Yeah those are awesome! Even better is when one of them pops open a portal to a vault…I made 40m gold + 3 or 4 legendary/set items off of one of those.
That’s the joy of D3. Crap that is just over the top cool can happen, because the developers aren’t obsessed about making the game challenging and hard, but about making it fun. Yeah, they miscalculated with the RMAH at first, among other things, but since then pretty much every decision has been in the right direction.
Totally agree, though I still think they are mostly clueless when it comes to balancing numbers (seriously, I have something like 75% lightning damage [potentially] on gear and it’s utterly pointless because Disintegrate is still so much better than anything). See also: Emeralds in weapons.
Oh, yeah, it’s a nightmare for theorycrafters I’m sure who want mathematical logicality. Even for us mortals, it gets a little disappointing when there are some abilities that are clearly so much better than others. But consider that if you’re playing softcore, like the majority of players, there’s a lot more incentive to play around with gloriously inefficient builds than there is in hardcore, where survival trumps experimentation. Still, with the new cube, the right sets, and creative skill slotting, you can usually figure out something workable.
But I still keep coming back to disintegrate, for sure.
Bateau
4165
So what’s the ‘best’ class at the moment? I’m looking for something fast and dynamic, preferably with more than one good spec.
I dunno about “best” but barbarians are a ton of fun and use a bunch of skills to control positioning, crowd control, etc unless you’re going for a lazy “spin to win” build.
TheWombat - I don’t disagree, but it’s telling that several classes have obvious “best” builds or at least primary skills (Disintegrate, Fetish Sycophants, etc) that relegate everything else to “eh, if you feel like screwing around, have fun I guess” status. It’d be one thing if the community-theorycrafted optimum were 20-30% faster/more survivable/whatever than one-off “fun” builds, but it’s more like 100-200% in a lot of cases. That’s just bad balancing.
KevinC
4167
Yeah I hear ya. Overtuning can definitely be a fun-killer, but when things are gratuitously out of whack it effectively limits options and variability. I don’t care if Ability X is exactly as good as Ability Y in all situations, but they need to be at least somewhat on par. From the sound of others it sounds like later gear might change things, right now Disintegrate is orders of magnitude more effective than the dozens of other abilities, even within its category. For instance, I love the lightning rune on Arcane Orb. The audio for it is so awesome, and it’s really fun to lob that thing around. But it literally takes me 6-7 times as long to kill things with in comparison with Disintegrate, even in situations where it should do better (i.e. enemies are scattered about a room, not in a narrow hallway). In a game that’s designed around pushing numbers and getting to higher Torment levels, you have to have a real stubborn streak to stick with Arcane Orb (at least as far as I’ve gotten in the game).
Same with Ray of Frost. I mean you have two similar spells in application (straight beam), but one pierces and rips entire rooms apart. Sure, Ray of Frost slows, but c’mon. Arcane can get similar slow with a passive, and the differential in damage output far outpaces whatever CC benefit Ray of Frost can provide. Now someone upthread mentioned a unique that made it pierce… that would get me to consider switching over, but at that point it’s only because it mimics the superior skill, not because of something it brings to the table itself.
Anyway, sorry for rambling, but while I’ve definitely seen games overtune and lose out on the fun that way, having clear best builds/abilities can have the same effect. To me, the combat in D3 isn’t deep enough to stand on its own (as compared to something like Dark Souls, where some people prefer a weapon type due to style/animation reasons, as opposed to pure numbers).
Oh, I agree at the macro level–there is something very much off about the balance or imbalance of abilities in Diablo III. There are simply no real reasons to use a lot of the abilities, and that is indeed something to ding the designers for. But I suspect it is amazingly hard to design a lot of very interesting abilities and make them all equally useful. PoE goes the complexity route, so that no matter what you use you can probably jigger it to work, but it’s not very accessible and quite unforgiving. Blizzard clearly doesn’t want complexity, so they’re caught in a net of their own weaving–to keep it simple they have to limit things, but to keep it interesting they need variety, and having a simple system with a lot of variety either leads to what we have now, or a bunch of abilities that are the same but with different names and different colored effects I guess. In other words, I don’t know exactly how to fix this.
Are there any games like this where everything is equally good? One of the joys of D3 is the sheer variety of situations you wind up in, and without predictable scenarios there’s little use for special purpose abilities (same thing is true often in games like World of Tanks–some tanks that are great in a specific situation are generally useless because you never can depend on getting that situation).
Pretty much, yeah. Overtuning, as you say, can really rip the soul out of a game like Diablo – if everything does the same dps in 90% of situations with few functional differences, that’s rather a boring game. But Disintegrate really is that much better than anything else.
Last I played Barbarian, though, the class was in a much better place. Slam/Hammer/WW were all useful to one degree or another, for example, and making the best build you could that suited your gear was fun and interesting. So it’s not a general failure across the board by any means.
I should play more Barbarian; I’ve only played a little (one 70 in HC, which I rarely play) and don’t know much about it.
I’m still on T2 with a Tempest Rush monk - loads of fun. Just run through everything and laugh as they melt away.
JMR
4172
I fired up the game post patch and joined my first public rift in who knows how many months and in our group was a barbarian who was doing whirl wind non stop with bolts of lightning shooting out laying waste to everything in his or her path no matter if it was white trash mobs or elites and champions. There was nothing left for the group to kill. It was simply ‘follow the barbarian’ and scoop up all of the free legendaries. There’s no fun in that :(
I don’t play much if at all with others in D3, and never public games, but I’ve found playing with people I know that it’s important to keep a balance between the players so this sort of thing doesn’t happen. Unless you’re power-levelling, which by definition isn’t supposed to be fun but rather efficient, you want the group to be just able to clear effectively as long as everyone does their bit. Some folks love to speed clear just for loot though, and I bet that’s the dominant vibe in most pub games.
Daagar
4174
Took a barb to 70 for S4, and it is fun. Then I read the thread and saw Tom raving about WD’s - which I’ve played before but wasn’t so enamored with. Started up a female one, am only mid 30s so far, but dear lord - a couple casts of Haunt and things melt. And for anything that doesn’t, I have an army to tank for me. Thinking I might prefer ranged to melee. Hoping I stay as enthused at 70, cause that’s apparently where the game starts and I keep rerolling.
Some people are just “in it for the money” so I am sure they are delighted to have someone just melt faces as they pick up loot.
How’s the new class, the crusader? I generally prefer melee but my main before I quit so many years ago was a barbarian. I also recall the monk being pretty fun.
Is there a Qt3 guild or some such?
Kelan
4177
I enjoyed my season 2 crusader quite a bit. I managed to get a Belt of the Trove and that with another item that doubled the number of Bombardments per cycle and it was quite a scene. He seemed to be very hardy, but I didn’t really use him as a short range attack guy like my barbarian used to be. I don’t normally min/max either so not sure of the best builds atm.
Yes there is Qt3 guild, but pretty sure I don’t have invite rights. I believe scharmers invited someone earlier in the week.
Just started replaying this on the PS4, together with my wife. She hasn’t played games in ages, but actually likes this, so I’m over the moon! So, to make sure she keeps enjoying it: any advice on what would be the easiest/best class for her to have the most fun with, taking into account her inexperience with a controller and with multitasking abilities? I’'d say it would be Witch Doctor, because the pets do most of the work themselves, but that might also get slightly boring after a while? And what combination would be best, as in: what class should I play to make life easier for her?
Not aiming at high lvl difficulties here, just fun…
Room for people in the EU QT3 guild, think everyone playing has invite rights.
I find disintegrate to be much like frozen orb used to be. On the torment levels where its damage to mana ratio works and it kills stuff fast enough, it’s godlike, once you past that threshold, it’s nearly useless as it takes too long to kill things and you have to stand still.
Once mob damage gets into the one shot category with a bad roll, builds like firebird really take over.
One of the great things about D3, is that different tiers of play can have totally different “best” builds. The difficulty curve really does make you have to rethink your builds. It’s one reason that you see so many copy cat builds at higher Grift levels, the game tends to funnel you towards min/maxing, even if you resist doing it. If you don’t care about pushing Grifts, and just like farming torment levels (like me), there are a lot of viable builds and skill sets.
