I’m not being sarcastic, I’d like to know. I haven’t made it to inferno yet though, so likely I might not understand some things, but I know enough about the game to get the gist of the difference, right?
For example, it looks like there is a difference in terms of the rewards. Is it a failure of interesting items popping up in inferno vs D2? Is it a fundamental flaw with the game, or is it something that a patch can easily fix?
Ok. Fair enough.
This has been discussed to death on the intertubes though so I’ll give you the short version.
In D2 once you beat Diablo on the hardest difficulty you could (and did) continue to play and play and play trying to complete sets of gear and/or make your guy a little more powerful. Though you may not have gotten perfect gear to drop every time you played at least you regularly got incremental upgrades, however slight, to make you feel like you made progress with your character whenever you played. The items also had a very wide variety of affixes that boosted skills directly or added cold/fire/posion etc… to your weapon.
In D3 once you beat Diablo on Hell mode you are very limited in what you can actually accomplish. Item drops that help your toon improve are virtually non-existent in Inferno. Set items almost never drop and when they do they are about as worthless as the legendary items, which also almost never drop. Recipes to craft gems are as rare as winning the powerball so most of us are stuck with Flawless Square gems unless we want to pay massive gold prices for better gems on the AH. Items that drop in Inferno typically wouldn’t even be useful in Hell let alone inferno difficulty an the affixes are all totally generic and roll horribly 99.9% of the time with things like 200INT on a Mighty Axe or a Wizard Hat with 200 STR etc…
There is nothing to keep a Diablo fan playing anymore in the end.
imho, the problem is the lack of an item sink big enough to cover the ones caused by the auction house. you get exactly what you want without the intermediary upgrades. Diablo 2 kept you stringing along for a long, long time because it simply took a long, long time to get the equivalent item you might find in seconds on the AH for a mere 40-80k. if you’re rich you could even get the perfect gear, something which would have taken a long, long while to collect in Diablo 2.
that is a difference between the endgame in Diablo 2 and 3 - the length of their grind.
i’m quite sure a casual player can afford 80k.
In high-level D2 play, drops that would directly help your character were quite rare, too. And to complete any but the lowest-level sets, your only realistic recourse was trading: I doubt that anyone ever completed any of D2’s class-specific sets purely through their own drops, for instance. You never grinded to find items that would help you directly; you grinded to get items that you could trade for the ones that would help you directly. The only difference now is that trading is a heck of a lot easier than it used to be, since the auction house has moved the game economy beyond the inefficient barter system.
This just means that people are setting their prices too high. Eventually, the market will figure that out, and start pricing things more sanely again. And guess what? You’re part of the market, so you can do your part in that. If you want the items you find to sell, you need to price them at a point people are willing to pay. It’s irrelevant that that price is so much less than what everyone else is charging, if everyone else isn’t making any sales.
I myself stopped playing before reaching level 60, but based on my experience and what I’ve read:
Inferno contains a lot of “enrage” timers - i.e., if you don’t kill the enemy within a certain amount of time, it’ll enrage, gain a ton of damage, and basically become unkillable. This means there isn’t any slope of difficulty anymore, you can either beat a monster or you can’t. Thus lots of people will get stuck in one Act of Inferno, unable to proceed until they finally get the gear they need.
The overall question of “can you beat it or not” is almost entirely gear-dependent. There’s no class that can proceed without awesome gear, like the Sorceress or Necromancer in D2.
It’s much more difficult to consistently find better gear because bosses don’t have a good chance to drop uniques and sets as in D2. I know the design philosophy over having boss runs be useful or not has been contentious, but at the end of the day, I think most people would agree getting gear from boss runs is more fun than getting gear from the auction house.
I think there are some other problems that killed D3’s longevity, such as:
And lastly, as a quick answer to your sarcastic questioning about the complaints - D2 provided many (hundreds to thousands) hours of entertainment. Dungeon crawlers are intended to be like this - it’s not about playing through once, it’s about playing through over and over and over again, constantly finding more gear, etc. D3 fails miserably on that account, so while you can say “well I played it for 40 hours and had fun, that 's the same as the $60 I spent on this other different genre game” in terms of expectations of the person buying it, it failed miserably.
I think PVP will be fun. However, in hell and inferno, the constant dying for shit drops is not worth it and an exercise in frustration to me.
The problem is that there are a half-dozen games coming out in the next few months that are going to be a hell of a lot more fun than trying to manipulate AH prices in D3. I’ve got maybe 50-60 hours of play time in and I’m done with D3; I’ve got over 600 hours in Skyrim and I’m still playing. There just isn’t that much to the game to make it consistently interesting to me.
I gave it up about two months ago. I plan to go back and get each class through Normal, but everytime I think about picking it up again, I just go ‘meh’ and do something else.
The game’s too tactically and strategically flat to sustain my interest on that side of things, so all it has to offer is the grind for goods - and while I haven’t hit the endgame point where that becomes completely useless, upgrades are still pretty thin on the ground for me.
I haven’t played D3 (and probably don’t intend to) but the fact remains that people are still playing D2. That’s a big deal, how many years later? And I hear lots of complaints about D3.
I can’t say for sure, but it certainly seems like a different kettle of fish.
I stopped playing… wow, about a month and a half ago, now. I have a really addictive personality with this sort of stuff, but it got to the point where I was just getting really frustrated every time I logged in. I won’t say that I regret the 100+ hours that I spent on the game, but I doubt I’ll be back before it gets an expansion.
I was lucky enough to be ahead of the power/gear curve for most of the time I was playing - I had completed almost all of Inferno before the repair cost nerf, I have good enough gear to farm Act 2 and to be mostly secure playing in Act 3 - and it still felt like a chore. The fact that it takes 6+ hours to get a new character into Nightmare and to even start having fun is another big drawback, as someone who likes alts.
I don’t think it’s a bad game, but compared to the expectation level that D2 established, it was a massive disappointment.
Personally, I’m still finding the actual Act I Inferno end area pretty fun on a purely tactical/twitch-game level. I’ve definitely hit the wall in terms of gear upgrades - at this point, seriously improving any of my gear will cost in the 5 to 10 million gold range, which is maybe a month or more of grinding. I can get some incremental improvements (as in +10 INT, +10 resist all) at a few slots for half a million or so, but why bother at this point?
I do think that the skill system was a miscalculation on their part.
Yes, it means that it’s easier to switch your character’s abilities around and removes the penalty of a “bad build”. But it completely guts one major replayability element that the hardcore really, really wanted.
And it was a miscalculation because it’s the hardcore that drive the game past the first few months, and the casual Diablo players aren’t going to continue to play anyway, so the impact of “bad builds” wouldn’t be such an issue in the community.
One big difference was that Diablo 2 was never actually hard. You could play the way you wanted, not just get forced into doing one specific way or get destroyed.
I dunno… I definitely tried out some character concepts in D2 that just simply didn’t work, and I play my D3 demon hunter completely differently than anyone else I’ve met. If anything, I’d say that D3 allows more flexibility in that regard, since all damage being based on your weapon means there’s no such thing as “bad skills” any more.
Id add in lag, as in I know Im playing a different game to someone closer to the servers, and loot variety.
Ive never even seen a set item before I gave the game away. Never saw a fun item either, like multi shot crossbows either - your attack is essentially identical regardless of the item.
They hardcored it to the point your average person will say screw it, and has. They may improve the game balance, but once people are disillusioned with a game, its pretty hard to get them to take a second go at it.
Particularly when your character has all red armour, and you cant be stuffed going to the work of getting the gold to fix it again which was my exit point.
As a way of ensuring people leave and dont come back, they cant do much better than that. Its almost like they didnt want people to return.
Otara
I have played maybe 300 hours or so total with a barb in act 4 inferno and a wizard in act 3.
The main source of enjoyment for me is progressing the game, questing, etc. Finding items are great but only to the extent that they help me progress. I didn’t use the AH until I couldn’t progress any further. When I got to inferno, it was a massive gear check. Basically everything you need to do well in act 1 doesn’t drop until act 1 so when you get there it’s a death factory.
I farmed act 1 for some time and finally was able to do well enough to pass it. Then Act 2 was the same story all over again. No way in hell I could take a single boss pack. That meant I had to go back to act 1 and do runs there. Over and over. And over and over. Lots of them. I finally got to the point where act 1 was pretty easy. Repeat the same for act 2. Act 2 is now pretty easy and given I’m using the most overpowered build for barbs (double tornado), I find it not that hard. Act 3 however, I get killed by normal trash mobs. The game is setup so that as I move further and further, I feel weaker and weaker. I want to be stronger.
Most items are just crap. I dont even bother picking up rares that aren’t lvl 60+ because they are a waste of time. I immediately salvage legendaries for the materials to save inventory space. And with the ridiculously low level cap, I can go 10 to 12 hours of game play with absolutely no progress. No new items, no new experience, no progress. Not quite sure why that’s rewarding. At least in D2 there was experience towards a higher level. That’s not that fun.
4 player max games. Really? You can’t even have a game with 1 of each class. There are serious disincentives to playing in a group, even with 2 people. I want to play with my friends but it’s more efficient to solo. D2 was a theorycrafting game to min/max your character. To min/max in D3, you play solo. That is a major fail.
Ultimately though, it’s the gear check. To get the gear you need, you need to pass the point you’re at. And even then, the gear will never drop. That overshadows the lack of build diversity and lack of incentive to replay. In D2, I had several builds of the same character to do different things. And past inferno act 1, everyone needs the exact same gear, mainstat, vit, all res. The only way to really boost your dmg is going to be crit chance and crit dmg as well. Anything that doesn’t have that, is worthless. And you need life on hit because of some stupid 80% inferno penalty for life leech.
And yes, I still play most nights for about 2 hours because I still like the game, but if 1.04 doesn’t fix some major issues I think that’s it for me.
I admit I was wondering why they didn’t ad whole stages to each difficulty. That would really keep people coming back: add some specialty areas for each class, as well as new plot elements and which expand or alter, but don’t contradict, the basic plot of the first runthrough.
This would greatly increase the variety available without really making the game that much more complicated to make. Blizz, however, seriously has a problem with the slows. There’s perfectionism, and then there’s insanity. When I look at D3, I start wondering how, exactly, this took so long to make. There’s simply not enough there, there.
I am a HC fiend and, as my characters aren’t twinked out, I have been loving the roller-coaster thrill ride through the acts up to level 60 and Act4 Hell. However, now I have hit the wall. Rather, I should say I have hit the wall before the wall. I need to farm Hell just to be able to farm Inferno Act1.
Rather than repeat what everyone has already said, I’ll just say that my playtime has waned significantly, and if some recent patches don’t majorly liven things up, I don’t know if I’ll be able to find the motivation to play more. It’s a shame too… I really wanted to finish Inferno HC, seeing as I beat D2 hardcore in high school… Kinda a nostalgia thing, you know?
I was purely HC in D2 as well, though that game mechanic for my playstyle lent itself better to HC play than D3. I still have the urge to play HC, but after going through to Act 4 in Inferno, I dont think that will ever happen. I still play the same way, minimizing deaths and not pushing content I’m unable to handle, but the cheap deaths and spike damage to me are insurmountable. That and I dont have the time I once had to grind for gear.
I think I could safely complete Hell difficulty in HC, but beyond that I think it would be impossible given my time constraints.
But the question is…why should they CARE? They’ve already sold you the game. At this point, unless you’re spending money on the RMAH, you’re a liability if you continue to play because you’re using server power.
It’s not in their best interest to have hardcore people “drive the game past the first few months”. It’s in their best interests to sell you another game or an expansion pack, or have you go back to playing WoW in September.
The only benefit they reap from you continuing to play their game is that MAYBE it will result in more hype for D4 in 2020. Maybe.