JTippetts

wow...

Nytegard, on 23 May 2012 - 07:39 PM, said:

I was L43 at uninstall, all my eq except sword and ammy were still pre L27 stuff, sword was L33 ammy was ( I think) 31. I was going for DPS on weap (obviously), Int and Vit. After those three, Magic Find. I was up to probably 900 dps after the sword upgrade, about 3800 life, and had maybe 26% MF. Mind you, I was doing okay. Really, really okay. In the entirety of Normal, I died a single time (it was a lag bump). In Nightmare, I never died. Never had to retreat from anything; a bit of kiting, maybe, but if I saw a pack I took it down and moved on. I was clearing maps through Normal; through Nightmare I wasn't fully exploring but I was hitting most optional branches.

Now that I'm thinking about it, though, that fact right there should have bothered me as well. Why was I clearing Nightmare so smoothly in such sub-par gear? Is gear really not necessary at all, and that's why I wasn't getting anything?

One (somewhat disconcerting) side effect of this D3 interlude has been a resurgence of interest in the ARPG branch of Goblinson Crusoe. Not sure how I like that, but there we are...

swiftcoder, on 23 May 2012 - 08:24 AM, said:

Not odd at all. RNG. I get drops, but they tend to be bad stats or unusable. Mighty weapons, barbarian belts, stuff like that. I did finally upgrade my weapon in Act 3 this morning. (To a big-ass sword. *sigh*) and my amulet to something with pretty good Int and MF. But the vast majority (ie, everything but sword and ammy) are all sub-L27 equipment.

What I find odd is your curious claim that you get Legendaries every few minutes. Very odd. Either the RNG gods have a weird, stalky crush on you, you have god-like MF, or you're exaggerating. Greatly exaggerating, based on what I've seen of posts on the forums about the frequency of legendary drops.

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I'm trying to understand this statement, but I can't. Which ones are melee skills again? The Chain Lightning, perhaps? You know, the crackly stuff that arcs all the way across the screen. Maybe it's the Arcane torrent? You know, the other one that I have that arcs across the screen? Surely you don't mean Magic Weapon or Sparkflint; those are pure damage increases. Perhaps it's the Wave of Force (the skill you so helpfully suggested I take just a couple sentences later). So, I reckon you think it's Diamond Skin I shouldn't take. You know, the one that helpfully lets me stand and channel while soaking hits from mortar mobs. Yep, sure that's a melee-only skill. Wait, exactly what is the difference between melee (stand and swing) and arcane torrent (stand and channel) again? Maybe I'm a baddie, but I just don't understand exactly what you're criticizing me for, here. Diamond Skin soaks damage; for a guy that wants to stand in one spot and channel Arcane Torrent, I'm having a hard time understanding exactly why you would have a problem with that.

I could conceivably see using Frost Nova in lieu of Diamond Skin, but to me it's apples and oranges; the rate of killing isn't any different. And having Diamond Skin on my toolbar gives me a good oh shit button against mortars who might be out of range of nova when the stuff hits the fan.

Still, that's one skill that arguably might be best for a melee. Still not sure what you meant by two.

At any rate, it's all an academic exercise anyway. I uninstalled the client at lunch today. I won't be asking for a refund or anything, though. It just might happen that Blizzard eventually patches this thing and gets it out of beta state, at which point I'll give it a second chance. But as it stand now, Act 3 Nightmare is my ending spot. It's for the best anyway; it's been cutting into my Goblinson Crusoe development.

I'm starting to really see the shortfalls of the skill system. Halfway through Act 2 Nightmare, and my character hasn't "changed" since Act 3 Normal. Let me explain.

In D2 (I know, everyone is starting to get tired of how D2 was the boss; and yes, D2 was far from perfect. And yet, I still play it to this day.) there were always incremental changes to your character. You get a level, you get a point to make a skill just that little bit beefier. You find a new item, maybe an amulet with +2 all skills. Whatever. There were constant changes occurring to your character.

Well, in the absence of any usable loot drops at all since A3Normal, and the absence of any rune unlocks that interest me, there has been approximately 0 character progression. Sure, there have been the small stat increases with levels, but those haven't been at my choosing. I have not been able to do a single thing to change my character by my own decision in the last probably 10 hours of gameplay. Maybe more.

Rune unlocks: I like the ones I have. Arcane Torrent + Disruption, Chain Lightning, Magic Weapon, Familiar+Sparkflint, Wave of Force (or Fus Ro Dah, as I like to call it), and the ubiquitous Diamond Skin that every Wizard has to take. (Wait, tell me again how we won't be required to take any one spell, but can choose whatever spells we want?) So, effectively, there has been 0 progression with my character for quite a few levels and several Acts. I'm fine with my current choices, and in fact I will be fine with my current choices for quite a few levels to come. In truth, I could see myself using this loadout for the remainder of the game, possibly with the sole change of taking Arcane Orb once I get to the kite-fest that is Inferno. (Which infuriates me because I love Arcane Torrent. I love the way it feels, the way it plays. The fact that I won't be able use it anymore because I have to kite rather than stand and channel just, frankly, pisses me off.)

And the fact that I already have the skill loadout I want to use for the rest of the game is depressing to me, since the only way my character is going to change now is if equipment drops. No more incremental, skill-point based increases. And I have yet to see any good item drops In Act2NM. No, I won't check the auction house. Buying my way to I Win equipment is not why I play Diablo, never will be. But apparently grinding my way to it isn't going to happen either. And I certainly won't be crafting one. I have yet to actually use anything I have crafted, outside of the sole exception of a wand I used around L9.

And let's talk about equipment again, shall we? As far as I can see, the only modifiers that make a bit of difference are: weapon DPS, main stat (in my case, Int), vitality and resistances. Weapon DPS is boss and king, god even. You want to kill things fast enough that they don't pummel you? Drop whatever crummy weapon+offhand you have and find the highest dps axe/sword/bow you can. Anything else on a weapon besides DPS is a second-class citizen at best. Think your Wizard should use spellbooks and wands? You're wrong, he should find the biggest-ass axe he can find. A wand+spellbook is only going to gimp his DPS.

The only "customization" of your character allowed by the current item system is choosing whether to emphasize your main stat or vitality, but by all reports you shouldn't emphasize vitality over your main stat since regardless of whatever vitality you have, you're going to be one- or two-shot in Inferno anyway, so you might as well just beef your damage since having a big health pool doesn't help you kite any better. So the much-vaunted character customization, it turns out, is actually quite a hilarious joke. I honestly think Blizzard has been trolling us all along.

At this point, I'm feeling a sort of sick dismay about this whole game. Yes, the core elements of combat are still fun. But I can see the end of the fun screaming toward me at a frightening rate. Already, logging in feels a bit like a chore. Slog through the story again (and why, oh why, do we have to roll back the story if we want to go back to different spots along the way?) hoping to finally, at long last, score an equipment upgrade. Collect a whole bunch of worthless items, salvage them, have the blacksmith craft something, have it end up with a whole bunch of +Dexterity and increased pickup radius, have the blacksmith shred it, go back to grinding. Ooh, level up! Useless Rune unlocks. Other Useless Rune unlocks. Mildly Interesting Rune unlocks, but I don't really see a way to work it in without changing my entire playstyle away from something I really enjoy. Try it anyway for awhile, end up going back to what I had before. Slog some more.

I remember reading an article somewhere about the psychology of reward systems and schedules in games, and I think a large part of my dissatisfaction has been the complete and utter lack of a worthwhile reward in over 10 hours of playing. The only rewards have been of the visceral variety: the splat sounds of a champion pack successfully taken down, the whirs and clicks and clings of loot hitting the ground (followed up by the depression and frustration of finding it to be simply shredder fodder). There have been absolutely no longer-term rewards. At all. Story progression? This is Nightmare, I've already seen the story. Character progression? Heh. Heh heh. Player skill progression? It's become a routine. I'm already pretty good at pushing the right buttons at the right times to take down whatever packs might come my way.

My honest prediction is that I will probably make it to Hell difficulty. Probably in the next day or two. (And that, too, is a depressing thing. I haven't exactly been playing for hundreds of hours. and you'll recall that my equipment is shitty. I can remember it took me quite a bit longer than this to unlock Hell difficulty in D2. It feels like difficulty-level progression is just being handed to me, without me working for it.) But once I reach Hell difficulty, I just don't see myself playing this game anymore. And I don't really see myself coming back to it some time down the road, either, the way I still occasionally come back to D2. This feels less and less like a Diablo game all the time, and it is becoming painfully obvious to me that the Diablo that I knew and loved is dead, that the original team is scattered to the winds, and that what Blizzard is producing in the absence might be an okay action game, but is most emphatically not Diablo.

Blew through Act 4 last night. It felt... unfinished. There were a couple special rooms that seemed interesting, but which in fact turned out to be nothing. No champions or bosses, no resplendent chests, nothing in them but standard old mobs. It's like Blizzard meant to populate them with interesting stuff, but ran out of time. (What ever happened to Blizzard's 'release when it's done' mentality? I'll tell you what happened to it. Activision.) One room had this big, square open space where tiles of a sort would fall from the sky. Stepping on the tile made it permanent, and a couple mobs would rain down on the tile like meteors. It was pretty cool, and I used the tiles to cross to an unreachable pedestal where I found.... just a regular chest. Had a couple pieces of white junk in it. I thought "surely that can't be all this neat room holds". So I solidified all of the tiles. Took me a bit of time, since it was, like a 5x5 grid of them and I had to fight the meteor mobs on each one. Completed them all and that was it. Nothing special in the whole room, just that one stupid chest.

Other rooms in Act 4 turned out similar. Meteor mobs raining down, sometimes shadow fiends spawning to mob me. But those other rooms didn't even have chests. They were just mob-filled dead ends. I did all the special branch rooms, and the only thing I got for my efforts were those two pieces of junk from the chest and some stupid achievement. Really?

From the start of Act 4 to the end, I felt like I was just being rushed along to the boss fight at the end. It started out okay, what with having to clear mounds of corruption to find some rifts, but once that was done it was all "okay, head out and kill the big D." It made me wonder why they even had an Act 4. They could have just gone with Act 3->cinematic->Fight Diablo! It was a shame, too, because the idea of fighting demons in the slowly-corrupting halls of heaven seemed pretty sweet to me. They could have done so much more with it. If they'd spent as much time on the second half of the game as they did the first half, it might feel like a finished game. As it is, beyond Act 2, it just felt like an unfinished beta again.

I started Nightmare difficulty and cleared the skeleton king. Outside one or two decent champion packs, it's been more or less identical to Normal. Sure, I have more abilities and sure, the enemies hit a bit harder. But the loot that is dropping is the same worthless crap that dropped throughout Normal. I haven't seen an upgrade in my equipment since Act 3 Normal, and even that wasn't an upgrade so much as it was "abandoning my wizardly-feeling wand and offhand in favor of a piece of shit bow because the bow has twice the damage of my wand+offhand." Another "really?" moment for me. Why do none of the rare wands I find have anything even approaching the damage of a crappy blue bow? Not even close. Why am I forced to pack a 2-hand bow around, despite being a wizard who should carry a wand and spellbook? Sure, I might get some other stats from the rare wands, but they won't make up for the DPS difference. When the best rare wand I can find is 36 damage and the crappy blue bow is 55.7, there just aren't any secondary stats that will make up for that huge gap. This game is all about killing stuff fast, so really the only stat that matters is DPS.

I kind of don't feel like playing anymore, which is a big departure from Diablo 2. When I finished Normal D2, I ended up clearing half of Nightmare mode that same night because I just couldn't get enough. Maybe it's just that i have more demands on my time now, maybe it's that I'm older and more of a stick-in-the-mud. But I just don't feel any compulsion at all to play further, despite the fact that the game in a way really only begins once you reach Nightmare.