DiabloFans

I'm curious as to how people plan on playing Hardcore. I basically intend to play slow and steady, stocking up on items, never having one character have all my top of the line items (until Inferno maybe) trying to keep all my characters about the same level so they can share gear and crafted supplies, etc.

How do other people plan on trying to get through Hardcore?

That is an interesting find. I've also always wondered why Griswold was the only person in the town who was raised as an undead while everyone else was just dead. What was special about him? Was it because he was the strongest person in town? If his zombie form was anything to go by, that certainly worked for him as an undead.

I think they are basically certain that no matter what they do with the game, and how long it takes to come out, it can't be worse than DNF, so they just aren't worried about it.

It's been taking so long, and will continue to take so long, because they will keep making changes forever, tell us they have made changes, then go and change things again. Just because the current changes are done means nothing, the previous changes were done and then discussed and that didn't do anything either.

Their view on items is that it's better to have a crapload of useless items drop as opposed to the occasional useful item. When you played Diablo 2, did you even think of a non-magic or better item dropping as even BEING a drop? When you were playing with friends, and you killed something that didn't drop a rare, but dropped an extra white item, did you say "wooo double drop off Pindle!"? I'm assuming not.

They are just generating screen clutter to disguise the fact that the items that you do pick up aren't as interesting as they were hoping they would be. I have no idea what other changes they are planning on making, but none of the ones they just announced make me go "oooh, that's way better than what it was before"

They can continue to modify this game all they want, eventually they either have to release it or eat the who knows how much money they spent developing it. I'm sure when they release it they will sell a lot of copies and that most people here will buy one, but seriously, I grew bored with the Beta in under a week, I'd rather start new characters in Skyrim than play more Diablo 3 and I don't really see that changing even after release, they just don't seem to be making it that much more interesting. That being said, I'm fairly confident when the game comes out I'll buy it and play for awhile, but I doubt I'll bother playing to inferno at all and I probably won't play past normal on more than one character if that. If their goal is to make the game lasting, this isn't helping, but if their goal is to sell one-off copies, they probably, correctly, figure "who cares"?

TLDR: Meh, release delayed, boring changes that don't mean much.

I don't understand this whole "Gold is useful only for leveling artisans". Don't you guys realize it takes huge piles of gold to craft items? The crafting system is the end game gold sink, they have set the drops up so that you don't get enough gold to craft everything with the mats you get, so you actually have to decide if you want to sell stuff or cube it into crafting materials. If it costs 30,000 gold to make a rare 6 random affix item, that's a LOT of times you're going to be rolling that item to get something epic, each of those times costs you the mats and a huge pile of gold. Saying that gold is useless is basically saying you're never going to craft anything in the game ever.

OK. I've had enough of this. For people who really care about finding out when the release date is, or what's going on, do the following. Buy a few hundred shares of Activision Blizzard; hire a securities attorney to ask for a proxy vote on having Blizzard's autonomy limited for purposes of the Diablo 3 PR and management team, get a priority vote on that issue, then get another proxy vote on a shareholder proposal to have the Diablo 3 team deposed for purposes of investment litigation, i.e. is Blizzard wasting the investor's money by not releasing Diablo 3. At the deposition, ask all the questions that you want about the release of the game and what the hold up is. Then leak the results of the deposition to the public. Congratulations! You now know all the information about when the game will be released, why they delayed, etc.

You're welcome.

Ooooh, it's a tinfoil hat thread! Let me find mine quick!

This game, internally at Blizzard, is nothing like SC:Ghost, or, for that matter, Lord of the Clans. They will be releasing it and it's almost certainly going to be in the first half of 2012. I'm expecting it by May at the latest, but anytime around there would be reasonable I think at this point.

I do agree though, the AH needs some work, but that's relatively simple to fix compared to all the other work that's gone into the game.

Quote from napobm43

The way I see it, if they get the game out by the end of April, they can claim it to be in "Early 2012" if you consider there to be four months of "Early", four of "Middle", and four of "Late" in a year. Not that when they told us "Early" in September that April is what any of us had in mind...

Early is January to September, Middle is October and November, Late is December.

Haven't we played this game with Blizzard before?

Unless you are very good and use it incredibly well, evasive fire is very difficult to use to get you out of danger. You basically have to specifically position yourself so that the enemy is exactly opposite from the direction you want to leap to, otherwise you don't make it and you get stuck on the wall or something. It's also not a very long distance that you flip back, so if you're being attacked by fast monsters, it causes problems quickly for you.

I don't think they need to bother with "caps" of any kind. The easiest kind of cap is to just make sure that the total amount of any stat possible, given what can randomly appear on gear, is not going to break the game. You have X number of slots, so if your "cap" is Y make sure that the max stat given per item is less than Y/X. It's probably slightly more complicated than that as I assume that different slots will have different stat maximums, but maybe not, maybe it will be the same for everything.

Regardless, I think this is a very easy thing for them to figure out, besides only Defense really matters, and I suspect it's not completely linear.

Wow...That's pretty insane. Obviously if it wasn't being confirmed, no one would believe it, but that's pretty nuts.

Anyone else notice that they seem to be cycling a lot of new spells and abilities into the Beta by changing the level requirements for the skills? I think it's a sneaky way of debugging and balancing other skills without having to admit that's what they are doing. They can sell all this as "balance" Considering the real balancing requirements won't start until Nightmare at least, when you have all the skills, I think this is just a way to try to keep people interested and/or debug some things that perhaps internally they think need a little work.



edit: OMG, I just got my own tinfoil hat! That's so awesome!

To really determine if MF is working you'd have to try killing somewhere around 1000 monsters with 0% MF and then 50% MF and compare the drops, see if you get more magic items. The problem here is you need a HUGE sample size to make an accurate assessment, not just a couple of Leoric runs.

And my friends wonder why I don't pre-order things anymore. Yes, I'll give you my money now and you give me nothing, but will hopefully give me the item I want somewhere down the line, but meanwhile you get to keep my money.

With interest rates near zero, it's hardly THAT big a deal I guess, but I'm still offended by the whole concept.