Bored Druid ThreadFollow

Problem solved.

Don't have any.



YOU BASTID!

That settles it, anime and D3 login screen it is.

Do you use a security key? Because I feel like that's working against me.

That requires going outside and I'm just not ready for that.

Go buy The Colour Of Magic, it'll be worth it.

It is, Terry Pratchett has a way with words. I love his writing style, it's very British, for lack of a better way to describe it. He uses lots of awesome words and his books alternatively make fun of real life and any and all fantasy cliches but there's still a good story in there.

I'd reccomend mort over colour of magic, but almost all of his books are awesome

I had a long rant typed out, but it wasn't worth it. I'll just post 3 things. Spoilered the body, to condense for people who don't care.

1. I'm pissed that they removed stat allocation and stream-lined the stats to be class-based (more the latter). They say they did so because the previous system was forcing players into cookie cutter builds. I call ********* because D2 probably had more viable build diversity than any other game I've ever played. Melee Sorceress? Super durable. Glass Cannon? Sure. The Longevity Mage? That's fine, huge mana and health pool let you spam hydra all day long. They all worked in both PvE and PVP, but it would have been impossible without stat choices and stats that were distinct from class. When a Sorc buffed Strength, she buffed her ability to wear armor AND her weapon damage.
Spoiler
In D3, there are only 4 stats. Each class gets its damage from one of them, and then anyone can benefit from a defensive side-effect. Strength gives armor, Dex gives dodge, Int gives Resistances. Then Vitality increases health. Resources are class-based. This effectively destroys stat variety in builds (as Blizz said they made the socket system extensive to replace stat allocation). It's completely meaningless though, because it does more than anything else to create cookie cutter builds.

Every Monk is going to be high-damage/dodge. The only variable will be how much health he has. If there are soft caps in armor/resistances, then he'll meet those. But that's how EVERY F*CKING MONK will gem. Because there's absolutely no reason not to. By not buffing your core stat, since your damage is directly linked to it regardless of what you want to do, you will gimp yourself. This created cookie cutter builds in a system that didn't have them before.

Not only that, but gone completely are the days of alternate builds. You want to be a melee Wizard? That's nice. You're still going to have to buff Vitality and Intellect (nearly exclusively). If you want to play as an arcane warrior, then you'll be using Energy Armor to buff your defense and Spectral Blade (a "melee" spell with an absurdly long range) as your free spell.

Oh yeah, you COULD do something like 7% more damage by using a standard attack instead of Spectral Blade (if you use a special spell to buff your weapon). Thing is, Spectral Blade is free and hits everything in a large area. Your regular attack hits 1 thing. Yeah. Oh, and SB may actually still do more to 1 target, because I'm looking at tooltips out of game. So, no, you won't be making an Arcane Warrior unless you want to gimp yourself. Unlike in D2.

2. Builds? Lol, no. Builds don't exist anymore. Now it's just the spells you happen to be using. Why? Because you get them all of course! Every class unlocks EVERY spell and rune. You don't make meaningful choices in a skill tree. You don't buff your skills to the relativistic levels you want them for optimal return with your play style. You just use whatever you want, and it's just as good as anyone else's.

SpoilerYou do get to choose only 3 passive skills from a big list. But you aren't locked into them or anything. They're more like Call of Duty perks, really. Some, I will grant, look like they'd have a meaningful impact on play. Others look like they wouldn't really influence play style, just make you (say) sturdier. But the only ones with really big impacts are the ones that come with big penalties, too. Because balance, of course. So they're only worth using if you structure your spell choices to make perfect use of them.

So that sorta, makes them... cookie cutter builds. OH NO, I THOUGHT THEY AVOIDED THAT.

3. You get your shizz way too fast. It's completely bland because of it, like a rich white girl getting her third Porsche.

SpoilerI got a spell that made me completely immune to damage while it was active. And a shield drop many times better than the one I was using. I failed to really care. Why? Because you get a new spell or rune every level, and you don't even choose them. They're just there, available if I want to use them. But chances are you've been doing just fine without them, so unless they're way more amazing than what you WERE using, why would you care?

Same deal with gear. It was a big deal to elevate gear tiers in D/D2. I had all blue gear within 10-20 minutes of playing D2, most of which buffed my experience gains or... chance to get drops.

Yeah, no. I didn't even get excited when I saw magic items drop, because chances were they wouldn't be better than what I was using at all. Most were worse, and the few that were better were barely so.


I have no clue why they made these changes, but they're a huge blow to what was so great about D2--the ability to make a fully viable build based on YOUR play style and desires. Plus the general difficulty/rewarding nature of the game is shot, from what I played. I didn't even get remotely scared of fighting bosses.

D3 is still a decent game, if what you are looking for is some mindless hack n' slash. But the Diablo series had never been about that, and I'm appalled that it's what they reduced this one to. And it's not like it does it better than <insert action game like God of War or Dante's Inferno>. I'll strive to withhold judgement until launch can tell us more about higher-level content, in hopes that the mindlessness of the game was entirely do to intentionally easy mobs (and mind you, I was soloing in a world with other people, so facing harder demons).

I'm reading Mort now and I think it's better now that I'm already familiar with the world so I'd say starting at The Colour Of Magic and The Light Fantastic is the way to go.


Then again, I'm also a little OCD about reading books in the right order.

Why were you saving stats in D2? I placed all of mine every level and never felt gimp as a result. I can see saving the skill points, for if you see something a little later you really want to invest in. But, generally, there were decent passives to serve as skill point dumps if you didn't want to invest too heavily in an ability. Yes, some of them would be wasted points, which is specifically why I said the way to avoid gimp builds is to avoid gimp abilities. And this didn't even apply to all classes, many of whom had strong early level skills.

Necromancer is a good example. First tier of summoning was Skeleton and Skeleton Mastery. You'd put points in the Skeletons as you wanted them, but otherwise SM would buff all your skeleton summons, even the higher tier ones. If you put 20 points in Skeleton, never once looking further down the tree to see what else you could summon, I don't really have much sympathy. I don't expect people to plan out, point by point, their characters. I think it's extremely fair to expect them to get a general idea of what's available, so they can move towards it. And ending up with 18/20 in a passive you would have maxed if you hadn't placed too many points in an ability wasn't the end of the world.

If you saved a point, it was almost always because there just wasn't anything worth getting at that level, especially with something pretty about to open up. And if there WAS something worth getting, you were probably going to revisit it later, so NBD if you tossed a point there.

No one power leveled because skill trees were annoying or because stats took planning--that was a joke right? They power leveled because the game has you playing through the same areas 3 times, at least, on every character, and because the really difficult or fun stuff (PVP, Mad Cow Level, super hard Diablo) were all at high levels. The ONLY players who would care that much about losing out slightly on X passive are the ones who were doing hardcore high-level PVP, particularly nightmare. And it's more than reasonable to expect them to be planning ahead.

As for abilities, it's not the changing aspect that I dislike, or even being able to get everything. My issue is that they just hand you everything and let you change it on the go. You should have to choose your unlocks (with you eventually ending up with everything) from a level-appropriate set of abilities and runes. Then you should commit to your set of abilities and runes, but be able to pay a level-appropriate fee in town to reset them.

Look at it this way--if every player has access to every spell (and with stats being so utterly diminished in variance), then every single <insert class> is equally prepared for every single situation.

Really think about that for a second.

In D2, if you weren't perfectly specced to handle some mob arrangement, that was fine. Your build just wasn't made for that, but probably excelled in other areas. It wasn't gimped, and there was no cookie cutter build (ever).

But now we're talking about a situation where it would absolutely be true that there are a best set of available spells for any encounter. It's no different than if, in WoW, someone wanted to play by spamming their favorite two abilities. In D2's context, they could actually design a build to make that fully viable. In D3's, they are a gimp.

It's not THAT bad. Last night I was reading about spiders and why humans have a natural fear of them. Fascinating stuff.

Edit: And the spider in that pic looks like a golden silk orb weaver?

Edited, Apr 21st 2012 2:42pm by IDrownFish

Australia is hell on Earth.

Hell. On. Earth.

I'm sure even these little guys are hiding some kind of switch-blade horn or something, somewhere.