Diablo III - New patch 2.1 Coming Aug 26

[Aegypticus]

Barbs can build themselves to be incredible tanks right now. We're farming Act 3 inferno as a team with three ranged and our barb friend. For most elite packs he can literally put himself between us and them and just tab out while we kill it. Half the time he's just acting as a wall so mobs don't come for us.

[Rathji]

So spent a couple hours tonight putting together a gear set with more resists and HP, including a few indestructible armor peices, putting my EHP (EHP calculator here if anyone is interested) at about 115k, while maintaining 50k dps (with SS). I then tried advancing in Act 2, and I am doing surprisingly well against Elites and Champ packs, but I think that is a partially a factor of not coming up against any really bad affix combos.

Found some decent drops, including one level 63 item. If think the drops might offset the repair cost, which is still pretty bad, even with the few invulnerable item upgrades.

Still pissed about Whimsyshire being nerfed all to hell. At least I didn't dump 1mill into the Inferno staff.

[photon]

I think I'm in it now just to finish Hell and get to 60. Act I in Hell was really causing me problems, I died to almost every single pack or elite, often a few times, fortunately at 55 the repair costs are still not that bad.

All during this I get maybe 3-4 blue drops that are at my level and maybe a couple rares.. and they're all quivers So gearing up through playing just doesn't cut it without spending tons of time.

So I went to the AH, spent about 60k (including a couple of weapons which got m DPS from 1800 to 3900), and now I can waltz through pretty much anything again.

And the gold/hour rate is much lower, so I agree with the sentiments above, I'm still at a point where I can find cheap gear for my level so still playing for now.

[Shawnski]

Originally Posted by Oling_Roachinen

While I realize I'm in the minority, which probably has at least a little bit to do with melee characters also being in the minority, the most vocal group is always going to be the ones who hate it the most.

I disagree with some of the changes, repair cost seems excessive and pony runs look to be almost pointless now, but for the most part it seems to me that the patch aimed to balance the classes and has now swung a bit too far in the other direction which will probably be fixed next patch.

Now what I do really hate about Diablo 3 is it felt even though I got the game weeks after launch I was still in the beta, to not have PvP in the game yet is a disgrace really.

I couldn't care less about class balances; perceived or not. All classes had their moaners.

This is far deeper than that. This patch nerfed a couple things that people spent at LOT of time (and in some cases, real money) acquiring. IAS and MF.

I had worked through most of the "Act 2 wall" and was almost beating Belial. With the nerf, I am back to Act 1 farming. Lost about 16% of my DPS, and the slowness now leaves me quite vulnerable compared to before.

The MF thing though, where they decided that MF no longer applies to treasure chests (and Whimpyshire clouds) is absolutely freakin' ######ed. You go through one of the caves, kill everything and in the end you get to the yellow respendent chest that usually has something relatively decent (more often than not) that you can at least sell if you don't need it. Now, I get only some crappy blues. I must have hit over 150 chests tonight, 40 or so resplendents, and I got 2 rares. That's it.... TWO. Five stack NV and all.

But hey, MF still works on dead villagers, oddly enough. I got my very first set item today from a dead villager. Yup, treasure chests shouldn't have real treasure in them apparently... but that local guy laying on the ground probably will. Dumbasses.

Those two things alone are enough to rank this patch as clearly substandard. But they also broke simple things, like in the AH, where you select your filter (like "Intelligence"). It was simple before. Alphabetical. Now? Some lame grouped list that takes longer to find the attribute you are looking for. Just insane to me.

Don't even get me started on what they didn't fix.

But those are just in THIS patch. The game itself as mrdonkey so aptly discussed, is just a disgrace to the Diablo gaming history.

[Ethaniel]

Firing up D2 as we speak. Oh look my nice single player characters! Oh look it is actually fun!

[SilverGS]

meh. You knew the OP's IAS was going to be nerfed. They are always going to "balance" things out for OP'd strats and you are going to have to adjust. If you spent a ton of money on IAS items you were kidding yourself if you figured it would never change.

No more Whym runs? ah well 5 stack elite and boss runs now which is what the designers were after anyways.

Sounds like Barbs got there fix and seem OP so be careful what you may stack since they will probably balance it at some point.

You may not have as fine control in skill tree selection as D2 but I think for casual gamers they like that.

My takes so far on the patch.

- Act 2 is now much more doable.
- Repair costs went the opposite extreme
- I feel MF should count on treasure chests but ok with it not being on clouds, vases and the like.

I recall a lot of rebalancing and complaints about D2 in the early years as well. It takes time to fine tune these games. In the meantime I am fine with levelling different chars for different play styles and doing 5 stacked valor runs with friends. Not going to worry about every little detail and just enjoy the overall play. If there is an impossible combination of elite once in a while skip and move on oh well. I still want it to be somewhat challenging especially in Inferno otherwise gets really boring.

[Rathji]

Originally Posted by SilverGS

meh. You knew the OP's IAS was going to be nerfed. They are always going to "balance" things out for OP'd strats and you are going to have to adjust. If you spent a ton of money on IAS items you were kidding yourself if you figured it would never change.

No more Whym runs? ah well 5 stack elite and boss runs now which is what the designers were after anyways.

Sounds like Barbs got there fix and seem OP so be careful what you may stack since they will probably balance it at some point.

You may not have as fine control in skill tree selection as D2 but I think for casual gamers they like that.

My takes so far on the patch.

- Act 2 is now much more doable.
- Repair costs went the opposite extreme
- I feel MF should count on treasure chests but ok with it not being on clouds, vases and the like.

I recall a lot of rebalancing and complaints about D2 in the early years as well. It takes time to fine tune these games. In the meantime I am fine with levelling different chars for different play styles and doing 5 stacked valor runs with friends. Not going to worry about every little detail and just enjoy the overall play. If there is an impossible combination of elite once in a while skip and move on oh well. I still want it to be somewhat challenging especially in Inferno otherwise gets really boring.

Clouds are chests, as I see it, and should have MF. If that means you tweak something else in the zone (less clouds, clouds drop less items overall, but MF counts, etc). Making the clouds useless and dropped broken and cracked stuff in the top tier is just idiotic.

Vases and other breakables, I agree with, but I think the better solution is just not having them drop items, rather than messing with MF on them.

[Ethaniel]

Originally Posted by Rathji

Clouds are chests, as I see it, and should have MF. If that means you tweak something else in the zone (less clouds, clouds drop less items overall, but MF counts, etc). Making the clouds useless and dropped broken and cracked stuff in the top tier is just idiotic.

Vases and other breakables, I agree with, but I think the better solution is just not having them drop items, rather than messing with MF on them.

IMO they have screwed this up royally. I know I am negative at this game, but in D2 you can get anything from anything. They stated many times that the same existed in D2 and now they have basically removed it completely. If I am rocking 300 MF it should apply to everything I touch just like D2.

[SilverGS]

Originally Posted by Rathji

Clouds are chests, as I see it, and should have MF. If that means you tweak something else in the zone (less clouds, clouds drop less items overall, but MF counts, etc). Making the clouds useless and dropped broken and cracked stuff in the top tier is just idiotic.

Vases and other breakables, I agree with, but I think the better solution is just not having them drop items, rather than messing with MF on them.

I suppose you could look at it that way.

How about a reduction in MF on different items. Resplendant Chests and Pot of Golds get MF * 150% due to rarity, chests 100% MF, Clouds and dead bodies 50%, Vases 5%.

[Meelapo]

Originally Posted by SilverGS

I suppose you could look at it that way.

How about a reduction in MF on different items. Resplendant Chests and Pot of Golds get MF * 150% due to rarity, chests 100% MF, Clouds and dead bodies 50%, Vases 5%.

You'd think that those Resplendant Chests would drop neat items since you need to go out of your way to get them. Now that they really aren't worth the time I'm sure lots of players won't even explore those side dungeons.

[MickMcGeough]

Originally Posted by Meelapo

You'd think that those Resplendant Chests would drop neat items since you need to go out of your way to get them. Now that they really aren't worth the time I'm sure lots of players won't even explore those side dungeons.

I really feel for Blizzard - they seem to be taking a spaghetti-on-the-wall approach to the tweaks here.

Opening up the RMAH before they completed the major tweaks was a mistake.

Kinda wishing I'd waited for all this to settle down before starting D3. My AS/LoH Monk is all of a sudden not so cool.

[Tinordi]

Anyone going to switch to Torchlight 2?

[llama64]

Originally Posted by Tinordi

Anyone going to switch to Torchlight 2?

I might try it.

But I'll still play D3. Not sure why people are whining. Game really hasn't changed - you increase numbers so that you can output higher numbers that get subtracted against other numbers.

We're playing a giant spreadsheet - nothing about that has changed other then some numbers aren't worth as much they were in a fake currency. And if you've spent money in the RMAH - well, you have other issues in your life that you need to look into before complaining about a game.

[nickerjones]

Originally Posted by mrdonkey

Diablo 3 threw that all out the window and made it a dps race. If you don't have the gear to whale on the bad guys fast enough (and, by extension, the millions of gold required to purchase it), you simply do not progress, no matter how skilled or insightful you might be as a player. The in-game economy might as well not even exist, because it's a far better solution to take your money and buy what you know is good on the auction house than spend the same amount of money rolling the dice at the blacksmith just to end up with items with nonsensical combinations of stats (such as gloves with +int and +str).

DING DING DING we have a winner Johnny! Blizzard didn't make this game to make gamers happy. It made this game to make money. Everything they are doing is pushing people to buy stuff off the RMAH. Blizz gets a cut , hell Blizz prob sells half the stuff on the RMAH. We don't know , We have no way of knowing.

Think about it .. If it cost so much gold to repair your gear and you can't possibly make that much money in X amount of time , what are you going to do ? You're going to go buy gold.

If you can't beat a boss because its so hard , what are you going to do ? 60% of the people will pay real money to buy better gear.

This game is a huge cash grab. They don't care that gamers don't like. A lot of the people bitching on the d3 forums are griping because they spend real money on gear with IAS then it was nerfed and now they have to spend money on the next thing that works. Blizzard knows what they are doing. To bad they are doing the wrong thing.

[Top Shelf]

Originally Posted by Tinordi

Anyone going to switch to Torchlight 2?

When is it rumored to be released?

[llama64]

Originally Posted by nickerjones

If you can't beat a boss because its so hard , what are you going to do ? 60% of the people will pay real money to buy better gear.

Imma stop you there.

Where did this 60% figure come from? I know about 10 people who play this game, every single one of us think the RMAH is pointless and defeats the purpose of playing the game. Not conclusive evidence, but it's a sample at least as opposed to numbers pulled from thin air.

I would argue it's far more likely people quit playing altogether if it costs them significant amounts of money to play. And people not playing the game isn't in Blizzard's best interest either.

[Flame Of Liberty]

Paying real $$$ just to beat the game you spent cool $60 on faster seems like the dumbest idea ever. You are paying to get less mileage out of your game? Might as well pay some Asian kid to beat the game for you...

I can see people dropping few hundred on uber MF gear then grinding the game 24/7 to find and sell enough loot to turn profit... But I'm not sure if that's a cool or a sad way to live.

[Resolute 14]

Looks to me like they quietly upped the gold drop rate from yesterday to today. Not nearly what it once was, but at least Act III inferno is giving me a decent number of 200g+ drops today, where I topped out at 70 yesterday, and rarely at that.

[Oling_Roachinen]

Originally Posted by Rathji

Clouds are chests, as I see it, and should have MF. If that means you tweak something else in the zone (less clouds, clouds drop less items overall, but MF counts, etc). Making the clouds useless and dropped broken and cracked stuff in the top tier is just idiotic.

Vases and other breakables, I agree with, but I think the better solution is just not having them drop items, rather than messing with MF on them.

It was a quick fix to prevent those who were abusing, for lack of better word, the pony runs by paying to get into a cleared one with nothing but just the clouds, presents and possibly pinata left. They didn't defeat any of the monsters (and likely couldn't) nor were they even there to make it harder.

So essentially 1 person could clear a run (in 1 person difficulty) but 4 players would reap the rewards.

As I mostly farmed Whimsyshire (actually doing the runs with friends..although using the hole a lot of the time) it's kind of ####ty for me but I completely understand where Blizzard was coming from, even if it's far from a perfect solution.

Same with the vases as you had guys running to them in Act 4, unable to actually kill any of the monsters, but quickly smashing and grabbing the vases and getting high level gear occasionally.

Originally Posted by Shawnski

I couldn't care less about class balances

I understand, but Blizzard and many other players do. There's really 2 ways to look at a patch like this, how it affected you and how it affected the game. I think this patch affected the game very positvely, lots of room for improvements, but melee classes have their strengths now while range classes that can actually look at taking a hit or two in Inferno become a real option...maybe not easily but at least a little bit more viable then a week ago. More options make a better lasting game in my opinion.

[automaton 3]

Originally Posted by mrdonkey

I just want to expand on these thoughts a bit because as a former game designer I have a major hair across my ass for this sort of thing.

Great summary and thanks. It has also become quickly apparent for me that this game only has a fraction of the re-playability of D2. I played through normal and most of the way through nightmare with a Monk and got bored. Decided to try a Wizard and am almost done nightmare and am bored again. Tried some multi-player, found it to be meh.

As this game was in development for so freaking long you gotta wonder how did they miss the mark so badly.