Patching 1.0.2c -- potentially nerfed mob damage

[Roland]

OK, you say, but what do I do now? Here are things you can do before 1.0.3 comes out:

1. Continue to farm Act 1 so that you can make the transition to Act 2. Too many people have said that it is possible to do this for you to convince me that it isn't possible, although yes, it is perhaps tedious and grindy.

Perhaps? No. No "perhaps" about it. It IS tedious and grindy. Almost everyone I know who's gotten into Act II and beyond, including those HC players in Inferno (whatever Act they're on), have farmed Goblins with excessive MF gear in order to get ahead. That is fundamentally broken, period. Farming Act I is boring, and I say that as someone who probably enjoys Act I more than any other Act (I'm undecided on this point, but it certainly gives me the D1 vibe more than any other Act). I have done hundreds of Warden / Butcher runs with full Nephalem Valor stacks. It's not even challenging anymore - it's flat out boring. Almost every single mob I can handle in Act I, including Immune Minions (most of the time, though I may die once to the more extreme combinations). Yet I step foot in Act II and die half a dozen times just reaching the first waypoint. The solution is to grind more? Nuh uh, no thanks. I've spent two solid weeks farming Act I and have jack to show for it save for a couple pieces that made a minor difference, and not nearly enough to get me even remotely comfortable in Act II.

The basic fact is Inferno is fundamentally broken for certain characters / playstyles right now, and no amount of farming Act I will change that. You either get the gear via the AH, or via Goblin farming with MF gear. That's it, and it sucks the fun right out of the game.

Go ahead and buy some things on the gold auction house so that you don't have to grind quite so much. Sure, all of the top items will be on the RMAH, but you don't have to own the very top items in the game.

I've been doing this. Do you want to know how much I've spent on the Gold AH doing this, before the RMAH came out? Well over 2 million gold, and probably more than 3 million. I still can barely set foot in Act II. In order to buy any sort of upgrade I'm looking at 1 million plus per item, and I guarantee I'll need at least 3 new pieces to get anywhere in Act II (let alone all the way to Belial, which seems an almost impossible task at this point). The requirements scale up so ridiculously fast you'll get whiplash trying to follow them. Also, pardon me but spending 20 hours a week farming for gold is not my cup of tea, especially considering how I'll just have to double that to get any further the next time.

Set aside your barbarian and play another class up through Act 1 Inferno. I've had a ball on my Wizard, and it seems like the other classes are pretty fun to play as well. Or start a completely different barbarian from scratch, do not twink him or her at all, and use completely different skills.

Right. Set aside our primary class that some of us have invested well over a hundred hours into so that we can, what, get yet another class to the brick wall? What do we do then, play another class, and so on, and so on until we run out of classes? What if we find the first three difficulties boring due to a lack of challenge? What if we don't enjoy the other classes nearly as much? There needs to be some middle ground here.

Look at the achievement lists and knock off all of the ones you can.

More mindless tedium that usually involves recreating games over, and over, and over again in order to accomplish this. I admit some of the challenges intrigue me, but some of them are just far more difficult for certain classes, and others are so random an encounter as to require multiple attempts at trying to finish them.

Start a hardcore character. It's a whole different very intense game. You know my attitude: Softcore is just practice. Come join us over on the hardcore side. I think you'll get addicted to it. As a bonus: No RMAH, so you no longer have to have to even think about it anymore.

Yeah, I'm really going to get addicted to dying due to desynch (NOT latency issues, flat out desynch). To say nothing of outside interference IRL (you try playing in a household with 4 kittens), nor lag spikes, nor one-shot kills (and how do you avoid those? Oh that's right, more mindless farming.) Sorry, but HC is not the be-all end-all. It's for people who don't care about their investment into their character, and don't mind the idea of losing all the time and effort they've put into their character to situations beyond their control.

Join the Lurker Lounge tournament. Play a random class with random skills assigned in hardcore and laugh when you die at level 18 or surprise everyone when you make it all the way through hell.

Probably the only suggestion that sounds even remotely fun, but not something I care to sink the time into right now. Frankly, I'd rather just set the whole game aside and wait for 1.0.3, because it's just too damn grindy at the high end, and the low end is too easy to hold my interest longer than an hour at a time. Admittedly, if I wasn't just flat-out burnt out on this game I probably would give this a go, and have a grand ball doing it. That's me, though - to each their own.

So, there are lots of things to do, even before 1.0.3 comes out and makes things a lot easier. I doubt that you have explored everything there is to know about the game, yet, so branch out to explore some other aspects of the game.

Nope. There's plenty of the game I haven't explored - namely certain random side quests / areas that refuse to pop for me. I just can't be bothered to do it because I find the game boring at this point in time. Melee flat-out bores me 85% of the time (the rest of the time is plenty enjoyable, but it's not enough to alleviate the disappointing majority), the Witch Doctor doesn't interest me in the slightest, and I can't get past the mental block of trying to progress through Normal for the third time with a new Wizard when it's a complete snoozefest.

I understand I'm bitching for the sake of bitching to a point here, but you have to understand until you've not only hit Inferno, but been there long enough to see all its ugly features hidden behind that shiny new coat of paint you cannot fathom what all the fuss is about. Between everyone telling everyone else what to do about it, and actually playing it day after day it just burns a person out (maybe that's why they dubbed it Inferno? ) There's no challenge left in Act I short of near-impossible fights (IM), yet Act II is precisely a brick wall. There's just such a jarring disconnect it truly makes one wonder how it got to this point prior to release (although we all know how that happened - complete lack of testing). Do I think the overall game is a broken mess? Absolutely not. Do I think certain parts of it are? Absolutely yes. For some of us, there's not nearly as much fun to be had in the game outside of Inferno simply because that's where the real challenge is (and this is different for everyone; if this was a top-down shooter I'd be farming "Normal" mode while plenty of others would be in "Inferno" ).

When 1.0.3 comes out I'll be back to try my hand at Act II, and hopefully gain access. From there who knows, but I intend to continue playing this game for quite some time. For now, though, there's no middle ground anywhere, no happy medium, no comfortable zone. It's just too easy, or too hard, and often times too grindy. It's not a bug-ridden fiasco, it's not a piss-poor game, but it's far from perfect. I have better games I can be playing while I wait for this one to get the polish it needs (and I will emphatically state that, outside of Inferno D3 is THE most polished Diablo title ever, especially at this stage comparatively speaking). I don't hate Diablo III by any stretch of the imagination. I just hate the state Inferno's in at the moment.