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Diablo 3 and Incoming Damage
I’ve recently become of the opinion that there was one main reason that Diablo 2 was as hard as it was – even for patient players. That reason is that in Diablo 2 it was nearly impossible to reduce the amount of damage done. Sure, there were resistances. Sure, there were a few items that reduced damage taken by % and fixed values – but these were rare, and the amount of their effectiveness was severely limited. This made for enemies which could melee hard in a way you couldn’t mitigate very effectively. Or at least, not nearly as effectively.
Statement 1: Gear/abilities in Diablo 3 are really, really effective at reducing damage taken.
In Diablo 3, by comparison, there are many, many ways to reduce damage – and they all stack up well. Let’s say you have good gear on a tanky barbarian in D3. This means you’ll have something like 9k armor, 900 resists, String of Ears with (we’ll say 17% melee reduction – cuz that’s what mine has), and the inherent 30% reduction in damage taken because barbarians are a melee class. 900 resist and 9k armor each represent 75% reduction, so our total damage taken from a melee attack is:
(1-.75)*(1-.75)*(1-.3)*(1-.17) = 3.6% damage taken
On top of this, you can get a large amount of +% life and vitality to make this damage even less relevant.
Statement 2: The above makes gear really, really important –and makes balancing the amount of damage enemies do really, really hard.
Let’s take the above stats, and assume we don’t have a SoE, that we only have 750 all resist and 8k armor. Maybe we took a damage passive instead of nerves of steel, and on this run through we had a little less money to work with.
(1-.714)*(1-.727)*(1-.3) = 5.5% damage taken
The overall effect of these gear decreases result in our taking 50% more damage. In other words, enemies which hit us above for 5k will now be hitting for 7.5k. Roughly, this is slightly more than the damage reduction we afford by being melee.
Now let’s assume (on top of that) that we’re not melee anymore (we’re a Wizard, with equivalent stats, ignoring of course that the different stats favored by each class will change stats a bit).
(1-.714)*(1-.727) = 7.8% damage taken
This is a 116% damage increase – meaning our 5k hit turns into a 10.8k hit.
So what melee damage is acceptable for a boss or an elite? 5k isn’t much on a melee class, but if you tune it up to 10k, your wizard is suddenly taking 21.6k damage – his reasonably high defensive stats are probably going to see him getting 2 or 3-shot. Is he supposed to be able to avoid melee damage? If so, isn’t that bad game design? What about vortex/fast enemies? What about players with lower levels of gear? This all rolls into our next statement.
Statement 3: The only way to balance mob damage is to assume a certain gear level and make encounters balanced at that fixed gear level, which is surmountable. This leads to dull encounters when using powerful characters, ultimately limiting a character’s lifespan and is bad game design for this reason.
The first part is easily shown by the above. The damage a character takes is based on base enemy damage * player damage reduction. Despite all the numbers which go into gearing, mechanically the gameplay is not changed. A certain level is survivability against enemy attacks is optimal for the playing experience. Said another way, it’s no fun if you’re getting 1-shot, but it’s also no fun if you don’t have to work not to die – there is a sweet spot where the amount of damage you’re taking is uncomfortable, but not so high that a person is continually dying. You must hit that sweet spot for some high level of gear for your game-making decisions to be sensible. Enough people are having enough success in inferno already that I think we can assume some people are at or above that spot.
Once above that spot, the quick scaling of gear makes otherwise fun encounters meaningless. If you’re able to get to the spot where it’s fun, and then reduce your damage another 25% - you’ll find that suddenly it’s not fun anymore. There’s no risk of dying, and therefore you don’t get a good feeling from playing. It feels like playing with cheat codes. It’s great entertainment for a few minutes of novelty (wow, you can deal 50k damage, cool!) and quickly becomes bland after that.
The result of all this is that your character was “rewarded” for playing to the endgame with a very bland endgame.
Why is this bad game design, though? Doesn’t gear need to make you more powerful – and therefore, shouldn’t encounters eventually be trivialized by well-geared characters?
Yes, of course you need to become more powerful the more you play. The point isn’t that your character shouldn’t be allowed to get better, but that the extent to which a character is allowed to improve needs to be tempered, and the areas in which he’s allowed to improve need to be well selected. The entire point is that “damage reduction” may be a poorly selected area of improvement.
Look to Diablo 2. Even the best-geared characters had difficulty in diablo 2 – this was for a few reasons, but most notably, some abilities were difficult or impossible to reduce the damage of. Take Lister for example. Why is he a fun enemy? He, and really his whole pack, nearly kill you when they hit you. You can mitigate this a little bit, but try tanking Hell Lister in Diablo 2 – and you’ll die. However, you can do things which allow you to be hit less often – things like amping up your armor or employing kiting strategies. These are fun because if you mess them up with poor reactions using your rejuv potions, or by kiting in a poor manner, you die. How do you mess up damage reduction?
You need to be allowed to fail. If you’re not, there’s no reason to want to succeed.
Of course, it isn’t just that at a high level of gear you aren’t allowed to fail, but that at a low level of gear it’s impossible to succeed. Some very capable players were able to kill Uber-Diablo with no gear on. Nobody ever stands a chance of doing this in Diablo 3 (that isn’t necessarily bad game design, but it verifies the point I’m making). Notice above that it isn’t all that unreasonable for a well geared player to take more than double the damage of another (more) well geared player. That means that at some lesser geared point, we’re probably taking triple and quadruple damage.
Oh yeah, and then there’s that harpy curse which reduces your armor…
Statement 4: In order for the game’s longevity to be preserved, the effectiveness of damage-reducing stats (as well as monster damage) needs to be scaled back, or (alternatively) the diminishing returns on armor needs to be greatly amped up.
Looking at the above, my point is really just that gear has way to much of an impact on how challenging the content is. I know they want the demand for the best gear to be high, but it won’t remain high if the gameplay experience at a high level of gear isn’t interesting. This may not be evident in a 2-month old Diablo 3, but when the two-year mark rolls around, I suspect it will be more so.
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Well, like someone said, D3 is difficult (end of inferno) but not in the right way. It doesn't challenge you at all mentally, it's just a gear check all the way. It's like if the whole naxxramas was just patchwerk with just more and more hp and damage. Nobody would play that, but just because it's an ARPG and it's made by Blizzard they can get away with it.
It gets tiresome after a while.
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I think one of the biggest problem with D3 is all these multiplers. Having no crit and crit dmg vs having some is ridiculously huge, and it continues to widen the more crit dmg you have.
There are some serious issues with class balance atm, though I expect that to be fixed eventually.
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Theres more damage reducing things in D2.
You could have 95 all resists, 75% damage reduce (50% after recent patches), elemental damage absorb (ie. light absorb.. if you had enough it actually healed u when u got hit), 75% chance to block with a shield..
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On June 30 2012 04:22 Incze wrote:
Well, like someone said, D3 is difficult (end of inferno) but not in the right way. It doesn't challenge you at all mentally, it's just a gear check all the way. It's like if the whole naxxramas was just patchwerk with just more and more hp and damage. Nobody would play that, but just because it's an ARPG and it's made by Blizzard they can get away with it.
It gets tiresome after a while.
The whole "it's an action RPG" bit isn't really an excuse for this type of gameplay though. In fact, I defend Blizzard for some of the complaints in a previous blog here: http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/viewblog.php?id=339914
The point really isn't that the gameplay is repetitive, that the mechanics of play aren't solid, or that no coordination between players is needed (the typical MMO-caliber complaints). The point is that really well designed characters with a lot of time behind them make the game very easy because gear is allowed to scale so far due to multiple multipliers, and yet impossible below a certain threshold, and on a cost-benefit side of things, a fix for this (by changing the numbers used for scaling and nothing else) would be very cheap, make the game better, boost Blizzard's sales (even if only slightly) and increase use of the AH (further boosting profits).
Hell, I could design this fix myself in 10 minutes of thought.
By multiplying the product of all % damage reduction by .75, and balancing damage at the 75% damage reduction level, you completely remove the "increased returns" effect of having multiple multipliers, and steepen the damage reduction diminishing returns. Maybe .75 is too harsh, and it could be adjusted to .9 later (with damage increased by 20% to increase scaling without moving the "sweet spot") - but there needs to be a buffer between the cap of damage reduction and 100%. Taking 3% of all damage is just silly to let exist with damage reduction scaling as wildly as it does.
I'm not saying this just because it's better, I'm saying this because it's better, it's easy, and it doesn't change the fundamental gameplay.
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One issue is lag-- I wonder if mitigation is done in this way to deal with the inevitable lag that results from an always online service. It's hard to reward/design an endgame around finesse when your server hiccups fairly regularly and kills people.
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On June 30 2012 05:36 caradoc wrote:
One issue is lag-- I wonder if mitigation is done in this way to deal with the inevitable lag that results from an always online service. It's hard to reward/design an endgame around finesse when your server hiccups fairly regularly and kills people.
Some have reported that you stay online for a full minute after d/c-ing.
If there's anything even remotely damaging around (i.e. white enemies) you'll die if they are allowed to beat on your for a full minute. Changing how damage works doesn't make this better or worse. Server hiccups were present in Diablo 2 as well. They're just something you need to accept as part of the game and play around them.
Personally, I always play during peak times, I have a level 60 hardcore character with several days played time, and I've never lost a hardcore character. It has not been my experience that lag and server disconnects are crippling currently, and it'll only get better as more people burnout or decide to try other games.
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I feel like this is just the way D3 works from the ground up, from why they changed IAS, to how Crit+Crit-Dmg Scales with or without Life Steal, to damage reduction as you described it. That said I feel like for this to really be an issue, it really does depend on your ending statement.
"This may not be evident in a 2-month old Diablo 3, but when the two-year mark rolls around, I suspect it will be more so."
This I think is the most important aspect, and perhaps illustrates where I disagree. I think either Blizzard changes the problems you've listed and we're all playing a better version of the same content we're playing now. Or Blizzard releases content to scale properly with end game stats. I would prefer the new content, particularly now with RMAH giving them incentive w/ spikes in revenue on new content. Ofc I wouldn't be very happy if they just went w/ some standard DLC model either. my 2cnts
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On June 30 2012 05:02 Assault_1 wrote:
Theres more damage reducing things in D2.
You could have 95 all resists, 75% damage reduce (50% after recent patches), elemental damage absorb (ie. light absorb.. if you had enough it actually healed u when u got hit), 75% chance to block with a shield..
Quite a few things hit through shield. Snake Vipers Charge does, and they could often 3 shot my paladin.
I don't know if it's possible to get 95 all resists, but I didn't have the gear to do it. In fact the -100 resist thing made it so I couldn't get 75 resist all even with salvation aura. Getting gibbed when you killed a doll and didn't heal up before you killed another one was stupid too. But at the same time I think a lot of D2 champions just had it really easy when they played twinked, or with a party.
And even with 50% chance to be hit and 75% block chance, your opponents just need to get lucky and get a string of attacks in once to kill you. So you always had to play safe on your own with bad gear.
I haven't played much D3 yet.
But D2 wasn't really a well designed end game for solo play either.
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Another thing to take note of: monster level. In Inferno they always have a higher level than you, although this has a huge effect at sub-60 levels. Changes the math slightly..
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On June 30 2012 11:09 Heh_ wrote:
Another thing to take note of: monster level. In Inferno they always have a higher level than you, although this has a huge effect at sub-60 levels. Changes the math slightly..
I play hardcore, so Inferno at sub-60 isn't really feasible without a lot of money/luck.
My whole point is that the diminishing returns curve isn't steep enough - the fact that you move a hair back on the curve doesn't change the phenomenon. In fact, it makes it worse because 900 resist provides more damage reduction over 750 resist when weight in the denominator is 315 or 325. I don't really want to do the math to indicate this is true at specific values, so let me illustrate this in general terms. If the weight in the denominator is 3000 instead of 300, then the first 1000 resist all provides the same diminishing returns effect on damage reduction as the first 100 resist all does now (which is to say, not very much).
But yeah, I used 300 to be conservative.
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My opinion is skewed by the fact that I haven't played D3 (lol). I have read quite a lot about it, though, and I played D2 for many many years, from before LOD to around 2009. HCC, SCC, HC, SC, ladder and non-ladder. The game kept my interest for a simple reason: finding shit.
Finding items is what Diablo is about. I spent many hours trading and trading (and after duping and botting ruined the game, many hours in other unscrupulous activities). I hoarded stuff, I made and re-made perfect PvP characters, I had probably 100+ fully geared out chars with every build possible over the time I played D2. I had a 99 HC javazon, like 20 99 SC chars, etc. The point is that I was obviously engaged for a really long time by a very simple model: coop, finding items, and perfecting your character.
It sounds like perfecting stuff is boring in D3. It sounds like the auction house sucks and takes away from the inherent fun of the previous Diablo model: find shit, trade shit. Now you just buy things straight up and there's nothing else to it.
Also, I can't agree with your assessment of the difficulty of PvE in Diablo 2. It was extremely easy to make a 100% unkillable hero. Max block, cap the 40% damage reduction, stack a bit of straight integer damage reduction, 20-30k+ defense, 90 all res, have a bit of HP regen. Pretty easy as a barb, even easier as a paladin. Other classes couldn't really do it, though. You wouldn't die to anything. Lister really wasn't difficult to deal with in Hell with really good equipment. As I recall the only monsters that were an issue whatsoever were the wisps who might spawn with conviction or something; those guys could one shot you -- so you just put a T-gods on when running around the WSK. It took a bit of swapping gear out but wasn't hard and wasn't even necessary if you had the afore mentioned gear; I bring out T-gods just to point out that even without the best equipment ever it was possible to swap things around for each area of the game to become basically (selectively) immune to the monsters there. Another issue was in the CS when the chaos knights might iron maiden a spinning barb but that was a pretty isolated problem. What obesechicken was talking about above is simply not an issue when maxed out, and since we're talking about maxed out gear and how it affects end-game PvE, that's relevant.
Again, having not played D3 I might be wrong. Is the gear far easier to find? Are you saying that the hero skills themselves contribute to this problem moreso than the gear, which compounds it? It sounds like the game IS oriented in a gear-centric way (it'd be dumb to change that model for a Diablo game) but clearly the way it's been implemented is not enjoyable.
All I can contribute is that from a player who played D2 for years and years the thing that kept me going (and was true for a lot of people I knew) was finding cool shit and then trading cool shit. After we got infinite HRs and I botted (sadly) perfects of every valuable unique (eye, coa, etc), I turned to finding the best rare fools stuff for pvping. Pvping was the next step after becoming ultra rich and PvE being boring as hell. The search for perfection; there was always a next step to be taken to get closer and closer. Crafting the perfect FCR amulet, finding perfect +hp or +fhr skillies, perfect anni, perfect torch, perfect fools items or +6 orb wands, finding perfect FCR rings, rolling the perfect spirit, etc (you get the point). Does D3 not have this? I think I recall reading that PvP isn't even out, plus it's like a separate thing so you can't just go into any game and start killing one another. PvP was the thing to do after you were geared out to the point that PvE was exceedingly easy. Will that be the same for D3?
Another thing that occurred to me is that the social aspect was quite important for D2. D2 of course used the old Bnet chat channel buddy list system. D3 is different in that too, isn't it?
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On July 01 2012 01:02 Ganfei2 wrote:
Please play the game before commenting..... You're jumping to conclusions about how D3 works from secondhand, extremely biased sources.
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Your post is completely worthless. I admitted my ignorance of the game, and mostly talked about Diablo 2. I didn't draw any conclusions about D3 that were not prefaced with "I may be wrong" or "correct me" or something of that meaning and I invited those with knowledge of the game to further inform me. Either respond constructively or don't bother making such an unhelpful post in response to me. Thank you.
Sorry if you get "offended" but your response is pretty much the most aggravating way possible to respond. People who simply reply "you're wrong" and do not explain why are very irritating.
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On July 01 2012 01:19 Ganfei2 wrote:
Your post is completely worthless. I admitted my ignorance of the game, and mostly talked about Diablo 2. I invited those with knowledge of the game to correct me, and asked questions as to the pvp and pve comparison. Either respond contstructively or don't bother making such an unhelpful post in response to me. Thank you.
What use is your extensive knowledge of D2 in this discussion? The game in question at Treehead is discussing, is D3, using D2 as parallels. Tbh, it seems more like a brag post than anything constructive.
Ok some points then:
Perfect items haven't been rolled, or rolled in very limited quantities. Think it's boring? Of couse, when bots aren't doing it for you.
Auction house sucks? Try it before talking. It was very well received, beyond Blizzard's wildest expectations.
PvP hasn't come out so absolutely no one knows how it'll be implemented.
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On July 01 2012 01:02 Ganfei2 wrote:
I can't agree with your assessment of the difficulty of PvE in Diablo 2. It was extremely easy to make a 100% unkillable hero. Max block, cap the 40% damage reduction, stack a bit of straight integer damage reduction, 20-30k+ defense, 90 all res, have a bit of HP regen. Pretty easy as a barb, even easier as a paladin. Other classes couldn't really do it, though. You wouldn't die to anything. Lister really wasn't difficult to deal with in Hell with really good equipment. As I recall the only monsters that were an issue whatsoever were the wisps who might spawn with conviction or something; those guys could one shot you -- so you just put a T-gods on when running around the WSK. It took a bit of swapping gear out but wasn't hard and wasn't even necessary if you had the afore mentioned gear; I bring out T-gods just to point out that even without the best equipment ever it was possible to swap things around for each area of the game to become basically (selectively) immune to the monsters there. Another issue was in the CS when the chaos knights might iron maiden a spinning barb but that was a pretty isolated problem.
Here's the difference in what I'm saying. It sounds to me like you're saying this:
"When I have my pick of well-rolled unique gear that I've been gathering for years and have a stable internet connection against enemies I've fought so many times that I never have to think on my feet when they spawn with any combination of mods - that I have minimal amounts of things I need to do when I play through D2."
No one is at this point yet in D3 - the game is only a few months old. I never got to that point in D2 - so you may be right. I found 10% damage resist/75% elemental resists (with one or two 90+) pretty hard to come by. What I'm describing is not the end point of the gear curve, but the way it slopes as your gear progresses (which is to say, heavily early on, and still pretty heavy later). I'm NOT saying perfect gear in either game is better or worse or even comparable - I'm saying it seems like characters are more able to die with moderate gear in D2 (moderate meaning decent rares, not uniques/legendaries/perfectly statted rares), and I feel as gear progresses up from moderate, better gear makes it easier faster than it ought to.
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If you think it was hard to survive in d2, you've never played a well geared hammerdin. I have one on a private server (no dupes, no botting), and with max block/max res/2.5k life after bo/hammers flying around stunlocking everything, there are very few encounters that even hurt me. Basically, only bad Lord de Seis spawns and some bad Gloam/Doll spawns have any chance of killing me.
But it's still so much fun.
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On July 03 2012 01:45 theonemephisto wrote:
you've never played a well geared hammerdin.
I haven't, in fact - especially the well-geared part. That not withstanding - my point was that this is not particularly applicable to the discussion, since "well-geared" part has a different meaning after 10 years of D2 than it does in the few months of D3.
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EPT
