Diablo III is now waiting for 1,000,000 MF swap tears

[Roam]

most barbs bitch that inferno isnt possible without sword and board. thats bullshit of the highest order, but you are gonna have to work hard on gear.

As people know, I've been one of the most vocal people arguing this point, but I must admit that my Barb/Monk duo has reached a pretty significant brick wall in Act 3.

My gear is pretty damn awesome, yet I'm still having the biggest issue tanking Act 3, perhaps in part due to the damage increase when coop'ing (a mechanic I still think is retarded and bad design, since your defensive stats don't generally go up by the same factor as the damage when grouping).

It's rather frustrating, because I just can't progress in act 3 even though Act 2 is on full farm, and my gear is so good. (50k hp, 10k armor, 1k all resists, 20k damage, helm of command with 8% block rate, 50% dodge and 500 life on hit). Still getting raped by most anything.

[Skeptic]

most barbs bitch that inferno isnt possible without sword and board. thats bullshit of the highest order, but you are gonna have to work hard on gear.

As people know, I've been one of the most vocal people arguing this point, but I must admit that my Barb/Monk duo has reached a pretty significant brick wall in Act 3.

My gear is pretty damn awesome, yet I'm still having the biggest issue tanking Act 3, perhaps in part due to the damage increase when coop'ing (a mechanic I still think is retarded and bad design, since your defensive stats don't generally go up by the same factor as the damage when grouping).

It's rather frustrating, because I just can't progress in act 3 even though Act 2 is on full farm, and my gear is so good. (50k hp, 10k armor, 1k all resists, 20k damage, helm of command with 8% block rate, 50% dodge and 500 life on hit). Still getting raped by most anything.

Thats fully understandable but with gear no where near as nice as yours I am prgressing through the start of A3 without too many issues. Most of the damage incoming is totally avoidable unless you are slowed or snared, most of the time good movement is key which is why Wrath of Berserker is so powerful. The window of immunity granted by WoB is just rediculous when taking on harder elites and nuking down that first mob.

Edit - Hold up your stacking block but using 2h? do blocks even occur without a shield equipped?

[Roam]

Thats fully understandable but with gear no where near as nice as yours I am prgressing through the start of A3 without too many issues. Most of the damage incoming is totally avoidable unless you are slowed or snared, most of the time good movement is key which is why Wrath of Berserker is so powerful. The window of immunity granted by WoB is just rediculous when taking on harder elites and nuking down that first mob.

Edit - Hold up your stacking block but using 2h? do blocks even occur without a shield equipped?

Nono, I'm a shield wearing Monk, not a Barb. Hence my higher stats (comparatively to Barbs), but lower actual survivability (none of my heals scale with gear, less gtfo abilities, less damage).

I can kite quite a lot of stuff (flying mobs in act 3 for example) and can do the first part of Act 3, just not without dying frequently. Which considering my stats I find awfully annoying.

The main issue, in my opinion, with Monk is the lack of reliable heals for a tanky melee class. I have two low cd heals, but since they are flat values instead of the scaling heals the Barb has they are almost entirely useless for keeping you alive, and I just get whittled down. If I could kill them before my cooldowns are done, I'm fine but that tactic doesn't work for Champs or Elites.

But hopefully incoming patch fixes a lot of that, the blogpost promises lots of nice changes.

[Bielz]

Has any one crunched the numbers on using two good one handed xbows? you would end up with way like 40 percent more critic damage from the second weapon. Socket and another 10 Percent critic chance from the passive. Add that to inate 15 IAS. And it just seems more powerful.

[omeg]

1.03 preview:
http://www.diablofans.com/news/1235-patch-103-preview/

TLDR:
We’re shifting to a philosophy where the best items in the game can drop from many different places, so a wider variety of play styles are viable.
We’re going to be reviewing Legendary items in a future patch. Legendaries won’t change in 1.0.3. When we’re done, high level Legendaries should be flat out better than blue items.
We’re lowering the number of guaranteed Rare items on bosses when you have your full five stacks of Nephalem Valor from two guaranteed Rares to one guaranteed Rare. In exchange, all champion and rare packs will now drop a bonus guaranteed Rare item when you have your full five stacks.
We’re removing the bonus monster damage per additional player in a coop game.
We’re adjusting the damage and health of monsters in Inferno Act II, III and IV. Our design goal with Acts II, III and IV is to keep them challenging, but smooth the difficulty ramp out a bit.
Repair costs on level 60 items are going to go up a lot. We’re currently evaluating repair costs between 4x and 6x their current values.
We need to reduce the effectiveness of Increased Attack Speed overall.
A Dramatic reduction is on the combine costs for tier 2-8 gems.
Class tuning is not a major focus for 1.0.3.

[Skeptic]

Thats actually quite dissapointing. Its refreshing to have a difficuly setting that poses a bit of a challenge.

[Pattern]

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/6262...-6_6_2012#blog

You Into the Group Thing?
We’re removing the bonus monster damage per additional player in a coop game. Our design goal is for players who prefer to play solo to be able to play solo, and players who prefer to play in groups to be able to play in a group. We feel the bonus monster damage per additional player is one of the biggest inhibitors to wanting to play with your friends.
In a perfect world, single player and co-op would be absolutely equal, but that’s not attainable when you consider item properties such as “Life on Kill” or skills such as Archon which simply scale better when you are solo. Since the variety and breadth of game mechanics essentially dictate that solo vs. group play will never be 100% equal, our goal is to make them as close as possible but err on the side of coop in cases where we need to make adjustments. The inherent logistical requirements when forming up with other players and attempting to work together effectively warrants some added benefits.

[Space Panda]

my attack speed backbone :3

[Roam]

Thats actually quite dissapointing. Its refreshing to have a difficuly setting that poses a bit of a challenge.

From what I can tell, they aren't nerfing it hard though. It'll still probably be a very high difficulty setting, the major component will be the incremental damage when in group play, which is the change that was really needed imo.

I also love the drop changes, should feel a lot more rewarding to play in lower Acts, and also allows you to play a segment of the game you particularly enjoy without making it entirely unfeasible that you will ever get a good item.

Also, the stack changes are awesome too: instead of kulle/belial runs it'll now be more worth it to run through entire areas, find all the champs for guaranteed rare per pack and do all the random dungeons and events you find. Very good change, imo.

[Antaris Xenal]

All great changes except the increase death penalty... Because I suck and die a lot.

[Shuko]

my attack speed backbone :3

"
What? Monks have a useful heal/shield without cooldown? Must get rid of that.
What? Monks can actually have some progress by gearing attack speed + Life on Hit? Must nerf attack speed.
"

Let's see whats the next thing to use/stack, which will be nerfed in 1.0x.

[Nicho Void]

We’re removing the bonus monster damage per additional player in a coop game.

Biggest change to the game, imo. Blizz is basically saying, "Hey, I know we said you're supposed to be able to solo Inferno, but that shit is HARD. Join a party instead."

[Malaes]

We’re removing the bonus monster damage per additional player in a coop game.

Biggest change to the game, imo. Blizz is basically saying, "Hey, I know we said you're supposed to be able to solo Inferno, but that shit is HARD. Join a party instead."

I think its a great change (not sure if you meant that or not) least for melee. For ranged it doesn't make any difference, but melee were almost punished for wanting to group.

[Mavolio]

We’re removing the bonus monster damage per additional player in a coop game.

Biggest change to the game, imo. Blizz is basically saying, "Hey, I know we said you're supposed to be able to solo Inferno, but that shit is HARD. Join a party instead."

its 100% because melee classes could never join a grp. Nothing to do with inferno being too hard. Tho they are making it more doable by making act 1 drop loot that is worth getting so you can actually do act 2 as a melee char.

[Roam]

We’re removing the bonus monster damage per additional player in a coop game.

Biggest change to the game, imo. Blizz is basically saying, "Hey, I know we said you're supposed to be able to solo Inferno, but that shit is HARD. Join a party instead."

its 100% because melee classes could never join a grp. Nothing to do with inferno being too hard. Tho they are making it more doable by making act 1 drop loot that is worth getting so you can actually do act 2 as a melee char.

Act 2 is easily doable. Act 3/4 is only doable with insane attack speed and life on hit. Also, several billion worth of gear.

[kyrieee]

Ugh, I hope they don't nerf IAS
It's the best source of dmg in HC since you need to stack vit

[ScaryTrollScaringYou]

Reddit AMAA, some good stuff in here.
http://www.reddit.com/r/Diablo/comme...mbers_and_jay/

[Vortex]

They want to encourage group play, but still penalize MF in group play, while SP provides more MF. Yea, that makes sense. At least melee can join a group without becoming hilariously useless now I suppose.

They want to massively increase death penalty, but no mention of nerfing mobs with full-retard affixes. I'm looking at you, invulnerable minions + anything else. Hell, they still haven't even fixed the invulnerable minion not-dying bug yet either. Grrr.

edit: AMA covered invulnerable minions, by nerfing the boss HP. Which is nice and all, but doesn't actually address how stupid a giant wall of invulnerable minions blocking all your attacks are.

[Itiken]

this ie beuried down teh bottom of the AMA, and to me makes interesting reading:

As mentioned in a different thread, the drop rates were carefully tuned for a single player playing through from 1 to 60 without ever using the AH.
All of our items are randomly generated, and so follow a distribution curve in power. Let's say for the sake of argument that you were to somehow distill an item down to it's "power level" and created a distribution graph of drop rate vs. power level. This graph would probably be normally distributed with outliers at high power levels dropping at a lower rate.
Looking at this graph, an average item drops every 5 minutes, a higher power item drops every 15 minutes, even higher power drops every hour. etc. As you move up the curve to ever more powerful items, the amount of time it takes to find such an item increases. This is what makes certain items more desirable, this is how things worked in D2.
What happens for a standard player who is playing solo when they first hit level 60 is they see an item upgrade every 30 minutes or so. Pretty quickly it becomes every hour, then every 2 hours. The higher the power level of your gear, the longer it takes to find your next upgrade, that's just the underlying math of this distribution. It's not really anything we set either. If we magically made all drops rates 10x higher, all it would do is shift the power curve left or right, it would not change the fundamental property that the higher up in power you go, the longer (statistically) it is going to take until you find your next drop.
So then let's say you visit the Auction House and get infusion of power that hurls you forward on that power curve. So whereas at one point your gear may be at a point that you are statistically speaking probably going to get an upgrade every 2 hours. After visiting the Auction House you hurl yourself forward on the power curve so far that now you are statistically going to get a drop every 8 hours.
To further illustrate the point, let's talk about the coming changes in 1.0.3. In 1.0.3 we're going to start dropping level 63 items in Act I of Inferno. We're also reducing incoming damage. What do I expect to happen? I expect that there will be a rapid increase in power across the entire community as all of these items become more widely accessible. It's like we took the distribution curve of items and made everything drop more. That item that used to take 10 hours to find is now a 2 hour item. An item that used to be a 2 day item is now an 8 hour item. After the initial frenzy of power increase, things are just going to settle again. People who think drop rates are too low now will probably still think drop rates are too low a week later when they move to the new point on the curve. I've spent a long time on this question so I'm going to move on but hopefully somebody who gets what I'm saying will be able to expand on it more, maybe draw some graphs to better illustrate the point.

tl;dr we could make drops 100x what they are now and it would just cause everybody to settle at a new equilibrium point. Anything you can farm in a few hours you'll already have, anything that takes longer you'll wish you could get faster.

[Tools]

The point he's missing is that a 2 hour item no matter the drop rate is a 0 hour item on the auction house.