07-10-2012, 12:48 AM
(This post was last modified: 07-10-2012, 07:02 AM by MongoJerry.)
I stepped away from reading this thread for a couple of weeks in an effort to make sure any response I made was calmly written. Here we go.
Bolty, disagreeing with you or others on the board who agree with you is not trolling. Being the owner and moderator of a site while accusing someone of trolling is a serious accusation. Suffice it to say that after more than a decade of administering this site, you know what trolling is and isn't. The fact that you haven't suspended or banned me, yet, shows that even you do not think that the posts I made along the way were trolling.
Let's look through my posts and see where I have ignored the damage numbers in Inferno that have been presented. Less than a week after the game's release, I stated that I may need to create a softcore character to practice tactics before stepping into Inferno. When the news that Force Armor was being nerfed came out, I stated that "Force Armor's seeming requirement seems related to the incredible damage dealt in Inferno relative to the equipment that people have," and later in the same thread I acknowledged that "perhaps Blizzard has just unbalanced things too much with the encounter dangers far outpacing the gear" and "if that [gear] doesn't exist, that's a problem with the game design." Continuing the discussion a couple days later, I wondered at what health and mitigation stats Force Armor would no longer be needed and "whether such gear that is capable of doing so has been implemented in the game."
On May 24th, I first aired my mostly wrong idea that Blizzard held back on some gear at release and noted that the person I was responding to seemed to have very little health for playing in Inferno. I later reiterated that the problems with Inferno were gear issues and acknowledged that "either it doesn't exist, yet, or it exists but takes a long time to farm... before you get the good stuff." I repeated the mantra about how I expected Blizzard to release better gear that would allow players to be Inferno capable several times.
On May 27th, I described Inferno as insanely challenging. I later discussed how people are choosing to skip ahead to acts that their gear can't support and were using the auction house to circumvent a farming process that was supposed to take months. In the same thread, I lamented that players are buying the wrong gear -- items that are glass cannon +mf% gear -- instead of vitality and mitigation gear that would help them survive. In a similar vein, I lamented that the most common Wizard Skill/Rune was the offensively oriented Diamond Skin / Mirror Skin instead of the defensively oriented Diamond Skin / Crystal Shell.
In several posts, I acknowledged the difficulty that melee characters were having in Inferno Act 2. I even provided some modest suggestions for improvements to the barbarian class in the hope that it would spark some positive discussions of solutions. However, the first hardcore kill of Inferno Belial, which was done by a barbarian, demonstrated that it wasn't really the melee class skills that were broken, it was the gear -- just as I had previously been saying all along. Further reading only reinforced this idea.
The rest of my comments are all in a similar vein asking people to stop talking about irrelevancies like mob mechanics and supposedly broken skills -- all of which were acknowledged to have been fine in hell difficulty and below -- and instead focus on the key problem with Inferno: the ratio of the power of a player's gear to the health of and damage dealt by mobs. In a discussion of the supposed evils of the auction house, I made my first comments on the impending 1.0.3 patch, "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." Later, I said, "There aren't any issues with Inferno that won't be solved with better gear" while reiterating my speculation that Blizzard didn't release all of the gear they planned to release (I didn't know at the time that they were going to nerf Inferno mob damage and health so much). In a discussion about the lack of build variants in the game, I said, "as Inferno is tuned down and as more powerful gear is released, I think a greater variety of builds will become viable." In a discussion of monster mechanics, I wrote, "there's nothing wrong with monster mechanics (well, maybe except invulnerable minions). The problems are simply a matter of gear and perhaps a tweak on the health and damage of mobs." In response a player complaining that he has to park nearly every elite pack, I said, "if you have to park nearly every Elite you come across, then go back an act or two and farm there. Clearly, you are not geared for the level you are trying to play at." Later, I acknowledged that Blizzard didn't QA Inferno properly while disagreeing with the statement that Blizzard's QA was better in the past. On 6/13, I stated my mantras clearly by saying, "There aren't any game mechanics that can't be solved with appropriate use of player skills and better gear, ... [but] it is entirely possible that the appropriate gear for Acts 2 and 3 Inferno doesn't yet exist or drops so rarely that it might as well not exist."
In response to Lissa where he laments supposedly broken skills, I said on 6/14, "All they have to do is make it easier for people to get better gear and tune down the health and damage on the mobs in Inferno a bit. That's it. The skills that you claim to be 'broken' in Inferno are not in fact broken.... The reason why some skills seem suddenly 'broken' in Inferno is because of the massive health and spike damage that gets dealt in Inferno. Allow better gear to drop and tune down the mob health and damage in Inferno, and poof all those skills suddenly come back into play again just like they were in hell difficulty. Guess what Blizzard is going to do in 1.0.3? Allow better gear to drop and tone down Inferno mob health and damage."
Finally, on 6/15 while acknowledging that certain skills need to be alterred or improved, I said, "I think the game was very well QA'd and balanced up through the end of Hell difficulty, ... [but] the problems arise in Inferno where Blizzard admitted they didn't QA or balance very carefully.... The only differences between Inferno and Hell difficulty are that boss packs have one more affix and all the mobs have more health and deal more damage. Allow better items to drop more frequently and tune down the extra health and damage, and the game will return to the well balanced realm that we all experienced in hell difficulty. I think that would be a good thing."
So, there you go, Bolty. 31 posts of mine related to end game balance in some manner, all consistently talking about how difficult Inferno is, how there is a need for better defensive gear, use of defensive skills, and how it's possible that appropriate gear for Acts 2 and 3 Inferno might not have been in the game yet. Now, please link to me a single post where I "ignore the damage numbers that have been presented."
That sounds difficult, Bolty. Neglecting the Invulnerable Minions modifier that I have repeatedly acknowledged is ridiculous, let me ask you this: Are you able to handle such a pack or for that matter any pack you come across in Act 1 Inferno now that you are well geared? I'm going to guess that you can. Why? Because there's a big difference in difficulty between whether you get 3-shot or 10-shot by mobs, and there's a big difference if you are able to kill or severely damage one or more mobs before your cc breaking skills run out. Again, it's not the elite pack modifiers that are broken. It's the ratio of the power of the player's gear (health, migitation, dps, and resource generators) versus the power of the mobs (health, damage, and ai).
It's fascinating that you say that, because looking back on every single post that I have made, I don't see this. I do see a couple of posts I made regarding DH's. For example, in this very thread, I told Smegged that his DH in nightmare seems to have enough health. I also made two posts saying that I don't know enough about DH's to know what kind of defensive skills they have and if they really don't have good defensive skills, then it's the class skills that should change and not the mob ai. There is also my response to Lissa saying that Rakanoth's attack is not insta-kill in hell and below, but unless you're saying that I can't talk about encounters with which I have had personal experience, I don't think this would count. The closest post I can find to your statement is the one I made to RedRadical on 5/27, where he complained about being 2-shot in act 1 Inferno while sporting 25k life. I responded that that amount of life seemed pretty low, considering my hell act 1 Wizard had 30k, and Chesspiece, whose character was in Inferno Act 1 at the time, took the subject further.
Your comments about being the "subject of continuous derision by a number of Lurker players" does make me wonder if perhaps ideas that I have never expressed and posts I have never written have been conflated with my actual posts during the process of gossip. However, please do link and prove me wrong.
When I sat down to write this post, I fully expected to apologize and eat crow on this one. I was angry when I wrote my post, and I thought it was likely that I had conflated your post on the RMAH with others who were more scathing about the concept. But, no, Bolty, you did say it. I realize that you had a bigger more nuanced point that you were trying to make, and I stand by my response to your initial post. However, while you might not have used the specific words "Diablo III is a big scam to get people to use the RMAH," you agreed with the characterization of Diablo III being a "gigantic gambling mechanism" and went on to say that "Inferno difficulty... is there to push you into using the Auction House, and by extension, the Real Money Auction House - where Blizzard makes their money." Sorry, Bolty, you did say it.
Back to the original topic. What is it that you and Lissa didn't think I knew about Inferno? It's a couple of weeks later, and I have had a taste of Inferno. So far, I haven't seen anything that I wasn't expecting -- mobs with higher health, speed, and damage and elite mobs with one extra modifier. I haven't seen Deathwing or any Pac-man levels, yet. I don't think that what I supposedly didn't know was an intellectual thing. Instead, I think it was an emotional thing. "If you'd been beating your head against the wall of Act 2 Inferno, you wouldn't be saying such nice things about Blizzard." Or, "If you'd been beating your head against the wall, you'd also be making irrational statements about Blizzard's QA being better in the past."
And you're right that we'll never know for certain what my emotional responses would have been, if I had been playing softcore and had been banging my head consistently against the Act 2 Inferno barrier. I know what my response has been when I've banged my head against the hardcore game crash/server instability barrier, though -- take a few days off from the game to regroup. Knowing myself, I probably would have farmed Act 1 for about a week and made a few attempts at the Act 2 barrier. When that didn't work, I probably would have broken down and bought a few items on the AH, tried the barrier again, got frustrated and kept farming Act 1. Then, when the announcement came out about the then upcoming changes in 1.0.3, I would have probably set my character aside, figuring the gear for the late acts of Inferno was about to be released, and played some other character classes while waiting for the changes. What I am pretty confident that I wouldn't have done was make multi-page and multi-thread diatribes asking to change everything in the game except the key things that needed to be fixed -- the massive health and damage of the mobs in Inferno and the availability of gear to handle those mobs.
This comment of yours was made in the light of the 1.0.3 patch, which didn't bring about significant mechanics changes or player skill changes. But, it did significantly change the health and damage of mobs in Inferno and the availability of gear to handle them. So, by saying that the 1.0.3 patch fixed the most significant problems with Inferno, what you are saying is, "Mongo, you were right."
(06-19-2012, 04:53 PM)Bolty Wrote: You haven't seen Act 2 Inferno. You don't know, and will never know (thanks to the nerfs), what you're talking about. And what you don't realize, and will never realize, is that your repeated posts about Inferno difficulty are tantamount to trolling.
Bolty, disagreeing with you or others on the board who agree with you is not trolling. Being the owner and moderator of a site while accusing someone of trolling is a serious accusation. Suffice it to say that after more than a decade of administering this site, you know what trolling is and isn't. The fact that you haven't suspended or banned me, yet, shows that even you do not think that the posts I made along the way were trolling.
(06-19-2012, 04:53 PM)Bolty Wrote:(06-19-2012, 03:32 PM)MongoJerry Wrote: Pray tell me what is this great mystery about Inferno that I as a layman have not been able to fathom?
...you routinely ignore the damage numbers that have been presented...
Let's look through my posts and see where I have ignored the damage numbers in Inferno that have been presented. Less than a week after the game's release, I stated that I may need to create a softcore character to practice tactics before stepping into Inferno. When the news that Force Armor was being nerfed came out, I stated that "Force Armor's seeming requirement seems related to the incredible damage dealt in Inferno relative to the equipment that people have," and later in the same thread I acknowledged that "perhaps Blizzard has just unbalanced things too much with the encounter dangers far outpacing the gear" and "if that [gear] doesn't exist, that's a problem with the game design." Continuing the discussion a couple days later, I wondered at what health and mitigation stats Force Armor would no longer be needed and "whether such gear that is capable of doing so has been implemented in the game."
On May 24th, I first aired my mostly wrong idea that Blizzard held back on some gear at release and noted that the person I was responding to seemed to have very little health for playing in Inferno. I later reiterated that the problems with Inferno were gear issues and acknowledged that "either it doesn't exist, yet, or it exists but takes a long time to farm... before you get the good stuff." I repeated the mantra about how I expected Blizzard to release better gear that would allow players to be Inferno capable several times.
On May 27th, I described Inferno as insanely challenging. I later discussed how people are choosing to skip ahead to acts that their gear can't support and were using the auction house to circumvent a farming process that was supposed to take months. In the same thread, I lamented that players are buying the wrong gear -- items that are glass cannon +mf% gear -- instead of vitality and mitigation gear that would help them survive. In a similar vein, I lamented that the most common Wizard Skill/Rune was the offensively oriented Diamond Skin / Mirror Skin instead of the defensively oriented Diamond Skin / Crystal Shell.
In several posts, I acknowledged the difficulty that melee characters were having in Inferno Act 2. I even provided some modest suggestions for improvements to the barbarian class in the hope that it would spark some positive discussions of solutions. However, the first hardcore kill of Inferno Belial, which was done by a barbarian, demonstrated that it wasn't really the melee class skills that were broken, it was the gear -- just as I had previously been saying all along. Further reading only reinforced this idea.
The rest of my comments are all in a similar vein asking people to stop talking about irrelevancies like mob mechanics and supposedly broken skills -- all of which were acknowledged to have been fine in hell difficulty and below -- and instead focus on the key problem with Inferno: the ratio of the power of a player's gear to the health of and damage dealt by mobs. In a discussion of the supposed evils of the auction house, I made my first comments on the impending 1.0.3 patch, "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." Later, I said, "There aren't any issues with Inferno that won't be solved with better gear" while reiterating my speculation that Blizzard didn't release all of the gear they planned to release (I didn't know at the time that they were going to nerf Inferno mob damage and health so much). In a discussion about the lack of build variants in the game, I said, "as Inferno is tuned down and as more powerful gear is released, I think a greater variety of builds will become viable." In a discussion of monster mechanics, I wrote, "there's nothing wrong with monster mechanics (well, maybe except invulnerable minions). The problems are simply a matter of gear and perhaps a tweak on the health and damage of mobs." In response a player complaining that he has to park nearly every elite pack, I said, "if you have to park nearly every Elite you come across, then go back an act or two and farm there. Clearly, you are not geared for the level you are trying to play at." Later, I acknowledged that Blizzard didn't QA Inferno properly while disagreeing with the statement that Blizzard's QA was better in the past. On 6/13, I stated my mantras clearly by saying, "There aren't any game mechanics that can't be solved with appropriate use of player skills and better gear, ... [but] it is entirely possible that the appropriate gear for Acts 2 and 3 Inferno doesn't yet exist or drops so rarely that it might as well not exist."
In response to Lissa where he laments supposedly broken skills, I said on 6/14, "All they have to do is make it easier for people to get better gear and tune down the health and damage on the mobs in Inferno a bit. That's it. The skills that you claim to be 'broken' in Inferno are not in fact broken.... The reason why some skills seem suddenly 'broken' in Inferno is because of the massive health and spike damage that gets dealt in Inferno. Allow better gear to drop and tune down the mob health and damage in Inferno, and poof all those skills suddenly come back into play again just like they were in hell difficulty. Guess what Blizzard is going to do in 1.0.3? Allow better gear to drop and tone down Inferno mob health and damage."
Finally, on 6/15 while acknowledging that certain skills need to be alterred or improved, I said, "I think the game was very well QA'd and balanced up through the end of Hell difficulty, ... [but] the problems arise in Inferno where Blizzard admitted they didn't QA or balance very carefully.... The only differences between Inferno and Hell difficulty are that boss packs have one more affix and all the mobs have more health and deal more damage. Allow better items to drop more frequently and tune down the extra health and damage, and the game will return to the well balanced realm that we all experienced in hell difficulty. I think that would be a good thing."
So, there you go, Bolty. 31 posts of mine related to end game balance in some manner, all consistently talking about how difficult Inferno is, how there is a need for better defensive gear, use of defensive skills, and how it's possible that appropriate gear for Acts 2 and 3 Inferno might not have been in the game yet. Now, please link to me a single post where I "ignore the damage numbers that have been presented."
(06-19-2012, 04:53 PM)Bolty Wrote:(06-19-2012, 03:32 PM)MongoJerry Wrote: Pray tell me what is this great mystery about Inferno that I as a layman have not been able to fathom?
It's been explained to you dozens of times. You don't seem to realize what the extra modifier does on certain boss combinations (yay Arcane Enchanted Invulnerable Minions Desecrator Frozen as melee!),
That sounds difficult, Bolty. Neglecting the Invulnerable Minions modifier that I have repeatedly acknowledged is ridiculous, let me ask you this: Are you able to handle such a pack or for that matter any pack you come across in Act 1 Inferno now that you are well geared? I'm going to guess that you can. Why? Because there's a big difference in difficulty between whether you get 3-shot or 10-shot by mobs, and there's a big difference if you are able to kill or severely damage one or more mobs before your cc breaking skills run out. Again, it's not the elite pack modifiers that are broken. It's the ratio of the power of the player's gear (health, migitation, dps, and resource generators) versus the power of the mobs (health, damage, and ai).
(06-19-2012, 04:53 PM)Bolty Wrote:(06-19-2012, 03:32 PM)MongoJerry Wrote: Pray tell me what is this great mystery about Inferno that I as a layman have not been able to fathom?
...You respond to Demon Hunters complaining about getting 3 shot and suggest they need better gear or more defensive skills, and anyone who has played past Act II Inferno will simply shake their head and laugh at that. I don't really know where to begin.
You continuously post as an authority on the subject without ever having experienced it. I do not post as an authority on hardcore mode, because I do not play it. You are the subject of continuous derision by a number of Lurker players who play in "easy mode" Inferno difficulty, but you just don't stop.
It's fascinating that you say that, because looking back on every single post that I have made, I don't see this. I do see a couple of posts I made regarding DH's. For example, in this very thread, I told Smegged that his DH in nightmare seems to have enough health. I also made two posts saying that I don't know enough about DH's to know what kind of defensive skills they have and if they really don't have good defensive skills, then it's the class skills that should change and not the mob ai. There is also my response to Lissa saying that Rakanoth's attack is not insta-kill in hell and below, but unless you're saying that I can't talk about encounters with which I have had personal experience, I don't think this would count. The closest post I can find to your statement is the one I made to RedRadical on 5/27, where he complained about being 2-shot in act 1 Inferno while sporting 25k life. I responded that that amount of life seemed pretty low, considering my hell act 1 Wizard had 30k, and Chesspiece, whose character was in Inferno Act 1 at the time, took the subject further.
Your comments about being the "subject of continuous derision by a number of Lurker players" does make me wonder if perhaps ideas that I have never expressed and posts I have never written have been conflated with my actual posts during the process of gossip. However, please do link and prove me wrong.
(06-19-2012, 04:53 PM)Bolty Wrote:(06-19-2012, 03:32 PM)MongoJerry Wrote: So, basically, all of your "sky is falling" pronouncements that Diablo III is a big scam to get people to use the RMAH and that if you don't use it, you won't be able to finish the game were complete farces.
I NEVER SAID THIS, ANYTIME, ANYWHERE, EVER.
(05-29-2012, 02:29 PM)Bolty Wrote:Bolty Wrote:[It's possible] that Diablo III is actually a gigantic gambling mechanism, Activision/Blizzard is the "house," and the game is an overlay for what basically amounts to pulling a slot machine. That Blizzard's sole reason to create Diablo III is to implement (and make money from) this RMT auction house. Your goal as a player is to be talked into using this auction house, and eventually get addicted to it, in a game that's all about the items you wear and a system that prevents you from getting all the best items without purchasing them from the AH.
Time will prove or disprove [this] theory; there's no way to tell this for sure one way or the other until the game's been out for a while and we can see what direction it takes.
--Bolty, September 13 2011
It looks to me like Daeity was right. And I've only been level 60 for 2 days... (Snip discussion of the fun aspects of Diablo III)... The REAL game begins with Inferno difficulty and the gear you gain there. Ask anyone who has been there a while.
Unfortunately, it doesn't take long to realize something: Diablo III's end-game isn't Inferno difficulty.
It's the Auction House. And that's exactly the way Blizzard wants it. Inferno difficulty is not there to challenge you as a player; it's there to push you into using the Auction House, and by extension, the Real Money Auction House - where Blizzard makes their money.
When I sat down to write this post, I fully expected to apologize and eat crow on this one. I was angry when I wrote my post, and I thought it was likely that I had conflated your post on the RMAH with others who were more scathing about the concept. But, no, Bolty, you did say it. I realize that you had a bigger more nuanced point that you were trying to make, and I stand by my response to your initial post. However, while you might not have used the specific words "Diablo III is a big scam to get people to use the RMAH," you agreed with the characterization of Diablo III being a "gigantic gambling mechanism" and went on to say that "Inferno difficulty... is there to push you into using the Auction House, and by extension, the Real Money Auction House - where Blizzard makes their money." Sorry, Bolty, you did say it.
(06-19-2012, 04:53 PM)Bolty Wrote: You haven't seen Act 2 Inferno. You don't know, and will never know (thanks to the nerfs), what you're talking about. And what you don't realize, and will never realize, is that your repeated posts about Inferno difficulty are tantamount to trolling.
Back to the original topic. What is it that you and Lissa didn't think I knew about Inferno? It's a couple of weeks later, and I have had a taste of Inferno. So far, I haven't seen anything that I wasn't expecting -- mobs with higher health, speed, and damage and elite mobs with one extra modifier. I haven't seen Deathwing or any Pac-man levels, yet. I don't think that what I supposedly didn't know was an intellectual thing. Instead, I think it was an emotional thing. "If you'd been beating your head against the wall of Act 2 Inferno, you wouldn't be saying such nice things about Blizzard." Or, "If you'd been beating your head against the wall, you'd also be making irrational statements about Blizzard's QA being better in the past."
And you're right that we'll never know for certain what my emotional responses would have been, if I had been playing softcore and had been banging my head consistently against the Act 2 Inferno barrier. I know what my response has been when I've banged my head against the hardcore game crash/server instability barrier, though -- take a few days off from the game to regroup. Knowing myself, I probably would have farmed Act 1 for about a week and made a few attempts at the Act 2 barrier. When that didn't work, I probably would have broken down and bought a few items on the AH, tried the barrier again, got frustrated and kept farming Act 1. Then, when the announcement came out about the then upcoming changes in 1.0.3, I would have probably set my character aside, figuring the gear for the late acts of Inferno was about to be released, and played some other character classes while waiting for the changes. What I am pretty confident that I wouldn't have done was make multi-page and multi-thread diatribes asking to change everything in the game except the key things that needed to be fixed -- the massive health and damage of the mobs in Inferno and the availability of gear to handle those mobs.
(06-19-2012, 04:53 PM)Bolty Wrote: The entire time you have been playing Diablo III, you've been in easy mode, where the game is balanced with a steady progression of difficulty and gear rewards to match it. That progression ends in Inferno difficulty. But you'll never see it now.
This comment of yours was made in the light of the 1.0.3 patch, which didn't bring about significant mechanics changes or player skill changes. But, it did significantly change the health and damage of mobs in Inferno and the availability of gear to handle them. So, by saying that the 1.0.3 patch fixed the most significant problems with Inferno, what you are saying is, "Mongo, you were right."