I still say that the removal of the gold auction house was a mistake. One thing that it takes away from the game is the ability to make quirky builds. If I find something clever or fun I can do with one of those secondary attributes, in D3 1.x I could just scour the auction house for items with that secondary, probably for quite cheap, and try it out. In D3 2.x (or D2 for that matter), though, I just have to wait and wait and wait until that attribute happens to drop on enough items to make it work.
It wasn’t so much the auction house that was the issue, it was the balancing of the game around the auction house that made the game suck horribly at launch.
Well holy crap the expansion is hard! I made my way through Act V with my wizard, mostly on Torment I, and dropped down to Master (? - the one below T1) when I wasn’t making a dent. Wow, that was a steep curve! Then I hit Maltheal, and had to drop down two more levels to finish him off. I had hit level 70 by then, which certainly had something to do with it - but wow, it’s going to be tough getting back to where I thought I was.
Yeah, I feel like the stats have inflated a bit in RoS. Within a couple hours, my DPS and toughness had at least doubled, but after the mid-act boss, I started having serious trouble, and had to drop to Master.
I have a question (end game spoiler):
Is the wizard’s mentor supposed to be the sorceress from Diablo 2? It sure as heck looks like her.
As you level, the monsters level with you as you progress, so unless you farm a ton, your gear just isn’t keeping up. Thus everyone has to drop difficulty leveling through Act V.
My wizard is tearing up adventure mode on master at 70. I take almost no damage but my damage isn’t enough to move up to torment yet.
Good question, I wouldn’t be surprised. I only recently discovered that all of the heroes from Diablo 1 were in Diablo 2. The warrior went on to become Diablo (which I knew), the archer became Blood Raven, and the wizard become the Conjurer (the mini-boss in the Arcane Sanctuary).
Wait, really? Is that confirmed somewhere in canon?
And I’d heard that there was originally the intention to make the male barbarian in D3 the same character as the barbarian in D2, but that they had dropped that idea. And there’s a necromancer NPC in act 2 who talks of his mentor, clearly the D2 character.
Here’s the wiki page for The Summoner. There’s a good deal of inference being made, but it’s close enough for me. I think Blood Raven’s story is a bit more confirmed. I haven’t dug into the references, but I think along with in-game lore books, there’s outside canon stories as well.
Someone wrote up a big summary on Reddit a few months ago, and it kind of blew my mind.
OK, theorycrafting time. As most of you guys probably know, armor and resistances are both formulaic in how much % damage reduction they give you, and the formulas are designed such that the damage reduction approaches 100% as armor or resistance approaches infinity. The formula is in fact chosen such that there is neither diminishing nor increasing returns: Every point of armor or resistance increases your effective health by exactly the same amount. Dodge chance from dexterity, however, does not use this same formula, though. Rather, instead of a curve, it just uses three straight lines to give dodge chance as a function of dexterity. This does not have an asymptote, and so it’s mathematically possible to reach 100% dodge chance with a finite amount of dexterity.
OK, so far, all of this is old news, known since the game’s release. It’s never been relevant before, since the dex needed for 100% dodge is 8000, and that’s so far above what’s possible that it doesn’t make a difference, and in the range of dex that is possible, the straight lines of dodge approximate the curves of armor and resist. Except that now, between loot 2.0, paragon levels, and level 70 items, 8000 dex just might be achievable. And even if 8000 itself isn’t quite achievable, it still means that effective life from dexterity is going to end up being much larger than effective life from int or str.
Is this accurate? I haven’t seen any indication that any of this has changed for Reaper of Souls. If it’s still the same formulas, Blizzard is going to be discovering that it has a huge balance problem soon.
Except that there are a lot of un-dodgeable attacks, like pools of venom and such. And a build that pumps Dex and avoids armor and resist is going to get creamed once it hits those. But it is interesting to watch for - someone will figure a way to do it.
Adria is also the witch from D1’s Tristam.
You and I might have different definitions of “personalized builds”, then. Your examples of switching skills on the fly in reaction to different monsters or party members, to me, says that you’re not personalized - you just switch to whatever skills you need at the time.
Personally, my enjoyment from D2 came from working out unique builds. Yeah, the balance for most of D2’s life wasn’t the greatest, and there were characters like Hammerdins that were way better than everything else. But my own gameplay style was coming up with more unique characters like a Paladin using Charge and the IK Maul, or a Leap Barb, or a Poison Necro, etc. Not all of them were solo Hell viable, but they were fun to play and design.
In D3, there’s no sense of uniqueness because everyone can just switch their skills on the fly. On top of that, each character needs certain skills - a Barb, for example, is going to use 1 fury producer, and have 1 fury spender, and then some of the buff skills.
Balance was also pretty bad in D3 at first, as well. Going back to the Barb - your choice for a main attack was either Cleave or Frenzy because Bash was terrible (and Weapon Throw was a spender back then). The only viable choices for spenders were Rend or Whirlwind. And Inferno was so tough that certain passives were required - you wanna be a Monk, better grab One With Everything.
I know they’ve made a lot of changes since then and overhauled a lot of the skill system, I’m just talking about how it was on release.
I’ve seen very little pub on D3 since the expansion came out. It’ll be interesting to see if the good word of mouth on the changes Blizzard’s made is enough to get them back in the good graces or not of the public at large, or whether the overall perception remains stained.
Why don’t you just spend the coin and materials and have them changed as you like with the new NPC? That’s what I’ve been doing. You still need to roll on the new skill but if what you are looking for is on the list of possible changes you will eventually get what you want if you keep trying (though the cost goes up quite a bit).
One thing I’m finding is I’m constantly running out of money. Between upgrading my gems and swapping out gems in the armor I’ve burned through over 5 million gold this last weekend, and my adventuring isn’t keeping up with my gold output. I’m hoping that playing in Adventure Mode will help with that…I’ve only just started to play in AM this week since it took me a while to slog my monk and demon hunter (the monk was pretty easy, but the DH was a challenge getting him through on expert) all the way through the act V.
Well, finding non-elite gear on the AH was super-cheap. If you were looking for average level stuff with “Magic Missile +12% damage”, it’d cost you a couple thousand gold. Rerolling via the mystic to do the same will cost you many multiples of that.
True, and I’m gold strapped so it’s no small matter, but you can do it if you really want. I was able to reroll some of my socketed stuff and buff it up quite nicely…even buffed some of my green/orange gear to optimize what I had when it wasn’t exactly what I needed or had a stat that was useless that I could switch to something that works with my own character build.
I never used the AH that much…really, mainly I’d use it for low level gear for my alts as they were coming up or if I needed something specific (like bracers with all resist on them in approximately the same stats as what I had). I’m more than happy with the new loot system verse the AH, since I am getting on average an orange an act, giving me oranges to burn for mats…something I was highly reluctant to do before. I’m still having issues finding some of the more exotic orange mats though…I have tons of recipes with no mats to make them.
Absolutely agree with 2.0 being a decent trade off for the AH. You should check around Reddit and other sites - there are specific places to farm various legendary mats.
I haven’t used the Mystic yet because I don’t yet have the expansion (I have a hunch I’m going to get it for my birthday). How fine a level of control can you get with her? Maybe that will satisfy my itch for quirky customization.
And magnusblitz, I once made a D2 paladin named John Henry, who wielded the Steeldriver maul, and used Sacrifice as his sole attack skill. This hammer be the death of me, Lawd Lawd, this hammer be the death of me.
You can use it to change one of the attributes. There is a question mark key that let’s you know what you can change for the attribute you selected. Usually it’s in like kind…i.e. if you are changing a certain resistance type, then the top possibilities will be other resistance types and then other things that have something to do with resistance. It costs you coin and mats to do a change (orange and green items require higher level mats of course, usually stuff you get from breaking up orange or greens first), and after you change something you can only change that one attribute in the future (I think)…but you can keep trying (the price goes up for each try) to get what you are looking for. When you change something you get 3 choices from the larger list (one seems to be what it originally was). It took me 3 tries to get what I wanted on some bracers I had, but once I got it the change made a huge difference to the utility of the gear.
So, is there still any interest whatsoever in old-style hellfire rings? I’ve got three machines I wouldn’t mind burning. If I make the game, the monsters should be level 60, which would mean that we should be able to go through them easily, even in a high-torment game (does Torment VI guarantee drops?).
Oh, also, if anyone has any interest in an old-style Maximus (summon a demonic slave when attacking; good for an enchantress) or Fire Walkers (burn the ground you walk on), let me know. I have several of both, left over from a couple of boom-bust cycles I ended up on the wrong side of back in the auction house days.