Some thoughts on Diablo 3.
Diablo 3 is definitely, in many many ways better than the games before it. Don’t get me wrong on that. I love the skills and the new skill system. The auction house is great, the updated graphics are fine. I don’t care about the story at all so I don’t have complaints about that. If I had to sum my complaints with this game:
1) There are few reasons to get excited about loot, especially legendaries. Legendaries should be more fantastic and awesome than they are. I think items are missing a lot of non damage stats that make them interesting. There’s no “Chance to cast amplify magic level blah on target on hit” or “+ to skills” (obviously due to the new system) that make the items feel like more than just damage damage damage. Sometimes you would find a drop that would make you roll a new character and that was part of the charm of the game. Finding Bartuc’s claw on your Sorceress or getting Lycander’s Aim on a necromancer. You knew then that you were leveling the character just for that item. Now since everyone can use every item pretty freely (I mean, there’s no str requirement for my wizard to use 2h maces or something) and all the damage stats are generic it really doesn’t matter. It feels like (aside from the class specific weapons) there are very few things FOR a specific class. The ridiculous dps 2h sword is just as good for my wizard as it is a barbarian so why bother?
I think we can see where Blizzard kind of misses the point. The best part of being able to respec is to avoid a situation in Diablo where you level a Frozen Orb Sorc or an Axes Barb and you find an item with +fire skills or a sweet sword. Then you had to reroll a new character of the exact same type just to use that. If only you could respec. Now you can respec, but there is no reason to ever need to. There’s no weapon for my wizard that makes me go “Oh shit that would make this spec much better.” Using swords, bows, wands, whatever is all acceptable on my wizard and there is nothing that matters on the weapon beyond “what is the dps, and does it have my damage stat and vitality?”
I think this is fixable by making skills modifiable by items. All of your skills should have types. For example, Blizzard should be “AoE, Cold, DoT.” And then you can find a Wand that says “Increases the area of all of your AoEs by 15%.” That would give you a reason to build around an item and try new combinations.
2) This game makes you feel powerful and then takes it away. You go from demolishing hordes of enemies as a weak wizard who knows a few spells to a mighty wizard who has an entire arcane spellbook at your disposal and instead somehow you’re relatively weaker than you were. At the core, Diablo is a game about murdering a ton of things for sweet loot and finding the big bad demon at the end of the dungeon and murdering him for the loots. I think it’s great that they gave you incentives to clear the entire dungeons instead of rushing through to the bosses, but the name of the game is Diablo 3, not Molten Vortex Jailer Shielding 3. My goal and the ultimate challenge should be killing the biggest and baddest thing in the game and destroying him. Not farming the trash mobs. I think it’s bad when someone has beaten Diablo in inferno and people say “Oh well he didn’t REALLY beat the game, the hard part of the game is actually just the generic mobs sitting outside Diablo’s lair.”
Why not keep Nephalem Valor but use it to encourage players to clear a dungeon and then go fight the boss instead of just straight up rushing to the boss? Wouldn’t that be an acceptable alternative to the boss rushing that was apparently so bad? People never farmed WoW dungeons for the trash mobs.
The issue is I don’t think a gameplay model where you skip all the mobs who are very difficult to get to the boss who is not so difficult so you can progress to the next act so you can try to get gear that will let you farm the act beforehand is intuitive, fun, or really has anything redeemable. The way that most people would think makes sense would be to farm either the bosses from the act before or the trash mobs of the current act to get the gear that would allow them to beat the end boss of the current act who stands there to say “If you can’t beat me you’re totally not ready for even the trash that comes after me.”
I don’t think it’s right that as I become more powerful, I’m even less capable. The game should be me defending against an unrelenting horde of demons who try to overwhelm me by coming faster than I can kill them with a few scattered champions (not champion PACKS) that pose a real challenge among the trash.
