Diablo 3 Blog Guide

1. Port to northern highlands, check for the Watchtower dungeon along the NW wall of the zone (it's small, takes maybe 10s). If it's not there, remake. If it's there, clear it for 1-5 stacks.
   
   I anticipate the number of packs here will be nerfed soon, though often times I just find 1 pack. Additionally I find the dungeon has about a 60% spawn rate.
2. Check northern highlands (small area, 0-2 packs).
3. Run to the hunting grounds (small area, 0-1 packs). it's NE of the highlands 100% of the time.
4. Run to Leorics courtyard (small area, 0-2 packs) it's NW of the hunting grounds 100% of the time.
5. Check cemetary dungeons, I kill one pack per dungeon and then port out and go to the next cemetary dungeon. The reason for this is that each dungeon can spawn 1-2 packs but it's rarely 2 and sometimes they can be quite large areas, not worth the time to clear them totally.
6. Festering woods - clear the 2 dungeons there for 2 more packs, kill packs that are out in the general area if you come across them. I usually find 1, but the range I believe is 0-2 in the general area.
7. Halls levels 1, 2, then the jail area (still deciding if this run through is worth it, it takes time but you usually find 1), then halls level 3 and butcher.

1) Champion packs over Bosses – I understand why you want to push people to fight champion packs. In Diablo 2 they were almost entirely avoided for the sake of getting to the bosses faster for better loot. However you must realize that MANY people find boss fights more entertaining? It also goes against the logic of some random monster is more dangerous than the greatest battle commander in all of the burning hells! Why is blizzard adamant that players avoid bosses and fight champion mobs when the outcry (for the most part) is the opposite?

2) Valor buff. Diablo 3 was advertised as having a wide variety of skills that can be swapped in and out at any time, even in battle (with a small delay for use). This allowed greater variety in the abilities that champion mobs could have and provide greater challenges for the player. You also then provided a Valor buff that is supposed to encourage players to kill more champion packs. But oddly you choose to have the valor buffs be removed if the player changes their skills (or even moves a skill on the hot bar from one position to another). This goes against the entire design of the buff and the goal of having players kill as many champion packs as possible, Why was this decision made and with what logic?

3) The IAS nerf was handled poorly in my opinion. I completely understand WHY the nerf was needed and probably agree with the logic that it needed to be changed. However HOW it was handled was a dropped ball. I believe that the best way to handle the situation was to bring in either diminishing returns or a hard cap (like run speed) that a player cannot go over. This allows people to still gain value from their RMAH purchases without feeling ripped off and also discourages people from stacking the stat over other stats which you want to be a greater focus for the character. It also maintains value in the IAS items for future sales. Why was the IAS nerf not handled in this manner?

There are two different solutions we’re considering to reduce the effectiveness of Increased Attack Speed. The first is to simply reduce the value on all the items to their desired values. In general our desire is to never change items as that makes them feel less concrete, but the upside is you would still be able to look at an item and know exactly what you are getting. The other approach is to change the formula used for attack speed aggregation so that stacking attack speed from multiple slots suffers from diminishing returns. The downside of that approach is that it introduces yet another hidden modifier on an item property (and many people dislike hidden modifiers), and complicates the already difficult decision of item gearing.

4) lackluster skills. Nether tentacles. Fix, bug, nerf or whatever you want to call it was probably deserved and required. However I have a design question based around the outcome of this change. If a skill is changed, updated or fixed to a point where not a single player wants to use that skill anymore wouldn’t that be a bad change or too drastic? Will further skill changes(give wiz tornadoes love) be in the near future to give people more options than just pick the next best skill available?(my hopes are to have several options of equal strength, currently I don’t feel that way with the DH setup)

5) The pots/breakables Magic find nerf. It seems from the players standpoint that this is an odd change. Nobody that I saw was complaining about having to put on magic gear to maximize their chances and opportunities with pots and breakables. Yet the reasoning given was that you felt it was unfun for the players. Can you elaborate a bit more on this as I feel the players think differently.

6) Stat stacking. It was mentioned that blizzard does not want players to stack stats in a way that they feel it is a must skill over the base stats such as Dex or Str or Vit. If that is true, why do barbarians and monks (and probably everyone else now after the current changes) have to stack resist all up to ridiculous levels just in order to survive?

7) IAS Side effects. The IAS nerf has had a few side effects which I am not sure were considered in the process. Monks and some barb builds relied on IAS to provide adequate healing through either leech or on hit healing abilities. However with the IAS nerf many are finding that this is no longer a viable path. Is there anything being done internally to consider this unintended consequence?

While we don’t have an issue with there being important stats, Increased Attack Speed in particular has secondary effects on mobility in combat, resource generation and resource consumption. We want there to be options and considerations for how you gear up, and one uber trump-everything stat can really work against choice and options.

8) The repair cost increase I believe is also a fair change; however the unfair part of this change was to the wear and tear of doing battle. Now I know that it has already been stated that this is being looked at for an update, are you able to share any reduction values or ranges that are being considered internally? (ex. 50%, 75%...)

06/21/2012 07:02 AMPosted by Gremble

9) Who are you kidding, all the WD re-rolled Barb or DH already!

10) Boss over tuning. In the recent patch there was significant changes done to some boss fights. However there appears to be a bit of over tuning done in a few cases (in others much needed difficulty improvements). In two cases, Seigebreaker and Cydea however there appears to be a bit of excess difficulty added to the point that in most cases the fights are impossible(for some classes). In seigebreakers case the addition of dmg reflect with a short enrage timer makes him quite the fight to handle on ones own. Cydea has had her little spiders amped up in an insidious way where they spread out and virtually refuse to attack or follow the player unless he/she goes near them. This causes the player to have to fight through them to get back to cydea, however once enough spiders are killed cydea auto jumps off the screen and spawns more spiders. Essentially making the fight a burn her down before she jumps or you lose fight. Are any hot fixes or minor updates being planed to fine tune these updates or do you feel that the current difficulty is appropriate?

06/21/2012 06:08 AMPosted by Tealeaves

11) Favourite snack while playing? I love me some fuzzy peaches

12) The quitters. Many of my friends who played the game have found the recent patch changes to create an unfun atmosphere within the game. They have recently stopped playing entirely in some cases and in others have become frustrated and play much less. While I respect that this is “your game” and you will present the vision that your team has come up with. Are any considerations being made to the players who recently disliked the changes?

13) GAH. 13 is my lucky number so this will be the last question. Due to the recent changes and increase cost of playing the game (gold wise) players have to maximize their income to offset these changes. One of the major ways players make money is through the gold auction house. Is there any consideration being made to increasing the limit of 10 items per account that can be up for sale to help compensate for this increase in costs?

• Item - What the item is, as well as its iLvl. This is also where base damage and base armor are stored. If you look at the white version of an item, you can see its base values. Item type also determines what affixes an item can get.
• Affix - Called properties in the crafting window. Blue almost always 1-3 of these. Rare always have 4-6 of these. They are things like "of Pain", "of the Lion" and "Cruel". In addition to primary affixes, there are secondary affixes with lower stats, this is why rings have half the stats of amulets.
• Mods - Affixes are actually a collection of one or more mods. For example, there is a +Dex mod. There is also a +Dex affix that has only a +Dex mod associated with it. There is however a +Dex/Vit affix which has 2 mods associated with it, one for +Dex and one for +Vit. Basically, a mod is always only one additional thing where is an affix can be a grouping of things.

• Step 1: An item type is chosen randomly based on the iLvl drop range and chances of the area. This includes both the category of item (gloves in this example) and the item type (name and iLvl). So if the game has decided to drop a pair of gloves it would then choose which gloves to drop out of all possible gloves in iLvl range 50-63 (assuming inferno act 1)
  • All possible gloves: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/item/gloves/#type=common
  • Stats determined so far: iLvl, Base Armor (the lowest armor value in the range on the link above), possible affixes
  • If you look at the crafted items you'll notice they have a single armor value instead of a range, this is the base armor value.
• Step 2: Now the magical nature of the item is determined. This is the part where your magic find comes in. A calculation happens and the item either stays white, becomes magic (blue), rare (yellow) or legendary (orange). The higher your Magic Find value, the higher chance of the item to drop as magic/rare/legendary.
  • If the item is white, it gets an armor bonus or some of the static bonuses such as "balanced" attack speed bonuses that white items occasionally get.
  • If the item is blue, it gets assigned 1-3 affixes randomly based on iLvl. The iLvl of the item is the maximum level of the Affixes assigned to it. Affixes are likely weighted that it is more likely to get a Affix level closer to the iLvl.
  • If the item is rare, it gets assigned 4-6 affixes randomly based on iLvl. The iLvl of the item is the maximum level of the Affixes assigned to it. Affixes are likely weighted that it is more likely to get a Affix level closer to the iLvl. Ilvl also affects how many affixes an item gets (higher iLvl items can have more affixes).
  • If the item matches a base item of a Legendary (all legendaries have a white item that they are based on) then the appropriate static and random affixes are assigned to it.
  • Affixes are restricted by item type.
  • Stats determined so far: What the item will have a bonus to, but not how much.
  • For our example, lets say a pair of iLvl 61 gloves has dropped with 4 affixes chosen as follows: Dex, VitDex, Haste (Attack Speed), DR (Armor)
• Step 3: Once the item has had its affixes chosen, the mods that belong to those affixes are applied, randomized and combined
  • Dex affix for iLvl 61 has a range of 130-149
  • DexVit affix for iLvl 61 has a range of 39-124 for the Dex mod abd 39-124 for the Vit mod
  • Haste (Attack Speed) affix for iLvl 61 has a range of 6%-7% for the attack speed bonus mod
  • DR (Armor) affix for iLvl 61 has a range of 286-322 for armor bonus mod
  • Stats determined so far: All
• Step 4: Mods are combined into a single value
  • Total +Dex range becomes 169-273 which is a combination of two separate random rolls, one from the Dex and one from the DexVit affixes

• When Blizzard nerfed attack speed, they reduced the range of possible attack speed bonuses on the Haste and HasteSecondary affixes. Quivers have a "built in" attack speed bonus similar to armor or damage which was not affected. This is the same reason you can't search for items by armor/damage/attack speed (for quivers) on the auction house. This may have also caused the haste value to be "re-rolled", so if before the range was 14-15 and you had a 15 the range may now be 6-7 and you may have a 6. If this were any other stat with a larger range I'm sure they would not be able to have made this change so quickly/easily.
• When Blizzard improves legendary items they will likely make a number of changes. Remember that legendaries have a different set of affixes that they chose from for their "special" stats and also have a normal set of affixes too. http://us.battle.net/d3/en/item/stone-gauntlets has a few static, a few random special and a few normal affixes. What will likely happen is that blizzard will do one of the following:
  • If they chose to change the range of existing special affixes then those item values will be re-rolled affecting older items. This likely won't happen. Instead they will likely:
  • Change the "blueprint" of legendaries to use new better special affixes. Any new legendaries that drop will use these new better special affixes which may have a different set of mods or a higher range of them. Old items will not be affected as they will still have the old affixes assigned to them.
  • Change the "blueprint" of legendaries to have additional special or normal affixes. Any new legendaries that drop will have these additional special/normal affixes. Old item will not be affected as they have already been generated.

• You can only have one affix of each type per item. There are also likely other limitations that I'm not aware of.
• All 2 stat affixes such as DexVit, IntStr, etc... are actually one affix so you can only have one of these
• Affixes levels are "up to" the iLvl of the item and are likely weighted to be closer to the iLvl but not necessarily at it

• Build: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/wizard#WOXYPk!agb!aYaZZZ
• My Stats: http://i.imgur.com/2TBql.jpg
• My Gear: http://i.imgur.com/HJdbt.jpg