Yea, hardcore is a lot more fun. I couldn’t push past GR55 last season on my monk, and that was scary enough, had 3 near-death experiences where my “phew!” ability triggered and I ran away as fast as I could.
Normal mode just seems tame, but I could probably push a lot higher and die many times in it.
I hit level 52 last night in Act 3 with my Witch Doctor. This is pretty exciting.
Except only having a handful of sets that can make GR90 does not tie your hands that much. I doubt there is a top leaderboard GR pusher for any class that does not use alternative sets for farming during any given season, for example. And as I said, if you don’t like the play-style of the meta, you are better off and are likely to perform better with something else.
I also would not be surprised if it is a deliberate design decision by Blizz to mix seasons up and keep the player-base interested and chasing the new meta. Last season, DH Shadow Mantle rework was stooopid OP, probably the easiest run to GR70 I have had. Season before that, Manald Heal wizards were ridonky-donk.
Blizzard likes whatever keeps the peeps coming back.
And don’t get me wrong, I always check what the new hotness is at the start of the season.
That’s a pet peeve of mine too. Everybody always uses viable wrong. If a skill or whatever truly isn’t viable, that’s an incredibly powerful argument for change. But that is very rarely the case.
Note I’m mostly bitching about word choice and the way it frames the discussion with the whole “viable” thing. I totally get that approaching the game with a powergamer mindset means that there’s going to be an optimal choice or build or mechanic or class or whatever.
Something is always going to be the best. Complaining that all four sets for each class aren’t all equally powerful across solo/group/farming/grifts is rather a silly position to take.
Honestly I’m surprised that people grind D3 that hard. I tend to lose interest when there’s some build-defining legendary (currently the Bone Spear scythe) that the RNG just isn’t interested in giving me, so I’m effectively stalled out until I can gamble or cube it. Not to flog the poor dead horse any harder, but pushing endgame is so damn much more interesting in Path of Exile that I’m legit surprised to find anyone bothering in D3.
But certainly, if the fun for you is in pursuing the highest grift or the most efficient farm or the optimal party comp or whatever, by all means. I just think it’s silly to get worked up about something being the best at a given role when, well, that’s kinda how it works in these games.
I mean, it’s not like you’re trying to raid vanilla as a Ret pally or something, for god’s sake ;)
Heh, nearly every build I have in any game is viable, but not optimal. I don’t know if I’ve every had an optimal build for anything.
Yeah, I find it a bit weird too, because I’m just not competitive in that sense. I don’t care if someone else can get further than me. The reason I’m playing the endgame is to get the gear, not the other way round.
I’ve played a fair bit of PoE, too, and I agree its skill system and interactions between gear and abilities is much more detailed and in many ways engaging than that in D3. But it’s also much more difficult, IMO, keeping in mind I only play Hardcore. In D3, while I don’t tread the upper reaches of GR levels, I don’t feel like I’m locked out of content per se. In PoE, I’ve never been able to progress much beyond the first difficulty level you run through, before either dying or the season ends. So, I’ve never done maps for instance.
The loot in PoE gets pretty complex, too, maybe more involved than I really want for what action RPGs are to me. So D3 is very forgiving, comparably, and rather less demanding.
More…dare I say…casual?
Heh. Nah, I get it. D3 I tend to fall in and out of love with in about a two-week timeframe. It’s super fun for a while, and then you get your 6pc, and you’re fucking Neo and the denizens of Hell are the hapless infinity of Agent Smiths and it’s hilarious.
And then you realize that you need three specific legendaries to survive the dumbass GR scaling mechanic and kill shit in a reasonable amount of time, and the RNG shits on you for a day and a half, and then you put D3 down for another few months.
Path is a slower burn. Kinda the same arc, but a) I like the leveling and midgame quite a bit more and b) at least you can buy the dumb Quillrain or whatever you need to make your build work if there’s something super-specific.
Currently I’m annoyed at realizing that my reasonable-well-built Pestilence necro (hey, it’s what dropped, and I’ve got an Endless Walk and a decent scythe) really can’t progress much past T9 without it being super annoying. So I’m stuck farming T8-ish (it’s that much faster) with no risk of death or challenge or anything to try and put together Inarius or Rathma (yeah, we’re not going to use the Kill Yourself build in hardcore) and basically re-gear to push any farther.
So I suppose you could say that Pestilence isn’t viable for what I’d like to use it for right now :D
I don’t care about being the best. Someone who plays 24 hours a day is always going to beat me on the leader list no matter what i do.
All i care about is what choices i can make when i play the game. If i’m playing GR60 and all three sets work on that level, they are all viable to me. If i’m playing GR80 and my only choice is a single set, only one set is viable to me.
This has absolutely nothing to do with GR rushing or achievements. I just want to play the game and have multiple fun options that don’t artificially limit my play due to balance issues. If there are balance issues so that only one set works on GR80 and the other two are stuck at GR60, i want blizzard to work to fix that.
When someone says viable, technically they need to condition it, although hopefully people would give them the benefit of the doubt that when someone says something is not viable in diablo 3, they do not mean that you can’t complete normal story mode with it.
This doesnt seem like it should be rocket science. i know there are a lot of ultra casual people in any game, and only a small number of ultra hardcore, but i would say most gamers are like myself, and fall somewhere in between ultra casual and ultra hardcore.
The only reason i get worked up about it is because the ultra casuals actively try to stop games from being balanced or refuse to believe that a game isn’t balanced because something works on normal story mode. A non pvp game doesn’t need to be balanced to the 1% because we aren’t competing directly, but i still want relatively equal options to pick from, especially in an rpg.
You should find whatever screed that exists out there and is so very offensive, quote it, and then we can maybe work through it.
But right now I feel like I’m boxing at shadows, man.
I don’t know if I should spoiler tag this, but I’m going to take a risk and leave it bare: I still can’t believe they killed Decard Cain in Diablo 3.
Every Diablo game has been wonderfully different. Those cool charging enemies in the first Diablo? We never saw them again in 2 and 3. The Warrior, Rogue and Mage classes from Diablo 1? Never playable characters again. Those guys who said “Rocanichu” in Act 1 of Diablo 2? Unique to that game alone. Those guys in the crypts in Diablo 2’s Act 2 who raised the dead even as you were killing them? Didn’t see them again in Diablo 3. We did see the Barbarian class again, and now the Necro, but they play quite differently in Diablo 3 than they did in Diablo 2. The series has always been great about never repeating itself and doing new things with new classes, new enemies to fight, new systems that they put in place. Each game feels very different.
But one element that was a nice light element that got a lot of people nostalgic is Decard Cain. We saw him in all 3 games, and along with the main bad guy, he’s the common thread on the side of good vs the common thread on the side of evil that is Diablo. So killing Decard Cain, I don’t know, it doesn’t feel like a brave choice or even provide a moving moment. And now we don’t have that one element in common going forward, and that’s a damned shame.
How do you get into a PL group? Just join the community and go “Looking for PL, please?” Is that the same on consoles?
I’m still undecided where I am going to play this, I have just the base game on my Mac and never got past Act 2. I do have the PS4 edition but haven’t made any progress. I am tempted to get a few months of PS Plus and the Necro expansion on the PS4.
The cost comes out to close to the same if I get Reaper and the Necro on my Mac.
How is the multiplayer between the two versions? Are both decent?
Ya, you got me. “Stay a while, and listen!” For some reason I misremembered it. Though I sure played enough D1/D2 that I should have memorized it by now!
Was just an excuse to post the song, which is amazing.
It’s maybe the greatest rap song evah.
So, did they bring the controller interface to PC? If so, does it work as well there?
Nihm
5743
I’m interested in d3 on the consoles, but how did they translate targeting to the controller? Like if you’re playing the necro and need to target a yellow in a huge mob of whites with your skeletons, can you do so?
