Diablo 3 is fundamentally broken

[smegged]

Hello,

I'm a long time lurker of these forums going back over a decade, and finally decided to make an account to discuss Diablo 3.
As a bit of an introduction, I've played D1 and D2 for a long time, including various mods such as VK/VKME and Abysmal in D1, ES and Median in D2, most of which are generally considered more difficult than the regular game.

I highly enjoyed most of these mods though, as I considered them a "fair" kind of difficulty. And for the same reason, I feel that D3 is a highly flawed game, as many of the challenges imposed on you are of an "unfair" kind that are often impossible to deal with the tools you are given, thus resulting in the player feeling cheated.
My main character is a Demon Hunter, which I mostly play solo, so most of my experiences will be from this class.
I've gotten up to the end of act 3 Inferno, where I've hit a brick wall at the Sin Heart quest.

Some of the things I find less than pleasant in this game are:

1) The hit & miss mechanics
I've noticed that sometimes you can get killed and upon death, the flag that marks your death location is often 10, or even 20 yards away from where your body lies.
Lag? Not quite so, I usually have 60> ms latency to the server.
This actually seems to be an intended feature, as I discovered from a statement by the Blizzard forum representative Bashiok, who wrote one of the most baffling things I've ever seen about a game:

Code:

It’s intentional. We don’t want a game where the most effective way to play is to dodge in and out of enemy attacks. It’s not that difficult to do, and it’s just not a very fun way to play. “Most effective” and “not fun” just can’t be in the same sentence when describing part of the game. We want combat to be based on use of abilities, putting thought into builds, building up offensive and defensive stats, etc. Skill is absolutely a part of all of the systems you’ll use, and kiting can be too, but it’d be ridiculous if you could avoid all of the systems that make the game the game because you can time dodges of enemy attacks and negate every other factor.

Also think about just running past enemies to rush through an area and never being hit. Anyone looking to rush would love it! Which is why it’s not a good idea from a design perspective. :) It’s not something we’ll be changing.

You could've fooled me if you told me this was an April fools joke, but apparently Blizzard does not want you dodging attacks anymore through movement, since that is "not difficult and not fun".
It's more fun to get killed from the other side of the screen by a melee attack that missed you by miles visually but hits anyway.
What this feature seemingly means, is that if a monster takes a swing at you, no matter how far you move away, it will hit anyway unless you use a skill such as Smoke Screen to dodge it.
This also seems to be valid for ranged projectiles to some degree, as missile attacks that were dodged with ample leeway sometimes end up hitting anyway, as such these mechanics simply feel very loose and uncontrollable by the player.

Concerning this, there were many people on various forums saying, "Well, just don't get close then!", but this is not as easy as said due to various factors.
Which leads me to the second major unfair difficulty issue I've noticed:

2) The unavoidable boss modifiers and creature attacks
There are some of these modifiers which are nigh unavoidable by the player, such as Jailer, Vortex and Teleporter.
Yes, you can use certain skills to break the Jailer effect, but these skills generally use up a lot of resources so you cannot always use them.
Vortex is another bag of fun, combined with some other mods such as Arcane Sentry it's a guaranteed death for some classes.

In many occasions it's literally impossible to avoid death from a Vortex + Sentry/Plagued combo: even if you hit Smoke Screen with superhuman reflexes the instant you are pulled by the Vortex, you will still end up dying (possibly due to the "feature" described in the previously mentioned point).

Similarly, Teleporter is often unavoidable as well. A monster with this modifier and a fast attack can often kill you even if you react fast.


There are also various monsters in the game which have impossibly fast attacks, I'm sure you've noticed the irritation of getting killed by these.
A few notable ones are the charging attacks the Oppressors and Corrupted Angels use.
The initiation range of these moves seems to be longer than your visual screen range, so they can actually kill you when you get no visual or auditory cue to warn you against it, in other words, another unavoidable death.
I simply have no idea what Blizzard was thinking when they designed these kind of moves.

The "tongue lasher" type of monster is also often complained about, because their attack is extremely fast and hard to dodge, while also dealing huge amounts of damage.
I noticed that you can avoid this attack somewhat by strafing rather than moving in a straight line.
Against white creatures of this type you might be able to dodge a few and take them out fast, but add in the extra health from a boss pack coupled with a few fun modifiers such as Reflect Damage, Fast, Vortex, Jailer, etc, and you're looking at either a park, die & move on or die and remaking the game.

Also, Reflect Damage: why? Iron Maiden was removed from the Oblivion Knights in D2 after a while, and now it was brought back with a vengeance, as it also returns ranged damage.
Yes, you can deal with this through Life on Hit items, but again player skill is taken out of the equation in favour of equipment.

In short, the design of this game very obviously wishes to steer you into building up good items rather than relying on actual player skill (through experience, strategy, hand-eye coordination, timing, reflexes, and so on), as many challenges are simply taken out of your control and require X amount of life, resistances or defense to survive.

Which brings me to another annoyance, the way the Demon Hunter class is built up, it is simply impossible to survive more than 1 hit in act 3 Inferno.
I am aware that the melee classes have it just as bad if not worse, so I do not wish to get into a melee vs. ranged debate.
Perhaps you might be able to become strong enough to take two hits rather than one with absolutely perfect damage mitigation items, but attaining such a setup would take such a long time of farming (or shopping!) that it is not realistically obtainable.
As mentioned in the other thread, the DH class truly need a rework in its defensive capabilities, even if at cost of its offensive abilities.

Regarding this, I noticed a very ironically titled point in the 1.03 patch note:

Code:

Paying for Your Mistakes
Current repair costs at level 60 are barely noticeable, and because of that we see a lot of people wonder if “graveyard zerging” tough enemies or “chain rezzing allies on a boss” is intended gameplay – it definitely is not. To help solve the issue we evaluated a number of new death mechanics, such as just allowing the resurrection timer to increase even higher, disallowing resurrection during boss fights, or putting a debuff on you when you resurrect (such as reduced combat effectiveness).
Ultimately we felt that increasing repair costs was the best solution that preserves the fast paced style of the game. Repair costs on level 60 items are going to go up a lot. Our goal is the next time a player is graveyard zerging a boss, it should occur to them that “this is probably not an efficient way to go about things”. We’re currently evaluating repair costs between 4x and 6x their current values.
In the face of increasing costs, we recommend listening to the Hardcore players out there as they probably have some helpful advice on how to minimize repair costs. Following this change zerging a boss will still be possible, but our intent is that it won’t be optimal, and players who are seeking to be as efficient as possible will adjust their item hunting routes accordingly.

Blizzard wants to increase repair costs to discourage zerging, but what about the players aren't employing these kind of tactics and are actually trying their best to stay alive and play normally, but die over and over anyway due to the unavoidable death mechanics mentioned?


There is a myriad of other flaws which I find less than agreeable, but this is already a very long and whiny first post, for which I apologize.

This is basically how I feel about D3 in its current state: unfair towards the player, designed with a combination of incompetence and greed in mind.

Great first post. Even MSLEB archers in Diablo 2 were beatable for range classes (melee was fundamentally broken in that game) because you could dodge the attacks and the sparks. There are some deaths that are wholely unavoidable in Diablo 3, simply because of boss combinations.