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Quote from Benegesserit

Also WoW is WORSE than it was back in the BC days. Blizzard hasn't made anything good since their merge with Activision.

Stop trollin', yo. Other than Kara, BC was pretty crap. Ulduar was the best thing WoW ever did, ever.

Good calls. It's kind of sad and stupid that you have to explain to people why you can't simply pull the AH out altogether. Did anybody play D2? Did not having an AH in that game stop or even slow RMT, dupes, and Hammer Bots at all?

One thing he didn't mention that kind of worries me is nowhere does he mention bound gear. One way to get people off the AH is to make BIS gear account or character bound. The AH is great for commodities or alt gearing. There just needs to be a lot more done w/ crafting to beef up the commodities market. And there needs to be more commodities. Example; in order to craft a BIS bound pair of gloves, you need a level 63 pair of gloves, plus gems and other crafting reagents. Make random drops a more important part of the recipe than simply scraps. I still think the biggest let down I've had w/ D3 is the terrible crafting system. It has so much potential, and falls so far short.

Why are they so stubborn about separating PvP and PvE "rules?" That's how it should work! In WoW, they finally figured out that CC needs different rules against players, they added separate gear, which is a round-about way of altering the "math" between the two modes. So why are they so insistent in not learning what works in WoW? If you go into a duel or (heaven forbid) the arenas, there should be disclaimers saying "things are different, here's what's different, enjoy." Stop making the game worse for everyone w/ your idealist purity crap. PvP and PvE have to have different rules. GET OVER IT.

I dunno who is at fault, but when the team goes 2-14, the coach gets fired. This game looked so damn great in 2010, right after Blizzcon w/ the super crazy fun PvP. Runes as items, Mystic and enchants, saphires and diamonds, Nephalem Cube, soul bound top end gear. And then they went backwards. They tried to be too much like D2. If I wanted a watered down D2, I'd play that crap fest Torchlight. D3 was going to be a better game, and someone got gun shy. Whether it was Jay or someone else, Jay didn't have the guts to stick w/ the good decisions initially instead of iterating the fun out. PvP is in utter shambles. They had separate PvP modes w/ altered stats/mechanics that would allow the designers to balance separately, and they scrapped that. They had so many good things in their hands, and they second guessed themselves to death. Indecisiveness does fault the manager, in the end.

Since they removed mouse over for skills/runes you haven't unlocked yet, and they haven't updated the calculator, this is really annoying. It is now mechanically impossible to get your auto-attack (regular attack) anywhere on your bar if you select a second skill at level 2. Does that mean they got rid of the passives for Wizards and Hunters that boosted auto-attacks? We can't tell, b/c you can't mouse-over and read tooltips for higher level skills, runes, or passives!

Point is, the new UI is much, much worse than the old one. I want to see all of my skills on the same page, no scrolling.

The mini-map in the corner was one of the best features of LoD. The overlay map is an abomination.

Yes, it's a good change for item diversity between classes, but at what cost?

-Tying defense and barbarian damage in the same stat is really dangerous. The hardest hitting Barbarians will be harder to kill. There is no trade off between damage reduction and attack power. Same goes for Hunters and Monks, as well (dodge being a great defensive stat currently). Doctors and Wizards got the short end of that stick; health globe bonus is nice, but not nearly as helpful as preventing the damage up front.

-There were much better ways to force class/item diversity than this. More/varied resource related affixes, especially weird ones (gain health per Fury spent was a great example). Class only stat bonuses, "+13 Attack (Wizard only)," which I admit is inelegant, but similar to what they're doing anyway.

-On that same track, it sounds like they're going to do this anyway, but here goes. They introduce skill modifier affixes. "+5% additional weapon damage Cleave, Barbarian only." Not only that, they can target specific aspects of the skills, so a single skill might have multiple affixes available. "+4% additional weapon damage Grasp of the Dead, Witch Doctor only." "+0.4 seconds additional duration Grasp of the Dead, Witch Doctor only." These would have to be handcrafted and tightly regulated, to avoid weird stacking exploits. This REALLY makes gear class diverse, but does so in a much more interesting way. And it makes the choices less boring than "+ all skills" from D2.

-This also leads to a way to save the Mystic. Take away all +stat enchants. They're boring. Give her weird enchants, like the resource enchants, proc effects (on hit/crit/etc), skill enchants (from above), etc. Maybe that's what they wanted to do, but tabled it for an expansion. Okay, I can live w/ that. But they started out of the gate shaky (having so many boring gems/enchants which overlapped) that I honestly wonder.

-On Precision. They could have fixed this easily by A) adding more +critical damage sources in the game, readjusting the point Precision to % chance critical hit formula, and C) readjusting the power of the Attack stat. It's not very clear whether critical strike chance is a flat % or the usual rating system (meaning you need more as you gain in levels to get the same % critical strike chance). Hopefully they keep the rating system in, otherwise we have the weird "obsolete gear is best in slot" problem from before.

Conclusion: They need to separate damage from defensive stats, especially if some defensive stats (Armor/Dodge) are way better than others (Health Globes). There needs to be a choice between defense and offense. They could have promoted class/item diversity through other, more clever, and frankly better ways. The system they had in place was a great foundation to build from. This adds more problems than it solves, and is inelegant and cluttered compared to what they had. Also, the skill/rune overhaul seems ominous as well. I'm worried they'll screw up a really good thing.

Ugh. What a bunch of noodling.
Pros: No ID scrolls. Good. Maybe they can get rid of the ID mechanic entirely. "Unwrapping your present" is when you finally have a spare moment to stop, open your bag, and read all of the stats on your new shiny. If the combat is as fast and constant as they promise, then you shouldn't have a lot of downtime to stare at your gear.

Cons: Everything else. There's a very good reason they changed the stats and made them only do one thing at a time. Barbarians/monks/hunters become defensive/dodging stalwarts AND can dish out the pain w/o any trade-off. Wizards/Doctors secondary benefits aren't very helpful most of the time. This is a dumb change.

Mystic wasn't broken beyond repair, you just can't use the same stupid stats for enchants as you did for gems. Besides, they still need a good rune sink (unless runes are removed from the game).

Cube/Cauldron gone, blech. I don't want to go to town. They were right the first time, I WANT TO KILL STUFF, not chat w/ the damn blacksmith. Maybe some tweaks? (Cauldron gives you a fraction of the vendor sell price? You pay a penalty for convenience).

I have a sinister, sinking sensation that skill points/levels are back again, and +skill gear is back. I really, really hope I'm wrong. If they bring back skill points, they're even more spineless than I figured, and we might actually get Diablo 2.5, which would suck.

Blizzcon: "If people only use Inferno in one small area, or there's a path of least resistance, we'll patch it and change it to try and get people to use more of the game in Inferno."

Today: "You can't farm any old act in Inferno you want. Have fun farming the Cathedral!"

If Blizzard had any balls, if Korea doesn't want an RMAH, they don't get D3, period. They just gave the 3rd party sellers a giant, lucrative, EXCLUSIVE market to work in. This gives hackers/account thieves a great big income stream, which keeps them fed and working, which puts other people's accounts at risk. This whole thing smells suspicious. I wonder, who has authority over this Ratings Board? Direct voters? Executive branch equivalent? Parliment/Congress equivalent? I don't know much about South Korean government.

Personally, I don't want the game released b/c of some sense of entitlement. I don't want D3 to turn into Duke Nukem Forever or Chinese Democracy, so overdone, so over polished, so bloated, and eventually irrelevant b/c the artwork missed its rightful place in chronology. Those two works were destroyed by hubris. At some point, you leave perfection to the gods, and release what you have. Hell, having it in players' hands gives you more feedback, and you can fix problems or get new ideas quicker when there are millions of people playing it.

Basically, When It's Done is a good philosophy, compared to the buggy, unfinished messes we usually see in this industry. But at some point, you're firing your third guitarist, rewriting the core engine, and adding features that were never inteded to fit into the scope of the original project. The noodling on the rune system (to me at least) appears to be at that point. Make them drops, save ranks 6 and 7 as hard to get craft recipes, and stop. There isn't anything you can add to them right this second that is worth the extra delay. If there is something awesome you can add to them (random affixes, ranged stats, unattuned gambling), add it in a patch or the expansion.

Or they're really and trully bulls---ing everyone, and they can't get their servers working, the RMAH has cracks in it, etc. Either way, SC2 development seemed much, much smoother, and definitely had a lot more concrete, under the hood stuff that the devs discussed w/ the fans.

Gee, it's almost as if Twitter is a terrible way to communicate important things. Or that employees shouldn't use their personal Twitter space to talk about work-related things. What the hell did he think would happen?

Any beta testers know whether the Attack stat boosts Thorns damage? Does Thorns damage scale w/ anything other than a couple of passives? (Ignoring Retribution Mantra/Aura and similar effects from runes, which are percentages of incoming damage).