Sirian's First Impression

[NuurAbSaal]

I could easily see that each toon may have a prime DPS gear set for advancement and possibly some 'magic find' and 'gold find' gear that several of their toons could swat to from the shared stash when they need to work at building up their resources

Any particular reason why one farming toon wouldn't be enough? Can't you transfer gold among your characters?

take care
Tarabulus

[Ruvanal]

I could easily see that each toon may have a prime DPS gear set for advancement and possibly some 'magic find' and 'gold find' gear that several of their toons could swat to from the shared stash when they need to work at building up their resources

Any particular reason why one farming toon wouldn't be enough? Can't you transfer gold among your characters?

take care
Tarabulus

No need to swap, there is only one gold stock per account. The later area will drop the better items for destructing into mats and their base gold drop will also be higher so the 'farming toons' would also need to be up near the point where your lead characters would be at. But that is why I was listing it as 1 DPS per toon and a shared set of MF and GF gear that any of your toons might take advantage of as desired.

[NuurAbSaal]

I could easily see that each toon may have a prime DPS gear set for advancement and possibly some 'magic find' and 'gold find' gear that several of their toons could swat to from the shared stash when they need to work at building up their resources

Any particular reason why one farming toon wouldn't be enough? Can't you transfer gold among your characters?

take care
Tarabulus

No need to swap, there is only one gold stock per account. The later area will drop the better items for destructing into mats and their base gold drop will also be higher so the 'farming toons' would also need to be up near the point where your lead characters would be at. But that is why I was listing it as 1 DPS per toon and a shared set of MF and GF gear that any of your toons might take advantage of as desired.

Thanks for clearing that up, reading it in your post I remembered about the shared bank (gold). And of course I didn't think about the different levels of materials either. Good job making me look like a doofus, brain!

Minor relevant contribution: I generally enjoyed the Magic Find aspect of D2. For me it was just one more thing to do besides progressing through the game with different characters and generally killing stuff. If memory serves I never got my MF above something like 300%, it really was more of a pastime, where the odd really good item would be that much more appreciated by the lucky alts that got them.

take care
Tarabulus

[Sir_Die_alot]

Now if the game is such that you can just stack magic find and stomp through all the difficulties without worrying about your other stats then that isn't an issue with magic find, but with the difficulty balance the developers have given it. The talk seems to be that some difficulties in D3 will be very tough though. The developers have said "You will die" right? So how do you balance the fact that you will die with finding room to fit magic find on your gear? I think that will be quite enjoyable to find out.

This reminded me that the attribute 'gold find' is on gear also. In D2 this was a pretty much worthless stat since the gold itself was only of minimal value to 95+% of the players (minor amount needed for any repairs). In D3 the gold is not something that is easily lost in piles when you die like in D2 and the repairs can escalate up quite a bit. There are also some fairly large sinks for the gold that have you wanting quite a lot of it. These are things like upgrading your vendors for being able to make better quality items for you and increasing the size of your shared stash (50k to 100k and up as you increase its size).

You and Swirly do have a point, and I leaft out gold find without even thinking about it, because as you point out, it wasn't an important stat in D2 because of the amount of gold that dropped. I still see both stats as kind of a cursed stat that again does nothing for the game. The game could easily, probably MORE easily, be balanced around available gear rather than some presumed amount of magic find.

You guys also got into farming toons. Having a farming toon is probably where I'm going with this. Blizzard should be focusing on making a farming toon unnecessary because that's time away from a toon you would want to be playing. It's the circle of un-fun again. You play a farming toon that isn't necessarily your favorite because they can stack the magic (or gold) find to support playing the toon you actually want to play. To go back to using WoW examples, imagine if you HAD to raid as a mage you don't like to get your favorite rogue loot.

Honestly this is what I see happening when D3 goes live and these issues have had some time to resolve themselves: Blizzard has already said magic find will average, so weaker classes are going to stack magic find and kind of play the chump to a group of the stronger classes. If you ever played a bowazon or pally early in D2 you remember how they were kind of joined at the hip for hell act 4 leveling. A paladin with concentration aura (and another with fanaticism if possible) would tag along with amazons and because of the way bows and auras were bugged in conjunction it made both hell 8 player viable. Maybe with some luck the class I like will be the champ not the chump so my distaste for magic find won't exactly matter.

[Sirian]

My favorite improvement is that it looks like no one can force you to PvP if you don't want to; i.e. it's like a PvE server. No more getting killed just outside of town by someone forcing PvP on me.

Game, set and match. Eleven years later, perhaps, but Blizz finally came around to seeing that one my way.

- Sirian

[Mavfin]

Blizzard has already said magic find will average, so weaker classes are going to stack magic find and kind of play the chump to a group of the stronger classes.

I guess if you're planning to play public games, this might be a worry, but I don't plan to play games with anyone I don't know, so I won't have to worry about leeches.

[MongoJerry]

Blizzard has already said magic find will average, so weaker classes are going to stack magic find and kind of play the chump to a group of the stronger classes.

I guess if you're planning to play public games, this might be a worry, but I don't plan to play games with anyone I don't know, so I won't have to worry about leeches.

If everyone's magic find is set to an average of the group's magic find, then the "leeches" are in fact helping you. I wouldn't be suprised if some people two box by having one character buffed to the max with killing equipment and another toon buffed with total magic find staying in the background.

Out of all the arguments I haven't seen anyone tell me how this is a fun stat. It doesn't increase your attack speed or increase your damage. It doesn't buff or heal or make your enemies weaker. Stat's and skills that do those things are fun. Magic find doesn't do anything like that. It just makes loot better. But this is a circular thing when this becomes the priority on loot, you get more magic find so you can get better gear with more magic find on it... Eventually every character comes to this unless you are playing some weird variant that deliberately avoids the kill-loot, kill-get better loot aspect of the game. Again if someone can explain how that circle is more fun than trying to make the biggest baddest monster killer I would actually appreciate it. Maybe I could enjoy Diablo 3 for more than the fresh storyline with that understanding.

I never hugely stacked magic find on my characters as endless boss or cow level runs weren't that exciting for me. However, I actually like it as a stat. One of the comments I would frequently make to people in game who would twink up and skip content all to run bosses endlessly is, "If you can already beat [insert name of end boss], why do you need better gear?" I just couldn't fathom why people who could beat Baal on 8-player mode would obsessively continue to farm farm farm for that one little bit better charm or item.

However, magic find, while helping the "farm farm farm" groupie, does make it so that you might have to start adding some skill back into the mix, since the magic and gold find items don't help the character become more powerful. So, in effect they make the character less powerful and rewards the character for being less powerful when they kill the boss. I like it.

[Sir_Die_alot]

Blizzard has already said magic find will average, so weaker classes are going to stack magic find and kind of play the chump to a group of the stronger classes.

I guess if you're planning to play public games, this might be a worry, but I don't plan to play games with anyone I don't know, so I won't have to worry about leeches.

If everyone's magic find is set to an average of the group's magic find, then the "leeches" are in fact helping you. I wouldn't be suprised if some people two box by having one character buffed to the max with killing equipment and another toon buffed with total magic find staying in the background.

That's why I used the word "chump" and not leech. In the D2 example I gave nobody was leeching, but the effort contribution gap was pretty wide.

Out of all the arguments I haven't seen anyone tell me how this is a fun stat. It doesn't increase your attack speed or increase your damage. It doesn't buff or heal or make your enemies weaker. Stat's and skills that do those things are fun. Magic find doesn't do anything like that. It just makes loot better. But this is a circular thing when this becomes the priority on loot, you get more magic find so you can get better gear with more magic find on it... Eventually every character comes to this unless you are playing some weird variant that deliberately avoids the kill-loot, kill-get better loot aspect of the game. Again if someone can explain how that circle is more fun than trying to make the biggest baddest monster killer I would actually appreciate it. Maybe I could enjoy Diablo 3 for more than the fresh storyline with that understanding.

I never hugely stacked magic find on my characters as endless boss or cow level runs weren't that exciting for me. However, I actually like it as a stat. One of the comments I would frequently make to people in game who would twink up and skip content all to run bosses endlessly is, "If you can already beat [insert name of end boss], why do you need better gear?" I just couldn't fathom why people who could beat Baal on 8-player mode would obsessively continue to farm farm farm for that one little bit better charm or item.

However, magic find, while helping the "farm farm farm" groupie, does make it so that you might have to start adding some skill back into the mix, since the magic and gold find items don't help the character become more powerful. So, in effect they make the character less powerful and rewards the character for being less powerful when they kill the boss. I like it.

I could handle magic find as a stand alone stat. But as something that is made to interfere with my monster killing just makes me not like it at all.

[Mavfin]

I could handle magic find as a stand alone stat. But as something that is made to interfere with my monster killing just makes me not like it at all.

The issue I have with that is that you seem to want it gone because it doesn't fit *your way* of playing. I know it doesn't really fit mine, because, same as MJ, I never liked to do Pindle runs or any of that, but, I'm perfectly OK with the people who *did* like it, and didn't ask for that way of playing to be removed just because it wasn't 'my way'.

This isn't really personal toward you in particular, Sir_Die. It's just a trend a I see a lot lately, where people label something in a game as 'bad' or "shouldn't be there" if it doesn't fit their particular playstyle, when lots of other people *will* enjoy it. WoW could remove fishing completely, and I'd never miss it, but, I won't ask for it to be removed, because I know several people who love it.

You can just sell all the good MF gear you find, and profit from the way other people want to play, you know.

[LavCat]

I'd like to see MF in WoW for fishing.

[Nystul]

I'd like to see MF in WoW for fishing.

I'd like to see MF in RL for fishing.

[FireIceTalon]

On D1, even though there was no MF, it was common for people in the end game stage to run Laz and Co., and 16, to farm all the best gear - in order to make the strongest char possible. After all, beating the game is hardly the point at the end of the day in my opinion - the REAL ultimate goal is to make the most badass char possible, regardless if its D1 or any other game of the same genre. The same will be true of D3, eventually. Sure, the object for a while is to beat the game on all difficulties, with all classes, but eventually the real goal will to be design the ultimate char of each class - be it for personal satisfaction/enjoyment, or for mastery of PvP which often requires more high end items/builds than PvM.

There is a lot of criticism towards making "cookie cutter" builds, and I can see why people may not like this, but for me at least, it really adds to the games re-playability - especially if you love PvP like I do. In D1, I ran countless Laz runs/16 (easily in the hundreds of thousands, possibly even a million) to make all my chars near perfect. I think D3's system will be a nice compromise for those who dislike high use of MF and making cookie-cutter builds, and those who dont mind it or actually enjoy it. You can use ALL the skills in D3 (even if only 6 at a time), and with the runestone system applying to skills nows instead of items, the amount of builds possible will be almost endless. The Cookie Cutter builds will be there for sure, but at least there will be a lot more of them from what I can see, then there was in the previous two games. I think this will help to create a more diverse range of playing styles among the D3 populace in both PvM and PvP. It will be really interesting to see what skills work in PvP and which do not, and developing the essential skills and tactical elements for each class in this realm of the game. The item drop system on "Inferno difficulty", however, has me pondering a bit. ANY monster on that difficulty, apparently, can drop top notch gear. In a sense, this is a good thing, because it means there is more opportunity and chance to find great stuff. But on the other hand, it seems like it may also take longer to find stuff since it would now make sense to clear an entire game, rather than just run Laz/Baal like in the first two games. I realize they are trying to make people play "all" of the game instead of just one section repeatedly, but for those who love to farm stuff this could be quite time consuming, especially since it is on the hardest difficulty, while difficulty on D1 did not matter when searching for the high end items (i forget if it mattered on D2 or not, and dont care).

[MongoJerry]

Right now, I'm just happy to learn that they brought back hardcore mode. I'll probably make a throw-away non-hardcore character to start with to get the gyst of spells and how the monsters work and then *boom* it'll be hardcore mode all the way. Just think: hardcore mode without the griefers. It'll be like the first six months or so on US West again. I can't wait!

[whyBish]

HC D3 ...
I wonder if I'm still a member of the Amazon Basin?

[Sirian]

I realize they are trying to make people play "all" of the game instead of just one section repeatedly, but for those who love to farm stuff this could be quite time consuming...

That isn't how it's likely to go.

If there is equal chance for loot anywhere, the farmers will ID the easiest sections to clear, with the best drop/minute ratio and farm only that. So fear not! The farmers will avoid having to play all of the game, you can be sure.

On the other hand, those who like to clear most or all of the content will now be rewarded almost as well as the farmer, so this is a good thing.


- Sirian


PS: Oh, and by the way, guys, this wasn't a thread about magic find. I'm lookin at you, you, you and you. Hijackers.

[RTM]

PS: Oh, and by the way, guys, this wasn't a thread about magic find. I'm lookin at you, you, you and you. Hijackers.

Hijackers? I think you mean 'Lurkers'. That's what we do.

[dtotheatothevtothee]

Thoroughly enjoying the beta...it took me awhile to remember the name of this site...used to be a regular back in the D1/D2 days! I haven't played either in ages. Used to love playing all the variants I found on here and Sirian's site. I'm glad to see the forum is still around!

Cheers,
DaveTheMage

[LavCat]

Having played a while in the open beta, a few things I've noticed: the action is all scripted. After killing Leoric with my witch doctor I can't find any more quests or monsters to kill. Is that it? I don't even see a way to start a fresh game.

And speaking of Leoric, the first time I fought him I died with a dark screen not seeing anything to attack. What fun is that? All the prior monsters had been trivial. It may have to do with the fact that I stood as far back as I could. Still, it is not very good balance in my opinion. The second time I fought Leoric I stood in front of his throne and the fight was not particularly difficult.

[FireIceTalon]

Beta is the first Act only, and the max clvl is 13 (you can reach this by repeatedly running the final quest). Already maxed out my DH, Wiz, and Barb - and oh what fun it was.......Barb seems a bit over powered, especially once u got some decent items. By lvl 10 I was killing even the top monsters so fat that i had a hard time regenerating Fury, many mobs died with 1 or 2 hits. Amazing game nonetheless.

[Ruvanal]

Beta is the first Act only, and the max clvl is 13 (you can reach this by repeatedly running the final quest). Already maxed out my DH, Wiz, and Barb - and oh what fun it was.......Barb seems a bit over powered, especially once u got some decent items. By lvl 10 I was killing even the top monsters so fat that i had a hard time regenerating Fury, many mobs died with 1 or 2 hits. Amazing game nonetheless.

Beta is not really even all of act 1.