3701

The monsters get harder mostly by doing more damage and having more hp (once you’re at a certain level, elite packs can spawn with 4 affixes but that’s the top in terms of complexity of opponents). Since the levels are timed, being able to take down big groups of monsters or various types of elite packs quickly and without dying is essential to completing greater rifts. It’s a much more exciting experience than running a normal rift where you are just killing stuff and get drops (and since you need to earn another try, it’s something that you care more about being good at).

I’m not really sure what you mean here in any sense more specific than that you don’t find it fun and think there is no possible build for which it would be fun. To put this another way, what would D3 have to be doing for you not to have this opinion of it? There are varied enemies that require you to adjust your approach, there are varied terrains that present problems or opportunities depending on what enemies you are facing, and there are a variety of ways your character can function that make it into a drastically different approach to things like skill timing, resource management, and space/crowd management. Most of these things seem irrelevant or barely present at low difficulty levels because you can just ignore them and bull your way through, then chalk up the occasional problem to an unlucky situation. At higher difficulty levels, though, you need to have a build that can deal with the things you run into and you need to play well. The game opens up significantly just past the point at which you stopped, so my main argument is not necessarily that you will enjoy it, but that your conclusion that you had seen all there was to see was not correct.

I agree that a good pure strategy title has more strategic considerations you need to deal with, and that a pure action title (like an FPS) has more “skill” during the action (though a lot of the skill is learning the maps and being good at aiming). D3, though, is a blend of those things - it has a real solid strategy layer in the character building side (which as I described a few pages ago has a surprising amount of depth to it), and it has a solid action game in the moment-to-moment play (where the skill comes more from managing your resources and your character’s location). These two things combine for an interesting and unique experience. It’s ultimately most similar to a CCG - you spend time crafting and tweaking your deck and acquiring the cards for it, and then you use the deck to play the game. It’s just that the card acquisition feels more organic and has more of that Skinner box / slot machine reward loop, while the “play” portion is obviously more dynamic. The part it’s missing is that you aren’t playing against an opponent, you are playing against a level, arcade-style. That can still be pretty entertaining, though, and the greater rifts show off its potential.

So I agree that the character building is the main thing and the fundamental gameplay is more arcade-y, but I don’t agree that it is as mindless as you make it out to be. I also think the character building is a deep strategic game that is interesting to play now that the player can control it. It’s no longer “kill stuff until it drops something better than you have, then kill more stuff or harder stuff because your numbers are larger.” Now you need to make decisions about when to sacrifice defense for offense, what kind of defense or offense you need most, which pieces of equipment are the most important to what you’d like to do, and both which skills will take the best advantage of what you already have and which skills would you like to be using and what equipment do you need to be able to switch. Do you run rifts to gather shards to gamble for a specific helm? Do you run bounties to try to get a certain cache drop? Do you just need money to upgrade gems or mats to do crafting / re-rolls? Even if we assumed that you had infinite time to play, there would be interesting considerations about what exactly is the best build for you, but the process of getting there is a lot of the fun.

3702

Expansion for 50% off?

Oh, I bought alright.

They seem to have fixed it.

Enjoying Crusader quite a bit, quite a bit.

Going to be playing Hardcore/Season Crusader with Mini-cyn. We both are enjoying the expansion very much.

3703

I know I am just clicking on things, but when they explode in a shower of bone and sparks and ricochet against the nearest wall which then crumbles and collapses, I can deal with it.

3704

I’m much too wimpy to play hardcore (also, bad player), but I also love my lowbie crusader. I had zero interest in the class when it was announced way back when, but rolled one anyway to get back into the game and love it.

3705

The essential difference between Greater Rifts is that they scale far beyond T6 in difficulty, the devs have flat-out stated that it is mathematically impossible to beat the rifts programmed into the system, so I’m assuming they probably have an upper limit of something nice and round like 100, which would be mathematically impossible to beat even with a character with infinite toughness. There is no way to deal the quadrillions of damage that would be necessary in 15 minutes. Even around GR40 the average mobs start having around 3-4 billion hps on single player, and the scaling of each rift level is dramatic enough to be noticeable.

This is why only a relative handful of people (compared to how many actually play) have beaten GR40 solo in the time limit, and most of them have “cheated” with the overlay program, which I refuse to do. The overlay program, for those who do not know, shows you the entire rift layout including exit, mob locations and affixes. This information is sent to your computer when you enter the rift but not shown on the standard interface until you reveal it with line of sight. For obvious reasons, this is insanely helpful information, especially for Demon Hunters who rely on setting up “nests” of sentries. When you know where all the enemies are and if you are going to be 1-shotted by a jailor affix, you can make preparations that can save you several minutes over the course of the GR. If you want to use it, you can find it fairly easily, but it’s pretty murky territory over whether or not Blizz will eventually ban offenders or not, as they have not made any statements about it that I know of. I’d both rather not risk it and find it kind of defeats the point of Rifts myself, but it’s pretty difficult to be competitive on the leaderboards without it, if you care about that.

I’d mostly like to see each GR level hand-designed, with the same layout, mobs, affixes, and end-boss each time. That would give a far more objective (and less prone to both cheating and luck) system to measure progress than the current one. But that’s probably a pipe-dream, as it’d require man hours to design and balance. Still, in a perfect world…

3706

I have a bit of a problem with this game-play type. When I play it a lot, my enjoyment of other PC games goes down slightly because they then feel to “slow”. It’s like yu get conditioned to having lots of stuff exploding and going on, then when I enter a game I should be blown away by (like Total War: Rome 2) and I’m not as blown away as before I started D3.

3707

If you don’t like the general concept of the game, I highly, highly doubt that greater rifts will change your mind.

For me the main draw is the interaction between the loot piñata and the character building: I like finding interesting items that get me to completely redesign my character to use different skills and different play styles or the reverse of coming up with a target design and then finding the items to optimize it.

3708

The problem I have with D3 is I really want to play Forza Horizon 2 and Fifa 15 but D3 keeps on dragging me back and saying just one mor rift and 1 more after that.

3709

Hey, I’d be happy to lend you (or anyone else in Qt3 for that matter) whatever cash you might need. I’ve got over a billion just collecting dust in the stash.

3710

Thanks,i eventually got a socket at 700k cost and figured out how to earn cash using boon of the hoarder.

Managed to GR 15 and it gave me a 17 to try but i dont think i have enough toughness at present. I really need a RROG so i can wear multiple sets and get the benefits, i actually have the pieces just not the ring.

I gather the ring drops from act 1 but is it from the bounties, boss or from the horadric cube tyrael gives you?

3711

I got my first RRoG from the cube you receive from tyrael for completing act 1 (it was my first set of bounties!).

3712

RoRG is s cache only drop from act 1.

3713

Haha, they should totally rename the caches to Tyrael’s Horadric Cube

3714

I’m pretty sure there is a cream for that.

3715

After picking up D3 (with expansion) in the recent half-off sale, I’ve been playing through the story slowly and have my witch doctor up through the start of Act 3. The story stuff certainly feels like Diablo, lots of references to the old games beyond just starting in Tristram. My favorite so far was Shrine of Rakanishu where you fight off a bunch of those little fallen dudes; I had many characters get their first death to old Rakanishu in D2. I know you don’t play Diablos for the story, but I’ve always enjoyed it in the first run-through and D3 is no exception.

I’m not a big fan of the skills-runes system, but that may be in large part because I’ve played Path of Exile with its over-the-top system for customizing a character. I feel like I’m constrained by the inability to mix things up the way I’d like. I love my stacks of zombies and big shambler dude and my zombie dogs, but I’d happily give up stuff like the Terror skill so I could have more/better pets, if that was allowed. Having only one rune at a time on each power sucks; Rabid Life-Linked Burning zombie dogs would be awesome, even if it meant I had to give up some other power’s runes. Just seems…limited, I guess.

Still, skill system aside, I’m having fun with it. I like the art style and the power effects. Something inside me giggles a little bit every time I throw a jar of spiders at something, or summon a stack of zombies that fall over onto some poor monster’s head. The side stories with the hirelings is a nice touch, too…I’m actually somewhat interested to find out more about the paladin and enchantress. (Not the scoundrel, though, screw that guy.) And I’ve gotten plenty of nice shiny drops (4 legendaries thus far) to keep the looter in me entertained, which if I understand the history correctly would not have been the case at launch, so I’m glad I got in late in that respect.

3716

It’s been a few days so you’ve probably found the RoRG by now, but just in case you haven’t, it drops only from Horadic Cache. T6 gives you a 100% chance of getting a legendary in the Cache but there are 5 possible legendary drops. That means, on average, you need to run it 5 times at T6, but it sure seems like I’ve run it a hell of a lot more than that and only have 2 RoRGs to show for it lol

edit: btw, blue post has confirmed that you can collect the caches using your most efficient farming character and then switch characters as needed before opening them. “Legendary items found in a Horadric Cache will be smart loot, and will roll based on the character opening them. - See more at: http://www.diablowiki.net/Horadric_Cache#Horadric_Cache-only_Items”

3717

In all fairness, for as “over-the-top” the customization for Path of Exile is, there are still only like 2 competitive builds tops per class that can actually do the end-game content, and require extremely specific items in addition to the extremely specific build. It’s really only the illusion of customization. Sure, you can play a substandard build “for fun”, but it isn’t much fun when you stall out because the math doesn’t add up your way after 100 hours of work, or whatever. All ARPGs are like this though, Diablo 2 and 3 as well. I actually like that Diablo 3 just owned it and said, “you know what, 1 or 2 builds are always going to be the best at any given moment, so why should we pretend otherwise and force people to replay the game from level 1 to experience them?”

That being said, I like the idea of being able to double up on a skills runes if you dumped a rune off another skill. In practice this would be insanely overpowered, and would basically force them to rebalance the difficulties, but still, it’s a cool idea. Your build ends up getting defined by your gear as you move into the higher difficulties at 70, as legendary affixes and set bonuses are so overwhelming powerful that they will completely shape your character. And yes, there is something deeply satisfying about the way the demons die in Diablo 3. Much more so than in PoE or Marvel Heroes, imo.

3718

Excellent point, and in fact that is exactly one of the major reasons I stopped playing POE. Their “endgame” starts fairly early on (level 60-ish out of 99) and the vast majority of possible builds simply can’t make reasonable progress past that point. And the ability in D3 to swap around skills/runes at will is great. But I do miss the option of being able to experiment in lower levels with some wacky stuff. Too bad there’s no perfect medium, eh? Maybe someone will figure it out someday!

3719

So I had just upped the difficulty for my WD to Torment IV to see what it was like - and bounties were ok - definitely taking longer than I liked but doable - when I kill an imp and he leaves behind a portal. So I see my first treasure portal. And to top it off, the end loot was not only the Hoarder gem, but Fire Walkers and the frickin’ Mask of Jeram I’ve been trying to get for a while (incidentally, fuck Kadala). So that was awesome.

3720

Just had a good couple of days farming and Grifting on the wizard. Got my double Unity rings, magefist, an OK Maximus and a pretty decent Blackthorne’s amulet. Beat Grift 30, and am confident I can match Melekith’s clan best 32 (for Wiz). To add to the Greater Rift discussion above, for me, it’s more than just T6+. Its where I need to bring my ‘A’ game in terms of positioning, anticipation and reaction time. I enjoy trying my best and being on-edge and fully-focused for the short period of time required. It’s a totally different mindset to T6 4-player farming, which is altogether a more relaxed affair, chilling and killing.