No posioned/burning mongrels!?

[Jedouard]

Q: What happened to imbuing the witch doctor’s zombie dogs with fire and poison?
A: One of the struggles we had with the Witch Doctor, Zombie dog in particular, was figuring out why would I choose to plague my dog or light it on fire, what are the situations that I would choose one verses the other. Is the gameplay supposed to be that the player is trying to keep the fire on the dog all the time but it keeps falling off or is that for some situations I want a fire dog and for others a plague dog? There were also issues where sometimes players would see this loud fiery dog on their screen and not really know how it got there because they didn’t realise it was their skill that did it. However, when we toned down the fire effect it made it hard to know if it was on fire or not so we had a bunch of difficulties with it, mostly in terms of communicating it to the player and having it be a meaningful gameplay decision. We still want to keep the idea of customising your dog in different ways and one of the ways we will probably look at doing that is through either additional skills or the rune system which we were unable to show at Blizzcon this year. That is a whole other level of customisation on skills that isn’t even being shown right now.

So, they took out one of the coolest parts of the WD because people couldn't figure it out? Hmmm. I think you light the mongrels on fire or poison them because they are better that way. And, if you cannot figure out that the poisoned/burning mongrel belongs to you, then you ought not play the WD.

Combined with more corpses/zombies appearing without deaths (zombie wall and now carrion spider, summon zombie and so on), a bunch of frogs and a puny char body, the WD's visuals are starting to really suck, as are the concepts behind them.

The worst part of it is that the WD's mechanics best fit my play-style. I mean, in terms of mechanics he is awesome. So, I am stuck with severely not-epic visuals and a mechanic I like or epic visuals (with the exception of the arcane tornadoes) and mechanics that are not my style.

[Mad Mantis]

One of the struggles we had with the Witch Doctor, Zombie dog in particular, was figuring out why would I choose to plague my dog or light it on fire, what are the situations that I would choose one verses the other.

Well, allow me to see what I pull out of my top hat. Monsters having a higher resistance to plague instead of fire maybe? There could be other effects such as plague doing little damage but affecting a lot of creatures, while fire does high damage but affects a single one?


There were also issues where sometimes players would see this loud fiery dog on their screen and not really know how it got there because they didn’t realise it was their skill that did it.

Then make sure the skill description mentions that mongrels can be set on fire or given plague. If they can't be bothered to read the description they are morons and should be banned from playing. Don't cut a good idea because of blundering idiots.


We still want to keep the idea of customising your dog in different ways and one of the ways we will probably look at doing that is through either additional skills or the rune system which we were unable to show at Blizzcon this year.

Additional skills is the cheap way out and allows them to easily fill the WD skill tree. It also goes directly against their idea that the summons are nothing more than cannon fodder. Placing points in a skill designed to support the mongrels is only useful if they are reasonably sturdy and stick around for a while. Otherwise I'm just wasting points on a skill that augments minions I am constantly resummoning. I won't be getting my skillpoints worth.

[Akimbo]

So they dumbed down the WD because people were too thick/lazy to understand what they were doing? *sigh* This is the exact direction I didn't want D3 to be taken in. Reducing options and variety like this leads to a stale game.

[ill logic]

That's just silly. While D2 wasn't a perfect game, certainly there were things going on behind the scene that weren't exactly obvious and yet people managed, especially with the help of online guides which will spring up as early as a few months after release. Dual-wielding Whirlwind, variable Valkyries etc. This is far more apparent than the calculations and variations going on in that game. These players would eventually realize that their own skills are setting the mongrels on fire, and give them that "Oh ****, that's cool!" moment. They're taking away the player's moment of discovery of something awesome, e.g. higher levels of skelly mastery change the look of skellies.

[Smash]

This game starting to be dumbed more and more instead to figure how make things interested and different they remove it or cap. They are creating second wow.

Removed Stats customize is the best example, look on Fallout 2 how stats can be interesting.

[Jedouard]

If they want to make it less confusing, then they ought to tone down the animations of skills a bit. I like the animations, but with four characters on screen, it got confusing... and sometimes it wasn't one of those "confusing's" that I think will go as the game becomes more familiar.

[vagrant]

It also goes directly against their idea that the summons are nothing more than cannon fodder.

Did anyone actually think that this idea would last or work in a game like D3? I admit when I heard about it I thought it was very, very cool. I even hoped that they'd be able to pull if off, but I've always been skeptical. It just seems, to me at least, to contrast their plan to get rid of the one button spam of Diablo 2. I mean if you have a lot of summons to pick from but they all essentially serve the same purpose, to keep the enemy from hitting you while you pelt the enemy with SoF or something similar, then what's the point of having options? Most people would simply pick the toughest, most aggro inducing summon and use it ad nauseam with one or two ranged attacks. I guess we'll all have to see once D3 is actually released, but I've got a very strong impression that the WD is going to end up with a combination of weak summons and strong summons that will each have a use in a given situation.

[Flux]

I noticed the dogs weren't burning from my firebombs, but I never had a poison skill (didn't put a point into locusts) to try that out.

There are a bunch of zombie dog passives; +hps, faster attack, etc. all further down the tree. they were acceptable tanks in the blizzcon build, but couldn't really kill anything by themselves, with just 2 points in the basic skill and no passive boosts.

[DiabloCalibur]

It sucks balls to think that they're taking away customization options from us, and yes, the reasoning behind their doing so also sucks. But have faith guys, when Blizzard taketh away, usually they giveth right back, two or three-fold.

[Telzen]

Did anyone actually think that this idea would last or work in a game like D3? I admit when I heard about it I thought it was very, very cool. I even hoped that they'd be able to pull if off, but I've always been skeptical. It just seems, to me at least, to contrast their plan to get rid of the one button spam of Diablo 2. I mean if you have a lot of summons to pick from but they all essentially serve the same purpose, to keep the enemy from hitting you while you pelt the enemy with SoF or something similar, then what's the point of having options? Most people would simply pick the toughest, most aggro inducing summon and use it ad nauseam with one or two ranged attacks. I guess we'll all have to see once D3 is actually released, but I've got a very strong impression that the WD is going to end up with a combination of weak summons and strong summons that will each have a use in a given situation.

Yeah I agree. They are more meat shields anyway, so no real point taking the time to hit them with spells just to give them effects. And now that you can't enchant them their basic damage has probably been raised to offset that loss.

[Mad Mantis]

Most people would simply pick the toughest, most aggro inducing summon and use it ad nauseam with one or two ranged attacks.

Most likely people will summon as many minions as they are allowed and use them as meat shields while pelting stuff from a safe distance. Not exactly the revolution in gameplay they were hoping for.


There are a bunch of zombie dog passives; +hps, faster attack, etc. all further down the tree. they were acceptable tanks in the blizzcon build, but couldn't really kill anything by themselves, with just 2 points in the basic skill and no passive boosts.

This is the exact opposite of what they said they would do. They want us to create strong minions with the passives and at the same time we aren't allowed to have a lot of minions since they are supposed to be nothing but cheap easily replaceable cannon fodder. I'm really getting mixed signals here.


Yeah I agree. They are more meat shields anyway, so no real point taking the time to hit them with spells just to give them effects.

Well they were in the way of where the spells would have landed. Chances are that through regular spam you would have hit all of the mongrels pretty fast.

[vagrant]

Most likely people will summon as many minions as they are allowed and use them as meat shields while pelting stuff from a safe distance. Not exactly the revolution in gameplay they were hoping for.

I should've qualified my post with, "assuming that you are limited to how many summons you can have at any one time." I think that given the design, or at least intentions, of the WD that you will be able to have many summons up at once, but if they have one big, bad summon that you can have, but with the exception that you can have no other summons out at the same time then many people would favor it over the tediousness of managing multiple summons.

In a lot of ways the WD reminds me of WoW's Shaman class. Shamans are able to have between 1 and 4 totems on the ground at one time that provide the shaman with either buffs, bonus damage, or other usually useless abilities such as being able to see far off areas. How this is similar to the WD is this, it took the Shaman 4 seconds to cast/summon 4 totems. Shamans only summoned 4 totems in situations where 4 totems were necessary, and in those situations 4 seconds could often mean the difference between life and death. Lastly, naturally, every second you spend summoning something is a second that you aren't doing damage.

In D2, with the necromancer, the class that most people are want to compare the WD to, this wasn't an issue because your summons were either your primary source of damage(skeles, revives), a semi-permanent meat shield/aggro magnet(golems), or non-existent. Now in the first case, that of a "Fishymancer", you weren't taking any time away from killing your enemies so that you could replace fallen summons. If you lost a skele or revive there were ample corpses available to replace it with assuming you didn't blow them all up, and granted the WD doesn't require corpses to summon minions, he is, unlike the necromancer, the primary source of damage so if he's spending time summoning more minions to do his bidding he isn't spending time doing significant damage to his enemies, much like the Shaman who busy placing or replacing totems. Not the most engaging form of game play I can think of and certainly a contributing factor to the Shaman being one of the most underplayed classes in WoW.

Now, in WoW Blizz solved this problem first by making totems last longer than your average fight so that a shaman rarely had to place the same totem more than a couple of times in any given fight. Recently I understand that they introduced a whole new UI feature just for Shamans to use to streamline their totem placement. I'm not clear on the specifics of it as I don't play WoW any longer, but I believe it allows the Shaman to place 4 totems in the time of one global cooldown.

I think I've rambled long enough at this point. I will conclude by saying that I realize that this is not WoW. The mechanics and game play are entirely different and this require entirely different methods of tuning and balancing, and I just hope that Blizzard really realizes that.





This is the exact opposite of what they said they would do. They want us to create strong minions with the passives and at the same time we aren't allowed to have a lot of minions since they are supposed to be nothing but cheap easily replaceable cannon fodder. I'm really getting mixed signals here.


Well they were in the way of where the spells would have landed. Chances are that through regular spam you would have hit all of the mongrels pretty fast.

Agreed on both points.

[Mad Mantis]

Shamans only summoned 4 totems in situations where 4 totems were necessary, and in those situations 4 seconds could often mean the difference between life and death. Lastly, naturally, every second you spend summoning something is a second that you aren't doing damage.

If the Totems are like in WC3 then they are fixed at a location. Minions can be cast without corpses and will travel with you. Most WD's will summon minions at the beginning of a game and only replace when one falls in battle. I'm guessing the summoning wouldn't take to long and most likely will be instant. So as a WD you are probably losing less time than a Shaman in each battle. I see what you are getting at. In the heat of battle when all the minions have fallen and you need a replacement fast I'd go with a single big one because it is faster and probably a better tank.

Still that leaves open the option of using a single big scary minion instead of lots of weaker minions at the beginning of the game. Depends on how good each is at keeping the WD safe and doing damage. We should know more once we get to see some of the skills.

[vagrant]

If the Totems are like in WC3 then they are fixed at a location. Minions can be cast without corpses and will travel with you. Most WD's will summon minions at the beginning of a game and only replace when one falls in battle. I'm guessing the summoning wouldn't take to long and most likely will be instant. So as a WD you are probably losing less time than a Shaman in each battle. I see what you are getting at. In the heat of battle when all the minions have fallen and you need a replacement fast I'd go with a single big one because it is faster and probably a better tank.

Still that leaves open the option of using a single big scary minion instead of lots of weaker minions at the beginning of the game. Depends on how good each is at keeping the WD safe and doing damage. We should know more once we get to see some of the skills.

As usual you're right again. Having never gotten to play a WD or any character in D3 my knowledge is limited to mostly dated information that is posted online and my experience with D2 and WoW. That is to say that the bulk of my post was based around the knowledge of the 1 second global cooldown in WoW, I have no idea how long the GCD is in D3, and also based on the one summon I know anything about in D3, the mongrel/zombie dog, which doubles as a source of significant damage when you blow it up. As cool of a concept as that is, that's still 2 button presses required to do a job that for most other characters would require only one button press. And in the end you still have to resummon those dogs which is going to take some time away from doing damage.

Anyway as I said I agree with you.

[Fire_Dragon]

This is the first time I've been in the WD forum and I must say, is this for sure? Current etc.? One of the main reasons I wanted to play the WD was because of the lighting minions on fire and plaguing them. It sounded like a really cool mechanic.

So blizzard has dumped this? Because people who are played the game at Blizzcon, never had a manual, didn't really know what they were being shown to begin with, got confused??

Please tell me this is a bad joke...

[popenfresh]

Well if blizz said that the mechanic wasn’t fun to play with then I believe them. Do you really think they’d remove a mechanic that was fun to play with. It was probably one of those ideas that looked cool on paper but one that didn’t quite work out in the actual game, at least, that’s my guess.

It could also be that the infusing of pets made a mess out of the skill runes for summoning spells. Anybody ever think of that?

[Mad Mantis]

This is the first time I've been in the WD forum and I must say, is this for sure? Current etc.?

For sure and current. Posted during this BlizzCon. They had trouble with the visuals and with people understanding what happened. Big chance that, as popenfresh mentioned, things didn't work out with the runes as well.

[engagequadlaser]

Removed
10char

[Dimmu]

Agree with Blizz, this is one of those mechanics that sounds great on paper, but either is fun for the initial novelty and then quickly wears off, or isn't fun at all in practice.

Exactly. I could see this being sort of fun to play around with when you first get a new spell to enchant the dogs with. But after a short time it'll just become tiresome to have to micromanage all these enchantments every time you summon a new minion. Ever use enchant on an entire group of necro summons? Not fun.

[AtomicJ]

I thought the idea was cool. I was slightly disappointed when Blizz said they were removing the mechanic, but I assume we'll see it in another form (runes, skills, etc.). I'm going to trust Blizzard, at least for now...

[Fire_Dragon]

I'm going to trust Blizzard, at least for now...

Tough call. I'm torn between feeling loyale to a company that makes great games versus feeling annoyed at another company simplifying their game for the masses.

I'm not sure there is a smilee that accurately describes this state of being, but this one is as close as I could find...

:fire:

[a black kid]

i find it hard to understand how people can so easily miss the fact that just because they removed the SKILLS used to enchant your dogs, theres a very good chance that you can use a RUNE to change how your dog operates, and i really wouldnt be surprised if those were only a few of dozens of options.

[SlechtWeerBeer]

i find it hard to understand how people can so easily miss the fact that just because they removed the SKILLS used to enchant your dogs, theres a very good chance that you can use a RUNE to change how your dog operates, and i really wouldnt be surprised if those were only a few of dozens of options.

There's only 5 runes.

You could use runes and your offensive spells with Mong-, Zombie Dogs if they had kept the now-removed mechanic.

[a black kid]

There's only 5 runes.

You could use runes and your offensive spells with Mong-, Zombie Dogs if they had kept the now-removed mechanic.

so, you're saying for certainty that there is only 5 runes.... do you realize how silly you sound making a claim like that, the game is still (probably several) years away from release, and still heavily in development... we could just as easily see 10-15 runes per skill as we could 5.

[theeliminator]

so, you're saying for certainty that there is only 5 runes.... do you realize how silly you sound making a claim like that, the game is still (probably several) years away from release, and still heavily in development... we could just as easily see 10-15 runes per skill as we could 5.

I agree, the odds are there will be more then just 5 runes by the time the game comes out. Also I wouldn't get to upset about them taking the "imbue" option out, because when open beta comes along (in 2 freaking years!) I am sure the players will say something and they will just add it back in. Blizzard is at least good at listening to their fans.

[a black kid]

I agree, the odds are there will be more then just 5 runes by the time the game comes out. Also I wouldn't get to upset about them taking the "imbue" option out, because when open beta comes along (in 2 freaking years!) I am sure the players will say something and they will just add it back in. Blizzard is at least good at listening to their fans.

thats generally what i try to imply on these forums more than anything... the game is still far away, how things are right now is not concrete... and i wouldnt be surprised if even MORE customizable options came out, let alone more runes to customize your skills.

and yes, blizzard is good at listening to their fans (and ignoring the ranters and ravers that refuse to accept even a nominal change)

[Fire_Dragon]

and yes, blizzard is good at listening to their fans (and ignoring the ranters and ravers that refuse to accept even a nominal change)

I think what some forumers are feeling (I know I am) is that in recent years companies continue to streamline and simplify their games. I grew up playing micro intensive RTS games and most of the modern fare in said genre is a far cry from what it used to be.

This does not mean people are going to boycott the game (that would be... weird). It just means some gamers like lots of options, but companies seem to water down games first, rather then let players adjust via playing them.

You seem to imply that certain gamers can't stand anything being taken away from them, but that is only one end of the spectrum. The other are gamers who go to a Blizzcon, complain that they don't know what is going on (for a game with no manual, no release date, not out of beta etc.) and thus Blizzard immediately removes said mechanic.

I think this philosophy is crazy. Just my opinion, but I don't agree with their reasoning behind removing the mechanic.

[SlechtWeerBeer]

so, you're saying for certainty that there is only 5 runes.... do you realize how silly you sound making a claim like that, the game is still (probably several) years away from release, and still heavily in development... we could just as easily see 10-15 runes per skill as we could 5.

You do know the D3 team confirmed that (more specifically, Jay)?

[Kingu]

As I remember and understood there are 5 types, but will vary on quality of its effects.

[a black kid]

You do know the D3 team confirmed that (more specifically, Jay)?

yea, and a year ago they said they werent going to have items that bind... and look, now there will be. the game still has a lot to go, and im sure many changes to go. and things like more runes to make things MORE customizable are extremely likely.