6141

The drop rates and levels are all designed around the knowledge that getting equipment via the auction house is much easier/more accessible than it used to be getting gear via trades in D2.

I personally hate that design decision, but that’s why it is what it is. If drop rates were set up like they were even in D2, the AH would be flooded within a few days with top end/ end game gear, and the game would more or less be over. I think that’s going to happen anyway, even if they do have the drops rates set to very low percentages. Given the fact there is no bind on equip, items are going to stay in the market forever, quickly removing value.

I think many of their core game design decisions are horribly thought out and implemented, and some of them are just amazing bad as far as missing the entire reason people played D2 for so long, and what the hooks were that facilitated that. They have changed some very major basic psychological hooks in the game, seemingly unknowingly, and for me, have destroyed just about every motivation I have to play games like these.

For just one example, the decision to move loot drops away from boss mobs. This is something that started in one of the D2 patches, and has been moving even more aggressively in that direction. This is the single biggest design mistake made in my opinion, and a very fundamental misunderstanding of what motivates people to keep playing their game.

Getting a drop off of a boss mob, that it takes you some time to get too has various psychological implications.

  1. The anticipation of knowing that you are getting to the loot mob. This is something that is completely removed when you make encounters with loot dropping mobs random. There is a build up in anticipation as you work your way from whatever waypoint down to the boss mob, and henceforth, the payoff when you do see that loot drop is heightened. This is such a basic failure in understanding behavioral psychology it’s hard to fathom.

  2. The simple fact that it’s the boss mob that drops that loot, and not random skeleton #3471. You spend a ton of game assets and story telling, to build up the mythology around boss mobs. Getting a drop off of a boss mob, even if it’s the exact same drop that you get off of a minion, is inherently more satisfying. Once again, a failure to comprehend very basic and important behavioral psychology.

Mark my words, in the future there will be a degree offered, that combines behavioral psychology, symbolism (Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung), and game design.

So many design choices in D3 really seem to me like they were made by people that didn’t understand some of the core things that made their other game work the way it did.

6142

Perhaps some of you would prefer if every item dropped in inferno required level 60 to use, regardless of its actual ilvl or quality. The level 60 boots without runspeed I just found are actually less useful than the level 51 boots with any combination of remotely useful stats I also found.

Most of the rares I find, I vendor. A few I AH, and get some more money, a smaller few I AH for a lot of gold, and they are exciting to find. An even smaller few, I use. They are awesome to find.

Here is how it works: you see colourful writing, this is like seeing presents under the tree, then you identify the item, this like unwrapping your present. Then you use/AH/vendor the item. That is like playing with your new toys. Now, you counter that getting shitty presents sucks, but here is the thing: when it is Christmas every day, the whole thing can get tedious. Tedious, unless it’s only occasionally that you get a really cool present, then that constant possibility, and variable reward schedule, keeps it exciting and fun.

6143

This, to me, once again validates my decision to stay the hell away from the Auction House.

What a way to ruin a loot pinata game like Diablo …

6144

But the game difficulty is tuned for said AH quality loot. I too want to avoid the AH… hence my frustration.

6145

I’d say the boring loot, poorly balanced blacksmith system and tendency for mobs to drop loot FAR below your level ruins the loot piñata more than the auction house personally.

6146

This criticism puzzles me, because it’s the opposite of the intended behavior. You’re supposed to go kill five packs of elites and then a boss, because then the boss is all but guaranteed to drop 2+ rares. That’s what the valor buff is all about. This is a problem on Nightmare and Hell, certainly; you’ll kill the bosses and get blues and that’s lame, but it’s not the case on normal or Inferno, and they’re clearly envisioning that their long term players will be spending most of their time on Inferno.

Of course, it’s far too easy to farm Resplendent Chests or Treasure Goblins with +MF gear, so folks who really want to farm do that instead.

6147

+1. The auction house should be for stuff which is really rare and valuable, say the Legendaries, gems, consumables.

I would also say that doing away with BoE/BoP in relation to an AH certainly will have a huge impact on prices as the game ages. So if it eventually costs just a pittance for gear which is literally 100% better than what you have, and the game is tuned for that, then perhaps they need to re-think the balancing.

6148

I’ve come around a little on the itemization. It’s not as bad as I thought it was. It’s still not great, but it’s better than classic D2 was. I’m not that worried about the loot anymore especially since it’s something they’ve already said they’re working on and are likely to fix.

I’m more concerned with the shitty hit detection that randomly affects certain categories of projectiles vs others and things like that which are much less likely to get attention but make some of the combat feel much shittier than it should. This complaint also extends to certain types of monster special attacks that SHOULD be dodgeable but aren’t, like Soul Lashers retarded tongue whips or the teleport-one-shot on a few mobs (e.g. Oppressors).

6149

If you mean Inferno difficulty after Act 1, it probably is. But that does leave three other difficulties tom play with five different character classes …

We already had the conversation about drop levels … it doesn’t matter if it’s below your level, it matters whether it’s an upgrade on what you already had.

My Barbarian just made it past Act 1 Inferno Skeleton King. I used the Barbarian to twink the Demon Hunter by setting aside interesting bows I found with him. That Demon Hunter is in act 2 Hell right now, and had a progression of weapons waiting for her. But I deliberately made the choice to limit it to weapons only, and mostly stuck by that, so the excitement of finding the rest of her equipment pieces was still there.

So both characters are doing just fine with the “boring loot”, which isn’t actually that boring to me. I keep finding exciting things all the time. And getting them through combat is far, far more rewarding than getting them from an AH listing. But that’s just me. In D3, the Auction House is even more boring than ye olde D2 boss runs, because there’s not even any freaking action in it (unless you make a whole other game out of it).

6150

I think it’s safe to say that if you’re farming Act 4 Inferno, level 50 rares aren’t going to be an upgrade for you. That whole line of thinking strikes me as patently absurd. Tightening up the drop levels would at least make the jewelry of some use, should you get something perfectly rolled, but any armor below level 58 (with a very few exceptions) is still going remain utterly useless.

Hell, you can’t even salvage level 50 items into anything useful were you into gambling with a 6-affix blacksmithing recipe.

6151

I wonder how many of the six million who are playing the game care even one iota about what the handful of people farming Act 4 Inferno consider an upgrade.

6152

This is, as was mentioned a couple posts back, wrong.

Once you get to 60 and gain nephelhem valor, farming consists of very interesting boss runs. Pick your boss, go find five randomly-generated, interesting-to-fight elite packs, then make your way to a guaranteed loot piniata. The system works brilliantly, and is a massive, massive improvement from the boring boss runs that made up DII’s farming end-game.

Today I’ve been running Ghom in act III hell on my wizard. I don’t use the auction house, so I’m not yet in inferno (which is fine, seems like a good idea to wait for them to tune it a bit, I’ve got plenty of other classes to play anyways). I’ve had a great time (and found a lot of great loot) doing this run because I’m strong enough and skilled enough to not have to constantly kite the elite packs in this section. Additionally I love all the interesting gameplay spaces you find in the keep depths. The randomly combined small and large rooms mixed with all the interesting monster affixes make just about every elite fight feel very different, while the cannon fodder enemies in the area keep me feeling like a destruction-bringing badass.

The champion fights lead to my five stacks of valor and final showdown with Ghom, who is a nice, easy dessert after the main course of randomized difficulty. He goes down, satisfyingly showers me with a few yellows and a number of blues (out of which I often get an upgrade for one of my characters), and I repeat the process, usually with a varied or completely new build. Sometimes I find a good enough item for my level 58 monk that I want to pop over and play her for awhile. My brother’s barbarian pops in on occasion and does a few runs with me, really changing up the feel of things. I imagine we’ll move on to act IV pretty soon. The main point is that we’re both having a great time. This really is classic diablo gameplay with all the modern refinements I’d expect, and I love it.

Reading through this thread (or much of the internet) is often puzzling to me. I feel bad/sad for the people who seem to have so many complaints, but I just can’t relate at all. Diablo III is some of the most fun I’ve had playing games since Diablo II. It’s not perfect, obviously, but I never expected it to be. The game is brand new, of course it has rough edges, and I look forward to watching it evolve.

I’d rather spend time focusing on all the things Diablo III does right, not the few rough edges Blizzard still needs to smooth out. If you find that those rough edges are so glaring to you that you can’t enjoy the game… well, sorry about that.

6153

I don’t think Inferno is “tuned for the AH”. Remember it was supposed to take months to crack. Those of us who’ve done well by the AH early on in the game have actually jumped well ahead of the expected progression.

As for getting loot that is off-level or off-class, it seems a bit silly to complain that random loot is, well, random. D2 was very similar in that you got a lot of useless loot, a few winners, and had to trade a lot when you got good items that weren’t for your class.

Some of the expectations I’m reading seem to be coming from the very hand-tailored content in more traditional RPG’s where there’s a nice, finely tuned loot progression that guarantees you’ll always get just the right amount decent loot (e.g. roughly the same loot as anyone else) as you play. That’s not what Diablo 3 is trying to be. Eschewing this model is a core tenet of the Diablo series.

Good items being rare gives them actual value. You can’t have lots of great loot dropping for you and an AH that maintains some semblance of value at the same time. While, yes, the AH may seem like “easy mode” for lower levels where items aren’t that valuable, it’s quite robust right now at the upper levels.

6154

Also my standard run is to do Act 3 Siegebreaker. I run around the fields looking for champ packs, duck into the caves of ice for more champs and a gold chest, then across the bridge (more champs) to Siegebreaker.

That’s definitely more interesting than repeated Mephisto/Baal runs.

The problem with bosses being the big challenge is that they’re known, fixed values. Belial was hard, at first, and now I can almost sleep my way through him. In comparison it’s much more interesting fighting random packs on random terrain.

6155

I think it’s pretty simple, really. I’d like at least one drop per end-of-act boss (when you encounter them the first time) to be of a usable level. When I hit the act I end boss and I’m level 17-18 and he drops two rares, both level 8, it’s too low. Period. There’s plenty of rarity and impetus to try to generate good affixes, rolls for those affixes, and gear selection that my class can use for the whole loot slot machine chase. This is how D2 felt. We’re not annoyed because he also tosses out a ton of blues (lower level or not) and whites (lower level or not). We’re annoyed because as you’re levelling up it seems more or less impossible to find level-appropriate gear from simply drops. The assumption that everything will end up on the AH also requires the implicit assumption that everyone will end up buying from the AH. That may tickle your fancy; it doesn’t for me. I want to play the loot chase game, not the gold farming so I can buy the loot game. But it feels like the loot chase portion of the game is stacked against me due to the AH, so that I’ll essentially never find a level contemporary item of superlative quality, at least not until I hit the level cap. That’s a whole fuckload of playtime to get to the loot chase portion of the game.

6156

Oh god yes. I am in A3 Inferno and I’m not sure that this could be more infuriating. I basically have to repress an entire life of learning to dodge by as little as is safely possible to maximize DPS uptime, because about 50% of the time dodging a projectile by moving 5 yards when it’s a half second out (and having the graphic of the projectile clearly miss me) will lead to a one shot death. Or when I’m kiting something fast, and it stops to wind up an attack that takes a full second to swing the arm or blade or whatever across where I’m standing, and then I get a nice little tombstone half a screen away where I have vaulted in the meantime but die anyways.

6157

Yep. I’m surprised at how shoddy the hit detection mechanics are. For the first while I wasn’t paying that close of attention because I assumed it was latency from the initial release, but since then I’ve really noticed it. It’s frustrating as a DH which is a fragile class based around evasion. I’m sick of Smoke Screen + Preparation basically being required for high-end builds due to those mechanics. And for the love of god can we please get some viable skills other than the aforementioned ones and Elemental Arrow? :) I see no point in using the Chakram, multishot, cluster arrow, etc when they do roughly the same damage as Elemental Arrow but for ridiculously high hatred costs.

6158

I haven’t used AH up until late Nightmare, all my gear was looted by me and I have no idea what you are talking about. There were plenty of very nice upgrades dropped and some OMG items as well.

Sorry, the game doesn’t drop an awesome item every time you kill a mob. Instant gratification FTW.

6159

And why did you use the AH in late nightmare? I mean if you have so many upgrades and OMG items, what’s the point?

Also, you can stop misrepresenting people with a differing experience/opinion. I know it’s the cool thing to do on the Internet and all, but no one is asking for the game to drop “an awesome item every time you kill a mob”.

6160

As it stands now, it’s either AH for Inferno - or several weeks of kite-grinding. Yes, Demon Hunters (potentially Wizards too - though I don’t know the class very well) can do without top-level gear in Inferno, because much of their defense comes from not being there - but that’s the exception.

Nightmare/Hell is completely different - and they’re relatively easy to handle without AH trading.

Obviously, luck is still a factor.

It’s not just about the ilvl of items, but also the probability of having ideal (or close to ideal) stats on rares.

It’s quite obviously a deliberate decision to extend lifetime of the game and make people work for the gear.

Like it or not, that’s the design.