DnD Next is running an open playtest for anyone who wants to test it out. I downloaded all of the files and took a look at them though I didn't actually play through the adventure supplied; it looked like a very large time investment just to learn all the ins and outs of the adventure prior to even starting to run fights. Rather than a more modern adventure that is segmented into discrete fights that are all reasonable challenges the module they supplied is more of a 'realistic' module in that there are plenty of utterly trivial fights and plenty of fights that will wipe the party out for certain. It is meant to be a complex world that the players can interact with by ambushing people, making groups work against one another, and other such tricks rather than simply by fighting. I like that a lot actually, though it works far better for a group interested in roleplaying than playing a board game.
It appears as though this is the direction Wizards is going with the entire design of Next. They have gotten away from a grid system, zones of control, and attacks of opportunity and instead simply let people move anywhere they want on their turn. Rather than move actions, swift actions and standard actions each character may move and take an action on their turn. Shifting and 5 foot steps are things of the past and it seems like it would be possible to run a fight in Next quite easily on a model with no measurements on it at all - eyeballing the ranges and movement should be quite possible since precise positioning is no longer key. This is going to make the game a lot more fun for roleplaying oriented gamers I suspect since calculating out the best possible turn is going to be very easy and combats should be much less mathy. There will be no more searching through stacks of ability cards and trying to calculate the best use of each of the three action types like in 4th edition.
There are some things I really question in Next though. Chiefly among those is the return to rolling for hit points. The way Constitution affects this is that you roll a die for hp which ranges from a d4 at the lowest to a d12 at the highest and if you roll below your Con modifier you get to take your Con modifier instead. So in this way Con is useful for people with crappy Hit Dice and pretty much garbage for people with good Hit Dice. I don't much like this whole concept at all and I would definitely scrap it in exchange for fixed HP / level. Con already gives you a little bit of HP in that you get HP equal to your Con mod baseline and it helps you heal faster - it actually doesn't need to give you more than that to be good.
One other questionable decision is setting up the game to be a single stat game just like 4th edition. Every class bases their attack roll and damage roll on a single stat, which is good in that stats seem to help each class comparably, but classes that use Dex to attack also get their main stat adding to the armour class. When a single stat determines all of your offense and most of your defence it is not going to leave much room for innovation in character design. Other than that though I really like that the stats are all useful defensively, if only in minor ways, and that casters' damage actually scales with their stat in the same way that thugs' damage does with theirs.
Something that many people are complaining about is that there is a serious return to casters having options and thugs having only 'I attack'. I think for some players 4th edition gave people too many choices but only having 'I move here and attack' in combat is very dull. We haven't seen a list of feats yet though nor do we have any real sense of what other options thugs might have. In the sample character sheet there is virtually nothing for thugs to do aside from attack but that really might change once we know more. I will reserve judgement until we see how it plays out but I do hope they find some kind of middle ground where thugs have a few different options to use without going as far as 4th did. Not that I minded 4th myself but I know lots of people who want a mechanics lite game and Next seems likely to deliver that.
Thursday, May 31, 2012
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
Resources and scaling in D3
Scaling has got to be one of the one misunderstood and abused topics in game design. Scales badly is a, if not the, most common way of saying that something is bad. Despite the whining though scaling is actually a really critical factor in keeping classes and skills balanced long term. I have been doing some looking into how classes can ramp up their damage in D3 and found some disturbing issues. The major problem is the discrepancy between class resource mechanics work with increased attack speed.
Some classes like Monk, Barbarian, Demon hunter (thugs) generate resources from some attacks and spend them with others. Increased attack speed (IAS) means that they generate more resources and spend more resources - 50% IAS certainly doesn't increase resource generation by 50% because there are static sources but it helps a lot. Wizards and Witch Doctors (casters) have resource pools that regenerate on their own and they don't get resources back by using attacks in any significant way. This means that IAS is somewhere between nearly useless and not so great because it doesn't let them attack more often since they are resource limited already. I can't attack extra times if I am already out of mana!
The reason this is such an issue is that IAS is by far the most powerful and easiest way to increase damage output at high gear levels. Once an item has your prime stat on it you can't just stack more prime stat - you need to go to other stats and IAS is the best. You can, if you stack huge amounts of +crit chance and +crit damage increase, get decent damage returns from crit but IAS is cheap and doesn't require other stats to be effective. It is pretty easy to get 60% IAS on gear without much investment and that is a really big problem when some classes get 50% more damage out of it and some get 0.
This pretty much revolves around the different resource systems not being similarly designed. Witch Doctors actually have to spend mana even for their very cheap spells so it isn't sensible to have more than 1 attack spell. If your attack spell is cheap you can't add an expensive spell because you can't afford to cast it and if your attack spell is expensive you can only cast it if you don't have another attack spells in your build! In my Splinter build for my Witch Doctor I cast just the cheapest spell available and even if I wanted to I couldn't put an expensive spell into the build - I can't cast it. Wizards aren't quite as badly off because they can actually have a cheap spell and an expensive spell in their build and use both so they can make *some* use of IAS but it is still much weaker than thug classes get.
There are other scaling issues that D3 handled really well however. In D2 spell damage scaling and weapon scaling was nutty and made no sense but those are handled very smoothly in D3. Crit scaling seems quite reasonable as there is some strategy in terms of when to go for stacking crit effects and when not to. Prime stat damage scaling work well and weapon scaling works well - IAS is the standout problem and really it just points to a major flaw in resource system design for Witch Doctors. Witch Doctors need their mana regen baseline massively buffed, Vision Quest nerfed or changed and probably need their cheap spells to be actually free. Until that happens they are going to be stuck in really one dimensional builds with almost no options.
Some classes like Monk, Barbarian, Demon hunter (thugs) generate resources from some attacks and spend them with others. Increased attack speed (IAS) means that they generate more resources and spend more resources - 50% IAS certainly doesn't increase resource generation by 50% because there are static sources but it helps a lot. Wizards and Witch Doctors (casters) have resource pools that regenerate on their own and they don't get resources back by using attacks in any significant way. This means that IAS is somewhere between nearly useless and not so great because it doesn't let them attack more often since they are resource limited already. I can't attack extra times if I am already out of mana!
The reason this is such an issue is that IAS is by far the most powerful and easiest way to increase damage output at high gear levels. Once an item has your prime stat on it you can't just stack more prime stat - you need to go to other stats and IAS is the best. You can, if you stack huge amounts of +crit chance and +crit damage increase, get decent damage returns from crit but IAS is cheap and doesn't require other stats to be effective. It is pretty easy to get 60% IAS on gear without much investment and that is a really big problem when some classes get 50% more damage out of it and some get 0.
This pretty much revolves around the different resource systems not being similarly designed. Witch Doctors actually have to spend mana even for their very cheap spells so it isn't sensible to have more than 1 attack spell. If your attack spell is cheap you can't add an expensive spell because you can't afford to cast it and if your attack spell is expensive you can only cast it if you don't have another attack spells in your build! In my Splinter build for my Witch Doctor I cast just the cheapest spell available and even if I wanted to I couldn't put an expensive spell into the build - I can't cast it. Wizards aren't quite as badly off because they can actually have a cheap spell and an expensive spell in their build and use both so they can make *some* use of IAS but it is still much weaker than thug classes get.
There are other scaling issues that D3 handled really well however. In D2 spell damage scaling and weapon scaling was nutty and made no sense but those are handled very smoothly in D3. Crit scaling seems quite reasonable as there is some strategy in terms of when to go for stacking crit effects and when not to. Prime stat damage scaling work well and weapon scaling works well - IAS is the standout problem and really it just points to a major flaw in resource system design for Witch Doctors. Witch Doctors need their mana regen baseline massively buffed, Vision Quest nerfed or changed and probably need their cheap spells to be actually free. Until that happens they are going to be stuck in really one dimensional builds with almost no options.
Saturday, May 26, 2012
D3 no economics
I was hoping to write about D3 economics this week. Unfortunately the Auction House is not fully functional and commodities cannot be sold. This means that people who generate massive stacks of crafting materials like me cannot sell their stuff to those who want said crafting materials and so massive surpluses build up. I can't say much of use about the current AH aside from "Good gear costs a lot" but I think I can make a solid prediction: When the AH is fixed and commodities can be sold the price of gear is going to plummet. This will happen for a few reasons:
First, there is going be a tremendous amount of trade that has been backlogged and that trade will deplete gold stocks by stealing 15% of every transaction. Second, the people who want to craft will be plowing enormous sums of gold into crafting with materials they buy from the AH which destroys gold. All that crafting with the newly sellable recipes and materials will fill the AH up with new gear. Destroy gold, create gear, and provide alternate sources of spending other than buying items directly and you can be sure that prices on gear will drop.
The endgame seems to me to have a tremendous amount of scaling in difficulty that cannot be made up with easily acquired gear. I am questing in act 2 and it is extremely dangerous but it is possible to push forward and kill champs/uniques with some deaths. However, in act 4 there are mobs that literally hit me for double my maximum health with a single ranged attack - the gear requirements to play there comfortably are insanely steep. Blizzard has obviously designed the endgame around gearing up in a variety of ways to survive the later difficulties so I wanted to do some math to figure out what I need to survive.
My current stats:
Resist all - 450 - 60% reduction
Armour - 3720 - 55% reduction
Vitality - 1022 - 43976 health
For example, if I stack on enough resist to take 40% less damage, enough armour to take 40% less damage (which are multiplicative, not additive) and increase my health and healing by 60% I will be 4.5 times as tough - this is enough to make it such that I can survive two ranged attacks, just barely. This would certainly be enough for me to completely maul act 2 in a very casual fashion. How much *more* of each stat would I need to achieve this?
Resist all - +500
Armour - +4478
Vitality - 618
These numbers are pretty ludicrous. I need to more than double my resist all and armour totals which seems absolutely bonkers in terms of farming time but certainly possible in terms of raw itemization - I just need 73 resist all per piece! Armour is a more challenging problem but again if I upgrade to higher base armour types where possible and get +300 armour on every piece of gear I have I can certainly make that benchmark. Vitality is by far the easiest here since even though I do have a lot of vitality on my gear I can easily imagine getting 50 more per piece. To keep up with the healing I would need to stack a bunch of life gaining effects too, of course.
This is all to say nothing of doing more damage. I expect to eventually be using a weapon that has 1100 dps instead of my current 700 and to get a lot more intelligence on my gear - it should easily be possible to upgrade my damage by 2.5 times eventually. What all this tells me is that if I could custom build my gear I would be tough enough and do enough damage to completely demolish act 2 for sure, and certainly to be able to play reasonably in act 3 and act 4. It is going to take an obscene amount of farming to get there but get there I will. Inferno difficulty in D3 is quite nuts but this is only the early stages of gear acquisition and there is no question that people will have sufficient gear to do everything quite comfortably and without awful kiting tricks eventually. I guess Barbarians and Monks will just farm act 1 inferno over and over until they get there. :P
First, there is going be a tremendous amount of trade that has been backlogged and that trade will deplete gold stocks by stealing 15% of every transaction. Second, the people who want to craft will be plowing enormous sums of gold into crafting with materials they buy from the AH which destroys gold. All that crafting with the newly sellable recipes and materials will fill the AH up with new gear. Destroy gold, create gear, and provide alternate sources of spending other than buying items directly and you can be sure that prices on gear will drop.
The endgame seems to me to have a tremendous amount of scaling in difficulty that cannot be made up with easily acquired gear. I am questing in act 2 and it is extremely dangerous but it is possible to push forward and kill champs/uniques with some deaths. However, in act 4 there are mobs that literally hit me for double my maximum health with a single ranged attack - the gear requirements to play there comfortably are insanely steep. Blizzard has obviously designed the endgame around gearing up in a variety of ways to survive the later difficulties so I wanted to do some math to figure out what I need to survive.
My current stats:
Resist all - 450 - 60% reduction
Armour - 3720 - 55% reduction
Vitality - 1022 - 43976 health
For example, if I stack on enough resist to take 40% less damage, enough armour to take 40% less damage (which are multiplicative, not additive) and increase my health and healing by 60% I will be 4.5 times as tough - this is enough to make it such that I can survive two ranged attacks, just barely. This would certainly be enough for me to completely maul act 2 in a very casual fashion. How much *more* of each stat would I need to achieve this?
Resist all - +500
Armour - +4478
Vitality - 618
These numbers are pretty ludicrous. I need to more than double my resist all and armour totals which seems absolutely bonkers in terms of farming time but certainly possible in terms of raw itemization - I just need 73 resist all per piece! Armour is a more challenging problem but again if I upgrade to higher base armour types where possible and get +300 armour on every piece of gear I have I can certainly make that benchmark. Vitality is by far the easiest here since even though I do have a lot of vitality on my gear I can easily imagine getting 50 more per piece. To keep up with the healing I would need to stack a bunch of life gaining effects too, of course.
This is all to say nothing of doing more damage. I expect to eventually be using a weapon that has 1100 dps instead of my current 700 and to get a lot more intelligence on my gear - it should easily be possible to upgrade my damage by 2.5 times eventually. What all this tells me is that if I could custom build my gear I would be tough enough and do enough damage to completely demolish act 2 for sure, and certainly to be able to play reasonably in act 3 and act 4. It is going to take an obscene amount of farming to get there but get there I will. Inferno difficulty in D3 is quite nuts but this is only the early stages of gear acquisition and there is no question that people will have sufficient gear to do everything quite comfortably and without awful kiting tricks eventually. I guess Barbarians and Monks will just farm act 1 inferno over and over until they get there. :P
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
Where I was right and wrong
I made some predictions for Diablo 3. Looking at high end spells I figured that people would end up with health pools in the 50k range and I think by the time I get to act 4 of Inferno difficulty that will be true - I am at 40k now and I desperately need more HP. In theory I was going to play my Witch Doctor by hiding behind minions and raining down death on the enemies but in practice the Zombie Dogs are useless because they die instantly and even my single big Gargantuan Zombie isn't very tough. I need huge amounts of health, just as much or moreso than a melee character. My Int is about 1.1k, vastly off from my guess of 5k, though again I will likely end up a fair bit higher before I beat the game.
The thing I got really, really wrong was Magic Find. I am very glad to be wrong. MF in D2 on any decently geared character was in the 300+ range and Blizzard implemented a harsh diminishing returns formula to curb it. Given that MF was present at level 1 in amounts of 5% and so were other stats I assumed people would have thousands of MF. Instead MF scaled from 5% at level 1 to 10% at level 60. Top end gear that has MF only has 8-16% and the monsters are savagely powerful so you can't possibly stack MF and ignore other stats if you want any hope at winning. This setup works very well I think; MF is a fine thing to have on a piece of gear but the numbers are small enough that it needs no diminishing returns. Some people value MF heavily of course, and some don't, but I am sure you will see top end characters with 0% MF on gear and other ones with 80% and both will be reasonable.
The build I ended up settling into is extremely close to the one I built just based on beta knowledge. The fundamentals are the same: Abuse Vision Quest to generate massive amounts of mana and Soul Harvest to generate massive amounts of damage. Here is the thing about Witch Doctors that is utterly bizarre:
Level 1:
Cheap Spell: 4 mana.
Expensive Spell: 30 mana.
Mana Pool: 100
Mana Regen: 20/sec
Level 60:
Cheap Spell: 10 mana.
Expensive Spell: 140 mana.
Mana Pool: 700
Mana Regen: 20/sec
As you progress from level 1 to 60 you go from casting an expensive spell every 2 seconds to casting one every 15 seconds. There are things you can do to up your mana regeneration but none of them mitigate the pain of levelling up enough. Other classes do not work this way as they all have fixed resource pool sizes. Vision Quest increases all mana regeneration by 300% as long as you have 4 abilities on cooldown so you have two build choices: First, to use a normal build with a cheap spell and cast expensive spells rarely. The other option is to use 5 cooldowns and 1 spammable expensive attack and leverage Vision Quest. Since you need every defensive cooldown you can get in Inferno difficulty it isn't hard at all to find 5 cooldowns you want to use.
It turns out there is a fantastic spell to be your only attack spell: Zombie bears. In addition to the awesomeness of hurling rotting bear carcasses as your attack the actual in game mechanics are fantastic. Each cast creates 3 bears that appear behind you to your left, right and centre and they rush a decent distance forward. They do utterly stupendous damage and hit enemies on all sides of you as well as ahead and behind. Nothing demolishes a crowd like a WD casting Zombie Bears because they hit incredibly hard even for a expensive spell and nobody else gets to spam expensive spells all day long.
The critical issue is that against large enemies all 3 bears can hit. When there is a stationary boss I can easily clock in 100k dps when other classes with my gear would be struggling to go above 25k. It makes the game fairly unbalanced when 1 class can do 4 times as much damage as another even if there is a cost associated. The cost is fairly high since my Zombie Bear build has no long range attack so against a boss like Izual I simply cannot win since I cannot fight at range and I cannot live when nearby. I don't think it is an especially good balancing factor to have WD be utterly ridiculous at many situations and useless at others particularly since I can respec if I have to.
I think the WD mana model is a bad one. There shouldn't be one passive ability that completely defines the class and causes huge balance issues with every expensive spell. The best way to fix this would be to ramp up baseline WD mana regeneration at higher levels so that expensive spells are reasonably castable and nerf or change Vision Quest. Zombie bears are very powerful but would be plenty balanced if their cost was a real mitigating factor. When you can ignore their cost things get completely out of hand.
The thing I got really, really wrong was Magic Find. I am very glad to be wrong. MF in D2 on any decently geared character was in the 300+ range and Blizzard implemented a harsh diminishing returns formula to curb it. Given that MF was present at level 1 in amounts of 5% and so were other stats I assumed people would have thousands of MF. Instead MF scaled from 5% at level 1 to 10% at level 60. Top end gear that has MF only has 8-16% and the monsters are savagely powerful so you can't possibly stack MF and ignore other stats if you want any hope at winning. This setup works very well I think; MF is a fine thing to have on a piece of gear but the numbers are small enough that it needs no diminishing returns. Some people value MF heavily of course, and some don't, but I am sure you will see top end characters with 0% MF on gear and other ones with 80% and both will be reasonable.
The build I ended up settling into is extremely close to the one I built just based on beta knowledge. The fundamentals are the same: Abuse Vision Quest to generate massive amounts of mana and Soul Harvest to generate massive amounts of damage. Here is the thing about Witch Doctors that is utterly bizarre:
Level 1:
Cheap Spell: 4 mana.
Expensive Spell: 30 mana.
Mana Pool: 100
Mana Regen: 20/sec
Level 60:
Cheap Spell: 10 mana.
Expensive Spell: 140 mana.
Mana Pool: 700
Mana Regen: 20/sec
As you progress from level 1 to 60 you go from casting an expensive spell every 2 seconds to casting one every 15 seconds. There are things you can do to up your mana regeneration but none of them mitigate the pain of levelling up enough. Other classes do not work this way as they all have fixed resource pool sizes. Vision Quest increases all mana regeneration by 300% as long as you have 4 abilities on cooldown so you have two build choices: First, to use a normal build with a cheap spell and cast expensive spells rarely. The other option is to use 5 cooldowns and 1 spammable expensive attack and leverage Vision Quest. Since you need every defensive cooldown you can get in Inferno difficulty it isn't hard at all to find 5 cooldowns you want to use.
It turns out there is a fantastic spell to be your only attack spell: Zombie bears. In addition to the awesomeness of hurling rotting bear carcasses as your attack the actual in game mechanics are fantastic. Each cast creates 3 bears that appear behind you to your left, right and centre and they rush a decent distance forward. They do utterly stupendous damage and hit enemies on all sides of you as well as ahead and behind. Nothing demolishes a crowd like a WD casting Zombie Bears because they hit incredibly hard even for a expensive spell and nobody else gets to spam expensive spells all day long.
The critical issue is that against large enemies all 3 bears can hit. When there is a stationary boss I can easily clock in 100k dps when other classes with my gear would be struggling to go above 25k. It makes the game fairly unbalanced when 1 class can do 4 times as much damage as another even if there is a cost associated. The cost is fairly high since my Zombie Bear build has no long range attack so against a boss like Izual I simply cannot win since I cannot fight at range and I cannot live when nearby. I don't think it is an especially good balancing factor to have WD be utterly ridiculous at many situations and useless at others particularly since I can respec if I have to.
I think the WD mana model is a bad one. There shouldn't be one passive ability that completely defines the class and causes huge balance issues with every expensive spell. The best way to fix this would be to ramp up baseline WD mana regeneration at higher levels so that expensive spells are reasonably castable and nerf or change Vision Quest. Zombie bears are very powerful but would be plenty balanced if their cost was a real mitigating factor. When you can ignore their cost things get completely out of hand.
Wednesday, May 16, 2012
D3 is live
Diablo 3 is up. A lot of people have commented that the servers had all kinds of issues on the first day like being delayed for an hour, requiring emergency maintenance for an hour and not letting people log in a lot of the time. This is pretty embarrassing for Blizzard since they had approximately a bazillion years to get it all right and set up properly; launch was sloppy but at least we are all playing fine now.
The game is awesome. I am eager to see how my predictions for endgame stats work out; I was basing my predictions off of the level 60 versions of skills and figured that people would probably have 50k health and 5k Int/Str/Dex and I think I overestimated. I currently have 5500 health in the middle of Nightmare and 900 Int so I doubt I will hit 50k/5k even with endgame gear. I will get into that ballpark for sure though as the amount of stats on gear goes up exponentially and the amount of health you get per point of Vitality goes up too.
My guesses for the amount of Int we will have are probably too high because I figured that Soul Harvest should not give more than a 20% damage increase and that is certainly not reasonable given how the game has played out. Right now Soul Harvest is a moderate sized AOE centered on me that gives a bunch of Int (Int gives bonus damage % equal to total Int. 100 Int = 100% more damage). At level 60 it will be giving 150 Int for each target it hits up to 5 - 750 Int best case. After playing a fair bit in Nightmare though I think that it isn't reasonable to math it out at a 5 stack since maintaining that isn't trivial at all both because hitting 5 targets is often hard or impossible and sometimes it can get you killed. Keeping that in mind I think endgame Int/Dex/Str scores in the 1k-2k range is quite reasonable; Soul Harvest will still be a very big damage boost but it won't be ridiculous.
I have not yet had an opportunity to test out the truly broken Witch Doctor build with Vision Quest and Soul Harvest that is set up to use 5 abilities with cooldowns and one spammable attack spell. Normally you absolutely have to have an ability with a practically zero mana cost to spam but if you can keep Vision Quest up you don't have to - you can spam your power spell constantly. I don't know yet if this is going to be the best build because I have to see just how all the spells and runes play out but Soul Harvest is definitely super powerful right now. Both abilities require a lot of setup and both have the potential to be totally nuts; the only way to know if the setup is feasible is to play a lot more.
One thing I found is that one of the basic mechanics of the Witch Doctor is totally unusable. Zombie Dogs started out being very tough and ended up being pretty near useless - they weren't good tanks and they just died constantly. This is pretty unfortunate because a large number of WD special abilities work with or rely on Zombie Dogs and if the Dogs continue to be as junk as they are then a large piece of the class simply doesn't function beyond the first half of normal - sort of like skeletons were in D2 at launch. Maybe there is some scaling with difficulty level that I don't know about, but if there isn't then the 'summoner' build is pretty much dead.
The game is awesome. I am eager to see how my predictions for endgame stats work out; I was basing my predictions off of the level 60 versions of skills and figured that people would probably have 50k health and 5k Int/Str/Dex and I think I overestimated. I currently have 5500 health in the middle of Nightmare and 900 Int so I doubt I will hit 50k/5k even with endgame gear. I will get into that ballpark for sure though as the amount of stats on gear goes up exponentially and the amount of health you get per point of Vitality goes up too.
My guesses for the amount of Int we will have are probably too high because I figured that Soul Harvest should not give more than a 20% damage increase and that is certainly not reasonable given how the game has played out. Right now Soul Harvest is a moderate sized AOE centered on me that gives a bunch of Int (Int gives bonus damage % equal to total Int. 100 Int = 100% more damage). At level 60 it will be giving 150 Int for each target it hits up to 5 - 750 Int best case. After playing a fair bit in Nightmare though I think that it isn't reasonable to math it out at a 5 stack since maintaining that isn't trivial at all both because hitting 5 targets is often hard or impossible and sometimes it can get you killed. Keeping that in mind I think endgame Int/Dex/Str scores in the 1k-2k range is quite reasonable; Soul Harvest will still be a very big damage boost but it won't be ridiculous.
I have not yet had an opportunity to test out the truly broken Witch Doctor build with Vision Quest and Soul Harvest that is set up to use 5 abilities with cooldowns and one spammable attack spell. Normally you absolutely have to have an ability with a practically zero mana cost to spam but if you can keep Vision Quest up you don't have to - you can spam your power spell constantly. I don't know yet if this is going to be the best build because I have to see just how all the spells and runes play out but Soul Harvest is definitely super powerful right now. Both abilities require a lot of setup and both have the potential to be totally nuts; the only way to know if the setup is feasible is to play a lot more.
One thing I found is that one of the basic mechanics of the Witch Doctor is totally unusable. Zombie Dogs started out being very tough and ended up being pretty near useless - they weren't good tanks and they just died constantly. This is pretty unfortunate because a large number of WD special abilities work with or rely on Zombie Dogs and if the Dogs continue to be as junk as they are then a large piece of the class simply doesn't function beyond the first half of normal - sort of like skeletons were in D2 at launch. Maybe there is some scaling with difficulty level that I don't know about, but if there isn't then the 'summoner' build is pretty much dead.
Monday, May 14, 2012
Me on BNet
Btw, if you want to find me playing D3 on Battle.net (which I will be doing feverishly for some time) I am Redcape#1348. Hopefully I can make posts on D3 this week instead of just playing more... we will see how my willpower holds up.
Early post... guess why!
Diablo 3 comes out tonight at 3 AM my time. Lately I have been often late with posts but this week I am going to be early to maximize my D3 time tomorrow. I won't be going whole hog for D3 though; no getting up at 3 AM to start playing at first possible opportunity for me. I did that sort of thing for every WOW expansion, standing at the store for an hour with friends and then rushing home to play all night so I could get raiding asap. Unfortunately this time I have a sick child in my house and I might actually have to be functional tomorrow to take care of her so having no sleep isn't a sound plan. I also remember having a tremendous amount of fun with midnight WOW releases the first two times but it really fell flat with Cataclysm. That was pretty much due to me failing to win the race to level 85 on my paladin since after much preparation and rushing it was a big disappointment to fail. I rushed through all the content and did it while feeling gross and exhausted and ended up with nothing for my efforts. This time I am just going to take my time and do whatever seems fun rather than go for broke; this is probably a good idea because I had a real chance at winning the server first race to 85 in WOW but I have zero chance of winning D3 first to level 60. The servers are huge, the number of people trying is massive and I have obligations... I can't just play for 5 days straight with no sleep and I know at least a few accounts are going to do exactly that.
I revised my build for my first Witch Doctor. Obviously this is tentative on the abilities actually doing what they say they do on the calculator and also seeing how they work in the game. The Zombie Charger in particular looks absolutely insane if it does what I think it does but it might have a very tiny range or something that isn't noted there. The main things I looked for in a build was as much passive defence as possible in terms of minions and walls, a way to abuse both Soul Harvest (insane damage) and Vision Quest (infinite mana) which seem like they *have* to be broken, and a powerful spammable AOE attack spell. It is a build arranged for Inferno, of course, because I am quite confident on any lower difficulty it will be a matter of clicking quickly and having a build that isn't idiotic and I feel confident I can meet that standard.
I am pinning a lot of hope on D3. After being bitterly disappointed by the end to Mass Effect 3 I am looking for a story that won't turn out to be a sad mess and I can't help but think that Blizzard will do a better job here than Bioware did. First off the Diablo series doesn't have crazy physics / metaphysics to deal with and isn't angling for a Deux Ex Machina to allow the player to beat an unbeatable foe; the Diablo universe has well and thoroughly established that the way to deal with a gigantic demonic enemy is to find some hero to go kick its ass in single combat. A lot of people are going to die along the way and a lot of bad things will happen but my Witch Doctor is eventually going to blow up every badass demon until there aren't any left. End of Story.
Or not, as the real End of Story is likely going to revolve around killing that super powerful demon over and over again to get MOAR SHINIES to increase my ever growing mound of treasure. Which, thankfully, is likely to be a hell of a lot of fun.
9 hours, 45 minutes, 30 seconds to release. Hell, it's about time.
I revised my build for my first Witch Doctor. Obviously this is tentative on the abilities actually doing what they say they do on the calculator and also seeing how they work in the game. The Zombie Charger in particular looks absolutely insane if it does what I think it does but it might have a very tiny range or something that isn't noted there. The main things I looked for in a build was as much passive defence as possible in terms of minions and walls, a way to abuse both Soul Harvest (insane damage) and Vision Quest (infinite mana) which seem like they *have* to be broken, and a powerful spammable AOE attack spell. It is a build arranged for Inferno, of course, because I am quite confident on any lower difficulty it will be a matter of clicking quickly and having a build that isn't idiotic and I feel confident I can meet that standard.
I am pinning a lot of hope on D3. After being bitterly disappointed by the end to Mass Effect 3 I am looking for a story that won't turn out to be a sad mess and I can't help but think that Blizzard will do a better job here than Bioware did. First off the Diablo series doesn't have crazy physics / metaphysics to deal with and isn't angling for a Deux Ex Machina to allow the player to beat an unbeatable foe; the Diablo universe has well and thoroughly established that the way to deal with a gigantic demonic enemy is to find some hero to go kick its ass in single combat. A lot of people are going to die along the way and a lot of bad things will happen but my Witch Doctor is eventually going to blow up every badass demon until there aren't any left. End of Story.
Or not, as the real End of Story is likely going to revolve around killing that super powerful demon over and over again to get MOAR SHINIES to increase my ever growing mound of treasure. Which, thankfully, is likely to be a hell of a lot of fun.
9 hours, 45 minutes, 30 seconds to release. Hell, it's about time.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)