Diablo 3 Expansion Reaper of Souls Launches 166
Today Blizzard released the first expansion to Diablo 3, titled Reaper of Souls. The expansion continues the story with Act 5, which includes trips to Westmarch and Pandemonium. The level cap goes up to 70, there's a new class: the Crusader, and a new crafting NPC: the Mystic. The Mystic lets players reroll specific stats on their gear and change how the gear looks. The loot system has seen a drastic revamp, and Blizzard recently shut down the game's controversial auction house so they could have players find better and more interesting gear by fighting monsters. There's a new type of gameplay called Adventure Mode, which unlocks all waypoints and lets players go wherever they want, unrestricted by the campaign progression. This includes completely randomized dungeons, which can pull art and monsters from almost anywhere in the game. They've combined Adventure Mode with the Bounty system, which opens up randomized objectives scattered throughout the world. Blizzard has confirmed that the first major content patch after the expansion will bring ladders and leaderboards.
no thanks (Score:4, Insightful)
still online only and 3 more expansions at 40 to 60 bucks a pop coming to up level to 100
sorry not interested
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When was the expansion from Blizzard more then $40?
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Since Warlords of Draenor, which is $49,99. For the standard edition, no less.
Source: https://us.battle.net/shop/en/... [battle.net]
Yes, I realize it's an expansion for WoW and not D3, but you only asked about expansion price from Blizzard and didn't specify it had to be for a specific game.
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still online only
The console versions don't have that requirement.
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The console version is a different game now essentially, with different mechanics and different content.
Re:no thanks (Score:4, Interesting)
Nope. (Score:3, Insightful)
Avid Ex-Diablo fan.
Never again, you killed the franchise Blizzard.
Re:Nope. (Score:4, Insightful)
How about on expanding your comments as to why?
I'd be interested in why you made that choice.
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I imagine all of these no forgiveness types in relationships and it helps explain the divorce rate.
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For me, it was the online requirement for the game, even for single player.
Unlike Diablo II, which I still occasionally play, Diablo III will one day stop working when Blizzard decides to shut down their servers and the game can no longer validate itself to launch. It's a game rental, put simply.
If I buy something, I want to own it, and Blizzard isn't giving me that option.
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it was the online requirement for the game, even for single player.
The console versions of the game don't have that issue. Offline single-player, no RMAH and "Smart Loot".
However, the upcoming PS4 version is the only console version confirmed to have RoS, so far. (There are rumors about an Xbox One version of the Ultimate Evil edition though)
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for me the online part sucks hard. comcast makes the game stutter like a bitch. I can't play as I click count to 2 and die as the monsters have hit me 40 times.
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Maybe they will, maybe they won't. But why should I subject myself to the whims and wants of a company? Why shouldn't they shut down the D3 server to make people buy D4 and move over there? As history has shown, it's far from impossible for a company to do something like that.
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Clearly Blizzard likes to shut down their servers ... I mean how can they shut down allowing people to telnet to the old battle.net chat!! I mean Diablo is 18 years old, its clear they have no respect for their customers!
Chat (1996-2005) (they used to allow standard Telnet clients to connect to their servers for chat purposes)
Diablo (1996-present) (limited to public chat channels)
StarCraft (1998-present) (and expa
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I can still play Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, from 1994, or StarCraft, from 1998. And Blizzard never had the power to change that, nor will they ever.
Can I be sure I'll be able to play Diablo III in 20 years? No. It all depends on me trusting a company that has burnt franchises* to the ground for the same or more income.
* Yes, Blizzards franchises have huge amounts of fans, by "burnt to the ground", I mean they died in spirit, and were replaces with games that carry no more that the title of Blizzard's form
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How about on expanding your comments as to why?
I'd be interested in why you made that choice.
Where to start?
The loot system is shit - everything from the drops themselves to their rarity to the auction house was designed to extract time and money from players. Yes, the auction house was removed last week but the drops still suck. The auction house (and the design choices made in order to push players to use it) ruined the game for nearly 2 full years.
The gameplay, story, combat etc. is uninspired. It's generally not any worse than DII but it's not any better. There's nothing substantively new h
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The loot system is shit - everything from the drops themselves to their rarity to the auction house was designed to extract time and money from players. Yes, the auction house was removed last week but the drops still suck. The auction house (and the design choices made in order to push players to use it) ruined the game for nearly 2 full years.
If you didn't notice, the loot system was revamped and the AH no longer exists.
The art is horrid. Being too bright/colorful isn't my main issue. The worst thing about the art is the god damned World of Warcraft art team shitting up everything.
Being an old retired WoW player of many years (and loving the early years), I don't really see any link in graphics design between D3 and WoW. WoW had a more cartoon look while D3 doesn't if you ask me. So I love the D3 graphics. I feel they were very well done.
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I find the drops to be good if not to often. I see "SOME" people on the Blizzard D3 forums bitching that they aren't getting enough legendary drops and it's shitty. I got 8 in one a hour time span one night. Other times I've got zero in an entire day. It's fucking RNG. People need to stop bitching. You want your fucking free handouts, go bitch to your favorite government representative. In this case, keep playing.
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Don't forget under loot 2.0 you're guaranteed a legendary now every 2ish-hrs of gameplay. I'd hunt down the blue post on it if I wasn't so lazy, but they want to make sure that people have the mats to craft gear, and have a chance for good upgrades for higher levels of difficulty. If you're trying to play higher than torment 3 with your basic rares, and non-crafted legendaries or set items you're going to be in for a world of hurt.
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After playing the new xpac last night, legendaries were dropping more than cheap whores. Most weren't upgrades but they also start losing their legendary feel if they drop this often. I remember being excited when a yellow item would drop. Now they are nothing but crafting mat trash.
Re:Nope. (Score:4, Informative)
I'm guessing you actually haven't played the game since 2.0 rolled out. And while what you said was semi-true before the AH was removed it's not now. Otherwise you'd know that loot is rolled based on the character you're playing. While you'll see an "off" stat like "arcane orb" on your "pew-pew disintegrate" build, you're not going to see +133str on your offhand anymore. So that pretty much guts the whole "flavor of the month" thing. There really isn't a pure build out that kicks ass anyway for any class atm.
Your complaint on the story? Meh. It's the same writer as Warcraft, Diablo, and everything else. There's plenty however for you to experiment with different builds for your playstyle. For quite a while I was a orb launcher, now I'm a destrobeam wizard. On several of the bosses, on torment there was no way I could beat them without using hydra's either.
Odd that you say the game doesn't have staying power. If you base that on the number of people playing it seems to be just fine. Then again, the only thing that kept people going back to D2, was that they could hack their way to happiness.
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Otherwise you'd know that loot is rolled based on the character you're playing. While you'll see an "off" stat like "arcane orb" on your "pew-pew disintegrate" build
Heck, in RoS you have the Enchanter where you can pay mats and gold to reroll a specific attribute, so if you find an OMG good source but it has the wrong secondary skill for your build you just reroll it a few times until you get the skill you ARE using.
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Dunno what you're playing, but in two nights of play with the expansion my level 62 Monk has picked up a huge number of crazy items and they all stacked beautifully. My wife's Barbarian had the same experience. Maybe its because we get the team bonus for playing together, I dunno.
Re:Nope. (Score:5, Interesting)
That said, I spent my money on Torchlight 2, which I still find enjoyable and more creative than DIII.
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I think we might have played different Diablo 2's. The Diablo 2 I played had a level cap but you definitely weren't hitting it until long after you beat all the difficulty levels. The cap was 99, but somwhere in the early 90's you stopped getting experience for anything but Hell Baal kills. It took thousands of Hell Baal kills to get to 99.
The Auction House to me was a failure in that it was too easily accesible. There was tons of trading in Diablo 2 but you had to really go out of your way to do it in a me
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Interesting, as almost all of your complaints were actually fixed by Loot 2.0 / RoS.
I originally found D3 to be an above-average, but not amazing game.
After 2.0...items that were fixed:
grind-fest - power-levelling is completely viable now. Grab a couple of level 60 friends and you can level to 60 in a few hours
random maps - added in RoS
Loot / Botched AH - AH gone. Loot 2.0 fixes most loot issues
Different Game - D3 "feels" a lot more like a Diablo game than it did previously. If anything, it is an impro
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Amusing that a post full of blatant lies can get +5 Interesting, if it just uses a bit of proper grammar and a tab indented list.
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Always online. Battle.net, while useful for chatting, is Blizzards answer to Steam for their 4 games. You can no longer play with friends in a LAN party, or via home to home without stopping by a Blizzard server that isn't guaranteed to be there in 10 years.
Blizzard's been pretty reliable keeping old game servers up, and I feel pretty confident I'll be able to play Diablo 3 in 10 years. That fear certainly wouldn't discourage me, though it's not my favorite thing in the world.
Incessant grind-fest. While the Diablo games are known for mowing enemies down for hours on end, in order to get to the maximum level pre-expansion you need to beat the game 3 times in a row. It gets tiresome the first time you do everything again. Try levelling more than one character and maintain your sanity... go on... try. D2 had pacing such that you would hit the level cap somewhere in your 3rd play through, though you could certainly grind at a lower level to give yourself better stats in the 2nd or 3rd run.
What??? I stopped playing Diablo 2 partially because I was sick starting in the same boring Act 1 Normal monestary over and over again. You want to get to the end of Diablo 2? You have to play the exact game three times in a row, all five acts in Normal, Nightmare, Hell. The only times I
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I'm not sure there were story problems with D2; it had a good story. A better story than D2, at least
Ack, I only caught this afterwards. I meant to say:
"I'm not sure there were story problems with D3; it had a good story. A better story than D2, at least."
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If you're a fan of D2, consider trying path of exile. It's always online but it's free to play because of it, and they only sell cosmetics and nothing else to finance the game.
So costs you nothing to try it.
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For one, you h
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* Online only.
* Pay-to-win.
* The "challenging" part that the previous titles had is gone.
* Nothing new at all (mechanics-wise). Blizzard was one of those companies that ALWAYS innovated.
Re:Nope. (Score:5, Interesting)
D3 character builds were set by the game design and are very limited compared to D2 character builds.
In D2 I had a crossbow-using Necromancer. That's flat-out impossible in D3. A Witch Doctor (the D3 Necro class) can't even pick up a bow, if I recall correctly.
They severely limited player choices, while giving them free respecs. This destroyed replayability. A character of any class in D3 plays the exact same as any other character of that class. (Or could after a quick respec.) This is a fundamental problem with D3 that the expansion doesn't fix.
It does sound as if the expansion fixes the loot/drop rate fiasco, at least. That's a separate issue, and one that is more important to some players.
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Witch Doctors can definitely use some ranged weapons. I don't remember which exactly but they can use ranged weapons. Most of the ranged weapons though seem to be Demon Hunter only.
Viable class builds was definitely an issue prior to the most recent patches. But honestly you have the same problem in most games like this. There is almost always some spec that is superior to all or most others and players gravitate towards them. With the 2.0 patch they changed a lot of skills and itemization, such that now th
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no, WDs can use any ranged weapon other than the class locked ones for the DH.
weapon type simply rarely matters. its just a stat stick. class weapons simply get a few bonuses that may or may not be worthwhile.
i dont see hwo free respecs kills replayabilty. id think not having to replay an entire 60 (now 70) levels just to get a new build would dramatically increase game life and reduce player burnout.
i played Diablo3 at release. it sucked. bad. hated it. left it, dropped, didnt touch it again.
tried Path of
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My crossbow was not a stat stick in D2. I marched an army of skeletons between me and the monsters, then took the monsters out with crossbow bolts. Got to level 73 that way. It was a viable weapon choice and a viable strategy. In D3 it no longer is.
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but really, you could build a passable to good character around at least 60% of the abilities, even more once synergies were introduced
Ah, but the reality is most of those weird builds were only usable if you had certain rare, very-difficult-to-obtain-unless-you-open-your-wallet items. The enigma runeword you mention, for instance, required the Jah rune, a rune rare enough that your average player has almost no chance to see it drop even once, ever.
Many of those D2 builds also only worked in the first two-thirds of the game but became fairly unrealistic when you got to Hell mode. Sorry werewolf druid, bet you wished you'd know you'd have t
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As much as Blizzard lost my fandom with D3, (well, starting with SC2, but D3 was the last straw), I have to applaud them for Adventure Mode and the Bounty system!
I've been saying for a long time now that the post-WoW MMO would need these in a shared world. And sure, the "shared" part is the hard part, but it's good to see a revival of "randomly generate a level, then randomly generate quest-specific content, then modify the level as needed for the content". Back in the era of low-res games, when worlds we
The launch was smooth (Score:5, Interesting)
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Ditto, I was talking in clan chat about how unstable everyone thought the servers would become at midnight, one of my clannies chimed up and said he had been on the EU servers at release and they had been stable, and sure enough the NA servers never missed a beat. This was simply the smoothest and lowest bug release from Blizzard ever and probably in the top .1% for all games ever.
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As has been pointed out, that's likely because the new players that are needed to clog the servers never came.
There are two ways of doing a smooth launch. You can prepare enough servers and test them severely before hand, or you can mess your game so badly that people don't come back to play expansions.
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That's probably because there weren't that many new players coming to play it, unlike launch of D3, where everyone was expecting an awesome game and it sold millions in a very short time frame.
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they did cheat a little bit. the expansaion was basically released around a month ago, and simply had a software block on when the "act v" button would become enabled. dramataically reduced the server load and the numbers of those who didnt download/install it until yesterday.
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I found PoE boring after 16 hours played (according to Steam), I've played D3 more than that in the last week alone. I'm already to the point where I know I'll be under $.25/hour which is some cheap entertainment.
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An auto-upgrade option could make it a good party game, have the game do some quick analysis and if a drop is better overall for the character have it equip on pickup. Obviously you'd want to be able to disable it if you're at all a serious player, but for a quick fun game it would be a neat twist.
Too Little Too Late (Score:3)
Maybe if they came out with this sooner with a higher cap, but Diablo just might be done for me.
I'll give Warcraft another chance.
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Actually with the 2.0 patch that came out a few weeks back the overall DII feel has become much better. Drops are more reasonable, not being dependent on having 3 Billion gold to buy items off the AH is a plus.
I won't say it made it a whole new game, but it freshened it up enough for me to want to play through again with a new toon.
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I don't really see how the height of the level cap actually matters. What I think would matter is more than just a single extra Act worth of storyline. They did some other content including a new character but it does seem pretty shallow for a $40 expansion.
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It's not about whether the game is fixed or not, it's about the business's management decisions. Lots of people won't buy EA games, for example, regardless of the quality of the title itself, because of the business's conduct in the past. The simple act of shipping a fixed game doesn't equate to the necessary cultural shift from the developer that would merit returning to the game. It's not as if they've gotten rid of Bobby Kotick as the head of Activision Blizzard, or said they'd commit to a long-term fan-
Re:Too Little Too Late (Score:5, Insightful)
So if a developer listens to valid criticism, fixes the game, and charges you the price of a full game for the fix, then screw them?
FTFY. And yes, especially when it's not up to the level of quality we expect from companies that are known for saying "we'll release it when it's done".
I'm an old-time Warcraft, Starcraft, and general Blizzard fan, but Blizzard started burning various bridges with their fans a few years ago, maybe a year or two after the Activision merger, and for awhile the pace of their doing so seemed to be accelerating, what with the real money auction house (or pretty much anything related to D3, for that matter), the real name ID system, dropping LAN support in their games, and various other smaller things. As a company that used to be known for putting quality and their customers first, those things ran completely contrary to what attracted me to Blizzard in the first place.
It seems like they're finally getting some sense back, but they'll need to re-earn my trust before I start throwing money their way again. I haven't purchased anything from Blizzard since World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade, and I currently don't have any plans to do so in the foreseeable future. And because most of my friends are feeling just as burned by the company, the peer pressure we used to apply on each other to pick up the latest Blizzard game has simply evaporated. We've moved on to other games from other companies.
Blizzard's not dead to us, but it certainly isn't anything special any longer.
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While I've played a fair amount of Warcraft, Diablo, and Starcraft my main interaction with Blizzard was with WoW and so I'm not really here to talk about D3. I only played D2 a bit and have not even watched a LetsPlay of D3 just to give an idea of my interest in the series at this point.
What I would like to say is that it is less than a year since Activision/Blizzard has detached themselves from Vivendi Universal. And as such there may be hope for them going back to some of the older better ways.
IIRC Viv
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I can't blame you for being wary, but they're definitely working in the correct direction. Can't really say if they're "there" yet ... that's a bit subjective, but it's a drastic improvement over D3's original release
Determining whether or not it's worth the full price (main game + expansion) is an exercise for the end user ... but for my money, it's $40 well spent (p.s. that's 66% of the price of a full game these days. Just sayin)
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Yeah, I'm tentatively hopeful that things will continue to get better. Everything I'm hearing for RoS has been encouraging, so I don't want to suggest that they're not making moves in the right direction, but as we're fond of saying around here, "an anecdote does not a trend make". RoS is a start. I'm curious to see what's next and after that.
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Well technically Patch 2.0 was a start. RoS is next ...
Patch 2.0 introduced all of the changes to loot and leveling and the difficulty system about a month ago. Those changes are available without the expansion. If you only have the original game, you can log on and play through the original levels with the new system.
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The developer *claims* to have listened to criticism, and *claims* to have fixed the game.
By not purchasing the 'fix', the players are sending the message that 'We Don't Trust The Developer Anymore'.
How do they regain our trust? If things actually are fixed and the developers are actually listening, word of mouth will eventually filter down to those of us that hold a grudge. It will take time.
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Loot 2.0 and the new more granular monster scaling did fix most of the brokenness with D3, there no longer an item wall at Act 2 Inferno where you can't progress without grinding for gold to buy items you have almost zero chance of finding yourself, now you find actual upgrades on a fairly regular basis that allow you to continue on to higher difficulties and you don't run into this steep cliff where you go from slaughtering monsters to being slaughtered through no fault of your gameplay but rather bad item
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When you release a game, make sure it's ready for shipping. If you don't, I'm not gonna fork over more just for the patch that should've been in there from the start.
Fuck the haters... (Score:5, Funny)
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and the pillar of light. Oooh shiny!
I'm rather fond of the sound of the character reaching Level 3 of Nephalem Glory too.
Some of the character/NPC phrases stick in your head too:
Templar: Dark Magic bars our way, but the will of a Templar is STRONGER!
DH: VENGEANCE!
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Hard to beat "Stay a While and Listen." as an ear worm.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Diablo II? Bah. The original, accept no imitations:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
I'm a Modern Gamer (Score:1, Funny)
Here's how I see the world:
1. Everything sucks
2. I will not pay for anything, no matter what the quality to cost ratio is. Any game with a price tag is the man trying to keep me down. In fact, if daily raging taser-sex with a different college's cheerleaders followed by a 29-foot roast beef buffet were priced at $0.02 and I had a half-off coupon, I'd still bitch like the entitled little fuck I am.
3. Everything sucks
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Here's how I see the world:
1. Everything sucks
2. I will not pay for anything, no matter what the quality to cost ratio is. Any game with a price tag is the man trying to keep me down. In fact, if daily raging taser-sex with a different college's cheerleaders followed by a 29-foot roast beef buffet were priced at $0.02 and I had a half-off coupon, I'd still bitch like the entitled little fuck I am.
3. Everything sucks
Seems to me that sex with an entire cheerleading squad and a 29-foot roast beef buffet are the same thing.
Not sure how the taser is involved.
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You gotta cook the beef somehow.
Ok, well, maybe not "gotta" [wikipedia.org]...
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come on, this sarcastic commenter isn't a troll, they've got that entitled attitude down pat. We sure see a lot of that attitude in the D3 forums.
something I never thought I'd say (Score:1, Informative)
I played a *lot* of Diablo 3 after it came out and, after bleeding my way through half of the game on inferno difficulty, I realized that whatever magic Diablo 2 had that made me want to keep playing for years just wasn't present in Diablo 3. The game wasn't fun so I stopped.
Fast forward to a couple weeks ago and I decided to log in again just to see if things were still as bad as I remembered and... to my utter amazement, Blizzard had actually fixed the game. It's fun again- they expanded difficulty sett
D3 was fun, expansion probably will be too (Score:5, Interesting)
I bought Diablo 3 and I got about what I expected from it - 60-ish fun hours. I expect I'll get about the same from the expansion pack. At under a buck and hour it's cheap entertainment. That's how video games worked for most of my life.
What got me was seeing people putting in hundreds of hours, and then complaining on the forums about how some aspect of the game annoys them. "Blizzard better fix this or I'm done with Diablo!" I don't want to come off like an aging hater. You know, "Kids today with their..." But it sure feels like the stereotyped sense of entitlement we ascribe to millenials.
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What got me was seeing people putting in hundreds of hours, and then complaining on the forums about how some aspect of the game annoys them. "Blizzard better fix this or I'm done with Diablo!"
Yeah People with multiple Paragon 100 characters saying that sort of thing made me laugh, though I only started playing it with the PS3 version.
From someone who gave up on the game... (Score:5, Informative)
1) With the AH gone, way more legendaries and meaningful items drop.
2) The drops (both rare and legendary) are often more meaningful as they cater the stats to your class for the most part.
3) All items (including legendaries) roll max-level with appropriate stats for the person who made the game.
4) +Skill and +DmgType has become very prevelent stats on many pieces now, making it less about sheet DPS and cookie cutter builds and more about building a spec that compliments your playstyle and the gear you've found.
5) Paragon levels are shared across all characters so no more grinding paragon for all your toons.
6) Paragon points are used to supplement stats like Int/Dex/Str, Vitality, Life on Hit, Crit Dmg, etc, allowing you to customize your build further and fill in the blanks your gear lacks.
All in all, I really like the changes and what little I've seen that they added to the Xpax (namely the Mystic for customizing drops in both appearance and stats) I like as well.
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sounds good.. thanks for the info, i got my son the expac early for the LOL clone perk blizz gave with it but now (since most of the items that bugged me too are addressed) I might have to grab a copy too...
Re: From someone who gave up on the game... (Score:2)
I picked the game back up last weekend and had a pretty identical experience. Quality drops and interesting legendaries that affect skills and game mechanics in fun, useful but not really game breaking ways. I also found far more crafting recipes dropping than I remember. I'm definitely excited to get into the expansion as soon as I can.
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1 - I don't think I'm seeing any more items actually drop, in fact I'm seen a good bit of evidence to the contrary. On the upside the quality of drops is better because of the "smart loot" feature and the general revamp of items and their properties.
2 - That is the "smart loot" system which for rares has something like a 20% chance to affect an item. Legendaries seem to nearly always be smart loot drops, which in combination with the revamp of legendaries in general makes for better items.
My only complaint
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^^^this.
Re:From someone who gave up on the game... (Score:4, Interesting)
there are Legendary [orange/brown] and Set [green]items
I assume that is what you are talking about.
Playing for 40 hours without a drop is supposed to be impossible.
There is a timer called "safety net" that is ticking away any time you are in combat killing monsters. If you get a legendary or set item, the timer goes to 0. If the timer gets to 2 hours, your chance to get a legendary item steadily ticks up until it is at 100%, then you get a drop, then it goes back to 0.
the most you can play (actually play, not just sit there) is just over 2 hours before getting a legendary. If not, you should record a video of you playing for 5 hours straight with no drops and put it on the youtubes, because you are bugged.
Blizz claims most people will not have to rely on the safety net, only the truly unlucky... but my experience is, you can set your watch by the 2 hour gap between legendaries.
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Interesting, I have been following the d3 news but I did not know that, where did you get this info? Also you have any reliable place I can look into the mechanics of the stats for patch 2.0, most sites are out of date now.
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That seems very strange. I get at least one legendary almost anytime I play (around 2-3 hour play sessions).
From what I understand, there is actually a legendary "timer" that increases the chance of finding a legendary as you play. Based on this [incgamers.com], it should be nearly impossible to play 10+ hours without finding a legendary.
Diablo guarantees you a legendary the first time you kill him (after loot 2.0)
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Diablo guarantees you a legendary the first time you kill him (after loot 2.0)....you've gone 40+ hours and haven't reached Diablo yet?
That got patched in later, it was originally the Skeleton King that had a guaranteed Legendary drop. I know my husband didn't get a legendary on Diablo the first 2 times he killed her (spoilers sweetie ;P ) since loot 2.0.
He has had a bucket of legendaries drop overall though. And at least 1 set item. I got a plans for a L21 Set the other night, not sure if they would be worth making for an alt. Given how quickly you level now, they would be replaced before I could earn the materials back. Might make them j
Bigger Party Size is what I want! (Score:2)
On our LAN gaming nights, we frequently have to divide up into 2 groups that can't play alongside each other.
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If people are throwing Blizzards and Meteors all the time, they're "DOIN IT WRONG" and probably playing at too high a difficulty.
Have you tried turning down the graphics?
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Traditionally in an ARPG, you don't cast your powerful spells all the time, you rely on your standard attacks You use spells like Meteor on Bosses/mini-bosses/elite mooks/overwhelming numbers only.
It'd be like a wizard not upgrading his weapon in D1 and relying on a Level 1 chain Lightning and having to go back to town every minute for mana potions.
PoE $0 D3 $60 + $40 (Score:2)
I've found Path of Exile to be the spiritual successor to Diablo 2.
Diablo 3 is more polished, has way better art style (aka "Blizzard" style), and is meant for casual playing.
* http://gdcvault.com/play/10153... [gdcvault.com]
However the game play is way better in Path of Exile (barring the desync, and single-threaded game) TONS of build diversity, named and colored stash tabs, way better end-game system (maps). Plus you can't beat the price. :-)
D3 on the consoles is getting better -- definitely will be checking out RoS t
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So A is better than B, if you ignore the crippled engine problems? Good sell!
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Both D3 and P3 are good games. They have both have pros & cons.
If you unable to appreciate someone being open and honest about both games strengths and weaknesses then I humbly suggest you go back to fantasy land where negative facts are ignored.
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Not a big fan of Exiles, learn and reroll talent system that has interesting options, and flat out bad ones that require a prohibitive amount of resources to fix to the point where you are encouraged to reroll.
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Yeah...played Exile up to the point where I realized I'd screwed up my talent tree. Then realized it would be prohibitively expensive for me to fix it. Moved on.
Yes, Diablo 3 is more casual. I like that. Strangely, I want games to be fun, not work. The minute I need to spend offline time researching how to best min/max my video game character is the minute I stop playing. Some people enjoy doing that...but I'm just not one of them.
A new Diablo expansion? (Score:2)
I the people playing are both going to be delighted!
I don't buy video games any more (Score:2)
I don't buy video games any more because I'm not interested in "always online" crap. The time I most want to play a game is when I'm visiting for a few days somewhere, which means no internet connectivity -- just my laptop and headphones.
If I want to play a game online, I'll play a game online. Otherwise shove your DRM in your anal sphincter and rotate it rapidly.
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Luckily there are enough offline games to last a lifetime.
Re:And it costs almost as much as a new game... (Score:5, Interesting)
Through Normal difficulty, Path of Exile is an amazing game. The character build paths are numerous and distinctive, the item/gem mechanics are interesting, and the skill tree is a genuine work of art. It beats D3 soundly.
But after the end of Normal, PoE starts to seem a little lackluster. I finished Normal at level 35, and I won't see any random maps until the end of Merciless at about level 65. So that's 30 levels -- and two full playthroughs -- to go with no new content. Add to that the fact that character builds that worked at level 35 will probably fail at high level, and specific unique items may be required for high-level builds. I just don't feel compelled to stay with the game. The high-level PoE game looks very intimidating and not very fun.
That's not to say D3 is any better; it's still grinding the same content with very little fresh loot. And D3 (plus the expansion) is expensive while PoE is free. I just wish there was more to do at high levels in both games. Adventure mode sounds like a step in the right direction.
For casual players who don't intend to play through either game the expected three times, I heartily recommend Path of Exile. The new D3 content doesn't make up for the flaws in D3 -- the characters, skills, and combat mechanics are still poorly designed and lack the appeal of D2. PoE has that appeal, plus some innovative charm of its own.
For the heavily invested type of player who loves the grind...I don't know which to recommend. I'm not that type of player.
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Because PoE is free, and requiring online connection is their business model to keep it free.
Diablo is pay to buy, and until recently also pay to win on top of that. All while requiring online connection specifically to facilitate pay to win.
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I'm not complaining about online only. It just doesn't matter to me.
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'Content' includes many things -- storyline, enemies, zones, and *character build options*. Being able to replay the game using an entirely different strategy is a form of additional content. That's what I love most in these type of games.
PoE has that in spades, at least through the first one or two difficulty levels. (At high levels, only a few strategies are viable, which is why the game starts to get more tiresome.) It also has enough storyline lore and enemy diversity to be consistently interesting.
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It's called the Crusader [wikia.com]. I was going to link directly to the Bliz gameplay guide but was still getting the press release in my hasty search string.