Except it’s all throughout the game. In NM I always got lvl 20 gear. During Hell I would get level 30 and 40 gear. Now in Inferno, no matter which Act you do get lvl 60 gear but you also get a ton of lvl 51-54 gear. And frankly to make matters worse it seems to drop me a lot of int and str gear which I can’t use so it’s either NPC it or hope it sells on the AH which most of the time it doesn’t since they generally have pretty bad stats on it.
You mean it stops in Act 1 Inferno. Until then bought (merchants), crafted and found loot gets you through more than fine. After that, not so much.
They are all very similar - but suited for different builds.
I was using the lightning (pure damage) but recently went with an arcane build with the passive that slows from arcane damage. The arcane hydra does less damage but adds AOE which is huge with the slow passive. The lightning could have a similar effect with the passive that has an 8% chance to stun. In my current build it would be a huge difference to swap from arcane to the other. I don’t think Blizzard intended every rune to be unique (although some are) but I do think then intended them toward different build strategies so they work better or worse with other elemental builds.
Feels like there’s a lot of hyperbole there to me. Sure, I got tons (and tons) of shitty gear in nightmare, hell, normal, whatever, but I’ve also found plenty of upgrades. Diablo is a game where you will find a shotload of crappy gear and the occational piece that’s useful. It was like that in Diablo and Diablo II and it’s most certainly like that in Diablo III. Nothing has changed. The game was not designed around the auction house despite how hard people want to believe it was. The game still needs tuning, sure, but the loot drops are simply not as bad as people in this thread make them out to be, unless you’re all really, really getting screwed by the RNG.
Joe_M
6345
Yeah, I get a ridiculous amount of 50-54 rares in Acts 3/4 and Whimsywhire. It’s a curious design decision considering you have to be 60 to step foot in any of those places, and given the whole philosophy behind Inferno. Fortunately, it seems they’re aware of the problems and aim to improve on it a bit in the next patch.
AGAIN AGAIN AGAIN AGAIN AGAIN AGAIN AGAIN AGAIN… the problem (primarily) being talked about here is not the RNG generating attributes for gear, but the level of items attached to enemies. Something that is 8 levels below you is just not going to be upgrade except in almost impossible, exceptional circumstances (ie you can’t use the auction house for religious reasons and you never found an item of that slot in 50 levels), no matter what stats it has.
This seems like a pretty obvious bug in the code that determine what level of item to generate.
Yes. I get it. I understand what we are talking about. What I’m saying is that I find plenty of level appropriate gear dropping off enemies. When I was level 57 going through act III hell, I found plenty of level 54-57 gear dropping off enemies. Most of it was still crap, of course, but not all of it. I also found plenty of stuff that was 8 levels below me dropping, as would be expected. Now that I’m level 60 in inferno, this trend continues. Maybe the fact that I’m one of crazies who doesn’t use the auction house contributes to my lack of problem with the drop rates, I dunno, but I’m not having the issues others are.
Blizzard wants a “loot explosion”, with a lot of loot dropping, but they don’t want the game to be inundated with too much good loot. The result: very few drops are at the level of the player, and even less of them have stats that any class/spec would want, and even less of those are worth keeping or selling on the AH.
It’s not a bug, it’s by design. The problem is with player expectations, when people actually expect more than 25% of the drops to be at their level, or to have useful stats. That will never happen, in a Diablo game.
It’s a loot pinata filled with broccoli-flavoured candy.
Pogo
6350
OK, then how about you stop acting like this isn’t actually a problem? Half of people seem to want to say they never felt like they had to use the AH, the other half will swear they did. I was one of the people that swore they never had to use the AH, but having gone through Nightmare as far as I could without weapons off of the AH I can swear that the levels of dropped items is too sporadic and crappy. Hell is most definitely requiring the AH unless you’re a fucking masochist, and you have to be in order to get past those elite packs in Act 2 with your 240DPS level 52 weapon (the weapon that most likely didn’t drop and you had to buy back in Act 1).
It’s a grind without the AH, it’s most obviously tuned to be a grind without the AH, so stop talking like it’s not tuned to be a grind without the AH.
maxle
6351
I used the AH exactly once during hell, to get a new weapon at the start of Act I. I never felt underpowered. I was with a group the whole time, which may have changed things. We’ll see how it goes for my hunter, who’s currently moving through hell without a group.
I’m sure using the Auction House is not required, but…
loot drops tend to be below your level. Depending on loot drops, you will be a tier or more behind even with good luck. Luck is luck.
You will also be using the horrible crafting system. The fees on crafting are pure madness for both the gem crafter and the smith. As it stands now, it costs significantly less to simply buy medium high level gems than to bother with anything lower using the gem crafter. This is purely going by the fees alone too, if you add up the little you could have vendored flawed rubies or whatever for, it gets even worse.
The blacksmith is the same, but MUCH worse. For the price of simply keeping your blacksmith updated with your level and not making any items at all, you could keep yourself wearing CURRENT LEVEL rare gear in EVERY slot for much of the game. Actually crafting the items again hits you with a HUGE fee and unless your crafting level is WAY higher than the item you wish to craft, it is almost certainly going to be useless crap.
It is really hard to believe blizzard balances (for example) level 40 content with people using a mis match of mediocre 32-35 gear in mind when a decent number are using full 40 rares with good mods.
And as a side note, i really hope blizzard does something about the crafting system because it is interesting, but it is completely broken now. At the very least, the gem crafter needs to not have any fees for combining and blacksmithing gear needs to be MUCH better and/or MUCH cheaper to make (so you can make lots of them to get one decent one).
maxle
6353
Blizzard insists this isn’t true and that the perception will change once item levels (rather than level requirements) are exposed. Either they’re telling the truth or they’re planning on altering drops at the same time they reveal item levels, as telling easily-disproved lies would be tremendously stupid.
Thongsy
6354
I wish I was. If I had never used the AH I would probably still be stuck in NM. This could be an isolated incident of me being screwed by the RNG but I really tend to have gotten really bad drops all the way up to 60. Then the first half dozen or so times I ran Act I Inferno I actually got quite a few useful pieces of gear and stuff I could sell. Nothing much since then though.
I have had more luck accidentally finding really good and undervalued items on the AH than I have dropped loot. I’m not really as upset as others may be since I came to Diablo with literally zero expectations of enjoying it and I have had a good run up to Inferno Act II/III.
I’d love to know what went wrong with the crafting balancing. Did the beta have much higher prices in the AH or something? Did they actually not include AH prices at all when balancing the rest of the system, like they claim?
Teiman
6356
The AH is part of the game and help jump to the fun of it.
The higuer the gear you have, the harder is to find any valuable item. But if you are on the higuer level on your char, you make enough money for upgrades.
The beta only went to level 13, so it was of limited value for testing the balance of a lot of things. As far as crafting was concerned in the beta, they initially let you craft better gear at lower prices… but then they were concerned that people would just use the crafted gear for everything, and never worry about drops. So they pulled back the power of the crafted gear, and now it’s pretty useless for leveling, compared to the cheaply available gear on the AH.
In an upcoming patch, it will be cheaper to craft equipment below level 60, which should make it a more viable way to gear yourself up as you level.
But basically, the AH got filled faster than expected, with more powerful gear that people were willing to sell for cheaper than expected – everything else in the economy, including the Jewelcrafting and Blacksmith artisan crafting, is out of balance because of that.
I spent a good chunk of today digging through network configuration to sort out why one of my boxes (Win XP) was able to play the game fine, and the other (Win 7) was booting me every 5-10 minutes today, with terrible latency. I tightened up a lot of configuration (driver updates, disabling checksum offloading, mucking about with DHCP settings on the router, changing a few automatic settings over to static, etc.), but in vain until I ended up completely disabling ipv6 on my Win 7 box (XP doesn’t use ipv6 by default), and my connection troubles seem to have cleared.
Tony_M
6359
I don’t understand how any change to item drops (or crafting) would fix these problems as long as the auction house exists. Lets say that overnight a patch makes items twice as good, by whatever your definition of “good” is. Higher iLevel, more DPS, better attributes whatever. Very quickly the AH will be flooded with items better than you are finding randomly, and your new improved random drops will seem worse than what can be purchased by grinding for gold.
Joe_M
6360
I just spent a couple hours grouped with a monk friend of mine in inferno for the first time since we hit the Act II brick wall a few weeks back (I progressed to Act IV solo, he quit in disgust). It is immeasurably more fun now, both for him and myself (on my DH). Now that he can stand in there and tank the damage, I find it’s legitimately co-op instead of mostly me soloing 2x difficulty with a monk intermittently flailing around for 3 second before dying.
So thumbs up on those tweaks they hotfixed in.
