Diablo III launch

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Turning on elective mode makes the game a lot easier once you're better acquainted with the mechanics. Deaths should be normal unless you know exactly what each and every monster in the game is capable of doing - D3's monsters are much more diverse (and deadly) than D1's and D2's ability/attribute-wise.

It no longer becomes point and click at around the later part act 2, unless you're very well geared. Battles become a lot more frantic after that. I had to fine-tune my build and give up gearing for magic-find after suffering through three consecutive deaths against a very annoying monster type who had to spawn with just the perfect elite ability for it. It's a lot more difficult than D2 - in D2 you could get by with subpar or almost non-existent equipment with player skill and by abusing followers, spell range, etc. I don't see how one could possibly do that in D3.

 

Yes, I was recently tipped about elective mode. It completely changes the ball game, I thought the game was supposed to be restricted to one spell per type and time but apparently not.

 

I got this a few days ago. I just started Act II. Finding it quite enjoyable so far!

 

Nice. A real gem. No server problems, no problems what so ever. I play on European servers.

 

Smacked Diablo around the face, on sissy mode. I reckon now is when the game is supposed to begin. Have old WoW friends who are already lvl60 and I think they just killed hell difficulty.

 

General thoughts, nightmare mode is trial mode imo. Prepare to respec like crazy if you feel your class is under-performing. I'm beginning to regret investing time and effort into the artisan training system. Noticed uniques are much rarer in this game. BTW for reference Lightning Enchanted (now known as Electrified in-game) is one of the "safer" enchantments monsters can spawn with in D3.

 

The skill system looks deceptively easy. They have really got the "easy to learn, impossible to master" aspect there. I am lvl40 and have a ton of skill and runes I have a very vague idea about. I found a set up that has worked the last 15 levels more or less and gone with that. You can change whenever you want but to actually learn how to use the different skills properly is another issue. The "story" is quite short and I have been sceptical but I think I can get pretty good mileage out of this game.

Oh and if you want sure gear the AH is the way to go. You can buy items that are twice as good as what you can craft at a tenth of the cost. Sure you miss out a bit on the thrill of finding upgrades but the loot system is extremely randomized that the chance that you get something that is actually good for is small and to get something great is tiny. Someone has though, probably millions of people have and they are selling them cheaply on the AH. Return the favour and sell the awesome demonhunter bow you found with your wizard on the AH for a reasonable price.

 

Just got the perfect weapon for my char at 2k gold from the AH. Woot.

Spoiler

Immediately recognized the voice behind Cydaea. Spent the next 30 minutes spamming "John were are you? We found Aeryn!" on party chat, much to the dismay/annoyance/confusion of my party-mates. Perhaps I should've used a DA:O reference.

 

Bnet has been down for most of the day, not good for a game that is supposedly partly singleplayer. I do think Blizz has the right idea on how to "combat piracy" by making every game semi-online and mostly multi-player but they need to make sure battlenet works even during launch periods.

 

The US servers have been up (at least when I've had time to play) pretty consistently, except for a couple of rolling restarts.

Last night, however, I experienced horrible lag in the game, while playing a single player game. I'm not happy with the fact that I have to maintain a network connection to play this game in the first place, but the fact that my private/single player game is so utterly dependent on that connection for basic performance is even less desirable. I installed a pretty big game on my hard drive... there's no good reason I can see that in a single player mode my “party” and enemy monsters should go into slide show mode just because Blizzard's server is not performing optimally. Check periodically that I'm connected to Bnet, I guess, if you must, but don't make my entire single player gaming experience completely and hopelessly enamored with some remote server that shouldn't really be necessary in the first place!

Oops, that became dangerously close to sounding like a rant.

 

Anyone else think that the story is the worst of the series so far?

Spoiler

Like how they made it so Adria somehow managed to seal all the prime evils' souls into the black soulstone before their deaths in D2. I imagine if the heroes from D2 were still alive and present when she said this, they would have killed her on the spot.
I also find it hard to believe that Tyrael just watched all this happen without comment.

 

There's a story?

 

The thing is, there is, and it's badly done. Compare to D2 where the game was about chasing the dark wanderer/Diablo. All the details could be traced back to the fact that Diablo was on the loose. The game made sense, the grind made sense.

D3 basically has no story until just before the final act, and that story wouldn't survive scrutiny from a 10-yearl old. But you can see that the game is trying hard to actually tell a story (about as ferociously as its attempts to kill people in 4-player hell/inferno).
And then there's how your "character" is only your own as far as combat is concerned. He/she makes his/her own decisions story-wise, and fails spectacularly at independent thinking. So much for the hero who was supposedly smart enough to figure out how to kill a non-recently revived demon lord solo.

 

Who's Adria? It can't be that girl you see in all the video's - Cain's niece. She wouldn't have been old enough to be around for the last battle against hell's minions. And what the hell was she doing stealing demons souls back in D2? How the hell did she get to the prime evils before the hero did? WTF?

 

It is the mother of the girl in the videos.

 

Aldeth, Adria is an obscure NPC from D1. She's basically the female version of Drognan from D2, with respect to function and character skill/wisdom/lore.

Indeed.

Spoiler

She basically swoops in from out of nowhere, and against impossible odds makes it so that everything good that your characters ever do in D2 is ultimately for nothing - the prime evils would have returned anyway, yadayada. Massive reset, except the Worldstone remains broken in D3 and Sanctuary is just beginning to feel the consequences.

 

Well given that I haven't played D1 in over a decade, I guess that's why I don't remember. Although there were only like 5 townspeople in D1. Was she the one that sold spell tomes? (Remember when you had to buy them, and all characters had the same spells they could cast, provided their magic skill was high enough?)

I think this needs to be asked right now - and I don't think a week after launch is too soon. We can all acknowledge upfront that unless Diablo 3 turned out to be the greatest game of all time, it could not possibly live up to the hype surrounding its release. And so it's not fair to judge it by that standard.

I'm also willing to set aside, for a moment, the issues of bugs, server downtime, and now hacked accounts. These are all fixable issues, and I have confidence that these issues will be fixed by Blizzard in fairly short order. (That is not to say I don't understand the frustration by players. It is not unreasonable as a consumer of a product - be it a computer game or otherwise - that upon purchase your product will function properly.)

But the question is - Is D3 a good game? Yes, it's kept true to the Diablo tradition of hacking your way through an army of monsters, and Blizzard cinematics are always solid. But the graphics aren't great, there's now nothing unique about the game play (as opposed to the earlier iterations of the game), and the story is non-existent.

We were also promised a near-impossible inferno difficulty, and a recent report was released that a group of players already defeated it. Shortly thereafter, a report was released that another guy defeated inferno difficulty - SOLO. (Blizzard claimed it was going to be impossible to solo inferno difficulty.) It would be one thing if they guys went in uber-geared with optimal character builds, but they didn't. To get through inferno difficulty in under a week, they necessarily were doing it with items they found in that first week. The drop system is such that even if you never stopped playing to eat or sleep, you couldn't possibly have all the best items, and an optimal build in a week. So what is up? Has D3 at least lived up to expectations, if not the hype?

 

I wouldn't say that it's a bad game. Somewhere between "decent" and "good", at the moment. D3 does have one saving grace - the skill system. joacqin pretty much seemed it up in one of his posts above - the skill system looks deceptively easy (each class has about 10-15 I think) but each skill comes with 5 different runes, some of which completely change how the skill works. Since you can only "equip" 6 of these skills at any one time (changing skills causes a 5-10 second internal cd), along with 3 "passives" out of another possible 10-15, there are hundreds of combinations available for every class. There is a downside though - we'll discuss that below.


GAMEPLAY SPOILERS BELOW!!!!!!

Beating the game is the easy part, I think, because Inferno D3's bosses aren't the tricky part. They have 1-hit kills and enrage timers (ie, kill me within x minutes or you're all dead) but there is well-defined, "standard" procedure for beating them. I think this is the reason why D3 bosses are notorious for dropping cheap items. In other words, I don't find beating Inferno anywhere near as impressive as say clearing Inferno. Like in D2, you can skip through most of the tougher encounters in D3 if you wished.
Clearing Inferno means killing off elite groups - and believe me all the monster enchantments in D2 combined (minus the immunities) would still not compare to some of the more dangerous Inferno elite groups in D3. Inferno is definitely no cakewalk, I know a barbarian with 70% damage reduction from armor and clad in +all resist gear and he can only take like 4-5 hits in Inferno before dying. He was down to using a shield. Consider that Barbarians are more than twice as tough as both casters and the Demon Hunter. Potions don't help much, D3 potions have something like a 10 second cooldown.

There are bugs that make this possible. Monks can become almost invulnerable (spirit bug), and the wizard can become a pure glass cannon who nevertheless is very difficult to kill(0 vit bug). Expect that to change in a patch or two. The only class which, atm, I feel can solo Inferno without relying on bugs is the Demon Hunter. Think Guided Arrow, except bigger and much more damaging. Combine that with traps, high crit rate and an invulnerability skill. Still, that Demon Hunter would need to be very well equipped, and player controlling him would have to be more or less equivalent to one of those pro Starcraft/Warcraft players who can basically multi-task with their eyes closed - Demon Hunters are natural glass cannons. You will die if you get hit without your invincibility buff on.

This is where the auction house comes in. It allows for a better re-distribution of items, which you could say is a mixed blessing.

One of the highlights of D3, as a results of the skill system, is that there is no optimal build. There is an optimal build for soloing, for burst damage, for simplicity, for killing things in a line, for killing things in a circular area, for killing monsters one by one, for mobility/survivability, for support, for PvP, etc. No build has it all, afaik. Most builds you usually see posted on the D3 forums are solo builds. You'll hear people go on and on about how D3 lacks customization yadayada, and at some point they'll say the one or two particular builds (it changes every few hours) stand out among the rest - then you find out that these builds work terribly when you're in a party and your mates are using knockbacks/fear to keep monsters separate, or that these builds require a skill rune that you'll only get at level 54. By that time, you'll be just one to two acts short of Inferno.

Edited.

 

Actually, I heard that PvP was NOT available upon release. Not was the real money auction house. Although the gold auction house was. I know a few people who were very disappointed that PvP wasn't available at release, as it is competitive PvP that makes the game for them. These people view the actual game simply as a means of acquiring items to use in PvP.

 

Items are cheap atm at the AH, except for obviously high-end ones. Every once in a while you'll find a particularly powerful item only valued at something like 10k-20k (easy gold at higher difficulties).

This just in, Demon Hunters are to be nerfed and the Monk/Wizard exploits will be gone by next patch. Barbs to be buffed I think. No comment on Witch Doctors.

As it should be. Blizzard just made a point about Inferno being the ultimate difficulty. Unless some other exploit presents itself these changes would make it almost impossible for any character to solo Inferno.