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First batter up: Life Steal
Official post: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/10039514450#5
Let's talk about combat.
From a big picture standpoint, it's not healthy for the game when a player's health pool goes from full to nearly empty and back to full on a regular basis very quickly, over and over, during regular play. I know not every character build plays this way - but I would assert that it's not good for the game when this is a dominant or even common way to play.
Why?
Here are a few negative effects it has:
1. A health pool that quickly goes from full to nearly empty implies that there's not a lot of room for variance in incoming damage. When incoming damage is that high, a 15% increase in monster damage would result in death. This leads to comments like "As soon as I turn up the Monster Power I get 1-shot". I'd like to see a game where a clever player can handle a higher Monster Power by reducing incoming damage through good play. Unfortunately, if the combat pacing and dominant builds are such that all players are geared to survive the biggest posisble hit from a monster and instantly heal to full then there's no room for that differentiation. Let's use mortar as a simple example. If a wave of mortar hits takes me from full to nearly dead, and then I instantly heal back to full, then mortars don't pose a realistic threat to me. In this state, there's no way for a clever player (who wants to dodge mortars) to differentiate themselves from somebody who doesn't care (and just decides to get hit). In both cases you're healing instantly to full and surviving through the damage no matter what, and in both cases turning up the monster power results in you dying no matter what if you take a single mortar wave. It becomes a pure gear check.
2. For players who push the MP up anyways, it makes the game feel like it was designed around one-shots. In my previous example with mortar, some of you may be thinking "There's room for turning up the Monster Power, just don't get hit at all!". This isn't great either. It means my death feels very binary. One moment I'm at full health, the next instant I'm dead. It also means that once you decide you are going to accept being one-shot, you don't care about your health at all. Who cares if you have 20K or 40K health if you're going to die either way? We'd be in a better place if the mortar-dodger was allowed to take the occasional hit, but can handle a higher monster power as long as a majority of them are dodged.
3. Healing very rapidly back to full also loses all the fidelity of small attacks. If players are regularly going from full to nearly empty and back to full again on a regular basis, then there's no room for mechanics which act as a slow drain on your health. Plagued is a great example of this. We don't want Plagued to be something that kills you quickly, but it also shouldn't be something you ignore forever. Standing in a pool of poison should be something that adds tension to the fight. You know you're not going to die now, but you can see the threat looming. When healing rates are very high, there is no room for the slow drain damage sources - they become insignificant.
4. My current health loses meaning. Being at 95% health should mean you're relatively safe. Being at 5% health should mean you're almost dead. Being at 50% health should mean you're somewhat in danger and you should play it safe, but as long as you do you should be fine. These are all concepts that make intuitive sense. Unfortunately, they are not at all true in the current Diablo environment. When health pools are rapidly going from empty to full and back again, these health values all blur together.
5. You lose a lot of tactical combat opportunities. Tactical combat requires that the player can properly assess the situation and react accordingly. When your health pool moves up and down rapidly you are no longer reacting to dangers. A rapidly changing health globe means you are playing in a predictable pattern and crossing your fingers hoping that you live through it. You are playing in a way that avoids situations that will instantly kill you, but there's no tension associated with being low on health that would cause you to make a tactical decision to change your play pattern.
I'm saying all of this without pointing at any specific solutions. That's because there are no instant-fix solutions. It's a challenging problem that we're actively working on. Things aren't going to be perfect overnight, but improving the pacing of combat is something we constantly work on.
I will say that the first line of defense is reducing the rate at which players heal. After we pull in the rate of healing, next we analyze the patterns in which monsters deal damage. Ultimately, defensive stats will play a role in all of this. If some life regeneration, damage mitigation or (gasp) life on hit lets me play a little more aggressively, that's a good thing.
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I saw this yesterday and read it. I understand the reasoning behind it and lifesteal mechanics are something to be careful when implementing in a game.
But at some point when you factor 4 base difficulties, that each have 11difficulty levels, damage numbers are going to be insane and some characters are going to get die instantly. Lifesteal was supposed to be capped at 3% on a weapon and with the Inferno settings it already is reduced by 80% and this doesn't even allow you to hit reflect damage and not die.
I don't know what they are doing about lifesteal on weapons but class exclusive lifesteal on items and skills was one of the most moronic balance decision made i ever encountered in a game. I honestly think people that worked on the itemization, item balancing and gearing progression are incompetents and ruined the game.
Diablo 3 v1.0 Two handed weapons only had 3% LS, while dualwielding could go to 6.Same with CHD 100% max.
Barbarians have 3% on their class specific belt, a passive giving 3% and wizard have a rune on one of their buffs that gives 1.5%.
So a Witch Doctor can have a whopping 3% while a barbarian can run around with 12%, Yeah good luck balancing anything after that.
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this is nice and all, but why are they doing this 2 years after release.
This should have been done in beta.
They had experience of 2 diablo games and there was also titan quest, sacred 1 and 2, tochlight 1.
Especially sacred 1 played exactly the same in endgame...gather a million mobs and then AE spam them down while your hopefully lifesteal enough while facetanking it.
Were they so arrogant to not look at other games? Or did they just not care?
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They did try this but people complained that it was too easy. Then in inferno v 1.00, characters like dh that could avoid attacks were able to progress faster than melee characters. The barbs complained and they became the most overpowered class after patch 1.03. Almost everything they fucked up was the result of fan feedback.
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On September 27 2013 01:25 andrewlt wrote:
They did try this but people complained that it was too easy. Then in inferno v 1.00, characters like dh that could avoid attacks were able to progress faster than melee characters. The barbs complained and they became the most overpowered class after patch 1.03. Almost everything they fucked up was the result of fan feedback.
I somewhat agree but if you remember May 2012, Barbarians were absolutely terrible, with almost no splash damage. Did they get overbuffed? Yeah for sure.
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On September 27 2013 00:29 LaNague wrote:
this is nice and all, but why are they doing this 2 years after release.
This should have been done in beta.
They had experience of 2 diablo games and there was also titan quest, sacred 1 and 2, tochlight 1.
Especially sacred 1 played exactly the same in endgame...gather a million mobs and then AE spam them down while your hopefully lifesteal enough while facetanking it.
Were they so arrogant to not look at other games? Or did they just not care?
Because their previous game director was a fucking idiot.
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On September 27 2013 00:29 LaNague wrote:
this is nice and all, but why are they doing this 2 years after release.
This should have been done in beta.
They had experience of 2 diablo games and there was also titan quest, sacred 1 and 2, tochlight 1.
Especially sacred 1 played exactly the same in endgame...gather a million mobs and then AE spam them down while your hopefully lifesteal enough while facetanking it.
Were they so arrogant to not look at other games? Or did they just not care?
we got Jay Wilson'd, director of the auction rpg
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It kind of irks me that he would try to defend a subjective point from almost every angle. This is a horrendous mindset from a developer side and has because a trend almost for Blizzard titles (D3, sc2).
While this one doesn't really strike me as arrogance that the sc2 ones(devs) usually display, it's just more or less a flawed view.
Percentage Leech can most certainly be tuned to an appropriate level. Current LoH (Life on hit) items are functioning almost exactly as what he sees as a problem. A lot of items' worth are even determined by this stat.
If you look at D2 for example, leech is a mechanic that made the game what it is. Arguments could even be made that it was mandatory for some physical classes, but the point is that it was a game-identifying mechanic.
If you took what he said and applied it to another game, it's basically saying a game is shit because X, where not only is X being independently isolated, but also ill-represented in the argument.
I am disappoint.
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On September 27 2013 01:25 andrewlt wrote:
They did try this but people complained that it was too easy. Then in inferno v 1.00, characters like dh that could avoid attacks were able to progress faster than melee characters. The barbs complained and they became the most overpowered class after patch 1.03. Almost everything they fucked up was the result of fan feedback.
Dont you dare.
Fans said that D2 was too easy, nobody even suggested that D3 should be literally 1000 times harder. In D2 most ranged monsters were attacking for ~30-50 DMG and melee for 150 DMG at most... They didnt always hit and you could block attacks fully, had 1500-3000 HP and 16 pots in belt to regain full health.
Vanilla D3 between 30 sec cooldown on pots that gave close to no HP and monsters that were almost 1 shooting even wizards literally went from "you are allowed to take 3000 hits before dying" to "you are allowed to take 1-2 hits before dying" without any prior testing or any theoretical studies at all.
So dont fucking blame this on fans, it was all Devs fault.
What I dont understand is what is OP about... Is it supposed to be about current state or state after release? If latter, then I must honestly say I for the most part have no Idea what are you talking about.
EDIT: NVM I just used link and realized that its actually Blizzard post... I still honestly have no idea what are they talking about...
Maybe its because there is close to zero death penalty in softcore so people always play on highest MP no matter gear, hoping for some drops?
Isnt then solution to simply add death penalty and give people a reason to not play just on MP7-10? I dont really know how this works on softcore, but as a hardcore player I feel like they are talking about different game...
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On September 27 2013 00:29 LaNague wrote:
this is nice and all, but why are they doing this 2 years after release.
This should have been done in beta.
They had experience of 2 diablo games and there was also titan quest, sacred 1 and 2, tochlight 1.
Especially sacred 1 played exactly the same in endgame...gather a million mobs and then AE spam them down while your hopefully lifesteal enough while facetanking it.
Were they so arrogant to not look at other games? Or did they just not care?
Actually, before patch 1.04 people were complaining a lot for the opposite reason, since life steal was considered inferior to loh.
Wyatt Cheng's response:
To make a long story short, Life Steal is tuned around where we expect DPS output to be months from now. As people do more damage, get more survivability, and generally find they can AOE things more than they used to, I expect the value of Life Steal to go up.
The real problem is what happened next. Buffed droprates, insanely buffed skills, overpowered legendaries, all items able to roll lv63 affixes (cc went from 4.5 to 6% on rings for example), black damage bug, crafted items with 100-130 bonus mainstat, etc. Today's average dps is probably at least double what the devs expected to be when they tuned life steal.
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Is this really what the whining community has pushed Blizzard to do? Well you know what, this outcome is far more deserving than the Pez 2 one (Fuck you, I'm out), this feel much more of a "Fuck you, if this is what you want, then here you go".
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Yea, I remember when the IAS nerf was made I thought it was just to reduce Life on Hit's effectiveness heh. I think if all they did was remove crit damage, life steal could stay the same, but who knows.
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lifesteal is ok-ish
they have to nerf CRIT in general. you cant play diablo without massing crit. there is no build out there. this is shit.
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If they don't like the way we play their game then change it and stop telling us what we do is not intended!
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On September 27 2013 04:08 Big G wrote:
The real problem is what happened next. Buffed droprates, insanely buffed skills, overpowered legendaries, all items able to roll lv63 affixes (cc went from 4.5 to 6% on rings for example), black damage bug, crafted items with 100-130 bonus mainstat, etc. Today's average dps is probably at least double what the devs expected to be when they tuned life steal.
I think this is the real problem: they designed LL with 1.00 in mind but then nerfed inferno, introduced mlvl, new legendaries (witching hour anyone?), better items and suddenly the damage exploded.
I don't think they designed LL for 200k dps chars. It is just natural that they fix it now.
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Datamined Stat Caps (first passthrough on closed PTR)
Critical Hit Chance - *You may have a maximum of +40.00% Critical Hit Chance from items.
Critical Hit Damage - *You may have a maximum of +250.00% Critical Hit Damage from items.
Attack Speed - *You may have a maximum of +40.00% Attack Speed from items.
Movement Speed - *You may have a maximum of +25.00% movement speed from items
Block Chance - *You may have a maximum of 75.00% Block Chance.
Gold Find - *You may have a maximum of +300.00% Gold Find.
Magic Find - *This increase is diminished for rare and legendary and set items.
Magic Find - *You may have a maximum of +300.00% Magic Find.
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On September 27 2013 09:47 Burrfoot wrote:
Datamined Stat Caps (first passthrough on closed PTR)
Critical Hit Chance - *You may have a maximum of +40.00% Critical Hit Chance from items.
Critical Hit Damage - *You may have a maximum of +250.00% Critical Hit Damage from items.
Attack Speed - *You may have a maximum of +40.00% Attack Speed from items.
Movement Speed - *You may have a maximum of +25.00% movement speed from items
Block Chance - *You may have a maximum of 75.00% Block Chance.
Gold Find - *You may have a maximum of +300.00% Gold Find.
Magic Find - *This increase is diminished for rare and legendary and set items.
Magic Find - *You may have a maximum of +300.00% Magic Find.
fuck the movement speed cap, it just boggles my mind
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I think I would rather see diminishing returns above those values rather than hard caps. Still, glad to see they are looking to do something to get the insane damage scaling under control.
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I agree with the OP. I'd like to see a game with more depth and less streamline. Especially none of this lifesteal dumbassery design. I guess they didn't learn a lot of lessons from how Diablo 2 played out.
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EPT
