I'd still just wait for the Battlechest, considering the expansion you're still blowing about $100 and for about $40 end up with the expansions, player guides, and ect. By then also most of the bugs are worked out of the game as well.
Then again I hate spending money in general.
That assumes that you have no skill in the Real Money auction house. The longer the game is out, the lower prices should be, as supply meets demand. So the money to be made is early on. If you're on top of things, and a bit lucky, you might be able to make up the difference that waiting would save you.
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I highly doubt it's going to be a simple thing to make vast sums of money on the RMAH. With a lucky drop or some attentive toying around with arbitrage, perhaps, but that'll only go so far.
And Blizzard has noted that there will be items released in patches, not just expansions, so those crazed few with the raw funding to chase the 'most uber of the uber' in gear will probably always have something higher to strive for.
I'm not saying that there won't be someone who walks away with hundreds or thousands of dollars in the first weeks or months of the game, but to say that it just takes 'some skill' is simplifying a lot, and ignoring the RNG even more.
Yea, but those same "goblins" will be losing a cut every time. Which early on should prove profitable, long run though it'll not be so hot, I'm sure once supply equalizes.
And gotta say, as someone who only got 15-20 min to play at a friend's before to experience beta - this weekend has assuaged any doubts the wife and I had. So good.
Eh, the only way I could see a complaint is the itemization isn't exciting in the first half of the first Act we can play - but... there really shouldn't be.
Assuming item progression is done well, I expect to be in love for a long time.
Yes weapon damage influences the right click attacks - (and some others) - but by the same token it influences the rate of attack etc as well.
So a 2H Axe using mage is going to cast much slower than a wand user.
And really from the numbers I've seen on the wands including their +to Cast bonuses and speed, I can't imagine in the longrun 2H Axe route will be best.
Diablo itemization lowend was always more about using the best thing you got to drop than what made sense - in the longrun it always made sense - seeing up to Act 2 will see characters develop each their ideal direction if it follows suit with D2 itemization.
And on the skill system - I mostly like it myself - I do wish the cooldown on switching a given spells spec was much longer though - changing rune or a completely new spell in should take longer than a few seconds. (maybe like 5x normal cooldown)
The skill system seems like a fairly reasonable compromise to me.
In the end, there are several times more skills available to a character than in D2. Unlike D2, you are free to use more than 2-4 of them at once. Unlike D2, you're not stuck using those skills with 1 point in them until you hit 30 (some synergies aside, though those came much later anyway). Unlike D2, if you decide you don't want to be an Orb/Meteor Sorceress, you don't have to spend 5 or 20 or 50+ hours (availability of rushes and bored friends pending) levelling another up to a reasonable point where you can try out a new build.
As well, apparently there will be room in itemization for affixes that give bonuses to specific skills, so if you gear heavily towards a 'build', and then want to try something else, you won't necessarily just be able to slap on a new set of skills and be equally as effective. Not to mention that some builds might require more crit, or more str, or to be geared more heavily for survival, etc, etc.
People are entitled to their opinions, but a lot of the opinions I've seen expressed on the skill system come across as ill informed or locked into a sense of nostalgia. Being able to get into Mephisto/Diablo/Ba'al/cow/whatever farming runs and getting to level 80 in a couple hours doesn't make the old system good, it just meant that people worked extra hard to bypass game mechanics.
Sure, it'll probably be annoying to want to try out a skill and not get access to it until the end of Hell, but the way things are set, you get a new skill or rune variation every level, so you have time to test everything out 'in the field' naturally and can make informed choices when it comes to where it really matters anyway; Inferno, which only starts at 60 anyway.
If by "generic character", you mean "cookie cutter builds", then all the more reason to try something different with D3, because every time I've glanced at D2 in the last decade+, it's been chalk full of 'em.
Will someone work out the mathematically perfect 'build' and gear set for a given class? Sure. Obtaining it and having it fit to your playstyle, however, might not be as easily done. Personally, having played all the classes to 13, having perused the character builder, I'm mostly excited to just try out all the skills as I level and organically build a character based on what I find fun and powerful, not what a calculator says should put out 2% higher DPS, if only I swap these passives, and these three skills, and re-gem all my gear, and find a pile of other gear.
... got a little ranty there. Long story short, decrying the lack of customization is misinformed at best and willfully ignorant at worst. For the most part, they didn't axe customization, they reduced the number of character design traps.
Ah, I see you've played all the way through Inferno, how is it?
More seriously, have you played the beta? With what classes? To 13? As someone who played all 5 to 13 a few patches back, I disagree.
What was your favourite part of D2 customization? Taking just enough str/dex to carry your choice gear and pumping all the rest into vit, or putting 1 point in each skill on the tree to your final goal at 30 and and playing all the way through to Nightmare before you got to assign anything else?
As for the No True Diablosman, I disagree even more vehemently. I played through Torchlight twice, and while a fine game in its own right, it's a Diablo 2 successor in that you use 1-2 skills constantly and there's a vested interest in hording skill points like they're made of gold wrapped Jessica Albas. Was on a third playthrough when I got tired of how same'y everything was.
The only thing that they really improved upon was using the dog to sell junk, and D3's ability to sell in the field does that better.
Diablo 2's customization is built on avoiding traps in character design, and picking which of a handful of top tier skills you wanted to use (minor hyperbole). As much as WOTC loves 'bad cards', it's not necessarily something that one wants to base an entire game around. D3's will allow for choice at will (skill swapping) while still requiring emphasis on a build (gearing appropriately) with the two feeding into one another synergistically, rather than simply "get *unique of choice here*, put *runeword of choice here* onto Merc, farm ubers by throwing a million *insert skill here*"
Min-max and theorycrafting still have a huge timesink in D3 based on available information and it's a bit that's not fully available in the beta.
Gems and gear: One has 0% available, the other has about 10% of one of 4 modes available.
Not to mention the specs themselves while you do have respecs on the fly so to speak, there's definite choices to be made each time - even at 13 there's a large difference in many of the specs, and generally no clear victor. (And of course, with using the "no Primary/Secondary/etc" option you'll be able to have a ton more options than normal as well)
Being able to screw up your build is a bad thing in gaming for a long time now - respecs exist in EVERYTHING these days for a reason.
I do agree that I'd prefer to see the swap time reduced to make it so you need to be a bit more tactical about respecs rather than being able to on the fly as it its right now, but eh - doesn't ruin the game or anything, just a personal preference.
I'd put it more on par with the Countess myself, but that's nitpicking.
Who said anything about making the game "casualized"? I appreciate them making an effort to make the game accessible, but that's not mutually exclusive with it being possible to have depth present. You still haven't said what made D2's system superior, merely that you feel it is. Why is it preferable to have locked in skills, and only use one or two (for the vast majority at least) versus flexability (backed by gear focus and affixes that will need tweaking to make a new build truly sing).
And why is Max Schaefer and/or his team's involvement necessary for it to be a "true diablo sequel"? Both D2 and D3 are the result of untold man hours across multiple years by hundreds (maybe thousands) of artists, programmers, designers, etc. There's a flowchart image that shows the evolution of Blizzard's Big Names across the series, and all of them have seen dramatic drift.
I appreciate the work he and they did, but Torchlight 1 was by no means a genre changing game. It was very much "Diablo 2.5: more clicking with 1-2 skills and better graphics". I wish them well with TL2, but I'll probably wait for a Steam sale before dropping any money on it if the first game is any indication.
Having a solid pedigree doesn't necessarily insure anything. Flagship Studios was formed by Ex-Blizzard employees (including Bill Roper and Max Schaefer, among others), and Hellgate: London was pretty much a steaming pile of crap that did one thing right (individual loot), which D3 is also doing (I'm seeing a pattern here...)
And while we're No True Diablo'ing, D2 differed vastly from D1. Running? Open areas? Where are my cursed items? What are these gem and rune things? Why can't my Barbarian cast Apocalypse? Why don't any of the monsters give permanent stat reductions?
Need I go on?
Adjusting a game's mechanics for the times isn't a bad thing. It's a sign that the developers are aware that over a decade has passed since D2/LoD, and making "D2: with better graphics" while ignoring those advances would be foolish. Hell, it's the very problem I have with what I've read of the D&D Next/5th Ed.
Is Aliens not a sequel to Alien? The latter is a top notch Thriller, the former is one of the finest sci-fi action movies ever made. The enemy is mostly the same but the details are vastly different. By your logic, it's not a "true sequel".
If what you're saying is true you're a Blizzard employee or you're lying/pirating. Friends & Family beta is the highest allowed to nonemployees and the friend I played via has no further access and has F&F from his old buddy Furor. (He's old days FoH)
Disagree Forar. They have reduced customization to practically 0.
There are obvious cookie-cutter builds for all classes and while you might not care about extracting 2% more dps, they have said Inferno will require the very best so anyone wanting to farm top end gear will take the best spec.
D2 actually opened more options , Sorcs had Orb/meteor , hydra , thunder sorcs
all equally good. Javazons/strafeazon/multizon/tankazon etc etc etc
D3 inherently has 1 best build because everyone has access to same skills/runes and their are no limits with trees.
Theorycrafting and min/maxing is kinda my hobby and d3 makes it incredibly easy.
I am not saying d3 is worse than d2 just that d3 isn't diablo it is a different game using the diablo license as a skin.
Runic games contains the true diablo team now (as shown by torchlight which was the true successor to diablo 2).
In theory everyone has access to the same card pool, yet there isn't one best Legacy deck.
Torchlight is hardly a successor to d2, it's basically a remake of d1 with some d2 elements thrown in to modernize it.
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And Torchlight while great has suffered from budget limitations - and besides Hellgate London proves they aren't always the best at guiding future success of the format. (I loved HG:L though)
There's been some hacking of the D3 beta client that opened up a few new zones. Not sure if people have hacked much further than that with the digital download version, but it wouldn't surprise me.
Not really sure what the big deal is, especially with d3 vs. torchlight. Torchlight was a decent game, but ended up being a technologically superior but technically inferior version of diablo 2. I like being able to toy around with skills rather than becoming super proficient in only two, and the auto stat allocation is...eh? It's not like allocating stats was a big part of d2. They were largely irrelevant in terms of their impact on your combat attributes, you'd need several levels worth of stats to bump your damage range by a point, when by the time you reached nightmare damage numbers were figured into the thousands, and Hell mode had calculated damage in the tens of thousands.
Damn, you guys are getting me depressed about this release. I've have been waiting for this game for LITERALLY 8-10 years. Slowly but surely I've noticed Blizz taking the game in the wrong directions. "Oh hey guys, btw we took ALL the runes out for customizing skills (cool idea), and now everybody just gets them all through leveling." "Oh hey guys, we've had 10 years buttttt no PVP at launch sry." Words like "Casualized" and "Restrictive" seem to be popping up more and more and it's really getting me quite upset. For a game I've waited this long for, it's sure looking like Blizzard is ready to ruin it for the original fanbase who spent years of their lives maxing out characters in hardcore mode in D2.
I can see it already, and the game hasn't even launched yet. That's a bad sign. Customization was HALF the fun of Diablo 2. And I can already see customization has been severely limited in what I've seen so far. Auto stat building? Auto skill choosing? Auto rune unlocking? The skill system has me more worried then anything. I mean damn, how are we supposed to make our character OURS. We can't even customize the character model. Every level 60 Wizard will have all the same skills, at all the same levels, with all the same "skillrunes" unlocked, with all the same attributes, as every other level 60 Wizard. That right there is just sad.
And I know what you guys are thinking, wow another dude who's trying to hate on blizzard without even playing the full game yet. I'm not, I'm just a man who has been waiting 10 years for a game that is finally coming out in less than a month and is looking less and less appealing as true gamers start coming out about how the game REALLY is. Frankly, I'm pissed off. I will buy this game, I HAVE to buy this game. But if it ends up how it looks like it will now, I will be infinitely disappointed, and I will never buy anything from Blizzard ever again. Taking a game from my childhood and bastardizing into a top-down WoW clone, I really hope you're all wrong.
The dropped runes for skills had to be changed to what they were the minute they went with the RMAH concept - either they needed to be super common, cosmetic only, or they'd have people trying to gouge an arm and a leg for the 'perfect' ones.
Given that RMAH is going to fund the servers so it can be F2P its an acceptable sacrifice - I'd rather every pay $10-15/mo with no RMAH. But alas...
I'm not worried about the RMAH. I'm not (too) worried about streamlined stats. Vanilla WoW was doing this as well, and the game delivered amazing customizable PvP (they've since destroyed that, but I haven't played d3 enough to see if this is the same). I assume they're going to make team based PvP a thing at some point, and runes are basically your customized abilities, which will work better in certain combinations ideally, and which will have versatility by that nature.
The game looks nothing like a Diablo game has to me. But game producers want to make money just like any other mass-producing business, and this is going to result in streamlining and appeasement to the more casual (the larger) audience. Whether or not this means D3 is going to be the best it can be is pure biased speculation, and we'll have to wait and see if it's a good game in its own respect, and not just in respect to its predecessors.
That being said, after open beta, I'm not sure I'm going to buy the game on release. I don't have enough friends to play with and it doesn't feel nearly as fun as D2 single player.
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and it will match so well with my starcraft thumbdrive.
That assumes that you have no skill in the Real Money auction house. The longer the game is out, the lower prices should be, as supply meets demand. So the money to be made is early on. If you're on top of things, and a bit lucky, you might be able to make up the difference that waiting would save you.
My Friend Code is: 0146-9645-8893
And Blizzard has noted that there will be items released in patches, not just expansions, so those crazed few with the raw funding to chase the 'most uber of the uber' in gear will probably always have something higher to strive for.
I'm not saying that there won't be someone who walks away with hundreds or thousands of dollars in the first weeks or months of the game, but to say that it just takes 'some skill' is simplifying a lot, and ignoring the RNG even more.
The RNG just hates some people.
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And gotta say, as someone who only got 15-20 min to play at a friend's before to experience beta - this weekend has assuaged any doubts the wife and I had. So good.
Re: People misusing the term Vanilla to describe a flying, unleash (sometimes trample) critter.
Assuming item progression is done well, I expect to be in love for a long time.
Re: People misusing the term Vanilla to describe a flying, unleash (sometimes trample) critter.
I had no idea that weapon dps influences spell damage but that is silly
So a 2H Axe using mage is going to cast much slower than a wand user.
And really from the numbers I've seen on the wands including their +to Cast bonuses and speed, I can't imagine in the longrun 2H Axe route will be best.
Diablo itemization lowend was always more about using the best thing you got to drop than what made sense - in the longrun it always made sense - seeing up to Act 2 will see characters develop each their ideal direction if it follows suit with D2 itemization.
And on the skill system - I mostly like it myself - I do wish the cooldown on switching a given spells spec was much longer though - changing rune or a completely new spell in should take longer than a few seconds. (maybe like 5x normal cooldown)
Re: People misusing the term Vanilla to describe a flying, unleash (sometimes trample) critter.
In the end, there are several times more skills available to a character than in D2. Unlike D2, you are free to use more than 2-4 of them at once. Unlike D2, you're not stuck using those skills with 1 point in them until you hit 30 (some synergies aside, though those came much later anyway). Unlike D2, if you decide you don't want to be an Orb/Meteor Sorceress, you don't have to spend 5 or 20 or 50+ hours (availability of rushes and bored friends pending) levelling another up to a reasonable point where you can try out a new build.
As well, apparently there will be room in itemization for affixes that give bonuses to specific skills, so if you gear heavily towards a 'build', and then want to try something else, you won't necessarily just be able to slap on a new set of skills and be equally as effective. Not to mention that some builds might require more crit, or more str, or to be geared more heavily for survival, etc, etc.
People are entitled to their opinions, but a lot of the opinions I've seen expressed on the skill system come across as ill informed or locked into a sense of nostalgia. Being able to get into Mephisto/Diablo/Ba'al/cow/whatever farming runs and getting to level 80 in a couple hours doesn't make the old system good, it just meant that people worked extra hard to bypass game mechanics.
Sure, it'll probably be annoying to want to try out a skill and not get access to it until the end of Hell, but the way things are set, you get a new skill or rune variation every level, so you have time to test everything out 'in the field' naturally and can make informed choices when it comes to where it really matters anyway; Inferno, which only starts at 60 anyway.
If by "generic character", you mean "cookie cutter builds", then all the more reason to try something different with D3, because every time I've glanced at D2 in the last decade+, it's been chalk full of 'em.
Will someone work out the mathematically perfect 'build' and gear set for a given class? Sure. Obtaining it and having it fit to your playstyle, however, might not be as easily done. Personally, having played all the classes to 13, having perused the character builder, I'm mostly excited to just try out all the skills as I level and organically build a character based on what I find fun and powerful, not what a calculator says should put out 2% higher DPS, if only I swap these passives, and these three skills, and re-gem all my gear, and find a pile of other gear.
... got a little ranty there. Long story short, decrying the lack of customization is misinformed at best and willfully ignorant at worst. For the most part, they didn't axe customization, they reduced the number of character design traps.
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I tried the D-III Beta
There is a walkthrough for the game here:
Diablo 3 Walkthrough
Also the character stats system is pretty extensive, you can find a list here:
Diablo 3 Guide: Character Stats and Details
More seriously, have you played the beta? With what classes? To 13? As someone who played all 5 to 13 a few patches back, I disagree.
What was your favourite part of D2 customization? Taking just enough str/dex to carry your choice gear and pumping all the rest into vit, or putting 1 point in each skill on the tree to your final goal at 30 and and playing all the way through to Nightmare before you got to assign anything else?
As for the No True Diablosman, I disagree even more vehemently. I played through Torchlight twice, and while a fine game in its own right, it's a Diablo 2 successor in that you use 1-2 skills constantly and there's a vested interest in hording skill points like they're made of gold wrapped Jessica Albas. Was on a third playthrough when I got tired of how same'y everything was.
The only thing that they really improved upon was using the dog to sell junk, and D3's ability to sell in the field does that better.
Diablo 2's customization is built on avoiding traps in character design, and picking which of a handful of top tier skills you wanted to use (minor hyperbole). As much as WOTC loves 'bad cards', it's not necessarily something that one wants to base an entire game around. D3's will allow for choice at will (skill swapping) while still requiring emphasis on a build (gearing appropriately) with the two feeding into one another synergistically, rather than simply "get *unique of choice here*, put *runeword of choice here* onto Merc, farm ubers by throwing a million *insert skill here*"
WCommander EeshaBDrana, Kalastria BloodchiefBGGlissa, the TraitorBWVish Kal, Blood ArbiterRUNin, the Pain Artist
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Gems and gear: One has 0% available, the other has about 10% of one of 4 modes available.
Not to mention the specs themselves while you do have respecs on the fly so to speak, there's definite choices to be made each time - even at 13 there's a large difference in many of the specs, and generally no clear victor. (And of course, with using the "no Primary/Secondary/etc" option you'll be able to have a ton more options than normal as well)
Being able to screw up your build is a bad thing in gaming for a long time now - respecs exist in EVERYTHING these days for a reason.
I do agree that I'd prefer to see the swap time reduced to make it so you need to be a bit more tactical about respecs rather than being able to on the fly as it its right now, but eh - doesn't ruin the game or anything, just a personal preference.
Re: People misusing the term Vanilla to describe a flying, unleash (sometimes trample) critter.
Who said anything about making the game "casualized"? I appreciate them making an effort to make the game accessible, but that's not mutually exclusive with it being possible to have depth present. You still haven't said what made D2's system superior, merely that you feel it is. Why is it preferable to have locked in skills, and only use one or two (for the vast majority at least) versus flexability (backed by gear focus and affixes that will need tweaking to make a new build truly sing).
And why is Max Schaefer and/or his team's involvement necessary for it to be a "true diablo sequel"? Both D2 and D3 are the result of untold man hours across multiple years by hundreds (maybe thousands) of artists, programmers, designers, etc. There's a flowchart image that shows the evolution of Blizzard's Big Names across the series, and all of them have seen dramatic drift.
I appreciate the work he and they did, but Torchlight 1 was by no means a genre changing game. It was very much "Diablo 2.5: more clicking with 1-2 skills and better graphics". I wish them well with TL2, but I'll probably wait for a Steam sale before dropping any money on it if the first game is any indication.
Having a solid pedigree doesn't necessarily insure anything. Flagship Studios was formed by Ex-Blizzard employees (including Bill Roper and Max Schaefer, among others), and Hellgate: London was pretty much a steaming pile of crap that did one thing right (individual loot), which D3 is also doing (I'm seeing a pattern here...)
And while we're No True Diablo'ing, D2 differed vastly from D1. Running? Open areas? Where are my cursed items? What are these gem and rune things? Why can't my Barbarian cast Apocalypse? Why don't any of the monsters give permanent stat reductions?
Need I go on?
Adjusting a game's mechanics for the times isn't a bad thing. It's a sign that the developers are aware that over a decade has passed since D2/LoD, and making "D2: with better graphics" while ignoring those advances would be foolish. Hell, it's the very problem I have with what I've read of the D&D Next/5th Ed.
Is Aliens not a sequel to Alien? The latter is a top notch Thriller, the former is one of the finest sci-fi action movies ever made. The enemy is mostly the same but the details are vastly different. By your logic, it's not a "true sequel".
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Re: People misusing the term Vanilla to describe a flying, unleash (sometimes trample) critter.
In theory everyone has access to the same card pool, yet there isn't one best Legacy deck.
Torchlight is hardly a successor to d2, it's basically a remake of d1 with some d2 elements thrown in to modernize it.
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Re: People misusing the term Vanilla to describe a flying, unleash (sometimes trample) critter.
Not really sure what the big deal is, especially with d3 vs. torchlight. Torchlight was a decent game, but ended up being a technologically superior but technically inferior version of diablo 2. I like being able to toy around with skills rather than becoming super proficient in only two, and the auto stat allocation is...eh? It's not like allocating stats was a big part of d2. They were largely irrelevant in terms of their impact on your combat attributes, you'd need several levels worth of stats to bump your damage range by a point, when by the time you reached nightmare damage numbers were figured into the thousands, and Hell mode had calculated damage in the tens of thousands.
I can see it already, and the game hasn't even launched yet. That's a bad sign. Customization was HALF the fun of Diablo 2. And I can already see customization has been severely limited in what I've seen so far. Auto stat building? Auto skill choosing? Auto rune unlocking? The skill system has me more worried then anything. I mean damn, how are we supposed to make our character OURS. We can't even customize the character model. Every level 60 Wizard will have all the same skills, at all the same levels, with all the same "skillrunes" unlocked, with all the same attributes, as every other level 60 Wizard. That right there is just sad.
And I know what you guys are thinking, wow another dude who's trying to hate on blizzard without even playing the full game yet. I'm not, I'm just a man who has been waiting 10 years for a game that is finally coming out in less than a month and is looking less and less appealing as true gamers start coming out about how the game REALLY is. Frankly, I'm pissed off. I will buy this game, I HAVE to buy this game. But if it ends up how it looks like it will now, I will be infinitely disappointed, and I will never buy anything from Blizzard ever again. Taking a game from my childhood and bastardizing into a top-down WoW clone, I really hope you're all wrong.
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"Some convictions are so strong that the world must break to accommodate them."
Given that RMAH is going to fund the servers so it can be F2P its an acceptable sacrifice - I'd rather every pay $10-15/mo with no RMAH. But alas...
Re: People misusing the term Vanilla to describe a flying, unleash (sometimes trample) critter.
The game looks nothing like a Diablo game has to me. But game producers want to make money just like any other mass-producing business, and this is going to result in streamlining and appeasement to the more casual (the larger) audience. Whether or not this means D3 is going to be the best it can be is pure biased speculation, and we'll have to wait and see if it's a good game in its own respect, and not just in respect to its predecessors.
That being said, after open beta, I'm not sure I'm going to buy the game on release. I don't have enough friends to play with and it doesn't feel nearly as fun as D2 single player.
"In a world where money talks, silence is horrifying."
Ashcoat Bear of Limited