Dear Readers,

"OMG I need to move away from enemy missiles?"

You will all cry like little girls when you try Inferno and well into it for months. Be prepared to grind Hell for some time before taking it on. Even more so if you want that extra crisp that is Hardcore-mode.

I read in another thread that people think they will do Inferno "Lite" to suit even casuals.
"Blizzard will make Inferno retain casual gamers, because if something is too hard they will leave".

- I don't see people leaving WoW because they don't beat the last bosses on Heroic?

- Or quit Starcraft because they don't beat it on Brutal?

- Or quit Diablo 2 because they can't beat Hell on HC with an untwinked Poisonmancer?

It's the sustained value in games it self that makes or breaks a good game and Blizzard has never disappointed us with the top tier difficulty level. Yes, the starter levels/difficulties can be played by a 5yo but that's how it is, easy to learn, hard to master.

You will be into some big surprise if you don't think Inferno (HC) will put even the most self-proclaimed Diablo 3 PRO-badass to test.

You read it here first.

Blizzard themselfs stated that Inferno is only for the most skilled players. Just can't remember where =(

Bashiok also said that Inferno is going to be "brutally difficult" and although it is Bashiok, I am not worried about its difficulty at all. I am prepared to get owned there :D

Inferno is also the reason that I won't be playing Hardcore mode because I'm sure I will die there xD

depends what is gonna be "hard"/"brutally difficult"/etc etc.

if its gonna be hard for fresh characters lvl 60 with some low hell items OR
if its gonna be hard for skilled lvl 60 characters with best hell items ?

i would be totally ok with the second option as hardcore d2 player. but if its gonna be a walk in a park in the second option i would be disappointed, very.

I think Blizzard can really make inferno challenging. Even WoW is differently total genre i believe they learned thing or two about difficulty adjusting trough that game.

If i guess correctly inferno will be less about hack & slash and more about executing fights correctly. Stuff like CC, positioning, pack handling and effective builds will be the name of the game instead of just acquiring better gear and overpowering your way trough the end game content.

If i guess correctly inferno will be less about hack & slash and more about executing fights correctly. Stuff like CC, positioning, pack handling and effective builds will be the name of the game instead of just acquiring better gear and overpowering your way trough the end game content.
thats actually what im afraid of. making hack and slash some stupid strategic game. making again only 1-3 viable builds for each class. etc etc. no, i hope its not going that way.

thats actually what im afraid of. making hack and slash some stupid strategic game. making again only 1-3 viable builds for each class. etc etc. no, i hope its not going that way.

It's probably gonna be a combination of both. You are going to need really good gear but you can't just run in and slash away in Inferno. Even with the best gear possible. You will die. Some strategy will probably be involved

I can almost guarantee you that unless we're talking fake difficulty it won't take long for people to figure out a cookie-cutter that will rape Inferno without any skill.

if its gonna be hard for fresh characters lvl 60 with some low hell items OR
if its gonna be hard for skilled lvl 60 characters with best hell items ?

I am guessing it will be hard for the latter as Wyatt and Bash have suggested that most players will probably want to farm better gear from Hell before attempting Inferno.


I can almost guarantee you that unless we're talking fake difficulty it won't take long for people to figure out a cookie-cutter that will rape Inferno without any skill.

We wont know until the game is out but I doubt it. Since all offensive moves are based on your weapon damage, it is very easy to ensure difficulty by scaling monsters accordingly so that no class can zerg through packs. And dont forget, all monsters will be a level higher than the player in Inferno.

That's where numbers come in. Of course even inferno can't remain infernally hard for ever, but there can be multiple elements that come into play. Number tuning consisting of gear and correct builds and correct skill usage. Then there are fight mechanics that vary from encounter to encounter.

I haven't played WoW in years, but i think they nailed the challenge aspect pretty well with WotLK heroic raids. Difficulty adjusting concept is pretty simple. Make staying alive require more attention while boosting enemy health pools so you need to pay more attention to your damage output as well. At some stage humans can't handle the multitasking anymore.

There's plenty of degrees of granulation between 'Inferno difficult' and 'easy'. Just because you can eventually get tricked out in Inferno gear doesn't immediately mean that Inferno will eventually become a breeze. It's far more likely it will simply become 'less difficult'. Which is about what we'd expect really.

Either way I imagine it will be much harder than D2's Hell. No potions, TPs, S/E, duped super items.

We wont know until the game is out but I doubt it. Since all offensive moves are based on your weapon damage, it is very easy to ensure difficulty by scaling monsters accordingly so that no class can zerg through packs. And dont forget, all monsters will be a level higher than the player in Inferno.

It depends on how you define "zerging". Imo, the time it takes to "zerg" (or "rape" or whatever definition of general pwnage) Inferno is quite irrelevant as a futility in time isn't what defines difficulty (some bosses in FF can take a ridiculous amount of time to kill, yet aren't at all difficult). In fact, the last thing i hope for in a inherently doomed quest to make Inferno truly difficult is huge hp pool monsters because then the game just becomes more boring instead, i also wouldn't like gamemechanics like immunities or impossible to dodge one-hit KO's because then the game becomes frustratingly unfair.
Unless Blizzard plans on making Inferno impossible with average gear and a average build (i'm 99.9% sure it won't), then that must mean Inferno will likely become just as easy as Hell in D2 did with the best gear and a general cookie cutter build. I couldn't even blame Blizzard for this because it's almost impossible to design a arpg any other way.

There's plenty of degrees of granulation between 'Inferno difficult' and 'easy'. Just because you can eventually get tricked out in Inferno gear doesn't immediately mean that Inferno will eventually become a breeze. It's far more likely it will simply become 'less difficult'. Which is about what we'd expect really.
yeah that can be another problem - the difficulty of inferno when running actually with inferno gear (good or close to best end game gear). i hope it can be still hard.
but actually what is the problem with inferno (kinda offtopic) - people will always search for the easiest way/place to get the best ration of time/quality/quantity/difficulty (you know what i mean). the situation i see here - how is blizzard going to avoid people farming for example 1 act (which should be the easiest one as being the first one) over other acts or late end game areas since all monsters gonna be lvl 61. its like why farming act 5 in diablo 2 which was relatively hard over act 1 when you can drop windforce from the fallen just outside of town in act 1 ?

i think everyone is afraid of the end game difficulty because basically diablo 2 has quite linear progress (editing here :D saying linear progress is way too much, there wasnt any progress in difficulty over lvl 80, or rather just a line going down ^^) at lvl 80+ when you could kill everything less or more.

Act 1 is not going to be the easiest act. All acts are receiving a flat rate of difficulty across the board, meaning that Blizzard is actively making it such that there is no immediately discernible path of least resistance. If/when these paths of least resistance are discovered, they'll be tuned to be more on par with the rest of the game.

In addition, loot does not drop any more frequently in any one place or off any particular boss. The highest and best loot droprates will be from champions and rares. There will be no incentive just to bossrun over and over again, when the best and most frequent loot will come from playing entire sections of the game start to finish. What those sections are depends entirely upon what the player finds the most fun / what they want to do at that moment.

I don't understand the point of this thread.

Was it created so you could simply call people who disagree with you whiners?

Unless Blizzard plans on making Inferno impossible with average gear and a average build (i'm 99.9% sure it won't), then that must mean Inferno will likely become just as easy as Hell in D2 did with the best gear and a general cookie cutter build.
Well, they did point out that Inferno isn't the "k we done" solution to end-game woes. It's something there, at release, to give a more varied item farming experience than endless boss runs and to hopefully challenge players long enough until they can implement something genuinely difficult.

It depends on how you define "zerging". Imo, the time it takes to "zerg" (or "rape" or whatever definition of general pwnage) Inferno is quite irrelevant as a futility in time isn't what defines difficulty (some bosses in FF can take a ridiculous amount of time to kill, yet aren't at all difficult).

To me the word 'zerg' connotes both high damage output and ease of survivability although in most situations that involves killing things rather quickly. I dont think Blizzard's concept of difficulty hinges on making it take longer to kill monsters without threating the player's survivability.

I don't understand the point of this thread.

Was it created so you could simply call people who disagree with you whiners?

i think you understood it pretty well.

I hope it's at least on par with some of the more demanding Median XL uberquests/areas (though it's been a while since i last played, Duncraig and Fauztinville come to mind), then i am happy. And of course (like in Median XL), there will be cookie-cutter builds eventually, it's inevitable, but this can be adjusted with patches and hotfixes.

I don't understand the point of this thread.

Was it created so you could simply call people who disagree with you whiners?

It was created so that people browsing this forum could tell the public how they feel about the "Inferno" difficulty. To get people involved in the subject and in a constructive way put some text behind their thoughts.

On subject:

I would like to see Blizzards difficulty tweaks be more of an "avoidance" theme than just simply give monsters bigger health pools. Higher tier of gear and the following damage output should only count for some of the evolving gameplay experience.

It could be more "avoidable" damage heading your characters way, but in the same way deadly, like ranged monster attacks or environmental bursts of danger. Those dangers should all be pre-emptied to the player with some kind of timespace for manueverability. But as a player you need to act as fast as possible and be able to foresee some of the danger.

People need to stop using the word 'rape' as a synonym for easy victory. It's disgusting.

With that said, please continue with your baseless speculation.

It depends on how you define "zerging". Imo, the time it takes to "zerg" (or "rape" or whatever definition of general pwnage) Inferno is quite irrelevant as a futility in time isn't what defines difficulty (some bosses in FF can take a ridiculous amount of time to kill, yet aren't at all difficult). In fact, the last thing i hope for in a inherently doomed quest to make Inferno truly difficult is huge hp pool monsters because then the game just becomes more boring instead, i also wouldn't like gamemechanics like immunities or impossible to dodge one-hit KO's because then the game becomes frustratingly unfair.
Unless Blizzard plans on making Inferno impossible with average gear and a average build (i'm 99.9% sure it won't), then that must mean Inferno will likely become just as easy as Hell in D2 did with the best gear and a general cookie cutter build. I couldn't even blame Blizzard for this because it's almost impossible to design a arpg any other way.

This.

The only way to make the game difficult for everyone, is to make it madly difficult for the 99% and somewhat difficult for the 1%. unless they could come up with a smart difficulty scaling feature that was able to analyze your gear, damage, healt, etc, and adjust monster damage and HP accordingly, there is no way for inferno to have that feeling of 'just the right amount of difficulty' for everyone.

I suspect that we will have some cry about it being way too hard, and some complain about it being way too easy.

wanna ask you all a question:
will you be able to scale endgame difficulty properly having a possibility of creating any character/any stats on it/any items on it/any variation of skills on it?
as going for my answer: YES, it will be possible to make the game difficult enough running around with character equipped with BEST items. i see it quite easy. What can be actually the problem is scalling the difficulty between fresh "endhell" character and "endinferno" character (but its not undoable). But the REAL PROBLEM is how hard blizzard is gonna make it. What will be hard in their minds. I bet 5 people (internal testers) can clear most things easily but will they make good decisions ?
I could also try answering the last question - and the answer will be ... yes, they can make it really good and balance (at least as going for PvE). Why? I think the experience they got with WoW is too huge too be unmentioned in here.

I don't understand the point of this thread.

Was it created so you could simply call people who disagree with you whiners?

You whine quite a lot yourself you know, so don´t be such a hypocrit...

I wouldn't compare it to median XL, because although it's a great mod, there is a very low number of effective builds in the later difficulties. I still wish Diablo 3 will go all the way with a good balance between the skills / characters. Of course not every build will work everywhere, and some will be better than others overall but still, in median XL there are too few builds that actually work.
As for the difficulty, I hope it will be really hard, but that once you have managed to get the very best gear from inferno itself, you can reach a point where it will be easy. What I like most in Diablo is the powering up part. It would feel awesome to start in an area where you take ages to kill packs of mobs, and then over the months of playing and trading, get your character powerful enough to burn those packs in a couple seconds.

The only way Inferno becomes hard is if it requires more than one person to do it. If you can solo inferno, then it's not that hard. If it requires you to have a class of another type to beat it, then that's when it truly becomes difficult.

i might be the worlds worst diablo player, but i'd be happy if the inferno super-rare packs are like the superboss fights of v1.13 (do i have the patch right?) i thought those were tough and took awhile to do even with help. i had decent gear but not 10 combat gcs in my quiver. i think if inferno is not tough and people voice that then blizz can respond on their end relatively quickly. id also like to see a few insane inferno world event things. that would be very cool.

Well last time i played D2 it took less than 2 weeks to clear the pandemonium event with kicker assassin from the scratch. Then again in all fairness i think that has more to do with bot riddled economy than with the actual encounters.

I'm still trying to figure out how they'll make it possible for single player but challenging for four.

I'm also trying to figure out how they make it anything more than a gear/build check.

Its not so about what people perceive wil be hard in inferno. It is the act of being vocal about it to ensure the it will be hard. So Blizzard wont be slacking off in this department.

People whine because they are waiting for the game to be out.

It is not difficult to make the game extremely hard, it's whether if it will be too hard.