First Hardcore Inferno Belial Kill (by a Barbarian, too)

[ViralSpiral]

Keep in mind that's also like 1/512th of the lag Elric probably is used to seeing, Frag. I'm sure to him, Kapp looks like friggin' Neo.

[MongoJerry]

Damn, he is good. Makes me look absolutely terrible at this game.

Irony? I hope so. He didn't do anything impressive, nor difficult. It was gear & spec that was really shown, just normal play.

No doubt, but having watched a couple of his videos, I do like the way the thinks about game situations, his skill selections, and his gear choices. I'm not ready to annoint him a god among men, but I do have to tip my cap to him and say, "well played."

Regarding the gameplay, it reminded me of seeing various levels of squash being played in a local raquet club when I was a kid. The lowest levels had the ball flying around at various speeds with people running all over the court. The medium levels had balls flying around at much higher speeds with people running all over the court. The highest level had two shots: 1. A lob to the very back corner of the room and 2. A lightning fast kill shot just above the blue line that would be impossible for any mortal human to possibly get to. Mess up ever so slightly on #1, and your opponent would give you a #2. Watching it, it seemed so easy. That's what good players of any sport make things look like -- easy.

I do wish he would make some videos showing more of his fights against champions and minor boss packs, though. I think that would be more interesting than the fight against Belial.

[Ashock]

This guy has a legion of people that make donations to him, he spends hours and hours and hours goblin farming in groups, he uses leveling "exploits" and so on and so fourth. His is very far from a typical D3 experience.

BTW, he died as soon as he went into Act3.

Just to set the record straight.

[Concillian]

This guy has a legion of people that make donations to him, he spends hours and hours and hours goblin farming in groups, he uses leveling "exploits" and so on and so fourth. His is very far from a typical D3 experience.

BTW, he died as soon as he went into Act3.

Just to set the record straight.

You expect first kills of inferno HC fights to come from joe blow with a wife and three kids playing 10 hours a week?

[Trevan]

This guy has a legion of people that make donations to him, he spends hours and hours and hours goblin farming in groups, he uses leveling "exploits" and so on and so fourth. His is very far from a typical D3 experience.

BTW, he died as soon as he went into Act3.

Just to set the record straight.

You expect first kills of inferno HC fights to come from joe blow with a wife and three kids playing 10 hours a week?

Wasn't Solo inferno diablo first downed by some random guy in europe?

Granted, he wasn't playing 10 hours a week, but he didn't exactly have a legion of people following him.

[MongoJerry]

This guy has a legion of people that make donations to him, he spends hours and hours and hours goblin farming in groups, he uses leveling "exploits" and so on and so fourth. His is very far from a typical D3 experience.

BTW, he died as soon as he went into Act3.

Just to set the record straight.

A "legion" of people making donations to him? Having some friends who exchange gear with one another hardly composes "legion." Goblin farming is a part of the game, and you are as welcome to partake in it as he or everyone else is. If you choose not to do it, that is your choice.

Death is a part of hardcore. He was the first to get to Act 3. We'll see how he or others do on the next progression. I take it that you're trying to set the goalposts back and say melee isn't viable in Act 3?

Right now, melee are actually having a better time of it in hardcore, because no matter how much one wishes to say "just don't get hit," it is inevitable that one will get hit and melee characters are most able to take the inevitable hits once they are geared properly. I would be willing to place good money on a melee character being the first one to finish the game. Afterward, it'll be interesting to see which ranged class makes it first. My guess would be a Wizard, but Witch Doctors have a lot going for them, too.

---

Wasn't Solo inferno diablo first downed by some random guy in europe?

Granted, he wasn't playing 10 hours a week, but he didn't exactly have a legion of people following him.

We're talking about hardcore, Trevan.

[Trevan]

We're talking about hardcore, Trevan.

Yes, I know, that's kinda hard to miss. But the point remains that the absolute hardcore gamers complete with teams can be beaten to the punch at things by seemingly random people.

Hardcore or not, I'd expect people who get paid to play a game as their job and steam all the time to generally get firsts over people no one has known about. But evidently that's not true.

[ViralSpiral]

Beaten to the punch in SC != beaten to the punch in HC. Totally different animals. In fact, the "tactics" (including intentional suicide) of the SC team would have gone poorly in HC for hopefully obvious reasons.

[Trevan]

Beaten to the punch in SC != beaten to the punch in HC. Totally different animals. In fact, the "tactics" (including intentional suicide) of the SC team would have gone poorly in HC for hopefully obvious reasons.

The person i'm referring to was solo and did not intentionally suicide.

This is my last post on the subject, since the reason behind the comment is being lost.

[Ashock]

This guy has a legion of people that make donations to him, he spends hours and hours and hours goblin farming in groups, he uses leveling "exploits" and so on and so fourth. His is very far from a typical D3 experience.

BTW, he died as soon as he went into Act3.

Just to set the record straight.

A "legion" of people making donations to him? Having some friends who exchange gear with one another hardly composes "legion." Goblin farming is a part of the game, and you are as welcome to partake in it as he or everyone else is. If you choose not to do it, that is your choice.

Death is a part of hardcore. He was the first to get to Act 3. We'll see how he or others do on the next progression. I take it that you're trying to set the goalposts back and say melee isn't viable in Act 3?

Right now, melee are actually having a better time of it in hardcore, because no matter how much one wishes to say "just don't get hit," it is inevitable that one will get hit and melee characters are most able to take the inevitable hits once they are geared properly. I would be willing to place good money on a melee character being the first one to finish the game. Afterward, it'll be interesting to see which ranged class makes it first. My guess would be a Wizard, but Witch Doctors have a lot going for them, too.

---

Wasn't Solo inferno diablo first downed by some random guy in europe?

Granted, he wasn't playing 10 hours a week, but he didn't exactly have a legion of people following him.

We're talking about hardcore, Trevan.

Melee is perfectly viable, in Act 3, 4, 5 or 6. As long as you like farming the AH. If you play pure or at the very least rarely look at the AH, you will not go past Act1. Period. Well, I am speaking mostly on behalf of Barbs, but Monks seem to be in the same boat, although my view on them is based 100% on reading the forums and playing a few public games with them, with no high lvl personal experience.

[MongoJerry]

Melee is perfectly viable, in Act 3, 4, 5 or 6. As long as you like farming the AH. If you play pure or at the very least rarely look at the AH, you will not go past Act1. Period. Well, I am speaking mostly on behalf of Barbs, but Monks seem to be in the same boat, although my view on them is based 100% on reading the forums and playing a few public games with them, with no high lvl personal experience.

That barb that killed Belial didn't get his gear by shopping on the AH, because the hardcore AH at the time didn't have the kind of gear he needed. So, he and some friends spent several days goblin farming in Act 1 and got they gear they all needed to proceed. Nothing is stopping you from doing the same. If you find that boring (and I would), then you can farm other parts of Act I and get the gear you want and have the experience of actually fighting things and having neph stacks. But the fact is that you can get the items you need to proceed, if you choose to take the time to do it.

If you choose to not use the AH, and this is entirely your choice mind you, it means you need to take more time farming up the gear you need. This is fine. It just means it'll take you several weeks longer to beat the game than people who short circuit the process and use the AH. Frankly, I think it would be more fun to find items yourself than to use the AH, but that's an entirely personal decision.

And we already know that things are going to get easier when 1.0.3 comes along, so all of this is really a moot point. Higher level gear will start dropping in Act 1 and the mobs are going to be easier. I expect everyone in Inferno now will be farming Act IV Inferno within a week of 1.0.3's release.

[Roland]

Beaten to the punch in SC != beaten to the punch in HC. Totally different animals. In fact, the "tactics" (including intentional suicide) of the SC team would have gone poorly in HC for hopefully obvious reasons.

The person i'm referring to was solo and did not intentionally suicide.

This is my last post on the subject, since the reason behind the comment is being lost.

If you'd link us to some video, post, anything describing who this person is maybe we'd have a clue. Your point is not lost, it's just completely without reference for lack of your own admission. Was it a Demon Hunter? If so, I'd be willing to bet it was Athene, and he is hardly your average Joe. He does, in fact, have legions of fans giving him tons upon tons of gold, loot, etc. Hardly a noteworthy accomplishment. Besides, if it was a Wizard for example he could have been using exploits at the time to solo Diablo with very sub-par gear (Critical Mass? Pre-nerf Energy Armor?)

You can state whatever you like, but if you want to be taken seriously shows us some evidence. Otherwise it's just so much noise.

[Concillian]

Melee is perfectly viable, in Act 3, 4, 5 or 6. As long as you like farming the AH. If you play pure or at the very least rarely look at the AH, you will not go past Act1. Period. Well, I am speaking mostly on behalf of Barbs, but Monks seem to be in the same boat, although my view on them is based 100% on reading the forums and playing a few public games with them, with no high lvl personal experience.

Monks are even more gear dependent than barbs due to having absolute heals rather than % based heals, they need even more mitigation + life on hit / leech than barbs do so they can make use of their heals. Barbs have a little more flexibility since their heals scale better with their gearing. Monks do have the 'one with everything' passive to offer a little easier going on the initial gearing, but it doesn't help a ton on Act III / IV gearing from what I understand.

All classes require gear. All classes need to farm. The choice is to farm the AH or to farm the game (like the gobo farming).

However, I guess I just don't understand the issues you have. When you look at Diablo II and compare it to Diablo III... outside of some mechanics differences (armor being mitigation rather than what is effectively dodge, for example,) if you remove inferno difficulty from Diablo III, it's pretty close to the same game design.

By that, I mean that there is minimal farming NECESSARY to complete Act IV hell DII or DIII, and if you look at high end gearing obtained in that act compared to the monsters in that act, both games have players similarly OP compared to the monsters.

Adding inferno is is just that, adding in.

Plenty of people grinded the shit out of Diablo / Baal after they beat Diablo II / LOD. Even when they could RUN all the way there and kill with little to no concern of defense or death. Some did this for weeks, some months, and some even years.

Okay, so you can still do this in Diablo III if that's your thing, you just aren't doing it at the "end of the game". Instead, this kind of thing becomes necessary for the inferno difficulty level.... okay, sure, but umptweeen thousand people did just that in Diablo II... so what's the issue? The issue seems to be that someone else is doing the same thing at a higher difficulty level and people who aren't at that difficulty level don't feel special enough for the simple reason that someone else is doing it, so they should be able to also. At least, that's what it seems like to me.

This is what I don't understand.
I can't help but wonder how many of the people complaining about the grinds would be grinding the shit out of Act IV hell if Diablo III shipped without inferno.
If it's just a matter of the psychology involved with the placement of the grind within the game. When it's at "the end" and it takes you from OP to furiously OP is it somehow more fun than when it's more a part of the game as a way to "finish" the game (even though you've already finished the game 3 times by the time you get to inferno and you've finished the "Diablo II difficulty" with Act IV hell.)

I also wonder if they should create a 3rd "core" of the game. Hardcore, Softcore and nostalgia-core. Nostalgia-core would remove all the inferno ilvl items except the legendaries, sets, and patterns, which would end up a low % drop from Diablo, and only Diablo. Nostalgia-core would, of course, have no inferno difficutly level.

Just my ramblings, choose to ignore if you wish.

[MMAgCh]

All classes require gear. All classes need to farm. The choice is to farm the AH or to farm the game (like the gobo farming).

...

Plenty of people grinded the shit out of Diablo / Baal after they beat Diablo II / LOD. Even when they could RUN all the way there and kill with little to no concern of defense or death. Some did this for weeks, some months, and some even years.

Okay, so you can still do this in Diablo III if that's your thing, you just aren't doing it at the "end of the game". Instead, this kind of thing becomes necessary for the inferno difficulty level.... okay, sure, but umptweeen thousand people did just that in Diablo II... so what's the issue?

It's kind of OT-ish, but here's my response anyway!

The difference, in my mind, is that the results of item runs in D2 were more fun and varied than anything D3 has to offer. With set/legendary items being rarer than rare (and, for the most part, something to get excited over purely in a "hey, this might be worth a reasonable amount of gold on the AH" sense), you're left with only blues and yellows. These really are nothing more than utterly soulless and virtually indistinguishable affix containers for whose acquisition I, at any rate, find it just about impossible to muster any kind of enthusiasm – a bland mess of bonuses to attributes and resistances whose impact on my character's performance is so absolute, and strangely sterile in a way, that all but the godliest of upgrades will be met with a matter-of-factly "uh huh" and nothing more. In D3, items are far more important than they ever were in either of its predecessors, but at the same time this has rendered them transitory and their acquisition curiously unalluring, as far as I am concerned.

Diablo 2 may not have featured an overall greater amount of usable loot (though I'd disagree on that count as well), but farming Mephisto, say, or Pindleskin, still was far more engrossing simply because there were outcomes other than "bunch of crappy blues", "bunch of crappy blues and yellows", and "bunch of crappy blues and one yellow that's a little better than what I'm using", even if those additional outcomes were just as superficial and of equally little benefit for the most part. In D3, though? Once in a great while, your farming efforts will pay off (increasingly more rarely so as you near the threshold of Inferno-level gear), but other than that all you're finding is gold, either directly or through vendor trash, to be blown on the AH. I can see how some people might enjoy that kind of thing (I always liked the market/escrow/contracts aspect of EVE Online), but I can just as easily see how people would not enjoy it, because it isn't generally the reason you play a loot-based hack'n'slash game like Diablo.

(And if you find my line of argument to be without merit, consider Blizzard's reasoning for retaining the functionally superfluous act of IDing rares/sets/legendaries in the first place. It's clear the greater idea behind it wasn't entirely foreign to them; they just didn't expand on it nearly enough for my tastes.)

[kandrathe]

Diablo 2 may not have featured an overall greater amount of usable loot (though I'd disagree on that count as well), but farming Mephisto, say, or Pindleskin, still was far more engrossing simply because there were outcomes other than "bunch of crappy blues", "bunch of crappy blues and yellows", and "bunch of crappy blues and one yellow that's a little better than what I'm using", even if those additional outcomes were just as superficial and of equally little benefit for the most part. In D3, though? Once in a great while, your farming efforts will pay off (increasingly more rarely so as you near the threshold of Inferno-level gear), but other than that all you're finding is gold, either directly or through vendor trash, to be blown on the AH. I can see how some people might enjoy that kind of thing (I always liked the market/escrow/contracts aspect of EVE Online), but I can just as easily see how people would not enjoy it, because it isn't generally the reason you play a loot-based hack'n'slash game like Diablo.

Farming in D2 was an example of how that game was broken, especially Mephisto and Pindleskin. It was so easy, a Bot could do it. Hence, the Stone of Jordan became THE currency.

[Elric of Grans]

I thought the Stone of Jordan became the currency BEFORE LoD, because it was so heavily duped. I could be remembering wrong.

[MMAgCh]

Whether bosses were (too) easily run or not has, in any case, no bearing whatsoever on my point.

[kandrathe]

Whether bosses were (too) easily run or not has, in any case, no bearing whatsoever on my point.

Oh, I know. But, the ease in which D2 delivered "teh awesome lewt" was a detractor, not a feature. The game became entirely dominated by certain supposedly super rare items, that were not so rare because people figured out how to cheat the game (bots, dupes, whatever).

If the game does not stand on the combat, and you must have the feeder bar dump out a monty haul of fatz lewtz in order for it to be fun, then it maybe is not the right game. I'd rather not play "Diablo III - slot machine version".

[Mavfin]

It seems like the people who most enjoyed the endless Pindle/Baal runs, versus building characters and actually playing the game, are the ones most dissatisfied with D3.

I never cared for the guides that had predetermined very rare gear for the end, even before you created the character. Most of that gear was stuff you had to trade for, and most of it was widely duped. I didn't go for that, either. I leveled toons through Hell Baal, didn't skip the necro in Act 5, actually killed the conclave or whatever it was in Act 3, and all that. D3's set up more to support the full-clear style of play, rather than endless X run, it seems to me, so people who like that better...like D3 better.

As far as me and the endless X run? I don't even like dailies in WoW for very long, and only do them more than once or twice for a specific purpose, if the end reward is worth it.

Yes, some things need tweaking, but, that will come. If you want the style where it's all about endless 'boss that drops fat lewt' runs, then maybe D3 isn't for you. D2 is still there, after all.

[FireIceTalon]

I think MMagCH's point is that the loot reward is far too small for the difficulty of the game - at least in Inferno. If that is indeed his point, I would have to agree, although come 1.03 this issue is supposedly going to be rectified somewhat. Guess only time will tell. Now, in D1 you could farm normal Laz/16 runs for hours a day and you would probably find something pretty decent, and if you were a nut job like I was (I did these runs for YEARS, and I made all 3 of my mains of each class 99% perfect), you could have PILES of legit/non-duped Obsidian/Dragon Zodiac jewelry, or Awesome Stars full plates. For me, it got to the point where I wasn't even that excited when I found one unless it had uber stats, and toward the end, even those meant little to me, and I even gave one or two away. Granted, this is super easy since difficulty doesn't matter for farming on D1, but in D3's case, farming Inferno, whether you want to get gear directly or try and farm gold to use for the AH, is very tedious and un-fun. There has to be a happy medium of some sort - hopefully 1.03 will fix this issue. Gear is ever more important in D3 because of Inferno, but for me personally, the importance of it would stay the same even if you removed Infero because I am a huge PvP nut - where having the best possible gear is extremely important. And with PvP coming within the next year, I want at least one near perfect char that I can play high-end PvP with by the time it is implemented.