Assuming you were using good gear in Diablo II you would spec your character to use one set of gear, maybe with a few resist swap-outs and that would be your character. You ALWAYS had enough life based on your build to get through the game if you did it like this. Any "viable" and I use that term loosely character spec gained most of their power from their gear - most players did not usually play through the game naked. WoW takes this a step further by letting a class use many different gear specs without having to make a new character to be viable.

Like Diablo II you always have enough life etc assuming you have decent gear for the role you take - unlike Diablo II you can switch your role by switching your gear set out - this allows players a variety of playstyles based on how they feel. Don't feel like healing on my priestess? I switch out to my stamina gear and re-spec discipline. Note that I'd still use the same schools of spells - mostly holy with some shadow/disc but the gear switch/respec allows me to take on a totally different role. Now if we look at say the druid I built this season - he doesn't have enough strength to wear a different gear set. He's stuck as summon. I enjoy playing summon but if I wanted a wind druid even though I have collected a wind druid gear set and theorycrafted a wind druid build I don't get to be a wind druid ever. This is needless since Diablo II is more about collecting gear and such - not about wasting your time cheesing your way through levels 1-90 in an hour - that's so fast it's in fact pointless. All it does is cause players less time doing things they enjoy and more time getting around a flaw in the system.

The game will be balanced to take into account the fact that players cannot point their own stats. Let's say if you could you might have 1000 more life in the end game on your character that has 9000 - this will be balanced correctly. Besides a minor balance change the system will allow nothing more than flexibility in play-styles / gear choices. After all it was pretty miserable playing through untwinked and finding a great item only to realize you couldn't use it for 15 levels where it would now be worthless. If I am using a big sword on my barbarian and suddenly want to switch to maces in Diablo II by about nightmare mode I usually cannot. In WoW I can and I hope I will be able to in Diablo III.

D3 will have plenty of theorycrafting trust me. Adding up how much strength you have on your gear to decide how much you want to put into life to fix you into one build is I hope not the most in-depth you ever got into theorycrafting Diablo II.

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Q u o t e:


OMG BURNED! BOBBY JUST BURNED YOU!

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Q u o t e:
Banned.

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What happened to not talking about bans?

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Q u o t e:


What happened to not talking about bans?

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Thread over.

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Q u o t e:





Ah, so then stat points were just a means to an end then, weren't they? In almost all cases anyway. They were a requirement to the items, clicking a button to raise a number to a required value. The items and abilities chosen are really what created the character, not figuring out item requirements.

You could argue about it forever if you wanted to. The stat points didn't make the character, but little extra math problems are fun, but little extra math problems don't really equate to fun or interesting character building, but I think that math problems are fun and interesting, but ... etc. etc. etc.

And of course all I can attempt to do is assure you that there's going to be plenty of build potential, plenty of customization, and plenty of math to dive into, if that's your thing.

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I totally disagree with you. And i guess no one here remembers how hard farming gear was in diablo. You didnt get an awsome piece of gear sometimes for a solid day or week. I've played the game since 2001 and there many of the elite uniques and runes that i never found. So in a since. stat points were a bridge to making the character more stronger. An example would be my fury druid. Yes. the gear is about 80% of the character build.... BUT my first fury druid had extra points into dex. Well i had 38k AR but 4.9k life.... Well on the reroll i had 33k AR and 6.2k life. and guess what. i won A LOT more duels w/ the reroll. All im trying to say is diablo 2 is THE only game that holds my attention longer than 20 minutes. I've probably made every character there is to make. and had to remake them because of mess ups in stats. BUT THAT WAS THE FUN PART OF THE GAME.
If you want to make diablo3 fun.

Dont get rid of rushes.
PUT A DAMN MAPHACK INTO THE GAME! IT WAS COOL TELEPORTING THROUGH HELL DURANCE FOR 15 MINUTES FOR THE FIRST .... TWO TIMES!. (sorry had to get that out.)
make it where i can have an elite character w/ the best gear and can roll through the bosses in 20 minutes of gameplay.
"no character can be too powerful" <follow that.
LET ME make my own decisions on where my stats go.

I dont see how you can look at the things that made diablo such a successful game and take out 50% of the customization.


Oh and your "can worms initialized" made laugh very hard.

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Q u o t e:
Assuming you were using good gear in Diablo II you would spec your character to use one set of gear, maybe with a few resist swap-outs and that would be your character. You ALWAYS had enough life based on your build to get through the game if you did it like this. Any "viable" and I use that term loosely character spec gained most of their power from their gear - most players did not usually play through the game naked. WoW takes this a step further by letting a class use many different gear specs without having to make a new character to be viable.

Like Diablo II you always have enough life etc assuming you have decent gear for the role you take - unlike Diablo II you can switch your role by switching your gear set out - this allows players a variety of playstyles based on how they feel. Don't feel like healing on my priestess? I switch out to my stamina gear and re-spec discipline. Note that I'd still use the same schools of spells - mostly holy with some shadow/disc but the gear switch/respec allows me to take on a totally different role. Now if we look at say the druid I built this season - he doesn't have enough strength to wear a different gear set. He's stuck as summon. I enjoy playing summon but if I wanted a wind druid even though I have collected a wind druid gear set and theorycrafted a wind druid build I don't get to be a wind druid ever. This is needless since Diablo II is more about collecting gear and such - not about wasting your time cheesing your way through levels 1-90 in an hour - that's so fast it's in fact pointless. All it does is cause players less time doing things they enjoy and more time getting around a flaw in the system.

The game will be balanced to take into account the fact that players cannot point their own stats. Let's say if you could you might have 1000 more life in the end game on your character that has 9000 - this will be balanced correctly. Besides a minor balance change the system will allow nothing more than flexibility in play-styles / gear choices. After all it was pretty miserable playing through untwinked and finding a great item only to realize you couldn't use it for 15 levels where it would now be worthless. If I am using a big sword on my barbarian and suddenly want to switch to maces in Diablo II by about nightmare mode I usually cannot. In WoW I can and I hope I will be able to in Diablo III.

D3 will have plenty of theorycrafting trust me. Adding up how much strength you have on your gear to decide how much you want to put into life to fix you into one build is I hope not the most in-depth you ever got into theorycrafting Diablo II.

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Hmmm My first thought that came up to your answer to balance was Think of it like this.

Nascar would be auto stat

Drag racing/ street racing would be manual stats.

In nascar everything is the same, The driver is the part that can make you win.

In racing on the other hand. You dont know what the other guys got under the hood.

i guess what im getting at is in dueling i could go up against a fury druid w/ my fury druid and we had the exact same gear. But i could kill him even if he got first hit. I had better stats than him.

Stop comparing WoW to diablo. the ONLY thing there share is Blizzard. WoW = you win by how long you've played. Diablo is skill based.

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Q u o t e:


Hmmm My first thought that came up to your answer to balance was Think of it like this.

Nascar would be auto stat

Drag racing/ street racing would be manual stats.

In nascar everything is the same, The driver is the part that can make you win.

In racing on the other hand. You dont know what the other guys got under the hood.

i guess what im getting at is in dueling i could go up against a fury druid w/ my fury druid and we had the exact same gear. But i could kill him even if he got first hit. I had better stats than him.

Stop comparing WoW to diablo. the ONLY thing there share is Blizzard. WoW = you win by how long you've played. Diablo is skill based.

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/facebrick

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Q u o t e:


Hmmm My first thought that came up to your answer to balance was Think of it like this.

Nascar would be auto stat

Drag racing/ street racing would be manual stats.

In nascar everything is the same, The driver is the part that can make you win.

In racing on the other hand. You dont know what the other guys got under the hood.

i guess what im getting at is in dueling i could go up against a fury druid w/ my fury druid and we had the exact same gear. But i could kill him even if he got first hit. I had better stats than him.

Stop comparing WoW to diablo. the ONLY thing there share is Blizzard. WoW = you win by how long you've played. Diablo is skill based.

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I enjoyed making mages with my friends in WoW for PvP ... each of us made different builds and could all stand our own in battles no problem. We didn't have that much experience (only a pair of 60s and no endgame runs), we all looked almost exactly the same, but each of us killed/survived differently. This allowed for much fun and diverse PvP.

So no, I disagree with you. In fact I'd still play WoW PvP if it was free but alas I cannot afford monthly fees as a starving student ;)

Good thread.

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Q u o t e:
Agreed, and we'll probably surpass them for viable number of character builds. With runes it's actually kind of scary. Seeing the game in the wild and what people will come up with... eek. But it's exciting, making a character that almost feels too powerful is pretty damn fun.

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This is one of my concerns. It's fun until the developer decides that it is too powerful, then releases a patch to nerf it. It seems like some games release a constant stream of patches consisting primarily of "game balance adjustments" that make someone's character build impotent.

That's one of the reasons I'm in favor of the auto-stats. Blizzard can keep a better handle on how powerful builds can become. In the past skills got nerfed and affected everyone whether they used the overpowered build or not. Then everyone complained that their build has become worthless. Now at least you don’t have to start over from scratch. You readjust your runes and equipment and come up with a new play style.

Even so, your comment about characters feeling too powerful brings back memories of some pretty nasty nerfs in various games that still leave a bad taste in my mouth. It seems like it can be pretty hard to find the right balance between providing players with characters that are fun to play and feel powerful without making them so powerful that the game isn’t a challenge. Making the game hard enough to challenge one build might make it too difficult for a different build. And yet, I also don’t want to see a long series of game adjustment patches that will force me to regularly redesign the character. What exactly is the philosophy of the development team on this?

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Q u o t e:

And of course all I can attempt to do is assure you that there's going to be plenty of build potential, plenty of customization, and plenty of math to dive into, if that's your thing.

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Fine, and wouldn't manual stat allocation provide even more build potential, customization and maths? :P

Anyway, I find the stat allocation freedom something very caracteristic from Diablo. If it's going to be missing in D3, it really dissapoints me, and I consider it a bad start, in all honesty. I myself don't want to see a new game, I want to see a sequel to the series, another true Diablo, in fact, a continuation to the storyline with the very same mechanics present in LoD with new graphics as shown of D3 to date, will be enough for me.

If I were asked to divide the Diablo's aspects in percentages based on their importance, our characters will go for a 40%, lore for another 40% and items, drop mechanics and art in general will be the last 20%. Something as critical as character stats shouldn't be put into generalizations, I of course don't know how the current system for stat allocation works, but the most common way of thinking about it would be Wizards' stats predominantly going into Energy (as for D2), since they are suposed to use mental powers and magics. What happens if I decide to roll out a melee Wizard? Are those stats going predominantly into Strength? Does auto stat allocation reduce the posibilities of the way I can play a certain class? Yes, I do think so.

Implement manual stat allocation and add an 'Automatic' button in the character sheet for those who want to set their stats automatically upon level up.

Remember, we want a Diablo, not a new game.

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Q u o t e:


This is one of my concerns. It's fun until the developer decides that it is too powerful, then releases a patch to nerf it. It seems like some games release a constant stream of patches consisting primarily of "game balance adjustments" that make someone's character build impotent.

That's one of the reasons I'm in favor of the auto-stats. Blizzard can keep a better handle on how powerful builds can become. In the past skills got nerfed and affected everyone whether they used the overpowered build or not. Then everyone complained that their build has become worthless. Now at least you don’t have to start over from scratch. You readjust your runes and equipment and come up with a new play style.

Even so, your comment about characters feeling too powerful brings back memories of some pretty nasty nerfs in various games that still leave a bad taste in my mouth. It seems like it can be pretty hard to find the right balance between providing players with characters that are fun to play and feel powerful without making them so powerful that the game isn’t a challenge. Making the game hard enough to challenge one build might make it too difficult for a different build. And yet, I also don’t want to see a long series of game adjustment patches that will force me to regularly redesign the character. What exactly is the philosophy of the development team on this?

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Yes I hate nerfs and hope they olny affect the PvP side of the spectrum! Honestly who cares if Paladins were ubber in PvM? To this day people still make other classes! It's not until Windy's, HDINs, or Smiters go into a PvP game that someone starts complaining!

I want to ask.. does the auto stats mean that some characters will not be able to use all kinds of armors and weapons?

It will be respec with abilities, so why don't give the same with stats? And everybody is happy. :)

They have stated that there will only be 2 kinds of reqs on items, level or class. So as long as the equip is not class specific and you have the right level, you will be able to equip it.



Adding respecs to stats only really makes sense if you had manual stats, and it would not make everyone happy, it would piss off all the people who have quieted down about the skill respecs into another frenzy.