next »

[C.A. Sinner]

i'm still on my first run (act 3). i play occasionally when i have nothing better to do but normal is just a chore to play. it's so easy the only time i died was when i was distracted and had to leave the game running for a couple mins (and i dont consider myself a "good" player).

blizz should really implement a feature to let you start on hell difficulty or whenever it is the game gets interesting with a higher level char.

also is it just me or is this game a lot slower paced and more stretched out (in terms of character progression and everything else) than d2?

[st33d]

Act 3 sped things up a lot I found. Act 4 is just a boss rush.

I felt that Act 2 was artificially long.

[Nillo]

I felt that Act 2 was artificially long.

I'm okay with this, because it also has the most interesting environment to me. I just find deserts intriguing in general.

[Fallsburg]

I feel like the acts decrease in variety/length of time spent in them.

Spoilerish stuff ahead, if that is such a thing that people actually care about here:

Act 1: Night Countryside, Cathedral,Countryside, Tombs, Village, Mountainside, Spider Cave, Torture Chambers

Act2: Desert, Oasis, Sewers, Aqueducts, Wasteland, Ruins

Act3: Fortress outside, Fortress inside, Snowscape, Hell

Act4: Heaven, corrupted Heaven

Don't know if that was intentional or accidental, but I'm not a huge fan.

[Nillo]

Personally I like that structure. It gives the game a greater sense of urgency as the game goes on - act 1 provides the PC with a lot of time to dick around and look for clues, while in act 4 Diablo is literally tearing Heaven apart and you only have minutes to stop him. Act 4 may be flawed in other ways, but I don't think the length of it is a problem.

[Fallsburg]

I guess, it's just that it feels so anticlimactic to have it be so front loaded.  Like, I spend hours on random fetch quests around a town and then spend like 30 minutes in hell. 

[phubans]

I agree with you Fallsburg; I, too, was disappointed by the increasing lack of variety and length of each act, which made me enjoy act IV the least (the entire act basically took place in one big dungeon, there was no town unique to the act, and the overall theme was kind of boring...) I feel like it's a bit of a misnomer to even consider theme IV a standalone act, thematically, since it could have easily been the grand finale of act III, and end of the game.

I did think they managed to cover good ground in terms of the biomes themselves though; I can't really think of any particular type of area that was left out. I think the overall length feels just right considering most players are going to run through the entire game multiple times. I took me 25 hours of playing before I beat Diablo on normal mode. I did miss a few things when my friends rushed around in multiplayer, but my thorough pace of exploring every corner of a dungeon probably more than made up for it. I think most people could probably average 20 hours on their first playthrough.

Anyways, yeah, for the sake of theme/content, acts 3 and 4 should be consolidated into one act and that should be that.

On another note, I read somewhere that Blizzard said that we shouldn't expect any content DLC for Diablo III. Too bad, I would have liked to see more areas :/

[JademusSreg]

It gives the game a greater sense of urgency as the game goes on - act 1 provides the PC with a lot of time to dick around and look for clues, while in act 4 Diablo is literally tearing Heaven apart and you only have minutes to stop him.

From this observation, I propose a fifth difficulty level beyond Inferno, with timed-limited quests and no checkpoints. Purgatorio would be an appropriate name.

[Moczan]

also is it just me or is this game a lot slower paced and more stretched out (in terms of character progression and everything else) than d2?

Like, if you make a FOH or Hammer paladin you have to play for 20 hours killing stuff extremely slow with basic attacks, while after 20 hours of Diablo 3 you've already beaten Normal and have plethora of skills under your belt. Of course it's faster once you have characters and friends to taxi and twink you, but that will be the case with Diablo 3 too.

[Fallsburg]

Yeah, I'm not going to lie, I prefer the skill system in D3. I can respec nearly instantly depending on the encounter/if I get a new rune/playing solo vs. with group, which is nice since you often want different builds for different scenarios.

That and you can toy around a lot more to create a build that suits your play style.

[Nillo]

On that note, does anyone know if it's possible to hotkey an entire skill build to a button? I have one build on my Witch Doctor for killing trash and another for bosses, and it gets a little annoying to select those skills every time, especially when the game doesn't seem to remember what rune I had selected for each skill.

[Samtagonist]

On that note, does anyone know if it's possible to hotkey an entire skill build to a button? I have one build on my Witch Doctor for killing trash and another for bosses, and it gets a little annoying to select those skills every time, especially when the game doesn't seem to remember what rune I had selected for each skill.

I'm hoping this is patched in.  I think ideally I would enjoy it if they did things the same way that TF2 does it, giving you a few slots to select your loadout and then letting you quickly click to change them.  If the intent of this new system was to allow us to quickly change our builds whenever we wanted to...  Then they should probably try to make it easier to do that!

[Derek]

I just almost lost a hardcore dude to a disconnect.

Scarier than any monster in the game.

[Moczan]

On that note, does anyone know if it's possible to hotkey an entire skill build to a button? I have one build on my Witch Doctor for killing trash and another for bosses, and it gets a little annoying to select those skills every time, especially when the game doesn't seem to remember what rune I had selected for each skill.

I'm hoping this is patched in.  I think ideally I would enjoy it if they did things the same way that TF2 does it, giving you a few slots to select your loadout and then letting you quickly click to change them.  If the intent of this new system was to allow us to quickly change our builds whenever we wanted to...  Then they should probably try to make it easier to do that!

I doubt they will introduce it, cause endgame focus on one universal build due to Nephalem Valor buff.

Also

Magic Find will no longer be considered when looting objects in the environment such as chests, barrels, vases, pots, and corpses

Too bad, I got my best bows in Normal and Nightmare from chests.

[The Monster King]

i like deserts a lot but both diablo's deserts are the acts i like the least for some reason

noob deserts