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Blizzard on End Game Solutions

Bashiok has posted about end game solutions on the official forums. Looks like we will be seeing changes to end game in upcoming patches, as well as PVP in 1.1. Below is the full post.

Blizzard blue tracker: July 4, 2012.

We recognize that the item hunt is just not enough for a long-term sustainable end-game. There are still tons of people playing every day and week, and playing a lot, but eventually they're going to run out of stuff to do (if they haven't already). Killing enemies and finding items is a lot of fun, and we think we have a lot of the systems surrounding that right, or at least on the right path with a few corrections and tweaks. But honestly Diablo III is not World of Warcraft. We aren't going to be able to pump out tons of new systems and content every couple months. There needs to be something else that keeps people engaged, and we know it's not there right now.

We're working toward 1.0.4, which we're really trying to pack with as many fixes and changes we can to help you guys out (and we'll have a bunch of articles posted with all the details as we get closer), and we're of course working on 1.1 with PvP arenas. I think both those patches will do a lot to give people things to do, and get them excited about playing, but they're not going to be a real end-game solution, at least not what we would expect out of a proper end-game. We have some ideas for progression systems, but honestly it's a huge feature if we want to try to do it right, and not something we could envision being possible until well after 1.1 which it itself still a ways out.

Auction House or Not Web App

Also check out the Auction House or Not web app (made by postm) that we added to the tools section today. It helps you determine quickly and easily whether you should sell an item on the AH or vendor it. We already have a great Auction House, Salvage or Sell guide in the guides section, but this tool makes determining what to put on the AH even easier. Note when using this, make sure you use it as a starting point, not as a final say in whether you sell an item or not. Always double check on the AH to make sure the item you have isn't worth a lot before scrapping.
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Magic Find Gear Swapping

July 3, 2012: Blizzard is taking suggestions on how to improve magic find gear swapping. Below are 6 options they have proposed. Stop by their feedback thread to give your thoughts about what you think would work best!

Since release it has become an increasingly common practice to keep a Magic Find (MF) set in your inventory, and swap it in shortly before a kill. Philosophically we don't have a problem with the practice. While players getting more Magic Find for their kills isn't a game breaker for us, many players have said they don't enjoy doing it but feel the benefit is too large to ignore. Since the call for a solution really comes from all of you, we'd like to invite you to chime in with your opinion on what the solution could be.
It's worth keeping in mind that if we do implement a method to alleviate gear-swapping in combat, we'll simultaneously be looking at ways for players to get an added MF bonus to compensate.
Here are the solutions we're currently considering, and would appreciate your feedback and opinion on what seems the most reasonable for you, and why:
Option 1: Set a Magic Find Cap
We could set an MF cap between something like 100% and 200%. Nephalem Valor provides 75%, so you would need between 25% and 125% to reach the hard cap. Everyone could find ways to hit the cap for MF% on their gear and then stop.
Pros: Creates a gearing-game around trying to hit the "MF% cap" that some players enjoy. It also solves the swapping issue for people with enough gear to hit the cap. Players who want to min-max and gear swap can do so, and players who think it's stupid but feel "compelled" can try to hit the new cap instead.
Cons: Depending on where the cap is set, it may not actually alleviate gear swapping, and players who wish they didn’t have to will feel compelled to do so. It also devalues a highly valuable stat, and desired stats mean desired gear, which helps diversify the item hunt.
Option 2: Slowly Adjust Magic Find Over Time
When you equip an item with Magic Find, we don't let your MF% change right away. Instead your Magic Find slowly "drifts" towards the target Magic Find -- potentially something like 1% every 3 seconds. If you open up your Character Details sheet, you can see the number change "8%... 9%... 10%." Even though you could in theory switch to Magic Find gear for the killing blow and get a few extra percent, it’s probably not worth it.
Pros: High degree of visibility as your stat sheet updates. Still allows you to swap your gear when you get an upgrade in the world without having to feel bad about putting the item on.
Cons: May not  alleviate the problem for players who still feel compelled to get a few extra MF%. Depending on the rate, some players may just swap in an item during the last 20 seconds of a fight even though they don’t want to.
Option 3: Use your average MF% or your lowest MF% of the last 5 minutes
We could sample your MF% every 30 seconds or so and create a moving average, or use the lowest MF% the game has seen on your character in the last few minutes.
Pros: A lot of the same benefits as Solution 2, but harder to game. Still allows you to switch gear when you get an upgrade, which is great.
Cons: Difficult to communicate. We'd have to communicate this on the Details page somehow, but during normal gameplay there could be the sense of not knowing what your "moving average" is and wanting to look at it. Magic Find is already a difficult number to feel at any point in time, so hidden rules that modify Magic Find feel that much worse.
Option 4: Zero-Out Your MF% for 3 Minutes After Swapping Gear
When you swap gear, your Magic Find is disabled for 3 minutes.
Pros: Absolutely effective at discouraging gear swaps. Still allows you to swap gear when you find an upgrade, and the 3 minute duration is probably short enough that if you kill an Elite pack and get an upgrade, you can put that upgrade on and have your Magic Find active again by the time you get to the next pack.
Cons:  Players who are unfamiliar with the system may open up their details page and see their Magic Find as 0% and not understand why. We could mitigate this by making the 0% MF colored with a tooltip stating the countdown until your Magic Find would work again, as well as what your Magic Find will be when the time expires.
Option 5: Gear Swapping Interacts with Nephalem Valor
There's a whole class of solutions that interact with Nephalem Valor. For example, we could remove a stack of Nephalem Valor when you swap a piece of gear.
Pros: Stops gear swapping just for the last kill, while still allowing the player the option to do so.
Cons: Some players will lose a stack by accident. We could put a confirmation box in to address accidental loss of a stack, but game-interrupting popups are potentially character-killing. It also causes co-op players to drop out of sync. One person may switch gear and lose a stack or two, and if it happens before a boss they'll want to clear two more packs before hitting the boss, but the other party members may not want to -- causing some tense social situations in co-op play. Finally, it tightly couples two systems together and generally tightly-coupled systems don't function over the long haul as well as loosely-coupled systems. In other words, future changes to the Nephalem Valor system or the Magic Find system (or systems related to those two systems) become harder to make as both systems would be impacted.
While we're having our own discussions and tests of how well these options could work, we’re interested to hear your thoughts. We’d mainly like to hear which approaches you like, if there are any specifics you like or don't like about it, and why. Having the context of how this affects you personally really helps us.
Check out the forum thread link to give your input on the choices.
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Monk 1.0.3 Guide

Here is a Monk 1.0.3 guide submitted by Nmity.



Hello again! Just a short one today recapping on the stats / gear you will want to use on your Monk after the 1.0.3 attack speed nerf and the monster damage nerf. This guidelines everything you need to know in terms of gearing for acts 2-4 on the Inferno difficulty.
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Drop Rates Increased - June Hotfixes

Today's hotfix has increased the Neph drop rate for all acts in Inferno. Bosses are now guaranteed to drop at least 1 rare with 4 stacks of Nephalem Valor and 2 rares with 5 stacks.

Here are the hotfixes:

June
Items
  • The drop rates for high-end items (items level 61-63) have been increased for Acts III and IV of Hell difficulty and Acts I – IV of Inferno difficulty:
    • The new approximate drop rates are as follows:
      • Hell – Act III and Act IV
        • iLvl 61: 9% to 13.9%
        • iLvl 62: 1.9% to 3.45%
        • iLvl 63: 0% (no change)
      • Inferno – Act I
        • iLvl 61: 17.7% to 23.9%
        • iLvl 62: 7.9% to 12.6%
        • iLvl 63: 2.0% to 4.8%
      • Inferno – Act II
        • iLvl 61: 18.6% to 23.3%
        • iLvl 62: 12.4% to 18.6%
        • iLvl 63: 4.1% to 9.3%
      • Inferno – Act III and Act IV
        • iLvl 61: 24.1% to 27.1%
        • iLvl 62: 16.1% to 21.7%
        • iLvl 63: 8.0% to 16.3%
    Bosses
    • Bosses are now guaranteed to drop at least 1 Rare item for players with 4 stacks of Nephalem Valor and at least 2 Rare items for players with 5 stacks of Nephalem Valor

    Bug Fixes
    • Fixed a bug with several items that would allow those items to block pathing when dropped on the ground
    • Fixed a crash that could sometimes occur when a player was interacting with environment objects (e.g. opening chests or clicking on a lectern)
    • Fixed several additional game and service crashes

    June 29 Bug Fixes
    • General
      • Identifying an item will no longer allow players to circumvent a skill’s attack animation cooldown
      • Fixed a bug that allowed players to temporarily increase their attack speed or double-cast a skill by clicking repeatedly on Town Portal while performing an ability
      • Fixed some additional (but rare) game crashes
    • Auction House
      • Fixed a bug that was causing stacks of commodities in a player’s stash to update incorrectly if the items being sent from the Completed Tab were purchased from multiple different sellers
    Read More... Drop Rates Increased - June Hotfixes

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    Patch 1.0.3b Delayed

    Blizzard Blue Tracker: June 27, 2012

    In general we tend to not provide release dates or specific timeframes for patches due to the complexity of the updates, and the possibility that we’ll discover an issue that keeps us from releasing it on time. We discovered a few such issues late into the testing of 1.0.3b, which means it won’t hit this week as previously mentioned.

    However, we know that a number of changes in 1.0.3b have been highly anticipated, and so we spent the better part of today pulling specific changes that did not run into testing issues out of 1.0.3b, and turning them into hotfixes. These include the Inferno drop increases among a couple others, and will be applied with off-peak rolling restarts tomorrow morning. We’ll also be updating theJune hotfix blog with specific changes (including new drop rates) tomorrow morning after we manage to wrangle up a cup of coffee.
    Read More... Patch 1.0.3b Delayed

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    1.0.3a Patch Notes

    Blizzard Blue Tracker: June 25, 2012

    Diablo III Patch 1.0.3a – v.1.0.3. 10235

    The latest client patch notes can be found here.
    Visit our Bug Report forum for a list of known issues.
    The most recent hotfixes can be found here.

    Classes
    • Witch Doctor
      • Bug Fixes
        • Zombie Charger 
          • Skill Rune – Zombie Bears
            • Fixed a bug where Zombie Bears were unable to attack targets on slopes

            • Zombie Bears should no longer become stuck on objects with which they shouldn’t have collision
    Items
    • General
      • Equipped items will now take "wear-and-tear" durability damage at half the previous rate
        • Please note that durability loss as the result of normal combat is different from the 10% durability loss characters will incur when they die. Equipped items have always suffered durability loss while fighting, and we are simply slowing the rate at which the loss occurs.
    • Bug Fixes
      • Fixed a bug that was causing Unique monsters to not drop the appropriate amount of loot when slain
      • Fixed a bug with linking items with 3 gem sockets
      • It is no longer possible to create fake achievement links
    Bug Fixes
    • General
      • Fixed a bug that was causing the “Switch Hero” button to occasionally disappear after leaving a game while in town
      • Fixed several gold and leveling exploits
      • Fixed several game and service crashes (for Mac and PC)

    Scheduled Maintenance

    We will be performing scheduled maintenance for Diablo III starting tomorrow at 5:00 a.m. PDT in order to deploy patch 1.0.3a. We anticipate that maintenance will conclude and that all services will be available by approximately 7:00 a.m. PDT. 

    Important: Please note that you will not be prompted to download patch 1.0.3a until the patch is live in your home region. If you are logging in from a European or Asian client, you will need to wait for this patch to release in that region before it can be installed. Additionally, if your home region is the Americas, you will be unable to log into Europe or Asia using Global Play after patch 1.0.3a is live until those regions have also patched. 

    For reference, here are the scheduled maintenance times for each region:

    The Americas: 5:00 a.m. PDT to 7:00 a.m. PDT 
    Asia: 1:00 p.m. PDT to 3:00 p.m. PDT 
    Europe: 8:00 p.m. PDT to 10:00 p.m. PDT 

    Please note that these times are subject to change. For time zone assistance, please visit: http://everytimezone.com
    Read More... 1.0.3a Patch Notes

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    Act 1 - 4 Inferno Elite Hotspot Guide

    Act 1 - 4 Inferno Elite Hotspot (Farming) Guide submitted by Nmitty.




    Hello again everybody! This guide is covering acts 1 through 4 elite pack farming routes! These are all of the farming routes I've been using since 1.0.3 has hit and they all have a great amount of elite packs over a short period of time farming. Hopefully this helps you progress more quickly to higher acts or just helps you farm more elite packs much more efficiently!

    Act 1: 0:00
    Act 2: 5:45
    Act 3: 9:46
    Act 4: 15:10

    Build in the video: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/wizard#blSjOR!XYc!bYZaZb

    Energy Armor can be swapped for anything defensive if need be, passive talents can also be changed for anything else you wanted! Going into detail on the Wizard guide coming up!

    Read More... Act 1 - 4 Inferno Elite Hotspot Guide

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