All in all, it is a decent game that came with some pretty sad decisions as baggage, and failed at making interesting villains. Had they managed to do this, it would have been an awesome game, regardless of colours.
Taken from my rant.
"First and easiest change to the plot to make it better? Give us a villain. Someone we can hate and want to chase down. Make it someone who scares us and is competent. For my money, if I’m working within the framework of the existing plot, I would have made it..."
Glad we're on the same page.
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Hey quick question for XBOx users. So i've created 4 characters under 1 xbox profile. I want my friends to play (at my house) as these 4 characters. How do i do this.Presumably by logging out of your friends XBox Live profile and logging into your own.
He is most likely wanting to play with his friends. The characters in Diablo 3 are saved to a particular Xbox ID. I do not know of a way to use characters that were created on one profile on another without a hacking tool. Even exporting to a usb stick and reimporting them does not work.
Do we know if any of that is effecting consoles yet? Doesn't say...
I meant the skill changes like the passive and active portions of the companion skill for the demon hunter....I like my spider....never thought I'd say that.
Removed Normal / Nightmare / Hell / Inferno? What the s#@*?
Well I like the new loot drops. 2 legendary items so far and I haven't played very long. I don't like the new paragon levels.
Stewart they just fused the old difficulty system with the old tiered play through system so that you got one unified experience. Makes sense to me.
Seems cost to repair has dropped as well. After dying nearly a dozen times in Act 3 on Torment 6 difficulty I only had to spend 3400gold for fixes.
Alright, I had a chance to look over the changes a bit more, and my conclusion is that this does absolutely nothing to incline me to play the game.
Big takeaways...
1. Most of the balance changes are simply the removal of options or changes to them that are functionally identical to removing them. I focused my attention on the wizard, where many of the best options (e.g. critical mass) are simply gone. Others have been reworked so as to be all but useless (archon for instance no longer grants extra duration for kills). Really disappointing because it feeds into...
2. The game is still built on a lazy class system. By dramatically limiting means by which classes tend to stay alive (e.g. mobility, durability, health, blocking, ect) relative to Diablo 2 they've really bottlenecked things on that front. Offensively things the use of weapon DPS as the starting (and functionally ending) point of offensive ability is pretty terrible, because rather than create many options that lead to similar levels of power (e.g. Dreamers, Light Sorcs, Meteorb, Vita-bears, ect) it bottlenecks things around one option: get a straight up better weapon. It is a streamlining of the system, but a terrible one.
3. The design team still has no idea what made Diablo II so compelling to so many people (and continues to make it compelling). Bind on Account is the biggest and most obvious new offender here, since it basically means you and you alone have to grind for each and every piece of high end gear you want. There is no trading economy. Period. This is number 3 on my list, but probably number one for changes here that put to rest any hope that this game will ever be a successor to Diablo II, or anything that I want to play.
Really sad.
I still to this day play Diablo II. I've probably put 5,000 hours into Diablo II over the course of 15 years, despite spam bots, hackers, dupers, failure to join, rust storm, nerfs to XP gain, and the ubiquitous 'realm down'. I doubt I'll ever put in more than 50 into Diablo III.
Wow. The number of wizard spells that got their damage doubled, tripled, or more is staggering.
Nephalem Valor has been removed from the game
Sweet. I hated the Nephalem Valor mechanic. One of the things I actually liked about the D3 skill system was being able to redo your powers and passives on the fly (so they could be custom tailored for specific fights, or just to experiment with weird stuff), and the Nephalem Valor mechanic existed specifically to penalize L60 players for doing that. Good riddance to it.
I'd quit D3 after playing for only a couple months because I had made it to Inferno mode, and Inferno mode had been the opposite of fun. Having a pretty substantial box of toys for my wizard to play with and not being able to use the vast majority of them (because I had to devote all of my utility skills towards not dying when something looked at me funny) sucked.
This is actually tempting to reinstall to try out. Not interested in the expansion, though - I was expecting to descend into Hell to rescue Leah's wrongly condemned soul, not fight some fallen angel I didn't care about just because Tyreal's plot-induced sloppiness caused him to lose the damn super-macguffin.
A proper exploration of Hell (going well beyond the super-short foray that's D2 Act IV, which amounted to one field and a building) would've been cool, and apparently is too much to expect of Blizzard. Dammit Blizzard.
Peter, you may want to look at Path of Exile if you hadn't already. It's clearly intended to be a spiritual successor to D2. It was kind of neat, though I admit I got bored with it and quit during the beta.
A few more thoughts.
I got on last night and played for a few hours, as I have every time they roll out a major change.
Overall this was probably the best patch they've put out. Item drops are tremendously better. I probably upgraded eight pieces of equipment in three hours, which is more than I was doing before even using the AH. This was on Expert Difficulty, which felt like old Act 1 Inferno or Act 5 Hell. I dropped four or five unique or set items in three hours of play - up from zero in the thirty or so hours I'd put in before. Beyond unique / set items, the ratio of rares to magics I was dropping was really nice, perhaps 1-1 for most of the game. Elite packs almost always dropped 2-3 rare items. I still hate bind on account, but it does seem as though drops are somewhat specialized for your class. I dropped what seemed like a disproportionate number of wizard friendly items.
Many skills previously considered useless in Hell / Inferno (at least for the wizard) are now actually usable. I enjoyed using disintegrate, arcane orb, and half a dozen other spells and pretty much all seemed capable of killing enemies at a reasonable pace. I'm sure some options remain superior, but it doesn't seem to be (at least on Expert) as much a case as before where you used arcane orb, venom hydra, chilling blizzard, prismatic force armor, and teleport exclusively.
The negative side of that is that unfortunately many skill runes are just gone, including the most popular. Of the six skills I had on my wizard before the patch four had to pick new runes or be replaced. Most noticable to me was arcane orb losing its most valuable tool (nova) and hydra losing its only worthwhile option (venom). Both skills got overall buffs, but the old run and gun into pools of acid is no more, which makes me a little bit sad. Wave of force also ate a bunch of big nerfs.
Archon is pretty much only useful for its 3600% detonation effect. Between the reduction in the defenses offered (they halved the defensive bonuses) and the greatly reduced duration (kills no longer extend its time) it has become a really sad option to have on your bar. Before it was relatively easy to go about half and half time between archon and normal form if you used it in enemy dense areas. Now it is something you can only break out relatively rarely and to limited effect. Biggest use is as an 'oh crap' when you run out of arcane power.
Passive options also ate some big changes. I ran illusionist, cold blooded, and critical mass before. Illusionist got a slight buff, but cold blooded is half as effective as it once was. Critical mass is removed entirely. Very frustrating, because they've basically ripped the heart out of most of the passives. I do appreciate that they added some new passive defenses that hopefully will let wizards run more offensive sets of actives, but this was a classic example of throwing the baby out with the bath water. The fact that critical mass was used so frequently spoke more to how badly many skills were balanced outside of it. The solution was the buff other skills, not to kill CM.
As a last note, it seems like leveling is much quicker. I picked up nine paragon levels in three hours or so of moderate play (mostly in act 2).
Overall, I felt that this was a big step forward for the game, but it probably isn't enough to get me interested again. It definitely isn't enough for me to buy the upcoming expansion. The really frustrating part is there are little hints of what might have been littered throughout the game. Dynamic zones, events, and so forth are great. Many skills are conceptually really cool. But the overriding system is just... meh. And we won't talk about the plot (I've already done that). I do appreciate the option to auto-skip all cut scenes.