I also found myself pleasantly surprised by the skill system. The beta really didn't do it justice. Only after you get a good, hefty set of runes to choose from do you really begin to understand that despite the lack of stat customization, there is still plenty of room for character building. The wizard, at least, feels like a deep and complex character whose gameplay changes radically depending on your skill loadout.
What do you mean with lack of stat customization?
A big part of your stats is in your gear (the majority if you dont have crap gear), which means you can do stat-customization at any time, and respec massively between every fight if you want, instead of a small incremental increase only on level up.
Normal mode was very very easy, I one-hit-killed almost everything the whole game with my little monk.
Nightmare feels like the part where the game actually starts, where every champion is harder then most bosses in normal mode, I'm about 2/3s through it now, can't wait for hell mode
I loved act 3 btw, such a nice atmosphere with the hordes of demons banging the walls
Nytegard: Sounds like you are confusing "legendary" with "rare"? The yellow rare gear is not very rare at all, just means its more rare then the normal magic gear and have more bonuses. I've sold tons of "rare" stuff to the shopkeeper...
Nytegard: Sounds like you are confusing "legendary" with "rare"? The yellow rare gear is not very rare at all, just means its more rare then the normal magic gear and have more bonuses. I've sold tons of "rare" stuff to the shopkeeper...
Nah, the legendary, not the rare. (I already have tons of rare, and was surprised that normal actually dropped legendary, but it does). Just started Act 4 (normal) and have 5 pieces. I have yet to sell anything to any shopkeepers (I've been salvaging all my pieces), so I'm severly short of money from being able to buy a tab for more storage space (and the artisans are upgraded as far as I can get them on normal).
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.
When the best rare wand I can find is 36 damage and the crappy blue bow is 55.7,[/quote]
Look on the AH. Search for int + vit + favorite extra.
Or you can farm for weeks and never win at RNG.
Another thing is tiers. At various level breakpoints, stats jump greatly. If blues are better it simply means you outleveled the old yellow by far.
Alternatively, start a character with different primary attribute. Then use one to farm for another. Since items that drop tend to be lower level, one will leapfrog the other in progression, but items looted will be much better for the one of lower level.
There's only 3 primary attributes, so by having two characters (or 3 if you wish), you are able to make use of 1/3 of looted items.
I agree act 4 felt a bit... short. Could have been a lot more epic.
Though at that time, in normal mode, due to it being so easy, I was insanely overpowered for the mobs...
Will be interesting to see how it feel in NM.
I think you should give NM a bit more chance, around the middle of act 1, stats started to rush, and I doubled my dps quite quickly.
Now, in the middle of act 3 NM, I have 4x the dps I had when starting NM.
Though, it still manage to get harder and harder, since the mobs scale up a lot quicker then normal mode.
Obviously you have to put a bit more thought into your build on the higher levels.
Now in act 3, even the non-elite/champion mobs of certain types start to feel dangerous.
In normal mode I felt like a 6th grade bully raiding the kindergarten.
I've been reading through the D3 general discussion forum. Sounds like I made the right choice in not getting this game. (I know, I know, forums exist solely for complaining retards and the fans who oppose them; but still...) The common complaints seem to be: bad/lack-luster itemization, requirement of cookie-cutter builds in order to be competitive at Inferno difficulty (wasn't the whole point of dumbing down the system to eliminate the cookie cutters?), lack of polish in the last half of the game, a general feeling that this entire game is designed solely as a thing to push people into using the real money auction house so that Activision gets their cut, single-player disconnects causing progress loss, inability to connect to play single-player, etc... I even saw one awesome little gem of a thread detailing a crash/exception bug. 10 years in development, and they're still getting actual C++ exceptions?
I've also been watching my brother in law play. The gameplay does seem fun; it's all action-y and boom-y, just like Diablo should be. But Rob was always 3 times the Diablo fan that I was, and even he can't stomach playing it for more than an hour or two at a time. I don't know what's missing, I haven't really played it. Just watched. But the magic seems to be gone.
I don't think it's that the magic is gone, I just think that the game hasn't really evolved enough to be seen as a true successor to Diablo 2. It's honestly hard to succeed when you have high expectations (ie. Deus Ex: Invisible War, Ultima 8, etc).
Quite honestly, it's refreshing to see a real money AH. If people are going to devote a portion of their lives to the point it's a second job, they might as well be allowed to make real money from it legitimately.
The always on connection is definitely frustrating, as I can't tell you how often I've been in the middle of a dungeon to lose connection and have to replay the whole dungeon all over again. It's even worse when you find an awesome item and lose it (hence why I teleport to town now after every major find). I guess another thing I would have preferred is if Blizzard wasn't so west-coast centric. (This isn't necessarily a Blizzard only problem, as many online games seem to treat the west coast as the center of the gaming world if you live in the USA). I don't think I could play HC mode as I've already died several times through warping and other connection issues (I'm lucky if my ping goes sub 200). I might as well join the European servers, as I'd probably have a better connection there.
requirement of cookie-cutter builds in order to be competitive at Inferno difficulty[/quote]
It's been less than a week. People who made it to inferno are the equivalent to top 1% of WoW raiders. Talking about balance is completely pointless right now.
If anything, I've found that it's very well balanced, but various points requires certain gear check, where it goes from "cannot be killed" to "moderately challenging". Either way, I won't be seeing much inferno myself, so these issues concern me as much as progression raiding in WoW (not at all).
I haven't really played it. Just watched. But the magic seems to be gone.[/quote]
Of course it is. We're what, 10 years older? If anything, it would be very worrying if things didn't change.
Quite honestly, it's refreshing to see a real money AH. If people are going to devote a portion of their lives to the point it's a second job, they might as well be allowed to make real money from it legitimately.
The issue I see with the concept in its current form is that it is only really viable for those who already make money from these sorts of games (aka gold farming businesses). The drop rates along with the 30% cut, $250 cap and limit to 10 auctions at one time mean only those with multiple account and multiple users will be able to generate any decent level of income from the game. It all results in a system that isn't really designed to give the long term player a way to make a decent amount of money from their playtime, but instead a system for the developers to get a cut from the already established gold farmers.
As for the real money, $250 is more than enough as far as a cap goes. To give an analogy, for the past several years, I've used StubHub to sells sports tickets. Similar model. Laws use to be in place forbidding scalping, but there would be several scalping companies (ie: to the gold farming companies). When the state I was in (along with several states around me) revoked the laws, I purchased season tickets to several different teams. The general consensus on the fans' forums was how this was going to be the death of the fan being able to attend games, and how prices were going to skyrocket. In the end though, ticket prices plummetted to the point where you could buy tickets far below face value. Open up competition, and prices plummet. Now, I'm not stating that this will affect the gold farmers money, rather, it will force undercutting of everyone that $250 won't be nearly as low a price as many people think.
As far as the cut, that's to be expected. And the drop rate should make it that 10 auctions hopefully won't be too little. If too many people complain, who knows, Blizzard might up the amount.
I don't see it as a way to get rich by any means. Just that you might be able to make a couple hundred, if lucky, over the course of a month or two. My biggest concern with a real life money AH is that when money gets involved, certain less ethical events tend to happen more often. These tend to attract people who make aimbots and other cheating devices seem like childs play in their sophistication, and also tend to lead to a revelation as to the real security of the company behind the product.
