Paragon Levels/MF changes

[Shagsbeard]

Once again, I'm pleased with my playstyle choice. I've chosen to play the game slowly, patiently. Maybe inferno will be ready for me to actually consider playing it. Good changes overall. There's motivation for play beyond 60, and with all the changes in 1.0.4 I think that we might be able to play it without resorting to cheating.

[NacRuno]

I really like the changes with paragon leveling and the bonuses it brings. It will be a much better progression in inferno right now. Extra levels will give you more survivability through extra stats and higher chance to improve your items.

@Shagsbeard: I have a similar playstyle as you, going only self-found and trying to bring all classes to inferno act 1. Planning to do the same in HC afterwards and I already finished normal with WD there. I do have 3 classes already in act 1 inferno (wd, barb, dh) and the other two are in hell act 1. I also did some farming in inferno, I can not steamroll stuff of course but I do have a reasonable pace with all 3 of my chars there with only self-found items and everytime I try some farming with NV stacks, I do find an upgrade or two for my item slots. I do need to kite some stuff even with my barb but I am enjoying it and finding the pace to be reasonable. I didn't even attempt act 2 yet and I know many people say its where things are really nasty but based on my experience, the difficulty and dependence on AH is not even close to being as bad as what people claim it to be. The new patch will definitely make it a much more smoother ride of course but you shouldn't cloud your judgement of the game based on what others are saying.

Also I assume you mean using AH by 'cheating' but that is just too harsh of an accusation towards the people that play the game as they enjoy it. I assume the SPF'ers have the highest percentage of non-AH users among all the sub-forums but I am not even sure if that's the majority of SPF. There are quite a lot of legit and respected people here that use AH too. As I said, I haven't used AH so far and I do not plan to use it in the foreseeable future, but 'we' might still want to use it after the patch without accused of being cheaters.

The activity is not as high in D3-SPF as we would like to see right now but I am hopeful that its going to change as some tourneys and pat threads start rolling. And I think this patch contains a bunch of nice changes that will help us get there (both due to increased number of viable skills and increased motivation for item hunts). But we can't get this going by alienating AH users and we should accept that AH is a legit part of the game. Sure, many of the tourneys will ban the use of AH but that's what we do in all our tourneys anyways, restrict ourselves with self-imposed rules. I am also sure that we will end up seeing some tourneys that limit getting items through other means and force you to use the AH with certain budgets. I would gladly make an exception to my 'current' self-found rule if such a tourney is hosted with interesting rules and enough participation.

Sorry for the off-topic which I didn't intend on lengthening this much, but I may not be much of a poster but I am a die-hard lurker of SPF. I do have no regrets about reading SPF much more than I ever played diablo. I do hope to see D3-SPF becoming a similar special place for me and I am actually optimistic about it. But I see this AH alienation to be one of the major issues that might ruin that.

[Shagsbeard]

My use of the term "cheating" only means to play with a different ruleset than I do. It has no negative implications. You've cheated by using items found by a more advanced character from inferno on characters that haven't gotten there yet. You're not evil, or bad, or playing incorrectly, but you're not playing by the same ruleset as me, so you're cheating. I wish we had a better word for it.

[Doctor Clock]

Vanilla? Taint? Self-found, no forward difficulty givesy-backseys?

I'm really excited for all the changes. I was already enjoying magic finding on my WD, and with the coming class buffs and the Paragon system, it looks like I won't be playing the other classes for a while.

[TheReadMenace]

Grail hunting almost seems possible; carrying a natural 375%MF bonus in late Inferno without ever needing to stack it on gear to sacrifice kill speed sounds very awesome.

Inferno runs just got runnier.

[BaronScarpia]

It definitly makes MF more doable, since you'll only need 100 MF and some paragon levels now. (The devs said it'll take the same amount of time to reach lvl 100 paragon and lvl 99 on d2. I don't plan to max paragon anytime soon.)

A blue bar filling up is a good thing to have. The mf benefits, idk, considering the time a lvl 99 takes on d2, most people will likely have top notch gear with mf enough to emule lvl 100 paragon before reaching there...

[SnickerSnack]

Inferno runs just got runnier.

"We do have some inferno runs. They're, uh, a bit runny, sir."
"Oh, I like them runny."

[Painman]

This sounds like a step in the right direction. It's difficult to stack %MF with only self-found gear and not make a character too squishy to actually use it well. OTOH, forsaking it penalizes the player via low drop quality on rares, so it's been a bit of a double bind. I think the highest base %MF I've ever had on any of my 60s at any time was low 30s.

I'll try to make an effort to keep all my characters in rotation, I think. If one of them is at, say, Paragon lvl 30 while the others are at lvl 10, it might become a disincentive to using them. I'd like to avoid that.

In any case, the upcoming changes make me not really want to farm Inferno much for the time being... so I'll try to focus on my young padawan Monk.

[SincereX13]

I am happy that they are moving the game forward and adding interesting news systems. This is much how D2 grew to be the game that we remember over time. That said I do enjoy trying to find that balance of great MF gear that does not hurt your killing power too much. I am now up to 187% MF before any NV stacks and am proud that I was able to get to that level as a self found player. Oh well, excited for the changes... now if they would only add runewords, crushing blow and synergies I'll be a pig in sh@t.

[Dreamcrusha]

this will be great cause people won't need to switch from current gear to mf gear, people won't need to spend money on MF Gear AND it gives us a goal to keep on farming and killing elites besides getting gear.