Are you going to play Diablo III: Reaper of Souls?

The Game Room
21

You would be selling gear to people doing easier content than you were, and buying gear from people doing harder content than you. For example Nightmare required you to be lvl 30 to enter, but you’d regularly get good drops for lvls 20-25 in Nightmare. While leveling you’d sell your gear to people who were less progressed than you, and buy gear from people doing harder content than you.

This largely continued through inferno, because there were a few powerful specs that could clear everything in relatively poor gear. Those people would then take the gear they didn’t need from acts 3-4 and sell it to people doing hell act IV and inferno act I. Only the people at the very top were getting upgrades through playing. Everyone else was getting gear by having it trickle down from above.

22

Which is exactly like it was in Diablo II.

23

There’s a vast difference in the amount of buyers and sellers, the availability of gear, and the cost of that gear due to the ease of access to the auction house. While theoretically you may do the exact same trades in Diablo II as you would in the d3 auction house, the vast majority of players won’t. Even the players who do trade a lot will tend to do trade more in high quality gear, instead of selling anything that’s better than average. The extra amount of effort you need to put in to sell an item is just not worth it the time investment.

24

What everybody else said.

25

I suspect there were many, many players of Diablo II who not only didn’t trade, but rarely or never went online in the first place. I was one of them.

I was excited for years about Diablo III. Then, I chose not to buy it due to it being always online. I refuse to reward a company for making an ostensibly single-player game that they can and will change at their whim with no recourse from me. (I know that now they say their focus was always on co-op, but that contradicts many things they said before it launched about how it was totally for single-players too. No game can serve two masters.)

26

Diablo II and III were both designed primarily as co-op, but playable as single player as well. Nobody ever claimed in either case that it was just as good for single as it was for co-op.

27

I’ll claim right now that D2 was just as good as or better in single player mode than it was in co-op.

28

I’m not sure how you can justify that, but I’d be willing to hear you out. Especially in later patches where it was nearly impossible to advance without a vast array of attack types, considering the amount of immunities that enemies would spawn with. And I definitely don’t see how teaming up could take away from the experience - unless you hated item-grabbers to such an extent.

29

Well, as usual, I seem to be the odd 'doper out. I liked D3, and will certainly buy the expansion. From what I’ve seen, it looks fairly cool, with some nice new features. I’ll have to tear myself away from Kerbal, but I think it will be a fun change and I’m looking forward to it.

(as the the AH, I’m pretty neutral…I used it to trade for gear, but I didn’t obsess about it or try and optimize my guy to the nth degree. If there was better stuff to buy and it wasn’t ridiculously priced I would…if not, well, not. I played the game to enjoy playing, and the only real downside IMHO was how steep the curve was going to nightmare level, but I understand they have fixed this…I haven’t played in a while so I don’t have any personal knowledge of this)

30

I enjoyed D3, also, and the only reason I might not buy the expansion is that I’ve a hunch a friend is going to give it to me for my birthday.

31

I strongly disagree, the auction house replaced the slot machine fun of item acquisition into the drudgery of working a minimum wage job to buy items. The game was balanced around the AH making it only real viable method of loot acquisition.

32

Just another voice saying that I’ll be buying the expansion on release day for sure, though I may not get a chance to play it until the summer. I don’t know that I loved D3 quite as much as D2, but I did end up really liking it and putting a few hundred hours into the game. I actually liked it more after taking a break: when I was initially playing I was progressed enough that I made some fairly serious money on the RMAH, which was nice but also made it feel way more like work than I prefer my games to.

33

I enjyoed D3 a fair amount and I played it for a couple months until I beat it on Inferno at which point the grind through Paragon levels just seemed pointless. Though I had good gear and managed to beat it, it wasn’t something I could do with great consistency, at least not cheaply, so I stuck grinding Acts 2 and 3 on Inferno to make money.

Why I stopped playing basically came down to three major problems. One was the RMAH. All it did was inflate the economy and it seems to go against a lot of the ideas that Blizzard had, for years, said they’d never do. I get why they did it, that they wanted to make some money off of the game, but it made playing the AH thoroughly frustrating for a player like me who wanted to earn it, but the prices were so inflated from people spending real money, or the best items weren’t even selling on the regular AH, that the grind just became painful. They need to leave the AH, remove the BMAH, and find ways to keep the economy in check with gold sinks like they did in WoW.

The second problem was with the horrible imbalances involved with the random elite monsters. Some of the combinations were just straight up brutal and, if I remember correctly, you basically had a time limit before they either hit harder or healed up, though I do think it got changed shortly after I stopped playing. Still, There were some that I’d run into and, playing a Monk, I’d end up having to do a whole lot of kiting if they had melee unfriendly combination of abilities, and so it would just take forever to kill them, and then they’d get that buff and I basically couldn’t kill them. As I understand, this got mostly or completely fixed, so maybe not an issue anymore, but damn if it wasn’t frustrating.

Third, I never liked that it was online only. I lost count pretty damn quickly on times where I’d have a brief hiccup on my network, and it would cause me to die, even worse was that it always seemed to happen when fiting an elite or a boss. With so many of the hardest enemies either being one-shot mechanics, or very nearly so, it was just too unforgiving. This is why I never played hardcore, because I knew I’d end up losing a character after a huge investment, not through a mistake, but because I got network lag. I get that they want to try to prevent cheating and all, but if I’m just playing solo, which was a majority of how I played it, why force me to play online? And even when I wasn’t solo, I was typically playing with real-life friends or WoW guild mates. Why not leave it optional like it was in D2, where you can play open if you want, and accept the possibility of hacked items and cheaters, or if I really wanted to have a clean game, at least I’d be accepting the forced online play.

Anyway, I probably would have picked the game back up if I could have played my toon with people who bought the console version. I still don’t really understand why they didn’t make that an option. Hell, I might have even bought the console version myself if I could have played it there rather than on my pc.

Still, I may play the expansion, if for no other reason than seeing the story, but I don’t know if I’d be willing to pay that much for it, especially since I got the original game free for re-upping my WoW account for a year. I might change my mind though, since the current WoW expansion is winding down. I guess we’ll see.

34

Y’know, on thinking about it, I think one of the main reasons that I liked D3 less than D2 is that it was less multiplayer-focused. In D2, you could have up to 8 players in a game, and most classes had skills which benefited your party members as well as you. In D3, though, you can only have 4 players in a game, and there are almost no skills which benefit party members.

35

Are they going to fix that obnoxious bug that requires Battle.net login for offline play?

No?

Then not only no, but hell no.

36

for me, the problem is not the drop rate nor the AH. it’s the items themselves. having everything tied to weapon dps and your primary stats is a mistake. where it used to be possible to get a slight upgrade easily over a wide variety of stats, now drops are entirely useless unless it had your primary stats and increased your dps. this also meant that there are lesser viable fun builds since anything that does not include your primary stats will cripple you.

i never understood the hatred for the AH. if you don’t want it to affect your gameplay don’t buy anything from it; and for a game revolved around finding loot, adding a real world value to the items you find is a nice bonus.

37

It’s because the game was designed around the AH with crappy drops, requiring you to buy things from it to keep progressing. The console versions that launched later had better drops since they had no AH to compensate. So use it or not, it affects you either way unless you get the console version instead.

38

And again, if they only had crappy drops, the auction house wouldn’t work.

39

Everything they changed from D2 was such a bad idea. Weapons DPS makes weapon dps the only stat that matters on a weapon, class having “main stats” makes that stat mandatory on any piece of gear. Both of those things completely killed the variety you could have in D2.

40

Sure it is.

What was the highest quality rune that you, personally, had drop in D2?