Worth noting that I’ve poked around regarding the session ID hijack issue, and it seems mythical.
I will add as a gripe that the scaling seems odd on item tiers - Diablo II had the same issue, but it seems even more exaggerated. What’s the largest raw damage number someone’s found on a weapon - 4 digits? 5?
I am not so worried about trying to convince you. Not everyone has to like everything, and there are plenty of things that perfectly reasonable people do not like about D3. There is nothing wrong with not liking the skill system. But your characterization of it and especially of the D2 system is wrong on its face. You’re welcome not to step away from it if you are determined, but I would hate for someone who might potentially enjoy the game to draw the wrong conclusion.
You can get about 1500 DPS rare on a lvl 60 2-hander. Such a weapon comes with significant mods as well. If you want to lay about with a beast like that, either get lucky in Inferno or be prepared to spend 5-10 million gold at the AH. One way or another, that’s a lot of loot to chase. This may change as more people are able to play Inferno more reliably. But then the demand for high-end gear will increase, so it is not clear to me what will happen to the actual prices. I don’t even know how many people can actually buy an item for 10 million gold at the moment. Certainly fewer now that the inferno-farming Force Armor build just got nerfed.
No, opinions based on personal value aren’t right or wrong. The problem is that the reasons you’ve given for your opinion don’t make logical sense. I fully undersand that you don’t enjoy the Diablo 3 skill system as much. I don’t honestly give a damn. Your arguments as to why you don’t enjoy it are very bad ones. All you have to say is, “I like having a limited pool of points to choose from.”
It is an argument, just apparently not one you want to deal with. Fine.
However, if you want to criticize people rather than make arguments, go to the Pit. Your “anyone who disagrees with me or points out that I’m not making sense” is a poor show and rather passively-agressively unpleasant. I would also make the same suggestion to your opponent in this case, as I see no reason anyone needs to be mocked in The Game Room.
I’m also not terribly fond of people suggesting I be ground up into [magic] powder, but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you were trying trying be funny.
“Joy of item farming”? Item farming in D2 was like repeatedly hitting your hand with a hammer and occasionally missing. It would feel so good when you finally got a useful drop.
No kidding. The AH solves this problem nicely.
And I don’t see how it really stops anybody from item farming. Go knock yourselves out spending hours on end trying to farm some items. Nobody’s stopping anybody from trying.
I get it, though. Some people actually enjoy mindlessly grinding for days on end and re-building characters from scratch over and over. And I guess somehow the willingness to do so gives one D2 moral superiority points or something over other players.
Most of us don’t enjoy the grind or trying to keep score against other players. And Blizzard bet on the side that has greater numbers and financial resources.
While I did knock D3 and Starcraft 2 for the writing, they’re otherwise superior to their predecessors. And not by a small margin. A lot of the “cons” in CandidGamera’s list aren’t even considered cons by the vast majority of players.
Following on from Great Antibob, I wouldn’t make the case that the first two were flawlessly plotted and acted, but their spareness in terms of story and dialog definitely worked in their favor, if D3’s verbal diarrhea is any indication of what they were holding back until now.
I said this in the other thread, but I think the key to enjoying the auction house might be to both buy and sell, and to try to keep the two in balance. So you’re still farming for cool items, except now it’s items to sell, which means you can be happy when you get something that’s good for anyone, not just good for you.
I’ll gripe about one particular aspect of the visuals, namely, the lack of Acts 2 and especially 3 from Diablo 2. I freakin’ loved the aesthetic of that jungle, and I was really hoping there’d be another lush area. The forests of Act I in D3 just aren’t the same, and Act 2’s desert is so murky and hazy that it’s kind of ugly.
I know it’s basically a dark fantasy verging on horror (and in Act IV is definitely horror), but I wish there were some beauty in it.
That said, Act IV’s aesthetic is pretty gorgeous, so I’ll give them that. It’s still no jungle.
Well, there is the Dalghur Oasis, which is pretty jungle-ish. Though that’s only one zone, granted.
“Hey, I know we’re in a lot of trouble and all, but would you LOOK at that VIEW!”
Acts 3 and 4 work pretty well for me in D3 - I’d say the battle on the ramparts in Act 3 is probably my favorite - but the first two by and large fall flat. Some combination of the color palette, the lighting, the 3D, or all or none of that makes the various areas compare poorly to their analogues in the earlier games (cathedral vs. the cathedral in D1, outdoor forests vs the outdoor areas in acts 1 and 3 of D2, desert vs the desert in D2, etc).
My general feeling of dissatisfaction may be exacerbated by the fact that I have played significantly more of Acts 1 and 2 than 3 and 4, between having characters halfway through their difficulties and being on my third hardcore character.
Most of the character graphic design also feels ‘off’ to me in terms of size, but I’m pretty sure that is because I am playing at 1920x1200 and the field of view really needs to be zoomed out another 50% or so, but that isn’t an option.
I am 90% on board with the changes from Diablo 2 to 3, but I wish that there was a bit more I could do with the skills other than picking them from a list. Personally, I would have made skills also have levels of power like in the earlier game, but with a pool of points that increased with level and could be freely assigned and reassigned. It would allow for a bit more experimentation like I used to do in Diablo 2, but without having to worry about your character ending up as a useless waste of time if things didn’t work out (I know they added in respecs in a recent patch, but considering how many years later that patch came after the game was released, I’m not counting it). Although many of you seem to think that people only made characters that were cookie cutter builds from internet guides, almost all of my characters in Diablo 2 were only loosely based around the common builds. My personal favorite was my holy bolt paladin, which was weak in most areas, but could completely destroy areas heavy with undead, as well as heal other players like an MMO cleric.
The difficulty is also weird. Did they have so little faith in their players that they had to make normal mode so ridiculously easy? On my first character, I didn’t die once and only had to use a handful of potions. Nightmare mode is where you have to actually start trying.
As for the story, I am completely baffled about Leah being given the “person skeptical about the threat/prophecy” cliche. She’s living in a town that’s besieged by zombies and monsters, near the ruins of a village that was destroyed by demons, in a world that suffered a huge invasion from demonic forces a few decades earlier.
Normal is definitely much easier than D2’s normal was. Other than the bugs that shoot more bugs in Act 2, and Diablo himself, nothing really touched me. D2 had bosses like Duriel. Heck, I died 27 times to Diablo the first time I played D2.
Yeah, even without the fact THERE ARE DEMONS INVADING RIGHT NOW, it’s hard to believe that just because she wasn’t around 20 years ago, she completely disbelieves Cain’s “stories”. There are plenty of other people around who were there.
Unfortunately it’s just one flaw of many in the story. I don’t expect much story from a Diablo game, but I do want what is there to be solid. Instead we get cheese and silliness and moustache-twirling villains.
It is generally agreed that synergies reduced options, rather than increasing them.
Before they added synergies, you could spread out your skills however you wanted, but many of the skills, even at level 20, wouldn’t do enough damage or be effective enough to be useful later in the game or at the higher difficulty levels. After synergies, the bonuses made many more skills useful for the entire game, but at the cost of having much less freedom to decide where to put your other points. So they both added and subtracted your options.
My husband was hacked night before last. He changed his password immediately, and sent in a trouble ticket. We haven’t even received a “yeah we got your ticket” response yet. No, he didn’t have an authenticator, but he’s going to get one. The thing is, we weren’t even aware that was an option.
Even more odd, it was only his level 39 Nightmare character that stripped of everything, well along with the stash and gold, which affects all of his toons.
And finally, weirdest of all, we got email from Blizzard for the WoW account saying they had restored everything there. He hasn’t logged on there in forever, and didn’t even ask about his WoW account.
Bah, so nearly 30 hours later no response at all. He sent another message early this afternoon. Still nothing.
I have an authenticator attached to my Battle.net account for WoW (canceled my account back in Feb., though planning to come back for the next expansion), but I don’t think D3 has ever asked me for it. Forums, yes, and logging into my actual BNet account, but not to log into the game.
Well, here’s my gripe. I just dropped 100k on an item in the AH that never materialized. Of course I submitted a ticket and will probably get either the item or my money back eventually. But I could use the cash now.
You make a lot of assumptions about the preferences of “the majority” in your post.
Have you bought stuff on the AH before? It took me a couple of days to figure out that I had to go to the AH completed tab and tell it to send the item to my stash.