Patching 1.0.2c -- potentially nerfed mob damage

[Lissa]

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.

No, Lissa. Again, I actually played a SF/Orb sorceress obsessively for almost a year. People complained when the distance formula was fixed. Do you remember how the distance formula had a sign error in it that created a four-pointed star shape that reached across most of the screen with only a single point (plus maybe a few +all skills points) in it? When they fixed the sign error, the distance seemed to shrink to a comparatively miniscule amount, so all those sorceresses who were used to killing screenfuls of mobs while running around with 1 point in Static Field suddenly found themselves in trouble. In my case, it didn't really affect me, because my sorceress was already at a high enough level that I didn't know what to do with my extra skill points anyway, so I just threw them into Static Field to raise the radius back up again and I continued to level like nothing had happened. The damage was not capped until LOD came out.

(I do have a vague memory that perhaps they did fix something so that lightning resistance affected static field, which meant that it took an extra second to kill Diablo in 8-player hell).

As I said, they capped it early on. It wasn't just fixing the bug with the shape of SF, but there was a cap to the maximum out of life it could take off and they capped it initially through a hotfix. So yes, they fixed the radius issue and they capped the maximum damage it could do, it was just that that cap was the same across all difficulties and then they increased it to 33% and 50% respectively in Nightmare and Hell.

This is why I think Blizzard's QA is worse. They had a lot of time to look at things and they didn't.

You have to complete the sentence: Blizzard's QA is worse than... what? In this thread, you were saying that Blizzard's QA was worse than it was at the time of the launch of D2 and LOD, and I think I can speak for the majority here by saying that we are laughing wholeheartedly at such a ridiculous notion. If you are now saying, "Well, Blizzard's QA is worse than Bioware's QA at the time of the launch of ME3," you're starting a new discussion.

So, I take it you completely missed this comment:

Likewise, and I've been looking for the post Bolty made, D3's framework has been finished for over a year and half as Blizzard was letting people play in Act 3 and Act 4 at various tech conventions back in late 2010. Blizzard had a year and half to sit down and QA a lot of the game as they worked out various potential blocks (such as the one South Korea had setup stating that D3 was gambling and that was against either the law or some societal norm in South Korea and was delayed until Blizzard worked that out with the South Korean government). The beta of Act 1 ran for over 9 months before it was finally released (and yes, there were some changes made, but not much). Blizzard had a lot more time with D3 to QA it inhouse before release then they ever did with D2 (remember, D2 came out 3 years after D1 where as D3 came out 11 years since LoD and they announced D3 in 2008 and the graphics in game show it's probably using technology from 2007 through 2009).

So, here we have a game that they've basically had finished for a year and half where they could QA in all this time and yet a bunch of things slip through. Does that really sound like their QA is on the ball compared to where they've had shorter QA times for their other games (even including D2)?

I made to You, Quark, and GG on page 6 of this thread. They had more time to look things over in D3 and still let things through. Nevermind that D2 was done in a shorter period of time with more things to check than they had to do with D3. So, yes, having less to check, more time to check it, and still letting some glaring things through (even if fixed quickly) shows a worse QA situation.