Cigol

Diablo III

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I originally meant to ignore it but the rareness at which I get good items kind of necessitated using it (at least in Nightmare Mode). And it does make a huge difference, I went from 200 to 600 dps after spending only about 5000 on a pair of fists for my Monk. It's great because it allows you to tailer your searches for only the stats you want your items to have. Which is a great balm for all those times your blacksmith makes you something that don't have any applicable use for your char. (for thousands of gold a try)

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I got lucky I guess, my 36 wizard is at like 1200 dps? 42 barbarian is a bit higher than that. Nightmare did suck for me on barbarian, at first. I also have friends im playing with that give me stuff when they find it, so that helps. My magic find is stupidly low, I just get lucky somehow

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The auction house is stupid. The 10 item limit is stupid. The 10 item limit means people farming items or chests will put items up for super cheap just so they sell quick enough that they will be able to put new items up. When I hit level 60 I was able to go to the AH and spend a few hundred k and upgrade my gear form 5k damage to 25k damage on my Witch Doctor. Not to mention that trading and bartering on servers was a HUGE part of the social scene for D2, and without the same server lobby it can't even happen outside the AH now.

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It does seem odd they didn't implement something more social and mmo-like given all the blurb about this being a strong multiplayer experience. It'd be nice if you could customise your town by hiring and upgrading additional merchants (etc), even having them selling your items to those visiting people.

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Woop, just finished Nightmare with Cigol and 2 pubbies. Nice when you get actually get a group of 4 going. When it was just the 3 of us, we kept wiping, but with the 4th one there, Diablo was stunned so much of the time that it couldn't really get an attack in. It took a while but then Diablo finally went down and the loot, oh man, the loot. 3 blue items and some gold. THANKS, GAME. I guess I'll have to build a magic find set if I ever hope to find any decent weapons.

On the plus side, I think I found a pretty good build for my Demon Hunter. I got rid of any mobility stuff, because I wasn't using it that much anymore + they're expensive to use. Caltrops with 2 sec immobility, Ice elemental arrow, long fuse bombs, that exploding arrow with the stun grenades and I haven't yet settled on the last skill, but another one that uses hatred. My main attack is the entangling arrow with the double hatred thing, so I generate enough to use all my skills regularly. The idea is that I don't need any defensive/maneuverability stuff because my other attacks slow/stun enemies enough for me to distance myself.

So is there a reason why you shouldn't be able to access the AH when you're in a game?

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I wouldn't bother chasing after magic find until you're level 60, at this point. Not when there's better equipment than you're likely to ever find naturally on sale for pennies in the auction house. For good or for ill, the existence of the auction house is probably the biggest change to the formula from Diablo 2; even more so than the skill system.

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For good or for ill, the existence of the auction house is probably the biggest change to the formula from Diablo 2; even more so than the skill system.

I agree. Lork provided me with a convincing demonstration of the power of the auction house.

Lork (a wizaaaaaard) jumped into my game last night, I (a demon hunter) was playing with a RL friend (another wizaaaard), we were all the same level (42), and making our way through Nightmare Act2. Lork was sporting a great many high level gems (assuming from the AH), and some other gear he admittedly picked up on the auction house. The end result was that he was killing things very very fast. My friend and I couldn't stop talking (via mumble) about how ridiculously more effective he was. We were just keeping mobs busy until Lork's death-ray swung around killing everything. When asked, because we had to know... Lork's Damage (DPS) was just under 2k, while I had just over 1k, and my friend was somewhere around 800-900. He was putting out more DPS than both of us together. Incredible.

Now if my friend and I had also gone to the auction house, and managed to get our DPS up to 2k as well, there literally would have been no challenge in the area we were last night. It would have been a slaughter, and probably no where nearly as fun (like Normal difficulty). After a bit of discussion, my friend and I have decided that we were not going to buy items from the auction house (for our first characters at least).

I like the smithy, but the AH seems to come in direct conflict with it. I spent about 15k gold (+ a ton of essence) trying to get my smithy to make me a good quiver. I ended up with a ton of useless STR quivers, INT quivers... until he finally pooped out a good one. Now that I think of it, I could have taken a third of that gold to the AH and picked up an equal, if not better, quiver in less time. That's a problem.

TLDR: Auction House.. more like Over-Powered House.

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What's the point of a loot game if you can buy better gear on the AH constantly for super cheap? And if all a higher difficulty means is more monster HP and damage, which then in turn means you simply need better equipment to deal with it, then doesn't that devalue the game as a whole?

It's nice for Blizzard that they're going to end up with a little fake economy using real money. They must be so excited.

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I agree. Lork provided me with a convincing demonstration of the power of the auction house.

It's both better and worse than you think. The only things I bought from the auction house were the weapon and a few gems. The gems had actually just become available from my jewlcrafter when I started playing with you... for way too much money, mind you. So the only thing separating me from an AH-less character provided they are willing to waste a ton of money on jewlcrafting at this point is the weapon.

Now, if just the weapon made that much of a difference, I can barely imagine what a full set of AH gear would do, and it'll probably stay that way until I beat hell, lest the game become too boring.

I hope this doesn't mean you guys consider my character too broken to play with in the future.

What's the point of a loot game if you can buy better gear on the AH constantly for super cheap? And if all a higher difficulty means is more monster HP and damage, which then in turn means you simply need better equipment to deal with it, then doesn't that devalue the game as a whole?
You could say the exact same thing about the trade economy in Diablo 2, except it's a million times worse because of hacking and duping.

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Now, if just the weapon made that much of a difference, I can barely imagine what a full set of AH gear would do, and it'll probably stay that way until I beat hell, lest the game become too boring.

To be honest I wasn't the one inspecting your gear, my wizard friend was. He wanted to know how you were doing so much more damage than him. Though if it is just the weapon, then I doubt that would enough for a two fold increase in DPS. Though the radiant square gems (4-5?) might help, but I don't know enough to say if that would make that big a difference. To be clear, I know my friend likes having some Magic Find on him which probably explains why his DPS was the lowest, and maybe we haven't been so lucky with drops/crafting. So it most likely is a combination of both. Though it feels pretty severe to have two players at the same level have such a huge disparity in Damage.

I hope this doesn't mean you guys consider my character too broken to play with in the future.

Don't worry about that. Though it might hurt our pride a little to see you cut through things so fast. :P

I apologize for not typing out more than I did. So easy to forget the chat when demons are chewing your leg off. Download mumble for next time. :)

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To be honest I wasn't the one inspecting your gear, my wizard friend was. He wanted to know how you were doing so much more damage than him. Though if it is just the weapon, then I doubt that would enough for a two fold increase in DPS. Though the radiant square gems (4-5?) might help, but I don't know enough to say if that would make that big a difference. To be clear, I know my friend likes having some Magic Find on him which probably explains why his DPS was the lowest, and maybe we haven't been so lucky with drops/crafting. So it most likely is a combination of both. Though it feels pretty severe to have two players at the same level have such a huge disparity in Damage.

You'd be surprised by how much of a difference just a few points of DPS on a weapon can make due to the way damage is calculated. It's further compounded by the fact that I've dedicated two of my active skills to buffing my damage by 27%, which just gets better and better the higher your damage was in the first place, as you can imagine. Now that I think of it, I should go all in with Glass Cannon and make it even more ridiculous.

The gems are plain old squares, by the way. Radiant squares are way out of my price range.

Don't worry about that. Though it might hurt our pride a little to see you cut through things so fast. :P

I apologize for not typing out more than I did. So easy to forget the chat when demons are chewing your leg off. Download mumble for next time. :)

No worries. Is there an Idle Thumbs mumble server, or are you guys just running a personal one?

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My thinking is that the AH is for people who want to get to 60 and then find epic loot. This will also probably be the point when the smith becomes relevant, assuming there are epic blacksmith diagrams dropping in inferno.

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Is there an Idle Thumbs mumble server, or are you guys just running a personal one?

No such thing. Though that would be awesome. I've been using a server my friend is running on his old box from his house. Get more than 5 people on it and it all goes to shit, but it's served my friends and I well enough for a while now.

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Just finished Diablo 3, so I can finally inspect this thread.

The one thing I have to comment on is how incredibly weird the story in D3 is. It's almost confidently amateurish. It's a pastiche of Diablo 2, but takes such weird turns that it feels like it was written by someone who has ingested a lot of stories, but doesn't really know how to make one themselves.

From a top level, it's just strange that 2/3rds of the story focus on Leah, but then she's all but forgotten and the game ends with a melancholy speech by archangel Tyrael. I'm pretty sure this will be remedied to a certain extent in the inevitable expansion pack that will surely focus on hunting down Adria and rescuing/redeeming Leah's soul, but right now it feels decidedly off.

And then there's the characters themselves, whose motivations are often incomprehensible.

Leah is a petulant teenager, but it still makes no sense for her to be this naive and unbelieving of Deckard's stories in the light of all that has been happening. The most baffling moment is surely the second cinematic, when Deckard is buried. Not only does Leah openly question how much Tyrael has suffered (holy shit), Tyrael then turns out to be the world's biggest dick by taking the bait and showing her his sacrifice in heaven. Way to go being supportive for someone burying her uncle! "You think you have it rough? I just tore off my wings and fell down from heaven! Take that, sulking infant child!"

Diablo 3's biggest writing problem is the exposition, though. It's downright horrible how all the main characters, most notably the villains, are constantly explaining themselves in the most facile way. It gets to a point really quickly where the world stops being believable at all, even as a pulp vehicle. These characters don't have a speck of integrity as people, they're purely functional narrative devices used for cheap exposition. I wasn't expecting Blizzard to bring Shakespeare-levels of writing, but this occasionally beggars belief. All the more since Diablo 2 had a surprisingly ingenious narrative structure and subtle character developments. I would trade in all of the main characters in Diablo 3 for one Marius (who, despite overacting, had a rooted presence).

Boggling the mind in that respect is how well the mercenary companions and the hero's entourage are written. All of them are keenly developed characters full of wit and vibrant personality. What they say is well-written and properly acted. I felt hugely more drawn to the subtle, engaging troubles concerning the templar, the scoundrel and Covetous Shen (please give him a game of his own!) than most anything the main characters force-fed me with their stilted, exposition-riddled monologuing.

I repeat what I stated earlier and elsewhere: Diablo 3 feels like it was written by a bunch of different people who hardly communicated with each other. Its dissonant writing styles and lack of cohesive tone suggests not much attention was paid to establishing any sort of narrative vision.

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Just finished Diablo 3, so I can finally inspect this thread.

The one thing I have to comment on is how incredibly weird the story in D3 is. It's almost confidently amateurish. It's a pastiche of Diablo 2, but takes such weird turns that it feels like it was written by someone who has ingested a lot of stories, but doesn't really know how to make one themselves.

From a top level, it's just strange that 2/3rds of the story focus on Leah, but then she's all but forgotten and the game ends with a melancholy speech by archangel Tyrael. I'm pretty sure this will be remedied to a certain extent in the inevitable expansion pack that will surely focus on hunting down Adria and rescuing/redeeming Leah's soul, but right now it feels decidedly off.

And then there's the characters themselves, whose motivations are often incomprehensible.

Leah is a petulant teenager, but it still makes no sense for her to be this naive and unbelieving of Deckard's stories in the light of all that has been happening. The most baffling moment is surely the second cinematic, when Deckard is buried. Not only does Leah openly question how much Tyrael has suffered (holy shit), Tyrael then turns out to be the world's biggest dick by taking the bait and showing her his sacrifice in heaven. Way to go being supportive for someone burying her uncle! "You think you have it rough? I just tore off my wings and fell down from heaven! Take that, sulking infant child!"

Diablo 3's biggest writing problem is the exposition, though. It's downright horrible how all the main characters, most notably the villains, are constantly explaining themselves in the most facile way. It gets to a point really quickly where the world stops being believable at all, even as a pulp vehicle. These characters don't have a speck of integrity as people, they're purely functional narrative devices used for cheap exposition. I wasn't expecting Blizzard to bring Shakespeare-levels of writing, but this occasionally beggars belief. All the more since Diablo 2 had a surprisingly ingenious narrative structure and subtle character developments. I would trade in all of the main characters in Diablo 3 for one Marius (who, despite overacting, had a rooted presence).

Boggling the mind in that respect is how well the mercenary companions and the hero's entourage are written. All of them are keenly developed characters full of wit and vibrant personality. What they say is well-written and properly acted. I felt hugely more drawn to the subtle, engaging troubles concerning the templar, the scoundrel and Covetous Shen (please give him a game of his own!) than most anything the main characters force-fed me with their stilted, exposition-riddled monologuing.

I repeat what I stated earlier and elsewhere: Diablo 3 feels like it was written by a bunch of different people who hardly communicated with each other. Its dissonant writing styles and lack of cohesive tone suggests not much attention was paid to establishing any sort of narrative vision.

Yeah. See also: StarCraft II.

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Yeah. See also: StarCraft II.

And every other Blizzard game. Although, at least the older games don't pretend they're something they aren't. I think Blizzard's biggest problem [in regards to the issue currently being discussed] is that they act like their stories are something special. At least, that's the impression I always get when they talk about it.

EDIT: In other, more important news, I'm about to fight NM Belial on my HC WD.

Initializations.

Anyway, I'm scared.

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And every other Blizzard game. Although, at least the older games don't pretend they're something they aren't. I think Blizzard's biggest problem [in regards to the issue currently being discussed] is that they act like their stories are something special. At least, that's the impression I always get when they talk about it.

Yeah there is a strange feeling of Blizzard taking its worlds very seriously sometimes that doesn't jive with how the writing actually works. That said, there are a lot of people who connect strongly with certain characters and there's a flourishing book business surrounding all three of the major Blizzard franchises, so perhaps the writers' hands are tied to an extent.

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Diablo 3's biggest writing problem is the exposition, though. It's downright horrible how all the main characters, most notably the villains, are constantly explaining themselves in the most facile way. It gets to a point really quickly where the world stops being believable at all, even as a pulp vehicle. These characters don't have a speck of integrity as people, they're purely functional narrative devices used for cheap exposition. I wasn't expecting Blizzard to bring Shakespeare-levels of writing, but this occasionally beggars belief. All the more since Diablo 2 had a surprisingly ingenious narrative structure and subtle character developments. I would trade in all of the main characters in Diablo 3 for one Marius (who, despite overacting, had a rooted presence).

Absolutely. Listening to just about any of the main storyline exposition, particularly from Leah, is really nails-on-chalkboard stuff. I mean, I get that game mechanics are really everything to Blizzard, but I'm really curious as to how these things come about. If writing and story are that unimportant, why spend as much time and effort on them as they evidently do? Is it just a function of time between games + huge expectations + giant corporate entity? It clearly works for them (fastest-selling PC game ever, and all that), it's just rather depressing.

I know the single-player wasn't the focus, but I never had the heart to finish the StarCraft II campaign, mostly because of how disappointingly drawn Raynor was.

I wish I could go back to StarCraft and Diablo II afresh with the benefit of maturity, or taste, or whatever it is that stops me enjoying the new games, just to see if they measure up. My memory of those two in particular is of strongly crafted stories, told in unusual ways, with really memorable and high quality voice acting. Absolutely genre stuff, of course, but great genre stuff.

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I think its an artifact of the CD-ROM era. Blizzard and others spent a huge amount of time and money creating CGI cut scenes.

I didn't have huge problems with th SC2 story. But in a way I still consider it developer writing.

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I didn't have a lot of problems with Starcraft 2. It was absolutely pulp and just as much a pastiche as Diablo 3, but Raynor felt quite sincere and was consistently the center piece of the story. For what it's worth, that's all I need to buy into a game story! I'm not going in with terribly high expectations here.

I think the reason Starcraft 2 worked better was that its genre (science fiction western) doesn't have the huge backpack of overwrought clichés that fantasy has. As a result, Blizzard were able to craft a pretty focused story that felt more like it had a vision behind it. Diablo 3 just goes nuts, like they don't even know what it is they're actually going for. Quick, sum up the Diablo 3 premise! ...

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A lot of it would be explained by the story stuff being added comparatively late in development, when they had mapped out most of the game already.

Quick, sum up the Diablo 3 premise! ...

I'll give it a shot!

Hero from Diablo 1 and wanderer in Diablo 2 has sex with Adria, who then has Leah who is then actually Diablo's offspring kind of and then there is a betrayal that no one saw coming and Leah's body gets posessed and turns into female shaped Diablo and then Tyreal is all like "Gee, humanity sure is the best" and everyone nods and agrees and then as you're killing Diablo, he/she starts threating you with terror and makes true this promise by sending you to the realm of terror where a terror diablo version of terror says that I'm stuck in the realm of terror and that I shall know a lot of it. I did not and Diablo exploded. Tyreal now thinks that perhaps it wasn't smart to raise all the dead and becomes Wisdom, but you know it's kind of douchey to decide that for yourself.

Agreed?

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