Neinball and Philter join Flux to discuss recent Diablo III news, including the v1.0.5 feature previews, Inferno nerfs, skill changes, item and economy issues, and Auction House problems and solutions.
Times and topics listed below are merely a rough guideline, as the flow of conversation twists and turns.
As a programming note, the DiabloPodcast.com site is no more, and going forward, all podcasts will be presented here on Diablo.IncGamers.com in the news. Due to this change the older shows are not all currently available as mp3s or via iTunes, but they will be added shortly.
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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:01:34 — 56.4MB)
Muchos Gracias. Seeing a new podcast always makes my day!
And was wondering: 9ball now has been on more than Elly? Any chance she will be on one again in the future? She makes me laugh. 🙂
I second that! Elly, we, the diabloiii.net fans, miss you girl! Come back please.
I also approve of this podcast.
It’s ‘muchas gracias’.
lo que
The posts on the DiabloPodcast.com had tags for all the “talent” which made it easy to see a count of how many podcasts everyone had been on. Those categories went away with the site and I’m unlikely to go through all 80 posts to recreate them, but last I recall the count was something like 24 Neinball, 22 Wolfpaq, 19 Elly.
As for more Elly shows, I’m game but scheduling never seems to work out. She’s busy with other stuff, or isn’t available when I need to record, or hasn’t played enough D3 lately to feel she’s got current opinions.
With more difficutly nerfs incoming, I dived into Act 4 Inferno for the first time last night. I already feel like I missed the boat for beating Inferno when it was hard, and considering I solo’d all of Act 4 last night without dieing, I’m sure I did. But at least I beat the game before it got even easier, for whatever that’s worth.
I hate typos and miss being able to edit our comments. Is being able to edit coming back?
As always great podcast, I can almost do my full act3 run in while listening 🙂 My thoughts:
1st. Flux if your paragon lvl 10, it means you farmed 1,3% of the expiriance needed to get 100 level (so it will take you 4,5 years to get 100lvl on your DH with that speed). So I dont know if paragon system is so easy and fast.
2nd. To fix drops, they doesnt need to introduce boe items, they need to fix random rolls. Remove 10-15 worthless properties like thorn effect, health globes heal more, radius pickup, reduce level req., undestructable gear ect. Also make loot system that got brain… I mean I dont want to see Inteligance or Dex on my IK gear or barb only weapons ect.
example: In D2 you have 15 versions of Ik helm coz of 25-40 mf roll, in d3 you got 2000 versions because 4 properties can be rolled and on top of that you got +2 random properties so there is hundreds of thousands if not milions of possible variations.
To sum up: make less randomnes (more set values) and remove worthless properties, so we can see good rares once in a while not a see of yellow crap.
Except that when you remove all this randomness from items , all these “good” items will be absolutely worthless in value because they will be too common.
The truth is , there’s no simple fix here . It is very difficult to balance drops while maintaining a viable item economy.
I dont want them to remove random factor, if you read carefully i used words “less random”
something is random or not random. “less random” doesn’t exists
Not sure if you are talking about rares or uniques here.
D2 definitely had lots of useless affixes on *rares*. That was what made good rares so valuable. Not sure that has changed. Remember ‘+light radius’ and garbage like that?
D2 *uniques* may have been less variable than D3 uniques though.
I think the best solution would be to add durability points to items. If it they reach 0, the item is destroyed.
Also, ‘pickup radius’ can be a very useful affix for witch doctors.
A big problem with legendaries/sets is that – in Diablo 3 – you don’t have “lesser” set items within a set anymore. For example, why not make the IK gloves, boots and belt relatively common, and make just the rest – armor, helm and maul – harder to get? That was another well done gameplay feature in Diablo 2: Give players PERKS to go after the full set! So much things that the Wilson team never should have dumped in the first place.
Really great point regarding sets, nobbie. It would be nice to see some variation in the rarity of sets with some pieces being easier to obtain than others. I think that would help excite people a little too to see green text falling that isn’t the Bloodstained Letter. 🙂
I’m also very glad that Neinball or Philter mentioned the experience boost needing to be part of the Monster Power system, too. I think if it’s a significant enough part, that might stop all the complaining from Paragon Levels not being account-wide because you can powerlevel your lesser PL alts/characters to respectable levels without feeling like it’s a “waste.” I’d argue it’s never a waste, but we’ve beat that to death in the forums by now.
Either you have a good economy or you have a fun game. That pretty much nails it. As long as they care about the AH, the drops are gonna suck. And that just isn’t fun. The AH is a failed experiment as far as items are concerned. (for mats/gems its fine) I suppose BoP could work. Perhaps all drops on bosses could be BoP. Maybe even go as far as champ pack drops being BoP too. And leave BoE gear for white mobs. Then you could raise the drop rates on bosses/champs. Maybe that is a good compromise.
About drop rates in general for legendary/set items. I shouldn’t have to wait for my paragon level to increase. I ran around with +200% MF pre-paragon farming Act1 and 2. I’ve seen so few legendaries its ridiculous. While I haven’t burned out yet, I sense it is coming for me soon. The play time/reward ratio right now just isn’t right. I feel like I’m punished by being a self found gear person. I’m still less than 20k dps. I can’t farm near as fast as someone who has used the AH to get to above 100k dps. I’m sure it’s those high dps folks who are saying they find plenty of legendaries. Perhaps the inferno nerf incoming will fix that. We’ll see.
re: they still care. They made something like 600 million dollars off Diablo 3. While I imagine the devs care very much about righting this ship regardless of money, they are very much financially motivated as a company. They WILL be doing an expansion. If they can fix shit in the coming months, it paves the way for another 600 million dollar release via the expansion. They MUST fix things tho or the expansion will not sell nearly as well.
@ “They MUST fix things tho or the expansion will not sell nearly as well!”
This. They have pretty much two alternatives to solve the ridiculous drops while maintaining a stable/proftiable economy: Re-introduce the ladder with timely economy resets (ladder and non-ladder AH’s), and/or BoE/BoP legendaries/sets.
Hey Flux, quick mention about the character x system upcoming. Bash said in a post that when they made that public, they meant to include a \for increased rewards\ sentence as well. So, if we do play solo and say +4 characters, we are getting better rewards, just don’t know what that means yet.
lo que tú ya sabes.
Great podcast, as usual. I’m also having trouble figuring out which passive to add to my monk if I can drop Seize the Initiative…
I really think one of the main problems with D3 is the rate at which stats on items increase and the amount they matter. As touched on in this podcast, D2 uniques and sets could potentially be good even if they weren’t elite quality. You might find a level 20 armor with +1 skills, and the best armor in the game only has +3, so they’re comparable. In D3, a level 20 legendary has 20 strength and a level 60 legendary has 500. There’s simply no way that anything under level 57 is useful to a level 60.
All the legendaries they made for pre-55 are pretty useless, and even items at 60 tend to fall into tiers. Finding an upgrade is hard because you’ve got 40 of stat a, 40 of stat b and 70 of stat c, and you only want a different item if it has a higher value of any or all of those without too great a reduction in something else. We’re essentially looking for perfect items, and that’s why we have to turn to the AH. Items fall on a bell curve, so there are a lot of mediocre items and that’s why they are all worthless. The near-perfectly rolled items that rarely drop are worth so much because that’s the only way people can find upgrades. The random stats are just too linear in power.
It would be much better if a lvl 63 item could roll either +gold find, +magic find, +crit, or +exp than letting it roll +1% crit, +2% crit, +3% crit…+5% gold find, +10% gold find…etc. It would be better if the items had fewer gradients of power so that there would be more good and more crap items, and less items in between flooding the AH.
No download link? 🙁