09-18-2012, 02:50 AM
I mostly like the way the AH works for my main character. It allowed me to relatively painlessly get past the hump of hell and levels 51-60. After 60 it made for a pretty satisfying progression - every session was able to afford some upgrade, and I went from barely able to handle act I to smoothly farming it to barely able to handle act II to beating Belial before patch 1.03.
I have a quibble with the AH progression now in that my analysis is the best thing to do is to save up the 80M for the Immortal King's chest piece but I'm not finding rares that sell often so it's very slow going. However, I can farm act 3 smoothly so it doesn't really matter that I can't easily afford the top end items.
Where I find the system falls down is when I want to play around with alts and variant builds. I stopped playing my wizard partially because it was very unsatisfying to hit 60 buy some stuff, and then find that I overgear act I. Similarly I tried a weapon throw based build on my Barbarian the other week. With the gear I have I crush act I with just about any build, found act 2 mostly easy except for a few packs I had no chance against, and act 3 too much to handle. So I didn't really get much interesting playtime out of that experiment. I really miss the Diablo II/Titan Quest experience of having a character organically grow. Knowing that I could very slowly farm up the gear I need to play around with variant builds isn't a satisfying - I don't want to spend a huge amount of time farming on alts. Stopping at nightmare doesn't do it for me either - most builds require runes or skills that aren't available by nightmare anyway.
I have a quibble with the AH progression now in that my analysis is the best thing to do is to save up the 80M for the Immortal King's chest piece but I'm not finding rares that sell often so it's very slow going. However, I can farm act 3 smoothly so it doesn't really matter that I can't easily afford the top end items.
Where I find the system falls down is when I want to play around with alts and variant builds. I stopped playing my wizard partially because it was very unsatisfying to hit 60 buy some stuff, and then find that I overgear act I. Similarly I tried a weapon throw based build on my Barbarian the other week. With the gear I have I crush act I with just about any build, found act 2 mostly easy except for a few packs I had no chance against, and act 3 too much to handle. So I didn't really get much interesting playtime out of that experiment. I really miss the Diablo II/Titan Quest experience of having a character organically grow. Knowing that I could very slowly farm up the gear I need to play around with variant builds isn't a satisfying - I don't want to spend a huge amount of time farming on alts. Stopping at nightmare doesn't do it for me either - most builds require runes or skills that aren't available by nightmare anyway.