Diablo III

[Izawwlgood]

HOLY FUCKING SHIT THATS RIGHT AFTER MY QUALIFIER EXAM I AM NEVER INTERACTING WITH PEOPLE AFTER THAT UNTIL I FINISH DIABLO

[The Utilitarian]

HOLY FUCKING SHIT THATS RIGHT AFTER MY QUALIFIER EXAM I AM NEVER INTERACTING WITH PEOPLE AFTER THAT UNTIL I FINISH DIABLO

SHUT DOWN EVERYTHING (That does not involve playing Diablo 3)

[Diadem]

may 15th! Wow! Only 2 more months!

Well I know what i'm going to do next summer!

[jawdisorder]

Conveniently located right when my exams start.

[Nylonathatep]

Pre-ordered, and it's two weeks before my exam.

I'll have enough will power not to open the box and install until I finish my exams thou. Did the same thing with Starcraft 2.

[SHISHKABOB]

My point is more that nothing in the game is really barred to you if you don't grind for gear, which is in stark contrast to WoW. While Diablo games are certainly very gear dependent, if you make a run through the game, the gear you have will likely be sufficient to start you into Nightmare. If you finish in Nightmare, the gear you acquired will likely be sufficient to start you in Hell.

Because Nightmare, Hell, and in D3, Inferno, modes are simply the game again, but harder, I'm not really convinced that gear grinding, while fun for some, is an integral part of the game process itself. There'll be plenty of people who get a character to lvl 40-60 and finish the game, and are simply done with that character. Compared, again, to WoW, where upon reaching the level cap, the game 'begins' for most; it's simply a different focus.

okay, that makes sense to me. I'll be honest and say that I never played too much D2 and mostly coasted through the game with the easiest class ever (summoning necromancer hell yes). I will say, though, that I did also find that resistances were a major thing in the game. One time I tried playing as a barb and just farted around. I got to Act IV and I got creamed hardcore by those guys with the flaming breath attacks (venom knights?). Since I didn't have the fire resistance required to survive those attacks, I was basically toast, heh.

Basically, there was almost no way for me to win the game at that point. I had hit a big fat wall that I could not defeat. The only way I could have gotten past it was if I had gone back and ground through some boss levels until I found some nice socketed armor and a bunch of rubies to make some reasonably good fire resistance.

Items are extremely important in D2, and I'm not sure if I agree 100% that in every case or playthrough that the game will end up giving you the stuff you need to defeat it.

[WarDaft]

Yeah, barbarians are basically just damage multipliers on legs in DII, you need something to make them work, and more something is better. A Lightning Fury Amazon with a poison backup... yeah, you could go all the way through the whole game without picking up anything but gold and potions.

[Izawwlgood]

Basically, there was almost no way for me to win the game at that point

Some of that is speccing; I recall there being a barb ability that boosted your resistances? If you had specced for that a bit more, you'd have been fine. I had a similar problem on my first shot at a Necromancer. There's an ability that boosts the resistances of your summoned critters, and I largely ignored it until about 50th, at which point I realized how important it was and basically just put pts in it for the next 20 levels. In terms of progress, you could always just grind for levels and try and power your way through; I remember having a similar issue with a wizardy lady and just grinding out another 10 levels or so and breezing on through.

The point I was making is that disliking the game because you don't have the patience to grind bosses for optimized gear drops is fine, but really only a small part of the game, and a part that isn't really even necessary for enjoying 99.9% of the games content. Compared to WoW, that had significantly more content in the post level max side of things, and bars you from this content until you have the gear to complete it.

[mfb]

In normal difficulty, you can boost your resistances with simple magic stuff from NPCs. Later, getting a shield with 3 perfect diamonds and/or some runewords with +all resistances is quite easy.

>> I recall there being a barb ability that boosted your resistances?
With level 30, which requires some levelling for act 4 normal if you play solo.

>> A Lightning Fury Amazon with a poison backup... yeah, you could go all the way through the whole game without picking up anything but gold and potions.
And javelins . Several builds can be played without any equipment or with really simple stuff (like non-magic javelins). In hardcore. But I think you need some experience with the game to do this.

[Izawwlgood]

With level 30, which requires some levelling for act 4 normal if you play solo.

Right, but resistances won't be an issue on normal play. There's no way you aren't past level 30 by the time you get to nightmare, when resistances become more important.

[Obby]

With level 30, which requires some levelling for act 4 normal if you play solo.

Right, but resistances won't be an issue on normal play. There's no way you aren't past level 30 by the time you get to nightmare, when resistances become more important.

Well they could be in act 5. The fight with Baal's minions, each one of them can deal a different kind of elemental damage. It's definitely helpful to have resistances, since at least 2 of the minion groups spit fire, one is lightning enchanted, one has cold damage in their attacks, and one has a lot of poison.

It's not required, but certainly resistance will help survivability.

[mosc]

It's not the fact that they attack with elemental attacks, that's normal. It's the fact that higher difficulties have inherent elemental resistance reductions which makes those attacks no longer balanced in nightmare/hell without additional resistances yourself. Elemental attacks at zero resistance are never one of the major threats at any difficulty level. You just need resistances in nightmare/hell to get back to zero. Is more nice? Sure. But no more so than block chance or physical damage resistance. Probably way less so than those two.

[Intrigued]

Never really considered the impact of resistances while playing d2 normal. Not having them requires faster potion usage, quicker reactions, and better strategy (if you get swarmed by a bunch of high elemental dmg dealers, you may have to split them and kill a few at a time). It is really amazing how much resistances do make a difference though. I don't think anything is impossible to beat on normal with level appropriate gear (found through questing/leveling, not grinding for gear) and a decent build. I would think you should've been able to go back and forth to the shops a few times and been able to pick up some cheap fire resist that gave you enough to deal with those guys (even if it weakened your dps), if they were killing you too quick for you to react. Mercenaries were also obviously available to fill the gaps in your playstyle.

I do think the elemental attacks do pretty high damage, and the thing in nightmare is that everything is going to be doing more damage and harder to kill. The instagib factor of high dmg elemental attacks is just increased to the point where (in addition to the -resists) if you can't manage to keep out of monsters' range, you need to grab some resists to be able to take a punch.

[Diadem]

In Diablo II normal difficulty is quite easy with all characters. Nightmare difficulty is a lot tougher, and probably requires some minor grinding to get enough levels and gear, but is still very doable.

Hell difficulty though is another story entirely. Soloing hell is basically impossible with several classes, unless you have absolutely godlike gear. Take the sorcerer. A sorcerer spec'ed for 1 element will do ridiculous damage with that element. But you won't be able to defeat monsters immune to that element. So you have to spec in 2 elements, and that brings you all the way through both normal and nightmare. In hell however you'll run into lots and lots of double-immune mobs. To solo hell as a sorcerer, you need to spec in all three elements. That simply is not doable without divine gear.

Paladin was the easiest class to solo hell difficulty (that's why all the bots were always paladin) but you were restricted to one single spell (holy hammer, which deals 50% physical and 50% holy damage. Almost no mobs are immune to holy, and only 1 optional boss is immune to both holy and physical damage). Necromancer is also quite doable because your skeletal archers do damage of all elements, but soloing bosses as a necro is a bitch.

All other classes you run into a wall on hell difficulty that you won't be able to pass unless you have both very good gear, and already started spec'ing specifically towards being able to do hell back when you started. I do hope that D3 will be better in that regard. I guess being allowed to change your spec already helps a lot.

I do think the elemental attacks do pretty high damage, and the thing in nightmare is that everything is going to be doing more damage and harder to kill. The instagib factor of high dmg elemental attacks is just increased to the point where (in addition to the -resists) if you can't manage to keep out of monsters' range, you need to grab some resists to be able to take a punch.

On hell difficulty having max resistances (75%) is pretty much mandatory for all classes. And since you start at -100% for hell, you need 175% bonus to all resistances. But if you keep a look out for good gear, that wasn't actually too hard to get.

[mosc]

I always found the main threats in D2 were related to the enemy's immunity. All mele classes hated the immune to physical with a passion. It wasn't the damage cut that was such a big deal, it was the lack of lifelink from them. Spellcasters hated elemental immunity to the element of their focus. An unlucky dual immunity would be nearly impossible to bring down. Knock-lock was also a major killer in act 5 (3 barbarians, baal's minions). The only time I remember elemental attacks really hurting when the enemy had a necro that cursed me with the resistance lowering effect.

[Spambot5546]

Hell difficulty though is another story entirely. Soloing hell is basically impossible with several classes, unless you have absolutely godlike gear. Take the sorcerer. A sorcerer spec'ed for 1 element will do ridiculous damage with that element. But you won't be able to defeat monsters immune to that element. So you have to spec in 2 elements, and that brings you all the way through both normal and nightmare. In hell however you'll run into lots and lots of double-immune mobs. To solo hell as a sorcerer, you need to spec in all three elements. That simply is not doable without divine gear.

Dual immunes happen, but they aren't all that common, especially ones that happen to be immune to both elements you use. I had a meteorb sorc that was doing pretty well until I got bored and started playing Final Fantasy Tactics.

Also, if you can get a few good runes this will break a lot of elemental resistances and fix your dual immune problem.

[mosc]

2 ber runes? Not happening in single player without cheating. Just not happening.

Dual immunities (usually it's cold+lightning that gets people) is generally on a boss that has a fixed immunity (lightning/cold) and a random immunity. I think the act 2 boss can have that combo, I forget the specifics. If I remember right Meph NEVER had that combo which was another reason why he was botted. But I played mostly .08 and .09 and there were a lot of 1.10 resistance changes so maybe that's out of date info.

[Diadem]

Runewords using runes above ist fall into the 'godlike gear' category by definition. It takes about a billion years of grinding just to get 1 such rune, and that particular runeword requires 4.

Besides, if we're going to go for runewords, then enigma on a summonmancer beats everything. Being able to teleport your entire army around is just imbalanced. And fun.

Dual immunities (usually it's cold+lightning that gets people) is generally on a boss that has a fixed immunity (lightning/cold) and a random immunity. I think the act 2 boss can have that combo, I forget the specifics. If I remember right Meph NEVER had that combo which was another reason why he was botted. But I played mostly .08 and .09 and there were a lot of 1.10 resistance changes so maybe that's out of date info.

If I recall correctly none of the final act bosses had immunities. Huge resistances to everything, but no immunities. Some of Meph's minions did have immunities, fixed ones iirc.

The main reason to bot Meph is that his minions give huge experience (a single Meph run gives a full level up to level 75 or so) and decent gear. Plus the level layout is fixed, and the mobs are fixed. Also, all hammerdin bots always carried the aforementioned enigma for the teleporting. "Detect mob, teleport on top of him, wait until he's dead, teleport to next mob" is a pretty simple AI script.

[Obby]

Runewords using runes above ist fall into the 'godlike gear' category by definition. It takes about a billion years of grinding just to get 1 such rune, and that particular runeword requires 4.

Besides, if we're going to go for runewords, than enigma on a summonmancer beats everything. Being able to teleport your entire army around is just imbalanced. And fun.

And laggy. Teleporting too often with loads of minions could frequently cause the servers to boot you for one reason or another.

[Spambot5546]

2 ber runes? Not happening in single player without cheating. Just not happening.

Plus it's a ladder-only rune word. You can't use it in single player. That's why I started playing on the Reddit server. It runs a permanent ladder (so your character never gets turned into non-ladder) and has a freebie room where people go to drop off gear they're not using anymore. I got a Spirit sword for my sorc that someone just dropped off.

[Diadem]

Runewords using runes above ist fall into the 'godlike gear' category by definition. It takes about a billion years of grinding just to get 1 such rune, and that particular runeword requires 4.

Besides, if we're going to go for runewords, than enigma on a summonmancer beats everything. Being able to teleport your entire army around is just imbalanced. And fun.

And laggy. Teleporting too often with loads of minions could frequently cause the servers to boot you for one reason or another.

True. But you're not going to teleport around hammerdin or sorcerer style. That's dangerous anyway, you won't have the health and armor of a paladin, or the casting speed of a sorcerer.

A necromancer can do huge damage, in all elements, but his main problem is that he is very slow. His theoretical firepower is quite huge, but his minions always get lost or stuck, especially in narrow corridors. Plus they attract additional mobs while wandering around. Enigma instantly solves this problem. Instead of having your minions go into a new room 1 by 1 through a tight door, which takes forever, you teleport in and all your minions will immediately do damage. Even better is that most will focus on the same mob, bringing it down very fast. And once one enemy in a tightly packed formation is dead, all the others instantly die from corpse explosion.

Teleporting around to find a boss or chest is best left to sorcerers. Taking down bosses is also not your forte. But a summoning-specialized necromancer with enigma is the single best character in the game for taking out mobs.

2 ber runes? Not happening in single player without cheating. Just not happening.

Plus it's a ladder-only rune word. You can't use it in single player. That's why I started playing on the Reddit server. It runs a permanent ladder (so your character never gets turned into non-ladder) and has a freebie room where people go to drop off gear they're not using anymore. I got a Spirit sword for my sorc that someone just dropped off.

The thing that always gets me with Diablo II is that your characters are deleted after 90 days of inactivity. It made sense back when Diablo II was released, when storage space was still expensive. These days however it makes very little sense any more. I've restarted Diablo II from scratch several times now, and every now and then I think about going back to the game. But restarting from scratch AGAIN, I just can't bring myself to do that.

[mosc]

taking out mobs? Windforce. Nef said. (you catch that pun? eh?)

[Spambot5546]

2 ber runes? Not happening in single player without cheating. Just not happening.

Plus it's a ladder-only rune word. You can't use it in single player. That's why I started playing on the Reddit server. It runs a permanent ladder (so your character never gets turned into non-ladder) and has a freebie room where people go to drop off gear they're not using anymore. I got a Spirit sword for my sorc that someone just dropped off.

The thing that always gets me with Diablo II is that your characters are deleted after 90 days of inactivity. It made sense back when Diablo II was released, when storage space was still expensive. These days however it makes very little sense any more. I've restarted Diablo II from scratch several times now, and every now and then I think about going back to the game. But restarting from scratch AGAIN, I just can't bring myself to do that.

SlashDiablo doesn't do that. It's superior to battle.net in pretty much every way, really.

[mfb]

Soloing hell is basically impossible with several classes, unless you have absolutely godlike gear.

Wait, what?
A sorceress with a single element can do it: She has to ignore some monsters, but few required bosses are immune, and she can use a mercenary there.
If you talk about classic: There, static field is powerful with just ~5 points and (together with a random other skill) enough to kill all quest monsters.

With two elements, it is even easier. Few monsters are immune versus both elements at the same time (only boss monsters), you can ignore them or let the merc do them.

>>holy hammer, which deals 50% physical and 50% holy damage.
At least since 2001 (1.07 and LoD release), it is 100% magic both in Classic and LoD. With 1.13, the hammer does not ignore magic resistances any more, therefore some monsters are immune to hammers now.

>> All other classes you run into a wall on hell difficulty that you won't be able to pass unless you have both very good gear
No. I saw assassins, necromancers and a druid soloing hell without any equipment - in hardcore. It should be possible with a sorceress (and it is so easy in softcore that I didn't bother doing it there). It is possible with an amazon and minimal gear (I saw one with an edge-bow and javelins reaching act 4 hell in hardcore). No idea how paladins would perform there.
Barbarians need some equipment, fine.

>> and already started spec'ing specifically towards being able to do hell back when you started.
This was true before patch 1.13 introduced the option to revert all skill and stat point choices.


>> On hell difficulty having max resistances (75%) is pretty much mandatory for all classes.
Yeah. Except for the 7 classes available in Diablo 2.

Some videos you might find interesting:
BNet-Speedrun (Softcore) - a party which completes all difficulties in under 4 hours, using only equipment found in this run. This includes a sorceress teleporting through hell with level 39.
Baal with a Melee-Party (Hardcore) - no equipment of any type was used, and to make it harder all ranged attacks were forbidden. The whole playthrough before baal was way too long to record it.
Ubertristram without equipment (Hardcore) - do I have to comment that?

A lot of videos of darkewokz.
Suzi - probably the hardest way to play the game at all. No equipment, no stats, no skill points. Just the fist to punch and mercs (without equipment). And even with that, it is possible to finish normal difficulty.

And then there are some speedruns which show how underpowered you can be, and still play the game:
Sorceress in ~4 hours (full game)
Assassin in <1 hour (normal difficulty only)

[/rant]


>> The main reason to bot Meph is that his minions give huge experience (a single Meph run gives a full level up to level 75 or so) and decent gear. Plus the level layout is fixed, and the mobs are fixed.
As every statement except "and decent gear" here is wrong, I think that you mean another boss?

[Diadem]

>>holy hammer, which deals 50% physical and 50% holy damage.
At least since 2001 (1.07 and LoD release), it is 100% magic both in Classic and LoD. With 1.13, the hammer does not ignore magic resistances any more, therefore some monsters are immune to hammers now.
>> and already started spec'ing specifically towards being able to do hell back when you started.
This was true before patch 1.13 introduced the option to revert all skill and stat point choices.

I haven't played the game in a few years. Those are some pretty big changes. I guess my info is outdated.

Soloing hell is basically impossible with several classes, unless you have absolutely godlike gear.

Wait, what?
A sorceress with a single element can do it: She has to ignore some monsters, but few required bosses are immune, and she can use a mercenary there.
If you talk about classic: There, static field is powerful with just ~5 points and (together with a random other skill) enough to kill all quest monsters.

Well perhaps "impossible" is too strong a word. You can do nearly everything if you are patient enough. But every single level takes a few hours then technically it's doable, but it's not much fun anymore. Also, for an effective mercenary you again need very good gear. Unless mercs got a boost too in a recent patch?

>> The main reason to bot Meph is that his minions give huge experience (a single Meph run gives a full level up to level 75 or so) and decent gear. Plus the level layout is fixed, and the mobs are fixed.
As every statement except "and decent gear" here is wrong, I think that you mean another boss?

Yeah I meant baal. My bad.

[Lostdreams]

I do think the elemental attacks do pretty high damage, and the thing in nightmare is that everything is going to be doing more damage and harder to kill. The instagib factor of high dmg elemental attacks is just increased to the point where (in addition to the -resists) if you can't manage to keep out of monsters' range, you need to grab some resists to be able to take a punch.

On hell difficulty having max resistances (75%) is pretty much mandatory for all classes. And since you start at -100% for hell, you need 175% bonus to all resistances. But if you keep a look out for good gear, that wasn't actually too hard to get.

Doesn't matter how much resist you have, If you don't have a cap raising item or absorb, multishot lightning enchant is GG, especially with conviction aura. I like how they removed it from the one council member in Mephisto's chamber but it can still show up in things far more lethal, like the wisp, mummy, and balrog enemy types.

[mfb]

Unless mercs got a boost too in a recent patch?

They are better with the expansion (well... they are completely useless without the expansion), and since patch 1.10 there are nice runewords like Insight and Obedience (both ladder only, but if you like you can activate them in single player as well), and there is always Honor which is easy to build once you are in nightmare. There are some more, and a lot of uniques and rare weapons you can find, too.

>> But every single level takes a few hours then technically it's doable, but it's not much fun anymore.
If it takes few hours, you are doing it wrong (or you try to make a second character like Suzi). Equipment can increase your damage a lot. But the difference between "random crap found while playing trough" and really good equipment is just a factor of ~2-4, maybe a bit more if the character relys on weapon damage.


>> multishot lightning enchant
This was dangerous before patch 1.10 (2003), but with this patch they removed most of the lightning bolts in this case.
However, two or even three enchantments at the same time have a bug which makes them much more dangerous. I didn't find an explanation in english, but the basic idea is that the monster hit recovery can trigger the fire/cold explosions even without the death of the monster, if it is lightning enchanted. In the worst case, you receive something like 1000-2000 damage every time you attack the monster.

Willowisps and similar monsters have a different bug, increasing their lightning damage.
And the viper mages near Nihlathak have a bad bug as well, giving them ~25 times the damage they should do.
Well, there are a lot of bugs in Diablo 2. And I am sure we will see a similar amount in Diablo 3.

[Diadem]

All this talk about diablo II actually made me go back to the game. So I make an account, make a char, create a new game and I'm immediately attacked by 6 spambots who put my entire screen full of text. Aaargh! I didn't find a single real player. Not a single game hosted, not a single real player in the chat. Just bots and more bots.

Game is deader than a dead doornail. Well, on b.net at least, dunno about other places.

I need a new game. Maybe I should check out skyrim.

[Gelsamel]

All this talk about diablo II actually made me go back to the game. So I make an account, make a char, create a new game and I'm immediately attacked by 6 spambots who put my entire screen full of text. Aaargh! I didn't find a single real player. Not a single game hosted, not a single real player in the chat. Just bots and more bots.

Game is deader than a dead doornail. Well, on b.net at least, dunno about other places.

I need a new game. Maybe I should check out skyrim.

Really? There are lots of spambots but I could always find players. Don't worry about the chat channels just make/join tristram games to start with. If you make a game expecting people to play it normally you won't find anyone, you can only interact with real people if you rush to hell and baal run and PvP.

[Diadem]

I know how diablo II works, I've put way too many hours into that game over the years. But there were zero active games when I joined, and zero people in chat. I suppose there might be some people in hell, but certainly not many if there's no one around on normal.

[mfb]

>> But there were zero active games when I joined
Maybe you picked some exotic mode without players? In decreasing order of #players: LoD ladder softcore --factor 5?--> LoD nonladder softcore ~ LoD ladder hardcore --(factor 2?)-> Classic ladder softcore, and everything else is singleplayer.
At least in Europe, I don't know how it looks like in other realms.

>> and zero people in chat
Which channel? Or did you stay in the lobby (default, and not a chat channel)?

Concerning spam bots in games: Most of them are level 1, a level requirement at game creation blocks most of them. This does not help if you begin with level 1, but after you reached ~level 5 you can open a game with a required level of >=2.

[Gelsamel]

If you do ever go into chat sometimes it pushes you into a new channel because the others are full.

Which server did you go on? I find it really surprising that you couldn't find anyone.

[Diadem]

>> But there were zero active games when I joined
Maybe you picked some exotic mode without players? In decreasing order of #players: LoD ladder softcore --factor 5?--> LoD nonladder softcore ~ LoD ladder hardcore --(factor 2?)-> Classic ladder softcore, and everything else is singleplayer.
At least in Europe, I don't know how it looks like in other realms.

I was on LoD softcore ladder (in Europe). So yeah. I just tried again, there were some people now. Not as many as a few years back, but definitely more than 0. Not sure what was up last time.

Anyway I think I'm just gonna wait for D3. In the meantime I'll play mass effect, that game was still on my todo list

[Psycojosh]

I've never played any of the Diablo games before. Are they any good? What genre are they even?

[Izawwlgood]

Hack and slash dungeon crawler rpg. Or you could google it.

EDIT: Oh god fucking April Fools.

[Will]

Well played, sir. Well played.

[Argency]

Hack and slash dungeon crawler rpg. Or you could google it.

EDIT: Oh god fucking April Fools.

You really don't like being asked questions, do you?

[mfb]

The current public beta is a nice stress test for the servers .
I hope that the release will work better. At the moment, most users get some random error messages.

[The Utilitarian]

Well I guess that's what stress tests are for.

Sweet zombie jesus I want this game to come out. The beta just makes me more excited for the full version. So many combinations of different runes. Squee!

[Ryom]

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/3967848172

That link goes to a shader that sharpens the game up, also can increase contrast. Really simple to use, unzip to D3 dir and press Pause to enable once in game.