2012-06-22, 05:55 PM
Zenkat Wrote:The only reason this game feels like a beta is because there is no decent end game. In D2, you could make many differing character builds to keep you busy, while in the background Blizzard was balancing and tweaking the game. You didnt notice because you were busy having fun with builds and item hunting. Now there are no builds. It's just item hunting, so we've gotten to a place where we're constantly paying attention to Blizzard instead of experiencing fun ways to play the game. Btw, you can't balance and tweak a game like this UNTIL it goes live. You need millions of people using all the skills to get the data required. This isnt stuff a handful of in-house testers is going to be able to perfect before launch. People calling a constant balance/bugfix on a live game a 'beta' just irks me. You might as well call nearly every online accessible game right now a beta by that logic.
I think 1.0.3 was a great step, and that the complainers are louder than the praisers. Full inventories of crap yellows instead of good blues? That is retarded logic. Blues are garbage. I can farm large chunks of Act 1 inferno, come up with 40-50 rare items (at least!); many of which are useful or sellable. I can actually progress through Act 2 better than i could before (it is by no means an EZ mode like so many idiots keep saying). They made later parts of inferno a little easier, but it is still hard.
I dont use IAS, so i dont give a rats ass about them nerfing it. I think IAS was a cheesy tool that let people who were undergeared, advance farther than they should have been able to. Yes, mortars still glitch on walls or something (so theyve said), but out in the open you can see very clearly how the range was changed. Yes, elites and bosses both drop a guaranteed 1 rare. But bosses also drop far far more other loot than packs to. You'd be an idiot not to progress through the bosses still. The change was good because, as i said above, i found a ton more yellows now than before doing the same boss runs. I think getting rid of MF for chests was good and bad. I think resplendent chests should always check your MF, otherwise they are basically worthless spitting out 4-5 blues. The whole point of dungeons is to kill the packs there and loot the super chest.
The change to the jeweler was much needed, and i welcomed it. I think the blacksmith could have his requirements for crafting reduced a little more, but it was a step in the right direction.
I had no idea that the top DPS weapons were all physical damage. I wish they would just add some spice to all the other elements. Make them do something so choosing an element can affect how you build your character. A lot of the stuff in this game is extremely bland like that.
i dunno, i think the reason the game feels like a beta is because every time someone posts an exploitative build or farming process it gets quickly nerfed into the ground to the point of there not being anything "fun" left to do once youve gone thru all the content 3 or 4 times. and that such ridiculous overreactions would have easily been prevented by having a few thousand out of house testers. you dont need millions of people. have them sign NDA's, do whatever it takes, get the glaring issues out of the game before it goes live. dont screw over the savvy of the population a week to a month after launch, theyre the best customers often times.
[rant="issues maybe solved by more comprehensive beta"]
also, so much of the end game feels like a trap set to kill you. unavoidably. without warning. and its apparently working as intended. why is that fun? wider and proper testing would have revealed it isnt. it feels good to kill a nearly impossible elite pack yes, but its at the expense of feeling extreme frustration at unavoidable death. a sense of relief that your death timer has reset once you get to the next elite pack is a cheap and obtuse version of fun. people constantly suggest elite affix changes on the forums with the only response being "we're open to ideas," followed by no info anywhere about whether its being discussed or considered or not. blizzards version of soon™. and in the end, the affixes are working is intended. horrible and nonexistent counterplay is intended. i think i should be making a decision to be vortexed or not, if i let it happen its cuz my gear is good enough that i dont care. teleports need telegraphing, then i can choose to care or not. autoattacks need modification to the hit frames (end instead of start) so i can try to dart away if i want, and not be killed 20 yards from the slashing axe.
[/rant]
secondly, the good blue weapons were absolutely not useless. my main weapon is just a blue, because a 1250 dps yellow 2h xbow costs a good 3x-10x the price i paid. even for bad ones. hell, even for equivalent real dps yellows sitting around 1k-1100 dps. filling my inven w/ 55-61 yellows in act 3 (and an occasional 62/63) instead of 58-63 blues is in no way better. half of those blues were weapons that were useful on just 2 decent affixes. now im like "omg 63 item o.O" any time i find either color, and maybe thats blizzards intention, but its so drastically different from before that the nostalgia of what used to be kills any current fun. i do agree with all the changes to acts 1/2. and the damage and hp is definitely better in act 3. but those drop nerfs hurt hard in terms of replayability.
the only IAS i used was rings, i bought an andy hat after nerf to get back to a comfortable orb walking shot/sec.
bosses on the other hand... lets say you decide to clear 1 more medium size area vs a boss. youll get 1-2 elite packs in the area, getting your yellow loot there. the white trash you 1-2 shot looking for those elites drops as much gold as you would get npcing the extra blues the boss dropped, because the likelyhood theyll be useful is more or less the same as the elites and trash dropping a useful blue. is it worth it? depends. if you know you can secure your boss kill on the first or second try, probably, because itll be quick and clean. and you dont have to worry the elites are a dreaded combo. if you would die 3-5 times on the boss... the elites probably wont reset their health until after a few deaths and you can probably take them out 1 at a time at least. boss wouldnt be worth it unless you get cornered into bad elite affixes everywhere. to make bosses worth the effort, theyve gotta have more rares++ on kill than elites (imo).
i really liked ghom before patch, he was a ranged boss. now hes a tanky dps boss, because no ranged will survive the extra poison while keeping a build sane for elite hunting. siegebreaker is still manageable on my DH build. cydaea is not. kulle was broken, now hes fair. belial is fine. in fact, belial is the best boss in the game. azmodan is easy, and would be the next best boss except for randomly spawning death pools under your feet. i havent bothered faceplanting against rakanoth or izual cuz act 4 sucks for NV, not that izual drops anything anyways. warden is fine or still too easy, butcher... was butcher changed? act 1 wasnt really the problem anyways.
simple solution to chest mf: scale it drastically with nephalem valor. rewarded for playing as intended, not rewarded for botting.
i like the other elements, and if i had seen 2 xbows with the same stats except 1 phys, 1 element... id go with element.
...and cold damage is far too useful to have the same damage as the others unfortunately. there was a dev post on this somewhere in the gd quagmire... all elements used to do something. the one that did the most damage was picked exclusively. when damage was normalized, the cc element was picked exclusively. hence, elements mostly just look pretty, but the one that kept its effect sucks for end game when dps is paramount. in early and mid game, definitely look out for cold damage weapons.