Discussion: game balance...

[FireIceTalon]

And the drops of course, are HORRID. I mean, I killed one pack today that dropped a level 49 item. 49 in Inferno, really Blizz?

Random is random.

Hell in Diablo II LOD sometimes dropped normal base items. It's not like there's no precedent for this. Not sure why people are surprised this is happening.

Also, modifiers make the item, not the level required. I know people who are using level ~40 items simply because they got the right stats with reasonable rolls together. You can't necessarily immediately throw out a level 49 item because it's not level 60. Same was true in Diablo II, some great modifiers (% leech, for example) were not high level modifiers.

Vitality is only one component to defense. DH are at a particular disadvantage because they have no base effective health modifier, but this means that even small amounts of extra armor (STR) and resists and / or INT are going to make larger differences in survivability than for other classes.

What I'm saying is that people are able to glass cannon until Inferno and they see system shock because they can't anymore. In Diablo II, people could effectively glass cannon the whole game. DIII they can do so until inferno. They hit inferno and can't anymore and suddenly their world is turned upside down. While Blizzard has said they're looking at making damage a little less spike prone for patch 1.03, I still think people are just plain going to have to gear more defensively than they're used to in a softcore Diablo game, and this is the source of the issue. Hardcore players are not going to see the same issue... because they're going to do the same thing in inferno they've always done... balance defense and offense, grind up decent gear before moving to the next difficulty level, etc.... Softcore players need to adapt, and this change is being resisted. It's really kind of natural, but it'll eventually die down. Blizz will certainly adjust the difficulty curve some, but most of the change will likely come from players adapting.

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Items with great modifiers are really rare. They were in Diablo II too, the only difference in Diablo II, was once someone got one who knew how to dupe... they were suddenly everywhere and people undervalued the time it takes to get a rare with a truly great set of stats. No doubt it's going to take the equivalent of a week of /played time to get a substantial set of upgrades. This is really not all that different from the Diablo II design, just that in Diablo II, there was no inferno difficulty, so those items never felt quite as "necessary" as they do in Diablo III. If you want to pretend this is Diablo II, just ignore inferno and run Act IV hell over and over.

In Diablo II, some items only dropped off like 3 monster types in the entire game. They were effectively unobtainable outside of EXTREME luck in months of farming until they were duped out the ass.

The one promising thing is that crafted items seem to be gaining some traction as gear fillers in inferno. As people obtain the Act 3+ crafted patterns, these will start coming down in price some, and that will make gearing new characters for Inferno a little easier.

Well, yea, The DH doesnt really have too many good defensive skills besides SS (which was nerfed) and Prep and Vault, but even these skills don't let them tank at all to anywhere near the degree that the other classes can (except maybe WD). And they are just a very squishy class in general. It seems you cannot ever get enough vitality, since if anything touches you, you are pretty much dead. And resist gear is very hard to come by and/or extremely expensive. Getting your dex up will increase your dodge, but this really only helps a little bit. Armor is virtually almost impossible to raise to any reasonable level. It seems like they are a super gear dependent class in a game totally centered around items - many of which are very difficult to get. The only thing DH has going for them is their potential to have a ridiculous amount of DPS (mine does over 20K, and Ive seen people with even alot more than that), but that doesn't do much good if you cant stay alive.

I know I need some better defensive gear (my resists and armor suffer alot), but just trying to farm the gold so I can hit up the AH is difficulty in itself, since to make a significant upgrade you will likely have to spend at least a couple million for just ONE item. It is really quite a paradoxical system. In nightmare and Hell, I could make decent upgrades for 50-60k, and it usually would suffice, even if the improvement was only modest. But with Inferno, you have to make HUGE upgrades, and that doesn't come cheap.

You may well be right that you cannot play glass cannon anymore come Inferno time. But the DH, by its very nature and mechanics, is a glass cannon class. It is very difficult to get your resists up to a decent level, and looks as though getting your Armor to a decent stat that is beneficial at all is impossible. This is one thing I loved about Dexterity with rogues in D1, Dex was the stat that contributed to Armor - D1 had the simplest yet really coolest mechanics. In D3, it is strength, which in a way makes sense, yet I think if you tied it to Dex instead the DH would become much less fragile.