Diablo III

[TheUndeadKing]

Then there's Vitality, I think the bonuses from vitality can quickly get insane. As soon as I got a piece of equipment with a vitality bonus, and one so large that I got literally over 800 extra HP, it was like NOTHING could put a dent in me, even bosses. Especially with my healing skill that I use once every 30 seconds. At one point I was using what started out as a great two handed weapon on my Monk that gave me 1,700 extra maximum life, but soon became quite under powered, simply because I didn't want to give up the large vitality bonus.

This is why I still love Titan Quest. There were dangerous monsters in later acts that would get your ass handed to you if you had bad resistances. With bad resistances your life bar (no matter how large it was) would melt like a hot knife through butter. Most importantly, there were special boss attacks where if you tried to tank them you would get one-shotted, even with 10-15k hit points. And all of those attacks were fair and avoidable (none of them were cheap).

Don't get me wrong, health was important in Titan Quest too, but you could easily get enough amount of health from your gear, then move on and forget about it (I'm talking about stuff that drops commonly and/or stuff that you can buy from the merchants, nothing rare/unique/legendary involved).

[darknessfood]

Isn't health important in like 99% of RPG's?

[TheUndeadKing]

Of course it is! But I just hate the approach (especially in Diablo), where you don't put point points in strength/dexterity/intelligence (or put just enough to equip items) and put the rest into health/vitality.

[ShadowLiberal]

I'm enjoying Diablo 3 a lot more lately.

I got bored of the Monk and decided to try a Wizard, and am up to Act 3 in Hell difficulty now. The wizard was a lot more fun, though much more fragile.

I've come to the conclusion that one of the problems with Diablo 3 is Normal difficulty, it's just too easy to the point that it's boring. But then things get more challenging and fun in Nightmare difficulty, and Hell difficulty.

Also, started to use the auction house some. The prices are so messed up, 750 gold for a subtle essence (normal difficulty crafting material) but only 150 for Nightmare and Hell materials? Who would pay such an outrageous price? I got an easy 200,000 gold selling off around 250ish of my subtle essence, and used it to buy hell crafting materials.

[TheXwarrior]

I'm loving my necromancer since DiabloII, but I have all the characters.


_____________________
"A mind all logic is like a fox knives all blade the. It makes the hand bleed that uses it" - Rabindranath Tagore

[Panda Tar]

So, is anyone playing the Expansion High Price Pack? I still didn't return to this game after some late disappointment with it. And seeing this EP is so expensive, I'm not very inclined to buy it and get bored two moons later.

[Banedon]

I should've bought it when the game was on discount, but didn't, and haven't been able to bring myself to buy it since I don't have many friends to play with either, and this is one of those games where playing solo is a lot less fun than playing with friends. I still haven't bought it. If the friends I do have who are playing now continue to play for several more months, I'll probably pull the trigger.

[Panda Tar]

It's too expensive, imho, for an expansion. Reading the reviews, D3 is today, what it should have been upon release, and it shows in their suggested price. Feels like buying a whole new game.

[ThunderTitan]

I've been replaying the vanilla to test out the new stuff and so far it's been fine, but i'm not getting the xp until it's cheaper either... even if the story is 10x better, it would still suck...

Blizz needs to rehire whoever helped the SC1 and WC3 stories to not telegraph the endings half way through...

[Panda Tar]

Well, it's been known the new story is still one of the weakest points of the Expansion. People loves the new Adventure Mode, which is what's truly grasping my attention.

[Banedon]

Well for me price is not much of an issue. I generally play the games I buy for hundreds if not thousands of hours, so it's always worth it, although the naturally thrifty side of me is causing some hesitation. What's more concerning right now is, do I want to play the game? Is there something in the game that's worth my time investment? The Diablo series are all quite similar: after clearing the campaign a couple of times, there's nothing left to do except farm for ever-better loot, and that's not something I find very fun. I still enjoyed the time I spent on D3, but that was with the Auction House active. Now I'm just not sure if I want to play the game, especially if I don't have anyone to play with.

As I said, if my (few) friends who still play do continue to play the game a few months from now, then I'll guess there's enough replay value in the game to play it, otherwise I'll just keep putting it off.

[Panda Tar]

Well, finding better loot is not reason to keep playing the game if the reason itself is only 'having a better equipment', rather than to beat or to reach certain requirements or to truly achieve something. I'm curious about the Adventure Game if it proves funny to play, if the local bosses are cool to defeat, while you gain loot. Not really playing to gain loot, but playing and gaining loot. I miss a truly nasty side-quest dungeon where you'd truly use all the awesome loot you might be able to find while farming or playing the game thoroughly, like Star Ocean 2's dungeon, that had some truly badass enemies and boss. The cool thing about that dungeon was that if you defeated the dungeon boss (which was hard), the final storyline boss had an update, which transformed him truly into a nasty final boss.

[wimfrits]

I'm playing and enjoying RoS. Act V is long, exciting, varied and increasingly difficult. I had to tune down difficulty by 2 levels while going through it. Reaching level 70 means you can double the stats of your old suit, so you can start optimizing gear all over again.

I have so far only played solo, haven't touched Adventure mode yet, haven't even tried the Crusader and already think it is well worth my money.

As for 'having better equipment', I think if you analyze motivation for playing, the base excitement in the game comes from loot. I think Blizzard anticipates on that well.

[Panda Tar]

That's nice. I might consider buying it a bit more earlier than I intended to. hoho

[Banedon]

wimfrits are you still playing RoS? I'm wondering what game to buy next, and am debating between RoS, GW2 HoT, and something completely new. I spent some time on D3 again for the first time in months recently, and played enough of it to gain like 20 paragon levels, but it's once again getting rather tedious. I hear though that RoS is a lot better than D3, and one of my friends who stopped playing D3 long before I did apparently enjoys RoS enough to start a new character every season. Against that, I still log on to GW2 every day, although I don't usually do much except complete dailies and log off, and there are plenty of games I want to play at some point, such as Dragon Age 2, The Witcher 3, and many others.

Your thoughts?

[Panda Tar]

I'm also considering buying, still. I'm actually waiting for a sale, if it would ever happen. The cost of it is almost the cost of the original game.

But reading the review and features of RoS, it seems that it covers what made me feel bored and unnerved in D3. But right now, I'm going to play AoE2 the new released expansion.

[wimfrits]

wimfrits are you still playing RoS?

Funny. Yesterday evening I made a start with Starcraft 2
That is after about 7 months of only playing RoS. RoS is a lot more fun than vanilla D3 was. But RoS patch 2.3 takes it to another level entirely.
Being able to extract legendary powers gives the player an enormous build variety. E.g I'm playing a wizard with 2 Delsere- and full Tal Rasha set bonuses, with an all-runes DoT Slow Time and extracted powers from the Grand Vizier and Nilfur's Boast to amplify meteor showers.

Like Panda said earlier, the game is still about getting better gear so that you can play on higher levels and find better gear etc. But there is much more variety along the way.

[Banedon]

Blimey, and I tend to figure out a build I like and stick to it for the rest of the game. Not particularly encouraging, especially since I've already given up playing Diablo 3 vanilla again.

Maybe I'll buy it if there's a discount and some of my real-life friends buy it too, otherwise I'm leaning towards waiting again.

[wimfrits]

Well, I too tend to stick to a build. Based on skills you like and then only keep items you find that fit your build.
But as you find new items, level up gems and gain paragon levels, new possibilities arise. With some thought you can combine multiple set bonuses. You can extract and use the legendary power of that item that you always thought too good to unequip. And sometimes you find items that are so good it makes you reconsider your build. I had a lot of fun playing with a frenzy Barbarian after I found a high damage Stalgard's decimator for instance, even though I normally don't even like frenzy. The wizard I noted combines 3 kinds of builds which was impossible before patch 2.3

With RoS I managed to keep up the 'stick to the build' attitude quite a long time but eventually succumbed to trying out new combinations. And then I realized I had actually been denying myself a whole world of new and fun combinations.
Almost like playing H4 after H3

[Panda Tar]

I agree with wimfrits there. Although I like sticking with builds too, whenever I deviated from my current one, I had a challenging and funny time, even when it was not optimized with my items, and soon enough I started having some other items as back up, for my female monk.

Ah, wimfrits, I forgot some stuff about D3, so I was trying to recall if we could equip two builds at the same time to toggle between them? I remember D2 which you could toggle weapons, but I completely forgot anything about D3. Can we toggle equipment?