A few ideas of how to save D3

[Skandranon]

Game's been out less than two weeks, and people are complaining that they can't full clear the difficulty that the game's designers said they wouldn't be able to do that fast. Imagine that. But the response is to ask for nerfs? From the same people that lambast Blizzard for nerfing anything in WoW, too. What ever happened to "But you need to work for it!"

Act II Inferno is to Act I Inferno as Hell is to Nightmare. So, the game really has seven difficulties. Normal, Nightmare, Hell and Inferno Acts 1-4. Inferno isn't meant to be done linearly with the rest w/o extensive farming. It's *for the people who want to farm*, not just roll through it WoW-raid style.

I was going to be done with this thread but I can't let this go without response. I understand that people who aren't there yet don't understand the problem, so let me try to outline it as best I can.

Everyone's approaching this as a "just farm more, stop whining" type problem. Except it isn't that simple. Firstly, none of the gear you actually get helps. Anything that might actually drop for you is too weak to help you continue. People are advancing slowly into farther acts of Inferno, but only armed with AHed gear from Act 4 Inferno. In essence, what you are doing when you "farm" is that you're picking up gear to sell to people stuck on walls behind you, so that you can buy gear from people ahead of you (most of whom got there through abuse of now nerfed skills, so you cannot repeat what they did), in order to hit something like an appropriate gear threshold.

Secondly, "farming", by the very use of the word, implies a sedate, placid sort of activity. Maybe even pleasant. If it was just a matter of farming, I'd have done it. Playing through Inferno does not, in any way, resemble farming. Instead it's angering and frustrating and sometimes quite literally painful, through arm strain. Farming was fine in D1/2 because the activity itself was at least sort of fun. "Farming" in Inferno is not any fun. I could "farm" inferno right now, I have a build that will do it (at least until it gets nerfed too) and I've done so for a few days. I got tired of it, because not only was it not fun but there was almost no actual skill involved, and yet it always required my full attention or I'd die. If I came across a pack with modifiers I could handle, great! I will now kite for 15 to 20 minutes to kill it. If I cannot handle it I have to kite it and strand it, if possible, and if I cannot do that I have to restart the game. To give a recent example, I managed, over the course of two hours, to obtain five stacks of Nephalem Valor and then advanced toward Maghda to get loot. At the gates of Alcarnus I found myself trapped between two unkillable packs and was forced to leave the game and lose all my stacks. In ten attempts at "farming" I had to terminate the attempt before racking up any more than repair bills eight times because I had run out of space to ditch unkillable packs. There's no challenge here - it's either the game says "you lose" (and you do) or it doesn't and it's merely boring instead.

Since you brought up WoW, I'll tell you what this reminds me of: raiding Burning Crusade 2.0, when everything was overtuned and frustrating and impossible to kill, and to top it all off when the epics dropped they were worse itemized than dungeon blues. The 2.0 nerfs were greeted with a massive sigh of relief by the raiding community, nobody complained in the least, because the game wasn't fun. At least there you had social cohesion to help hold people together until the nerfs went in, but Inferno has a solution for that too! I played almost all of Inferno Act 1 with three other people in a four-person team and it was difficult but doable. In Act 2, grouping up makes it so difficult that we literally cannot group or we won't get anywhere.

Your point about very few players in Inferno is well taken, but it isn't going to be less of an issue when more players get there. And it's not like WoW raiding - everyone IS going to get to Inferno at some point, and if they're presented with frustrating and angering gameplay I can't imagine many players not having the same reaction. And if, as you say, and I agree with, there doesn't seem much else wrong with the game, what other problem should they work on?