Diablo III

[The Utilitarian]

Magic broadsword, imparts +1 sharpness to fists.

Heh, except who would ever make such a thing, and for that matter, why would he bother holding it in his idle animation anyways? Madness.

[Will]

Finished my first Witch Doctor playthrough. Can't say I enjoyed it much, I don't really like most of the abilities. Maybe it'll be more interesting in the full game? I loved the Necro in D2, and Witch Doctor does a lot of the same stuff.

[Izawwlgood]

I think if anything, the WD plays exactly like a Warlock.

Personally, I found it more entertaining than either melee class or the Wizard. There's a bit more... I dunno, flexibility? it felt to the actions. It wasn't just 'BASH ALL THE THINGS' or 'ELECTROCUTE ALL THE THINGS'.

[Will]

Yeah, I can see that. It just felt...ineffective to me. It has all these crazy options but none of them are as effective as BASH ALL THE THINGS or DISINTEGRATE ALL THE THINGS

[skeptical scientist]

How much did how a character played in act 1 normal tell you about how they played later on in D2? I would think D2 would be similar; there were several classes that weren't much fun at the start, but got a lot more interesting later on. The best way to start the game as a sorceress or necromancer was to join up with a group. (On the other hand, martial-arts assassins were super fun in act 1.)

[Izawwlgood]

I thought the level 13 WD was crazy effective. The dogs are tearing up anything they come in contact with, Haunt is doing crazy damage, that Fire Bomb is at worst two shotting things in a large radius, or those Fire Bats are destroying everything nearby. I'm super pumped for the WD. Lots of AoE, lots of DoTs (I <3 dots)

Also, I think it's important to not over copy the templates from D2. My necromancer did nothing but walk around with an army, alternating between raising new corpses and spamming that spirit spell. It was neat, but A ) incredibly ineffective on bosses with decent AoE, and B ) a bit tedious.

[Gelsamel]

How much did how a character played in act 1 normal tell you about how they played later on in D2? I would think D2 would be similar; there were several classes that weren't much fun at the start, but got a lot more interesting later on. The best way to start the game as a sorceress or necromancer was to join up with a group. (On the other hand, martial-arts assassins were super fun in act 1.)

I've not played D3 at all but isn't that what they're trying to charge? How you don't have to level up to 30+ to start having all your moves?

[Will]

I thought the level 13 WD was crazy effective. The dogs are tearing up anything they come in contact with, Haunt is doing crazy damage, that Fire Bomb is at worst two shotting things in a large radius, or those Fire Bats are destroying everything nearby. I'm super pumped for the WD. Lots of AoE, lots of DoTs (I <3 dots)

Level 13 *anything* is crazy effective, because the beta includes the parts that are intended for levels 1-10. If you're grinding up to level 13, you're going to be way ahead of the difficulty curve.

[Izawwlgood]

Of course Will, but my point is the WD has plenty of DESTROY ALL THE THINGS, as well as subtlety in ways that the Mage and Barb don't. I felt.

I've not played D3 at all but isn't that what they're trying to charge? How you don't have to level up to 30+ to start having all your moves?

I'm guessing stuff is going to shift around more, but my hunch is as various things become problematic (Roots/Freezes/swarms) abilities to mitigate will pop up.

[Chen]

I agree with Will here. The WD just felt slow at killing things. DOTs are nice for sustained damage (usually) but in Diablo they just feel slow. The dogs also feel slow. A barbarian just leaps into a group swings a few times and everything is dead. The wizard can just electrocute them all or disintegrate them. The witch doctor still gets them dead, but it seems to take so much longer. Maybe as things start getting more HP it'll feel better, but in the beta its probably my least favourite class by far.

[Lostdreams]

As long as that shitty 8x minion damage doesn't show in D3 the witchdoctor should be doing better in boss fights. So long as the mana hold he can keep things at bay and just recast minions as needed.

Higher difficulty is where the necromancer/witchdoctor really shines. With a wall of minions he is usually safe where a sorcerer/wizard or barbarian can be overrun by the right type of enemy pretty quickly. Of course, with the right item build(if those types of items are in D3), a barbarian, sorceress, or any character could withstand many of the things they wouldn't be able to or were granted skills not normally available to them because of the unique item abilities.

Auradins were busted; I think it was like 7 or 8 auras at once if you included the merc.

[Izawwlgood]

The WD just felt slow at killing things.

I dunno, I felt the Fire Bomb did better damage than Electrocute all told. The Dogs are good for clearing stragglers, and Haunt was good for laying a DoT on a tougher hero. Ultimately, our metric for assessing these things is kind of wonky, given, as Will pointed out, level 13 running around what's available in the beta is OP.

[Lucrece]

I liked the DH, although some of its attacks felt redundant. Fire arrow vs. Chakrams -- chakrams go through enemies as well and cover a wider area, and as far as I could tell the damage of the chakrams was actually better. For Hatred builders, the explosive bola shot seemed weak to me-- did similar damage to the others, except its effect was delayed whereas I could snipe away with snaring shot to perma snare opponents or use the magic arrow to do aoe seeking damage.

As far as discipline skills, Vault was not very attractive to me. It cost a crapload of Discipline when you could otherwise lay a trap for aoe snare or slot Evasive shot that would shoot you back away from enemies while remaining offensive. Shadow Power seemed like the best slot to take -- spam Hatred-costing abilities and then activate shadow power for huge speed boost and spam hatred builders to fill the hatred bar back up in just seconds.

The grenades are meh. Shorter and more whimsical range than just spamming my chakrams through a crowd of mobs.

[Izawwlgood]

The grenades are meh. Shorter and more whimsical range than just spamming my chakrams through a crowd of mobs.

You should see the WD's poison frogs or spiders. Laughable.

[Chen]

I just read some of the latest patch notes and noticed they removed the Cauldron of Jordon. Was there any justification for this? Did they not like the fact you could salvage things in the field? It just seems like it adds more tedium of having to go back to town to do things. And yet in the same patch they removed the Nephalim Altars so you can once again respec in the field. It just seems confusing to me.

[The Utilitarian]

I just read some of the latest patch notes and noticed they removed the Cauldron of Jordon. Was there any justification for this? Did they not like the fact you could salvage things in the field? It just seems like it adds more tedium of having to go back to town to do things. And yet in the same patch they removed the Nephalim Altars so you can once again respec in the field. It just seems confusing to me.

The reasoning behind the removal of the Cauldron was actually supposed to be for preventing slowdown of the gameplay. The idea is, if you go to town, it's a break in the game. Everyone generally follows suits, you buy, sell, grab a pop from the fridge and then back to action. On the other hand, having your crafting and selling in your inventory meant that players were constantly stopping to flush their inventories individually and out of sync with eachother, which was causing folks to fall behind other folks at roughly the same rate you would if, for instance, in D2 you didn't have Cain to identify things and people you were playing with were occasionally stopping to manually use identify scrolls on everything in their inventories.

The other reason given is (apparently) useless items are a big part of the Diablo "experience" and the dev team feels they should really, honestly, be useless. A quote was something to the effect of "if people start picking up and selling white items past the first few levels, we'll make them EVEN MORE worthless until they stop." Evidently those items are really just meant to be there so that when something magic DOES come up you'll be more excited for it, or something to that effect. I imagine having the ability to sell any item right out of your inventory was causing people to pick up every rusty shortsword they came across, which again was likely slowing down gameplay.

On the topic of recent changes though: I am 100% behind the most recent (saturday) changes to the Rune system from items to an integrated advancement system. It's fabulous to have new variations on your abilities unlocking as you level up. You have greater freedom to switch between skill versions and try things out, and you feel like you're unlocking a lot more advancement per level, so you never have a dead level, and rarely one where something interesting doesn't happen. I suppose the trade off is that actual skill unlocks come less frequently but I think I'm ok with that.

[Izawwlgood]

On the topic of recent changes though: I am 100% behind the most recent (saturday) changes to the Rune system from items to an integrated advancement system.

Is this in the beta? I haven't checked in in a while.

I imagine having the ability to sell any item right out of your inventory was causing people to pick up every rusty shortsword they came across, which again was likely slowing down gameplay.

Do you mean cauldron? I don't think you could sell items unless at a merchant.

[Will]

On the topic of recent changes though: I am 100% behind the most recent (saturday) changes to the Rune system from items to an integrated advancement system.

Is this in the beta? I haven't checked in in a while.

According to the patch notes, yes. As he said, they're not items anymore, but integrated in the system, and the first ones are unlocked at level 6, so they're part of the beta.

[The Utilitarian]

On the topic of recent changes though: I am 100% behind the most recent (saturday) changes to the Rune system from items to an integrated advancement system.

Is this in the beta? I haven't checked in in a while.

I imagine having the ability to sell any item right out of your inventory was causing people to pick up every rusty shortsword they came across, which again was likely slowing down gameplay.

Do you mean cauldron? I don't think you could sell items unless at a merchant.

Well I'm sort of bundling the Cauldron of Jordan and the Nephalim Cube or whatever it was together, the dual purpose of being able to sell and break down to crafting materials items into the field, which I believe were both removed together.

[Chen]

The reasoning behind the removal of the Cauldron was actually supposed to be for preventing slowdown of the gameplay. The idea is, if you go to town, it's a break in the game. Everyone generally follows suits, you buy, sell, grab a pop from the fridge and then back to action. On the other hand, having your crafting and selling in your inventory meant that players were constantly stopping to flush their inventories individually and out of sync with eachother, which was causing folks to fall behind other folks at roughly the same rate you would if, for instance, in D2 you didn't have Cain to identify things and people you were playing with were occasionally stopping to manually use identify scrolls on everything in their inventories.

This seems like an odd justification. Groups will rarely have their inventories all fill up at the exact same time, so I fail to see how its any more game breaking than people breaking things down in their inventory. Especially considering early levels where blue items can be useful and you'll want to see exactly what some are after picking them up. The extra time to sell/break down the rest of the inventory whenever you do that would be pretty minor I'd think. Whatever, it'll just mean that the early levels, where you need gold/components, that I'll be town portalling back to town every time my inventory is full.

On the topic of recent changes though: I am 100% behind the most recent (saturday) changes to the Rune system from items to an integrated advancement system. It's fabulous to have new variations on your abilities unlocking as you level up. You have greater freedom to switch between skill versions and try things out, and you feel like you're unlocking a lot more advancement per level, so you never have a dead level, and rarely one where something interesting doesn't happen. I suppose the trade off is that actual skill unlocks come less frequently but I think I'm ok with that.

Hmm haven't seen these changes yet. I guess I should fire up the beta and see whats new.

[Intrigued]

This seems like an odd justification. Groups will rarely have their inventories all fill up at the exact same time, so I fail to see how its any more game breaking than people breaking things down in their inventory.

That's exactly what he's saying though. Going to town offers a natural break where everyone deals with their inventory at once. When people DON'T fill up at the same time, everyone is taking breaks in the fight at different points, and it messes up the flow. Not to say this is true or not, since I haven't played, but yeah, that's exactly what he's saying.

[Izawwlgood]

Groups will rarely have their inventories all fill up at the exact same time,

Not that I disagree, but remember, the majority of drops are handled per person now, not 'available to all!'.

[Chen]

Groups will rarely have their inventories all fill up at the exact same time,

Not that I disagree, but remember, the majority of drops are handled per person now, not 'available to all!'.

True which helps a bit I suppose but there is still variance in drop rates I'd imagine. Over the long terms they probably stay the same. E.g., if all you pick up are legendary items I'd imagine each player would fill up their inventories at approximately the same rate (all other things being equal). But once you get down to the more common grey/white/blue drops I'd imagine the variance would be bigger and people will fill up at different times. Which means people would go to town at different times which still breaks up the action unless everyone goes back at once.

[rigwarl]

I can definitely attest to this being true as I have played through Diablo2 on LAN with two different groups of people, and each time we had someone, lets say Joe, who would constantly lag behind and we're all thinking "hey, wait, where's Joe?" and then a few seconds later Joe shouts across the hallway "hey does anyone need a +2 to light radius ring?"

[Izawwlgood]

Yeah, there's a balance to be struck between ignoring everything to beeline towards more advanced stuff, and picking up stuff that's close for the sake of having extra coinage.

[Lostdreams]

In D2 junk sale pickup order was wands and staves first(small and expensive), followed by amulets and rings(smallest and moderately expensive), and then armors. I expect the same style of GP-per-inventory-unit based hoarding, unless they somehow make the inefficient items useful.

[Izawwlgood]

Well the idea now is that you can dismantle items into parts for crafting. My guess is this is going to be adjusted for size.

[Will]

Also, pretty much everything takes up two squares in your inventory, except belts, rings and amulets which take one. That means there'll probably be less variance in how quickly your inventory fills up.

[rigwarl]

Man, I cannot wait for this game to be released.

[Izawwlgood]

So are all the runes in for all the available skills? I'd be incredibly interested in checking out the variants.

[The Utilitarian]

So are all the runes in for all the available skills? I'd be incredibly interested in checking out the variants.

evidently, though with only the first two hours of normal difficulty available to play roughly I think it will take some time for people to grind up to most of the variants. That said there's a fair amount of video footage of various runed abilties already out there if you look for it (either released promotionally, or from people getting ahold of the runes in the beta previously)

[Izawwlgood]

EDIT: Just read the wiki... Weird, lots of drastic changes from what they proposed.
EDITEDIT: New skill layout is great, very sensible. While it reduces the amount of funky slotting options people can take, it's more straight forward and shows how spells are supposed to serve certain roles.

The new rune system, however, is a disgraceful disappointment. The old system would have allowed amazing customization, while the new system is basically just 'abilities powerup over time'. Very lame, very mindless.

[Chen]

The new rune system, however, is a disgraceful disappointment. The old system would have allowed amazing customization, while the new system is basically just 'abilities powerup over time'. Very lame, very mindless.

How does the existing implementation not allow amazing customization? There are still the same number of runes available and later runes are not necessarily better than earlier ones. They could have just added a level restriction on found runes and I imagine the system would have been nearly identical. You want a specific rune you either farm for it, or you go buy it on the AH. Now you just have a level restriction on them.

[The Utilitarian]

The new rune system, however, is a disgraceful disappointment. The old system would have allowed amazing customization, while the new system is basically just 'abilities powerup over time'. Very lame, very mindless.

You're completely misunderstanding the new rune system if you think that sir. ALL the same customization options for skills are still there. All it is now is that instead of finding an "indigo" rune for your skill to make it change in a certain way, now after level X you unlock the ability to chose that skill change, and you can use it or not use it as you like. You still chose which versions of different skills you want to use in exactly the same way as you used to, and the only difference in those versions is now when you select an alternate skill ability, it functions at its best right away, instead of initially finding tiny crappy versions of the indigo runes and having to constantly be on the hunt for the "perfect" indigo rune, which keeps you from ending up in a problem where you have a really nice alabaster rune but you really WANTED to use the indigo version but haven't found the better runestone yet.

I suggest you read it over again.

[Izawwlgood]

I was misunderstanding it; it appeared as though you could activate multiple runes per skill, so that simply as you leveled up, skills became more and more powerful, with no customization. If you can still only slot one rune per skill, then that's fine, and this system seems a totally reasonable improvement. I read a couple complaints from other people stating just this, which probably led me to believe this was how the system was functioning. I don't believe there are any skills that unlock two runes by 13th, but I'd have to check again.

[mfb]

IIRC, there is one skill for the wizard. But you always have the option "no rune" available, so you can see how the choice works even with lower levels.
The rune system would be a bit pointless if you could choose all runes at the same time.

[The Utilitarian]

IIRC, there is one skill for the wizard. But you always have the option "no rune" available, so you can see how the choice works even with lower levels.
The rune system would be a bit pointless if you could choose all runes at the same time.

You can unlock two runes for Magic Missile as wizard during the beta, though the first one is just "does a little more damage" so it's hardly very exciting.

Also, though I imagine later runes might change things good GOD is Electrocute miles better than any of the other Signature spells.

[mfb]

GOD is Electrocute miles better than any of the other Signature spells.

And "removed" (moved to level >13) with patch 14 . I noticed it when I tried to activate it again, after testing the cold beam (forgot the name).
The doubled radius for the arcane orb was removed, too. Luckily, I did not change that, so my wizard still has this rune .

[The Utilitarian]

GOD is Electrocute miles better than any of the other Signature spells.

And "removed" (moved to level >13) with patch 14 . I noticed it when I tried to activate it again, after testing the cold beam (forgot the name).
The doubled radius for the arcane orb was removed, too. Luckily, I did not change that, so my wizard still has this rune .

I can see why tho that double radius arcane orb was stupid good.

[Drumheller769]

Confirmed for May 15th!