Patching 1.0.2c -- potentially nerfed mob damage

[Lissa]

And Mongo, if you had been into Inferno in any serious amount, you would realize that Blizzard's QA is sorely lacking. The information is all around you on these forums, but you refuse to realize it. It goes beyond the difficulty of Inferno and the stupidity of how they decided to do it so arbitrarily, it also goes to viability of some skills and why others are way too powerful along with how some of the cheese/exploits got through. Face it, Blizzard's QA needs some pretty hefty work.

I believe your statement was that "Blizzard's QA has been steadily going down hill for years." That means that you believe that Blizzard's QA was much better in the past. My comment was to demonstrate that, no, in fact, Blizzard's QA was quite crummy in the past. Perhaps nostalgia is clouding your mind to just how buggy and broken D2 and especially LOD was at the time of their releases. Compared to those fiascos, the problems with D3, which do exist, are minor and more easily fixable in comparison. All they have to do is make it easier for people to get better gear and tune down the health and damage on the mobs in Inferno a bit. That's it. The skills that you claim to be "broken" in Inferno are not in fact broken. They don't suddenly change their effect in Inferno versus hell, right? (Well, perhaps Barbarian stuns shouldn't have their effect reduced so much in Inferno). The reason why some skills seem suddenly "broken" in Inferno is because of the massive health and spike damage that gets dealt in Inferno. Allow better gear to drop and tune down the mob health and damage in Inferno, and poof all those skills suddenly come back into play again just like they were in hell difficulty. Guess what Blizzard is going to do in 1.0.3? Allow better gear to drop and tone down Inferno mob health and damage. We'll see when the patch is released whether the changes are enough.

This is opposed to D2 and LOD, where patches had to rewrite the game code and fundamentally alter the skill systems in order to finally make a game that had at least some semblence of balance and playability. How long did it take between the release of D2 and the 1.10 LOD patch? Three years? And even after that, they had to continue patching to remove some gross problems. This isn't even to mention all of the duping problems that plagued the game throughout its tenure. Compared to all of the problems D2 and LOD had, the problems that D3 has are trivial.

I take it Mongo that you haven't paid attention to other games that Blizzard has produced since D2/LoD. Overall, they QA sucked during D2/LoD, but it's gotten far worse since then. If you had actually paid attention to some of the things going on with WoW along with some of the things going on in SC2, you'd realize that the QA back during D2/LoD was better (even if it was bad), than what we've seen over the last 5 years out of Blizzard. So yes, Blizzard's QA has gotten worse and that's not nostalgia on looking back at things, that's fact from looking at how bad the screw ups have been since D2/LoD was released and all the patching it got.