To be fair, the final boss of Act 1 is harder, but not a ton harder. I hate to bring MMO-speak into this, but it’s pretty appropriate since D3 took so much influence from WoW. It’s an easy fight if you don’t stand in the fire! 
The final bosses of the remaining Acts are all a decent step up from that even on Normal though; on my Normal run, I died about 15-20 times to those bosses, and a total of once in all of the other Normal content combined (solo Demon Hunter).
But you can, it’s under “change quest”. What I think you can’t do is play a multiplayer game with multiple difficulty levels, but any given game can be played in any difficulty level from “normal” to “OMFG!”
You have to unlock the difficulty levels first, though, right? So you’ll always have 12+ (guessing) hours of easy mode to get through for every character before you can get to the second difficulty.
BTW, part of my complaints about the game being too easy is because I’ve played 4 player coop. The game doesn’t scale up well. I played single player and it’s more challenging and satisfying, although still easy. The scaling is that mobs get 75% more hp per player that’s on the team, but their damage doesn’t go up, which means you just end up clicking them more but they aren’t much more of a threat, yet you do 4x more damage with more crowd control abilities too.
SP is just better, at least so far, which sucks because the whole reason I got the game was to play with friends. But with SP you actually have to start worrying about positioning and using the right abilities and managing your resources… in coop you just steamroll across the game no matter what you do.
Son of a… :smack:
Correct; you get it when you find the crown. I finally muddled through the game to that point and got town portal - at the next de-synchronization I tried it as a workaround, and sure enough, it worked! So that’s one less bit of annoyance at least.
I think I’ve finally figured out exactly what makes it a B+ game for me - it feels like the League of Legends guys made a Diablo knock-off. Dumbed down skills, online-only - really, only the use of the Diablo intellectual property sets it apart. I’m honestly not sure why they didn’t do a console release, since it doesn’t really take advantage of any of the PC’s features other than the mouse - add targeting, and you’re good to go.
If you’re a squishy, you can get hurt pretty bad if you fail to dodge his Sub Zero harpoon thingy while HE is standing in the fire. It’s winnable, there just isn’t a lot of margin for error (at least for a low-health character).
I believe that the 0% extra damage is Normal only. Other difficulty tiers scale up everything, and they scale faster (Inferno is nuts).
No, the skills aren’t dumbed down; rather, they require a slightly different playstyle from D2, just as the skills in D2 required a slightly different playstyle from D1. However, let’s go over the things that are the same:
-Different character classes, including a couple taken from D2;
-Isometric point-and-click interface.
-Randomly-created environments.
-Randomly-created treasure.
-Randomly-placed events and creatures.
-Stats (admittedly you don’t get to place them, but since where they were placed isn’t really an interesting choice, I’m not too concerned; gaming should be about making interesting choices, not about following an optimization guide, IMO)
-Choice among skills (admittedly your choices are specific to the moment, not to the character–but this results in more, not fewer, choices, and since gaming is about making interesting choices, I see that as a feature and not a bug).
Some folks have said that they wish Blizzard had left all game features exactly the same and just updated graphics. That’s fine, but that’s not what Blizzard decided to create. This isn’t a remake, it’s a sequel. Criticizing it for changing features from D2 isn’t a valid criticism, any more than criticizing The Empire Strikes Back for its failure to start with the destruction of a planet would be valid.
There is also a horodric cube recipe that gives you a respec so technically you have unlimited respecs.
My main gripe with D3 is that there seems no point levelling up the crafting skills when you can just buy the same or better items using the auction house. You could spend hundreds of thousands levelling it up and countless resources trying to get the right mods on an item or you can just visit the AH and get something better for a bargain. It seems to completely ruin the point of finding or crafting items ingame. You can spend money levelling up your gemcrafting skill or buy them off the AH at relatively cheap prices, in bulk.
I personally think they should have added bind-on-pickup status to crafted items along with a boost in power else what is the point?
Which way of doing it sounds like more fun to you? Choose that way and do it.
Providing additional choices for play is not, and will not be, a flaw in a game.
I figured out what was confusing me about Town Portal. You get it when you find the crown, or whenever you join a game that’s already past that point. So you could end up with TP immediately upon character creation, if your first game is a co-op one, but you won’t necessarily.
Which seems an odd decision to me: If you’re going to do it like that, why not just give it to everyone immediately? But I guess that’s not really a big deal, since a quarter of the way through the first act is pretty close to “immediately”.
Are the servers stable?
I held off getting the game because of all the ka-bitching that the servers weren’t stable.
My thinking is that the game is paced like a tutorial: they’re introducing new concepts bit by bit in order not to overwhelm new players. I certainly wouldn’t mind getting the town portal immediately, but the waypoints were so common that I didn’t really notice their absence.
Seem to be now; that was quicker than I expected. Only been bumped off once in two days.
I haven’t played a co-op game yet, so this may be moot, but in single player, don’t you learn Town Portal when you reach the first waypoint? The Town Portal takes you back to town, but there’s no D1- or D2-style portal waiting for you, just the waypoint, so it would be kind of pointless to give you Town Portal if you have no waypoints yet…
Only if you enjoy severely handicapping yourself for some roleplaying reason. The AH overshadows everything when it comes to loot, which is hardly surprising. What are the chances that I’m going to find something better than hundreds of thousands of other people have already found and put up for sale for a relative pittance? I realise some (or most) might consider that a positive thing but it seems to me the antithesis of what Diablo 2 was all about.
Then again I only played D2 in single-player which doesn’t really exist in D3. Perhaps multi-player in D2 was always like this.
Not that any of that matters because the EU AH has not been working for the last few hours anyway, heh.
There’s no portal that appears in the dungeon, but there is one in town, right next to your stash, and going back through it takes you to the place you portalled from.
I’m most of the way through Act 2 now and the skill system isn’t bothering me as much, though I still find it to be dumbed down. I have switched a couple of times, essentially changing from AOE type slashes with my Barb to single target stuff when I get to bosses. I’m playing solo BTW.
I think the lack of permanency in character builds takes away from the game for be because on D2 you would get into a multiplayer game and the PVP bell would ring and you’d get scared that someone was going to wack you and take your stuff. Now you don’t have to worry about that because once the best builds are discovered for PVP (when it launches) everyone will be able to just click a few buttons and be identical, other than some gear. That’s not fun. I want to be able to build my guy and live or die by my choices, and I want my opponents to have the same restrictions. That was a big part of the fun of the PVP side of D2.
It’s not right or wrong. It’s my opinion.
Frylock, you are WAY too wrapped up in deciding which peoples comments are “correct” or “incorrect”. You aren’t the arbiter of D3 and these are our opinions based on our experiences and desires. Chill.
Cubsfan, you’re insisting that something I enjoy is dumb, and then you’re trying to avoid the practical implications of making such a statement by hiding behind ill-understood and mistakenly applied concepts of subjectivity and/or relativity. (Still haven’t figured out which.)
Then you’re trying to get out of that bind by shifting the conversation(without justification) to an explicitly personal one about who’s taking what too seriously.
I do–when I played a pirate in a D&D campaign, I cut off my own leg. The prosthesis was expensive, but it was worth it.
That, however, has nothing to do with this situation. I’m probably not going to use the AH, because I enjoy finding/crafting items. I don’t really enjoy buying them from other folks. If I did, I’d use the AH.
My choice not to use it isn’t equivalent to my cutting my leg off; rather, it’s choosing to play the game in a way that I find fun. Your use of the AH in no way diminishes my fun.