Related to this, there seems to be a shortage of crafting for mighty weapons. I’ve gotten my blacksmith up to about level 6, and he’s got five different wand options he can make, and a similar number of magic sources, mojos, and monk 1h and 2h weapons, including rares for each, but he still only has one mighty weapon available.
I’ve wasted a lot of money on that blacksmith, rarely crafting anything that was useful to me. I’m at about level 34, which is somewhere around mid-artisan on the blacksmith… does it get better and become worth the investment later?
Is there a way to check gear in the inventory vs your companion’s?
I mean the tooltip, it always shows you a comparison vs your own gear, is there a way to show the comparison vs your follower’s current gear?
If it’s just not useful to you, you might still be able to sell some of it on the auction house. But yeah, it’s a gamble.
I feel that I’ve done better by buying what I need off of the auction house than by investing in the blacksmith. Maybe once I’ve hit 60 that will change. Currently a 57 DH in A2 Hell. There’s a craftable legendary 57 crossbow (Starspine) with dex, +arcane dmg and +ias as well as three randoms stats. By spending a little time over three days I found one with the stats I like that cost less than it would to level up my BS to level 8.
I’m going to respond to Candid Gamera on part of his issues, because he’s wrong, but there’s an important reason he’s wrong.
Namely, that no, there was no sense of character in Diablo 2. Your character was an arbitrary bundle of skills and stats, grabbed from some cookie-cutter build off the net, or else you jsut sucked. And even then, you re-rolled when the next patch came down and made your toon worthless.
You cannot have worthwhile permanent choices when the situation itself changes, often quite radically and repeatedly, over time. This was a huge issue in numerous MMO’s until they finally got the message and allowed cheap or even free respecs. Which people then felt compelled to use repeatedly.
Now consider that in the context of Diablo. The obvious solution is to avoid the requirement of ever needing respecs. There were NEVER permanent choices in Diablo 2. You simply rolled up the same character five times, more or less. Worse yet, the skill sytem, in not allowing you to respec or take back skill points, required players to make judgements and choices on skills they did not have, and could not understand… unless they were using a cookie-cutter build or were re-doing a toon, in which case Candid Gamera’s entire point goes bye-bye again.
You can argue that you’d like to see more ways to customize your character. I can understand that. But that has nothing to do with the situation changing. Blizz made it possible for your character to actually have a history past the last patch day. Instead, you’re asking for something quite new and different, which is not, and never was, part of Diablo. More to the point, the skill system has been “dumbed down” only if you somehow think that wasting player’s time is a worthwhile endeavor. Blizzard has ALWAYS targeted Diablo (really all of its games since Blackthorne) at a casual crowd of gamers, even before there was a casual games industry. They’re substituting incredibly varied numbers and combinations of abilities, any group of which might be more towards your preference, or combo better, or be more suited to the situation, for the “fun” “intelligent” “strategic” elements of building the same damn character five times.
They’re stopping you from doing anything you didn’t do before. They’re making it so you don’t have to do if you don’t want to. But by all means, play through the game with just six abilities if that blows your hair back. ust don’t tell me I’m enjoying a “dumbed-down” game for having fun trying out a half-dozen new combos without leveling another five Wizards.
Apart from that, your views on potions are complete nonsense. Dude, I’m try to give you every benefit of the doubt on this one, but you are not making the slightest lick of sense. yes, you want it done another way. Fine. I can even acknowledge making it an inherent ability might be a better method. But at the end of the day, you’re complaining over the way they did something rather than the result, and the way you initially proposed does not make any better sense.
My view is that people are bidding far too little, and setting buyout prices that are far too low. As the economy stabilizes, I figure prices will get to a point where blacksmithing, AH-ing, and simple farming will all be about equally viable.
Why the fucking hell are you mocking anyone at all?
For the life of me I cannot figure out what your claim actually means. D3 is a far richer and more sophisticated game than D2 ever was.
This has been mentioned as a gripe, and I don’t know if this utility has always been there and I (we) just missed it or they just patched it in, but I found today that if I hold down the Alt key, the names of all the junk on the ground that doesn’t have names over it show up again. Makes it much handier finding gems and magic items in a large pile of bodies.
it has always been there. you can also choose to set it to toggle, to appear only when you hold down the button, or to have it fade 10 seconds after you pressed it.
you should also turn on Elective mode if you haven’t already. i see no reason not to.
Here’s an ex-gripe, and I wonder if it happened to other folks. You know how you start to see your health drop precipitously, and you start spazzing out trying to mash the Q button to drink a potion, and instead the map overlay appears and when you try to click to run away from the mobs, instead you move the map around, and before you know what’s happening you die? Like an idiot?
You should go to Gameplay–Key Binding (or whatever) and remove Tab from “Display Map.”
I swear that spazzy “Drink a potion!” motion has killed me more than anything else; now that I’ve removed Tab from the map function, I’m invincible.
Right now it’s almost never worth using the jewelcrafter unless you’re dealing with the very high level recipes. You can buy most square gems (tier7 gem) for 300g, and rubies for 700g. It costs 500g to combine three tier 1 gems into one tier 2 gem, and the costs only get worse from there. I like the idea of combining gems thematically, but right now it only exists as a trap for inexperienced players to waste their gold.
I actually dealt with this by moving the potions to the “R” key, so I’m leaving my left hand on 1, 2, 3, and R, since I use all the number commands all the time and don’t want to waste time moving to them.
I really don’t understand why only a select few items can be crafted. I understand it’s supposed to replace gambling, but I could gamble on every item in the game except for some of the class-specific items. But now I’m stuck looking at 2-handed swords, and can only make a level 9, level 19, level 44 and level 60 sword. And the level 60 one isn’t even the highest DPS base sword.
Diablo 2 has x skills, where x is some integer. Diablo 3 has y skills, where y is some integer. x and y represent ‘breadth’ - the number of different options available.
Diablo 2 also has degree - you can choose the same skills again and again to make them better. You can put one point or five points or fifteen points. This would be ‘depth’.
So if you were to map out the ‘choice space’ that each game gives you, Diablo 3 would have y, (or, charitably, 2y since you get a rune on each skill) and Diablo 2 would have 15x. Some will argue that many of the choices would be meaningless - no one’s going to put that fifteenth point in Resist Fire - but there’s still a clear discrepancy.
Diablo II now allows for respecs, and has for some time. They’re uncommon – you only get 3, unless you craft some rare hell-level drops to get more. This allows the flexibility to deal with patches, while retaining the “your choices matter” feature that makes a character a specialist and not generic.
Nitpick – my Holy Fire Paladins put all 20 points into Resist Fire. But they are oddball builds, that’s true. 
Oh, smiling bandit, you really are a treasure. In that you should be salvaged at the blacksmith for a jar of magic dust to make something better. 
See, this is a matter of opinion. And opinions aren’t right or wrong. But I’ll tell you what - I’ll give you the same deal as Left Hand of Dorkness - you say whatever you want, and I’ll pay you no mind. I won’t chastise you for conflating fact and opinion, I won’t lambaste you for not actually reading what I said, or making grossly exaggerated assumptions, or anything.
Because this is not an argument. No matter how much you seem to want it to be.
True, there was synergy from that skill, wasn’t there? I’d forgotten that. I loved that ability to get families of skills that would give each other bonuses.. And I’d forgotten the maximum was 20 points, I had thought it was 15.
Well, you’ve picked a subclass with a LOT of passive skills that don’t get hotkeyed. But even a Bowazon, in not using Decoy, Slow Missiles, and Multishot/Strafe, a Bowazon is giving up a LOT of survivability and flexibility in the high-end game. I guess I won’t call it a BAD build, but it would work substantially better if you, well, used more than two skills.