The Diablo Formula and how Diablo 3 falls short
#1
I've been thinking quite a bit about what makes Diablo 3 is such a poor game, especially compared to the previous Diablo games. After all, you can't fix a problem until you've identified it.

The Diablo Formula is what defines a Diablo game. It is the format created by Diablo and followed by Diablo 2 that resulted in those games having such longevity. It is the formula that Diablo 3 falls short of, causing players to ask "now what?" within a month of release. I will explain this formula and how Diablo 3 fails in every aspect of it.

It comes down to three factors (in order of importance).

1) Gameplay that is fun and maintains interest
2) Highly replayable through randomized content
3) Rewarding item system that causes the feeling of anticipation

Gameplay that is fun

First and foremost, a game must be fun. A player doesn't need any other motivation to play a game other than to have fun - period. Players don't question what there is to keep them playing a game until they stop having fun. At that point, it doesn't matter what there is to do; the moment the motivation to play the game stops being to have fun, it becomes a chore. Chores are tedious; you can only play so long before it gets too boring.

A large factor in how fun the game is how well it maintains the player's interest. That is primarily accomplished in two ways: depth of gameplay and breadth of gameplay.

1) Depth of gameplay

Diablo 1 is an example of gameplay with a lot of depth, but very little breadth. There was really only one thing to do in the game - Hell/hell runs. There was a lot of of depth to them, however. The player had to learn about many aspects of the game to be effective: item affixes, spells, enemy stats, and many different tactics to use against all sorts of different enemies and combinations thereof. The skill differential between a new and seasoned player was very large. A new player with the best gear in the game would get absolutely destroyed in hell/hell while a good player could clear it with relative ease.

2) Breadth of gameplay

Let's be honest, most of Diablo 2's gameplay was pretty simple - most engagements didn't require a lot of tactics, just spamming a primary attack. What it lacked in depth, however, it made up for in breadth. There was just tons of stuff to do in the game. When PvE got boring (which happened relatively quickly), you could do Baal runs for exp. When that got boring, you could do Meph runs with MF. When that got boring, you could do trav runs, pindle runs, countess runs, key runs, cow runs, try a new build, or even just chat on b.net. The point is, whenever the game got boring, there was always something else to do to have fun.

High Replayability

Randomized content allows Diablo to be highly replayable. It is tied very closely to keeping the game fun by maintaining the player's interest. What you must understand about Diablo is that the game's content is the end-game content. The game is designed for players to play the same thing over and over and over again. You see, most games are just meant to be played through once - that means that they don't have an end-game. Think games like Zelda, Super Mario Bros, etc. - even MMO's which rely on continually adding content as opposed to playing the same content multiple times.

Therefore, in order to prevent a Diablo game from becoming repetitive too quickly, everything about it is randomized. Maps, quests, events, enemies, the combinations in which enemies appear, and items are all randomly generated. It's all designed to keep players from getting bored from playing the a fun game over and over again. Case in point: the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remains a fun game to this day, but how many times could you play through it before it gets stale?

Rewarding Item System

This is the slot machine effect that really differentiates a Diablo game. Many games are both fun and highly replayable, but only a Diablo game has the constant feeling of anticipation for reward in addition to being inherently fun in the first place. The key is that the reward must be, well... rewarding. Diablo 1 and 2 pulled this off extremely well.

Drops in these games were exciting even if they weren't upgrades to your gear. In Diablo 1, every single ring/amulet drop was exciting. In Diablo 2, it was always exciting to find a unique such as a shako even if you really didn't have use for it. It was still fun to find somewhat decent gear even if it wasn't the best. Of course, when an item was an upgrade to your gear, it felt just that much better.

The bottom line is that the player was rewarded frequently and consistently while playing the game, regardless of whether or not the drops are upgrades to their gear. That's important because the longer a player plays, the less often they will find upgrades (as expected).

How Diablo 3 fails in every aspect of this formula

1) The gameplay isn't very fun

The fact is that if the game were fun, players would enjoy playing it regardless of what items they found. Instead, the gameplay stops being fun relatively quickly because it has neither depth nor breadth. There is very little to maintain the player's interest. It quickly devolves into an item/gold grind which is a chore, which can only keeps players going for so long.

The gameplay has no depth. It revolves around encounters with elite enemies with very cheesy mechanics. There's no strategy involved in engaging these packs. In other words, a player's skill factors very little into whether or not a player can overcome them. Being successful just comes down to two things:

1) Having good enough gear (the "gear check")
2) Being lucky with affix spawns

Honestly, a new player will be just as effective as a seasoned player so long as they have some of the best gear in the game. If your items aren't good enough, you'll just keep getting one-shot and cheesed. Once they are, this game takes no skill. Contrast that to Diablo 1 where new players would get owned in hell/hell even with the best, hacked items in the game.

Furthermore, the game has no breadth. The gameplay revolves around killing elites for NV stacks and then killing bosses... and that's pretty much it. When you get bored of that, there's nothing else to do except maybe play the AH a bit (which is pointless). Inferno revolves around farming elites in the same area of the game over and over. If you want to get to Act 3, you have to farm Act 2. When you get bored of that, you can't go farm somewhere else - you're just stuck. Contrast that to Diablo 2 where you could do any one of a dozen different kinds of runs.

2) Diablo 3 is the epitome of repetitiveness

Players are forced to replay the same exact, scripted quests with the same dialog every single time. These quests are perfectly linear; players are on one quest at a time and one quest begins as soon as the previous quest ends. They must play through the same static maps that make up 90% of the game. These maps always have the same enemy types. They must fight the same scripted boss fights. That makes the game bet boring very quickly regardless of how fun it is to play or not.

3) Diablo 3's item system is unrewarding

The first problem is the AH because it's the most reliable method of obtaining upgrades to your gear - it's also the least satisfying. It doesn't produce the slot machine effect. There's no anticipation you get with drops, there's just short-term excitement that comes with buying something new. That a one-time rush that wears off quickly.

The problem with the drop system in Diablo 3 (with regard to rewards) is that the player is only feels rewarded when they find an upgrade. For whatever reason (such as the item system is just flat out boring) there's nothing exciting about finding gear that isn't better than what the player has already found. Frankly, even upgrades to their current gear are kind of boring, i.e. upgrading to a 1100 DPS weapon from a 1000 DPS weapon.

Unlike the previous games that consistently rewarded players with fun drops, players in Diablo 3 are only rewarded when drops are upgrades. That means that as players acquire better gear, there's a longer and longer amount of time before they are rewarded. Having such a long time between rewards greatly diminishes the feeling of anticipation for drops.

This is the reason people are complaining about the low drop rate/quality of drops in Diablo 3. The core problem isn't that they aren't finding better items - after all, that's also how it worked in Diablo 1 and Diablo 2. The core problem is that there is nothing exciting about the drops they find in the meantime.

Conclusion

The Diablo Forumla is what has made this series so great. The gameplay is fun by having depth and/or breadth, the game content is highly randomized to prevent it from becoming stale too quickly, and the drop system frequently and consistently rewards the player.

Unfortunately, Diablo 3's gameplay has neither depth nor breadth, the game content is very repetitive, and the item system is unrewarding. Diablo 3 fails at everything that made the Diablo series awesome, making it a mediocre game and a terrible installment of the Diablo franchise. The gameplay quickly devolves into nothing more than a gold/item grind with a drop system that doesn't even reward players appropriately. The result? - players are quitting in droves.

I really don't think patches are going to salvage it, and I am certainly not going to spend another $60 for an expansion that attempts to reboot it (especially from the same design team).
--Lang

Diabolic Psyche - the site with Diablo on the Brain!
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#2
Well said. I wonder if anyone from Blizzard knows we exist, though? I know some of the Northers did. I'm half-tempted to C&P that over to their forum (C&P - I'm certainly not going to link them here. Heh. I remember the LoD fiasco.)
Finally satisfied that this, in fact, a game in the Diablo series.
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#3
Heya Eso, FIT here.

Sadly, I have to agree with your assessment almost entirely, although my feelings arent QUITE as harsh. Nevertheless, this game suffers from VERY deep flaws.

Normal-Hell is pretty fun actually, but Inferno is just complete trash. It is a total chore that punishes the gamer rather then challenges us to become better players as Hell difficulty did in prior games (in particular D1). What really annoys me though are the fan boys who were barely even born when the original Diablo came out, that love this game so much and tell critics like me "learn to play", when I would completely take them to school on D1 - a game which has MUCH more skill involved than D3 does and most likely ever will. Inferno is based entirely on how good your items are, and absolutely nothing else. If you gave any random person a char with decent defense stats and 100k DPS, they would faceroll Inferno np, regardless of their general skill as a gamer. And before anyone tries to argue "there is more to the game than Inferno", lets be real here.....the endgame has ALWAYS been the most important aspect and phase of a Diablo game, this isnt even up for debate. And D3, sadly, is very much lacking in this most critical element.

The cheesy mechanics of most monster traits need to go, as do the enrage timers, revive countdowns, cooldowns on potions, having cooldowns on more than half the skills, and the absurd repair costs. This game has been wow'i'fied, much to my (and many people's) disapproval. But I guess we have to face the facts: Blizz is a corporation whose bottomline is making profits - to the exclusion of everything else. Although they have always been this way, at least there was a time when they actually put emphasis and care into making quality games, but that time seems long past, and never to return. Which is really sad, because D3 DOES have the formula to be a great game - Blizz North practically handed the new Devs a masterpiece GIFT WRAPPED for them, and they still managed to eff it up. Sad.

The lack of randomness in environments is a huge flaw as well. In D1, it was fun going into hell and discovering what demons awaited you on level 13 for example. You could roll Balrogs and Witches, or Knights and Vipers, or a number of other monster combinations. On D3, when you get to a new Act, you know what monsters will show up for the most part....there are a few areas with some small variation but not much. And don't get me started on the items and the AH.......just thinking about it makes me throw up in my mouth a little bit.

I just hit 50 on my WD tonight. IN the coming days when I 60 him, I will have done so on all 5 classes. I will finish Inferno with my Wiz, and after that, I think I am done. My hope is PvP will be something worthwhile to hold my interest, but considering they cant even balance PvM correctly, I have my doubts.
https://www.youtube.com/user/FireIceTalon


"Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class, made into law for all, a will whose essential character and direction are determined by the economic conditions of the existence of your class." - Marx (addressing the bourgeois)
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#4
...While Red goes too far in the other direction. CDs on potions was a wonderful idea and I'm glad to see that people can't be effectively invulnerable so long as they can keep pushing one button. I mean let's be serious here, the numbers of potions we had to cart into the Ancients fight sometimes just to eke through...but then the Ancients had to have the mechanics they did to be a true challenge in D2. Note those mechanics pretty much got transferred to every fight here - no mid-combat TPs, and a strict limit on how much healing you have available (in D2, it was the amount you could go through and pick up off the ground before the game auto-erased them.)

Similarly, CDs on skills allowed them to make a lot of skills they couldn't have otherwise. Mirror Image, Stomp, Fetish Army, stuff like Diamond Skin and Frost Nova that don't even have a resource cost...without CDs, these skills would have to be drastically altered or not exist at all.

So far as revive countdowns and repair costs...well, frankly, stop dying so much. If it had been me, and I were forced to this 60 level cap (not a decision I would have made), I'd have flat out stuck with XP loss on death - a full level after L50. The odd level loss would keep XP useful since you'd only ever permanently be at 60 if you didn't die. I guarantee we wouldn't have seen necrozerging if it dropped you down to L50. People would be playing much more carefully.

But yes, enrage timers and invulnerable minions can go die in a hole and horde/illusionist should not spawn with certain combos.
Finally satisfied that this, in fact, a game in the Diablo series.
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#5
Indeed, if I was in control, this game would be nerfed to the ground. But I would add in challenges that actually require skill and tactical play instead of relying on a stupid difficult, near-impossible system that relies on artificial mechanics and boring items. The challenge would be there, but without the frustration and punishment that the current game has.

The potions suck anyways, most of them dont even give you back 1/3 of your life, so why put a CD on them?

I can see CD's on extremely powerful skills like WoTB, Archon, Fetish Army, or Seven Sided Strike.....but CD's on important defensive skills (see Teleport, DS,) is just lame and un-fun.

I don't see the big deal with death zerging either. Lame as it may be, if someone paid their hard-earned money for a game, they can play how THEY like so long as they don't cheat - Blizz has absolutely zero right to force anyone to play a certain way. If they don't want people death zerging, then take out the bullshit cheesy mechanics that make death in Inferno a certainty. Give the players control of their chars back - the problem isn't the players the problem is the GAME ITSELF - blaming the players is a copout. Really, things like jailer, waller, frozen bombs, and vortex really are cheap and have no place in this game (especially since the monsters have no CD's and can chain cast them) - neither does invulnerable minions, reflects damage, or shielding. Not to mention most elites have an asinine amount of health. The punishment for dying is already there - loss of time and having to clear an area to progress that a superior geared char would clear much easier. Inferno's mechanics are designed in a way that you WILL die - no matter how skilled you are or how careful you play. There is no skill involved in Inferno, it is all based on your items and getting "easy" rolls on monster traits. Even if there was skill, I still don't think the absurd repair costs would be justified, but they sure as hell aren't now. They discourage progression and it is just another mechanic that punishes the player much more than they should be. Why should I have to go back to Act 1 to farm gold for repairs because I died a few times in Act 3? That is ridiculous.

The most important thing, as Eso mentioned, is that a game is fun, and D3's endgame comes up way short there for the majority, and it is mostly for the reasons I mentioned above.
https://www.youtube.com/user/FireIceTalon


"Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class, made into law for all, a will whose essential character and direction are determined by the economic conditions of the existence of your class." - Marx (addressing the bourgeois)
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#6
(07-09-2012, 04:37 AM)the Langolier Wrote: Let's be honest, most of Diablo 2's gameplay was pretty simple - most engagements didn't require a lot of tactics, just spamming a primary attack. What it lacked in depth, however, it made up for in breadth. There was just tons of stuff to do in the game. When PvE got boring (which happened relatively quickly), you could do Baal runs for exp. When that got boring, you could do Meph runs with MF. When that got boring, you could do trav runs, pindle runs, countess runs, key runs, cow runs, try a new build, or even just chat on b.net. The point is, whenever the game got boring, there was always something else to do to have fun.

Let's examine this carefully. When D2 was first released, there was only one thing to do when once you finished hell difficulty. If you were a sorceress, necromancer, amazon, or (after the hammerdin exploit was discovered) paladin, you cleared the Cathedral and killed Diablo over and over again -- preferably in 8 player games where the other 7 people were playing in a different act than you. If you were a Barbarian, you were left out in the cold and had to settle for whittling Izzy down repeatedly. Loot was inconsequential. Uniques were based off normal difficulty items that could be gambled quickly, and it wouldn't take long to get your couple other items that would let you get through the Cathedral. The most difficult part of the runs were the Oblivion Knights and the occational MSLE boss, so you needed enough resistance to deal with those. Otherwise, Diablo himself was a piece of cake (at least for a sorceress, who could kill him in about 3 seconds).

But you're not talking about D2 when it was first released. You're talking about LOD. Right, then what you did then was clear the first area of Act V repeatedly in 8-player games, get to level 99 in one day as well as obtain all of the best items in the game without being in any danger, because most of the mobs were too busy fighting NPC's.

But you're not talking about LOD when it was first released. You're talking about after it was patched to make those runs less rewarding. Fine. Then, you ran Pindle, a pittifully easy boss right by a waypoint that dropped most of the best items in the game. He was so easy that botters wrote programs to run him all day long and flooded the trade channels and 3rd party RMAH sites with their ill gotten gains.

But you're not talking about *those* Pindle runs, are you? You're talking about after Blizzard finally fixed that. At this point, my memory gets fuzzy. The game either turned into cow level clears over and over or Baal runs. Cow level clears were tedious in that it was just a big wasteland of the same mob over and over. Once you killed the first group of cows, you were home free. Let's just skip to Baal runs, which had some fun features to them. Now, you zoned in with a pug group doing Baal runs. Forget randomness of maps, because there was always at least someone running Maphack who ran/teleport past every mob on the first couple of levels and threw up a town portal to the bottom level after a few seconds. Then, you cleared the bottom level, which could be somewhat fun, if you got a boss pack with a bad combination of immunities. Then, you killed Baal, his loot dropped and anything valuable went to whoever had the best connection and botting pick-up program. That was pretty much all you could do in the game to get the best items.

But you weren't talking about *that* LOD game. No, it sounds like what you were talking about was the D2/LOD starting with the 1.10 patch -- which was released a full three years after D2 was released. It was only then that you started to have a diversity of areas where you could farm for interesting items. And it was only then that you started getting interesting runewords, sets and uniques with powers that could completely alter the way you played your character.


Alright, I'll let you off the hook now, and I'll tell you now what I think really is the problem. It's not the difficulty of Inferno (thank God for that, I say), elite modifiers (take out Invulnerable Minions and we're good), or gameplay (which is excellent imho -- the player skill combinations and mob ai are light-years ahead of D2). It's the decision to have an easily obtainable level cap. Looking back on it, I remember why I played classic D2 so obsessively. It wasn't the item hunt. I doubt I got an upgrade in the four months before the release of LOD. But, every night I could see that little exp bar slide just a little further along.

After a few months of tinkering around with various classes, I got hooked on Cathedral runs with my hardcore sorceress and ran them night after night. It was fun to be able to tell people I had a level 93ish (?) hardcore sorceress, which had some meaning back then. I remember watching my sorceress slowly climb the USWest hardcore ladder. I forgot how high she got -- in the 40's by the end, I think -- but it was just fun watching her go up and seeing if someone ahead of me died. With the current model, though, I'm not sure if I'll ever get that. What can a person say now? "My hardcore Wizard has 30% crit!" It doesn't have that cache.

That's the piece that I don't know how to fix. The other stuff you mentioned is easily fixable. Blizzard has already said that they're working on genuinely legendary items (making me scared that they'll make them *too* legendary), and I'm sure runewords and jewels will come down the pipeline over time. It'll be easy to patch and tweak things here and there to vary the favorite item farming locations, modify boss encounters and rewards to make them more interesting, or even add levels here and there. But the one piece that I just don't know how to replicate under the current model is the excitement of leveling one's character gradually and steadily over time.
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#7
(07-09-2012, 04:37 AM)the Langolier Wrote: Honestly, a new player will be just as effective as a seasoned player so long as they have some of the best gear in the game. If your items aren't good enough, you'll just keep getting one-shot and cheesed. Once they are, this game takes no skill. Contrast that to Diablo 1 where new players would get owned in hell/hell even with the best, hacked items in the game.

In Inferno you can easily spend a long time in a gulf where elite stuff doesn't one shot you and yet you can't afford to stand a second in the various fires either. There's a number of BS combos that are unfair to many characters (hello vortex + arcane), but there's even more that can be beaten with patience and good timing. Waller champs are one of my favorite combos as a melee toon because they make maze chunks to navigate without pinning you down too often, particularly when paired with the various fire skills. Sussing out the real mobs when you split an illusion monster and navigating the maze of monsters to not get trapped. Arcane when not matched up with some BS control is also great, you get to dance around the foes like clockwork while whittling them down. All the while you need to be planning how to use your defensive cooldowns to survive an encounter's relatively unique affix combos, rather than just guzzling potions and avoiding stunlock.

From a D1 perspective I think some people's idea of "skill" means learning a rote strategy and executing it flawlessly over and over on predictable enemies. Set yourself up in a door or corner and wait to swing when mobs step on a tile. Teleport on a tile adjacent to the one a succubuss is walking to. Carry stone curse + golem for killing advocates. But throw in some randomly spawning desecrators or arcane beams and it's just "cheap bullshit" that you need items to solve rather than walking a few feet to the safe ground between whatever modifiers.

Quote:Inferno revolves around farming elites in the same area of the game over and over. If you want to get to Act 3, you have to farm Act 2. When you get bored of that, you can't go farm somewhere else - you're just stuck. Contrast that to Diablo 2 where you could do any one of a dozen different kinds of runs.

Everywhere in Inferno can drop max items now. I found a several million sword in act 1. In fact, some people are complaining that act 1 is too profitable given how fast it can be cleared, and there's no point in farming the later acts. Diversity *is* limited early on when you still can't kill wasps, but not in the long run. (Albeit, balance might be improved between areas, but Diablo games were generally not good on this point...)

Quote:Drops in these games were exciting even if they weren't upgrades to your gear. In Diablo 1, every single ring/amulet drop was exciting. In Diablo 2, it was always exciting to find a unique such as a shako even if you really didn't have use for it. It was still fun to find somewhat decent gear even if it wasn't the best. Of course, when an item was an upgrade to your gear, it felt just that much better.

In the case of D2 this reads like a coded way of saying "sets/uniques/runewords are better than random rares." I won't argue that preference but that's basically what it boils down to. And I do find rare amulet/ring drops exciting in D3 because they are even harder to find that D1 jewlery.
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#8
(07-09-2012, 09:29 AM)MongoJerry Wrote: Let's examine this carefully. When D2 was first released, there was only one thing to do when once you finished hell difficulty.
...
But you weren't talking about *that* LOD game. No, it sounds like what you were talking about was the D2/LOD starting with the 1.10 patch -- which was released a full three years after D2 was released. It was only then that you started to have a diversity of areas where you could farm for interesting items. And it was only then that you started getting interesting runewords, sets and uniques with powers that could completely alter the way you played your character.

That may all be true; my examples were more of a summation of popular activities over the course of the game. Honestly, I don't remember a whole lot about the early days of Diablo 2. I did start playing Diablo 2 on the release day and continued to play well through the release of LoD.

I had a lot of issues of the game and am generally highly critical of the it. I do remember resenting the game early on because it felt like it was only balanced through normal difficulty, evidenced by the unique items as you mentioned, as well as the highest skill tier only being level 30. As can be inferred by my post, I think the gameplay is shallow, generally has poor mechanics, and remains inferior to Diablo 1 to this day. Honestly, I hate almost everything about Diablo 2.

Regardless, I can tell you with certainly that something about the game held my interest for a good year and a half before it's many issues became too much for me and I quit. That's not a fluke. There was something fun about the gameplay; the monotonous level grind and impossible drop rates alone wouldn't be enough to keep me playing that long, that's for sure.

Diablo 3, in contrast, only managed to hold my interest for two weeks - as far as Act 2 Hell with my first character. It had already stopped being any fun. I had no desire to twink myself through the Auction House (cheesy way to progress that provides no satisfaction) because I knew I'd just find myself in the same situation somewhere in Inferno once I caught up to my gear.

Now, having submitting that the scope of Diablo 2 was very limited at release and it took a full three years to have the kind of varied gameplay I referenced - is that any excuse for the gameplay of Diablo 3 to be just as limited at release as Diablo 2 was at release? I'd argue not. The three years it took Diablo 2 to mature into what it is now puts us at 2004. Development for this version of Diablo 3 began in 2006. They had the resources of a mature Blizzard, 6 years of development time, and began development with 5 years' worth of experience as to how Diablo 2's gameplay evolved over time. I think that it is reasonable to expect that they could have created a game with gameplay that was at least equally varied, if not more so, than it's 10-year old predecessor.

Nevertheless, having very little breadth in gameplay isn't damning in itself. After all, Diablo 1's gameplay (primarily hell/hell runs) is just as limited as the day it was released, which is fine. The gameplay is deep enough that it remains interesting for a very long time. Therefore, it's not wholly problematic that there is so little to do in Diablo 3 even if it were excusable.

What is damning is that the gameplay is very shallow as well. The little bit of strategy involved in engaging enemies is pretty straight forward: Get CC'd -> use skill that breaks it. Low on health -> use heal or invulnerability skill. Overwhelmed -> use CC or escape ability. These are very basic concepts that are pretty obvious to players. There is no differentiating between skill levels with this kind of reactive strategy. For example, it's not like you would ever describe a player in Diablo 3 as being "really good at breaking CC".

"Oh man, this guy is really good at using revenge to recover his health when it's low"

"Wow, did you see that move?! She just got backed into a corner and used vault to get behind those guys!"

"I was fighting this elite mob when I got vortexed right into the middle of the pack so I popped serenity. Nailed it."

No, these are pretty obvious tactics that just require hitting a button at the right time. If it's not on cooldown, you win, if so, you probably lose.
--Lang

Diabolic Psyche - the site with Diablo on the Brain!
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#9
(07-09-2012, 10:32 AM)FoxBat Wrote: But throw in some randomly spawning desecrators or arcane beams and it's just "cheap bullshit" that you need items to solve rather than walking a few feet to the safe ground between whatever modifiers.

I'm not trying to say they aren't fun; it's only "cheap bullshit" if you aren't geared properly and they practically one-shot you.

There's probably around 100 different types of enemies in the game, each with interesting and carefully crafted mechanics that encourage players to adapt just as much as elite encounters. There's all kinds of different enemies - big hit enemies that "charge up" powerful attacks, swarming enemies that pin players down, ranged enemies with powerful projectiles that kite around, leapers that burrow and attack from all angles. They also spawn all over the screen in a dozen interesting ways, such as popping up from the ground, flying in from the ceiling, etc.

When a player is geared such that elite enemies are managable, however, all other content at that level is trivial. You trade the challenge that 100 different mechanics of normal enemies could provide for the half dozen mechanics that elite enemies do provide. That's not a fair trade IMO. Sure, a desecration appearing underneath your character forces you to move, but so does an enemy "charging up" a big hit... so does a Morlu caster calling down a meteor... so does a fallen lunatic charging you... and so on.

But no. I'll just tank it all because they are "trash" mobs - all I really concerned about are the two elite groups per area that might use arcane sentry or desecrate to really challenge me. (Unless they also have invulnerable minions, jailer+vortex or any number of cheesy combinations that will just outright kill me).

When you are geared at a level where normal enemies are challenging, the game is actually really fun. The different abilities of all the enemy types are really interesting, especially when you must engage a few different types at once. You have to pick targets intelligently, position yourself well, and most of the skills can really be useful. If that's the case however, elite enemies are just too powerful and aren't fun to enounter at all.
--Lang

Diabolic Psyche - the site with Diablo on the Brain!
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#10
(07-09-2012, 11:55 AM)the Langolier Wrote: When you are geared at a level where normal enemies are challenging, the game is actually really fun. The different abilities of all the enemy types are really interesting, especially when you must engage a few different types at once. You have to pick targets intelligently, position yourself well, and most of the skills can really be useful. If that's the case however, elite enemies are just too powerful and aren't fun to enounter at all.

I think this is your real problem and one that others have touched on. In D2 All mobs were trash mobs. Champions, uniques, everything was handled the same way, which was generally spam an AoE, and maybe use a single target skill. The only mobs that weren't were some of the bosses, which created a feeling of excitement for the bosses. D3 bosses are actually a bit more interesting but since they are easier than some of the trash stuff, even if they are harder than D2 bosses, it gives you dissonance.

Because of this gear didn't matter as much and the tons and tons and tons of crap that got left on the ground for the odd upgrade wasn't noticed as much and an upgrade became more noticeable and pushed the reward button. Since most mobs were easy and most gear didn't you could find cheesy ways to win encounters (suck a bunch of potions, tp out and back in, exploit bugs, over level it by a lot if you are playing some sort of variate, get better gear, or learn to play better).

In D1 most mobs in a level were of similar "power" but in general the same well executed tactics could be used to be beat them all. Activate and run to choke point, port and trap, potion suck, or get better gear so that hits did no damage or you could hit recovery lock everything, or knock it off the screen, or learn to play better, etc. Again bosses provided a different type of challenge, but again in reality were pretty limited and could be cheesed or what not when understood. But it made them feel a bit more special.

Again since the mobs were all pretty much dumb, and you could cheese chug potions, gear once again didn't matter so finding a piece that did matter was cool. Of course creating games over and over or zoning in and out of levels and spending what felt like 20 minutes to walk over to wirt was often the best way to farm for a piece of gear.

For me both D1 and D2 and D2/LoD tended to wear thin after beating Hell Diablo/Baal with a toon. Playing the other classes or other builds added value, and then of course multiplayer and leveling groups and self imposed rules were fun, but without multiplayer both games would have only lasted a few months. D2 without multiplayer would have only made it a few weeks for me because much of it felt tedious and the "oh cool" newness factor would have worn off. Even with multi I went back to warcraft 2 and starcraft before LoD came out. I just got tired of holding onto skill points while leveling to try out a new build and using cheesy methods to level quickly did nothing for me. I found the stat system to have no value and just be a source of "oh I was an idiot for putting points there because I didn't know better on my first play through".

D1 was such a unique experience that the uniqueness factor took a long time to wear off. But MOO II drew me away from it frequently. It was fun, but the replayability was mostly linked to multi player for me again.


So what did D3 do? They tried to improve on the bad aspects of both of the games and for many people (not me) they produced something where while the parts are generally better the sum is not. I saw tons of people rage quitting D2 when it first came out and only lasting a few weeks in it too. Though most of those were because it simply was not as unique as D1 was. Of course what is as unique as something that creates a new genre?

But in D3 getting rid of the tedious and generally pointless stat allocation is mostly met with good reviews. The skill system is generally viewed as better than D2 and offering more choices. What it doesn't have is forced replay if you wanted to try something else. This is good.

If you don't have uber gear (you don't use the AH and you don't have a fully leveled blacksmith) white labels mobs are much closer to D1 white label mobs than they were to D2 white label mobs. This is good when taken by itself. Champions and uniques are certainly more interesting and while there are some problems they aren't because of bugs like in D2, which was very frustrating. The most common complaints I hear about D3 special mobs is when you get a combo on a base mob type that effectively makes it feel like they have 5, 6, or even more affixes instead of just the 2 or 3 or 4 they are supposed to have.

I could touch on more points but I don't think I need to.

What happens when all this gets pulled together is that, as others have pointed out, the game feels spiky. For me this isn't a problem, in fact the variable challenge is part of what makes the game less boring for me than D1 and D2. Now factor in that in general the mobs have been made smarter, and more interesting, and a little harder to kill compared to D1 and D2 mobs and the removal of the cheesy potion spamming or same old same old environmental abuse and you are left with learn to play, out level it, or get better gear.

Out level it goes away as an option much sooner. Some of the mob combos end up feeling so cheesy that you can't always learn to play, but in general that isn't the case. Though again remember I'm talking about the balanced part of the game, not inferno which they are balancing after release. The people having problems prior to Inferno generally are because they have to learn to play. Your point about Hell/Hell in D1 is exactly what happens in D3. The difference is a lot of people didn't realize there WAS a Hell difficulty in single player D1 because you couldn't just select it. You had to make a multi game then go back to single player. So they had all the options outside of learn to play at their disposal.

So what D3 got wrong was making the game harder, and making the game spikier. They limited your options to gear and learn to play, and because of some current balance issues l2p can in fact go out the window. They also added a difficulty level that was designed to give you something to do with the gear you farmed. In D1 there wasn't anything to do with that after you beat the game. In D2 it could be used to help you get L99 faster if you wanted to do that.

I actually see more useful gear drop in D3 than in D1 or D2, but since the game is harder and you need gear you are thinking about gear and seeing something cool isn't as rewarding. As others have said most of the "cool gear" from D2 was from the runewords and uniques (in 1.10) that made the rest of the gear even that much more pointless.

So D3 became a better game for me, because they enhanced all the things that I valued from D1 and D2.

D3 became a worse game for a lot of other people because they liked the simpler games that D2 and D1 were. Things that forced replay on people (the skill system) are removed and that is viewed as bad by some because it covered up much of the boring.

I don't think any of the games were designed from the start to have infinite replay. Players created a lot of replay for them though out of many of the flaws the games had. If those flaws didn't bother you, you had replay, if they did bother you, you didn't. D3 tried to get rid of those and succeed in some cases and it killed the game for people that liked that stuff. Though D2 forced replay from the skill system. D1 had some replay from skills being drops and that making a character play different but it was designed to played through once.

D3 was going to do the D1 thing with runes dropping. It was going to give you that for the replay through the same areas by making the same class play differently each play through. But they scrapped that because people were complaining they wanted to be able to plan like they could in D2. So they took a game that was designed to only be played through to the end of Hell, like D1 kinda was, and then slapped the modified planned skill system from D2 on it, but without the forced replay of having to rebuild the toon. Then they slapped an untested difficulty on the end to try and give people something to do with the cool gear they were getting.

I think D3 would have been a better game with skill runes dropping and ending at kill Diablo in Hell. This is the game they designed, but they listened to people and tried to add other systems that don't quite do what they want them too. But I still like the game a lot for what it is, but it does eliminate all the options that let people play D1 and D2 for the games they weren't supposed to be. Blizzard though has always tried to quash those options via patches, in all their games. They just weren't always as successful in the past.

So I agree that D3 has problems, but I think your original post actually failed to hit on what they really are.
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#11
Totally disagree about D1 ending after killing Diablo on Hell mode. There was a MILLION other things to do after that. You could play Ironman, one of a thousand crazy variants, or PvP. PvP alone held on interest on D1 for a good 7+ years, and that in itself made me farm for the best possible gear even more so.

And unless some very serious changes are made to the endgame in D3 or PvP is very worthwhile(or both), I see no future for it....people are already quitting in droves. D1 and D2 have 4 stars on Amazon, D3 has TWO stars. Ouch. But Blizz hardly cares anyway, they have our money already. 60 bucks a pop x 7 million sold in the first two weeks, you do the math.
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"Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class, made into law for all, a will whose essential character and direction are determined by the economic conditions of the existence of your class." - Marx (addressing the bourgeois)
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#12
(07-09-2012, 06:41 PM)RedRadical Wrote: Totally disagree about D1 ending after killing Diablo on Hell mode. There was a MILLION other things to do after that. You could play Ironman, one of a thousand crazy variants, or PvP. PvP alone held on interest on D1 for a good 7+ years, and that in itself made me farm for the best possible gear even more so.

Plus, the obvious one. You could level up.
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#13
Yea, that too, even if the lack of leveling after Inferno is something I can live with despite the old system being better. Although leveling to 50 on D1 was sort of a pain in the ass because it probably took as long for one char as it does to lvl ALL 5 classes to 60 on D3, but you had co-op play to make it more interesting along the way. Co-op play though on D3 is even more tedious than playing solo, so there is little incentive to do it even if you could still level. Although you do have that rare occasion where you may need a team to get past a certain area or boss. I found Belial for example much easier to beat with my Wiz in a team, than I did solo. But this is an exception - for most non-boss areas or dealing with elite packs, solo is usually easier. It's kind of sad - because it should be the other way around: co-op play should be easier so that playing with others is more easily encouraged, even if Diablo is considered a single player game.
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"Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class, made into law for all, a will whose essential character and direction are determined by the economic conditions of the existence of your class." - Marx (addressing the bourgeois)
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#14
I do appreciate that elites do stand out in this game. But the mod combos are too hard to balance.

There is almost no error in some of these. Crap like vortex, arcane, desecrator will crap on you regardless of how good you are, and they spam their cc effects. Well, some would say spam invincibility/or stay away if you are ranged. But that's the problem. You can't expect perfect play in an imperfect environment. Latency's an inevitable part of the game, and well... shit happens.

Also, traps seem to do ridiclous amounts of damage disproportional to the damage of the act they're in, especially fire grates. There is no reason why I should get 2 shotted by these things if I have good gear. Sure, I should be punished for not being careful, but D3 makes mistakes excessively punitive, and in laggy enviorment. Pretty much every thing that does tick damage is excessive, and once again shows it wasn't planned out properly.

Champions IMO should just be enhanced versions of trash mobs like they were in D2 and should not have the same amount of affixes as the elite ones. They can get stronger stats as compensation, but it's pretty ridiculous to see like 5 of them with some stupid combinations of mods. Elite monsters are different, and unique monsters should be stronger too.

The good classic platformers would teach you about its mechanics through its stage and enemy design. It tended to be gradual and very drawing to the eye. Diablo 3 teaches you, by killing you with it. And the teacher is incompetent because they don't know anything, and once again it shows.

Ultimately, Blizzard's fatal flaw was thinking that we'd play like good children and stick to hell and have patience for inferno. Sadly, that kind of reasoning was only a dream. The masses will always want to get to the endgame and hell didn't qualify. The plot, while serviceable, wore thin the third time around, there's a level cap, and any gear worth caring about isn't in hell. If so many years of Diablo 2 didn't teach us that, well...

And of course, it also falls short in the community sense, with that POS known as Battle.net 2.0. Just like Sc2, it gives off a very strong ghost town feel. Well, I guess they kept the bot spammers in channel for nostalgia.
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#15
(07-09-2012, 11:41 PM)Archon_Wing Wrote: There is almost no error in some of these. Crap like vortex, arcane, desecrator will crap on you regardless of how good you are, and they spam their cc effects. Well, some would say spam invincibility/or stay away if you are ranged. But that's the problem. You can't expect perfect play in an imperfect environment. Latency's an inevitable part of the game, and well... shit happens.

Also, traps seem to do ridiclous amounts of damage disproportional to the damage of the act they're in, especially fire grates. There is no reason why I should get 2 shotted by these things if I have good gear.

That's because those attacks are currently bugged, or your resistances are.
There is a part of the damage mitigation chain that isn't (fully) working anymore since the hotfix on 29th June, and many of these damage sources do significantly more damage than they did prior to this.

There was a person on the official forums who happened to keep track of how much damage he was taking from the flying creatures in A3 that spit fire (to compare the effectiveness of some equipment), and he mentioned that they sometimes did up to six times as much damage since the hotfix, while strangely, sometimes they did "normal" damage (in line with pre-hotfix) as well.
There are other issues with elites using their abilities more often as well, with somewhat humorous screenshots depicting an Arcane Enchanted elite pack that has over 20 sentries up at the same time that keep popping up from different people.

It's been 2 weeks now, and not even a response from a Blizz rep about any of these current issues even with the exposure they get on their forums, so seems like we have to wait for 1.04, as the upcoming 1.03b patch seems kind of thin.
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#16
(07-10-2012, 01:04 PM)Kurosu Wrote:
(07-09-2012, 11:41 PM)Archon_Wing Wrote: There is almost no error in some of these. Crap like vortex, arcane, desecrator will crap on you regardless of how good you are, and they spam their cc effects. Well, some would say spam invincibility/or stay away if you are ranged. But that's the problem. You can't expect perfect play in an imperfect environment. Latency's an inevitable part of the game, and well... shit happens.

Also, traps seem to do ridiclous amounts of damage disproportional to the damage of the act they're in, especially fire grates. There is no reason why I should get 2 shotted by these things if I have good gear.

That's because those attacks are currently bugged, or your resistances are.
There is a part of the damage mitigation chain that isn't (fully) working anymore since the hotfix on 29th June, and many of these damage sources do significantly more damage than they did prior to this.

There was a person on the official forums who happened to keep track of how much damage he was taking from the flying creatures in A3 that spit fire (to compare the effectiveness of some equipment), and he mentioned that they sometimes did up to six times as much damage since the hotfix, while strangely, sometimes they did "normal" damage (in line with pre-hotfix) as well.
There are other issues with elites using their abilities more often as well, with somewhat humorous screenshots depicting an Arcane Enchanted elite pack that has over 20 sentries up at the same time that keep popping up from different people.

It's been 2 weeks now, and not even a response from a Blizz rep about any of these current issues even with the exposure they get on their forums, so seems like we have to wait for 1.04, as the upcoming 1.03b patch seems kind of thin.

Demonic Hell Flyers definitely have bugged damage. My Wiz with 750+ fire resists and near 45k hp was almost dead just from 2 fireballs from these things. When I was doing the signal fires quest it was a complete nightmare to deal with them, compared to the Fallens and the Demon Troopers.
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"Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class, made into law for all, a will whose essential character and direction are determined by the economic conditions of the existence of your class." - Marx (addressing the bourgeois)
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#17
(07-09-2012, 06:41 PM)RedRadical Wrote: Totally disagree about D1 ending after killing Diablo on Hell mode. There was a MILLION other things to do after that. You could play Ironman, one of a thousand crazy variants, or PvP. PvP alone held on interest on D1 for a good 7+ years, and that in itself made me farm for the best possible gear even more so.

For me, D1 ended after killing Diablo in normal. Because I was playing off-line single-player, not part of any on-line game communities, and never found out until much later that there were higher difficulties I could have gone on to. Big fail on Blizzard's part there.

D2 I played a lot, but I never played any "end-game". I played one-pass full-clear from walking out of the rogue camp in normal to killing Diablo (or later Baal) at the end of hell, and then that character was done and I never played it again. PvP, level grind, boss-of-the-week-runs, item trading -- none of those appealed to me at all.

And then we have D3. Through to the end of hell mode I can play D3 in exactly the same way that I played D2. The gameplay of D3 is at least as much fun as D2 (which is a subjective opinion, but I find it so). And then there is inferno, which gives me a reason to carry on playing a character after they would have been finished in D2. Inferno gives me an end-game, for the first time ever in a Diablo game, and even if the balance is completely out-of-whack and I never manage to complete it on any characters, I still see it as pure bonus, an optional extra that I can play for as long as I find it fun.

Maybe I am the person that Blizzard was thinking of when they designed D3 Smile
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#18
(07-11-2012, 05:28 PM)Jaffa Tamarin Wrote: For me, D1 ended after killing Diablo in normal. Because I was playing off-line single-player, not part of any on-line game communities, and never found out until much later that there were higher difficulties I could have gone on to. Big fail on Blizzard's part there.

But really, that was the game. The rest was for goofing around.

One thing Diablo and Diablo II had in common was that the difficulty levels were a complete afterthought. I think this entire genre has these new game plus style difficulty levels because someone at Blizzard said "Hey guys... Doom and Quake have difficulty levels... maybe we should too!" Somehow hell/hell in Diablo ended up being a lot of fun, but areas like hell/church and nightmare/church are just trash.

Diablo II was supposed to be so epic, with each Act being much larger than the entire game of Diablo, that it wouldn't need extra difficulty levels. But then someone on the Blizzard forums said "Hey guys... Diablo has difficulty levels... maybe Diablo II should too!"
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#19
(07-09-2012, 06:41 PM)RedRadical Wrote: Totally disagree about D1 ending after killing Diablo on Hell mode. There was a MILLION other things to do after that. You could play Ironman, one of a thousand crazy variants

Even D3 has plenty to do if you're willing to take on variants.
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#20
(07-11-2012, 05:28 PM)Jaffa Tamarin Wrote: Maybe I am the person that Blizzard was thinking of when they designed D3 Smile

Both of us. Big Grin
--Mav
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