Diablo 3 - Reaper of Souls

Ortega said:

I always found it a bit frustrating that they blamed the RMAH. I don't think the auction house was really the problem at all. The problem is that they see it as an all or nothing equation. As you mentioned drops were insanely rare, so you were forced into the auction house. Now they have made drops insanely common, but bind on pickup essentially. Personally I think keeping the auction house and having drops somewhere in the middle would've been more interesting.

Ultimately there was a lot of arrogance on Blizzards part with D3. The had so many issues and such a lack of content that I can't help but feel like they fucked themselves by limiting testing to Act 1 only...

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They explained the limited testing in the video. They said they were so concerned with not letting spoilers out into the world, and they wanted everyone to experience the story for the first time when the game launched, that they screwed themselves with the 45 minute Demo as they called it in the video, not even a beta test. I guess as you mentioned, this is just them showing more arrogance. We love our story so much, and be damned if we'll let anyone know it before they play it!

I think the system they've adopted now across all of their games where the PTR is very much takes part in the development process is good. Can make a lot of changes, and test things out. Nothing is ever still perfect, but it's better.

Ortega said:

I always found it a bit frustrating that they blamed the RMAH. I don't think the auction house was really the problem at all. The problem is that they see it as an all or nothing equation. As you mentioned drops were insanely rare, so you were forced into the auction house. Now they have made drops insanely common, but bind on pickup essentially. Personally I think keeping the auction house and having drops somewhere in the middle would've been more interesting.

Ultimately there was a lot of arrogance on Blizzards part with D3. The had so many issues and such a lack of content that I can't help but feel like they fucked themselves by limiting testing to Act 1 only...

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They mentioned that too, that their beta approach was wrong.

Honestly, I see where they were coming from - d2jsp is still around and it was arguably at its height during most of D3 development. People wanted a difficult game, since eventually people gravitate towards the hardest difficulty that gives you the biggest rewards, however the game design has moved on since then, however every single ARPG allows you to overgear content to a degree so you can fulfill your fantasy as they call it. They fell into the same trap Torchlight did with random items, since stats were very polarized, if it didn't have your mainstat, it was generally shit, unlike D2. And there was no guarantee you'd ever find a good item, but there's an AH right in the main menu...

I find it fascinating how many of similar problems PoE faced/faces and how they solved them, since Blizzard could definitely learn a lesson or two. The economy, loot inflation, how currency works, stat usability etc. The argument that any kind of trading eventually diminishes people's enjoyment of the game rang especially true.

While I won't argue that PoE's currency is way better than D3 the way PoE has sidestepped many of these issues is by largely ignoring. Since the entire game resets every few months if something is insanely out of tune the problem eventually just goes away. Inflation happens but it doesn't happen until the latter part of the season and then it goes away. It isn't like PoE doesn't have many of the same problems vanilla D3 faced but since no real money is ever exchanging hands they can freely nerf and outright eliminate things from the playing field. D3 couldn't do that because simlar to when they nerfed IAS shortly after launch people who paid $100+ for a well rolled weapon that relied on IAS to be BiS suddenly they're asking for refunds. First-party support of a RMAH simply ties the hands of the developers too much and even if D3 was implemented with a well-done currency system instead of massively over inflated gold the RMAH was still untenable to maintain. D2JSP was able to do this because they were 3rd party and made no guarantees. Blizzard had to keep those guarantees with the RMAH and I don't think that idea was fully thought out.

Crone said:

They explained the limited testing in the video. They said they were so concerned with not letting spoilers out into the world, and they wanted everyone to experience the story for the first time when the game launched, that they screwed themselves with the 45 minute Demo as they called it in the video, not even a beta test. I guess as you mentioned, this is just them showing more arrogance. We love our story so much, and be damned if we'll let anyone know it before they play it!

I think the system they've adopted now across all of their games where the PTR is very much takes part in the development process is good. Can make a lot of changes, and test things out. Nothing is ever still perfect, but it's better.

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Apologies as I'm at work, and can't watch the video. The story is really a silly argument and I think Blizzard knows that. We're not talking about the Last of Us or something that actually had a decent story. The story is regarded by everyone is irrelevant/bad, and quickly becomes nothing more than a side note after the first run through.

I still love Blizzard, and believe they will learn from this whenever they do make Diablo 4. I just hope that isn't another several years away...

slippery said:

I would argue that gear isn't that common now. I stopped playing after the stash space because I just can't get shit at all. It's not fun to play when you can't get the shit that makes the builds work. The cube costs are way too fucking high for reforging legendaries.

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But if you're reforging shit that just means you're looking for betterer items. Gear is common in that you can get any piece of gear to do any build you want in a reasonable amount of time. Even the "rare" items like witching hour or unity for example if you spend all your blood shards and upgrade as many rares as you can you'll get that item in a fairly quick amount of time. I know I spent at least 30k blood shards early on into the season trying to get ancient ue pants, so it does suck when you can't get that ancient upgrade you're looking for, but its also not necessary except for pushing the highest grifts so you need something to work towards other than more paragon/augments.

Does remind me I wonder what the drop rate on primal ancient items are going to be, did they say? Ancient still has the same 10% chance in t13 as it does t10 doesn't it? Hope they do something like increase ancient drop rate to 20% and make primal ancient 10% in t13.

slippery said:

I would argue that gear isn't that common now. I stopped playing after the stash space because I just can't get shit at all. It's not fun to play when you can't get the shit that makes the builds work. The cube costs are way too fucking high for reforging legendaries.

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I think they have it fairly well tuned. The stronger you get from random drops the faster you clear. By the time you can only upgrade from ancients/better ancient rolls and need reforge mats you can speed run bounties and rifts so fast that you're spending 1/10th the time you were a hundred paragon levels ago.

The RMAH was interesting, but as a monk I hated it. Why? Because due to their tuning of classes the only people who could farm max ilvl shit in Whimsy were kiters. Monks couldn't really kite. So I made ~$120 from RMAH whereas my friends who were a WD and DH made thousands. Why? Because they could run in circles and spam abilities and I would die instantly, even with a fucking Skorn with life steal.

slippery said:

For a single build though. I definitely can't switch builds because I don't have the shit, and I only have like 2 ancients in my current build, which is the starter build

I just want to reforge weapons to ancient, it takes way too much playtime though

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You gotta work towards something. I was just working on ue on my dh and I come to find out there are two new builds with grenades. One I already had everything I needed because it also uses ue and already had the other items. The other uses marauder's which I already had so I just needed 2 items and I got both within a couple hours play time. It doesn't really matter what build you use, you just gotta work towards clearing shit fast then you can focus on other builds.

I need to run bounties because I'd like to get an ancient witching hour mostly just because i've never had one and I'd also like to get a decent compass rose so if you want to run bounties sometime let me know.

I just came back after a long break. Begaro#1704 if anyone wants to play. I think I left around t5 but have no idea what is going on with any classes so far. Just been leaching pub t10 runs ha.

They already said they're going to significantly change how Primals are acquired or work or something I believe, based on pre-PTR feedback even. My assumption (and what probably is way smarter) is you can enchant/augment an ancient to a primal somehow. Having it be a 10% chance of a 10% chance of a specific legendary dropping means it's just TOO rng based.

I would kind of actually agree with the sentiment of loot being too rare still - that's not true in a general sense, but if you want to aim for a specific build it can be REALLY painful if RNG isn't on your side. It mostly only matters for the last couple steps of the journey but like this last season, RNG just was so bad I gave up 3 steps from the end, whereas I had been completing every step. Blood shards and the cube help alleviate the RNG somewhat but are still beholden to it in the end.

I love a guaranteed method of upgrading non-ancient to ancient for weapons. Charge me the cost of 10x cube rolls whatever. Just remove that horrid RNG component.

Interesting, do they say what the chance is? If it's 10% for a regular ancient on an item, and its a further 1% chance of that ancient rolling primal, blah.

a_skeleton_03 said:

Not bad actually.

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sounds like a crock of shit and a waste of time. How many classes can reach grift 70 without a decent number of anicents?

Deathwing said:

Most if not all just need your weapon slots ancient. Pretty sure my MH wiz could do GR70 without an ancient weapon too.

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Meh...possibly if you have some decently leveled legendary gems.