good at theorycrafting now that every "choice" boils down to some theorycrafter saying "this is the optimal choice, and if you don't do it you are factually wrong", followed by everyone on the internet screaming at Blizz that they don't have any options because they are "forced" to do what the theorycraft says.
The thing that separates WOW and D2 from D3, is that the optimal choice is fairly obvious, and you actually know where to look. D3 its like "I want Dex/Stamina/XX on my item" but there is no, for instance, String of Ears or Shaco where you are like "hooray, slot XX is filled." Or in WOW, you say "aha, the best shoulders for me drop from boss X!" Instead it is, "I must identify every yellow that drops and look over every stat to see if it is good for any of the 5 classes so as to equip it myself or sell it on the AH so then I can browse the AH for a similar item for the character that I intend to gear."
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On September 02 2013 08:08 cLutZ wrote:Show nested quote +On September 02 2013 07:42 dmfg wrote:On September 02 2013 03:44 cLutZ wrote:On September 01 2013 20:54 dmfg wrote:On September 01 2013 15:28 chaos021 wrote:On August 29 2013 06:55 dmfg wrote:On August 29 2013 00:50 crms wrote:
i like a lot of these suggestions but itemization and character development are by far the most important issues. paragon system 2.0 is a nice baby step but the items and character interaction needs an overhaul.
while the writing is harsh and I wish better written and a bit more comprehensive, this 'info-graph' highlights the major issue with D2 vs D3 loot itemization. While doing my re-play of Diablo 2 this week, I've run Nightmare Meph about 10-15 times and found ~12 uniques (legendaries). Including some nice niche uniques that are great for certain builds on other classes. Stuff like that just doesn't happen in D3. It won't happen because you'll never spend 15-20m doing quick boss runs to obtain ~12 legendaries, and the legendaries you would find in ACT3NM wouldn't be worth IDing. When characters have no depth of customization, the items are boring and undesirable.
I think there are 2 separate issues that this infographic is trying to pass off as one. The stat allocation issue is completely separate to the diversity of gear issue. If you couldn't allocate stats in D2, the exact same gear would still be desirable to the exact same builds (the only difference being the number of str/dex charms required to equip it). Character stat allocation did absolutely nothing for gear diversity; having unusual and gamechanging affixes is what did it. As for what makes gear "interesting", every single item from D2 that I would call "interesting" has one thing in common: they grant unique spells that are normally locked to one class. Whether that be Enigma, Andy's visage, Insight, Passion, Chaos, Atma's scarab, Demon Limb, Wolfhowl, etc. Yes, there are other powerful items like BotD, but there is nothing interesting about BotD other than it being really really powerful. These items were interesting because they let you make (effectively) cross-class hybrids. They did nothing for itemisation - maybe you aimed for a different IAS breakpoint but that was really it. Some of them changed nothing at all about how you build or played your char (2x CTA in alt weapons anyone?). I don't think these are an answer to "the loot problem" - you get a few interesting items, but you won't really add any depth to gearing. And I think that is my problem with analyses like the one in that image. D2 had a lot of pieces of gear which were interesting in isolation (all of them added after LoD, and almost all of those added in 1.10 or beyond when LoD had already been out for years). But they didn't make building a gear set interesting, because by and large it wasn't. What it came down to was meeting some caps (resist all and IAS, and IAS was almost entirely based on weapon IAS so the rest of your gear hardly mattered) and calling it a day. Yes you could stack different things, like going for pure weapon speed (enchantress, firebear, tesladin), stacking CB, stacking DS, whatever. But none of those things really changed anything about how you played the char, or how combat felt. They were just generic DPS increasing affixes that happened to use different mechanics. They were (to use the phrase in the infographic) toast. I think Blizz needs to be very careful, because if they give in and just give D2 patch 1.10-style loot in D3, we might have fun initially until the clear cookie cutter builds come out, and then we will be in the exact same situation as we are now, where after you decide you are going Monk + claw that lets you use whirlwind, the gearing is just as uninteresting as it is today (and as it was in D2). You are so backwards that I'm not sure any further explanation would even help, but let's just bang my head against a wall anyway... You do get that in D2, that allocated stats points and gear had a pretty big determination on the effectiveness of your character based on how you set it up (what main skills you wanted to use). Therefore, a melee sorc would want high dex for that shield and just enough mana to keep their enchant skill rolling. You absolutely CANNOT do this type of shenanigans in D3. If you're a barbarian, your damage in D3 is absolutely tied to strength and the dps in your weapon slot. That's it. Who am I kidding? It's really just tied to whatever is in your weapon slot. If you were a sorc, you either had 156 str and 222 dex for 75% block with SS, or you put every single point into vit and didn't care about block. Didn't matter if you were melee or not. Turns out you can do these shenanigans in D3 - if you don't care about block, you can use an orb instead of a shield and get more DPS. The difference is you do it with gear instead of clicking on a menu.
On top of this, you're forgetting the other widely used and fairly awesome stuff like straight up % damage reduction, life steal and mana steal before they nerfed it (was based on percentages before nerf iirc).
These are still in D3 except for mana steal, which has been replaced by spirit/hatred/mana regen, AP on crit, fury on crit.
There was also shit, like deadly wounds, open wounds, +% elemental damage, chance on striking/hit to do randomness, etc.
There was no +% elemental damage (you might be thinking of -enemy elemental resists?). OW was only ever useful for the PMH aspect. All the others could just as easily have been replaced with a single "increases damage by X%" mod since they provided a generic DPS increase in a way that did not interact with skills or other affixes on gear. There were lots of different affixes that increased your DPS, but you didn't really care which one you got. The only interesting one was CB, and it was so scarce it just came down to "get as much as possible". When LoD came out (1.07 I think?) random procs were worthless (although very pretty). Remember Guardian Naga, how awesome that poison nova was? No? Just like D3 legendary procs on launch, then. The only useful proc I can think of on LoD launch was Lava Gout, and even that was only because of Enchant's huge +% AP and not because of the fire damage. I'm sure even D3 has one or two procs that you'd consider useful though.
Yea, there were also really cool runewords that let you do some cool crap, but you didn't have to use them. Some people actually tried fun stuff for, you know... fun. Hell, some of the runes were just useful as runes. The best part about all of that is that, you weren't locked into looking for the same fucking stats on every piece of loot that dropped. Right, now if it doesn't have your main stat (strength/dexterity/intellect), vitality and maybe 1 or 2 minor improvements in D3 (crit chance, crit damage %), then you don't give a flying fuck. Whereas in D2, you could do max block sorceress with a shield or try going all out into energy shield into whatever else. Synergies in skills made it even more interesting.
Not sure what point you are making here. You've gone from complaining about gearing in D3, to talking about skill choices in D2, which aren't really things you can compare. Energy shield is another example of something in D2 that looked like it had depth, but didn't really. You ended up with a % conversion of life to mana that means that there is one, single optimal ratio of life:mana and that was it. Maybe the serious duellers have some magic point allocation in TK that makes good things happen, but I don't know of any. There were some builds out there that were popular in D2. No one can deny that, but they were not the only ways to be successful (killing hell mode). How you can sit there and say that having an assassin claw that let's you whirlwind is just as "uninteresting" as it is today? That, sir/madam, is mindblowing and greatly saddening. I think you misunderstood me. Using WW as an assassin is great and fun. I said in the bit you quoted that these unique skill runeword items are interesting. However, it doesn't make gearing interesting. A WW assassin wants exactly the same gear as a dragon tail assassin, wants exactly the same gear as every other melee out there. And that's why I think this is a big deal - not because I want to rip on D2, but because I don't want reaper of souls to blindly copy these popular elements of D2, since if they do that I think they'll end up with a pretty shallow game (again). Meh. Itboils down to the unique vs. rare paradigm. Or getting endgame items in nm vs. not even in hell. The current system is frustrating to have to look for new items for nearly every slot at all times. Sometimes its fine, like if it was weapons only, but fir every slot is tiring. Does it? To me it boils down to having meaningful options (in gearing). It's something they have struggled with endless not just in D2, D3 but also in WoW with talents. People are so good at theorycrafting now that every "choice" boils down to some theorycrafter saying "this is the optimal choice, and if you don't do it you are factually wrong", followed by everyone on the internet screaming at Blizz that they don't have any options because they are "forced" to do what the theorycraft says. The thing that separates WOW and D2 from D3, is that the optimal choice is fairly obvious, and you actually know where to look. D3 its like "I want Dex/Stamina/XX on my item" but there is no, for instance, String of Ears or Shaco where you are like "hooray, slot XX is filled." Or in WOW, you say "aha, the best shoulders for me drop from boss X!" Instead it is, "I must identify every yellow that drops and look over every stat to see if it is good for any of the 5 classes so as to equip it myself or sell it on the AH so then I can browse the AH for a similar item for the character that I intend to gear."
to each their own, but i prefer the d3 system. knowing there is always something better and knowing that it could be one of any drops that i see on the ground is more interesting to me.
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Cayman Islands24199 Posts
d3's upgrades don't feel like upgrades most of the time though. if you get a marginally better piece of gear, say +5k dps and -250 hp, it just means more time at the AH selling your old piece of gear. as there are more and more items in teh game and less and less buyers, who themselves have high gear levels already, the excitement from drops can turn into tedious inventory tracking.
other games have dealt with item gluts with an upgrade gear option, where for a certain chance of failure you can give some bonuses to existing gear. the bonus needs not be large, it just feels more exciting to have succeeded say a 20% upgrade even though it gives the same 5k dps gain.
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On September 02 2013 06:45 KalWarkov wrote:So would I, if the characters would be ANY exciting...
Yeah everyone was raving about it..I gave it a go back in the beta, and found the game world and characters to be quite bland, could never really get into it.
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The expansion looks quite awesome actually. I'll liking all the changing they're bringing in, though the paragon system probably won't affect me because I won't be playing at capped level for all that long. Interesting legendaries at all levels? Yes please. 
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I can see a ladder getting added and some people really like them, for me they dont really matter that much, I just hope they dont add alot of items that are ladder only (like the ladder only runewords), if getting people to play ladder in and of it self is to hard without other rewards behind it, maybe ladder is not important enough to get added
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Just add ladder, people on ladder start from 0, people on non-ladder can continue with their vanilla characters. If you do not play ladder you do not obviously care about resetting the economy so like, no reason not to do it. Everybody wins.
On September 03 2013 06:59 DODswe4 wrote:
I can see a ladder getting added and some people really like them, for me they dont really matter that much, I just hope they dont add alot of items that are ladder only (like the ladder only runewords), if getting people to play ladder in and of it self is to hard without other rewards behind it, maybe ladder is not important enough to get added
For most people it is probably not the competition when they refer to ladder in D3. Competition was found on third party sites that listed their own ladders. It is the reset that people nagging for ladder want for the most part. I like ladder only runewords because it is harder to play ladder then non ladder. Gear is scarcer. Hence i think it is ok to add more gear for ladder itself, but there really is no reason for ladder only items in practice.
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From my reading of this thread, this seems much more like speculation than a guarantee. Also, the thread is from early June, more than two months before the Reaper announcement. I could have sworn I heard or read a much less enthusiastic view on the possibility of ladder from one of their Gamescom guys.
They are speculating at diablo.incgamers as well, but they, like you, are much more bullish about the possibility based on that same thread from June.
http://diablo.incgamers.com/blog/comments/reaper-of-souls-rumors-ladders-are-coming-ironborn-is-not
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On September 03 2013 11:04 skatbone wrote:From my reading of this thread, this seems much more like speculation than a guarantee. Also, the thread is from early June, more than two months before the Reaper announcement. I could have sworn I heard or read a much less enthusiastic view on the possibility of ladder from one of their Gamescom guys. They are speculating at diablo.incgamers as well, but they, like you, are much more bullish about the possibility based on that same thread from June. http://diablo.incgamers.com/blog/comments/reaper-of-souls-rumors-ladders-are-coming-ironborn-is-not
i got it from incgamers, and you are correct, its ultimately conjecture until blizzcon. but they do make a compelling argument.
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EPT
