Open letter to Blizzard...

[Kevin]

Yes, the cooldowns of your escape skills are grossly out of whack with the frequency that you get vortexed or jailed. But really, they're dumb abilities and need to be changed. Jailer should be telegraphed like diablo's bone prison, so you have .5-1 second to react before you get snared. Vortex should be the same thing, or it should be a projectile (like ancient spear) that you can dodge.

These are much better suggestions than just removing the abilities that would help add another level of player skill in. Right now it does take skill to use cool downs correctly and avoid some stuff, but having another level of options is good. Of course I don't want the only option to be manually dodging everything, that was a BAD thing in D2 that I agree with Blizzard was unfun. But if you can dodge the circle for jailer like a bone cage, then it's easier to save the escape skill for when you don't see it in the craziness and you get stuck on the desecrator/molten/plagued/arcane beam/whatever. It shouldn't be trivial to dodge them, but it should be possible.

The unique affix combinations is what makes the champs and elites fun. It's the best part of the game. Some of the combos do get crazy, but I don't want all it it just eliminated.

I think invulnerable minions should have a health link to the boss. Which makes sense in a game world situation too, the boss is casting something so they can't be hurt, relying on them to keep him safe, it should come with a vulnerability that is more than just them having less health. Something like 5% (or 10 or whatever it's a number that can be dialed in) of the damage to a minion is transferred to the boss. It's still optimal to damage the boss directly, but it's not the only option, since wizards and demon hunters really don't have ways to easily avoid the minions to get damage to the boss. Witch doctors have quite a few ground effect AoE and "arcing" direct attacks where they can attack around the minions, melee has the option to get in close and "stick" to the boss, but it's still way more dangerous as the minions are still hurting them and mitigation through killing them is no longer an option, but if the AoE's that all melee have are helping to kill the boss faster the ability isn't as broken. Of course this one specifically is possibly too broken to fix.


Now to address more of Elric's points.

I don't have much of an issue with whites being so much weaker than specials. D2 was along those models but erred on the side of everything being weak. D1 was a different beast in that whites were weak, but the ability to be swarmed was the danger. Both had the awful mechanic of potion spam. But I like having the uber power feeling you can get from plowing through white mobs in normal-hell. I do agree that it's anticlimatic for set bosses to be so much easier than champs/elites. I pay that price though because the champs/elites are fun (again normal - hell). I'm not sure you can make set bosses always be the challenge without trivializing one of the best features of D3

I find leveling up no less dull than D2. Often a D2 level meant nothing at all because you couldn't spend the skill point until a later level and dumping the 5 skill points into vitality (or whatever planned min str/dex) was not very interesting either. I often ignored levels completely in D1 and D2 until I had gotten 3 or 4 of them because it didn't matter. That can happen in D3 depending on what skills I want to use, but I'm generally pretty excited to level because of adding a new skill slot or being able to swap to a different build as I level because I want a different play style. For several skills changing a rune isn't just changing flavor it's almost a new skill. The witch doctor I think sees the most of this. I think the leveling experience changes based on class a fair bit, it can use some work, but I think they improved it over the older games.

I do agree that gear checks reduce the item variety. I think the better solution is not to get rid of the gear checks, because that would make content too easy, but to make other affixes have more value. I don't think you can look at those as two separate points.

The design idea for inferno missed the mark. Normal-Hell is a good game, you reach 60 somewhere in Hell, you kill Diablo, you've won. For me that is great. I get a few hundred hours of play time, I'm happy. I never felt compelled to grind to level cap, I never felt compelled to grind "the best gear". I understand that many many other D1 and D2 players weren't like that, there are a lot of reasons for that, they only liked one class, that got a lot of satisfaction from hitting the cap or finding that perfect item. For me there wasn't any content that needed it, why did I care? Having a reason to grind the gear, Inferno, seems like a good idea, but it doesn't work. Having any end game doesn't work. I thought it would, it thought it was a good element to borrow.

I think the problem for many is, if you have an end game it becomes the whole game. I can ignore it just fine, beating Hell is beating the game for me, and I have fun getting there. Pushing through Inferno gives a reason to keep playing that character, something I never had in D1 or D2. But people seem to be expecting thousands of hours of play from this game, not hundreds.

I don't know. They can't win. I think they built a very fun game. It plays more like D2 and feels more like D1 to me. That makes me happy.

You aren't going to please everyone, and I do hope they improve the game and keep people involved. It's more fun in multiplayer, just like D2 was, but at least I can play this one solo, something that I couldn't do in D2 because D2 was dull. I got a lot of play out of D2 because I played with others, without multi I would have played through with a toon or two and likely left it. Which still would have gotten me my value.