Mysteries of the Mighty Barbarians.

[Anakron]

They did acknowledge that the item-hunt they envisioned was not sustainable, and that they were looking to do something else for end-game. They're probably saving level-cap raises for expansions, so I think some kind of FFXI merit system would work. i.e. you can put merit points into stats or specific skills for small gains

Whatever it is, I don't see it coming out until 1.1 at the earliest, though.

[BaneTheBrawler]

I always thought XI's merit system was particularly well done. It gave you something to work towards while doing end-game that didn't require anything more than just usual EXP parties, but at the same time the bonuses aren't so strong that you're unable to progress in end-game without them.

[kisada]

right, which is why they should be prioritizing that over everything else. i want them to fix all the piss-poor design issues they lazily threw in our faces. but that's not as important as addressing end-game by relaying their intentions and making sure we're in the loop as often as possible. transparency is imperative for them because just about everyone thinks they gave up on the game. and after CM's finally commenting on the game after 3 weeks of silence, blizzard continuing to keep us in the dark regarding the biggest issue in the game is insulting.

[Lordender]

I don't have a problem with "the endgame" where we farm endlessly, here is my problem.

The itemization just sucks ass, on armor, we have 4 useful affixes, must haves.

All resist, vit, primary stat either crithit chance or crithit dmg(sometimes both)

On weapons:

Primary stat, crit hit dmg, LoH, +dmg

Then you have affixes that are nice on gear but not really must haves like: Magic Find, Gold Find, Life Regen.

Then you have sub level 60 gear dropping in Inferno, set items/legendary items have really poor drop rates + they're way too random.

Blizzard needs to fix the loot, the loot is the biggest issue with the entire game.

[Anakron]

What are you proposing? That they remove all affixes except those you mentioned and have every weapon drop with the following?

1000+ DPS
900+ LoH
90%+ Crit Damage
+300 primary stat
+300 VIT

[Lordender]

What are you proposing? That they remove all affixes except those you mentioned and have every weapon drop with the following?

1000+ DPS
900+ LoH
90%+ Crit Damage
+300 primary stat
+300 VIT

No, the point is, they failed so hard on the loot system. Every affix out of those 4 are mostly useless, you have to stack resist, especially if you play a melee. There is no wiggle room on the gear like there was in Diablo 2. In D2, 1 item could define your entire character like the Infinity runeword, it made that single lightning sorceress viable.

The loot system is just so poor, it will always be poor if we're going to be pidgeon held into stacking 700+ resist or pay 30-50k repair bills. In D2, it was fairly easy to balance damage, resists, magic find, you forgo all resists if you wanted provided no casters were in an area like "The Pit" etc. Thats why the loot system is so terrible in this game, there is 0 experimentation because the game is nothing but a gear check.

Wanna farm A2

Get X resist
Get X LoH
Get X Dps
Get X Armor

Wanna farm A3?

Get more Resist
Get more LoH
Get more DPS
Get more Armor

It's just so poorly done, there is really only one way to gear in D3 as opposed to multiple ways to gear in D2. The freedom is completely lacking in D3 as opposed to D2.

[Anakron]

That's just a bad balance between difficulty and itemization. All of those stats wouldn't be nearly as important if the game were easier. You didn't need any of those stats in Hell.

And that brings up an interesting question--would the community have reacted differently if the game just ended at Hell? All of this pigeon holing you mentioned came out of the difficulty in Inferno. If the game ended in Hell, you could beat it (i.e. Hell) using only what you found, and many more builds and styles would have been possible.

[shrapner]

I dont think they would have reacted differently, because the loot system would be the same still

Point is, the affixes you can get on your loot is just bleh compared to d2.

really the ones that matter in d3 are, crit chance, crit dmg, attack speed, resistance, loh, main stat then vit, if you're a monk then you gotta worry about stacking 1 res + all res.

in d2 you had crushing blow, faster hit recovery, attack rating, enhanced damage, resistances, +skill, plus you could make runewords which are far superior to legendary shit in d3.

those are just what i remember off the top of my head. what i liked about d2 was that there were break points, and to reach the next one you had to optimize your gear to get just the right amount of the correct stat. if you didn't want that break point then you could optimize it differently.

really there is just nothing to do but farm 1 act start to finish over and over and over and hope you get a good rare drop, or a plan, or a decent set item, or at least gold so you can just buy the shit you want from the AH instead of trying to find it yourself.
plus too there is no more lobbies, you only can join a game with friends or a game with random people who are on the same quest as you. the AH replaced the trading from d2 which IMHO is what made d2 so good.

everyone has their own opinion though, but for me it'd just be easier to bot sarkoth and buy the gear, but that defeats the purpose of finding it yourself since they'd be no other reason to play once you have bought all of the best gear.

[Tajin]

That's just a bad balance between difficulty and itemization. All of those stats wouldn't be nearly as important if the game were easier. You didn't need any of those stats in Hell.

And that brings up an interesting question--would the community have reacted differently if the game just ended at Hell? All of this pigeon holing you mentioned came out of the difficulty in Inferno. If the game ended in Hell, you could beat it (i.e. Hell) using only what you found, and many more builds and styles would have been possible.

Itemization is not the problem. Is level 59- dropping in every inferno act. Hell is too easy and a3+ inferno is not quite hard but the gear needed to progress just wont drop.

[Lucavi]

The fact that there are no "fun" stats anymore sucks as well. No open wounds (unresistable poison damage, essentially, with glorious blood spray), no freezes on hit, no spell casts on hit (that I've seen). It was a lot of fun having a sword that somehow managed to have a 6% chance to cast level 6 confusion on a mass of mobs; that sword did a lot of damage mitigation over time - without any defensive stats on it - simply by virtue of confusing targets.

No crushing blow, no...

[Lordender]

That's just a bad balance between difficulty and itemization. All of those stats wouldn't be nearly as important if the game were easier. You didn't need any of those stats in Hell.

And that brings up an interesting question--would the community have reacted differently if the game just ended at Hell? All of this pigeon holing you mentioned came out of the difficulty in Inferno. If the game ended in Hell, you could beat it (i.e. Hell) using only what you found, and many more builds and styles would have been possible.

If the game ended in hell, the legendary's would have been fine, a 400DPS weapon steam rolls hell. I don't know how they're going to make the loot more diverse, you still need to stack shitload of resists, you're still going to need X amount of stats for A2,3,4 Inferno.

I think what Blizzard should have done was just uncap NV buff from 5 to 20, cap the MF @ 5stacks then start granting small buffs per stack up to 20 then you'd have more freedom if every stack past 5 granted some resist or armor etc. Perhaps @ the 10th stack you got a special bonus for popping chests, 15 stacks you get higher I.lvl loot, 20 stacks gives better quality rolls or something along those lines.

[arus2001]

I'm just waiting for the terrible MF fix that resulted of their piss poor options in that giant thread of everyone telling them they sucked.

[kisada]

LOL yeah. i can't wait to see what horrid option jay wilson picks

[Maaglin]

lol.

Players and Friends,

Even when you are in the business of fun, not every week ends up being fun. This week, our security team found an unauthorized and illegal access into our internal network here at Blizzard. We quickly took steps to close off this access and began working with law enforcement and security experts to investigate what happened.

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We also know that cryptographically scrambled versions of Battle.net passwords (not actual passwords) for players on North American servers were taken. We use Secure Remote Password protocol (SRP) to protect these passwords, which is designed to make it extremely difficult to extract the actual password, and also means that each password would have to be deciphered individually. As a precaution, however, we recommend that players on North American servers change their password. Please click this link to change your password. Moreover, if you have used the same or similar passwords for other purposes, you may want to consider changing those passwords as well.

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http://diablo.incgamers.com/blog/com...r-password-now

[Tajin]

Well you cant really fault them for being big and targeted by lots of people. RMAH is a solid business opporunity on many levels.

Unless of course the people handling blizzz network security is the D3 team

[Eanae]

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/6923...view-8_10_2012

Doesn't look half bad.

[Mrf]

I like the chance for weapon DPS to go all the way to max even on lower ilvl weapons, might actually get me to log back on again after the patch.

That and no more enrage timer / regen health on elites / invlunerable minions.

[Roranora]

wooo

I'll get to play WD again ~ ~

...in the coming weeks

[Lucavi]

What's up with game companies always screwing up dual-wield vs. 2-hander damage mechanics all the time, then having to go back and buff 2-handers? I could have sworn this game had a nice, healthy beta test phase.

[Lordender]

WD gear is going to skyrocket, thank god I was able to buy some nice stuff on the cheap, lol. Too bad I'm not as leet as that 1 WD I saw with 425k DPS.