Slitherine

I may need a serious intervention to stop playing this game.
Panzer Corps Afrika, help!

I pretty much agree with all that deducter has said and I would like to add that the viability of some classes in the highest difficulty levels is really bad.

Barbarian (which I play) is kind useless starting from Hell Act III, at that point it's all about kiting and not about taking the fight to the mobs.
Monk has better survivability but still has problems, Demon Hunter seldom gets hit unless charged and they excel at kiting and do insane dps, Witch Doctor is good but slow progress (solo at least), Wizard is reasonable, also a glass canon but less dps and general surviveability (I am amazed that a wizard solo'd Diablo at Inferno).

Don't get me wrong I had great fun this week with my friends online screaming and shouting and we all really enjoyed the game, but we all have some feeling of disappointment regarding the brevity - and perhaps depth - of the game. One of us was already asking if the expansion was coming next week .

Blizzard surmised, it would take months to beat D3 in Inferno difficulty
Actually the fight only lasted for 4 days and 20,75 hours:

SPOILER

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyAPdEB2tk8&feature=plcp

See videos on YT channel "Method Network"

http://www.youtube.com/user/MethodNetwork/videos

huertgenwald wrote:Blizzard surmised, it would take months to beat D3 in Inferno difficulty
Actually the fight only lasted for 4 days and 20,75 hours:

SPOILER

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyAPdEB2tk8&feature=plcp

See videos on YT channel "Method Network"

http://www.youtube.com/user/MethodNetwork/videos

Completely irrelevant. You can't judge or balance a game based on the most elite of elite players. I have 75 hours played (as of this moment, the game has been out for approximately 130 hours which is roughly 5 days), and I only just beat Act 1 Inferno tonight. My hardcore gamer-ness pales to these people though.

This is literally 4 people out of several million players (that's 0.0000008% of the population, assuming only 5 million players), and these are people truly professional gamers using every underhanded and exploity trick in the book to blitz through content, such as corpse hopping and account sharing.

Inferno is only truly beaten when its beaten on Hardcore. No one has even come close to that yet, and even when they eventually do, it'll still only be 0.0000000x% of the total player population that does it.

Kerensky wrote:I may need a serious intervention to stop playing this game.
Panzer Corps Afrika, help!

You got what you wished for, servers down again

Damn, was about to solo Skeleton King on Inferno, got him to 15% this morning, got some new gear and was ready to try him again.

Kerensky wrote: This is literally 4 people out of several million players (that's 0.0000008% of the population, assuming only 5 million players), and these are people truly professional gamers using every underhanded and exploity trick in the book to blitz through content, such as corpse hopping.

I'd just want to say that the only "professional" gamers there have ever been are Korean BW Pros. Otherwise Kerensky is right.

Took a while, but it's done. Now the farming begins...
http://i.imgur.com/WE0bw.jpg

Wizard ofc , now try to do that with a Barbarian or even a Monk , still stuck in Act I (I breeze through it though), in Act II I get owned all the time.

It's so damn boring farming the same Act all over again. Can someone sent me 50 million gold so I can buy the gear that drops in Act III and IV so I can do Act II?

Anyway congrats Kerensky

Rood wrote:Wizard ofc , now try to do that with a Barbarian or even a Monk , still stuck in Act I (I breeze through it though), in Act II I get owned all the time.

It's so damn boring farming the same Act all over again. Can someone sent me 50 million gold so I can buy the gear that drops in Act III and IV so I can do Act II?

Anyway congrats Kerensky

Exactly this is the problem. Blizzard totally cocked up inferno for melee. You either need the best possible drops from Act1 which considering the randomness of drops may take forever or gear from act 3 to be able to survive in act2. I am in exact the same position as Rood. My monk can breeze through Act1 asleep only dying rarely to the very annoying champions combos like vortex, jailer, arcane enchanted, plagued ... gotta love to stack 3 beams of deaths and 3 pools of slime and then get summoned into it and rooted there. In Act2 tho i get annihilated.

Does this means that the game is unbalanced for certain classes?

VPaulus wrote:Does this means that the game is unbalanced for certain classes?

Imho yes. Blizzard's definition of making inferno difficult is to make everything deal insane damage. The ranged classes get one shoted by nearly everything but they can damage stuff from afar without being hit. The melee classes have to go in close and personal to be able to deal any damage and can not avoid to take damage in return. Now you are a lot more resilient as melee then the ranged classes are but all you gain is taking three hits to die instead of one. The only way to stop this is to stack huge amount of hit points, resistances and armor. You need as well to keep your damage high as Blizzard introduced a timer to all elite encounters. If you do not manage to kill them in a certain time you get debuff calling "Time Out" which causes you to lose increasing amount of hit points per tick.

So in short ranged classes can just stack on damage and burn stuff down fast. Yes they do die often but they can clear content. This can be achieved by gear with only a few good stats which can be farmed within a reasonable time frame. Melee need armor, resistance, hit points and damage stacked to be able to do the same. This need nearly perfect gear pieces collected. Taking into nature the totally random stats allocation in Diablo pieces which offer you all that are very rare and few in between. You need to farm for ages to be able to get it and progress to next act. Needless to say on top of that is the further in the game you progress the better and more loot you get.

Hmmm.
If I understand what you're saying, this means, that AH will compensate this "drought". So it's true, that the game was definitely made with AH in mind.

VPaulus wrote:Hmmm.
If I understand what you're saying, this means, that AH will compensate this "drought". So it's true, that the game was definitely made with AH in mind.

Yup pretty much this. The classes are all viable in end game Inferno, but only with gear is it possible to do. For example I actually finished Inferno Diablo with a Barb melee in group, so melee is obviously viable.
The catch is that no amount of skill can compensate for a lack of gear in this game, so range can go full glass cannon and kill stuff that would one shot them if it got in attack range, but melee don't have that luxury and so its harder for them to get the gear they need to actually survive.

And yea the AH is definitely the solution to this problem, there is no shortage of amazing gear already, but all the top of line stuff costs insane amounts of gold, and pretty soon real money. Only reason I cleared Inferno is with the AHs help, half my stuff is from there purchased from farming early Inferno content repeatedly.

Wow meets Diablo... well now I'm sure that this is not from me. It still can be fun, for people who like to play in Coop... not my case.

VPaulus wrote:Wow meets Diablo... well now I'm sure that this is not from me. It still can be fun, for people who like to play in Coop... not my case.

Yes I have a similar feeling by reading this thread. I had the impression of reading a WoW raid thread which is not really my type.
But to each his own. You guys might just have saved me from buying a new computer.

VPaulus wrote:Wow meets Diablo... well now I'm sure that this is not from me. It still can be fun, for people who like to play in Coop... not my case.

Playing in Coop at the highest level is sometimes not beneficial aswell. For every player (up to four max) the hitpoints of the mobs increase and so does the damage output and both in a non linear way. I found it easier to just play alone then with a friend since the damage from the mobs was too high, and we did not kill them any faster aswell.

I stopped playing WoW years ago since I really disliked the dps/healer/tank party type, now in D3 I have to 'tank' again, and other should do the dps. That is a huge design flaw.

And right now when I play D3 I go to a specific area in Act II, get some Magic Find gear on and farm those Treasure Pygmy's. I now search the Auction House for +MF gear...

And in case you didn't know, there was supposed to be a real money auction house a week after release, it's still not here and I suppose it will be some time before it eventually arrives. As blizzard will take 15% of any transaction that is gonna be the real money maker.

The game in it' current state is not very fun for melee without the gear, and you can guess where that gear is gonna come from eventually...

Rood wrote: And in case you didn't know, there was supposed to be a real money auction house a week after release, it's still not here and I suppose it will be some time before it eventually arrives. As blizzard will take 15% of any transaction that is gonna be the real money maker.

I didn't know how much was the fee, but I already knew that real money was going to be involved.
That was the reason number one why I decided to pass D3. When real money is involved, well let's say things acquire a whole new dimension. It perverts game.
As a business I don't question Blizzard's decisions. I only question them as a game developer and what seems to be their only true motivation.
However, it seems that people don't care with these concerns, and the game is a true success. So I'll say that in terms of business, they know what they are doing.