New Testingstan

Gands wrote:

Oxymoron wrote:So I hear there's already a lot of nerd-rage about Diablo 3, about the graphics ("they would have looked good in 2004") and about the "dumbed-down" game mechanisms ?

How can the game mechanisms get any more dumbed down than D2? However, the graphics are pretty and I'm playing on low.

Not that I ascribe to the criticism, but D2 was all about efficient spending of points and analysing the skill tree for the most bang for your limited buck - particularly when patch 1.10 came out and introduced the concept of synergies, which made everything more complicated. The difficulty increase between nightmare and hell also invalidated certain builds, unless you had specific high-end gear which was really fucking hard to get legitimately, or you partied up with someone in an equally precise build. (so for example, playing a blizzard sorceress which would mean 80+ points in the cold tree, maybe 1 point in the fire tree for warmth, and a MAXIMUM of three skill points in the lightning tree - static field, TK to get teleport. High DPS from blizzard as all three of its synergies will more than likely be maxed and cold mastery is the only other skill that matters in the cold tree, but what do you do when you come across a cold immune monster in nightmare/hell especially? Nothing but die in two seconds. So, you need to have the high end runes to make the runeword 'infinity' in a polearm that you can then give to your act 2 mercenary who then has an active conviction aura which MIGHT break that immunity. Or, you party up with a vengeance Paladin who has conviction as an active aura. Or you just teleport past the monsters)

Now you can say that that kind of game mechanics is annoying anal, stupidly implemented, overly complex, whatever - but that's the kind of thought that goes into making a successful build in D2. What D3 did was take all that away and add a system that is far more simpler and takes away a lot of the needless shit that you had in D2. Another example, D2's attribute system was shit. Energy was a complete waste, strength was only needed to meet gear requirements (and most people would factor in +Strength items towards that end anyway), dexterity only mattered to bowazons or getting max block on a shield (the bulk of which only paladins needed to worry about and even then they had the skill holy shield which did the lion's share of increasing max block), and vitality was easily the only stat that actually mattered because it increased you HP and in hell difficulty HP and DPS is the only two things that mattered the most.

D3 from what I understand has none of that. To go from an overcomplicated system to one which is streamlined, makes fat nerds angry. Holy shit D2 didn't even have respec for most of its 13 year history. Respeccing was only introduced in the last patch it had, which came out a couple years ago IIRC.

Aaron wrote:Tetris inventory?

This is where your inventory is laid out in a grid format, and every item in the game takes up a certain number of grid squares. So the inventory for D2 was 4x10 I think. A ring or amulet would be 1x1, a belt would be 1x2, any armour would be 2x3, a polearm/heavy two-handed swor/heavy maul would be 2x4 etc etc. Then you had charms which give you a persistent attribute bonus but only if they were in your inventory, so that takes up space and limits your loot carrying capacity. You basically had to juggle things around and rearrange things whenever you picked up loot, and running out of capacity was a common problem.

D3 has from what I've seen increased the capacity, and made everything in the game take up either 1x1 or 1x2 slots. STREAMLINING!!!!

aaron, deus ex has tetris inventory

Zod wrote:

Losonti Tokash wrote:boy i like it when somebody basically says the same thing as me but in the sort of tone you'd use to correct someone

broomsticked

I kinda wished she'd continue the stupid and idiotic communism vs capitalism thread hijack she started so I could have told her to STFU and not make every goddamn thread be about her.

Stofsk wrote:

Gands wrote:

Oxymoron wrote:So I hear there's already a lot of nerd-rage about Diablo 3, about the graphics ("they would have looked good in 2004") and about the "dumbed-down" game mechanisms ?

How can the game mechanisms get any more dumbed down than D2? However, the graphics are pretty and I'm playing on low.

Not that I ascribe to the criticism, but D2 was all about efficient spending of points and analysing the skill tree for the most bang for your limited buck - particularly when patch 1.10 came out and introduced the concept of synergies, which made everything more complicated. The difficulty increase between nightmare and hell also invalidated certain builds, unless you had specific high-end gear which was really fucking hard to get legitimately, or you partied up with someone in an equally precise build. (so for example, playing a blizzard sorceress which would mean 80+ points in the cold tree, maybe 1 point in the fire tree for warmth, and a MAXIMUM of three skill points in the lightning tree - static field, TK to get teleport. High DPS from blizzard as all three of its synergies will more than likely be maxed and cold mastery is the only other skill that matters in the cold tree, but what do you do when you come across a cold immune monster in nightmare/hell especially? Nothing but die in two seconds. So, you need to have the high end runes to make the runeword 'infinity' in a polearm that you can then give to your act 2 mercenary who then has an active conviction aura which MIGHT break that immunity. Or, you party up with a vengeance Paladin who has conviction as an active aura. Or you just teleport past the monsters)

Now you can say that that kind of game mechanics is annoying anal, stupidly implemented, overly complex, whatever - but that's the kind of thought that goes into making a successful build in D2. What D3 did was take all that away and add a system that is far more simpler and takes away a lot of the needless shit that you had in D2. Another example, D2's attribute system was shit. Energy was a complete waste, strength was only needed to meet gear requirements (and most people would factor in +Strength items towards that end anyway), dexterity only mattered to bowazons or getting max block on a shield (the bulk of which only paladins needed to worry about and even then they had the skill holy shield which did the lion's share of increasing max block), and vitality was easily the only stat that actually mattered because it increased you HP and in hell difficulty HP and DPS is the only two things that mattered the most.

D3 from what I understand has none of that. To go from an overcomplicated system to one which is streamlined, makes fat nerds angry. Holy shit D2 didn't even have respec for most of its 13 year history. Respeccing was only introduced in the last patch it had, which came out a couple years ago IIRC.

D2 doesn't sound like a lot of fun to me. I don't want to spend 10 hours trying to figure out which build Blizzard wants me to play in order to get through a section.

well uh, good for you i guess

Oxymoron wrote: Gamers...

so i streamlined MW4 to like eight keys plus the mouse

the only thing you have to keep is the Lance commands because your AI buddies super dumb to do anything without handholding

I know what it is, I was wondering if D3 had it.

Aaron wrote:I know what it is, I was wondering if D3 had it.

Sorry mate, I thought you were asking what it was, not whether D3 had it or not.

Tis cool.

D2'S big thing for a decade was synergy

d3 should still haev synergies between skills

so for no wierdos the game will be fine

Stofsk wrote:Not that I ascribe to the criticism, but D2 was all about efficient spending of points and analysing the skill tree for the most bang for your limited buck - particularly when patch 1.10 came out and introduced the concept of synergies, which made everything more complicated. The difficulty increase between nightmare and hell also invalidated certain builds, unless you had specific high-end gear which was really fucking hard to get legitimately, or you partied up with someone in an equally precise build. (so for example, playing a blizzard sorceress which would mean 80+ points in the cold tree, maybe 1 point in the fire tree for warmth, and a MAXIMUM of three skill points in the lightning tree - static field, TK to get teleport. High DPS from blizzard as all three of its synergies will more than likely be maxed and cold mastery is the only other skill that matters in the cold tree, but what do you do when you come across a cold immune monster in nightmare/hell especially? Nothing but die in two seconds. So, you need to have the high end runes to make the runeword 'infinity' in a polearm that you can then give to your act 2 mercenary who then has an active conviction aura which MIGHT break that immunity. Or, you party up with a vengeance Paladin who has conviction as an active aura. Or you just teleport past the monsters)

Now you can say that that kind of game mechanics is annoying anal, stupidly implemented, overly complex, whatever - but that's the kind of thought that goes into making a successful build in D2. What D3 did was take all that away and add a system that is far more simpler and takes away a lot of the needless shit that you had in D2. Another example, D2's attribute system was shit. Energy was a complete waste, strength was only needed to meet gear requirements (and most people would factor in +Strength items towards that end anyway), dexterity only mattered to bowazons or getting max block on a shield (the bulk of which only paladins needed to worry about and even then they had the skill holy shield which did the lion's share of increasing max block), and vitality was easily the only stat that actually mattered because it increased you HP and in hell difficulty HP and DPS is the only two things that mattered the most.

D3 from what I understand has none of that. To go from an overcomplicated system to one which is streamlined, makes fat nerds angry. Holy shit D2 didn't even have respec for most of its 13 year history. Respeccing was only introduced in the last patch it had, which came out a couple years ago IIRC.

Clearly I missed a fuckton of D2's stuff.

Gods I hate "OPTIMUM BUILDS".

Gands wrote:Clearly I missed a fuckton of D2's stuff.

Gods I hate "OPTIMUM BUILDS".

Blizzard kind of forced people down that route because they introduced synergies in 1.10 but also monster immunities in Hell difficulty. Basically every monster in Hell is immune to something, whether it was a particular elemental magic (fire-lightning-cold-poison) or magic magic (I think this refers to the necromancer bone skills maybe, but not elemental magic, but I was never all that clear on it; it doesn't really matter because this was the rarest of immunities) or physical (haha so you're a melee character? Fuck you). Some monsters could be immune to two things as well.

Single-element sorcs were still more than viable, like the blizzard sorc I mentioned had a scary-awesome DPS from a fully maxed and synergised blizzard. And if you come across a cold-immune monster (which weren't all THAT common), you could either let the idiot merc poke it to death which took forever or teleport past it. Bigger problem were the physical immunes for melee characters. Paladins were more or less safe because zealots usually had one of the elemental auras active (usually frost because it slows every monster down, sometimes the lightning aura because it gave way more raw damage), or had conviction aura, or had that plus vengeance which added elemental damage to your melee attacks. But barbs only had one skill that could completely negate physical immunes, and again you had to optimise it. Necromancers had amplify damage which broke the immunity, so they were safe. Any other melee build needed some way to address physical immunes in the game, and usually that was a gear solution (with the high-end stuff being extremely hard to get; like as an example, the odds of getting a zod rune, which was the rarest of them all, was fucking stupidly absurdly huge, so much so you're more likely to dupe the item than to have it actually drop from a monster).

The bottom line is that it looks like Blizzard has learned its lesson and streamlined D3 so that you don't really *need* to *optimise* a build permanently, because obviously the whole 'you must follow this build PRECISELY otherwise the endgame content will laugh at you' thing is only a problem if respeccing doesn't exist. Even 1.13 which introduced respecs was only a bandaid solution, as it's limited to a max of three for new characters, or one for old characters who've been up-patched. D3's skill system looks infinitely superior, based as it is on leveling up unlocks everything and customisation (which is where I predict endgame optimisation will occur) is pretty easy and painless from what I can gather.

But yeah it doesn't have the sort of complicated stuff D2 had, a lot of which was based on a shit load of work fans did to analyse the skill tree and run the numbers.

ArmorPierce is a fucking nut job.

US Police are anti white reverse racists apparently.

Edit - and I'm a derp.

Stofsk wrote:[...] a lot of which was based on a shit load of work fans did to analyse [...] and run the numbers.

Sounds like a Paradox game. :troll:

Gands wrote:

Oxymoron wrote:So I hear there's already a lot of nerd-rage about Diablo 3, about the graphics ("they would have looked good in 2004") and about the "dumbed-down" game mechanisms ?

How can the game mechanisms get any more dumbed down than D2? However, the graphics are pretty and I'm playing on low.

Why does every game have to have cutting edge new age graphics?

What about any previous game blizzard has made would have made them expect cutting edge graphics?

Expectations are not always based on reality

And man it's a bit sad that nerd expectation has literally become the only requirement for success

Stofsk wrote:

Zod wrote:broomsticked

I kinda wished she'd continue the stupid and idiotic communism vs capitalism thread hijack she started so I could have told her to STFU and not make every goddamn thread be about her.

but stofsk she has worked

she knows about working

she knows that if the boss takes a loss then no surplus value is extracted from the workers because one time she worked as an independent contractor and then she had to buy her own tools and they were pretty expensive tools but she got help with the tax stuff but it's not always you get help with the tax stuff and sometimes people get money for driving cars even though it's not directly related to their job and this is called compensation of course in those days we called it perks of course in your commie paradise people would only get everything they need it's so unfair people don't get shit they don't need and can have sausages rotting in all corners of their house

my god

i can't decide whether it's grampa simpson or louis from ghostbusters

Dooey Jo wrote:

Stofsk wrote:

Zod wrote:broomsticked

I kinda wished she'd continue the stupid and idiotic communism vs capitalism thread hijack she started so I could have told her to STFU and not make every goddamn thread be about her.

but stofsk she has worked

she knows about working

she knows that if the boss takes a loss then no surplus value is extracted from the workers because one time she worked as an independent contractor and then she had to buy her own tools and they were pretty expensive tools but she got help with the tax stuff but it's not always you get help with the tax stuff and sometimes people get money for driving cars even though it's not directly related to their job and this is called compensation of course in those days we called it perks of course in your commie paradise people would only get everything they need it's so unfair people don't get shit they don't need and can have sausages rotting in all corners of their house

my god

i can't decide whether it's grampa simpson or louis from ghostbusters

i know that feel, bro

omg so the powah went out in liek half the city this morning

i lost it at my house then heard the fier truks leaving

then i waited with baited breath

my UNINTERRUPTABLE POWER SUPPLY would surely be unable to live up to its name

i thought 10 mins was about the best i could expect from it

but i had to go to the babies and if i turn it off i'd def lose out on work so i left it on


tried remote connecting to the desktop 30 mins later

no connection


30 more mins later tried connecting

at this time i figured even if the power was on, the computer surely lost power and is off now

but to my surprise it connected


the ups held out for about an hour

wow

i wonder how much further it could have went too

my mind is blown





anywho on the way to the babies i passed a TRAFFIC LIGHT too

and holy crap it was turned off

no green

no red

no blinking yellow

not even a police officer


WHAT THE HELL ARE WE SUPPOSED TO DO NOW?????????????????????????????????????????????????????///

i was expecting total chaos

but it was actually pretty well ordered as people simply treated the intersection as if there was some kind of STOP SIGN there

zero fatalities as far as i know

unreal

weemadando wrote:ArmorPierce is a fucking nut job.

US Police are anti white reverse racists apparently.

Edit - and I'm a derp.

I already knew AP was a dork and a few planks short of a ship from his misadventures in ARSE and HOS. Turns out being cute doesn't count for shit on the internets. It just makes dudes fap to your pics

Ask that twerp for his evidence about 'racist' cops targeting whites anyway

Einhander Sn0m4n wrote:

weemadando wrote:ArmorPierce is a fucking nut job.

US Police are anti white reverse racists apparently.

Edit - and I'm a derp.

I already knew AP was a dork and a few planks short of a ship from his misadventures in ARSE and HOS. Turns out being cute doesn't count for shit on the internets. It just makes dudes fap to your pics

Ask that twerp for his evidence about 'racist' cops targeting whites anyway

He was being sarcastic and WMA didn't notice.

lolwhoops

Seven deputies from the Los Angeles County sheriff’s gang unit are on paid leave during an investigation into their suspected involvement in a secret clique that promoted aggressive policing and celebrated officer shootings, sources confirmed to The Los Angeles Times Wednesday.

http://usnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/ ... lique?lite