Some Champion Affixes *Need* Nerfing?
Posted 21 June 2012 by FluxA fan brought up the issue on Battle.net and got some blue replies.
You said you didn’t want one shots to occur anymore, but champion packs that have certain combos are ALWAYS a one shot. I’m running 5k armor, 50k hp, 700 resists and one vortex into an arcane and I’m dead. I don’t even understand how that’s supposed to be fun. It’s completely unavoidable. I strongly feel that champion packs need a hard revamping so that a player can accurately predict and prevent incoming champion pack damage because it’s currently impossible.
Lylirra: This thread has a lot of good feedback regarding affix packs (as does this thread), but let me try to address one question really quickly:
I dunno, OP has a point with certain combos. Vortex + frozen+ arcane + desecrate can be a pain, or similar with waller.
There’s a difference between saying “that’s an unfair affix combo” and “I can’t beat this affix combo” (yet). Certain affix packs will be harder than others. The variance in randomness and in the difficulty of the packs is completely intentional and we’re happy with where things are right now.
Having to restart a game or skipping packs altogether is also totally fine. As you become more powerful, finesse your builds, and develop a variety of tactics to use in different situations, you’ll be able to kill more monsters. If you could kill everything uniformly the first time you stepped into an Act, you’d have a really limited sense of progression and the feeling of becoming “more powerful” wouldn’t be as present. The design intent is that some affix packs will unbeatable for you at first, but then you’ll come back later and get your sweet (and well deserved) revenge. We feel that making every affix combo equally difficult would take away the satisfaction of overcoming the more challenging combos later on.
I posted about this a few weeks ago, and our general philosophy hasn’t really changed since then. You feedback is still encouraged, though!
Its not present, this is the first game I have played that as I got higher level, I feel weaker, and I have to go back and farm stuff just to progress through the game. In case nobody has told anyone at blizzard, games are supposed to be fun. This aint fun.
(For you) what would make affix combos more fun, but still be reasonably challenging? Keep in mind that we don’t expect players to be able to easily kill everything they come across the first time, every time in the later difficulties.
This question is open to anyone reading along. If you have suggestions or thoughts, please chime in!
How about those more difficult affixes result in a higher chance to get a rare from those mobs?
Interesting suggestion. I’ll definitely pass it along.
As nasty boss mods are a topic that’s long been near my own heart, I read this thread with interest. That’s an interesting suggestion there at the end, but of course the problem is determining which mods or combinations of mods are the most difficult, as that varies a lot by class and play style. Your Wizard and Demon Hunter dread 
Mortar and Teleporter and Vortex, while your Barbarian and Monk generally think those mods are a delightful present (new bugs aside) that took up a monster affix spot that might otherwise have featured something dangerous. By the same token, melee chars dread Plagued and Desecrator and Fire Chains and Molten (or all 4 at once) while those are irrelevant or far less troubling to a ranged attacker.
Just yesterday my Barb (who is newly in Hell, and all self found gear, so it’s hard) got Fast, Horde, Molten on a Mage Construct right near the stairs into one of the Act 2 sewers, and I gave up and left the game after five minutes and several deaths when I’d hardly put a dent into the 8 minions, much less the boss. I wished (not for the first time) that D3′s online game system worked like D2′s, so I could have switched characters and joined that game with my DH, who would have taken speedy and violent revenge for my Barb’s impotence.
In general though, I fully agree with the developers that the point of boss mods is to be difficult and to change up the play style, and that it’s a lot of fun to battle with a combo of mods that challenges your character. When my Barb was even newer in Hell, I got Frozen, Arcane Enchanted, Desecrator on a champion pack of those big hammer Cultists in Leoric’s Torture Chambers, and it was ridiculous, since I had to retreat after literally every swing I took at them. And yet I knew I could beat them and it didn’t feel unfair, and when I finally took out the last of the three, (it was easy once I finally got one of them down, since the frequency of their Arcane and Frozen casts decreased greatly) the feeling of victorious accomplishment was intense.
That said, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to keep some mods from spawning with other mods on the same boss or champions. Mods that immobilize you + mods that create huge damage beneath your feet are just wrong, since not all classes have skills that can break through or escape such situations. It might also be nice to limit what can spawn with Vortex, say not allowing that with Fire Chains + Molten + Plagued?
I’d also like to see item mods that helped with such things. Chance to break Jailer, chance to break Walls, chance to resist Vortex, etc, though that seems like something we’ll probably have to wait for D3X or D3Y to see, as they further diversify the item system. Or how about improvements to some of the useless Skill Runes in good skills; a Vault that can pass through Jailer/Waller obstacles, for instance.
Do you guys want to nominate any Elite Affix combos that just should not be? (Can someone can say Invulnerable Minions early on, so then everyone else can upvote it so it doesn’t fill the whole thread? Thx.) Or do you like the unpredictable nature of boss mod combos and how odd pairings force you to vary your play style, even if that means sometimes some classes will be unable to defeat them?
This calls for a vote. Just a quickie, though.
Should Diablo 3 Elite Affixes be Nerfed?
- 2) Not nerfed, but some Mods should not spawn with others. (37%, 1,344 Votes)
- 1) No way. Leave them nasty and unpredictable.` (33%, 1,208 Votes)
- 4) Yes, some mods and combs are way too hard. (16%, 600 Votes)
- 3) Maybe a little, but only on Inferno. (11%, 386 Votes)
- 5) No opinion/not sure. (3%, 105 Votes)
Total Voters: 3,643
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I disagree with Blizzard’s assessment that it’s okay to make you leave the game and start a new one if you meet an impossible mob. It interrupts the flow of the game, it destroys your Nephalem Valor that you’ve built up and just doesn’t make sense.
Then go back and fight easy content in another act/difficulty and enjoy your flow.
You’re missing the point. Blizzard are effectively telling us that at Inferno level we should be quitting the game and reloading to get past mobs, at least until we have ridiculously overpowered gear to the point of being able to kill anything. Do you seriously think the choice should be between playing pointless easymode lower level content, or being forced to leave an impossible game?
Inferno is supposed to be hard. Nothing is impossible for any class; most of these challenges can be overcome through gear or through group play, but a lot of it is also skill. Blizzard shouldn’t change anything regarding nasty combos, but some of the affixes individually should be tweaked. The only real problem with affixes is their bias. Jailer stops you from moving, which isn’t that bad unless you’re trying to kite or standing in some bad stuff, but it stops my barbarian from whirlwind (and thus from healing). Also, some attacks go past Waller walls and some don’t.
Aside from that, CC is a bit ridiculous. Nightmarish fast monsters or nightmarish frozen can result in 10+ seconds of inability to control your character. Is Wrath of the Berserker supposed to be mandatory? It’s not fun to win a battle through luck because you managed to not get feared for 10 consecutive seconds. 1 second of immunity to the same CC after the effect ends would be completely fair.
The problem with that statement is the ramp-up. My monk is currently geared with enough armor/resists/life on hit to take most Act I packs with relative ease. There are the occasional mean ones I have to kite a bit, and even some that manage to kill me a few times. Then I will suddenly (still in Act I) run into some wicked combo that just destroys my face. I’ll beat my head against it for 5 or 10 minutes, lose 60k worth of gold in deaths, get it down to 2 of the original 4 mobs, and have it enrage and become unkillable. Unapproachable even, as I died just walking into to sight of it. And I’m forced to leave the game and lose my NV stacks.
Due to the ease with which I can kill everything else surrounding that pack of mobs, it just feels like a brick wall. Not something I need help gearing past, but a cheap combo that needs a fix. I don’t mind harder fights, but I dislike impossible ones in areas which I am already overgeared for.
“Having to restart a game or skipping packs altogether is also totally fine.” -> A restart is not fine for me. Challenging means it takes time to kill, not quitting and restarting hoping it’s not there. I like public games and often the group gets into a good rhythm but when players start to leave because of frustrating elite packs it breaks the rhythm. If you have to restart and leave your party it means there’s something game-breaking in the game. I get the most satisfaction from a play session when we’re reliably *progressing*. The more you break the flow the more likely I am to stop playing and watch a movie instead.
But how could Bliz determine that? They don’t know how well geared a player is, how good their build is, what sort of party cooperation they’re using, etc. If Bliz makes some judgments based on average or typical characters, there will be endless players who think a change is too hard or too easy, or just wrong for their build/class.
I guess Bliz could put in some code to control the available/common boss mods in a single player game, since D3 largely forces all chars of the same class to play in the same fashion (at least on Hell/Inferno), but that’s not going to translate into MP games.
Flux wrote: “But how could Bliz determine that? They don’t know how well geared a player is, how good their build is, what sort of party cooperation they’re using, etc.”
IMO, Blizzard is still suffering from what Gary Gygax called “Monty Haul Syndrome”. The gear and stats are extremely overpowered (seriously, what character should have 50,000 H.P. ?) so the monsters have to be overpowered. Putting the overpowered genie back in the bottle is next to impossible without a major rescaling of the game.
If Blizzard’s only strategy to make the game challenging is requiring great gear, then eventually all serious players will have great gear and the challenge will be gone. If the challenge requires some skill in playing, some reasonable gear and some luck, then the challenge will last.
If I were CEO of Blizzard, I’d hire some outside players to help put the fun and challenge back into the game. There are four people in particular I’d look to: Jens Baumann and Martin Reich (the V&K wizards) Brother Laz, and a longtime Diablo 1 & 2 player by the name of Steven Van Ham, who understands the aspects of making the game fun the way Griswold knows his way around an anvil.
I think most players want to be excited about playing Diablo 3 as long as they were Diablo 1 and Diablo 2. Blizzard has put a lot of exciting stuff into Diablo 3, and I’m hoping they continue to try and improve the game.
I don’t really mind the numbers, though it does seem silly when someone has 100,000 damage. Just the number being so large clashes with my sense of discrete values for dps in this type of game. But that’s purely a sense of players not being used to D3′s style/system. Bliz could instantly reduce all of the values to 10% of their current, changing nothing but our perception. And then 5000 hps would be a lot, but you’d be dealing .3 dps at the start of the game.
Basically it’s a problem with their dev theory of making chars forever progressing and more powerful, and with a long game and 4 diff levels, and a need for noticeable, obvious improvements even in Inferno, numbers are necessarily going to expand pretty high.
>> “If Blizzard’s only strategy to make the game challenging is requiring great gear, then eventually all serious players will have great gear and the challenge will be gone. If the challenge requires some skill in playing, some reasonable gear and some luck, then the challenge will last. ”
I read a forum thread today that touched on similar. It’s how D2 vs. D3 was end game designed. D2 hell wasn’t meant to be impossible. Even with junky equip and bad char (e.g. variants) you could beat it, eventually. There was never a real “gear check” deadstop point like D3 gives in inferno. The goal for players in D2 was to get faster at doing it, add in MF, etc, and since max level was 99 and very long time to reach, replaying felt like progress even w/o item improvement.
D3 doing away with a level grind end game puts all the marbles into items, and if you don’t improve gear, you feel you’ve wasted your time. Also, D3′s unique/sets are lame/boring, on top of being essentially nonexistent in scarcity. In D2 you had specific things you wanted to find, and knew you had a chance, so you weren’t just hoping for incremental Rare improvement. And even if you found a unique set you didn’t want, it felt somewhat special, reminding you of the specific unique you did want.
That is definitely one of the big things I miss – that idea that you have specific things you want to find. And each one you find was a small step toward completing your build. Most of them were reasonably attainable, even for SP, and most build guides included some kind of hierarchy, e.g. “Skullders > Wealth > Tal’s Armor > 4T Armor” (credit Flux’s Javazon guide
)
I was a big fun of hunting for specifics in D2, I knew I wanted my Arreat’s, dual Doombringers (yeah, I know it wasn’t the most powerful sword, so what? the name was awesome and it looked great!), String and what not…
But playing D3 I realised there’s a pitfall in that. Basically, two things happen with the old approach:
1. Anything other than the item you hunt for feels…meh, unless you want to transfer it to other chars or maybe trade.
2. You will find the item and then you’re done with the hunt (happaned once I got Buriza).
So far in D3 I don’t have any particular items I hunt for with my Barb and thus each new rare has a potential to be exciting or an improvement over my current stuff. I focus on item properties, i.e. does it have Res All, Vit, Str etc and then make choices when an item has some of them but not others. Every improvement in at least one property feels good.
So yes, I could dream up an ideal rare to hunt for but if I do so, any rare I find has a potential to be that one and I don’t go “booo, it’s not a unique”. IIRC non-ring rares felt quite disappointing in D2 once I decked out my chars with a bunch of uniques.
Just my thoughts.
There is no difference between doing 1 damage to a 100 hp monster and doing 1k damage to a 100k hp monster. The large numbers are the result of having an exponential growth in player power. By having an exponential increase the power gain going from lvl 61 to lvl 62 is the same as going from lvl 11 to 12. A linear increase would mean that gear obtained in act 4 inferno would not feel that different from act 1 gear, there would be no “progression”
There is a difference between doing 1 hp of damage to a 100 hp monster and 1K damage to a 100K hp monster if the monster regenerates life at 20 hp per second. Therein lies the problem. Unless everything in the formula scales by the same method and rate then certain aspects can throw the system out of balance.
When you have a smaller range of values, it is easier to mix arithmetic, geometric, exponential and logarithmic terms and still have the probability curves overlap where you want them to. As the ranges become larger and you add more variables the interactions become more complex and soon grow beyond predictability.
Blizzard could leave their ranges as they are and rent some time on a supercomputer and run some stochastic simulations using Monte Carlo methods to find out where combinations of affixes, skills and buffs will break their game balance.
The IAS nerf is a good example of something that scaled up faster than Blizzard intended it to. Players devoting almost all of their resources to a few key stats is also an example of where the game balance model is probably broken by scaling.
In the meantime, while Blizzard is ironing out how to best balance the game they could put some diminishing return caps on stat interactions both for players and monsters.
Blizzard could also rework the skills/rune system so that certain combinations were much better for some situational tactics while being lousy for others. An escape skill that helped with Jailer, but wasn’t much use against Waller for instance. A movement skill that helped your character combat mortar, but made you more susceptible to Vortex would be another. With this kind of scenario, characters willing to give up Nephalem valor could find a skill combo that would allow them a chance at beating a certain champion pack. This wouldn’t be to make it easy, but just so the group of monsters wasn’t a game breaker.
IMO, if instead of being instagibbed repeatedly and having to go to another game, the player spent 10-20 minutes battling an elite pack to finally get through, then Blizzard will have achieved a reasonable challenge because the game was fun enough for the player to want to continue that battle.
Dalai Lama wrote : “If I were CEO of Blizzard, I’d hire some outside players to help put the fun and challenge back into the game.”
Why would you want to keep people in-game ? Why would you want increase servers upkeep ? It’s not WoW where customers pay subscription fee. D3 is B2P (buy to play) game with possibility to buy power in game – RMAH.
So if you want maximize profit as CEO of Blizzard you should let customers buy game then force them by design to buy some stuff from AH/RMAH (in game where items are central part when you have everything game is pointless) then just wait becouse sooner or later they will stop playing till next expansion.
What really annoys me about affixes is cc-chain they can do. You can be feared into freez and just die becouse of arcane enchant/desecrate/plague without chance to react. It’s not funny to watch your character dies becouse fear/freez appearently doesnt have any DR and fear can proc alot.
On top of that, the champion packs are so resistant to cc effects themselves that it’s almost not worth bothering. Playing as a witch doctor, I want to rely on control, not kiting, and I can’t.
As a side effect, I’d like to point out that one of my dreadest affix combos is illusionist with mortar, just because in mid to low end machines it totally destroys frame rate, leaving you totally helpless.
“5k armor, 50k hp, 700 resists” Ok stats for hell, I doubt he dies there one shot. Inferno? Bad gear tbh, maybe defense passives or skills help..
I don’t mind challenging bosses per se, but there’s a thin line between challenge and frustration; the former makes me want to keep playing, the latter doesn’t. To me, repeatedly dying to a random bs combo, watching that res timer increase and the elite pack quickly regenerate to full health is easily the most frustrating thing you can experience in Diablo 3.
I completely agree about elite full regen. I think the problem is that it feels random; I’ve usually got one or two deaths “invested” in a tough fight when it happens, and it’s just demoralizing to see that progress suddenly erased. I know that the devs want to discourage death zerging, but I think the increased repair costs (plus the eventual breaking of gear) are enough. Beyond that, let us decide how much gold/time/pride we want to lose to a ridiculous elite pack. Screw the elite full regen and rage timers.
It’s Inferno, it’s SUPPOSED to be difficult. I hate all the qq to get things nerfed, it already got Inferno nerfed which sucks. By the time you hit Inferno you better well know what affix combinations are hard for you and avoid them if you can’t kill them. For me right now about the only affix combination I fear is Horde/Nightmare because if I engage I’m basically chain cc’d until I die (and as a HC player this is a pretty siginficant problem). But I know this which is why I identify champ mods and run if I can’t kill them. If you don’t know what you can’t kill by the time you get to Inferno that’s your problem, it’s not an issue with the game.
To me the big issue is when there are packs that makes running away from them hard or impossible.
Combining fast, vortex and jailer and you may not be able to get away even if you wanted to.
And teleport, jailor banelings is just broken.
no one is asking for it to be easy, everyone is asking for it to be fun. you can make inferno hard while remaining fun. being killed without any chance to save yourself is not fun. if the only way to survive is to make a new game then something is broken. i like the random mobs but when you can get killed from fear to frozen to arcane or whatever then its not fun.
is it that hard to understand that people want a fun game thats not easy mode? i know it can be done it has in the past. of course everytime anyone says anything bad someone like you makes a post with “qq” in it. when will people understand that you can actually have a discussion without either side “qq” ing or being a fanboy
Make stuff like Vortex or Jailer dodgeable/interruptable, damnit. That fixes most of the issue right there.
The most feared affix for me is fire chains for sure. If it’s paired with shielding or nightmare it gets really frustrating, since sometimes the nightmare procs in about every 2 or 3 hits. So if I don’t kill any of them before my wrath of the ancients runs out, I basically need leave them alone. Anyways, I’m totally fine with these almost impossible combos, because they are rare.
I don’t really know what the OP expected? Inferno suddenly be a lot less difficult? It became quite a bit less difficult simply by the damage reduction.
There can be some nasty combos that you might want to simply outrun, but i think there is a strategy for all of them. If you can’t pass them yet, then you need to gear up!
Keeping on like this the difficulty of Inferno will be nullified and then people will cry its too easy and not like Blizzard sad, almost impossible!
The problem with “There can be some nasty combos that you might want to simply outrun, but i think there is a strategy for all of them.” is that in too many cases the answer is just “get better gear”.
I want to be able to defeat elites that would tear a similarly geared character apart if controlled by a less-experienced player because I chose the right skills and knew how to dodge and weave through enemy attacks. And many a time this just isn’t possible – you can try dodging arcane beams (which can be rather fun) but that’s not going to help you if you get instantly jailed at the spot with no way to break through. Or if you get vortexed back in. Or walled in with them.
Sure, I could just grind over and over until such things no longer phase me at all, but the gameplay will still remain boring. There’d be no point in dodging or having fast reflexes because you’re going to get trapped anyway. The only reason you’d win is that you had enough gear to tank the damage or enough DPS to kill the elite before he can use his abilities on you. At which point a bot would be better than me at the game. And I hate that.