DiabloFans

For fuck's sake, just sell the Diablo franchise to GGG or Crate Entertainment. You know, someone who actually has a clue how to make an excellent ARPG and has a great track record in that respect. Someone who doesn't need to change directors, twice, and take four years to figure out what a Diablo game is supposed to be. Diablo 2 changed a great deal over the course of its development, sure. A lot of people don't know but early news were showing D2 to be A LOT closer to what Diablo 1 was. But then they got a little more ambitious, expanded their vision, included outdoor areas and the whole thing pieced itself together rather logically. These...amateurs can't even figure out what a Diablo game should be like over the span of four years.

Do not under any circumstances fall for the idea that Blizzard has learned. They've been hiring a lot of people for "unannounced Diablo projects". Hiring = Diablo games will be developed by people who likely have no experience in developing ARPGs. Not with D3, certainly not with D2. In a way, they'll be like the D3 team. New and clueless. Their directors sure as hell won't know what to do, seeing as they have to change them so frequently. This ain't Blizzard North, these aren't the people with the track record of making D2 and LoD. These are rando guys just working under the Blizzard brand that happens to (unfortunately) own the Diablo franchise. They are not the legends of the industry that gave us the great games of the past, they're not the Blizzard we used to know. They needed to change directors, twice, because they're not building on the foundations of Diablo, they're trying to reinvent it, even though the foundations are right fucking there! Which means it won't feel like Diablo. That's why they don't already know what D4 should be, even though someone who developed D3 should fucking know what was wrong with that game and how to improve upon it. But they don't. They're still learning how to make an ARPG.

On D3 release: "So, um, is Witch Doctor supposed to be the replacement necromancer?" "Nono, the witch doctors and necromancers are entirely different. The witch doctor raises the dead, uses poison and spirit magic, curses en...um...I mean... Next question!"

D3 DLC: "Yeah so we're adding the necromancer to show you just how different the two classes are" *proceeds to release a bastardised version of what the necro used to be, just to pretend Witch Doctor isn't a poor man's necro*

Diablo "The Garbage Nobody Asked For" Immortal: There will be 6 playable classes to parallel the "classic" lineup of characters from D3 and RoS. The game's starting classes, Wizard, Barbarian, Monk, Demon Hunter and the Necromancer, and the expansion's Pal..I mean Crusader. We swear we're not trying to rip off the best parts of the Diablo franchise for nostalgia *quickly hides papers with concept art for Leoric and Butcher from D3 under the table*

I'm sure they're going to retcon that the Witch Doctor is actually the Necromaner's son. For emotional impact, ya know.

Though it does seem sketchy in terms of the time allotted for it, Diablo's position front and center as the first panel after opening ceremony on the main stage would definitely indicate some major news. We know Blizz has been hiring for a Diablo project for the past few years and we have had strong hints that a big announcement is coming soon (can't recall when that was, it was an official statement). That is all good and solid.

My question is, has Blizzard learned? Because currently, I have no confidence at all the Blizz has what it takes to make a deep, lasting ARPG. If Diablo 3 is anything to go by, they keep pushing the same policy they've been pushing in other games. Take a genre, streamline it as much as possible, cut out all the "superfluous stuff" (read: stuff that gives a game complexity and depth and can keep you engaged once the lustre wears off) and make the game immediately engaging and fun to play at the expense of the game's longevity.

Diablo 3 is a discouragingly shallow game, with:

a) all the stuff lined up for you. These are the four sets/skills you will be focusing on with this class, these are the only supporting items for that given set that make any sense, go and play! Nono, forget about not playing with sets, here are your sets, this is the game...oh and we give you the sets for free if you play seasons. Remember when you had to make a build that's good enough to just "make do" with what you found, and completing the game was an actual challenge, instead of a thing you just kinda do in your first few hours? I do, it's called playing ARPGs that are not D3.

b ) a lot of the good stuff from ARPGs reduced to a chore (level up, bitches! it's just a waste of your time because the game starts at 70 and nothing before that matters, but do it anyway) and

c) the only thing holding the whole game standing at least for a while is super smooth and responsive combat and graphical polish. That is the one place where D3 holds a monopoly. No other ARPG has such a meaty combat as D3. But having streamlined the game so much takes away a lot of the deep engagement the genre can offer, and you're not going to spend endless months mindlessly levelling legendary gems if there's nothing underneath that that helps keep you engaged.

The game's longevity was kinda artifically prolonged by a steady supply of content for a while (updated legendaries, balance patches) under Josh after RoS release, but those stopped shortly after Josh's departure and the game has been limping on ever since. Now, I'm not saying that D3 is a bad deal. I can't count the number of hours I've spent on it over the years and it certainly didn't milk my wallet dry like F2P games like to do. But in the end, when you leave D3, you leave because you feel like if you level another fucking gem one more level, your brain will start leaking out of your ears to escape the horror. When you leave D2 or other ARPGs, it's usually with a feeling of accomplishment, after having beaten the game on the hardest difficulty, having killed that final bastard of a boss, and you'd be up to do it again at some point later. If you're done with D3, you're just done and fed up.

With essentially all of the D2 team gone with Blizzard North and the folks who at least tried to bandaid D3 with at least some content pretty much gone as well (none of them really fixed the underlying problems of shallow character building and itemisation), I don't see any indicators that the people who will be working on any future Diablo project, be it D4 or otherwise, actually have a clue as to how to make an ARPG. So a new game? Probably yes. A good one, though? Eeeh, saying I'm sceptical about Diablo's future would be an understatement.

Quote from TOPCommander»

The problem in Diablo 3 specifically is not that there is a lack of "new content" every couple months. D2 does not have this problem, no one asks for "new content" every new ladder reset, and instead D2 fans drool when the Ladder Reset is announced even 18 years after its release. The problem is that D3 has terrible "core-game-mechanics". D3 has no trading, no pvp, no long journey to get geared and level to the high 80s or 90s. All there is to do in D3 is to run endless difficulty "Hamster Wheels" with NO purpose other than having your name on some pointless "Leaderboard". Beside that, 99.999% of the playerbase will never see their name on that useless and counterproductive leaderboard due to people that play games for a living, people that share accounts, and last but not least people that use bots. D2 "Leaderboards" for leveling to 99 did not affect any of the playerbase, and no one cares about that. people just check it to compare their own Level-Up-Progress to the TOP people on that "Leaderboard".

Every Ladder Reset in D2, a 18 year old game, is stormed by tens of thousands of players to reach Hell difficulty as fast as possible to start farming gear and level up. There is no need for new content every few months because the game is absolutely AMAZING at it's core mechanics and that takes replayability far beyond D3. In D2, The journey is long and the economy is reset and so players have an incentive to play like crazy. People trade left and right to get geared with items they could not find or to get in-game wealthy etc. people offer rush and level services to other players and the whole system is "timeless". D2 Ladders can be repeated indefinitely, and will be because of the amazing core game and longevity.

D3 gives you everything for free without effort.

D2 you have to work for it and put an effort and invest time, and as such, the rewards for doing so, is what gets players addicted to D2.

Yep, D3 is all about doing things that are expected of you. There's no achievement in anything. It is expected that you find your set of choice (as if there was even the option of not playing with a set), you even get it for free as rewards in the Season. It's expected that you find all the supporting legendary gear to fill out your slots and stock out your Cube. The legendary drop rate you get after your set is complete makes it impossible not to. It's expected for you to find your 3 legendary gems of choice (once again, no option of not using them, they're just incomparably better). Hell, they even make sure you don't get duplicate gems to ensure you do get the gems you want. Then, it's expected that with the gear you have, you will easily clear T13 and level your gems in rifts. It's expected, because there's literally nothing else for you to do. Once you've levelled your gems as far as you can and hit a difficulty (read: HP/DPS) wall, you go level new gems so that you can augment your gear, get some paragon levels along the way, to get % boost to DPS and toughness. Once you've done that, you can level your gems a bit further, pushing you higher in the GRs. Once you've hit the ceiling again, go level another gem for augment, or relevel a new gem to upgrade the augments you already got applied. Before long you'll realise that essentially since the moment you started doing Greater Rifts to level your first Legendary Gem, you hit the threadmill. That's all you're going to be doing now. Levelling gems, forever, like a good little hamster. Meanwhile, I'm leveling my x-th self-found character in Diablo 2, trying a bow+javelin multi-elementalist Amazon. Still haven't found 50% of high level legendaries or runes after 11 years. Don't need them, as long as my build is good and I work on it, I can beat the game with skill and effort regardless of gear.

D2 self-found in single player (the way I always played it) was about you overcoming the predetermined challenge of the game by making the most out of what you have, with the reward being a hard earned victory at the end, with the character you created through sweat and blood. And if you wanted more after beating the game, the best legendaries only became available at around lvl 82, which is approximately where the playthrough ended. So if you persisted and pushed on, you'd be rewarded with things you only dreamed of before, and could transform your struggling character into a true god with enough work. D3 is about giving you everthing as long as you invested enough time (not effort), preferrably not doing the hard stuff but the optimal stuff to max out your XP and legendaries per hour (meaning you are never incentivised to challenge yourself), with the reward being no final victory because you're on an endless threadmill, with a character that dropped for you from monsters and doesn't have a speck of your own design in it. A character that only deals damage with specific skills because your items say those skills do high damage (otherwise all damage skills are interchangeable), being survivable only because your items say you are. Once you get to the true "end-game" of gem levelling, you realise that all this time you've been doing not what was hard but what was expected,and the game is hollow. Diablo 2 ends on a triumph over a hard boss and one day, perhaps, you shall return to relive that moment. Diablo 3 ends when you've grown sick of the threadmill. And you're never coming back.

What are you talking about? Both items got a MASSIVE damage buff and nothing else.

But your first question is correct. What are they doing? Why are they buffing Marauder more than Natalya? Why are they removing the only interesting gameplay cycle from the Monkey King Set in favour of pure power creep? Why are all other Wizard sets except for the unplayably terrible Tal Rasha getting a buff?

I'm glad I stopped giving a fuck about this game or I'd be furious. They basically just powercreeped almost everything, so numbers get higher across the board and nobody benefits. The only difference is, those that didn't get these buffs, like the fucking Tal Rasha set that needed a buff like a year ago already, are now not just miles behind. You can't even see them on the horizon anymore.

Quote from Tconl >>
Grim Dawn is a great game but with its own flaws as the skillsystem is quite poor with relative little options. Same flaws obviously as Titan Quest.

I actually find the Grim Dawn/Titan Quest system extremely enjoyable. The ability to just spec into a skill for its effect, or go fully in and get all the synergies that often change it into a completely different ability (through the mutator points), along with the ability to combine skill trees as you wish gives it a lot of replayability and allows you to really create your own character (something D3 doesn't do at all). Even the Mastery Points, though dull, serve a vital funciton in your character creation and planning and, best of all, the devotion system is pure genius. At later levels, when you require tons of XP to get new skills and therefore feel like you have nothing to "look forward to", you have the Devotion Shrines speckled across the world to give you another thing to be excited about while you slowly gain XP for your next level. Titan Quest was my favourite ARPG after D2 and in my eyes its greatest successor in its time, and I'm enjoying Grim Dawn even more.

If Blizz got off its ass and pushed out the Necromancer during this little lull that we have, I might almost, for just a split second consider playing it before waving it off as a waste of cash. But seeing as Blizz is taking its sweet time with this one and Fall of Oriath and the Grim Dawn expansion should come out in a couple of months, they are just burying their chances of drawing ARPG fans back, even for a little bit until they remember why they left in the first place.

Can't wait for them to release this at the same time as Fall of Oriath and the Grim Dawn expansion come out. Will be kinda delicious to see how hard it flops. An extra class isn't going to change the fact that Diablo 3's system is flawed and is currently one of the worst among ARPGs on the market. This isn't going to bring people back I don't think. It needs an overhaul and they've shown clearly across the recent patches that they have no intention of actually changing anything major anymore.

Not a perfect solution but miles better than the original. Considering my low expectations, I'm reasonably happy. Even with the low drop chance, a perfect ancient legendary is far from anything I've managed to obtain over my thousands of hours played (though it is worth mentioning that I am gearing up 15 different characters).

Wow, that Seismic Slam buff is really nice. Though, the duration on the EQ buff is relatively short, so spamming it is also useful. Definitely interesting.

Would love to understand Blizz's set design philosophy though. Does Delsere really need repeated buffs more than fucking Tal Rasha? That set is hopeless in its current state. It doesn't even combine well with anything, so it's not like there is a good reason to keep it weaker than the rest like there is in IK or Akkhan.

Why should there be hype? After the way D3 ended up, they will just churn out a new game instead of improving the not so old one? So all the farming you've done is now invalid and you can start again from scratch, until 5 years down the line they release D5 and the entire clown fiesta starts again.

If D3 was a thoroughly solid game like D2 was at its time, there would be a reason to anticipate the next one. But D3 is in a pretty sorry state, considerably worse than the plethora of ARPGs on the market such as Grim Dawn or Path of Exile and has now been abandoned by devs who just recently seemed dedicated to making it better. I guess that enthusiasm left with Josh Mosqueira. If that's how they treat the Diablo franchise, then why even bother buying the next one? Where's any guarantee it won't end up the same?

But hey, at least in the meantime we can farm stash tabs for a game we won't play anymore. That feature was put in, I assumed, because they intended for the game to go on. Instead, the sets are grossly imbalanced despite the dev's claims they want all sets as close in power as possible (try playing 6pc Tal Rasha, Natalya or Roland). D3 didn't even get a proper story ending (that hand drawn bullcrap isn't the kind of thing Blizz games used to end with, let alone the final line being "Diablo is free"...yeah, see you 5 years later in a sequel).

As an avid Diablo fan since childhood, having spent close to 12 years playing D2, I feel no desire to play D3 (aka "Level Up Gem Simulator 2016") again. The only thing that ever kept me playing were the new things introduced in patches and the satisfying combat. Once the influx of new stuff stopped, it became clear how goddamn bland D3 is, how predetermined your builds were, how pointless and spoulless progression was. It's now to the point where even introducing something new into the game would barely get me to notice. Yes, building the game anew from scratch is needed for Diablo to become good again. But not when the previous game is still relatively recent, in poor state, and unsupported.

Holy shit! Except for the Mephisto model (wrong colour, an extra pair of arms instead of tentacly appendages) and Andariel's face which looks more like a High Elf, these all look amazing.

Nice to see them reacting to feedback. Absolutely nothing seems to have changed since the last PTR patch update. The new Storm Armor ring is still as pathetic as before, some sets still seem to be severely underpowered compared to others, etc etc.

These patch notes better be wrong. Not only is R6 not getting any buffs (unlike every other set which is getting big ones, especially in terms of toughness), but now they even nerf it? What? Also wtf is with the nerf to tal set? It's only good defensive part was that yes, you take massive damage from poison and physical but at least elemental is pretty ok. Now you take massive damage from elemental too. There have to be pieces missing in here, some parts make no sense.

I like that the seasonal items are now more like items that will be helpful for the next season (likely, since they buff skills not currently in use which might get a new set later) instead of being build defining items which make playing a new set pointless until the season ends. That said, the Wiz belt is still one hell of an offender, since without it, you are going to be gimped hard for playing a melee Wizard. Also, is it just me or does the Hunter's Wrath belt say generators? Meaning it will work with Krider and Spines of Seething Hatred. Didn't they say this was intended for primary skills only? Or is that why it's in the patch notes (they changed their mind)?