One could argue that the biggest mistake they made was in drastically altering player progression from the way it worked in Diablo 2. In D2, you farmed to get good items to equip your next character with. In other words, you would have your magic find sorceress accumulating gear while actually playing the game with <insert character>. You would start a fresh assassin, or barb, or whatever, and make yourself a shopping list of gear that you want to equip the character with. "Well, I'm doing a dual claw, tiger strike assassin, so I'm going to need a Vamp Gaze, Shaftstop, and a couple of Bartucs to get me through nightmare for sure. Time to go shopping."

This time around, what reason would a person have to start a new character of a class they've already sent to 60? It isn't like you could change your attribute allocation this time around, and being able to change your skills on the fly has the same effect.

I guess farming to find stuff to sell on the RMAH would be reason to keep playing, but if the player base vanishes, what few people who are left will quickly outfit their five characters with the best gear, and that market will crater.

Did an act 1 runthrough off and on tonight. Demolishing Act 1 with my ~250/270 MF/GF was fucking glorious. I was finding tons of iLevel 63 rares that I literally didn't know I hadn't found and didn't even recognize at first (helms, armors, bracers, etc). Found a good bracer that was just BARELY not an upgrade, but that was about it. But on a regular basis I'm finding 1h weapons more in the 600-700 range consistently as opposed to the 200-300 range before; half of the stuff I was picking up was actually decent. In my act 1 playthrough I probably picked up around 150 drops, and the vast majority (about 75%+) were rares, not blues, and half or more were at least 61 or 62, with a good amount of 63's. Also even though I didn't necessarily find a ton of stuff worth selling on the AH, since the stats are higher on the higher ilevel items I cleared about 350k on one run from gold and vendor trash, as opposed to about 250k on a run before.

Also the reports of killing goblins with 5 stacks guaranteeing at least 1 rare drop seems to be true. Not only did I seem to be finding WAY more Goblins than normal (could be RNG, but I probably found at least 5 or 6 in my playthrough which is way more than I usually get) but I can think of at least twice when I killed them I was getting 3 or 4 rares, and one time all 3 were ilevel 63's.

Amazing.

The only reason to make a second of one class is to play as another gender or to do it in Hardcore, I guess. I'd consider that as perfectly fine, except leveling is terrible.

I can understand why they want to limit fast character progression in Hardcore, but there's no sense in killing off all the leveling methods in softcore. Honestly, the game is Inferno, and you can't access that until 60. It's so boring going through normal then nightmare then hell.

Interesting hotfix news. I suppose I'll give farming some more another try.

yup totally agree. Granted I've pretty much only played DH but since the whole stat thing is gone and there only seems to be one "right" build i can see pvp just becoming whoever has the gold to buy the best gear. sad.

*GET HOME FROM WORK AFTER HAVING 3 DAYS OF NO INTERNET DUE TO STORMS*

*DIABLO 3 SERVERS DOWN*

fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu

Yeah, I was on farming Act IV Hell with my friend, when the servers started acting funky. I got kicked off after we killed Izaul and the loot sprayed everywhere. :(

Don't worry, I'm sure all of it was witch doctor gear.

ahaha... Actually... it was. Well a dagger. had int, dex and reduce some kind of spell by 3 mana, damage to monsters on attack and I think convert attack to life.

Managed to play for a bit last night. Then today there was maintenance, then ironically right around when that ended our internet went down again. By the time it came back up I was balls deep in Theatrhythm soooooo.

So is anyone going to be around tomorrow who is down for doing some Act 1 farming? I can probably pry myself off Theatrhythm if there's going to be folks around.

Trying to figure out if I'm having more fun playing the game or just doing auction shenanigans. Nothing like buying a bow for 2k gold and reselling it for 120k within an hour. I just wonder if people on the RMAH are this dumb. :(

Edit: Just logged on after not being on for a few hours and saw my 15 minutes of AH shopping, socketing with 100 gold gems and relisting got me 200k. Not bad for my max character being level 53, and being unable to farm properly. Let's see how an investment of about $20k and ten minutes turns out over the next day.

People have bought things in the RMAH, so: yes.

Hey Daravon,

I'm at work in the morning EST, but I'll probably be around in the afternoon. If I see you online I'll just pop into your game.

I've almost broken 2M gold for the first time ever. Got to the sewers in Act II also, although by the time I got there, I was down about 100k gold from when I started from repair costs. Fucking firebombs, man. And mortars. Fuck mortars.

Daravon: Past 4 PM PST I am down since that's the time I go home from work.

Act III still kicking my ass. If you're online, I'll join your game.

I'll probably hop in in a couple of hours then after lunch. I haven't really tried progressing in the game; I can do Act 2 mostly okay though with my normal gear. But my MF/GF gear is ridiculous (I think I'm up to 202 GF and 188 MF without any NV) and is good enough to get me through Act 1 with minimal issues, so I've just been running that. I'm sitting on about 6 or 7 million right now, and I could bump my GF/MF set up even higher, but we know that they're making some changes to MF/GF in the near future so I kinda don't want to invest in that. But at the same time I don't really want to blow most of that to get a single upgrade for my "real" gear if I'm not even really using it right now. So I'm just kinda trucking along atm.

The funny thing is my "normal" gear represents only about 1k dps difference to my mf gear right now. Which you would think means I could upgrade relatively cheaply, but I can't find jack that's under 2M, and the 2M is extremely marginal upgrades.

I suspect I'm doing it wrong.

You play a Wizard right? No idea honestly. My MF/GF unbuffed damage is like 30k, my "real" gear is I think around 43k. It's enough of a difference where I won't fuck with Act 2 in my MF/GF gear, at least not solo. As far as costs go for me to get upgrades for my real set I'm looking at 2-3 million at the least for small upgrades so that sounds about right I guess?

I did spend probably like 6 million or so on my MF/GF gear though, but it's also always hard to tell how lucky I got with purchases from either set. I definitely got an amulet for both sets and a pair of gloves on my real set that I should have paid 10+ million for that I got for less than 1 million, so there's always a random/stupid factor.

Just finished act 1 Inferno with my barb, with minimal problems while playing solo. A couple of champion packs in the areas ahead of the Butcher were problematic, but otherwise I was good. Beat the Butcher on my first attempt.

Started act 2 and proceeded to get rolled by wasps.

What's your regular DPS at?

My regular gear puts me around 33k or so DPS with Magic Weapon/Force Weapon on. I get around 30k with some MF gear on (~150MF), but my survivability takes a huge hit. I lose something like 10k or 14k hp and my resists/armor take a dump. Finding gear with upgrades across the board can be expensive, yeah, but there's also been some inflation going on. 2M gold just doesn't go as far as it used to.

Still in Act 1 myself. I know I gotta try and find gear that's vit, dex and resist for my Demon Huntard. Good place to farm? Act IV hell? or should I keep trying Whimseyshire?

My resists are crap. =p I don't think any of my equipment has resists on it. I'm using prismatic armor vs. force armor because I don't think things are hitting me for 35% of my health THAT often. I took off magic weapon, so my build is charged bolt with piercing orb, arcane orb with tap the source, teleport with fracture, diamond skin with crystal shell, energy armor and venom hydra.

Basically I diamond skin as often as I can.

My DPS with "regular" gear is literally like 32k vs. 30 now. I think my critical hit chance actually DROPS with my regular gear, but my int goes up by about 100 points. My INT right now is something in the 1600's. My resists with energy armor is between 250-300? I think damage reduction is around 50% for both armor and resists. I've got around 29k life.

The main driver of my dps right now is critical hits. My crit chance is 36% with 150% damage boost. I think my regular gear ups the damage but drops the chance.

I had this fantasy of getting critical hit chance up really high and then putting critical mass on, and keeping diamond skin up forever.

I don't think Prismatic is worth it over Force unless you already have a substantial amount of resists already. Force Armor will at least keep you from being one-shot by most attacks and give you time to teleport/diamond skin yourself out. Of course, if you're trying to crit a lot to keep diamond skin off cooldown (a legit build) then that might be different...

Crit is definitely the popular way to go for now. I think I've got around 33% crit change with ~200% damage, myself. If I had higher crit chance and some AP on Crit gear, I'd probably switch to an arcane orb build.

One of my friends who plays wizard has a funky build which uses Energy Twister/Wicked Wind to crit a lot, with the crits reducing cooldown on Diamond Skin/Mirror Image/Frost Nova. It works quite well as a tank/disruption build, but he couldn't kill anything to save his life. So, there is a danger on having all your gear focused on survivability instead of DPS as well...

So I haven't played in about a week, and I load up and there's been a patch. Apparently now you can sell stuff other than weapons and armor in the RMAH. Now you can sell dyes, crafting mats, gems, etc... (still no gold yet). This is great cause now I can attempt to get rid of my excess Tomes of Blacksmithing (well I guess I could have sold them for gold, but I'm hoping to make some cash from them heh)

Well according to diablofans... you can buy and sell gold. Hmmm

No idea what tomes are going for, but apparently there's zero market in the RMAH for most craftables because there's a 0.25 minimum per item, and people won't buy even Exquisite Essences at 25 cents a pop (nor should they). Not sure what's up with gold right now, supposedly gray market prices have already dropped to something like under $2/million now, so I'm not sure there's much money to be made there.

I'm still playing here and there, but honestly I'm not sure why. The end-game and general disappointment with it has been pretty widespread (I mean fuck, there was an article on goddamn CNN about it) and they've already said that it's not something that they can really patch and that an expansion isn't coming anytime soon. I'm still playing it when listening to podcasts, but the moment Torchlight 2 hits (or maybe when Path of Exile goes open beta or I can get into that) I'm out. I've been currently stuck in the exact same spot progress-wise for over 100 game hours despite upgrading a fair bit since I first got there, which basically indicates to me not only that it's broken, but that there's no point in trying that anymore. So last night I dumped almost all of my cash into further upgrading my MF/GF set that I can run Act 1 with as well as upgrading the MF/GF on my follower (Templar, also gave him that one weapon legendary that has MF on it). If I'm playing solo with my Templar and my ferrets out I have an obscene 230% Gold Find and 212% Magic Find without ANY NV. And this is a million times more productive than actually trying to advance in the game. It's pretty retarded. Between the problems it obviously has and Bashiok pretty much saying that most of these issues are beyond patching and will require an Expansion, I'm sure eventually it'll get there but not before the first expansion which I would imagine is at least a year off at the very, very earliest. At least supposedly Torchlight 2 is in about a month, hopefully they didn't fuck that one up.

Basically, like Daravon, I just farm Act I for interesting shit but my interest is slightly waning. Sometimes I use my WD, sometimes Monk. Now I'm just trying to level 60 both Demon Hunter and Barbarian, then possibly Wizard to get the last achievement I'll probably do. Otherwise I'm here and there without any general direction to advance past Act III (my WD is getting slaughtered by Ghom every single time and Monk is basically meh-ish).

I've taken a monk, wizard, demon hunter, and barb to 60, and taken the barb and monk to act 2 inferno. Here is my problem with the game. My barb and monk absolutely roll through act 1 solo. They can barely survive in act 2. I understand that inferno is supposed to be difficult, but come on, if I can dominate act 1, I should be able to at least compete in act 2.