Well, I really haven’t gotten around to playing much in the last couple weeks, and my character is only as far as the beginning of Act 2 Normal, so I don’t have a whole lot to judge by, but … D3 just isn’t sucking me in the way D2 did right from the start. I can’t really put my finger on “why”.
Maybe I’m just a “one game at a time” person. I’ve got D3 on both my Mac and my Windows laptop, and I’ve been trying out Aion, DDO, and Champions Online on the laptop (none of those have a Mac version), but I still end up spending the bulk of my time playing City of Heroes. Maybe getting used to the whole “big open world” aspect of MMOs has turned me off more linear games like Diablo.
I personally think it’s because of the lack of set items and skill points. In D2, you were constantly seeing direct improvements to your character, because you had to manually do it. In D3, that all happens under the hood. Additionally, you were getting set items right from the start. They weren’t good, mind you, but for my first run through, they were welcome pieces of equipment, because they were an improvement over the terrible items you’d normally find.
I think D3 is going to really shine down the road - when we can equip new characters with 100,000 gold from an established character. There’s also a ton of room for expansion. They can add new equipment (low level sets would make new characters more enticing to start), runewords, side quests, charms, etc. Remember D2 before LOD came out? Some of the best items were just 6-sockets with p-emeralds in them, and a Sigon’s shield with a p-diamond in it was standard kit. There’s far more possibilities right now in D3, and we’re still on 1.0.2.
There is no way to see how much people are actually paying for things on the Auction House. This makes it even harder to figure out how to rationally price your own things!
I like the game (it feels a bit like work right now but I suspect that will pass when I max level).
A better AH interface would be so much better. Its not like they don’t know how to let you sort by bid price or auction end time, they do it in WOW. Its not like they don’t know that auctioneer is one of the most popular mods in WOW. I’d even pay an NPC to keep track of prices in the auction house and to allow more sorting options, I’d even do some auction house quests to enable that NPC.
I don’t really like the targetting mechanism.
I like the fact that you can respec your character based on the situation. I wish they let you have standard specs so you can go from your multitarget spec to your single target (boss) spec to your survival spec without going through changing everything one skill at a time. It would help if also included a wardrobe function as well.
This one bugs me, too. I can search for what people are charging, but I have no clue how many of those are realistic prices, and how many are just going to get re-listed every three days.
Interesting - in City of Heroes, it’s exactly the opposite. When you post something, you can see a listing of the last several bids, but you can’t see what other people are selling for. So it’s “blind bidding”. The odd thing (though it’s handy from a seller’s perspective once you figure it out) is that the lowest asking price will sell first, but it will sell to the highest bidder.
The thing is you have to pay a “listing fee” to the AH, up front, and that fee is based on your minimum asking price. So you might see that people are bidding 50 million, but you don’t have enough cash to pay the up-front fee on a 50 million asking price. But it’s safe to assume other sellers are listing their items for close to that 50M mark. So the thing is to pick a much lower price, one you can afford the listing fee on. The item sells almost instantly, and boom you’re 50 million richer (minus the second fee you pay when you collect your money).
I like that idea. They really need to find a way to organically get gold and gems out of the economy because over years inflation is going to destroy this game for any newcomer.
Gold, they’ve already taken care of: There’s crafting, and the secret level, and repairs, and they take a 15% cut on all auctions. I’m not sure what plans they have for sinking gems and other items, though. My guess is that they’ll eventually create crafting recipes that use gems as ingredients.
You’re nuts if you think those things get rid of anything more than a negligible amount of gold. I pick up enough gold to repair all of my gear in the first minute out of town on every difficulty. No one is really crafting because there is no return on the investment.
On another note the official forums are on fire right now with talk of a 24 server rollback due to some duping or something. I will be pissed if that actually happens. I went from 48-57 in the last day.
I could be wrong, but I think the rollback was only targeted at the Asian servers, as that was the only server the duping worked on apparently. Again, I haven’t checked the forums since this morning, so I could be mistaken.
From my reading, some live streamer said it was real (duping). It created a blizzard forum hurricane which led to a post by Bashiok at 1am. This led to much speculation that it was real, photoshops galore, and perhaps legit screens. Personally I find it all very annoying, and any delay it causes in the release later this month of 1.0.3 makes me a sad barbarian.
re: repairs, they’re supposedly increasing/planning to increase the repair cost for level 60 gear by a significant amount (while lowering the cost of a lot of crafting).
They already know how to sink gold. Repair costs and potions (long lasting temporary buffs)in WOW keep you doing daily quests so you can afford to go raiding.
I just made it to Act 2 Inferno and I knew ahead of time it was going to be next to impossible, and was ready for that, but I wasn’t ready for it to be IMPOSSIBLE.
Specifically the enrage timers on the champ packs. WTF?? Why do they even exist? I’m slowly chipping away at a pack of bees, dying a bunch and paying my repair costs, and after about 3 minutes they have a skull and crossbones above their head and there is no way to injure them. They hit you with immediate death as soon as you show back up. I cant even wrap my head around the rationale for putting that in there. They are next to impossible to kill as it is, but the enrage timers basically end the game for you right there.
Is there a way around these things other than UBERGEAR?
I assume the enrage timer is there to keep multiplayer inferno from being trivialized by continual death zerging. My wizard does a lot of very slow kiting to kill any of the nastier packs and she’s still never run into it on her own, so it’s fairly lenient. Also, the enrage timer should reset if the group goes out of combat, so I guess they found NPCs or something to fight while you were dead?
Word of warning, the act bosses have enrage timers in Inferno, too.
This is still somewhat true. For lowish level (23 - 40ish) characters, Cain’s Laurels is simply an awesome piece of headgear. On the hardcore server, some of the guys I quest with got the recipe for all the Cain’s set in the first week after release and we’ve all become (in-game) millionaires by taking advantage of just how OP the helmets are by auctioning them and using proceeds to make even more. We’re not even charging all that much for them but making up for it in volume. Selling 20 hats at 60k a pop is way more profitable than attempting to sell 3 hats at 200k per.
One silly thing we noticed was some other players buying our gear cheap and trying to re-sell them at triple (or more) the cost. I suppose a few managed to do it, but if we’re constantly underselling them, it’s a losing proposition.
The auction house and attendant inflation/deflation mechanics and how the real money auction house affect the in-game economy is rather fascinating to study, in a pseudo-academic kind of way.
That said, it’s some major BS that you basically have to go to the AH to get set items. They don’t drop nearly often enough and they’re often outclassed within a few levels (the Cain’s set hat being a notable exception). And legendaries absolutely blow. I haven’t found a legendary that isn’t outclassed by a rare or even a better blue item. I guess Blizzard knows about that particular problem, but it should be addressed soon or legendaries simply removed.
I haven’t run into the problem of enrage timers, but I think it’s much less of an issue in hardcore, for obvious reasons.
Okay, I kind of hate the layout of the basement levels in Act 3; I get killed by a nasty pack and now I get to run for like five minutes through little twisty rooms to get back and fight for another minute or so before they kill me again; aargh.