I have to admit that I am absolutely amazed that there is such active development for a non-service game that was released seven years ago. Even if you consider Reaper of Souls to be the "real" Diablo 3, which is an imagined argument I just made up to make my point seem more impressive, that's still five years old! Maybe I shouldn't be surprised, given how long support for StarCraft 1 was - but also let's be real, Diablo 3 is not exactly StarCraft 1 in terms of impact, importance, and visibility.
In some ways, sure, but it shouldn't be forgotten that Diablo 3 is one of the best selling PC games of all time, and one of the fastest selling as well, with over 5 million sold in its first week of release. And if you narrow it down to AAA titles, it is the best selling PC game of all time.
forty on
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KlatuAussie Aussie AussieOi Oi OiRegistered Userregular
Is there anything you think D3 does especially well? Is there anything about it that routinely feels crummy?
Only thing that is crummy is if I want to try and push high in Grifts or complete the season journey. But even those I have certain things or builds I use.
So eh, not that much to complain about. I should also mention that D3 is my "fun" game so I don't pay much attention to anything. Which is why I roll a DH each season. Simple and I remember some of the two builds needed to grind.
Is there anything you think D3 does especially well? Is there anything about it that routinely feels crummy?
What it does well is keeps me coming back to at least do the season journey nearly every season.. though there has been a few that i've missed.
Crummy... doing bounties for rerolling materials and grinding a ton of forgotten souls for rerolls on equipment. Actually, just rerolling in general. It's more so the forgotten soul requirements though, I can live with the bounty material requirements if I have to.
Is there anything you think D3 does especially well? Is there anything about it that routinely feels crummy?
Where D3 really wins is with loot/gear. Now, it has taken them a while to get there, but they have an amazing balance between the ability to get gear that you *need* fast enough by gambling, re-rolling, cube recipes, Hagrid's, etc. - and making the *perfect* gear hard to get to keep you playing forever. They've also kept a little bit of the magic of finding a thing, hoping it's great, identifying it, etc. that gets some good brain-drugs going (which I am totally fine with in a game that doesn't ask me to pay extra to get this stuff).
I know some people might find issue with the way sets have 14,000% bonuses and that sort of thing. I don't - I don't see another great way to do it. And there are definitely some useless items, etc. (but game designers will tell you, this is actually necessary).
It has other things going for it too. It's got non-mandated group/role play where folks can plan teams together and make it more fun. The fact that the internet decides one group composition is the best and eliminates all other options is a downside, but one that can be avoided (especially if you play 2's or 3's). It has a variety of modes of play - the difference in gameplay experience between speedruns and pushing in one game is pretty great, to be honest, and then you've got the other actual modes as well. And there's immense class/build diversity. Not at the highest level, again, but you can very easily decide to play a certain spec and see how far you can push it - the community even celebrates those that do very well with "off-meta" builds.
The future of D3 should be D4 announced soon, since another expansion or any meaningful update isn't an option at this point.
The subtext of the blog post is "these are the things that the D3 team has been allocated enough resources to do." A new expansion is off the table. According to the rumors, a lot of people have been shifted to D4, but that's a different team. Or maybe the D3 team is a part-time subset of those devs.
Where D3 really wins is with loot/gear. Now, it has taken them a while to get there, but they have an amazing balance between the ability to get gear that you *need* fast enough by gambling, re-rolling, cube recipes, Hagrid's, etc. - and making the *perfect* gear hard to get to keep you playing forever. They've also kept a little bit of the magic of finding a thing, hoping it's great, identifying it, etc. that gets some good brain-drugs going (which I am totally fine with in a game that doesn't ask me to pay extra to get this stuff).
I largely agree with you - Hagrid's, especially, bootstraps you past the less productive difficulties very quickly - but there are still things that annoy me a little bit. Sockets on everything that can hold a socket are absolutely essential, for example, especially on jewelry - not equipping a legendary gem is like not equipping a set of gloves or boots or whatever. I suppose it's true that the items without sockets are usable, which aligns with what you said - get items that are usable, use them to get items that are good, use those to get items that are perfect - but I feel like they are so sub-par that it feels bad. Missing a socket on a ring is not like rolling 4.5% crit vs. 5% crit, or rolling CDR when your build needs attack speed; they're categorically different. Rolling 1 socket on a chest-piece feels bad. Doing dozens of rolls on a ring before you can get a socket feels bad. I feel like jewelry should always come with a socket, and/or Ramaladni's Gift should be expanded to apply to jewelry as well.
While we're at it - and I've whined about this extensively - I think that Ramaladni's Gift should be a little bit less random. This season I've gone for ~550 paragon levels without seeing a single Ramaladni's Gift; the first one dropped after I'd started gearing a second character to try for a third conquest. You can target other types of items by gambling for that slot at Kadala's, or upgrading rares, but Ramaladni's Gift (and the potions, I suppose) are the thing you can't target at all. There's no way to smooth out the probability curve, you're at the mercy of drop rates.
My big beef with D3 gear is sets. They've made them so absurdly powerful that you can see your power increase tenfold by equipping a single piece of gear, which feels silly. More importantly, what that means is that the class sets single-handedly dictate what playstyles are viable for each class, which takes away a lot of opportunities for creativity. You have only half of your gear slots to actually experiment with. Making a build without a 6-piece set is positioned like a novelty which is only made possible by a special set and a lot of Ancients.
IMO 6 piece sets should be optional things than enable a totally new type of gameplay from what your skills usually do, but don't increase your power more than the equivalent number of legendaries.
Despite whatever issues the items themselves have, the item drop system in Diablo 3 is pretty damn good. Probably because of the their current idea of drop rates and no trading, but it be nice if we had trading too and they didn't screw with the drop rate or otherwise improved it.
My big beef with D3 gear is sets. They've made them so absurdly powerful that you can see your power increase tenfold by equipping a single piece of gear, which feels silly. More importantly, what that means is that the class sets single-handedly dictate what playstyles are viable for each class, which takes away a lot of opportunities for creativity. You have only half of your gear slots to actually experiment with. Making a build without a 6-piece set is positioned like a novelty which is only made possible by a special set and a lot of Ancients.
IMO 6 piece sets should be optional things than enable a totally new type of gameplay from what your skills usually do, but don't increase your power more than the equivalent number of legendaries.
The next patch will add a legendary gem that has a power similar to the Legacy of Nightmares ring set:
Legacy of Dreams
While you have no set bonuses equipped, every Legendary item you have equipped increases your damage dealt by 3.75% and reduces your damage taken by 2%. (Max level 99)
Rank 25: This bonus is doubled for Ancient items.
That's from the PTR notes, so I don't know if it'll make it over to Live intact, but that certainly looks like it'll be interesting. I feel better about taking up one legendary gem slot than about taking up two ring slots. Further, Legacy of Nightmares only takes ancients into accounts, while the gem will give you a bonus for regular ol' legendaries as well.
I agree with you that sets (and especially 6-piece bonuses) dominate the landscape too much, but at least this gems seems like a nice patch for the time being.
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KwoaruConfident SmirkFlawless Golden PecsRegistered Userregular
Diablo 4 should bring back cross class skills on items and cap sets at like 4 pieces
Diablo 3 needs to make gargs and dogs have targeted active components like necromancer skeletons do
I am actually in favor of making all skills untargeted and passive. The last thing I want to do with D3 is put any effort into it.
EDIT: Snark aside, I generally find that a rotation that includes more than, say, 3 skills starts to feel extremely hectic to me. I deeply appreciate having set-it-and-forget-it skills like zombie dogs and gargs; any time I have skills with passive and active components (Crusader Laws, Necro skeletons), I typically find myself not using the active portions much because I have trouble fitting them in the rotation, but also feeling bad that I'm not using the skills to the fullest.
On the other hand, I think it's neat when skills have passive runes and active runes, like Necro Devour and Curse of Frailty, both of which are active skills that have one rune that turns them into always-on auras.
Delduwath on
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KwoaruConfident SmirkFlawless Golden PecsRegistered Userregular
I just want to be able to make dogs and gargs focus on something specific if I need them to
Oh, one thing that I enjoy is being able to mix sets. That's pretty limited in D3 right now because a lot of the sets have near-100% item overlap, but like Demon Hunter has the staple 6-piece Natalya/4-piece Marauder build, which is neat.
Those two bugs I mentioned are fixed (squirts penalty and crimsons snapshotting), and the final notes added some clarity about how some of the items work.
I'm a little bummed about no new visual rewards, but I guess I don't have that pennant yet. At least there are two easy (just time-consuming) conquests. I have absolutely no interest in the special season buff, because I just know that I will absolutely not pay enough attention to the circles to use them.
The crafted sets look really good. Interested to see how Messerschmidt's Reaver and Captain Crimson's set impact cooldown-reliant builds, and whether Echoing Fury can fit into any speedrun builds.
Which Haedrig's Gift sets would you folks recommend? I have almost no play time with Monk and Wizard, so I'd be interested to try one of them out.
I think it may have actually been during season 6 that I tried Wizard and got the free DMO set. I'm not sure how things have changed now that there are more tools available to players, but finishing the journey to get the 6 piece bonus was very difficult (compared to other sets), because you didn't get a big damage boost to help you past the solo GR20.
Inna’s is another that can be a pain for GR20, unless you have gungdo gear bracers or get lucky on your first weapon upgrade.
Akkhan probably stands out the most, since it’s very flexible and pairs amazingly with the new crimson’s. Pestilence can be good if you like LotD/Lance, especially now with Messerschmidt’s.
I think this is my least favorite season cycle; other than Akkhan, I feel like I have to skip past Haedrig’s ASAP.
As a separate consideration, the triune rings will really favor ranged builds that can stand their ground but also quickly reposition, i.e. DHs, WoL monk, Lance necro, and channeling wiz. Honorable mention for Blessed Shield and WDs, who have to hoof it.
Got my galactic wings just under the wire on PC (got them on Switch earlier this week). Ended up doing Years of War as the 3rd conquest - it turned out that putting together 2 6-piece bonuses on a second character was way easier than putting together 4 6-piece bonuses (for Masters of the Universe, which was my original plan). Doing the lvl 55 grifts was trivial by then, because ~650 paragon points and lvl 70 gems can cover for a lot of sins in terms of itemization.
At the start of the season, I was sure I wouldn't have the endurance for 3 conquests, so I am very pleased to get these wings.
I need to investigate the play styles behind the haedrig's gift armor sets for the classes I haven't yet played.
I've played Wizard, Barbarian, and Necromancer, so everything else is an option for me. Any suggestions? I'm leaning toward Demon Hunter or Crusader, but if their armor sets are garbo this season, I'll do something else.
Here’s a rundown of the free sets, and other current play styles you can build toward.
Barbs get Raekor, the charge set. It can somewhat awkwardly shift focus toward HotA or Slam while still charging around. Might(Leapquake) is still a classic, and Wastes(Whirlwind) apparently works well with the new Captain Crimsons and Exhoing Fury.
Crusaders start with Akkhan, which will be smoother than ever with the extra CDR and damage from Crimsons. The set is mainly used for either Condemn or Blessed shield, both of which also work in LoN. Seeker (Hammerdin) and Invoker thorns are still good, and Roland’s Sweep is looking better too thanks to Crimsons.
DH gets Marauder which is fine to start, just more of deliberate pace because of the sentries. It can build into N6M4 sentries, LoN Rapid Fire, Shadow Impale, or Unhallowed Multishot. MS will be very popular due to the RCR/toughness bonus from Crimsons, and easily slots in the new Squirts Necklace for up to double damage.
Monk gets Inna, which can be a pain to start with, but can still support Wave of Light, or a variant of shenlongs generator build. There’s also a Raiment generator build, Sunwuko/LoN wave of light, and even Uliana’s Exploding Palm/Seven-sided Strike build.
Necro’s get pestilence, which can now use Messerschmitts Reaver to rapidly reset land of the dead and corpse Lance everything in sight. You can stick with Lance, or go Rathma/LoN mage spam, but not much else without handicapping yourself.
Docs get Zuni, which can be general purpose pets or Carnevil/Dagger of Darts army. Jade is still a beast too, dotting up the screen and then exploding it with soul harvest.
Wiz gets Delsere’s, and depends on spamming slow time bubbles to buff a few different skills like Frozen orb, twisters, or explosive blast. It’s fine, but really overshadowed by Vyr’s Archon or Tal/LoN meteors.
I might have missed a couple options, but if any of that sounds interesting you can search for YouTube guides to find out the finer details.
We'll see how I feel. Its another season where the start date isn't very convenient for my schedule so I might be looking at a late start again - probably sometime in the following week.
Posts
*pours one out for WD Garg builds*
Only thing that is crummy is if I want to try and push high in Grifts or complete the season journey. But even those I have certain things or builds I use.
So eh, not that much to complain about. I should also mention that D3 is my "fun" game so I don't pay much attention to anything. Which is why I roll a DH each season. Simple and I remember some of the two builds needed to grind.
Steam: betsuni7
If the necro set dungeons are anything to go by, then the new set dungeons won't be painful at all.
What it does well is keeps me coming back to at least do the season journey nearly every season.. though there has been a few that i've missed.
Crummy... doing bounties for rerolling materials and grinding a ton of forgotten souls for rerolls on equipment. Actually, just rerolling in general. It's more so the forgotten soul requirements though, I can live with the bounty material requirements if I have to.
Where D3 really wins is with loot/gear. Now, it has taken them a while to get there, but they have an amazing balance between the ability to get gear that you *need* fast enough by gambling, re-rolling, cube recipes, Hagrid's, etc. - and making the *perfect* gear hard to get to keep you playing forever. They've also kept a little bit of the magic of finding a thing, hoping it's great, identifying it, etc. that gets some good brain-drugs going (which I am totally fine with in a game that doesn't ask me to pay extra to get this stuff).
I know some people might find issue with the way sets have 14,000% bonuses and that sort of thing. I don't - I don't see another great way to do it. And there are definitely some useless items, etc. (but game designers will tell you, this is actually necessary).
It has other things going for it too. It's got non-mandated group/role play where folks can plan teams together and make it more fun. The fact that the internet decides one group composition is the best and eliminates all other options is a downside, but one that can be avoided (especially if you play 2's or 3's). It has a variety of modes of play - the difference in gameplay experience between speedruns and pushing in one game is pretty great, to be honest, and then you've got the other actual modes as well. And there's immense class/build diversity. Not at the highest level, again, but you can very easily decide to play a certain spec and see how far you can push it - the community even celebrates those that do very well with "off-meta" builds.
The subtext of the blog post is "these are the things that the D3 team has been allocated enough resources to do." A new expansion is off the table. According to the rumors, a lot of people have been shifted to D4, but that's a different team. Or maybe the D3 team is a part-time subset of those devs.
While we're at it - and I've whined about this extensively - I think that Ramaladni's Gift should be a little bit less random. This season I've gone for ~550 paragon levels without seeing a single Ramaladni's Gift; the first one dropped after I'd started gearing a second character to try for a third conquest. You can target other types of items by gambling for that slot at Kadala's, or upgrading rares, but Ramaladni's Gift (and the potions, I suppose) are the thing you can't target at all. There's no way to smooth out the probability curve, you're at the mercy of drop rates.
Steam: betsuni7
I wish they would let you use the Gifts on off-hand items as well as weapons.
Steam: betsuni7
IMO 6 piece sets should be optional things than enable a totally new type of gameplay from what your skills usually do, but don't increase your power more than the equivalent number of legendaries.
That's from the PTR notes, so I don't know if it'll make it over to Live intact, but that certainly looks like it'll be interesting. I feel better about taking up one legendary gem slot than about taking up two ring slots. Further, Legacy of Nightmares only takes ancients into accounts, while the gem will give you a bonus for regular ol' legendaries as well.
I agree with you that sets (and especially 6-piece bonuses) dominate the landscape too much, but at least this gems seems like a nice patch for the time being.
Diablo 3 needs to make gargs and dogs have targeted active components like necromancer skeletons do
EDIT: Snark aside, I generally find that a rotation that includes more than, say, 3 skills starts to feel extremely hectic to me. I deeply appreciate having set-it-and-forget-it skills like zombie dogs and gargs; any time I have skills with passive and active components (Crusader Laws, Necro skeletons), I typically find myself not using the active portions much because I have trouble fitting them in the rotation, but also feeling bad that I'm not using the skills to the fullest.
On the other hand, I think it's neat when skills have passive runes and active runes, like Necro Devour and Curse of Frailty, both of which are active skills that have one rune that turns them into always-on auras.
Those two bugs I mentioned are fixed (squirts penalty and crimsons snapshotting), and the final notes added some clarity about how some of the items work.
https://us.diablo3.com/en/blog/23093786
I'm a little bummed about no new visual rewards, but I guess I don't have that pennant yet. At least there are two easy (just time-consuming) conquests. I have absolutely no interest in the special season buff, because I just know that I will absolutely not pay enough attention to the circles to use them.
The crafted sets look really good. Interested to see how Messerschmidt's Reaver and Captain Crimson's set impact cooldown-reliant builds, and whether Echoing Fury can fit into any speedrun builds.
Which Haedrig's Gift sets would you folks recommend? I have almost no play time with Monk and Wizard, so I'd be interested to try one of them out.
Steam: betsuni7
Akkhan probably stands out the most, since it’s very flexible and pairs amazingly with the new crimson’s. Pestilence can be good if you like LotD/Lance, especially now with Messerschmidt’s.
I think this is my least favorite season cycle; other than Akkhan, I feel like I have to skip past Haedrig’s ASAP.
Steam: betsuni7
At the start of the season, I was sure I wouldn't have the endurance for 3 conquests, so I am very pleased to get these wings.
I, unsurprisingly, have not.
I've played Wizard, Barbarian, and Necromancer, so everything else is an option for me. Any suggestions? I'm leaning toward Demon Hunter or Crusader, but if their armor sets are garbo this season, I'll do something else.
edit: DH seems nice
Crusaders start with Akkhan, which will be smoother than ever with the extra CDR and damage from Crimsons. The set is mainly used for either Condemn or Blessed shield, both of which also work in LoN. Seeker (Hammerdin) and Invoker thorns are still good, and Roland’s Sweep is looking better too thanks to Crimsons.
DH gets Marauder which is fine to start, just more of deliberate pace because of the sentries. It can build into N6M4 sentries, LoN Rapid Fire, Shadow Impale, or Unhallowed Multishot. MS will be very popular due to the RCR/toughness bonus from Crimsons, and easily slots in the new Squirts Necklace for up to double damage.
Monk gets Inna, which can be a pain to start with, but can still support Wave of Light, or a variant of shenlongs generator build. There’s also a Raiment generator build, Sunwuko/LoN wave of light, and even Uliana’s Exploding Palm/Seven-sided Strike build.
Necro’s get pestilence, which can now use Messerschmitts Reaver to rapidly reset land of the dead and corpse Lance everything in sight. You can stick with Lance, or go Rathma/LoN mage spam, but not much else without handicapping yourself.
Docs get Zuni, which can be general purpose pets or Carnevil/Dagger of Darts army. Jade is still a beast too, dotting up the screen and then exploding it with soul harvest.
Wiz gets Delsere’s, and depends on spamming slow time bubbles to buff a few different skills like Frozen orb, twisters, or explosive blast. It’s fine, but really overshadowed by Vyr’s Archon or Tal/LoN meteors.
I might have missed a couple options, but if any of that sounds interesting you can search for YouTube guides to find out the finer details.
HA HA HA!
Steam: betsuni7
Betsuni witchdoctor dot com
We'll see how I feel. Its another season where the start date isn't very convenient for my schedule so I might be looking at a late start again - probably sometime in the following week.
As they tweak things, more and more, playing anything but DH just seems like a mistake.
Akkhan + crimsons does sound interesting though. Condemn is fun.
D3: HexDex#1281, PSN: DireOtter, Live: DireOtter