The Auction House III: Evil is Back

[ErickTheRed]

The way it's set up right now, you farm Act I to be able to progress to Act II, farm Act II to progress to Act III, and farm Act III to be able to progress to Act IV. A lot of the problems people are running into is that they want to skip a lot of those steps and end up in later acts without having the gear to support it, which is enabled by being able to resurrect infinitely in softcore, even during set-piece encounters, if you are in a party. The players then forge on ahead, even though the multiple deaths to get there should have told them to hold back until they get better gear, and they then complain on the Blizzard boards about later acts being "impossible."

Except this part is a bit broken currently. The higher acts ramp up so quickly that it starts being very difficult to farm the current act for better gear. As I look to break into act 2 it seems my demon hunter friends really do hit a wall where it doesn't seem possible for them to gear defensively and not get flattened. Blizzard has learned that it's better to release overtuned content and balance it down rather than err the other way. Presumably that's what is happening here.

For now the overall plan of having different difficulty levels for each act still appeals to me, as it suits my play style very well. I like to have goals ahead of me, and it doesn't hugely bother me if some of them are out of reach. I don't want to farm content just to collect items and let me farm the same content slightly faster. I already somewhat overgear act I in that I can carry a fresh 60 through it (Makes the butcher fight pretty exciting.) I like that there's still a lot more for my character to do.

I recognize that there are different play styles and some are not well fitted by the current game. Many people would rather inferno didn't exist and they would either be done, or just farming hell. Others would like to be collecting set and unique items and are probably frustrated at their rarity. It's difficult to please everyone.