It's good to see them giving a consequence for respeccing, or to be more accurate, giving a bonus for not respeccing. I would assume it is to satisfy the slightly less casual gamers who don't care about being able to respec as long as they get some benefit for not doing so.

Re beta difficulty:

I don't get it, so your gold/magic find keeps going up as long as you don't switch what's in a skill slot?

These sorts of systems are put in place to prevent extremely dedicated players from being encouraged to play in a style that creates artifical time sinks. If the most optimal way to play was to respec your character between every group of monsters, dedicated players would do that. Which would be boring for everyone.

For every elite boss you kill in the world, your gold and magic find will go up a small amount. This means that instead of rushing to the act boss and killing them to get the best loot, you should instead play the rest of the act to kill the elite bosses. Then, after you've killed them and increased your magic find, you should kill the act boss.

This encourages people to not simply do Mephisto / Pindleskin runs, as happened in Diablo 2, instead they will go out and look for random bosses to kill and then after that, kill the act boss.

If you change your skills, then you lose any magic find that you'd accumulated. Presumably if you die, you will also lose it. Presumably when you start a new game, your MF goes back to 0 also.

This encourages people to find a skill set that they find effective and stick with it, instead of changing skills every 5 minutes when they enter a new level with new enemies that require different tactics.

Here is the official report on that mf thing, called Nephalem Valour

http://diablo.incgamers.com/blog/comments/nephalem-valor-announced

Just like in real life.

I feel like unless the magicfind increase is pretty dramatic, it would be more effective to do 2 or more runs rather than running around trying to kill some random hero. Or possibly the heroes could be easy to find. It'd be hard to find any sort of balance with that. I mean it's not like you can really tell too much of a difference with 100% magicfind or 105% magicfind. It sounds good on paper but logistically I don't see how it could work out.

There's no way that you can have a substantial difference made by killing heroes that give the sort of feedback to positively reinforce going after them, all the while keeping the gains low enough to balance it, and while making it big enough to make it worth it rather than just going for the boss. That's a complicated mess.

Yes, it's going to be a very fine balance between waste of time and perk worth having.

One thing they could do though, is simply increase the number of items dropped. Say you kill an act boss and normally they only drop 3 items. But if you've got high enough valor, they'll drop 5 or 6 items instead. Then you can increase the magic find on top of it.

That would mean that killing the boss once after killing all the elites gives you both more items and a higher chance of getting good ones from the magic find. It wouldn't be difficult to take it a step further and make it so certain items can only drop when you've got high valor.

If the drop tables are as bad as the TC's in diablo 2... which no doubt they will be... MF will be largely useless again.

As far as the difficulty is concerned, I'm being told it's actually easier now due to increased AoE. Supposedly they just tried to "increase the difficulty" by reducing player HP, but this is, as always, the wrong place to be changing numbers. The monsters do damage, it's just that their AI is total shit. Fix their AI, the difficulty will go up dramatically. Tried and true. (Edit: Sorry, misunderstood what he said; he was talking about Tera when he mentioned the health change. Supposedly d3 is very "slightly" harder.)

I might do another runthrough sometime and record it for you guys, and point out all of the things that piss me right off. But I need to wrap up my current work first, and the beta might not last that long.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Mar 22 2012, 2:18 am by IskatuMesk.

As an alternative argument in factor of respecialization:

If every human being on the planet played Diablo 3 every second of every day, it would take them 316,381 years to test all possible builds. That doesn't factor in how items might affect builds.

Tell me how you got that number.

That was a little high. For some reason I thought there were 32 skills per class; there is only about 22. Also I'm assuming you cannot place the same skill in multiple slots with a different rune in each. I'd also assumed 30 hours of testing, this time let's assume 1 hour instead.

22 skills * 6 runes per skill = 132 skill choices per class

132 * 126 * 120 * 114 * 108 * 102 = 2506423772160 possible combinations of six skills per class

2506423772160 * 15 * 14 * 13 = 6842536897996800 combinations of six skills and three passives.

6842536897996800 * 5 = 34212684489984000 total choices for all five classes combined.

34212684489984000 / 24 hours in a day / 365 days in a year / 7,000,000,000 people on the earth = 557.9 years, testing each build for 1 hour.

Although it might be 'fairer' to go with just 5 runes per skill, rather than 5 runes + base skill. For each skill there is (should be?) a rune that doesn't really change the base skill, but buffs it in terms of damage or duration or whatever.

That still gives a time of 157.96 years, or 31.59 years per character class.

Just bought the Book of Cain today and currently reading through it. Some nice artwork and the lore is pretty interesting, especially about the seven Archangels.


I've also got work rostered off for the release date and afterward for Diablo 3. Now I've just got to stock up on LA Ice and I should be good to go!

Diablo III Open Beta Weekend now

Ugh I'm a bit disappointed now. They've changed Tyrael's voice actor from Ed Trotta to Jonathan Adams (the same guy who has been doing all the VOs for the class videos).
I made a video comparing the two voices, even the sound effects have been changed!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HiElGiIgH4

I hate it! It's Starcraft 2 all over again!

The theme of the storyline is broadly the same as SC and WC3 as well.

It seems with movie AND game industry there is a smaller and smaller emphasis on quality writing.

But I'm withholding judgement until afterward, the premise seems good:

Fallen angel crashes into tristram starting off some big chain of events.
The two lesser evils start stirring shit up.
Black Soulstone is some sort of crucial plot device.
Diablo will get ressurected somehow.
Bigger emphasis on angels this time around.


I'm not too worried about Diablo story compared to Starcraft. See Starcraft 2 had a superficially good story but Starcraft 1 had a superb story that SC2 didn't even come close to being a worthy successor to.
Whereas Diablo 2... barely had a story at all lol. Just a long series of skippable monologues by various characters, most of which only hang around for a single act. Diablo comes back, resurrects brothers. Hero kills all three of them. World stone is some sort of dues ex machinia only it isn't... then it gets destroyed for some reason and there is some sort of unknown consequence...

So really in terms of story I think there is pretty much nowhere else they can go except up. Whereas SC2 had a much higher bar to reach.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on May 10 2012, 5:30 am by Oh_Man.

My BattleTag is Shmidley for those interested.