A fan posted some happiness about the Anniversary Week bonus, which prompted a chatty Blue reply. Which prompted me to remember to remind you guys that the week’s bonus time is ending soon. How soon?
Well we don’t know, exactly. The official announcement post went up some time after the bonus we live (I had to figure out the values myself for this post), and it doesn’t give an actual ending time. It just says, “…between May 15 and May 21 will receive a 25% boost to their Magic Find and +EXP stats.” The usual weekly maintenance is coming up early Tuesday morning, which is the 21st, so maybe the bonus will end with the maintenance? Or maybe it’ll last all day Tuesday?
Loving the free Anniversary Boost!
Ever since it was activated, I’m finding legendary and set items all over and the gold drops are wicked. Would be nice to get feedback from other players (positive or otherwise) on how everyone would feel about making that boost permanent? I’m in!!
Grimiku: The anniversary buff combined with the multiplayer changes, and monster density in patch 1.0.8 have been a lot of fun. I keep joining Public Games through the “Any Act – Any Quest” feature, and managed to increase my dps by about 20k in the last few days. I hope everyone is enjoying the anniversary buff, and good luck on finding awesome loot!
I love the anniversary buff, but my luck has been a little more tempered. I found a nice Butcher’s Sickle that sold for a decent amount, but everything else I’ve found was salvaged. I’d like to craft something with additional pick up radius and not lose any other stats, but I haven’t been that lucky yet.
I’ll pass along the feedback about using buffs for special events, and feel free to keep posting your thoughts on the anniversary buff.
I enjoyed the OP’s appreciation of the “wicked gold drops” for the near beer effect. You know, how you can serve non-alcoholic beer at a party, tell people it’s the real thing, and watch them fool themselves into thinking they’re drunk?
The Diablo community speaks.
I like the EXP and will definitely miss the speedier leveling, but I haven’t noticed any diff in my Magic Find, and I still think it should have been say, +100% for the bonus. Maybe it’s enough for lower level characters or those without MF, but if you’ve got like 400% normally, going up to 425% isn’t making any visible difference.
Just on that point, am I the only one who finds a surprising number of Legendaries before I’m even stacked up? Quick game this morning I found a green spirit stone and an orange two-handed sword, both from trash mobs, when I only had one stack. That’s with a character who was over 270% MF even without stacks, but finding a legendary before I’m stacked up happens quite often, in my anecdotal experience.
As for the overall anniversary bonus, what do you guys think? Good bonus feature? Should have been MOAR?
The patch notes for v1.08a spoke of an improvement to the rubber banding issue, and that topic received a lengthy blue post today.
Rubberbanding (especially as it relates to movement-based abilities like Whirlwind, Strafe, and Tempest Rush) is an issue that may not always come with a quick-fix. The source of the problem is not always easy to identify, and sometimes it may not always be the same thing for every player. As a result, there will be times where we implement potential fixes which we know will work for some players, but don’t know if it’ll work for all plays.
In other cases, we’ll make improvements — i.e. changes that probably won’t stop rubberbanding from happening completely, but should at least help reduce the frequency with which rubberbanding occurs. This was the case for 1.0.8a and with previous hotfixes we’ve made throughout the year. Again, we know these fixes may not resolve the issue for every player, but they should help reduce the occurrences of rubberbanding, and lessen the effects should rubberbanding occur for most players.
Now the important thing is that we’re still working on these issues — just because we implemented some changes that we hope will make the situation better doesn’t mean we’ve called it day. So, if you’re still experiencing rubberbanding, here are a few things you can do.
First, you can try performing the following troubleshooting steps to ensure that external causes are not adding to this issue (this isn’t required, but recommended):
If those steps don’t help — or if you’ve chosen to skip them — please let us know so we can continue looking into this issue by posting in the Bug Report forum (and be sure to check out this guide on reporting. That’s really the best location for those types of reports, as it’ll allow our QA representatives to document them and forward them on to our development team for additional review.
(We want your experience in the Diablo III to be as fun as possible, so working on these issues is important to us. That also means we’re extremely grateful for any reports receive that can help us troubleshoot — so thank you to everyone who’s already posted!)
I wonder if some people don’t play that much and don’t notice boss mods and thus confuse Knockback or more likely Vortex for rubber banding? Sometimes a pack of champions with Vortex can yank you back in several times in a row, creating a (dangerous) game mechanic that can mimic a technical difficulty while being nothing of the sort.
This problem varies from person to person and as far as I can tell it’s got a lot more to do with your machine and internet connection than the game. I say that because had a ton of rubber banding issues in the Beta and right after launch, typically when I used Dashing Strike " target="_new">Vault[iki] or Dashing Strike. The technical fixes over the months have made a big difference though, and I honestly couldn’t tell you the last time I saw more than .1 second rubber banding in an entire game, and my main is a Monk who uses Tempest Rush constantly. It used to happen a lot with Tempest Rush, but during the past few months I simply don’t see it anymore, and I’m using the skill for short bursts of movement hundreds of times per game.
Maybe I’m just the lucky one though, and everyone else is bouncing worse than ever? Share your experience in the comments.
Flux, Xanth, and Aahz discuss the major issues, pro and con, surrounding the Diablo 3 Auction House, especially in light of the v1.08 gold dupe bug. Also, how does D3′s story stand up after a year’s evaluation?
This is part two of TDP #93, but the episodes are edited to stand independently. Approximate segment start times:
1:30 — Hacks and gold botting. Increasingly in Hardcore? Economic ramifications of cheaters.
5:30 — Story. Everyone was disappointed by the main story but most loved all the smaller details. Why? Flux thinks it’s intentional; that the main story was made like a Michael Bay film, so anyone could understand it while paying no attention. Everyone tries to explain Magda. No one can.
20:50 — Auction House. People say they don’t want it, but 3 days of AH downtime while they fixed the v1.08 bug had people going crazy. Could players really stand to go back to the barter system? (No. No no no.) Lack of currency for sales? WUG was hell. The AH does a great job establishing fair market value to facilitate trading. Will the v1.08 in-AH item tooltip compare/display change prices and sales?
35:50 — v1.08 gold dupe bug and Blizzard’s recovery efforts. Restore vs. rollback? The gold duping underscored the problems with the AH, and then the next 3 days of AH-downtime underscored how utterly addicted to the AH are so many players.
Earlier this week Travis Day spoke on the same live stream that brought us that great Wyatt Cheng interview. The stream is run by ArchonTheWizard, and Travis joined him for nearly two hours of chat. Travis had a *lot* to say, answering dozens of questions, chiefly about the upcoming itemization changes, but also touching on skill issues, class balance, his development time working on World of Warcraft, and much more.
Many of us found Wyatt’s time on the stream frustrating since he was so into the nuts and bolts of specific issues, but the streamer never asked any redirects or follow ups on those detailed issues. Travis’ conversation doesn’t suffer (as much) from that problem, since he’s more thorough in his replies, but mostly since the interaction is more general. This isn’t a critique of either dev — it’s more about the topics that were covered. Travis speaks more about future (and past) changes on a theoretical or high level sense, whereas Wyatt’s was more about specific examples of ongoing skill tweaks and nuts-and-bolts game changes.
Here’s the stream; Travis joins in to chat around an hour and ten minutes in, and continues until almost three hours.
The transcript below is *not* word for word, since it was a very long conversation with a lot of chat and digression. I distilled Travis’ comments into more direct, discrete points. This is hugely long; nearly 8000 words to cover the 110 minutes Travis spent chatting. If you don’t want to read the entire thing, I broke the blue quote format in a few places to put in a remark or two after the especially interesting revelations, so you can kind of skim down the page and check where there’s a comment if you want the really highlight points.
1:08:00 –
Will elemental effects do something again?
Travis: Yes, we’d like them to do things again at some point. That was a very cool thing in D2. It’s nice if they have effects, more than just cold slows things. But no concrete details at this point.
Can you tell us about itemization?
Travis: I’ve been been working on Diablo III for eight or ten months, and I worked on World of Warcraft before that. In terms of Diablo 3 items, I really value randomization on the items. I like the fun of not knowing what you’re going to get. That said, there’s definitely room for improvement.
Legendaries should be more game changing. There’s something to be said for having a Holy Grail of items that players strive to obtain. The very best possible gear. Just yesterday we were talking about just how crazy we could get with legendaries or sets. What are the bounds? How powerful can something be without breaking the game?
Extreme #1, anything that makes the player invincible forever and always. Obviously that would be too good. But there’s something to be said for gear that can be super awesome, but is a really big challenge to obtain. Like D2′s runewords, some of them had 6 runes and almost every rune was really hard to find. When we’re debating item qualities, I say that we don’t need to make everything bland just because players might get it someday. Diablo 3 is an ARPG, it’s supposed to be awesome.
We also talk about game-changing gear. Like for instance, what if a full item set granted a bonus of infinite resource? That sounds crazy, but maybe it could be there someday. We’ve also talked about an item that would grant no collision with monsters. That’s something we’re not really sure how useful it would be, but we like the idea of throwing in some interesting properties and letting players figure out ways to use it.
Click through for the rest of the transcript. It’s hugely long and full of good details. Here’s a *very* brief bullet point list of what I think are the key points:
Travis was not working on the D3 team during dev. He moved over from WoW after D3′s launch and is open to making many major changes, including totally overhauling items.
Travis thinks the IAS nerf in v1.03 was a mistake since it changed existing items. They’ve learned from that example and will not repeat it. (See how they dealt with the buggy Black Weapons, for example.)
He’s committed to adding many more play styles and options into Diablo 3. So players could decide to spend their evening of gaming in different ways and different areas of the game whether they wanted to farm for exp, general items, specific items, specific materials, etc.
He’s very focused on greatly improving legendaries. D2 style game-changing items. He thinks legendaries should almost always outpoint Rares of the same item type.
He wants to reduce the variation in weapon stats and eDPS, so that a higher % of weapons would be at least pretty good.
He feels the health globe system isn’t working very well and the end game health system needs adjustment since high end characters have enough life steal to make globes and potions irrelevant.
There are plans for much greater character customization tied into improvements to the Paragon levels. Travis didn’t share any details, alas.
Travis wants to set up Diablo 3 for long term sustainability, so even in 5+ years when there’s not a big team actively patching the game, there will still be fun to be lasting fun. (Quite possibly via D2-style ladder resets.)
One year ago I was going to bed early to wake up and play through the night. I couldn’t get out of work that day but I wasn’t going to be hindered by that. A year later I am still logging in, still searching for loot, still having fun. Diablo 3 and Hardcore have changed a lot in a year, lets look back and see how much.
A fan brought up an issue I’ve been talking about with friends of late; the best Diablo 3 Farming spots in Act One (and Two) in v1.08.
Fields of Misery Caves
Make sure you guys are clearing out them caves, Scavengers Den, The Lost Mines etc. It is packed with mobs.
Grimiku: I was in the habit of skipping these as well, but a couple of group members suggested we clear them out the other day. I was pleasantly surprised with the results, and now I try not to miss them. I like the variety, and exploration aspect they add. I’ve got to agree with some of the other posters in this thread, though, the Decaying Crypt in the Fields of Misery is particularly awesome.
Anyone have a fun farming route that incorporates side dungeons? What about a favorite side dungeon you’re always on the lookout for?
I’m becoming more and more of a sucker for the Act 4 Hell Rifts. Talk about packed with mobs! Grimiku: I keep hearing that these are a lot of fun, but I haven’t been to them since patch 1.0.8. Maybe I’ll try to do an Act IV run tonight, and see for myself.
Yeah give us back the watch tower please. Always full of packs (3-7). Very sad it got nerfed to the groud because we were having so much fun in there.
Grimiku: We’ll pass along the feedback, thanks!
I’ll expand on the OP… almost *all* the caves in Act One/Two are worth doing now. The other surface areas in Act One that have like, Goat caves and such. Go in. They are wall-to-wall with dudes. This was especially true of Act Two caves/dungeons when v1.08 was early on the PTR, and I exulted over the Act Two potential since the surface deserts were pretty good, but the dungeons below them, and elsewhere in the act, were off the proverbial hook.
Something for you, I am making.
Sadly, I’ve come to realize over the past week+ of v1.08 being live… that those Act Two dungeons were all nerfed in monster density. They’re still pretty good, but the density is far less than it was early in the PTR. As a result I think Act One is better than Act Two (at this point) in terms of having more fun areas with high monster density that can be profitably farmed.
Another related issue… the (arguably) best area in Act One and in Act Two, is the area with the Keywarden in it. (Imagine if Xah’Rith the Keywarden was in say, the Fields of Slaughter, or the Keep Level 2?) These v1.08 Act One and Act Two keywarden area buffs are awesome if you went to Stonefort enough to store up a bunch of Keys of Terror back in the “farm Act Three endlessly” days of v1.07, since now you can accumulate Keys of Hate and Keys of Destruction almost by accident. Even if you’re doing it on a low MP level. And that’s cool since after all… can you ever really have too many Hellfire Rings? (Not in Hardcore, you can’t.)
Flux, Xanth, and Aahz discuss the numerous patches and difficulty changes (nerfs) we saw during the first year of Diablo 3, which made the game easier, characters stronger, and much improved the game.
4:45 — Diablo 3 patches relived. Many nerfs over time have made the game much easier and much more fun, showing the lie of our pre-game “we want it harder” claims.
Patch 1.0.3, June 19, 2012. Huge reductions in gem upgrade prices and Inferno-nerfed by huge boosts to the odds of high level items dropping.
Patch 1.0.4, August 21, 2012. Paragon system, skill tweaks, lots of inferno nerfs. Also, sparkles added to Legendaries! (That video is guaranteed to amaze in retrosepct.)
Patch 1.0.5, October 16th. Tons of skill changes/buffs, big Inferno nerf, Monster Power and Infernal Machine enabled.
22:00 — Mage issues. Flux explains why he regrettably has no use for the Diablo III Wizard, after mages were amongst his fave classes in previous Diablo titles.
25:50 — Vote kick fixed and useful crafting (that worked like crafting did during the beta) reintroduced. More patch coverage!
Patch 1.0.7, February 13, 2013. PvP brawling enabled, to universal disinterest. No Inferno nerf for a change, but mega-improved crafting recipes.
Patch 1.0.8, May 8, 2013. Monster density adjustment leads to rejoicing. Also minor skill tweaks and major social feature improvements.
30:50 — We’ve got at least a year until D3X; what can we look forward to before then? Will we ever again see new content in a patch?
35:20 — Whimsyshire! Memories of Diablo III’s secret level.
Yesterday, Wyatt Cheng spent an hour chatting on a fan via a Diablo 3 stream. It’s more of a casual chat than an interview, but there are some good nuggets of info, which I’m transcribing below. (Wyatt was followed by Travis Day for an even longer chat, which you can read here.)
The transcript below is *not* word for word, since it was a long conversation with a lot of chat and digression. I therefore tried to distill and abbreviate Wyatt’s comments into more direct, discrete points.
0:30 –
Can we see some sort of self found play mode?
Wyatt: We’ve given it a lot of thought. Right now I’m playing some self found Hardcore; alternating time on that and my higher level Paragon softcore characters. We like the idea of self-found, and of course players can just do it themselves, but ideally there would be some kind of recognition or insignia to denote self found characters.
An issue is trying to do it without cluttering up the UI. There’s a balance between giving expert players the options they want while not complicating things for other players. (Such as with Elective Mode and advanced tool tips.) Do we want another check box on the character creation screen?
I do think it’s a very cool way to play, but we don’t want to force it on people who don’t want to play that way. I know we’re non-committal about things a lot and some of the fans get frustrated, and I apologize for that. But our development process is super-iterative, and we’re always changing things around as we tested them out. And I don’t want to promise anything we might eventually test internally and then decide not to implement.
We’ve talked about making some kind of self-found insignia that would be on every character by default. So you’d create a character and they’d be self found until you traded or used the Auction House.
Gold sharing is another issue. Playing self found requires you to note how much gold you have to start with, so you don’t accidentally spend more than your character accumulates. We’d like to put in something that would let players show each character’s gold individually, but there’s no ETA on that.
Could we see some sort of self-found ladder?
Travis: Maybe. Again, sorry to be so non-committal, as they often are. It would be cool, and it’s come up internal discussions, but he can’t say more than that.
Nice that Wyatt replied with interest, but this desperately needed a follow up question. The entire point of a self found, Ironborn mode is that the characters are separate. It MUST work like Hardcore, to create an ecology of characters who can play together (but not trade) who are following the same rules. If you are in there growing chest hair by surviving with an Ironborn, you can’t be in a game with a character who has 10x your DPS and EHP from Auction House goods. It’s unfair, and would taint the entire experience since your “self found” drops wouldn’t really be self found, since someone else did all the work. So pity Wyatt didn’t mention that, and the streamer didn’t ask for clarification.
Click through for coverage of the hour Wyatt Cheng spent in the chat, with interesting info about upcoming itemization changes, overall skill balancing, lots of Auction House theorizing, and much more.
In a new video from Blizzard which was posted on the Playstation Youtube channel, the development team discuss the challenges they face with the control system doe the Playstation 4 Diablo 3 version. Does it look easy to you?
Welcome everyone to the second part of this special Diablo Fan Art Watch. This time I have collected my favorite pieces of artwork for Diablo and his minions.
Here’s to many, many more pieces of artwork in the next year and years to come.
Click the thumbnails to see larger versions of all these images.
If you enjoy Fan art and want to contribute to this growing community, please stop by the Fan Creations Forum. Many artists visit frequently, posting works in progress looking for feedback and conversation. You don’t have to be “arty” to join in. If you have any questions, comments or have some fan art related news on the web please send me a PM and I’ll get back to you.
