Discussion about the recent Diablo 3 news. (RPG, character, single, 2012)

[lovesthebass]

I'm surprised no one has made a topic about it yet, but I'd like to hear some opinions from those people who bought Diablo 3, regardless of if they enjoyed it or not, on the recent news that surrounds the next expansion.

There's loot 2.0, paragon 2.0, a ladder system, the removal of the auction houses, a new class, new skills, raised level cap to 70 and so forth.

The things I'm most interested in are the loot 2.0 and removal of the auction houses. (though I can't wait for ladder)

They haven't said much about loot 2.0, but IMO, they have a lot of work to deal with the horrible itemization system. Something has to be done about the four "king" stats. Though, I think really the only major contributors to that issue are crit damage and all resist. I wouldn't be against removing those two stats all together. It gives Blizzard a much more even playing field for adding new affixes and allowing them to be comparable in power to the current popular affixes. I see it being extremely difficult to come up with more affixes that would give someone a different option than crit damage when it comes to killing efficiency.

Going further with the loot system, I think that item levels need to really mean something. No level 73 item should be comparable in power to an ilvl70 item with the same affixes. It just doesn't make sense. The values should not overlap whatsoever. Though, in contrast, the higher the ilvl, the more rare it is. They need to bring back rarity and quality, rather than quantity. So if you're farming and you come across a rare/legendary item drop, you hover over it and see an ilvl73, you know right away that you've found something fairly powerful, whether or not it's useful to you. They need to move away from the whole "rare loot pinata" system that is currently in place. I understand quantity being important in a loot based game, but rarity and quality are even more important, IMO.

Now, moving onto the removal of the auction houses. I think it's a good move. I think the convenience of the auction house takes away from the fun of the game. Why? Blizzard doesn't want you to gear up too quickly because, well, what's after that? Especially in a system with an indefinite existence. So, they have to fine tune the loot system to be less rewarding to the player because the player has the option to trade with every other (millions) player in the system at any time. Bashiok explained this himself back in May of 2012. I'm pretty sure we all saw it.

Now, if Blizzard is giving us a more rewarding loot system, it is detrimental to the longevity of the game if there is a forum for trading with every single player at any time. There will be so much good gear everywhere, that you can just gear yourself up in no time without opening your wallet. So, how do they combat this? Remove the auction house. Allow players to find their own forums for trade and it drastically reduces the amount of gear they have at their instant disposal.

I suppose I'll touch on one last thing. I think Blizzard needs to do more with paragon levels. I do believe they were talking about allowing the player to add account-wide bonuses (as paragon levels will also be account-wide), but I think they should go a step further.

A long standing problem that people have with Diablo 3 is the lack of permanency. Now, I don't suggest that you should pick skills and have to stick with them. The D3 talent system certainly doesn't support something like that. However, I think that each character should be able to put paragon level bonuses into their skill runes to give them more of a permanency feel. Would they be forced to stick with those skills? Absolutely not, though they would be more apt to stick with them for efficiency. Those paragon points would be permanent per character. (If you had 100 paragon levels, you would have 100 paragon points per character to spend on buffing runes)

Say a skill does a base damage of 150% and freezes the enemy for 2 seconds. One rune ups the damage to 200% while another rune ups the frozen time to 3 seconds. Say you put ten paragon points into the damage rune and each point gives it say, a 2% bonus. Now you have 220% damage. Say you want to go the other route and put ten paragon points into the frozen time at say, .2 seconds per point. Now you have a frozen time of 5 seconds. Maybe you want to do both? Sure, you can put maximums so that you can't put 500 points into the damage and make it an unrealistic 1200%, but it's just something to think about.

I'm curious what others think about all these changes? I've logged nearly, if not over 10,000 hours playing the first two Diablos and played only about 300 hours of Diablo 3 before losing interest. Though, all these changes are certainly looking like Diablo 3 could become an interesting game.

[calnbs]

I'm a huge, huge Blizzard fan. I got my first PC gaming experience from them with the original Diablo and Warcraft and I have follow them religiously all the way to World of Warcraft and left WOW right before Cataclysm. Unfortunately, I have not follow up on Diablo 3 and have no intentions of ever playing this game. This was not the format I wanted Diablo to be in. I wanted a MMORPG for Diablo. I hope that one day Blizzard will do a Diablo Online MMROPG.

[Malloric]

I never got into it. I don't like the art, the Item Quest gameplay design, the lack of PvP, the always on DRM that doesn't work. I can see how it's an improvement... but it's an improvement of a game that just fundamentally does not interest me in the slightest. From my perspective, they just haven't finished the game. Originally I figured they just needed some money from a pay to beta product, but we're now a year and a half later and the game still isn't completed. My guess is Blizzard just isn't capable of releasing it, so they released the stripped down version and turned to Item Quest mechanics since there wasn't an actual game to play.