As many of you probably know, I recently made a comment on Facebook about Dave Brevik. I want to make it clear that I am very sorry for what I said. I have higher expectations for myself than to express my feelings in such a rash way and disrespect a fellow developer like Dave, someone who deserves to be treated with greater respect.

What I said was expressed out of anger, and in defense of my team and the game. People can say what they want about me, but I don’t take lightly when they disparage the commitment and passion of the Diablo III team. Dave is awesome. In Diablo and Diablo II, he made two of the games that have most affected me as a developer. I respect his vision for Diablo, but just like he said in his interview, the Diablo III team must drive a vision for the game that is true to us. We believe in Diablo and have stuck by it through years of hard development to make it a reality.

The foundation of the Diablo team was built from the remnants of Blizzard North: Our lead programmer, who built the basis of the Diablo III engine while at Blizzard North; our lead tech artist, who drove much of the combat visuals, FX, and skill direction of our classes and is one of the most avid Diablo II players you can find; our lead concept artist, who helped establish the core look of the game; Wyatt Cheng, our senior technical game designer, who writes many of our blogs and works tirelessly on the live game. All these people and many others made the commitment to Diablo even after Blizzard North shut down. It was hard for me to see their contributions be diminished by someone they worked alongside, and even harder for me not to try to jump to their defense. I only wish I’d done so in a more professional manner.

Joining the Diablo team was a dream come true for me. In my house, the name Diablo was always spoken in hushed tones. It meant late nights that turned into early mornings, moments of pure adrenaline and pure joy. It meant countless conversations, debates, scouring websites for good builds, and more than one or two sick days. When Diablo II was released, I took a week off work and sent my wife out of state… and she was pregnant at the time! I played Diablo II with my dad during one of the most difficult times of his life, and the experience brought me closer to him, and I hope helped him through it. I joined the Diablo team because the idea of a world without more Diablo seemed like a pretty crappy world to me. I wasn’t sure if I’d be good enough. I’m still not sure. But I felt I had to try.

Regardless of how I’ve done, my team has been more than good enough, and I’m proud of the game we made together. We believe it’s a great game. But Diablo III has flaws. It is not perfect. Sales mean nothing if the game doesn’t live on in all of our hearts, and standing by our games is what Blizzard does. Patch 1.0.4 is a step in the right direction, but we have no illusions that our work is done.

Playing Diablo III needs to be a rewarding experience. The new legendaries are a big step in the right direction, as are tweaks to item drop rates. But I’m not convinced that we’ve gone far enough. If you don’t have that great feeling of a good drop being right around the corner — and the burst of excitement when it finally arrives — then we haven’t done our jobs right. Out of our concern to make sure that Diablo III would have longevity, we were overly cautious about how we handled item drops and affixes. If 1.0.4 hasn’t fixed that, you can be sure we’ll continue to address it.

Part of the problem, however, is not just item drops, but the variety of things to do within the game. Many of you have stated that there needs to be more to the game than just the item hunt, and we agree completely. The Paragon system is a step in the right direction, giving meta-progress for your time in the game, but it does little to address the variety of activities you can do while playing. I don’t think there’s a silver-bullet solution to this problem, but I do think we can make this aspect of the game better, and as such we’re planning more than just PvP for the next major patch. Not trying to be coy, but we’re still firming things up and will talk about this as soon as we can.

Difficulty has been a constant source of division when discussing the game. Some players believe Diablo has never been about crushing challenges, but more about efficiency and farming. Some players want a game that tests them to their limits. Neither player is wrong. As it stands, Diablo III simply does not provide the tools to allow players to scale the game challenge to something appropriate for them. We set Inferno as the high watermark and took a one-size-fits-all approach to game challenge. Later in the development of Diablo II, the ‘players 8’ command — which let people set monster difficulty — was added to address this issue, and we’re considering something similar for the next major Diablo III patch to allow players to make up their own minds about how hard or how easy is right for them.

The Auction House has also proven to be a big challenge. It adds a lot of power for players to trade and acquire items. Getting a great Monk drop that you can trade for better gear for your Wizard is obviously a great benefit, but it does come with a downside. The Auction House can short circuit the natural pace of item drops, making the game feel less rewarding for some players. This is a problem we recognize. At this point we’re not sure of the exact way to fix it, but we’re discussing it constantly, and we believe it’s a problem we can overcome.

While these are some of the major issues with Diablo III, they aren’t the only things we’re looking at. On a daily basis we ask ourselves if the classes are satisfying to play, if rares and champions are fun to fight, if they’re tuned well relative to normal monsters. Can we make further improvements to social elements of the game? How can items be even better?

We made Diablo III because we believe in the Diablo games. We think the gameplay is awesome, the world is compelling, and it’s the game we all wanted to play. Because we believe in it, we’ll continue to stand by it and make it better. We are committed to making Diablo III the best Diablo game to date, and we hope you’ll continue to help us do just that.

Saying that, I’d like to apologize to all of you, the players in our community. You deserve better than my reaction to Dave’s comments. You deserve more honest communication about the game and what we’re doing to make it a more awesome experience for us all. We care about Diablo very much, and appreciate your passion for it. Without you, we wouldn’t be able to do this, and for that I can’t thank you enough.

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The change we made back in 1.0.3 to remove the bonus monster damage per additional player was a great start, but we can clearly go a bit further. The first change we’re making in 1.0.4 for co-op is to remove averaging in multiplayer games of Magic Find and Gold Find. You’ll benefit from your full Magic Find stat, independent of other players in the game. We originally added Magic Find averaging so optimal play did not involve people stacking what we call “adventure stats” to the detriment of their party. While this may re-emerge as a problem, we think the current solution feels like too much of a penalty, and is doing more harm than good.

Great change in my opinion.  While this can and likely will promote leeching, a player with good enough gear shouldn’t be penalized because of players lacking good equipment.  A good way to encourage group play and I have no idea why they even added this in as a “feature” to begin with in a game like Diablo.

Along the same lines as the change in 1.0.3, we’re going to be lowering the health multiplier for monsters per additional player in co-op games. It’s going to be a flat 75% in 1.0.4 for all difficulty levels, as opposed to the scaling 75/85/95/110% it is now. This makes enemies far more manageable in co-op games, and rewards a co-ordinated group with a higher farming efficiency than playing alone.

Another great change in terms of improving the co-op experience.  However I feel a lot of the “hardcore” players who through tedious farming/grinding may be a little upset at the “nerf”.  Mainly because the difficulty in group play drops significantly and other people will now be able to farm easier to close the gap between the 1% “hardcore” players and the casual/semi-hardcore players.

We know there are a lot of you out there that are really frustrated by the difficulty of some of the champion and rare packs, so in 1.0.4 we’re going to shrink the gap between normal monsters and Elite packs (Champions and Rares). The design intent of Champion and Rare packs is to provide a spike of challenge, but in general we feel like the gap is too big. Normal monsters die quickly and are usually just fodder, and Champions and Rares can feel like a brick wall.  In general we’re looking to bring normal enemies up a smidge, and Champions and Rares down.

So, in 1.0.4 we’re increasing the health of normal monsters by approximately 5%-10% in Inferno, but also increasing the likelihood they drop magic or rare items by a factor of four. We’re correspondingly lowering the health of Champions and Rares by 10-25% and editing specific affixes to shrink the difficulty gap. We’re still working on those numbers, but that’s approximately what we’re shooting for.

Farming will become a lot easier with this.  White mobs generally posed very little threat, so a small boost in HP with a greater chance at loot is great.  Some Affixes combination on Elite and Champion packs were ridiculous so by addressing that and by lowering their HP, farming speeds will increase and players will begin to find more loot increasing their chances of getting an upgrade.  It also means there will be more items on the RMAH, oh Blizzard, you crafty devils.

Weapon damage is the most important stat on a weapon. It can be disheartening to get a lot of weapon drops and you know before even looking at them that they have no chance of being good. To help give weapons a fighting chance, the raw damage value on all level 61 and 62 weapons will be able to roll damage that extends all the way to the top end of level 63.

While DPS is the most important stat on items, I hope there’s more changes to values then just DPS.  There should be better scaling for other attributes from 61-63 to keep the 61 and 62 ilvl items competitive.

We also want to close the gap between dual-wielding and two-handers, and so we’re improving two-handed melee weapons by creating a new set of stronger affixes to compensate for the loss of stats that can come from your offhand.

Excellent!  I play as a Barbarian and once I found out about stacking critical damage with dual wield, it didn’t matter about the DPS difference on a 2-hander.  This should help change the cookie-cutter dual wield critical damage builds that everyone has been forced to use.

On the topic of two-handers, we’re also changing how damage is calculated on a few damage-over-time skills.  Many skills have text like “Deals 75% weapon damage for 5 seconds”, which isn’t exactly clear as it can be interpreted a few different ways.  It also made skill evaluation difficult, particularly for skills with long durations or cooldowns.  We’re switching a lot of these skills to read “X% weapon damage over 5 seconds”.  Many skills already follow this format, and understanding what the skill does is very clear.  As the skills are converted there is an additional opportunity: when converting to this format, choosing a value for X depends on your weapon speed.  So what we’ve done in most cases is assumed a high attack speed (at least 2.0 attacks per second), chosen a value of X, and then in many cases bumped the value even higher.  A skill that currently does 75% weapon damage for 5 seconds, with a 2.0 speed weapon, will convert to at least 750% weapon damage over 5 seconds.  The skill becomes easier to understand, is a small buff for most one-hand builds, and a big buff for two-hand builds.

Simple change that will keep consistency with skills.  Likely will make some skills have value now, and can’t complain about clarity.

We’re removing Enrage Timers and the “heal back to full” behavior from Champion and Rare monster packs.

Never should have been there to begin with.  This discouraged fighting “tough” packs, so this is a no-brainer.

That said, we think repair costs are just a bit too high, so in 1.0.4 we’re going to be reducing repair costs of high-end items by 25%.

Repair costs should _NEVER_ have needed 2 changes to find the right balance.  With the previous changes listed, I believe this will be as close to perfect as possible.  If you’re still dying to things that have weaker affixes and less life, you need to get some better gear.

That addresses that current preview of changes listed.  There will be additional information on class balancing, legendaries and some additional system changes.  Blizzard states the patch is slated for the 4th week of August, so we’re still 2-3 weeks out.

My only fear is that the “hardcore” players may feel the game has been made too easy now, but I really don’t care about them.  I care about my experience and so far I think Blizzard has addressed a few of the bigger issues.  What remains to be seen is when Jay Wilson addresses Magic Find.  I’m sure he’ll have lots of gems for us all to pick at.

The post Diablo 3 – 1.0.4 Preview Thoughts first appeared on GamingRendo - News, Reviews, and Videos of all your favourite games.

Another positive addition is that Boss monsters will now drop guaranteed rares if you have so many stacks of Nephalem Valor.  1 if you have 4 stacks, 2 if you have 5 stacks.  Couple that with the large amount of drops a Boss typically has, it’s possible to see anywhere from 2 to maybe even 5 rares from Bosses with a 5 stack.  Bosses relevant again?  Thumbs up here.

While this is just a precursor to the 1.0.3b patch which has been delayed, I’m glad Blizzard is finally listening to reason.  It means there’s still hope for Diablo 3 and maybe the game will be in a place sooner than I thought so I can go back to enjoying the game I’ve been waiting for.  What are your thoughts on the hotfix?

The post Diablo III Hotfixes – June 28 first appeared on GamingRendo - News, Reviews, and Videos of all your favourite games.

It doesn’t exist.

There is no end-game in Diablo 3.  Inferno is supposed to be the end-game, but only the super rich (Who got rich via exploits) or pansies who ignore champion and elite packs, abuse game exploits, etc can complete the game.  I wasn’t one of the people who got in on some of the exploits and amassed millions upon millions of gold in wealth to buy whatever I wanted without denting the wallet.  I commend Blizzard for holing up the actual “exploits” in farming gold, but to repeatedly nerf things is a knee-jerk reaction to botters.

Smashing pots no longer yields gold, effectively making them worthless in game, why keep them?  Magic Find no longer effects opening treasure chests, reducing the value of keeping strict MF gear.  All to stop the “botters”.  What about the legitimate people who were using these methods or WANTED to use them?  The effect on the economy is staggering.  Top end items cost tens of millions of gold and with the increased repair costs now, if you actually want to FARM gear for gold or HOPE you get a good roll, you’re eating into what you earn.  So you can play it safe in Hell A3 and A4, hope you don’t die and pray you get decent item rolls and item levels.

Speaking of item levels.  Why is Inferno Level 60 to start, but items as low as ilvl51 drop in Act 1?  How does that help or encourage people to farm when 95% of the time you’re not getting ilvl60+, gear that has the potential to help you or be sold for some gold so you can further gear your character?  “Get Good, Farm A2/A3/A4”  I can already see a response like that.  You CAN’T get good though.  You need gear to do that and it’s an endless sink.  I can farm A1 Inferno solo.  I can run Sarkoth with 240% Gold Find.  I shouldn’t have to struggle to progress to the so-called “end-game” or spend hours and hours just to have a chance to find a good item that can sell, or earn enough gold sans repair costs to spend 2-3 million gold on a marginal upgrade.

Blizzard has lost sight of what made Diablo 2 great.  They took away the great things of Diablo 2 in favour of simplistic design.  There’s nothing left to do at Level 60 but grind and grind and grind to MAYBE progress and beat Inferno and even if you do accomplish that, all that’s left is farming gear for marginal improvements.  They don’t want you farming bosses over and over again, they want you to explore and fight everything you see, yet there’s no real reward for doing it.  Make events worth something if you want us to explore.  Nephalem Valor’s are essential for farming and you didn’t want to pigeon-hole yourselves with Diablo 2’s skill system, yet here we are sticking with the same build to farm gear because we’re penalized for swapping skills.  (You lose your ENTIRE valor stack if you do).

There’s a new patch being rolled out as I write this.  A reduction in “wear and tear” on items is helpful, but the repair costs are out of control, especially if you get caught in an elite pack that has a nasty affix combination.  “Fixed several gold and levelling exploits”.  JOY!  Others were still earning insane amounts of gold further destroying the in game economy.

I’m done.  I can no longer play a game that is this poorly developed, that’s this focused on real money monetization, that doesn’t listen to the players who played Diablo 2 for a decade, even up until the release of Diablo 3.  You got my $60, but you’ll need to get your head out of your asses if you ever want to win me back.  I’m going to install Diablo 2 and play a Diablo game that was done right.  My beta test is over.

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Taking place 20 years after Baal’s fall in the Worldstone Chamber, Diablo III returns us to Sanctuary.  After an impressive opening cinematic where we’re re-introduced to our old friend Deckard Cain and a new face, his niece Leah, the journey to finally bring an end to Diablo begins.

Diablo III gives you 5 classes to choose from, only one returning from Diablo II.  There’s the Barbarian, a physical tank with a wide range of offensive and defensive skills and a high damage output.  The Demon Hunter is a fusion of the Amazon ranged abilities with the Assassin’s trap abilities.  The Wizard is re-branded Sorceress from Diablo II that cast spells to enhance their own abilities while raining havoc on anything in their path.  The Monk replaces the Paladin from Diablo II.  This class focuses on mitigation, healing, and hand to hand combat, a very versatile class and my personal favourite.  Finally we have the Witch Doctor, which utilizes voodoo, crowd control and minions.

Each class has a specific role they play.  One of my biggest gripes with Diablo III is the removal of the Skill Tree system from Diablo II in favour of an automated skill and rune system which unfortunately paints a class into a corner. Previously with Diablo II, on levelling up you’d receive skill and stat points that you could distribute how you saw fit.  This allowed people to build a character to the play style they wanted, focusing  on skills/abilities that appealed to them.  Upon reaching a new level in Diablo III, you unlock a new skill/ability and or rune that modifies what said skill/ability can do and your stat points are automatically assigned.  This essentially makes every class the same at the maximum level 60.  The only difference is player skill and their equipment.

Taking a page from World of Warcraft, Diablo III replaces the player belt user interface with quick bar with your assigned skills.  Skills have an associated cost, a cool-down timer, a resource generator, or a combination of any of those.  It seems Blizzard was trying to go for a more simplistic approach with this, and while it does the job, I wish they hadn’t gone this route and refined/tweaked Diablo II’s system.  Enabling “Elective Mode” in your options menu allows you more flexibility with customization of skills which should have been enabled by default.

One of the things that is a fantastic improvement in Diablo III is the stash and inventory system.  For years players wanted a shared stash amongst all their characters and we finally got it with Diablo III.  It starts off small, and requires a significant gold investment to expand it to maximum capacity, but the function of it is perfect.  Items and gold are stored universally over all characters on your account and server.  This only changes for Hardcore mode which has a separate stash from Softcore characters.  Items can quickly be transferred in and out of your stash with right click, so dragging and dropping is a thing of the past. Furthermore, commodity items,  can now be stacked up to 99 times, which allows for better organization and less clutter.

With the inventory system, hovering the cursor over an item will reveal a breakdown on what the item does, and if you have a piece of equipment of that slot equipped, it will show both items and compare them, revealing automatically for players whether an item is an improvement or not, though this only applies to Life, Damage Per Second and Protection.  Another enhancement is a massive list of details on your character.  It breaks down every possible stat you can acquire, how much you have and what it does for you.

Gameplay is virtually the same as Diablo II.  This is a hack n slash game where you will likely go through a few mice a year with all the clicking you’ll be doing.  Diablo III has been modernized to feel more like an MMO.  As mentioned a few paragraphs back, the skill system has been simplified and the customization factor Diablo II had is essentially gone.  One improvement with the skill system is the ability to respec your character at a moments notice.  This does allow you to tweak the way you play your class and it does work extremely well, however this may seem blasphemous to Diablo II fans.

Loot is one of the biggest features the Diablo franchise is known for.  When you kill enemies in Diablo, they have a chance to drop items, potions, and gold.  A new addition to drops are health globes.  These are automatic potions that heal you in the middle of combat.  Globes and gold are automatically picked up when you walk over them so you can focus on what you’re fighting.  There are the base items, magic items, rare items and legendary items.  Items can have anywhere from 1-6 properties.  These properties are what improve your character and that’s where the lasting appeal to Diablo comes from.  You always want to have the “best” equipment, and to get it you need to farm farm farm.  So you’ll end up spending hours trying to find better equipment.  The biggest issue with the loot system is it always felt like junk items were dropping. Items dropped numerous levels below your current level so it felt like you were either over-levelled, under-geared or both.  Thankfully Blizzard added the Auction House giving players easier access to quality items at a price.

The Auction House is fantastic in principal.  Items you don’t want or need, you can either sell it for pennies to vendors in game, or you can load up the Auction House and list it.  You can set the minimum bid price and the a buyout price for an immediate purchase.  You list the item and wait to see if it sells.  When looking for an item you can search by specific item locations, you can set search parameters for what properties an item has and by what factor, and you can even set the maximum buy out price you’re willing to spend.  Unfortunately Blizzard didn’t add an option to filter by auction end date so you’ll have to really search hard for bargains.

Blizzard doesn’t do this for free though.  There’s the Gold Auction House and the Real Money Auction House.  Yes, that’s right.  You can sell items for in game currency, or for REAL money.  If you’re selling items in gold, Blizzard takes a 15% cut.  This is done as a Gold Sink so Blizzard can reduce the amount of gold people have as it can be gained quickly through killing things or completing quests.  If you’re using the RMAH, Blizzard charges $1 minimum if the money is going to your battle.net account, or 15% if you’re transferring the money to Paypal.

I applaud Blizzard for doing this as they will and ARE going to make a lot of money from this and it will help keep the game up for a very long time.  However it forces player to either play the game A LOT to find elite level items.  All the best items you can find, generally are listed on the RMAH.  The GAH gets some good items listed, but the prices for these are extremely steep.  With all the nerfs Blizzard has been doing to places that give great gold or good item drops, it seems they’re doing this intentionally to force people to give up and spend real money on items.

The biggest issue with the Auction House, besides all the downtime but that’s mostly resolved now, is the social factor Diablo II had no longer exists.  When joining a Public Game you don’t know who will be in it.  While you can still trade in Diablo III, it’s a more complex process and it’s not worth the hassle of trying to find people to trade with directly.  This eliminates the bartering, but it takes away a huge social element from the game.

The presentation of Diablo III is fantastic.  Even though the game looks like it was designed years ago, it’s very polished.  The cinematics are hands down some of the best I’ve seen in a long time.  There are a handful of cinematics in each act.  The sketched cinematics are good, but it’s the start and end of Act ones that will truly impress.  The voice acting is great and I love that the town folk attempt to interact with the player and what’s going on in the story, even if you hear the same thing over and over again.  “I was thinking…”  “Don’t hurt yourself.”  Old joke, but still funny.

The story of Diablo III starts off fantastic but tapers off as you progress.  Act I and Act II are the best  developed.  The story comes full circle with characters and references from Diablo I and Diablo II.  The entirety of Act I is a tribute to Diablo I and I love that Blizzard did that.  Act II starts to get into the actual story and it has one of the most epic Diablo boss fights ever, even though we’re in the desert again.  Act III is challenging, but it’s very repetitive and lacks a “wow” factor.  Act IV…. Sigh.  Blizzard, we’ve been waiting for 12 years.  We knew Heaven and Hell would eventually meet and it would be huge, EPIC.  So why was this the most disappointing Act in the game?  It was rushed, repetitive and it should have been the longest Act.  The conclusion of the story leaves some questions unanswered and that will pave the way for an expansion or two.

I’m a Diablo enthusiast.  I’ve been waiting for this game for a very long time.  Even though I’ve criticized a lot of things about Diablo III, the game is still great.  It could have been exceptional in my opinion.  Regardless of the short-comings I believe there are, I’ve put 100+ hours into the game and that number will continue to rise.  If you are a fan of the Diablo franchise, and you haven’t picked this up yet, you’re insane.  Diablo III will keep you engaged for years to come.  When additional content is released and promised features are finally added, (Where’s the PvP?!) you’ll find that Diablo III was well worth your time and money.

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