DiabloFans

Uninstalled it yesterday. I was one of those tards most likely... Game didn't really do much for me though I only played less than a dozen matches. Sorry that I really contribute much to this discussion; I am ten hours into an overnight shift...

One of the issues I had was that if you screwed up at the beginning it was really hard to recover...

Maybe they didn't show the monk armours because they didn't think of showing off the sets until 3ish weeks before blizzcon (and really liked the two per week schedule) or wanted to throw the first three announced classes a bone (/rekindle excitement).

I have a question that I don't feel like looking up the answer to: does each class-gender combination share the same face? In other words: will we be able to customize our characters' faces?

Quote from FingolfinGR

multiple items salvaged = the best thing i saw in this video. one of the annoying things in WoW is hoarding stuff and disenchanting them for components (quite similar to salvage). Only one at a time. gonna be awesome, i hope we get something about ETA of the beta in this Blizzcon.

Agreed. I hope the salvage box has more than 6 slots. Instead of 2x3 how about 4x5?

Quote from Magistrate

I'm hoping it will be a long beta so that it will launch with little patching necessity.

Agreed (see below)

Quote from FingolfinGR

i hope i get in the beta so i wont have to worry about when it launches
but yeah, its better if it takes a little longer and it appears as bug free as possible.

I'm on the fence as to whether or not to try to obtain a beta key. My natural inclination would be to worry that playing any beta would make me less likely to want to actually purchase a game since I would have already played through it. The counter argument would obviously be that the time I spend playing D3 will hopefully be far longer than the beta period. Ideally, a game would be better at the end of its beta than at the beginning, at least in terms of balance and bugginess (as per Magistrate).

I think my final conclusion would therefore be: As much as I want to play this game, I think I want it to be as outstanding as it could possibly be ("When it's done, " anyone?) the first time I boot it up; so I will wait till 12:01 a.m. on release day to start playing (or installing, depending on how it is released).

Now the question of whether or not I would indulge in a demo if one were released before the actual game... That is worth another thread and it seems that I've gotten quite off-topic on this one. However, in all honesty I think the artisan discussion can go no farther than it already has given the limits of our knowledge.

I'd like to start by saying that I appreciate everyone's opinions and don't think that anyone can necessarily be right or wrong about this, but instead, let's try to look at things a different way.

One thing that I have not seen mentioned in this thread is that artisans also serve the fantastic feature of being a gold sink. I have posted about how excited I am about Blizzard's attempts to make gold useful in D3. I think that artisans do this in an effective and logical manner. I think that the following scenario fits into the concept of a Diablo game:

Hero goes about and fights demons and such. The latter die and drop loot which can be wearable items or crafting components. The wearable items can be broken down into crafting components if desired. Then the components can be given to an NPC (the artisan) whose speciality is combining said components to create useful items for a fee because it is his or her profession, not the hero's; the hero's job is killing monsters. What is created by NPC might actually be useful enough to be worn by Hero.... Process repeats itself... Occasionally really fantastic blueprints are found on corpses by hero and returned to the specialist (the artisan) for incorporation into his or her repertoire.

Thus we already have a few differences: The first being that each crafted item not only requires an investment of components but also gold. Second, crafted items are ordered from the artisan such that the order is carried out (we don't know how long it will take, but from what I can understand, much longer than it did in the demo video) by the artisan while the Hero is occupied doing other things. Third, different characters have different specialities: the player character (hero) is an expert user of items (and magic) and slayer of demons; the artisan's life's work is crafting items that are so good that they can be used by the legendary monster-slayer that is the hero. I personally feel that the last bit adds a lot to the feeling of epic-ness of the items and the character using them.

Also items are not crafted in D3 for the sake of improving the crafting abilities as was the case with crafting in WoW where a player was almost forced to create a bunch of items that they probably didn't need so that their character could become a more skilled crafter. The proposed mechanic in D3 appears sensible. If the character wants the artisan to practice her skills, he throws some raw materials at her and pays her to practice her skills. She practices, levels up, and from then on can make some better stuff. At the end of the day, the player's inventory isn't full of junk that was just created with the hope that his character's enchanting skill would increase by a point or two.

I understand that functionally, the character collects items and then clicks a button to make the crafter produce the resulting item. However, I feel that the crafting mechanics that they have proposed for artisans in D3 seem to make a lot more sense than they did in other games (WoW or D2 for instance) and/or at least fit a lot better into the Diablo world.

(Regarding the Xbox 360)

I had been playing a healthy amount of Battlefield: Bad Company 2. Then took a break from that to tear through my buddy's copy of Assassin's Creed. Recently I popped in my Red Dead Redemption disc because I had left it very unfinished when I picked up BF:BC2.

I quite liked the controls of BF:BC2 on the 360. I will grant that I often felt like I would not have minded one of those analog stick extenders on my left stick for long-distance precision aiming [because I had my sensitivity jacked way up to allow for faster target acquisition in close quarters]. Keyboard and mouse is a very effective setup though I believe that a good mouse allows for unrealistically fast precision--above and beyond all of the other incredibly unrealistic elements of any shooter (disclaimer)--and my fingers are too long to use my keyboard comfortably (in the WASD department) for any extended period of time.

Anyhow, BF:BC2 is a great game and if anyone wants to play that or RDR over Xbox Live, I'm down.

Quote from MaDDoG1221

Is there a higher res video?

YES! http://bit.ly/ba6LD5 I highly recommend you watch this fullscreen (tempted to make an entire thread dedicated to this)! I did and I noticed so many new and exciting things that weren't even mentioned in the interview.

Prime examples being the item descriptions and modifiers. They seem to have invented new ones and be bringing back some oldies-but-goodies as well! I haven't been as actively following D3 as I was before (I'm on my clinical rotations, cut me some slack) but I noticed today that apparently "Brilliance" is a character stat.

I don't know how many of these item modifiers will make it to the final game, but I distinctly remember:
extra base experience per monster killed
magic find (!!)
health per hit (or kill, I don't remember and I am not going to watch it again pausing every 4 seconds)


Once again I encourage all of you to watch this high res and fullscreen and enjoy!

Hey fellas,

I was planning on picking up a copy of this game and renewing my XBox Live subscription when I have finished with this test I have in a couple weeks (june 7th). If anyone plays it on XBox Live and still finds it worth playing, I'd love to get some online action in with other d-fans. Also, if anyone wants to comment on how well the multiplayer holds up (read: stays fun) over time, I'd appreciate a real person's opinion as opposed to that of a review site.

3C: Name 15 Fruits (I either cannot count or carambolage only listed 14)

Apple, Banana, Orange, Avocado, Peach,
Cherry, Blueberry, Blackberry, Strawberry, Nectarine,
Grapefruit, Watermelon, Cantaloupe, Raspberry, Apricot

3B Ireland

Codeword!!!

2C I definitely played that game a long time ago either on Windows 3.1 or on Dos...

I am going to guess MS Dos

2B: Sid Meier?

I am being a poor former physics student, but is it not possible to bend the path of light magnetically/electrically? Let us not forget that light is an electro-magnetic phenomenon consisting of electric and magnetic field components which oscillate in phase perpendicular to each other and the direction of propagation.

And my real question is can I answer again?

3B: It depends on the refractory coefficient of the materials on each side of the interface. If you are only interested in the case where the light is completely reflected (mirror), then the measure of the angle between the incident ray and the normal will be the same as the measure of the angle between the reflected ray and the normal. However if you are interested in the case where the light is not reflected, read on:

I will call N the angle between the normal and whichever ray we are measuring. Pretend the lower-case letters are subscripts and 1 means the incident ray, 2 means the ray in the second medium, and r means reflected.
Let's let P be the refractory coefficient.

I believe snell's law states that the sin(N1)/sin(N2) = P2/P1 so that when light travels from a medium of low refractive index to one of a high refractive index, it "bends" toward the normal line (the angle decreases). The opposite is of course true. When light moves from a medium with a high refractive index to one of a low refractive index, it bends away from the normal line. This case is significant in the event that the angle of the incident ray causes the projected angle of the refracted ray to be greater than pi/2 rads (90 degrees). In this case, the critical angle is exceeded and all of the ray is reflected as if the interface were a mirror.

In the case where the light is not reflected back into medium 1:

N2 = Arcsin[P2/P1 sin(N1)]

2B: Alloys are combinations of elements which include at least one metallic element. They are useful because they are typically stronger due to having tighter bonds than their constituent elements. For instance the carbon atoms reinforce the iron atoms in steel by fitting into gaps between the iron atoms.

2C: Just off the top of my head

Kepler
Schrodinger
Newton
Bohr
Einstein

maybe you'd like a few more

Feynman
Archimedes
Descartes (I know I missed the spelling there)
Copernicus

P.S. Thanks for the gift