Patching 1.0.2c -- potentially nerfed mob damage

[Lissa]

I agree, game balance and such are developer issues, and not QA issues.

At least according to my conversations with my friends who work (well worked) in game QA.

Yes, the game has balance issues. In my mind they completely revolve around the design of the DH class defense (almost exclusively avoidance based) clashing with the defensive design of every other class (largely mitigation based), and this results in a situation where it's impossible to tune monster damage. DH have no viable means of mitigating, but other classes can amass huge amounts of mitigation. anything tuned for the other classes will one-shot DHs, anything tuned for DHs will mean a walk in the park for other classes. Can't balance the game until you virtually re-make the DH. Chances of this happening are near zero though. It is a fatal flaw in the design of the game. Didn't happen in Diablo II, since all classes defense worked pretty much the same way.

If you had used the right terminology a couple days ago, we wouldn't have had so much back and forth in this thread.

See, this is why I say that QA has gotten worse, not better. Things should have been found and sent back to the developers to rectify. It's not just bugs that QA is looking for, they're looking for balance issues, skills that aren't up to par, and other aspects that improve the overall game play. To me, this is why things are worse with Blizzard's QA now than back in the past. They were given more time, had a smaller amount of things to look at, and still missed it. This is the essence of my problem with Blizzard's QA and why I think it's worse.

As to fixing things with the DH, there's a couple things that would easily fix some issues.

1) When using Vault, while the animation is in effect, the DH is invulnerable. The Vault distance isn't that far and typically is just enough to get you out of melee range. Other classes have skills that work in this regard (like WD spirit walk where you become invulnerable while moving).

2) Make mobs that are unhittable until they either get into Melee (looking at the Deceivers here) or can't be hit while performing a move (like the Lacuni) be hittable so that the DH has a chance to kill them before they reach melee range.

3) Increase the DH's inherent dodge so that they can dodge at twice the rate of the other classes (so at 500 Dex, a DH has 40% dodge compared to the other classes that are at 20%, this could potentially lead to issues further down the road through if a DH hits 2000 Dex or even 3000 Dex).

Any one of these would increase DH survivability.

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Mongo, that's when they the raised the cap in the higher difficulties, it was capped before LoD. That was done as a hot fix and then the tooltip was update in 1.03 to note that change. Again, it helps to actually remember how the skill was. You claim others are using nostalgia glasses, but made a huge nostalgia glasses mistake yourself.

Lissa, you do realize that reality doesn't change simply because you say something repeatedly, right? You could static field Diablo down to a sliver right up to the LOD release. That was reality. I know, because I did it over and over and over again right up until the LOD release, and I never had to change my build to compensate for any nerf to Static Field. (I think I might have thrown a few extra points into it to make its radius bigger after the radius formula was fixed, but by that time, I had so many extra skill points to spend, it didn't matter).

Mongo, you're evidently forgetting things because SF was capped before LoD (either 10% or 25% across all levels). I remember the cries about the change on the forums as you literally could not SF to kill everything anymore. And likewise, never trust patch notes to cover everything the patch "fixed". If I had a dollar for every time I've heard someone find something that wasn't listed in the patch notes, I would have several thousand dollars. So, unless you stayed off B.net prior to the SF cap, you're not remember things are you think.