The Glade 4.0

I'm not sure what to say other than:

- I played a lot of Diablo 1, on and offline
- I played D2 and got bored prior to beating it once, never played it online
- I'm playing the **** out of D3 and I see it lasting longer than 1 did for me

I was the opposite. I played D1 a medium amount.... D2 I had multiple maxed chars.

I really do see the frustration with D3 rewards. On the one hand, it's cool to be able to trade more easily.... On the other, I have yet to get a boss drop that my character could use. On any of my characters.

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

D2 had some incredibly tedious parts in the first and second acts, and the 6 level spread between new abilities was incredibly boring.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I think people tend to forget just how much crap upon crap upon utter crap there was that was dropped in D2. And I am even talking about Unique drops. Items were extremely restricted per class and per stat point selection (oh, you were a sorc who didn't have over 100 str? well, no super unique sorc armor for you. cry some more). And I think people tend to forget just how much of a boring grind D2 was at the highest levels in the game (Act 5, hell difficulty). It was the exact.... EXACT same routine every time.

Bosses did drop better gear in D2, but that was because the designers thought that bosses were the ultimate fights. But in reality, they were placed on farm status and because they were in the same place with the same attacks, it grew very stale. This is why in D3 bosses don't drop the most exceptional gear. Elite packs and chests do. They want players to go hunt randomly for these things, which VERY MUCH alleviates the tedium and boredom.

Let me explain the graph in that link so an EQ'er can understand: Remember camping a mob for a single drop of gear? A mob that only spawned once every 8+ hours and wasn't even guaranteed to spawn, but had many placeholders? Remember that rush of feeling you got when you finally got him after 2 weeks of camping?

That's Diablo 2. Give someone a long enough withdrawal and give them a tedious enough task, then the reward is much sweeter. If this was such an awesome reward system, why haven't more MMOs adopted that system since?

Because the ratio of tedium/boredom to reward was terrible. And nostalgia tends to gloss over the tedium.

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Les Zombis et les Loups-Garous!

See, I hate the nearly completely randomized loot. Not to mention very little in the way of specialized weapons.

This post describes my feelings quite well:

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/5271605567

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

I agree that legendaries need to bumped up in power, as of right now they are pretty worthless compared to many yellows and blues. I am betting that will change so I am not too worried about it.

The other thing people tend to forget is that Blizzard continued to fine-tune D2 over the course of many *years.* I, again, have no doubt this trend will continue with D3.

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Les Zombis et les Loups-Garous!

PEople also fail to realize that unique loot in Diablo 2 was just as worthless as it is in Diablo 3. Runewords is where it was at in Diablo 2, making drops that weren't runes completely worthless. Of course, it wasn't like that at the start, but that's what everyone compares Diablo 3 to.

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Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

Not sure if anyone else has encountered this... annoying 'feature' yet, but rare/elite packs have an enrage timer now. I was forced to kite a pack around tonight that had knockback and vampiric on them. Normally I'd just Mirror Image a pack and not care, but they were healing from my image deaths faster than I could kill them....

Kite kite kite... 5 minutes later I get a stacking DoT on me and die. Ok, thats fine...

Apparently it doesn't go away until the pack is at full health..

Thats bloody annoying. I can only imagine what would happen if I got vampiric and extra health!

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For contrast:

I am loving this game and I have only played around 5 hours, if that. I haven't even completed Act 1 yet.

I guess I will get the benefit of the game being patched/balanced to Blizzard's liking by the time I get to the later difficulties with more rare/legendary item drops.

As an, almost exclusively, single player gamer, I'd like to see the in-game item drops be enough of a draw so that I never have to bother with the AH. I'd rather spend my time killing and hoping for that next awesome drop than to go shopping through the item list. It's just not part of the game and no fun whatsoever, IMHO.

EDIT - Doesn't having an AH take away the very essence of what Diablo is and always was...a loot hunt? Now it's just turned into shopping. Boring. Burn the AH, I won't miss it.

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This must be Thursday. I could never get the hang of Thursdays.

You'll appreciate the AH after your 125th boss run without an upgrade you can actually use. Or when you can get a 600 DPS weapon for cheap instead of the 200 DPS drops your game haunts you with.

That's the point, though. Blizzard lowered the drop rate to compensate for the availability of gear on the AH.

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Go back to zero, take a pill, and get well ~ Lemmy Kilmister

Sucks that it will become the norm to do so. I'm not in the game to max out my character's gear, dps, skillset, lvl, etc. I don't have the time nor the inclination to shop ingame in the auction house.

I don't want in game experience (drop rates, item lvls, etc.) to be borked because of the existence of the AH. If the game is being tweaked to accommodate the existence of the the AH, then I am not happy. This is not a fair trade-off for those who don't want to bother shopping for their equipment rather than just enjoying the game for what it is and finding the equipment on their own.

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This must be Thursday. I could never get the hang of Thursdays.

I don't mind the AH so much as the fact that all of the "good" items seem to be random.

I don't mind some randomization, but keeping an eye out for a specific piece of nice gear is cool. It gives goals to work towards.

Of course, I completely agree that the drop rates are pretty screwy. Halfway through nightmare (with multiple runs on bosses), and I have yet to see anything better than rares drop- no recipes, no legendaries.

I barely look at >95% of the stuff I get before salvaging it now, it's crazy.

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

I guess I don't see the downside to the AH. You don't have to use it if you don't want. Loot in Diablo has always been terribly rare and random, so I don't think Blizzard has changed that much. However, when I DO get shitty drops [for my character], I appreciate the ability to get a good amount of gold for an item that would otherwise be sold to a vendor for 200g or destroyed for mats. I also appreciate the fact that if I'm hamstrung by strings of bad luck on drops that I can choose to pay for some upgrades so I can move on.

I agree 100%

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Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

What he's saying is that if the difficulty of the game is balanced for characters that buy gear on the AH, it will be harder (possibly too hard) for those that don't. It's definitely a legitimate downside to the AH, but for my part I don't think it's a big deal because it's not a persistent world. Run any given area on any given difficulty enough times and sooner or later you WILL get good drops. It might be a problem if you want to play D3 for a few months and then take the next thing to come along, but given D2's lifespan I don't think Blizzard is (or should) proceed around that assumption.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Blizzard's changes to drop frequency in the next patch should alleviate people feeling the need to use the AH. When you start being able to get Act IV drops from Act I, it's just a matter of time before you're decked out.

For now, though, I'll continue farming pygmies and ash pots. Only 100k to go for Nightmare Whimsyshire.

Diamondeye framed what I am saying perfectly. I am hoping that the game doesn't get so hard and a tedious grind because of the AH, thus forcing me to have to use it...something I'd rather not have to rely on.

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This must be Thursday. I could never get the hang of Thursdays.

It's no different than it was in Diablo or Diablo 2. Instead of having open games where people traded stuff, you just go to the AH. Diablo and Diablo 2 had drop rates very similar to Diablo 3 only they made it much easier to do the trading with the AH and gold has actual value unlike in Diablo or Diablo 2.

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Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

While I completely understand the financial reasons behind Blizzard adding an auction house to the diablo world (although not a general channel... really?), I still wish there was no auction house and the game was better balanced for individual players, instead of the player base as a whole.

Regardless, it is an excellent game.

What Raltar said. Diablo is notorious for being a tedious grind The only time you will feel the "need" to rely on the AH is when you're playing Inferno and you can't wait on the perfect drop. Drop rates themselves are not bad; you could have a bag full of rares in a couple of hours. The bad part is the fact that everything is random stats, and you could get a +200 int/str item drop as a DH just as easily as you could get a 250 dex/+30% crit item.

If you want, just avoid the AH completely unless you get an awesome drop. Then sell it. Then get something to replace whatever you feel is lacking; like you would do with a normal in-game merchant. You don't have to pretend that the items are coming from real people if you don't want to.

Diablo 2 was just as gear dependent to make progress. If you did not have gear that bumped the hell out of your resistances (as well as mitigate damage for the melee classes), and if you did not have gear/abilities that could do multiple types of damage, you were screwed on hell difficulty.

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Les Zombis et les Loups-Garous!

I forgot once I got back, but I've still got one or two friend passes for D3 if anyone would like. Just PM me.

Nothing in Diablo ever gave me that phat lewt feeling.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Lenas:

Good point. I guess the crux of what my issue would be is that I am hoping that the existence of the AH doesn't cause Blizzard to make changes to the ingame drops that would be negatively impactful to those who would rather not rely on it.

As someone who won't know the ingame economy, my problem with trying to sell items would be I don't necessarily know what to list things for or know what stats are the most sought after.

Point one will be my main concern, though. I'll adjust to minimal use of the AH if need be, but all I want is a game that isn't going to be patched all to hell to mitigate the ease of access to items through the AH. I want to be able to enjoy it without being forced (through patching) to go to the AH to get the gear I need to progress.

From what it appears, the patch seems to be going the opposite direction. Making better drops happen in earlier difficulty level. That'll be just fine for me. I had always enjoyed being able to take the short bits of time that I had and squeezing in some D2 for a quick couple of runs to see what drops I might get. Was always part of the fun of the game to me, that uncertainty...seeing that Golden unique or Green Set item. As long as this isn't broken too badly in D3, I'll be happy. Happy to be able to take a half hour or so, run out to find some champions, elites, or a boss and hope for something new and interesting drop.

So far, I have been seeming to get items that fit me just fine. I just beat that nasty spider queen (Aranae, or somthing like that) and had a yellow spellbook drop. When I realized it was an actual equipable item, not another piece of lore and then IDed it, I was pleasantly surprised to see that it was an off-hand item that outclassed my orb by a longshot. That feeling is what I want to remain as part of the game, that rush of finding a rare, useful item and not having the drop rates lowered because of the AH for any reason.

Wow, that was long winded. Sorry.

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This must be Thursday. I could never get the hang of Thursdays.