Monsters a bit too easy?

[stillman]

I noticed the following in the gameplay video:

1-The monsters are all naked; no armor at all (except the boss at the end, still pretty naked).

2-They are slow.

3-The AI doesn't look too good. There's some good formation with the shield skellies being in front of the ranged attackers, but after we entounter this a few times, it'll be the same old story. Each monster doesn't have many tricks up his sleeve.

4-Mostly undead monsters compared to animal or demons.

Someone mentioned that Bizzard plans to get upwards of 100 monsters on one srceen. It appears the goal is to have VERY LOW quality (i.e. unarmored, meat, low AI, slow, easy) monsters and lots of them. Now, I realize the barb was overpowered in the video, and the video represents the earlier part of the game, and it could change and monsters can get more seriously armored and smarter, but I wonder if Blizzard's goal is to make the game ridiculously easy.

If this is the goal, then we all know what comes next. Step 1 is Blizzard gives us what we want, which is mass killings of mobs in small amounts of time (as described above). Step 2 is Blizzard continues to give us what we want: enigma equivalent so we can all skip the parts we don't want to bother with and we can exploit bosses. Infinity equivalent is given too, for no-brainer automatic damage. Step 3 is Blizzard continues to give us what we want: a slew of elite uniques that make faster run/walk, resistances, crushing blow and other mods way too easy to achieve. And lets not forget anni and torch. And if a dupe problem arises, why bother dealing with it? After all, it only makes the game less challenging, which is the goal.

Does anyone else get the impression that the d3 monsters are mindless pieces of meat?

[Nostavar]

Compared to D2? Not at all.

[sicilian]

Didn't get that impression at all. They clearly had both heroes leveled beyond the challenges of the game (you can tell because the exp bar barely moves through the whole area). And the Barb's gear was likely overpowered too... unless you think a mace doing over 100 dps with additional fire damage should be the standard in the early portions of the game?

Also, any decrease in speed of the monsters is counteracted because it seems your character will be slower than in D2 as well.

I agree with the poster above. D2 was the epitomy of mindless droves of enemies. The most "intelligent" move any enemy had was something like the corpse spitters eating and then trying to gain distance. Hardly impressive AI, but that wasn't the point.

I thought the dark berserkers looked like they had a few different types of attacks, and combined with the summoners looked like they could be a challenge to a normally geared/leveled character.

[Xeteh]

You have to assume that the monsters in the gameplay trailer are either extremely weak or the barbarian is extremely overpowered for the demonstration. Watch the Barbarian's exp bar during the dungeon clear, it barely (if at all) moves. I'm willing to bet that it was a lower level dungeon and the Barbarian was far higher level than was needed for it just to showcase the abilities and allow them to show a decent sized dungeon in a shorter amount of time. The guy said they rigged that chest to drop a full set of armor, you know they can rig anything they want.

I seriously doubt monsters will die that fast to an equally leveled player in normal gear come release.

[Grawner]

arg, stop with all this nonsense.. you haven't played the game yet, therefore you do not know, how the game is going to be at all!

[Apocalypse]

to be fair, if you(the character) are good enough to take on the lords of hell then you should probably be able to cut a path through tons of monsters anyway.

i am not worried at all as it was clear the gameplay video was 100% scripted just to show off some stuff, nothing about how the video played should be taken into consideration when talking about how the final product will play

[visom]

I noticed the following in the gameplay video:

1-The monsters are all naked; no armor at all (except the boss at the end, still pretty naked).
monsters have something called "natural" defense, in diablo2 the corrupted rogue are half naked yet they have defense ratings. It's just the animations anyways, besides who knows, those naked monsters might have steel strong skin

2-They are slow.
but they're stronger. The grotesque explodes into a bunch of lampreys, the zombie's upper body can detach from its torso to give itself a "second life" after being killed, the berserker's attack is insanely strong since it took out 1/3 of the barbarian's HP who is pretty like twice their level

3-The AI doesn't look too good. There's some good formation with the shield skellies being in front of the ranged attackers, but after we entounter this a few times, it'll be the same old story. Each monster doesn't have many tricks up his sleeve.
yea i don't really understand why the shield skellies has to be behind the archer ones, probably either a placement error in the game, or if the archer skellies are behind the shield one then your character will be out of it's attack range

4-Mostly undead monsters compared to animal or demons.
of course theres alot of undeads, animal monsters are pretty rare in D2 (the only ones that i remember are quill rats and gargantuans). Also the demons are much stronger than the undeads, so it makes sense to have less of them

Someone mentioned that Bizzard plans to get upwards of 100 monsters on one srceen. It appears the goal is to have VERY LOW quality (i.e. unarmored, meat, low AI, slow, easy) monsters and lots of them. Now, I realize the barb was overpowered in the video, and the video represents the earlier part of the game, and it could change and monsters can get more seriously armored and smarter, but I wonder if Blizzard's goal is to make the game ridiculously easy.
well the monsters can't provide too much of a challenge, since we don't want our video host to die and end the video. and for the very low quality part, i don't think they'll lower the quality so much, since its also your responsible to have at least a decent computer to play diablo3

If this is the goal, then we all know what comes next. Step 1 is Blizzard gives us what we want, which is mass killings of mobs in small amounts of time (as described above). Step 2 is Blizzard continues to give us what we want: enigma equivalent so we can all skip the parts we don't want to bother with and we can exploit bosses. Infinity equivalent is given too, for no-brainer automatic damage. Step 3 is Blizzard continues to give us what we want: a slew of elite uniques that make faster run/walk, resistances, crushing blow and other mods way too easy to achieve. And lets not forget anni and torch. And if a dupe problem arises, why bother dealing with it? After all, it only makes the game less challenging, which is the goal.

Does anyone else get the impression that the d3 monsters are mindless pieces of meat?
that's always been the case because:
melee monsters just charge towards you
range monsters try to stay away from you
caster monsters try to summon whenever they can and cast spells on you

our time in gaming is not technically "futuristic" yet where monsters can think like a normal human, they're intelligence is still limited

read bolded words

[MooCQ]

Its a DEMO.. for all we know they typed "GODMODE" into console..

[NKlint]

The Siege monster must've been using Anti-Godmode hax to one-hit that barbarian :D

[unmoses]

Beware foul demons and beasts..

Run out as a starter Barbarian in Diablo2.....:yes:

[Sein Schatten]

lol... this is priceless.

[KREGA]

The Siege monster must've been using Anti-Godmode hax to one-hit that barbarian :D

It was TOO awesome! Was that a totally scripted sequence or can they actually do that sort of stuff when they deal the killing blow?

[Felix]

If the barb was so overpowered as everyone says he was, then why does he die to the Boss at the end?

[KREGA]

If the barb was so overpowered as everyone says he was, then why does he die to the Boss at the end?

Scripted or the siege breaker was really tough so that they could show off a real battle as he said he would.

[slickr]

Hmmm. You are forgetting that it was only a Demo.
They can't play lvl1 heroes that die all the time during the demo, LOL.
Also the monsters would have won in the mini-boss fight when the chieftain froze the 2 heroes, if another 2 heroes didn't join the fight so...

[Onehouse]

arg, stop with all this nonsense.. you haven't played the game yet, therefore you do not know, how the game is going to be at all!

Exactly, just leave it be as you got no hands on to back it up. How do you know the baddies wont be smashing down walls on you as well?

[stillman]

I clearly stated in my OP that I am aware that things can change, the barb was overpowered for the demo, it was early in the game, and we've only seen the first little part of the game, so monsters can still get tougher. I am aware of all this.

I'm not talking about the killing prowess of the barb. I'm not saying the barb is killing things too fast and easily.

Here's what I am saying: All of the enemies are naked. And slow. And have about the same number of moves as they did in d2. And, they are are rather brainless things that just move towards the hero without retreating, etc. Many of them are obese making them appear to be even weaker, even easier targets. I'm not talking about the math, damage, def, or overpoweredness aspects of the game. I'm saying there appears to be a trend where the enemies are designed to provide minimal challenge.

Now, why is this an issue? Well, in other threads, people say they want a different, more challenging playing style than d2. In d2, you just hold down the mouse button and kill everything on the screen while drinking beer with your free hand. Some people are looking forward to having to use more skills, and switch between them, and play strategically. The way the demo looks, the monsters are designed to herd themselves together like in d2, and systematically get slaughtered without much effort on part of the player. This observation is derived from the artwork we've been shown (i. e. monster behavior and movement), not the number crunching. The most important observation is the monsters' lack defensive moves and strategizing.

And I'm talking about all the mosnters except the boss at the end. ALL of them seem like newborn kittens. Even if the barb was rigged to low level with low damage, the mosters still look too straightforwardly easy to handle. My main complaint is that I thougth d3 would have better AI for the mosnters. It kind of looks like d2 AI.

Yes, it's a demo. But you guys can basically go to every single thread and do this:

Thread 1: "I have a concern about respecs taking away challenge of the game"..."It's a demo, you know nothing about the game yet. How can you say that?"

Thread2: "The health globes don't look right"..."Dude, it's a demo. Wait untill you play it before you complain."

Thread3: "Will PvP be different?"..."The demo was about PvM. You can't say anything about PvP. Who knows what blizzard will do."

Thread4: "How will we handle bosses with fewer pots?"..."It's a demo, they might add potions for boss fights. Stop worrying about it, you have no idea how it will turn out."

Thread5: "Mf made d2 end game boring for some."..."They clearly said the drops in the demo were all staged. No one can say anything about how mf might be incorperated into d3."

Thread6: "There should be more short term buffing skills"..."Dude, it's a demo. For all you know there are lots of buffing skills. Stop jumping the gun and assuming there won't be any."

Thread:7 "Will PKers be able to enter my game and ruin my fun? Will there be a boot button?"..."You haven't palyed the game yet. You only saw maybe less than 1% from the demo. PKing could be handled in a number of ways for all you know."

Thread:8 "How Blizzard can handle hacking on bnet2"..."All we have is a 20 minute demo. We don't know anything about Blizzard's new systems."

Thread 9: "Should end game have an optional endless dungeon?"..."It's too early to tell. We've only seen the first part of the game in a doctored up 20 minute demo."

Gosh, I guess there should be no forums since we have nothing to discuss based on the demo.

[Sein Schatten]

ROFL.
Okay, but you have to admit that some topics are a bit early to dicuss. You cannot judge the difficulty of monsters at all. Except you come from the future.

For example your Thread 3 is a good topic to discuss and voicing opinions. And it is correct to say that noone knows what will happen in D3 with PvP.
This thread right here is not worded good. Why? Because all we saw was staged fights.
Know what I mean? :)

[sicilian]

I saw a number of things that would lead me to believe there will be some strategy involved. Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that the Barb was overpowered for this area. That being said:

1) Berserkers. Their smash attack took down a good deal of the Barb's health. If he isn't as high a level, that could mean half the health of a melee character is gone with one hit. Imagine a caster now, who gets caught napping and hit with one of those. Also, it took the overpowered Barb three or four swings to take one of these things down. In that time, he had to move out of the way of these big smashes, and a lower level character will need to do that even more.

2) Dark Vessels. These things attacked FAST. It almost looked like a charge type of attack. Didn't do much damage in the demo, but again, we're assuming the Barb has more health than normal.

3) Shielded Skeletons. This already is more tactical than anything in D2, and opens up the possibility that enemies are not just drawings that attack you. They're actual things with equipment that can be manipulated. That opens the door for Blizzard to do a lot of things strategically.

4) Environments. If you can use the environment, who's to say your enemies can't as well?

Now, all that being said, there was one thing about the AI that troubled me, and that was Zombie Wall. I'm hoping in the real game, that enemies won't just charge into the wall of death in droves. Maybe the first few that were really close when you raised it, but those in the back should be smart enough to back off. It should be a crowd control device, not a spell to be relied upon for damage.

[Felix]

Attacking Zombies, i.e. something that can maybe be killed, makes alot more sense than walking right into a wall of fire.