PSA: Diablo III Open Beta WeekendFollow

My biggest issue with the Softcore AH is that there's no mechanic in place to remove gear from the economy. On Hardcore, player deaths both remove gear from the economy and create demand for more gear as they level up new characters. The SC economy is just absolutely flooded with items. Have fun selling things at $1.25 (of which Blizzard takes $1.00 off the top, plus another 15%). I'll admit to listing a few items at around $3-5 but I don't really expect them to sell.

So I'm working on a viable Hardcore Inferno DH build. My DH on the EU server is closing in on 60 and so I'm practicing on my Squishycore US DH to try to get at least Act 1 down without dying and without A3/4 gear. Basically, I'm running a 1-handed weapon build, with shield offhand, built around high crit rate and attack speed, utilizing the Nightstalker passive and high base Discipline pool. I don't know if I can build a soloable DH, but I should certainly be able to build one to work in tandem with a Barbarian and/or Monk, especially with the nerf to monster damage gains in co-op.

Monsters in multiplayer do the same damage they do in solo. T'was in the hotfix a week ago or something.

That would explain why my tankiness didnt seem to change much when i was playing with friends. I thought that was some future patch.

Since thats the case, have they revamped the cost of JC and BS yet and I just missed it? please say this is true...

Along with smoother scaling of monster damage in A2+ in Inferno. **** still hits like trucks for now, though. Hulking Phasebeasts and Soul Lashers can go DIAF.

So patch 1.0.3, Forum meltdown (I havent played as of yet). Or is everyone already over the game?

Most of the patch changes sound good to me. I'm just into act 2 nightmare on my DH. I'm not sure just repeating the same story and zones but now with high speed hedgehogs with mortor molton teleport reflect doom is compelling game play yet.

I did enjoy the game the first time around in normal mode, Heck the final fight even gave me some trouble until I bought an OP bow from the AH. But if the new patch makes it so I can actually get my gear from progression rather than farming and searching through 100 pages of the AH for a decently priced bow then I might keep at it a bit more. /shrug



Edited, Jun 19th 2012 5:53pm by Shojindo

Apparently you'll run out of money trying to farm gear now at higher levels (higher repair costs, lower rewards for farming, and supposedly even opening chests reduces durability on equipment). 2-8% chance to get an ilvl 63 item, plus the chance that it actually has the skills you needed/wanted. You'll be killing a lot of stuff, repairing a lot of equipment. I think they said something about lowering the number of magic items guaranteed to drop from elites too?

One of the "really?" changes... Weapon Racks no longer drop weapons 100% of the time. Why? They were usually white crap weapons, worth 4-7g each. What was so bad about those dropping always? Seems like a pointless change.

MF no longer affects non-monster drops? Items can't drop from destroyable stuff? Sounds like they are wanting to make it HARDER to get items. The way they are treating this game makes it very hard to play single player.

The cynical view of Blizzard pushing people towards the AH and by extension the RMAH is looking more and more realistic.

Edited, Jun 19th 2012 11:03pm by TirithRR

I'm puzzled, really. The Inferno adjustments were needed, yeah, and I won't argue against the 5 stack NV tweak. A lot of the other nerfs just reek of heavy-handed overreaction to the small few who've exploited things, though. When I first heard about them wanting to bump repair costs up 5x, I knew people were gonna suffer. I probably fluctuate between 50-75k/hr doing full clears of areas in A1 Inferno. Yet, on top of this, they go and mutilate incidental gold pick ups from destructibles and the like, probably knocking a good 10-15k off depending on much I wanted to click on pots and such.

As for ilvl 63 items possibly dropping earlier, I'm just gonna call it bunk. 8% chance to get something of that tier to drop? Okay. Pray it's in the slot you want, of which you're basically looking at probably over 25 possibilities of a given item, making it more like a 0.32% drop rate. Then let's say that has a 50% chance of being magical quality or greater, making getting a blue something more like 0.16%. If getting a rare is 5% or less? At least 0.016%. Basically forget any real shot of getting a later act drop from a white mob, you're playing the NV lottery and it's still a crapshoot on randomly generated mobs if you do get something from the 63 tier. Bluntly, Hell drops need to be eliminated from Inferno to bring those numbers up to more acceptable levels.

And far as I'm concerned, they still have a long way to go with crafting. Recipes need to drop a hell of a lot more often, or at least the 5 mod ones. When you need Primary Stat, VIT, and All Resist to even consider making an item good for a class, there's not much margin for error on the entry level recipes. And even if you do get those on 3 of 4, they could be low end rolls and junk anyway.

When gold started getting out of hand, I would've much rather them taken the time to individually comb through accounts and figure out what was generated from things like pot bots. Strip them, ban them, and follow the money trails (that should be there for security purposes). If someone innocent got caught up, give them a complementary rollback or more customized character adjustment. Instead, we get "NERF ALL THE THINGS!" where it's basically anyone who didn't exploit sh*t gets to pay for it as Blizz hopes to bleed gold from the economy. Downside is, once people start thinking, "Hey, I could sell this for x million!" getting them to go to x hundred thousand or less isn't going to happen with any level of haste without the AH having some kind of listing fee and not just a post-sale tax. All the hundreds of k you're gonna see people spending on repairs now is just going to be passed off onto buyers at the AH when someone finally does get that 1 okay+ drop to sell.

Edited, Jun 20th 2012 1:20am by Seriha

While I like to consider myself a bit more... I dunno, civil when it comes to expressing matters of gaming discontent. I can't really blame people.

There seems to be this growing developer trend of, "We don't really care, but we'll take your money, anyway..." going on with a side of people defending these companies for no really good reason, usually falling back to buzz words like entitlement, insulting someone's skill/intelligence, or the ever humorous just demanding people quit.

And while some people are just talking out of their *** with complaints, resorting to the above for legitimate gripes just doesn't help.

Gold drops, just like gear, is a matter of luck. I was concerned about the repair cost nerf for the very reason of knowing how much gold I tend to walk away with after a session. Personally, I'm at around 5k per death. Just clearing the crypts, repairing my bow was around 2.5k with whatever incidental damage repairs come on the side. I don't strive to die or zombie kill, so let's kindly not open that can of worms which inevitably leads to the commentary I mentioned above.

I'm sure someone who craps out more DPS (I'm only about 28k now, if I didn't mention) will make more much more quickly, especially in squishing alternative gold methods. It doesn't change the overall relationship of my gripe, though, in that making money will be more about dumb luck on drops to AH than actual gold farming. Moreover, sinks in crafting are still present, and would be far more prevalent if recipes weren't so rare. Basically, if Blizz wanted money gone from the economy, they had other methods of self-correction to employ instead of using a small fraction of the player base as a starting point of where to set their standard.

Anyway, I don't doubt you made 230k. Bigger question is how long it took you to go from the Highlands Crossing to the Butcher, with perhaps whether or not you break down unwanted items instead of NPCing. If you're killing every mob and doing every little side-area possible, I can easily see it taking 2 hours or more if you're averagely geared.

Wasn't that the entire point of whimsyshire?

Also, the repair change was put in to sink some of the gold that was cheesed into the game. Which is an asinine way of handling it.

Well, the IAS nerf greatly affects DH as well, since they were stacking it too. In fact, just about everyone was stacking IAS.