Is this current patch done? It says it should be done by 11 PT, which I guess is another hour and a half. My impatient self tried logging in.
First I would I get the screen with a big [Play] button (and, inexplicably, a [Buy Diablo 3] button saying that the game was up to date. When I tried to play it would say I needed an update that it would download then restart, then Windows would say that it stopped working.
Then one time on that first window it said that it needed to download an upgrade, then that it was done. Now when I try it says that the site is down for maintanence. I now have version 1.0.2.9950, so it seems that I may have slipped in and gotten the update before they were done.
Now that I think about it, they probably hate people like me… banging on the door next to a sign saying that they are out for lunch.
Got through Normal last night, picking up a legendary helm (not awesome, but certainly an improvement over what I had) and a staff of herding plan. Busted out a few quests this morning in NM, and my build seems to still be holding strong (lvl 32 DH with Hungering Arrow (scatter) and Chakram (double) as my mains).
Are there plans to be able to show our characters on battle.net?
I was pretty excited for D3 to launch, but that feeling is pretty deflated by the downtime. I didn’t want a Guild Wars -style MMO, I just want a single player game that I can actually play when I want to. Knowing that it was done this way either as a DRM measure or to make the real-money auction house feasible (or both) doesn’t exactly put Blizzard in a warm fuzzy place in my heart.
“But they’re bringing the game down to patch it and make it better for you!”
Appreciated, but making it mandatory and keeping me from playing while you implement it is… sub-optimal.
Those patch notes seem pretty awesome. I will regret the loss of attack speed on my WD and the repair costs are going to hurt (currently about 1k a death) but the other changes are certainly worth it. I can easily kill things 4 times faster in Act 1 than Act 3 and so I’ll be farming Act 1 in the hope of some good drops at last.
Either I’m an idiot, or I don’t understand set items (okay, those aren’t mutually exclusive). I cannot for the life of me find a page listing the various sets, along with their items. Battle.net has set items listed within their items pages, but they don’t have pages for each individual set. (Or so it seems.) For instance, here’s Cain’s Laurel, the helm portion of Cain’s Honor. It’s a 4 piece set, with bonuses for 2 and 3 items together. But no full set bonus? Huh?
Question about Auction House sales: Would it be worth selling the stuff that I found or crafted in Act II normal with a character in the mid 20’s? I’ve just been salvaging them for crafting stuff (they only get a couple hundred in gold from a vendor anyway). If I could get a few times the gold as what vendors give I’d do it, but would anybody in the AH we willing to buy low level gear?
The problem they’re trying to address with IAS is having it in a bunch of different item slots adding up to a much bigger bonus than they intended. I’d expect all of the other item slots to get nerfed before weapons.
Full set bonuses can feel restrictive, eg having a nice item drop, but feel that you can’t use it because it would break the set bonus is no fun. Not having any set bonuses that require the whole set gives you some room to shift your gear around.
If it’s a decent item, socketed weapons in particular, it might be worth a try, posting an auction is free so you got nothing to lose. Just make sure you set a buyout, when people go to the AH to buy gear for their lowbie chars they want it now, not in two days.
Quick list of the stuff listed as potential changes in the next patch:
Better drop rates for highest-level items in lower areas of Inferno
Adding better and more unique legendaries
Adjusting Nephalem Valor stacks so that bosses will only drop one guaranteed rare rather than 2, but all champion/rare packs will drop a rare at 5 NV stacks
No more extra monster damage in group games
Lowering difficulty of Act II Inferno and up
Raising level 60 repair costs (possibly 4x-6x)
Fixing IAS bugs, but also reducing its effectiveness overall
Lowered combine costs for gems
Minor class balances, with most of it to be saved for an even later patch
All in all, mostly good changes. Repair costs seem a bit substandard compared to losing experience in D2, but given that it’s far easier to hit the level cap in D3, that’s not really an option now. I don’t really understand the thinking behind the NV change - Blizzard said they like that people will run some boss packs to get stacks, then kill a boss; but they don’t like that they stop after the boss. I really don’t understand why Blizzard seems to hate the idea of people running bosses so much… and it seems to me if they want people to just “play the game” they should let people keep NV stacks between acts or games.
I also don’t like the idea of straight nerfing IAS. Generally, I think game design is more fun and works better when instead of nerfing something, everything else just gets buffed to bring it in line. So instead of nerfing IAS, provide a way for other, slower builds to survive. I like being able to hit 3.0 attack speed and blast out a bunch of life-on-hits and the like.
On the other hand, I think I’d be okay with a weakening of IAS if they added a better bonus to dual-wielding (which is currently seen as the weakest of the three main choices between 1 hand/shield, 2-handed and dual wield). Crank up the bonus IAS to something like 50% instead of 15%, so at least we can still have the super-fast attackers, just as glass cannons instead of the shield-wielding tanks.
If they let it persist between games, then folks would just build it up once, and then go right back to boss runs. Persisting between acts, though, would encourage you to keep going through the next act after your boss kill, so that would work.
Maybe just make it so it resets when you change quests? That would also be friendlier to folks who play in short time blocks.
Blizzard would have to figure out some way to distinguish people who can only play in short blocks from people who leave a game because they encountered a tough elite pack that they didn’t want to deal with.
Well, most are. You can buy pages, tomes, plans, dyes, and crafting ingredients. Still can’t buy gems damnit. I was really hoping to get a good deal on some rubies for my weapon.
I am finding Hell kind of not fun. Dying often and running from most things, is lame. I doubt I will bother much with inferno.
I suspect that when the real money auction house goes live, all the items that you need for late hell and inferno will leave the gold auction house as people try to get real money. At least until they find that they won’t sell.
The trick is to find a build that can run from most things, and still be killing them anyway. Either use a skill that you can attack with while moving, or leave effects behind you that will continue to hurt the enemies.
