Inferno Tuning Incoming
Posted 24 May 2012 by NizarisPosts across the net have been filled with laments to the difficulty of 
Inferno. Some unfounded, some perfectly reasonable. It seems nearly unanimous, though, that Barbarians have it tough past the first Act.
Change may be coming, as Bashiok mentions they are working on a piece for the front page that will be addressing the issues that many have been raising. Regardless of their intent with this initial difficulty, Inferno as a game mode will fail if people do not find it fun. Whether you think it currently hits the sweet spot of tuning for you right now or not, it looks like some tweaks will be happening.
I think the main problem we’re running into is people progress more or less linearly to Inferno, and the brick wall effect makes it seem like these broken skills were the correct way to overcome the difficulty because the belief is that Inferno must be an immediately surmountable challenge, which it isn’t intended to be. Or the reverse, that because these skills allowed progression the classes that did not have them were too weak/broken, which isn’t correct.
We’ll provide a bit more info/context on Inferno tuning through an article we’re working on for the front page.
It makes one scratch their head as to why the QA team never attempted such builds. It would seem that rotations for Smoke Screen and Preparation would be a staple for Demon Hunters, or else Force Armor on Wizards for later difficulties. While it seems that Blizzard has killed the golden geese for the two favored classes with the most recent hotfixes, it raises the question as to how they will be tuning Inferno in light of vast amount of complaints filling the forums.
What we do know is that Blizzard has a vested interest in making this end-game fun. If people are not having fun, Blizzard will be taking action. Whether this will be in the best interest of all of their player base remains to be seen.
People whining about the most difficult part of the game a week after it is out. Kids these days want everything handed to them…
The same complainers made Sunwell the last decent raid instance that didn’t allow you to “see all the bosses” with easy modes.
Yep, I really don’t get this rage RE Inferno. Go farm Hell and stop whining.
I always thought a meaningful end-game was exactly what we wanted, but apparently not :S
I bet these whiners are just people who never really played Diablo2, they just had friend rushed them to hell baal and handing them all the runewords.
^ Dont you mean they got rushed and handed a set of duped items?
I hope they don’t nerf it, i just started it and find it very fun that way. If i don’t have to farm billions of demons to pass my way through inferno, then it would make me sad :’(.
I do think people are looking for ‘reasonable’ difficulty and not just stuff that one-shots you, but still, I’ve been playing with 4-6 different friends and through farming Hell or Act 1 Inferno we’ve been able to gear up and break through parts of Act 2, and some of us into Act 3 Inferno. And our Barb actually does a pretty good job, but he has been playing a lot and has quite good gear.
My concern is they make things easy to the point that the gear up ramp is too short and people are clearing too quickly. In my eyes that’s at least as much of a failure, if not more.
I thought we were supposed to hit some sort of a wall, forcing you to gear up with resists, etc. What’s so wrong with that.
To argue the other point people are making however — on the surface it appears you can have excellent gear and still get destroyed, and I can sympathize with that viewpoint entirely. People want to be rewarded for their efforts in being able to have [at least] a slightly better chance of succeeding.
Nothing wrong with that! I agree totally.
Nothing wrong with the Electro Specter either.
^ Well it shouldn’t be cake walk to OMG I am going to die difficulty jumps in mob power. IE unless your really unlucky you should be able to see that it getting hard for you before it before you bump into a hahaha your dead mob. This along with a message clearing up what the expected requirements are for inferno IE that you are expected to get really good gear to do parts of it would go some way to fixing the problems (getting more defensive skills can make up for weaker gear).
\Begs the question\ does not mean \raises the question.\ Begging the question is a logical fallacy that assumes the conclusion within the premise meant to prove it.
I’m not Aristotle or a grammarian. Welcome to the 21st century and modern English usage on an internet forum.
I thought you were Aristotle! :O
I am Aristotle, lvl 47 HC wizard.
Polite criticism is often the only way people spot mistakes they may make. It’s sad when people imply that because they live in the 21st century and use the internet their standards are too low to bother improving.
Being a pedant and giving polite criticism are quite different worlds. He/She was clearly the former of the two, as he/she chose to post in a public arena about something inconsequential. I don’t normally reply to snide comments, but being pedantic over an adapted English idiom was entirely unnecessary. It is the history of the English language to evolve: common usage undermines a root and creates multiple meanings.
As a note, I had already updated the article for justice. So evurrbuddy keep their pants on.
(I update and edit articles constantly for grammar and problems I or others notice. Pedantry notwithstanding.)
Language naturally morphs over time. This is one that i am convinced is beyond the point of no return. Begging the question now has 2 meanings, for better or worse.
In D2 essentially everyone the the best gear in the game. Without Bass runs it would have been really hard to survive in Hell save for a few builds.
We don’t even know what is best in D3 yet, let alone 1000′s of people obtaining this gear easily.
It must be really rewarding for those hard-working/ lucky enough to find the gear that enables them to play well in inferno.
Should they change it – NO! they shouldn’t.
I am JUST getting my first char into Hell… and probably won’t make a SERIOUS foray into Inferno till I have five chars at 60… by then presumably it will be perfectly balanced, right?
The only mistake Blizzard made was probably allowing people to enter each act in inferno when they weren’t supposed to be ready for it gear-wise.
Maybe each act boss should have been much harder to ensure nobody would get to the next act before really being ready for it.
Instead people were clever with builds (or at least smarter than Blizzards testers) and got through the game and access to much better loot than intended, flooding the market.
Maybe they should just give up on Inferno, lets people keep progressing in it, and add another Inferno 2.0 in some months.
I’m still in act 2 of Nightmare due to my heavy work hours, so I have a question regarding Inferno. Why are people complaining about it? Is it too easy? Is it too hard? Is it not fun? Thanks.
I initially saw people complaining about Inferno being too easy, that a couple groups of players had already cleared it within a couple days after the game’s release. Are people now complaining that it is too difficult?
I think it is largely that it isn’t fun. I’m in act 2 in hell and I can see how that might be. Even with three mods, elites can get pretty ridiculous. I was in a multiplayer game and it is basically chaos because you have to kite the mobs around since no one can spend more than a few seconds in melee since a few hits will kill you.
It seems it’s just more of this but worse in inferno with most characters able to take only 1-2 hits at the very most in act 2 and beyond. As a result characters are forced into a limited set of builds which of course doesn’t go over well. I’m already seeing that happen in hell. My zombie dogs just don’t work any more so I had to completely change my play style to make progress. That’s really a disappointment since it means I can’t play the class my way because of the content/skill balance.
My barb is in hell gear and in act 1 Inferno the first zombie has 100k health and hits for 15kish. The problem is, I can get thru act 1, but i have to use gimicky stuff like thrown weapon and leap and ground stomp just to kill 1-2 mobs before i run and heal then tag a couple more. Alot of the champion packs are death runs.
Personally I don’t care that its hard, I like it, but above is why people are complaining, they either have to farm gear for days or resort to gimmicky stuff if they are not a DH/Wz/Mo. Although, those classes just got a pretty decent survivability nerf so who knows now. They probably are the people complaining lol.
Based on calculations of effective hps the monk & DH have the easiest way to get to high amounts of it, purelly because as far as I can see there’s only one way to load up on dodge that is via DEX. The rest can be got high enough without STR or INT, TBH + Resist and +armour mods are preferable. STR = Armour and +armour mods are bigger in size from what I seen. Any way 3000 armour = 50% damage reduction and 300 Resist = 50% damage reduction assuming monster level is 60.
this is true, but we have our own problems as well.
Monks probably have the best survivabilty in the game, but we also exchange most of out dps for that survivabilty. My monk can survive most act 2 elite mobs that don’t have completely ridiculous mods, until they enrage because I don’t have enough dps to kill them.
DH has pretty much the opposite problem. They do a ton of dps and have range, but it they ever get hit once they are dead, almost regardless of how they itemize. That means pretty much anything with vortex, teleport and waller is out of the question, and they have to be extraordinarily meticulous to not be blindsided by any enemy, because any enemy, including the regular trash mobs, will one shot them.
Being in hell with my wd, I’ve found the most effective way for me to take out troublesome packs is to stack for damage and repeatedly sacrifice dogs on them (sixty second cool down, patience is a… boring thing). Kind of repetitive, so not fun. Though, I don’t really find kiting with the wd fun or effective either, especially depending on mods.
I feel forced into using specific tactics or skill/rune combos. It would be nice if skill/rune selection was a hard choice, everything being as viable as the must-haves. I probably wouldn’t be as discontent with this if itemization wasn’t so bland. Item mods are very limited and heavily restricted by item type and amount, leaving me mostly to focus on improving damage inflicting or receiving thresholds. It would be nice to be able to improve non-damage related skill effects (to something beyond lottery style proc rates if you focus a whole set of gear on it).
When mobs had one or two mods you could rock paper scissors different skill sets to deal with them specifically and that was tactically pleasing. Now I find myself using the same skill set for everything, because it’s less likely I’ll find a specific counter that will give me an advantage (with the exception of mini or act bosses). I think it would be more fun if they buffed up the modifiers, but reduced the amount… Some of the mods are ridiculously weak compared to the others.
Well I haven’t reached Inferno yet but I only wanted to say that I remember you from the Diablo 2 days. Good memories. I was mostly a lurker in these forums and, if my memory serves me correctly, you were a fan of the druid -and also you had a couple of guides?-. I was too, but I only used to read the forums rather than writing much. I am glad to see you here again anyways.
I’m a monk about half way through act 3 Inferno so I think I can try to explain it to you as best I can without a wall of text.
Currently the biggest “issue” (and by issue I don’t necessarily think it’s bad, it’s just the way the game works currently) is that melee classes are forced to expose themselves to much more massive damage than the ranged classes. This was to be expected since that’s how all melee classes have worked in all arpg’s like D3. It forces barbs and monks to itemize for armor and resists and build, which severely hampers our dps. You run into the problem often of survivability vs. damage, and it is very unclear how to exactly go about doing that since Blizzard has withheld so many critical statistics from the players, presumably to not overwhelm us with numbers. People should know that melee classes are inherently more difficult, yet they still whine when they see wizards and demon hunters farming act 3 and act 4, when they are stuck in act 1. Also, these diminishing returns, coupled with the rarity of good upgrades for us makes it extremely difficult to get good enough upgrades to continue progressing. For example, I’m looking at needing roughly 5k-10k health in order to continue, or about 125-250 vitality. To get that amount, without losing a ton of other stats, I expect to have to shell out about 2 to 5 million gold for a single item which will barely scratch the surface of what I need to continue.
Secondly, item scaling is currently horrible. Ideally you should have to farm act 4 hell for a very long time to get ideal act 4 hell gear before even attempting inferno, and then do the The problem though, is that the best items you can possibly get in act 4 hell do not scale at the same rate mathematically as the monsters do from act 4 hell into act 4 inferno. The same is true from act 1 to act 2, but worse, and it supposedly gets even worse from act 2 to act 3. This is because of the massive diminishing returns that stats experience, but please take my word for it since it takes a very, very long time to explain how it all works. The only way people are able to pass act 2 is by buying items off the auction house that drop in act 3 and act 4. These items have been found due to a few players exploiting bugs in the later difficulties which allow them to farm with very little risk. These bugs have been hotfixed (mostly) which means that the act 3/4 item flow has been severely dampened, making progress for those without characters already in those difficulties very hard.
I hope this makes sense. I’m a bit buzzed and really tired.
The next blue post in that thread is hilarious:
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/5149180916?page=3#45
I’m yet to even try Inferno, but the theories behind blue response sound great to me.
We can ask questions all day about why internal testing didn’t catch them, but this doesn’t matter. What matters is that Inferno is balanced for the *right* reasons – for example don’t make everyone stronger because a few people created unforseen builds. Keep it hard (for everyone, not just a few classes), let people cry about being hard, and let them farm items to hopefully overcome it over the next year.