Diablo 3 Discussion Thread

naticus said:
What are you smoking? Frost nova is currently the core skill for a CC/ww/CM build, that 90% of Wizards are using, the ones that are actually still playing that is.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=royP1XXhx-c

I've been using this build for almost two months now, I ditched my DPS build as this build farms much faster and is much funner to play. WIth my tank wizard (13k HP, 1200 All Res, 16k DPS, 45%CC,200%CD) i do more dps and can tank ALL of inferno with no issues. I don't really play d3 anymore though, as Path of Exile is taking more of my looter time, and is a superior game loot wise to D3. But if you haven't tried this build it is currently the most popular, cheapest and most efficient Wizard build to date.
Click to expand...

Ahh see, i've never had a chance to try that, because i have no crit gear. The move alone, without CD reduction from critical mass, is worthless because it lasts maybe a half second before the mobs are out of it.

Once they fix their ah so i don't want to kill myself while looking for items, i'll probably grab a crit set and try that out.

thanks for the link.

edit: they don't mention the AH changes in that post... are those coming before, after, or in 1.04?
 
Last edited:
stevedave said:
I don't think blizzard sells gold out of thin air....I may be wrong....But I am pretty sure all gold sold comes from other players. And they put a minimum of price on the gold so botters with 1 billion gold can't sell it for 100,000 gold for 1 penny devaluing the gold.

bottom line blizzard gets their cut no matter who using the RMAH. So catching botters likely isn't on their list of priorities because they make them money.
Click to expand...


But what the original poster who you were responding to, I think he was implying gold being sold on 3rd party sites. I would bet you that most of the gold that these big botters sell, is on a private site being sold thru paypal, not thru the RMAH. So it is undermining Blizz, by taking their sales away. They lose the 15% cut, they lose the business which is what the point of the AHs were in the first place. Its hard to get a cut from something when its being circumvented.

Go read other more active forums, I can tell you that people that do buy gold mostly buy it somewhere else. People kind of struggle to sell gold on the RMAH. Plus its like 3x as expensive.
 
Rdzona said:
But what the original poster who you were responding to, I think he was implying gold being sold on 3rd party sites. I would bet you that most of the gold that these big botters sell, is on a private site being sold thru paypal, not thru the RMAH. So it is undermining Blizz, by taking their sales away. They lose the 15% cut, they lose the business which is what the point of the AHs were in the first place. Its hard to get a cut from something when its being circumvented.

Go read other more active forums, I can tell you that people that do buy gold mostly buy it somewhere else. People kind of struggle to sell gold on the RMAH. Plus its like 3x as expensive.
Click to expand...

Blizzard got way too greedy with their cut of the RMAH transactions. It forces sellers to inflate their prices in order to make a profit, which opens the door right back up for the black-market / 3rd party sites, which the RMAH should have made obsolete. I was a big fan of the RMAH, I guess I'm still somewhat of a fan, until I saw what the cut they were taking was.
 
Oh nice. So they're going to buff underpowered runes to be competitive rather than nerfing the most overpowered runes. Sweet! I also agree with the idea of removing enrage timers and health resets. Although I never hit the enrage timer anymore and I rarely die in Inferno, it's great for others who are still chugging along. Diablo seems to be returning to the old design philosophy of increasing your rate of killing rather than your ability to survive. Too bad the game will be easier as a result, but I think it'll be funner too (as evidenced by how much enjoyment people got out of the God mode Wizard bug). edit: Ha, nice footnote at the end. You will be missed, Invulnerable Minions.
 
Yoshiyuki Blade said:
Oh nice. So they're going to buff underpowered runes to be competitive rather than nerfing the most overpowered runes. Sweet! I also agree with the idea of removing enrage timers and health resets. Although I never hit the enrage timer anymore and I rarely die in Inferno, it's great for others who are still chugging along. Diablo seems to be returning to the old design philosophy of increasing your rate of killing rather than your ability to survive. Too bad the game will be easier as a result, but I think it'll be funner too (as evidenced by how much enjoyment people got out of the God mode Wizard bug).
Click to expand...

While I liked the concept of increasing the difficulty, the way it was done really sucked. Looking back at D2, jumping all over the map as a sorceress and just mowing down a whole screen of badguys with frozen orb was awesome. You just never get the same feeling of "power" in D3, even at max level with some pretty good gear. For me at least, I enjoy a difficulty ramp while leveling and initial gearing, but at some point I want to feel like a badass after going through all that - in D3, it's almost backwards. Leveling is incredibly easy, then when you get max level and badass gear...you're getting your ass kicked in Act2/3.
 
TwistedAegis said:
While I liked the concept of increasing the difficulty, the way it was done really sucked. Looking back at D2, jumping all over the map as a sorceress and just mowing down a whole screen of badguys with frozen orb was awesome. You just never get the same feeling of "power" in D3, even at max level with some pretty good gear. For me at least, I enjoy a difficulty ramp while leveling and initial gearing, but at some point I want to feel like a badass after going through all that - in D3, it's almost backwards. Leveling is incredibly easy, then when you get max level and badass gear...you're getting your ass kicked in Act2/3.
Click to expand...

Yep, the curve was shaped incorrectly when it came to difficulty. It should have gotten more difficult much earlier. Getting killed in Normal -to- Hell basically never happens, even with pretty crap gear.
 
LeninGHOLA said:
Yep, the curve was shaped incorrectly when it came to difficulty. It should have gotten more difficult much earlier. Getting killed in Normal -to- Hell basically never happens, even with pretty crap gear.
Click to expand...

Yea if you want a challenge, you have to make it so by choosing bad stats on gear lol
 
LeninGHOLA said:
Bahahaha.



To think that everyone shitted on the idea that people enjoy playing single player more than multiplayer... Hell, "it's a MP only game, and Diablo always has been" got spread around a LOT when people complained about always online issues.
Click to expand...
I think you misunderstand. Prior to this patch hitting, playing in a group puts you at a massive disadvantage for gear drops unless everyone has equally high MF. This is a clear problem in a game where the whole goal is getting gear.
 
LeninGHOLA said:
Yep, the curve was shaped incorrectly when it came to difficulty. It should have gotten more difficult much earlier. Getting killed in Normal -to- Hell basically never happens, even with pretty crap gear.
Click to expand...

I must have had beyond shitty gear at the time then lol. Hell was where things started getting tough for me. I remember having to pop Diamond Skin with my Wizard on Rakanoth right before he did that "blink strike" attack, which would 1-shot me otherwise. Being able to distinguish that attack animation from his aoe one in that split second was critical.
 
Rizen said:
I think you misunderstand. Prior to this patch hitting, playing in a group puts you at a massive disadvantage for gear drops unless everyone has equally high MF. This is a clear problem in a game where the whole goal is getting gear.
Click to expand...

I don't misunderstand. I played 80% of my time grouped in D3. I say the supposition that the only reasons a small minority of players are grouping is due to MF and difficulty is not entirely true. In D2, you wouldn't want to group with people that had much lower MF than you either. MF and difficulty scaling certainly are factors in the ratio of people grouping vs. soloing, they just aren't the primary reasons.

Most of the 10million people who bought the game played by themselves, and that would have been the case even if the game was properly balanced from day 1. Most people who purchased Diablo 2 also played by themselves. Lots of people played the multiplayer portion, but the majority of players spent less time online vs single player

My point is that it was asserted that making a single player component to the game would be useless, since nobody would want to play a Diablo game by themselves.
 
Yoshiyuki Blade said:
I must have had beyond shitty gear at the time then lol. Hell was where things started getting tough for me. I remember having to pop Diamond Skin with my Wizard on Rakanoth right before he did that "blink strike" attack, which would 1-shot me otherwise. Being able to distinguish that attack animation from his aoe one in that split second was critical.
Click to expand...


I only played melee, so that may be why I didn't really die more than a handful of times before Inferno.
 
Yoshiyuki Blade said:
I must have had beyond shitty gear at the time then lol. Hell was where things started getting tough for me. I remember having to pop Diamond Skin with my Wizard on Rakanoth right before he did that "blink strike" attack, which would 1-shot me otherwise. Being able to distinguish that attack animation from his aoe one in that split second was critical.
Click to expand...

Well you were almost to Inferno at that point. I had to grab another set of gear from the AH for Hell Diablo as my latency in the game didn't allow for me to properly dodge his attacks.
 
LeninGHOLA said:
My point is that it was asserted that making a single player component to the game would be useless, since nobody would want to play a Diablo game by themselves.
Click to expand...

Eh, even if they're playing by themselves, it's not an isolated environment like an offline single player mode would be. I bet most of us farmed gear and commodities to sell on the AH for better gear. So there's still player interaction going on at some level, though in the most remote way possible.

cageymaru said:
Well you were almost to Inferno at that point. I had to grab another set of gear from the AH for Hell Diablo as my latency in the game didn't allow for me to properly dodge his attacks.
Click to expand...

Most of hell was pretty tough actually, I just referenced an extreme case with Rakanoth that required more-than-normal precision to clear. I think I was even skipping elite packs by Act 2.
 
Also, rather than being able to use more skills as you unlock many more while leveling up, you had to use less because the majority weren't viable. Early on I used all kinds of crazy builds and it was fun...later in Hell then Inferno, I had to use a certain build to be viable, which is the exact opposite of what this skill system was supposed to be. In D2 I had a very viable charged bolt sorc leveled up to 86 that would destroy shit.
 
TwistedAegis said:
Early on I used all kinds of crazy builds and it was fun...later in Hell then Inferno, I had to use a certain build to be viable, which is the exact opposite of what this skill system was supposed to be..
Click to expand...

Same. Leap, ground stomp, and seismic slam were mainstays of my build until Inferno. I changed around a lot of skills but I had a ton of fun with those three, especially. I found out that the build that got me into Inferno was basically suicidal. lol
 
Yoshiyuki Blade said:
Eh, even if they're playing by themselves, it's not an isolated environment like an offline single player mode would be. I bet most of us farmed gear and commodities to sell on the AH for better gear. So there's still player interaction going on at some level, though in the most remote way possible.
Click to expand...

There is truth to this.
 
Business6 said:
Same. Leap, ground stomp, and seismic slam were mainstays of my build until Inferno. I changed around a lot of skills but I had a ton of fun with those three, especially. I found out that the build that got me into Inferno was basically suicidal. lol
Click to expand...

Same with wizard. I used all the AOE spells that required you to be nearly in melee range...frost nova, then bomb, then the chain reaction force wave. Inferno...I guess there is a crit build similar to that now, but the cost to get gear like that seems prohibitive.
 
By the way, I wonder if the price of 6 prop recipes for weapons will skyrocket. I learned a few that I found on a whim because I thought they were too worthless to even sell lol. It'll still be hard to get a good roll though. 3 props will be consumed by +min damage, +max damage and +% damage to be worth considering. Edit: Scratch that. I've only found a few 5 prop recipes.
 
Patch Notes TL;DR: We are going to make the game easier, death less expensive, and give you more loot. Sadly the loot will still be crap but you'll have more of it.

I never really was of the opinion that D3 is all about the RMAH and the fees Blizzard collects, but it sure seems like it is no longer about the game at all and all about the "efficiency at which you can generate loot" presumably to sell a bunch of it at the RMAH.

#fail
 
Thuleman said:
Patch Notes TL;DR: We are going to make the game easier, death less expensive, and give you more loot. Sadly the loot will still be crap but you'll have more of it.

I never really was of the opinion that D3 is all about the RMAH and the fees Blizzard collects, but it sure seems like it is no longer about the game at all and all about the "efficiency at which you can generate loot" presumably to sell a bunch of it at the RMAH.

#fail
Click to expand...

It will also make loot worth less than it is now, and price many items right off the RMAH. I doubt their revenues from RMAH will change much.
 
LeninGHOLA said:
It will also make loot worth less than it is now, and price many items right off the RMAH. I doubt their revenues from RMAH will change much.
Click to expand...
Could be.
Or it could be that due to the influx of more quality items the price of items on the RMAH will drop and thus there will actually be more RMAH transactions sort of like more people buying games on Steam when they are $5 as opposed to $50.

I bet you anything that there are plenty of people who wouldn't mind spending $1.25 on a piece of gear and yet the very same person wouldn't spend $5 on the same piece of gear.
 
As luck will have it I actually got into a conversation with a botter yesterday and got some interesting insights in how they operate.

The botter averages 300k/hour and the software he uses is undetectable by Blizzard (or hasn't been detected to date anyway) but it doesn't allow you to run multiple instances on the same machine (which some other bots do allow, but those users do get busted). His solution is to spin up VMs and run multiple bots that way. They are all farming Hell Act 2 with high movement speed (25%) and very high gold find (280+).

This is the most efficient way to gold farm as the bot never dies and there are plenty of mobs with few elite pack occurrences (elites take longer to kill and don't drop as much gold as you could have gotten just killing normal mobs). The bot will loot and sell gear but the botter said that he doesn't bother as it takes time away from the grind. He has the bot pick up legendaries, set items, and/or recipies when they drop. When the inventory is full the bot returns to the stash and deposits the stuff.

The guy didn't make the bot, he's paying for it at a cost of USD20 per month per instance. Since I am not morally opposed to botting this got me thinking ....

If you buy gold from the gold sellers rather than the AH, then the price is like $1.2 per million. So for $20 I could buy 16.6 million gold. Since I wouldn't be a pro-botter I would run a single instance of the bot, and probably only for like 4 hours per day. That would net me 1.2 million gold per day, or 36 million per month. So on face value it would make sense to bot for gold rather than buy it from gold sellers.

However, I also pay $0.22 per KWh for electricity and when my machine is on it sucks ~370W when running D3. So 120 hours of botting per month times 0.37 KW times $0.22 = $9.77.

Total cost of botting 120 hours per month is $29.77 for a gain of 36 million. Alternatively you could spend $30 and buy 25 million from the gold sellers and not risk your account getting banned.

So my conclusion is that for me it doesn't make sense to bot because I wouldn't run the bot long enough per day to make it work. Obviously the numbers look a lot better if you were to run the bot for 8 hours, or 16 per day.

The botter doesn't actually sell the gold, he buys up high end items with the gold and then sells those on the RMAH.
 
^That's weak. A friend of mine has been running a bot since the first week, at about 800k/h (probably closer to a million) in inferno act1. He's not even doing anything with it. He's not buying anything or selling anything either. It's just pointlessly running on his spare machine 24/7. Every so often he'll make some radiant starts for shits and giggles, but that's about it.
 
I wonder which place they farm - i was averaging 300k gold per hour in act 3 hell with my 220%GF +5 stacks of NV bach when i had my GF gear.
 
northrop said:
^That's weak. A friend of mine has been running a bot since the first week, at about 800k/h (probably closer to a million) in inferno act1.
Click to expand...
My guess is that your info is old especially since you are specifically saying "since the first week". I found 300k to be low as well but the thing is that the all destructible items that used to drop a lot of gold have been nerfed weeks ago. It used to be that for example each vase would drop a shitton of gold. Now those containers don't drop anything or maybe a little gold every 10th or so.

@Michaelius, all he said was Hell Act 2. Who knows maybe they run the whole act as to not seem to bot-like.

I think that when comparing gold per hour then a human player will likely make more than a bot just because a human has situational awareness and can respond better to how the map is layed out yet.

To me it was really surprising to find out how not worth botting is to a casual botter in D3 whereas in say EVE or EQ2 you can make decent coin even if you only do it for a few hours a day.
 
Thuleman said:
My guess is that your info is old especially since you are specifically saying "since the first week". I found 300k to be low as well but the thing is that the all destructible items that used to drop a lot of gold have been nerfed weeks ago. It used to be that for example each vase would drop a shitton of gold. Now those containers don't drop anything or maybe a little gold every 10th or so.
Click to expand...
Could be. I haven't played the game in weeks myself, but I do know that he has been making adjustments to his character. DH with +350 gold find, and his bot does not depend on destructible items at all. At least the bot he was showing me two weeks ago when I was at his place didn't.
 
might as well get it now it's not going to be any less expensive even in a year
 
I played diablo 3 for like 2 weeks then got really boring,, it was just a grindfest with no fun...
the items where annoying, the lack of proper endgame was the worse, felt like i wasted my money buying the game
 
mope54 said:
might as well get it now it's not going to be any less expensive even in a year
Click to expand...

Might leave a bad taste in his mouth if he tries it now though. I would second waiting for a few months to a year at least for some patches if you're just starting out. Blizzard still doesn't know exactly what they're doing (as evidenced by repair fees- they increased it a bunch, and now they are decreasing it), and by then, some aspects of the game should be more concrete.
 
guess it depends on expectations

I wasn't planning on getting it because i was going to just play to level 10 with my buddies but when we finally cranked it up about 2-3 weeks ago realized that starter accounts can't play with full accounts (wtf?) so I ended up buying it. I haven't been wow'ed (no pun intended) but I haven't been particularly disappointed either.

rather than waiting might as well start up a player and enjoy the storyline while waiting for the patch.

stuff like repair costs being adjusted up and then down is just normal balancing and will go on for years
 
Skizzy said:
Blizzard still doesn't know exactly what they're doing (as evidenced by repair fees- they increased it a bunch, and now they are decreasing it), and by then, some aspects of the game should be more concrete.
Click to expand...
I really don't get the repair fee thing. The amount of the fee is irrelevant as is not sure why someone would make a big deal out of it one way or another. At level 60 I have no idea what I pay per death, my guess is that it is around 10k or so. What's the fuss all about?
 
Just throwin out a line, but has anyone really sat down and studied the economics of the AH and RMAH?

I've just started in my endeavor and want to see if there's anyone out there who has found similar results. So far, I've noticed that there's a big discrepancy between the RMAH and AH in terms of value based on what the RMAH values gold to be worth. The only downside to this, and whats keeping me from making $7 per gem resale is that I can't sell gold on the RMAH, I've been trying for a while now and nothing has been selling. I attribute this to an influx of people selling gold (presumably due to botting) and a lack of people purchasing gold.

The only way that i've seen currently to make a decent amount is to buy items in the AH, and sell them at a loss (in terms what the gold is worth at a $ value based on what you'd get for selling) on the RMAH. This would constitute putting in time farming gold + items with high MF and gold find values, which is actually something I find enjoyable playing with friends.

I'd love to start a sub topic of AH/RMAH economics if people are interested, but i figured I'd post here as this is the only D3 thread i could find thats relevant.
 
wrt: RMAH/AH economics
The biggest issue is that there really isn't any data. Unlike in other games with in-game economies in D3 there is no record of what items have sold for and how many items have sold. This is were EVE Online for example really shines.

For example, I sell all my loot (that is worth selling) for less than half of the lowest buyout I can find. Could I potentially sell it for more than that? Probably. Why do I sell for less? Because an item sitting in my inventory, or taking up one of my AH slots, is worth nothing to me.

You also hit another good point. Blizzard setting a floor for the gold price prevents the "free market" to take charge and that results in many gold buyers just buying gold from the goldspammers outside of the RMAH. Why would you spend $2.90 on a million gold if you can get more than 2 million for the same price if you buy it not on the RMAH.

Blizzard needs to change the approach to gold sales in that they allow the price to fall as low as it will go and then they tax each transaction with 15% and the $1 on top of the gold price rather than including it into the face value of an item.

So what if the gold price falls to 1 cent per million, or 1 cent per billion, who cares. It will push some people out of the market (and out of botting) and it will eventually even itself out. The 999 billion gold cap per character puts an artificial ceiling on inflation.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top