A few ideas of how to save D3

[MMAgCh]

I've decided to make a whole new account and start from scratch with the rule of not using the Auction House. I've never twinked in any Action RPG before, so this was really my first time experiencing it. At the core this game is about item finding and advancing your character- I found accelerating that using outside means will just shorten that enjoyment of progression.

Unfortunately, you are only handicapping yourself there. (Well, maybe that actually is what you're going for, in which case never mind!) Still, Blizzard have stated, albeit in not so many words, that the AH really is supposed to be as much of a source of loot as ordinary item drops are, which apparently is why the loot people are generally procuring is so underwhelming even by pRNG standards.

There's really very little to be gained abstaining from using the AH other than making it more tedious still to progress in the game after a certain point.

[MonTy]

Unfortunately, you are only handicapping yourself there.

I look forward to the challenge and will let you know how it goes. Started a Witch Doctor on my new account this morning.

[Chesspiece_face]

To take it a little further, here is another quote from Bashiok on the subject:

This isn't a new concept. In Diablo II gear was randomized and so absolutely ridiculously rare that you could almost be guaranteed to never find the exact item you were looking for just by farming for it yourself. To be the best you had to trade items with others, as you might find an extremely rare item, they may be willing to trade for yours. If you wanted to get ahead within any reasonable amount of time you had to trade. Now, Diablo II had one thing going for it which was the mass proliferation of dupes for the rarest items, which completely tanked its economy and quickly allowed anyone to gear themselves in the best possible items for nearly nothing. In Diablo III you don't have that luxury, you need to actually find the rare items, or trade for them.

Now, you have a couple options, you can jump into our Trading Forum, post up your item/s and then meet someone in-game and barter a trade. You can also use the in-game Trade channel, and again barter trades. Or you can use the auction house system. How you trade items is up to you, bartering out of game, bartering in-game, the AH for gold, or real money once it launches. We're not forcing anyone to do anything, and if you don't ever want to trade with other players that's your choice as well, but due to the nature of drops in Diablo games, if you want to be the best you need to trade.

[MongoJerry]

Except that in Inferno mode, almost everything 2-shots you, even in Act 1, unless you have about 40k health (I'm only working with around 25k). You will see when you get there

Sounds like you need to get 40k health. I'm in Act 1 hell and have 30k health on my Wizard. I hope I'll have at least 40k when I finish hell. You can't complain to Blizzard about not being able to survive, if you don't equip yourself to survive.

[Bolty]

Just to annoy RedRadical, I'll point out that my Barbarian just completed Hell difficulty tonight at level 60 without buying a single item from the Auction House, ever. Act IV was a little rough, I'll admit, especially with my gung-ho "jump in and ask questions later" style of Barbarianism. However, it was doable, and Diablo went splat. No rares or champion packs were skipped. If I was playing Hardcore, I'd have had to skip that one Infernal pack on the way to the Pinnacle (Molten Plagued Fast and runs away from you).

I'm using a blue item as a weapon. My chestplate is total crap, I never found any rare rings worth squat, and my boots are a joke. I finished with roughly 26,000 hit points and 4600 armor.

All the same, I don't understand the hatred for the Auction House. It is a source of loot. You earn gold in the game that you use to get more stash space, buff your Blacksmith and Gem Vendor, and buy loot off of the Auction House. If I want to get serious about Inferno difficulty, I can either farm Hell Act IV or Inferno Act I for a long time, or else shop the Auction House. Both activities are equivalent, and nobody's "forced" into one or the other.

[Chesspiece_face]

Sounds like you need to get 40k health. I'm in Act 1 hell and have 30k health on my Wizard. I hope I'll have at least 40k when I finish hell. You can't complain to Blizzard about not being able to survive, if you don't equip yourself to survive.

I've been chuckling while looking over the Wizard forums over on the official site. All these Wizards crying that they are getting 1-shot on act 2 Inferno and then they list their stats and it is always something like: 30k damage, 10k life, 3k armor (With Energy Armor!!!), and it's obvious they aren't using a shield...

Well DUHHHHH. Learn to itemize your F'n character and you won't get 1-shot. As a comparison I'm sitting at 12k damage, 60k life, and about 6k armor and having a blast farming Act 1 Inferno. The biggest hit I've seen with these stats is about 10.5k and that was from Manglemaw, the unique Unburied before the Chancelor, and that guy is so slow the only reason I got hit was because my Diamond Skin didn't go off on time.

The only conclusion I can come to is that most of these Wizard posters complaining about Inferno either got to the level they are at by exploiting a gimick build that has since been nerfed (What did you expect?) or they pretty much zerged their way through the rest of the game wracking up tons of deaths all throughout Nightmare and Hell and like to think that since they are in Inferno they must have been successful.

[MongoJerry]

Well DUHHHHH. Learn to itemize your F'n character and you won't get 1-shot. As a comparison I'm sitting at 12k damage, 60k life, and about 6k armor and having a blast farming Act 1 Inferno.

Excellent! I was wanting to build my character like the way you describe it, but I wasn't sure if the itemization would allow for it. It's good to know that this is possible.

[FireIceTalon]

Just to annoy RedRadical, I'll point out that my Barbarian just completed Hell difficulty tonight at level 60 without buying a single item from the Auction House, ever. Act IV was a little rough, I'll admit, especially with my gung-ho "jump in and ask questions later" style of Barbarianism. However, it was doable, and Diablo went splat. No rares or champion packs were skipped. If I was playing Hardcore, I'd have had to skip that one Infernal pack on the way to the Pinnacle (Molten Plagued Fast and runs away from you).

I'm using a blue item as a weapon. My chestplate is total crap, I never found any rare rings worth squat, and my boots are a joke. I finished with roughly 26,000 hit points and 4600 armor.

All the same, I don't understand the hatred for the Auction House. It is a source of loot. You earn gold in the game that you use to get more stash space, buff your Blacksmith and Gem Vendor, and buy loot off of the Auction House. If I want to get serious about Inferno difficulty, I can either farm Hell Act IV or Inferno Act I for a long time, or else shop the Auction House. Both activities are equivalent, and nobody's "forced" into one or the other.

DPS, resists?

And define "total crap", what tier level, required clvl, and affixes do your items have?

Anyway, thats cool and all if you didnt use the AH - great for you. But for most of us, it becomes a necessity - because the drops are god awful and crafting anything at this stage of the game until you max your smith is just illogical.

[MongoJerry]

Anyway, thats cool and all if you didnt use the AH - great for you. But for most of us, it becomes a necessity - because the drops are god awful and crafting anything at this stage of the game until you max your smith is just illogical.

You keep using the word, "necessity." Inigo Montoya has some words for you:

[Tal]

Add me into the crowd that hasn't used the Auction House to buy (and haven't had any luck selling) gear.

[smegged]

I'm a bit leery of making any comments on this without being there myself, but a friend of mine has stopped playing the game now that he's level 60.

The reason that he's stopped is this:

1) When you have a level 60 character of any class, they're level 60. There is no way to make the character any chunkier without items.
2) The lack of meaningful, character defining choices in the game means that once you have a level 60 barbarian, you have *every* level 60 barbarian.
3) If you use the auction house, you end up using it for almost every single item you end up wearing. Your character feels like you could have just bought it off ebay.
4) If you don't use the auction house, you are crippling yourself and your progression. You farm not for gear, but for salebait.
5) There are no character-altering quests (ala the skills quests in acts 2 and 4, the resistance quest in act 5 and the health quest in act 3) like there were in diablo 2.

In short, once you have 5 level 60 characters, the only way to progress is through getting better items. The only way to get better items (generally) is to use the auction house. This leads to a rather impersonal and detached feel. You never get the same "holy crap, I remember where and when this particular item dropped for me years later feeling" that you got in diablo 1 or 2.

What amazes me is just how much fun people had playing diablo 2, even with the plethora of dupes and poor itemisation. There were choices that could not be unmade (this is not really the case in d3). You only got 3 socket quests for each character. You only got 3 imbues. There is *nothing* like this in diablo 3 and I feel that this will lead to less re-playability.

The only advantage to this is that you only get a pitifully small number of character spaces in d3 (only 10 characters - wtf blizzard? How can I be running half a dozen variants at a time, while keeping my "mains"? What about the large number of characters I only want to play with different specific sets of people?).

---

Having said that, other than the stupid 3007 bug, the game has been really fun so far on my runs through normal and now the beginning of nightmare.

[ViralSpiral]

Wow, only 10 characters? There were times when I had that many in a month. I suppose it must be to limit muling. We all know how much Blizzard hates when people get to keep all the items they find. Hence why we have to come up with stuff like PlugY on our own. So between online only play, limited characters...they're really trying to force people into the AH. How much you want to bet that at least 10-20% of all the really rare and desirable stuff that shows up in the RMAH will be coming anonymously from Blizzard employees? Watching the posts here, D3 is starting to sound less and less like a game and more and more like a cash cow/scam on Blizzard's part.

[MongoJerry]

3) If you use the auction house, you end up using it for almost every single item you end up wearing. Your character feels like you could have just bought it off ebay.
4) If you don't use the auction house, you are crippling yourself and your progression. You farm not for gear, but for salebait.

Only if you choose to skip ahead, because you really really badly want to see the higher acts of Inferno now and don't want to put the time into farming and crafting earlier acts to enable to get your character to get up there. It's your choice to use the auction house to circumvent the process that by plan was supposed to take months. Otherwise, you can slowly build up your gear over time and make incremental forays into the next area of an act as your gear and playing skills improve.

What's funny is that it seems that most people are buying the wrong gear -- stuff that's glass cannon +mf% type gear that would be highly desired in D2. So, they die over and over again, even though they spent millions of gold on the AH to get it.

[smegged]

3) If you use the auction house, you end up using it for almost every single item you end up wearing. Your character feels like you could have just bought it off ebay.
4) If you don't use the auction house, you are crippling yourself and your progression. You farm not for gear, but for salebait.

Only if you choose to skip ahead, because you really really badly want to see higher act Inferno now and don't want to put the time into farming and crafting earlier acts to enable to get your character to get up there. It's your choice to use the auction house to circumvent the process that by plan was supposed to take months. Otherwise, you can slowly build up your gear over time and make incremental forays into the next area of an act as your gear and playing skills improve.

What's funny is that it seems that most people are buying the wrong gear -- stuff that's glass cannon +mf% type gear that would be highly desired in D2. So, they die over and over again, even though they spent millions of gold on the AH to get it.

But that's just it, the game has been designed in such a way that you *won't* get stuff drop that's good for your character. It's balanced around you picking up stuff off the AH. Blizzard don't consider it min/maxing to be buying off the AH. They consider it to be a required part of play. They made it that way on purpose so that people will use the RMAH and give them a revenue stream.

Why else do you think it only takes 60 odd hours for a non-twinked character to hit level 60 and beat hell difficulty?

Diablo 3 has a late-game centred around itemising your character. The auctionhouse is Blizzard's way of controlling and monetising the flow of items. The problem is that unlike in diablo 2, the late-game offers little else other than gearing up. There are no perma-bonuses to completing certain quests. There is no long slog levelling from 80+. The slow trickle of rewards, the multiple build paths and intentionally misbuilt characters that give diablo 2 the addictiveness it has is gone. Now all that's left is the required itemisation and farming. It's like WoW, but without raiding in the endgame. WoW without the coordination of teams of 25.

The leveling game is fun, but none of the level 60+ players I've talked to in real life like the game after they hit 60. They either reroll or quit.

[ViralSpiral]

Sounds like they're building it like WoW where they're going to up the level cap in an expansion and that's when they'll "have time" to include the replayability and other features so they can make their money. I understand they need to make a profit, but it seems to be their only goal with this game, from what I'm reading. Like they're just using this to make funds for a different game they'd rather be making.

Really bizarre that there's no character-altering quests. Those were, to my knowledge, generally people's favourites. I knew people liked doing the Den, enthusiastically murdered Izual, got excited about the Hellforge, and were into rescuing Anya (class specific rare - this is actually valuable in single player - AND a resistance scroll! Score!). As for quests without character-altering rewards, how many people remember the thrill of assembling the Horadric Staff? Or getting Khalim's Spleen, Liver, and Kidney? Oooh. And everyone got rushed to Nihlathak so they could get their names inscribed on an item. You know, I think I'm seeing a pattern here.

I dunno, from what I'm reading, the game doesn't sound very interesting once the newness wears off. There's no real point to having more than one character for each class and maybe a mule or two. Variants are slain, or at least restricted to Hell difficulty. Skill can be switched around, but there seem to be pretty clear "bests", which are necessitated for use due to the extreme difficulty of Inferno, where they slapped 80% of the content anyone is interested in. Even playing through the game four times doesn't sound super interesting to me. I'd rather play a really long game once than the same one four times. But I guess that's a franchise sacred cow now.

...If there's one thing Diablo II taught us, it's that we ought to be slaughtering cows, though.

[Jester]

Variants are slain, or at least restricted to Hell difficulty. Skill can be switched around, but there seem to be pretty clear "bests", which are necessitated for use due to the extreme difficulty of Inferno, where they slapped 80% of the content anyone is interested in. Even playing through the game four times doesn't sound super interesting to me. I'd rather play a really long game once than the same one four times.

Why are variants slain? If there's an optimal skill set, then variants pick a sub-optimal one. Each variant is essentially its own difficulty curve - some are difficult to even get through normal, others perfectly viable in inferno (presumably, it's not like I've done it.) How is this different from D1 or D2 variant play?

-Jester

[ViralSpiral]

Well, from what I've read, you can't customise stat points anymore, which prevents any sort of jerrymandering there (MongoJerrymandering, here?). I guess it depends how tightly you want to define "variant." Sirian ran Ember, who had a definite cap of Nightmare but was one of the most tightly restricted non-naked characters ever. Then MJ had Irene, and there was the Irene clone, which had a cap at Normal - but then there were others like Skeletorr, Astra, Grizabella, Gunter, et cetera, who were all clearly variants and generally FAR, FAR below the power curve of the builds B. Netters "approved" of, but who were all able to finish the game at the highest difficulty.

I'm just guessing there won't be any variants able to do Inferno, or at least at variants that aren't just 1-2 skills off the power builds, because it seems despite Blizzard's best (or worst) intentions, some skills are just plainly far more viable than others.

[Elric of Grans]

It all comes down to your definition of variant. I concede, a naked character is not going to get to Inferno, though I think LoL would be a cake-walk compared to Diablo. Many Variants were about a theme, which does not preclude using `top-tier' skills. For example, I have been thinking about a Grenadier-themed Demon Hunter, who uses all the grenade and rocket skills/runes and melee weapons. It would be a variant, but so far I have not seen any reason it would not get to Hell, and I doubt it would fail to enter Inferno. Some variants do not even care about death, or even embrace it. Am I the only one who remembers The Lemming? For Glory! (Personally, I preferred the Hamster ~wheecht!).

[smegged]

It all comes down to your definition of variant. I concede, a naked character is not going to get to Inferno, though I think LoL would be a cake-walk compared to Diablo. Many Variants were about a theme, which does not preclude using `top-tier' skills. For example, I have been thinking about a Grenadier-themed Demon Hunter, who uses all the grenade and rocket skills/runes and melee weapons. It would be a variant, but so far I have not seen any reason it would not get to Hell, and I doubt it would fail to enter Inferno. Some variants do not even care about death, or even embrace it. Am I the only one who remembers The Lemming? For Glory! (Personally, I preferred the Hamster ~wheecht!).

With only ten character spots to play with they have pretty much killed off most chances I'll have for playing variants. Already no less than three character slots are taken up by characters that I have reserved *only* to play with a specific group of players. If I want a "real" character of each class, I'm left with what, two spots left? That's not even including HC characters (not that I think I'll bother with Australian ping and the stability of Blizzard servers).

[Jester]

Well, from what I've read, you can't customise stat points anymore, which prevents any sort of jerrymandering there (MongoJerrymandering, here?). I guess it depends how tightly you want to define "variant." Sirian ran Ember, who had a definite cap of Nightmare but was one of the most tightly restricted non-naked characters ever. Then MJ had Irene, and there was the Irene clone, which had a cap at Normal - but then there were others like Skeletorr, Astra, Grizabella, Gunter, et cetera, who were all clearly variants and generally FAR, FAR below the power curve of the builds B. Netters "approved" of, but who were all able to finish the game at the highest difficulty.

I'm just guessing there won't be any variants able to do Inferno, or at least at variants that aren't just 1-2 skills off the power builds, because it seems despite Blizzard's best (or worst) intentions, some skills are just plainly far more viable than others.

And so, what? The game is hard enough (on inferno) that variant scum will have to be satisfied with merely beating the game on hell? Or nightmare? Or even normal?

That sounds like par for the course for variants. You make you own challenge - if the game makes it impossible, you find out what is possible, and do that instead. Find some boundaries, and push them. Ember couldn't do Hell - and nobody cared. It was still awesome.

-Jester