Diablo 3 - Reaper of Souls

that I think

Ao-_sl said:

What were the ubers in D2?

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One was a rare spawn, beefed up diablo, that could spawn in any act of Hell mode. He dropped the annihlus charm.

The other was special versions of baal/diablo/mephisto that were ultra powerful, and had new special abilities. You did a bunch of farming for key drops to spawn the alternate version of tristram to fight them. If you beat all 3, you got the hellfire torch.

That's from memory, and it's been a long time, so I could be fuzzy on some of the details.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOSzgV0xVZo&noredirect=1

^ if you pulled all of them or added players to the game... they became almost impossible from my experience.

I was brought along with a pal's smite-a-din for my insanely high cloak of shadows on my assassin (ww claw, poison was shadow.. quite a few shadow skill charms).

The guy in that video's smiter is very fucking insane god damn.

Smite never misses right? So OP.

Needless_sl said:

Diablo != WoW

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Yep, removing the AH, but adding in plenty of quested BoA drops and BoE (Effectively since classes will need to primary stat swap, all gear you use will be bound) gear has made it less like WoW.Okay. This game just became tremendously more like WoW with these changes, removal of the AH doesn't change that.

Kruegan and Mist hit the nail on the head. I'm not a fan of the AH, but it wasn't the problem, it only made the problem more visible. Removing the AH does not solve the underlying issues. Maybe their loot redesign, ladders, and variable soft cap gains will do that, but pulling the AH is just pushing the economy back to the auction sites. The only fringe benefit I can see is less time spent hunting for marginal, level based upgrades--but even that, was a byproduct of boring, derivative loot that required a certain subset of statistics to even be viable, and that subset was shared across all classes, rather than being unique to certain builds.

In other words, Diablo 3's loot issues were caused by how specific the classes needs were, and how ubiquitous those needs were across all classes. Good loot may as well have been Generic Power X + Primary Statistic +Useful Secondary (Crit/LoH ect)....it's what it came down to, it's what causes 90% of loot to be garbage and it's what made marginal upgrades so linear/easily discernible at the AH.

j00t_sl said:

the benefit of the AH is that it gives a purpose to some of those bizarre items that are worthwhile, but not to you. the problem with the AH is that in order to make items have some real worth, they HAVE to bend the RNG. we can't have 40 million perfect rolls out there... it'll tank the market.

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Items should be an extension of how you build your character. D3's loot is boring is because it's items are +gooder, you could really just take most of the statistics and rip them down into +defense +offense and there would benodifference except the description on the character sheet. This makes loot boring, and it makes it so very few pieces can be good--because any piece without those very linear, very narrow +gooder statistics, is auto-garbage.

But if ALL items had those, and what differentiated items was how they interacted with your character specifically? You could have small upgrades drop a lot, while the big upgrades wouldn't just be linear power increases of an item, but rather would be specific to a certain build. So if you found an item that tosses exploding bodies out if they are killed by Whirl Wind, it might suck for you, even if you're a Barb, because you don't have a Whirl Wind build/Items that support Whirl Wind--but it might be truly exceptional for a Barb that DOES have a WW build and ALSO has, say, a set of boots that makes it so exploding bodies have *2 the normal radius. (Just tossing crap out)...But in any case, loot should be a personal extension of how you build your character, it should be like adding cards to a TCG deck, creating combos and augmenting other cards in very specific, creative ways.

But it's not like that. All upgrades are very linear and rather boring. And the AH shines a light on that, but it's not the source of it.

The problem was always that they designed the entire game to nearly force you to use the AH. You could technically play without doing it, but it was such a futile and blatantly unintended experience that the deliberate AH dependecy was very obvious as soon as you got to inferno with a self-found character. D3 was a game of farming money to buy new gear that you're statistically never going to find yourself, which caused nearly everybody to quit in disgust. Seems Blizzard got rid of that retard Jay Wilson and installed some people who actually know how to make a fun game instead of a Skinner's box cash-grab, so now they're getting rid of the AH so that playing the game itself will actually make sense. All it then takes is for the loot aspect of the game to be adjusted. Seems sensible, but I wonder if it isn't too late to rescue this game. Maybe if they'd done this within six months of release, not a year and a half later.

Nevergone_sl said:

Am I the only one that thinks it's an over reaction to pull the auction house entirely?

I don't mind if the RMAH is gone, but to remove the gold auction house seems a bit extreme when other measures could be implemented to fight the problem of "killing monsters should be the way you get your loot"

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RMAH isnt the design problem - any AH is problematic for a game thats based on loot acquisition. There are some longer replies to this already so I'll just say that removing only the RMAH wouldnt change anything to me, since I never used it anyway.

W4RH34D_sl said:

It is bs, its a video game. the AH was the opportunity for gamers to fleece wanna be's of money to get them the gear, realize thats the point of the game and quit. Blizz gets a sale, gamers get some money. Win, Win.

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Damn right it is a video game. If I want to make extra money I'll put in a few extras hours at work. Fuck a video game where the driving factor to play it is hoping to get a $250 drop at lottery odds. That's called a job where I come from and with those odds its a shitty job.


I dont know if cutting the AH is pointless or their best decision for this game - it depends entirely on what they do with loot 2.0. I hope Blizzcon has some details on that, what we've seen at gamescom and on the console is loot 1.1 at best.

They could just as easily keep in AH for gems/mats/whatever loot they deem fit and say that "the strongest items can be only passed from one person to another" and it would have the same effect. With so many blanks in RoS so far, it could be anything. I'm still waiting for them to announce what they are doing about the itemization.

Tuco_sl said:

Really surprised by the announcement. What motivation do they have for removing the AH? Isnt' that the way they make their money?

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The money bin was probably TOO full.

Caliane_sl said:

The money bin was probably TOO full.

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I wonder if they did it to increase box sales of the expansion. Maybe a huge number of people actually really do hate the AH and wouldn't buy the expansion if it was still in.

All they needed to do to guesstimate something like that is look at box sales, subtract the number of people still playing from that and then factor in the success of an AH-less console version.

Maybe the guy who took over for Jay Wilson, if he really made this decision, is just a purist and convinced them that the AH wasn't true to the nature of the Diablo series and...

ah who am I kidding.

They must be losing money somehow running the RMAH, there's no way they'd dismantle the ah system just out of the goodness of their heart. Bobby Kotick would come down off the mountain and start eating people.

bixxby_sl said:

They must be losing money somehow running the RMAH, there's no way they'd dismantle the ah system just out of the goodness of their heart. Bobby Kotick would come down off the mountain and start eating people.

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Then it's probably CS people who they need to handle all the issues or maybe they are paying Paypal something apart from the transaction fees.

Mr Creed_sl said:

RMAH isnt the design problem - any AH is problematic for a game thats based on loot acquisition. There are some longer replies to this already so I'll just say that removing only the RMAH wouldnt change anything to me, since I never used it anyway.



Damn right it is a video game. If I want to make extra money I'll put in a few extras hours at work. Fuck a video game where the driving factor to play it is hoping to get a $250 drop at lottery odds. That's called a job where I come from and with those odds its a shitty job.


I dont know if cutting the AH is pointless or their best decision for this game - it depends entirely on what they do with loot 2.0. I hope Blizzcon has some details on that, what we've seen at gamescom and on the console is loot 1.1 at best.

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Well from that perspective it would suck. But if you truly were playing for joy wouldn't that joy be enhanced by selling gear you don't need for cash? I didn't say fund your college with it but its just a cool idea when you don't spotlight it as the reason you play.

I personally never really considered the AH to be the problem. I thought the problem was the fact that 99.999% of the stuff that dropped was shit. I think the AH would have worked a lot better if it wasn't the sole way to find decent stuff.

Xith_sl said:

I personally never really considered the AH to be the problem. I thought the problem was the fact that 99.999% of the stuff that dropped was shit. I think the AH would have worked a lot better if it wasn't the sole way to find decent stuff.

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Some of you are definitely missing the fundamental issue with the auction house. If trading is going to be infinitely easier then they need to throttle the item drops. When trading difficulty increases then they can ease up on the drops. You can't have both the auction house and super easiness of selling/buying items while having the expectation of getting enough drops to be constantly progressing until you can do MP10. You'll soon end up with an auction house that is abundantly more stocked up than the current incarnation upon which the game will be written off as too easy and no fun, because it would be pointless to fight for drops when you could literally get them for nothing on the auction house.

Exactly my point. People keep saying it. This game was balanced around people being able to find what they need of the ah. It was not balanced around finding your own gear. That's why everything you find sucks. It's there only to either vendor or sell on the ah.

The removal of the ah forces the design of d3 to revert back to d2 level loot.

Speaking of that... Based on some of the datamined affixes... I'm pretty optimistic.