What I don't like

[The Great Snook]

I'm still in Hell mode so I'm sure there are things that I haven't had happen to me yet, but here are some of the things that I don't like about D3 and I don't know why Blizzard chose to make it this way.

1. Cool down on health potions. What is the point of this? I should be able to pop them like Kool-Aid. OK, maybe I could live with a 5 to 10 second cool down, but 30 seconds is way to long. Is their stated goal to have us die?

2. Only being able to have 6 active skills (and probably the three passive ones). In the Auction House thread I was asked how I'm doing against "mortar mobs". I basically run around and try to stop long enough to fire off a couple of shots. Demon Hunters have a skill that enables them to run and shoot at the same time, but I don't have that one active so I can't use it. It isn't like in the middle of a fight with a mob that I can go to the skill screen and change it. Even if I could there is then a cool down while waiting for it to change. I say bring back
D2 and let me assign the F1 to F12 to whatever I want.

3. Act Boss drops. I have been very underwhelmed after killing an act boss. I don't think once have I picked something up and said. "This is my new piece of equipment". I am getting better drops from elites.

4. Scaling of multiplayer- This may just be me (or my demon hunter). I find the game in solo mode with the Templar much easier then playing a two person game with Teen Snook. The four person game is even harder and I see many games get abandoned as a particular mob is too tough for the people in the game.

5. 4 vs. 8- I really miss having the chaos of 8 people in a game.

6. Resurrection- There should be some sort of benefit for everyone involved for resing someone instead of having to go back to the last checkpoint.

However, overall I am totally loving this game and hopelessly hooked. I haven't decided what my next character will be yet, but I have a feeling I will be playing until I get all the characters to beat inferno at least once.

[joacqin]

The pots are balanced around the cooldown, if you could pop them like kool aid a huge part of the challenge would disappear and you would spend millions on pots.

Blizzard intention is that the champion packs are the game. You are not supposed to just run the same boss again and again. In inferno with nephalem stacks bosses are guaranteed to drop two yellows while packs drop one guaranteed. When you farm you basically run an act, kill as many packs as you can be arsed and then wack the final boss.

Overall the game is easier solo except when you face a pack that is designed to counter just you. Then you are toast. I have played a lot with a barb and a monk and there are some packs they find easy which I find impossible and vice versa. As a team we can take them.

Against packs out in the world there is usually no time to resurrect but in boss fights you kinda have to. You need the damage from all players generally or the boss will enrage and kill you (mostly). If you are able it is always more beneficial to res than to let your partner run a few miles but if the checkpoint is just around the corner there is no point.

Let's see how your enjoyment stands up against inferno. I blasted through the first three difficulties in a week or so and have spent the rest of the time in act1 inferno more or less. I do enjoy the game but it gets ridiculously hard past act2 inferno. It is basically one huge grind and it is kinda fun if you like to grind. Just sold a pair of pants for 5m and that felt nice. As I have stated in a previous thread it is time for me to start spending my money.

[Paracelsi]

Seriously, 5m for pants? I can't even sell a good pair of bracers for 80k (400+ def/100+ int/attack speed/60+ resistances/random freebie). I really hate our AH sometimes.

1) I've also wondered about this. I think the developers did it to force us to invest in other means of HP recovery (otherwise potion spam + lifeleech would imbalanced, as joacqin said). Wizards aren't as affected (you gotta love Diamond Armor - they should put a label on it "lasts until the next health orb drop!") but all the other classes I've played need to start looking for alternative ways to recover HP around late Hell. There are two general ways: +life per hit (for attack speed nuts) and +life steal (for critical damage nuts - we just love seeing those big numbers).

2) Agreed 100%. At least, bring the count up to 8-10. If you're complaining about this now, wait til you reach level 60 and learn more about the mechanics behind the Nephalem Valor buff. Btw, the best way to fight something with mortar is to try to engage it up close. While the targeting AI behind the skill is ridiculously precise, mortar won't hit you at near-melee range unless you're cornered. Nevertheless, killing these things in Inferno can be a painful process.

3) Yep, as joacqin said.

4) This depends on teamwork and team composition. A party of DPSers with no rhyme or reason behind their overall skillset, for example, is bound to fail while a party with a party with a monk/barb tank (who knows how to spam taunt or "vortex" skills like Cyclone Strike), a debuffer monk (conviction aura spammer - basically a +48% overall damage boost to the party, also offers extra CC's like blind and support skills like healing), an AoE dpser (wizard or WD, also offers extra CC's like Slow Time, AoE stuns from the Gargantuan or buffs like Big Bad Voodoo) and a ranged DPS (for things like those da*n wasps in act 2) can be counted on to accomplish more than what any of them could have accomplished solo. I was the WD in that party, and we were able to reach Inferno Magda using mostly 55-60 gear. I think the key was the fact that all of us were using "decrease enemy damage" or "decrease enemy attack speed" runes and passives. Everything within the Time Slow bubble was moving in slow motion, and I believe the "decrease enemy damage" mod stacks because the tanker kept saying that under normal circumstances (ie solo) he would be dead in 2 hits. This was before the difficulty rebalance patch but after the hotfix that removed mob damage scaling for multiplayer. Repair costs were staggering, though.

5) Same.

6) Just wait til you reach Inferno.

[The Great Snook]

One more thing to add. They should not be doing maintenance to battle.net starting at 6am PST. They should be finishing at 6am PST. I'm sure Blizzard can afford to pay someone to work in the middle of night to do the updates. It is summer vacation here in the US and when dealing with a country with 4 time zones, you are really pissing off a lot of people on the East coast who cannot play from 9am to 2pm (or check their auctions)

[dmc]

TGS -

ad·dic·tion   [uh-dik-shuhn]
noun
the state of being enslaved to a habit or practice or to something that is psychologically or physically habit-forming, as narcotics, to such an extent that its cessation causes severe trauma.

Just sayin' . . . .

[The Great Snook]

Originally Posted by dmc

TGS -

ad·dic·tion   [uh-dik-shuhn]
noun
the state of being enslaved to a habit or practice or to something that is psychologically or physically habit-forming, as narcotics, to such an extent that its cessation causes severe trauma.

Just sayin' . . . .

I figure as long as I keep going to work and have the Mrs. to scream at me to get out of my "cave" I should be OK (barely)

[joacqin]

Man, you should have been playing the first two weeks when the servers were down constantly. It was infuriating and very closely led me to give up on the game for that reason alone.

[Gnarfflinger]

1: 30 seconds is too long. I can see the need for a cooldown, but the one that's there is too long.

2: I'd like to see the toolbar expanded, where you can take a different skill from the one of your other categories, or a different rune for a particularly useful skill. I'd like more flexibility.

3: Loot drops everywhere are underwhelming. While I believe this has to do with promoting auction house usage, it feels like a waste to get an item that requires level 21 to use and give you +1 to a stat or something like that. And what's the point of putting Strength on a wizzard only item?

4: That would not be as big a problem is you got to keep 1 of each follower. For example, if you had a two player group you could keep a templar and a scoundrel. For three or more have all three running around with you.

5: Hopefully they can put this in a future patch.

6: In some way there is. They get their teammate back and dealing damage again.

7: The server downtime is extremely annoying. Why can't they start it 5 hours earlier? And why does it take so long?

8: I'm adding one more of my own pet peeves--the gold farmers and their pet spambots. Occasionally I see some good conversation in the general chat only to have it shoved out of the window by some jerk pushing a gold selling site. And it's not always just one, but two or three of them. At first I started blocking them, but I quickly filled my blocked list, with about 35 to 40 of the same name! If they get someone on that big a violation of the EULA, can't they just ben the account?

[Paracelsi]

Makes one wonder why they haven't yet included "bot suspicion" as a reason for filing a complaint against another player. It's not like these spambots get deleted as soon as they say their piece, they usually stick around for hours.

[The Great Snook]

OK, time for another rant.

What the hell is with Act 2 inferno??? I've been doing Butcher runs for days now. I'm really getting happy with my equipment and with a decent party mix I can do a Butcher run and only die a couple of times and net around 100K in Gold.

Today I decided to see if I was ready for Act 2, The party was me (DH) and a M, W, and a B. We died so many times that we never even made it to the second quest or even to a waypoint.

Does Blizzard want people to stop playing?

[Paracelsi]

Well the good news is that being a DH and all you'll have an easier time farming for just the right items to help you through act 2. A DH is not as item dependent as a class like the WD, for example. Not much, but at least it's something.

The bad news is that from this point on you'll want to either solo or play with people you can easily communicate with or just really good players (I hope you friend requested all those oddly more-than-competent barbarians or monks you've played with so far). You can try searching the LFG (looking for group) channel for competent players while you solo or search the AH for items. Multiplayer act 2 and beyond is like 70% synergy and only 30% individual skill. Just because a barbarian can solo act 2 easily doesn't mean he will be a good tank for multiplayer. From my own experience less than half of barbarians/monk I play with actually know how to tank in act 2+ inferno, and from those very few understand the mechanics behind armor/resists/penalize enemy damage or attack speed.

Btw, act 2 is like 80% avoiding ground traps and projectiles. You do not want to get hit by lacuni grenades (the ground will start to light up telling you where the bombs will fall), desolates/plagued (more elites will have these), wasp chain-stinger attacks (fatal, even for a tank), flame attacks from those insect-mages, ground poison that those creatures that look like undead lacuni release upon death, fallen suiciders (you have around 1 second before they explode) and the special attack from those massive zombie guys carrying battleaxes. These things can potentially kill even well equipped DPSers, so you'll want to avoid them completely. To help with this you can try practicing the "move" command. By default it doesn't have a hotkey, I usually assign it to the spacebar. The "move" command should be indispensable for navigating past ground traps evading projectiles at the last moment, especially if you don't have Tumble. It also oddly seems to work even when the screen is filled monsters or should you experience choppiness.

[joacqin]

Isnt it grand? It actually gets worse, sure the jump isnt as big between 2 and 3 as between 1 and 2 but it is still pretty rough. Looking at your gear you listed in the other thread leads me to believe that you are quite far from being able to farm 2 but you could maybe progress through it solo or more likely with a good group.

[The Great Snook]

I guess that is the crazy thing. Almost all of my gear is now level 60+. Everything I'm looking for is to max out Dexterity to increase DPS and resists.

[Splunge]

The more I read here about D3, the more I’m thinking I might not enjoy it. I play solo, and it seems that success, particularly at higher levels, is almost completely equipment-based, which means lots of farming and/or trips to the AH, and that just doesn’t appeal to me. This is totally different from the original Diablo (which I loved), and while D2 involved some grinding, it didn’t seem to be to this extent. I realize that I could probably just play Normal and Nightmare, and maybe Hell, but that would annoy me because it would feel like I haven’t finished the game since there are skills that I wouldn’t have unlocked yet. It’s actually odd, since with FPS’s, I never have any desire to play through a second time at higher difficulties, but I just know it would bug me with D3 since the whole point here is character advancement.

[Paracelsi]

I play solo, and it seems that success, particularly at higher levels, is almost completely equipment-based, which means lots of farming and/or trips to the AH

This is basically what D3 is atm. The developers keep saying that's gonna change once they release the class rebalance patch, but so far there's been no word on when that'll be.

[The Great Snook]

Originally Posted by Splunge

The more I read here about D3, the more I’m thinking I might not enjoy it. I play solo, and it seems that success, particularly at higher levels, is almost completely equipment-based, which means lots of farming and/or trips to the AH, and that just doesn’t appeal to me. This is totally different from the original Diablo (which I loved), and while D2 involved some grinding, it didn’t seem to be to this extent. I realize that I could probably just play Normal and Nightmare, and maybe Hell, but that would annoy me because it would feel like I haven’t finished the game since there are skills that I wouldn’t have unlocked yet. It’s actually odd, since with FPS’s, I never have any desire to play through a second time at higher difficulties, but I just know it would bug me with D3 since the whole point here is character advancement.

Trust me, you will like it.

[henkie]

Originally Posted by The Great Snook

Trust me, you will like it.

That probably isn't the problem, the problem is that the gameplay is apparently blocking off a part of the game unless you grind yourself retarded. It might be fun for a while, but then you start the grind and, for people that don't like to grind, that will probably lead to an unsatisfied feeling. Like a bad ending of a good movie leaving you with a sour taste in your mouth - and for me usually makes me not like the movie too.

If these things don't bother you so much - i.e. if you enjoyed grinding for better gear in D2 or if you generally liked WoW - you'll probably enjoy D3 as well. For all the rest, it's probably not that good of a game.