Diablo 3 focus too much on RMAH /rant

[Manicdan]

the math sounds right, but actual numbers are not the same

when i get hit for 20k, how do you expect me to use just gear to get that back? with 1000 life per hit (which is alot) it still takes well over 10 seconds to get that back if you never stop shooting. so in order to recover from 1 hit, you have to stand there and shoot long enough for them to hit you 5 more times. or you kite, so lets say it takes about twice as long since you run instead of attack half the time. so 25-30 seconds to get that back. 30 seconds is a long time to never get hit by a mob, when they have things like: mortar, teleport, vortex, wall, fast, devastate, jailer, frozen, arcane, and reflect damage. then some mobs just come with things like: ranged attacks, invisibility, burrow, and leaps.

so option A is loose alot of dps to take 3 hits, or just try to kill them twice as fast perfectly. with a pack in act 1 i can usually burn them down in 20-60 seconds, it makes sense that its better to try a perfect offense and ignore defense completely. my demon hunter friend has so little defense he gets one shotted by the chains on butcher. (15k hp type glass cannon). i go for just enough to survive one hit, and hope i have a potion ready.


so if melee got hit for half as much, and could stand there and dps twice as often, then they can get 4x the survivability from life on hit.

[zanzabar]

the math sounds right, but actual numbers are not the same

when i get hit for 20k, how do you expect me to use just gear to get that back? with 1000 life per hit (which is alot) it still takes well over 10 seconds to get that back if you never stop shooting. so in order to recover from 1 hit, you have to stand there and shoot long enough for them to hit you 5 more times. or you kite, so lets say it takes about twice as long since you run instead of attack half the time. so 25-30 seconds to get that back. 30 seconds is a long time to never get hit by a mob, when they have things like: mortar, teleport, vortex, wall, fast, devastate, jailer, frozen, arcane, and reflect damage. then some mobs just come with things like: ranged attacks, invisibility, burrow, and leaps.

so option A is loose alot of dps to take 3 hits, or just try to kill them twice as fast perfectly. with a pack in act 1 i can usually burn them down in 20-60 seconds, it makes sense that its better to try a perfect offense and ignore defense completely. my demon hunter friend has so little defense he gets one shotted by the chains on butcher. (15k hp type glass cannon). i go for just enough to survive one hit, and hope i have a potion ready.


so if melee got hit for half as much, and could stand there and dps twice as often, then they can get 4x the survivability from life on hit.

melee is not really about life on hit, the barb and monk get hp back from most of their skills. like a barb with overpower you get healed per thing it hits and the cooldown goes down per crit. with the monk you get healed per spirit spent and most skills add a shield or involn and a heal.


what i think that blizz is doing is getting it so you have to 2 man with a tank (as all melee have to be tanks now) and a ranged glass cannon. i also did a full act1 run yesterday with a demon hunter who is glass cannon with mostly lvl 62/63 gear and 20k hp (had all AS gear and needed money) the butcher only hit for 8k with the aoe chains so it should not one hit you. the main problem i see is that if you are a tank you will not have the dps before the enrage timer (especially in act3 since they are anti melee skilled, like fart man that stays in the farts and the farts do double damage but he enrages not so what do i do die in fart or from enrange) and then if you are ranged you now get 2 hits instead of 1 hit.

on the RMAH, blizz takes $1 from each sale, shouldent they make it easy to get gear so more people buy gear on the RMAH for cheaper thaat they get more money. or maybe they should fix legendary weapons, i found a grand father sword yesterday and have not IDed it yet as it is worthless, the best sword from d2 is in d3 and it is competently worthless right now.

[Manicdan]

i get hit for 20k from those chains. who gets hit for 8k?

act 1 is a joke right now and has been for a while if your gear is any bit decent. all of my stuff is lvl 61 or less with lvl 62 gloves and a lvl 63 weapon.

[zanzabar]

i get hit for 20k from those chains. who gets hit for 8k?

act 1 is a joke right now and has been for a while if your gear is any bit decent. all of my stuff is lvl 61 or less with lvl 62 gloves and a lvl 63 weapon.

it may have the been the barb buff i put on him but it did less than half. and i was running it for money to regear and hoping that it was going to drop something since it can drop 62 and 63 gear but it did not drop .

[Chickenfeed]

i get hit for 20k from those chains. who gets hit for 8k?

I just redid my Wizard and did a few butcher runs and he hits me for only 5-6K now. I don't even use Force Armor with my setup. My listed damage has been cut in half BUT because I am not constantly fleeing for my life I am able to consistently do damage more often as I don't get dismembered everytime a fallen breaks wind...

Look at this effective health pool calculator.

http://rubensayshi.github.com/d3-ehp-calculator/#intro

You will be surprised Basically it shows you what stats will currently benifit your surviability most. More or less it is possible to take *many* hits and have a comfortable buffer where you aren't always hairtrigger with survival. The great thing is often you can go toe to toe so you don't constantly have to stay on the move and if things do get hairy you can just revert to that. Its much more enjoyable and less frusturating to play in my opinion. Theres a lot more room for error and things are much more forgiving. I went from 30K dps with Act 2 being annoying to 14K dps and it being borderline easy. Sounds crazy but it works.

I currently have 8500 armor, 550+ resist all, 20% dodge, 30% melee reduction, 32% block (with high block amount like 3700-4500 or something ) 32000hp along with 700 life per second. I'm using the Enchantress for the extra 15% armor as this ends up increasing survivability more than having the heals of the templar. My ultimate goal is to have 40%+ melee reduction 750+ resists, 25% dodge and 48% block chance with as close to 20K dps as possible. This is entirely possible and will take time but it surely will make A3/4 much easier.

This is still a ranged and AOE build (its not a melee Wizard) so when needed kiting is still viable for the toughest of mobs. I was shocked when I was able to take nearly a dozen mortar hits where as before using force armor id be down 3 hits max. Not having to constantly be on the run makes stationary abilities even better as the enemies stay in one spot ( ie blizzard, venom hydra pools, meteor etc. )

With the right skills this same kind of setup can be adapted to the other classes as well ( espeically Barbarians )

[Buckeye]

The templar really does not seem to actually heal you all that often either.

[Manicdan]

Chickenfeed, you have a wizard with a shield?

[Chickenfeed]

Chickenfeed, you have a wizard with a shield?

You bet I do.

Its down to how damage migitation scales. If you can achieve 90%+ damage reduction in melee ( doable ) with a high block amount all of a sudden those 50K hits are doing under 5K. Coupled with high block and dodge you can get to a point where you won't even take damage 75% of the time and the damage you do take is sinificantly reduced.

The damage reduction is mutiplicative. You take your armor damage reduction, lets say 70% (1-.70) multiply it by your resistence reduction, again lets say 70% ( 1-.70) and finally multiply that by any melee/ranged damage reduction, in my case currently 30% (1.-30)

So you end up with (1-.70)*(1-.70)*(1-.30) which is 0.063. Multiply that by 100 and you get 6.3. So in the end you effective take 6.3% of the total damage for a reduction of 93.7%!

Now that raw 50K hit the Mr Fallen does suddenly only does 3150! Couple this with a near 50% chance to block damage in excess of 3150, you no longer take *any* damage 50% of the time he attacks and another X% based on your dodge chance. The higher into the 90% range you get your reduction the better it scales as more and more attacks can be blocked outright.

This why is with the right setup, shields are your friends

Also its worth mentioning that you can find shields with +int (and any other primary stat for that matter) and +crit chance along with a high block amount and chance so you still get some damage out of it versus using a source offhand.

[STEvil]

and the next nerf will be..

[DeathReborn]

and the next nerf will be..

Whatever people use, Blizz nerfs. So I expect Life on Hit to be next.

[Chickenfeed]

and the next nerf will be..

Its not unbalanced per say, you need the right items to make it work and they are not all together cheap. I'd consider something unbalanced
if you are able to coast through with a character with minimal to no item investment. This was the case with the force armor rune until they changed it.

I found my first good ilvl 63 weapon off the butcherer last night. Does 1000 dps with a bunch of + min and max damage + 35% damage 180vit and a socket. With the new drop rates, with some patience you are now able to do Act 3 Hell runs to gear adequately for up to Act 2 Inferno... all but the best items will become dirt cheap.

[nksharp]

It's fun when they start nerfing equipment people payed money for :/

[Chickenfeed]

Whatever people use, Blizz nerfs. So I expect Life on Hit to be next.

The 50% IAS decrease should make that unnecessary as high IAS was the main mechanic that made life on hit so effective. Life leech out performs life on hit once you exceed a certain damage threshold and especially with a high critical chance and crit damage %.

I've gotten up to 95% damage reduction on melee now (against lvl61 mobs) with 40K hp and 800 life regen making it possible to tank nearly everything in A1/2 (yet to start a3 in earnest yet). I did the butcher again and didn't have to use a potion or healing well once, it was pretty funny actually, his normal melee hits were hitting me for less than a fallen did beforehand. I even let him hit me with his charge and it did 1/3 of my health at the most...

One intersting thing I just noticed about mortar mobs is their mortar attacks have a minimum effective distance so if you get close enough the mortars can no longer hit you at all (looks to be within 15 or so yards from the mob) so its a matter of being able to handle their melee at that point. That alone makes this much less painful. Basically it seems blizzard intended mortars to piss off ranged characters more than anything. I've also found the damage from arcane sentry won't cut me in half in 1 second anymore so if i take a couple hits from 1 or even 2 of them I'm not completely screwed.

Theres still the hellishly terrible combinations that cause most trouble but its just best to avoid those but at least now I find myself being able to handle 8 out of 10 groups without too much difficulty.

Also the biggest thing I've noitced now, my repair costs went WAY down. Before even if I didnt die and went through a few areas Id have a few thousand in repairs. Now I can go all the way from leroics mansion to the butcher and in the end repairs are only around the 2K mark.

[Manicdan]

but they said life leach is reduced in higher levels to make that take a long time to reach.
last math i saw was 3% life leech is really .6% in inferno. devs even responded that life leech needed a buff because at this point life on hit was 6x better, and about half as effective as they wanted. inorder to get life leech better than life on hit, you need 100k dps.

and the 50% nerf on IAS was a lie. i had 12% on one weapon and 19% on another, after patch they were 3% and 6%, my gloves went from 12% to 6% though.

i played with the spreadsheet some more. my stats ended up with 97k EHP and 140k with dodge.
my brother on his monk was at 719k/1280k EHP. i had him change his sheet from monk to demon hunter and it dropped to 120k. thats how pathetic the survival skills are for demon hunters. i changed up a few pieces, but not sure how much it will really affect things, in act 1 im not scared of death anyway, and i wont go to act 2/3 until prices come down on lvl 63 gear.

would be nice to see that sheet expanded though to include other means of survival, like the life on hit/leech/second and see an example of a typical lvl 60 something mobs hits, and how long you can survive.

[s4pphire]

The worst part was the nerfing of drop-rates post-RMAH to increase their sales. Either way, the first few weeks were really enjoyable to me and the Inferno progression was rather satisfying.

Ended up selling my gear for ~$2k and taking a break, the game really does feel to revolve too much around the RMAH in its current state.

[Chickenfeed]

but they said life leach is reduced in higher levels to make that take a long time to reach.
last math i saw was 3% life leech is really .6% in inferno. devs even responded that life leech needed a buff because at this point life on hit was 6x better, and about half as effective as they wanted. inorder to get life leech better than life on hit, you need 100k dps. .

In regards to life leech in Inferno, it works at 20% effectiveness. Its more likely they buff life leech items thnn changing the percents themselves though. As I mentioned above, life leech works well with high crit chance and crit damage. Before trying my defensive setup again, I was using a critical build with 35% critcal and 4x damage on crits (300%). With arcane orb using a slower 2 hander I was easily criting for 300k. I had 5% life leech which results in 1% in inferno. Considering those crits were often aoe I was looking at 3K heals often on 3+ targets. Thats like getting a free potion 30% of the time you attack a group but obiously with that setup I would generally take more damage than I could heal. Now life on hit is better in most other circumstances but the reduction to IAS did hurt it.

i played with the spreadsheet some more. my stats ended up with 97k EHP and 140k with dodge.
my brother on his monk was at 719k/1280k EHP. i had him change his sheet from monk to demon hunter and it dropped to 120k. thats how pathetic the survival skills are for demon hunters.

Yes unfortunately demon hunters are more about their maneuverability and avoidance more than anything.

would be nice to see that sheet expanded though to include other means of survival, like the life on hit/leech/second and see an example of a typical lvl 60 something mobs hits, and how long you can survive.

I'd honestly like math on block factored in as well and possibly some active skills, for example with when I use Diamond Skin with Crystal shell my actual HP goes from 40K to 60K for up to 6 seconds. Obviously this boosts your effective health even if temporarily. With block and crystal shell factored in my effective hp is likely 3x higher ( hard to say without know exact mob damage average ) and its over 1 million (melee vs lvl61 mobs) now before dodge. I may try to work on the formula where you can alter block chance and block range.

Life regeneration is more about how quickly you can restore your health pool rather than how large it is so its not quite the same comparatively.

[Philip_J_Fry]

The worst part was the nerfing of drop-rates post-RMAH to increase their sales. Either way, the first few weeks were really enjoyable to me and the Inferno progression was rather satisfying.

Ended up selling my gear for ~$2k and taking a break, the game really does feel to revolve too much around the RMAH in its current state.

i saw 2 threads on blizz trading forum where people are selling all their inferno act 4 capable gears, but for like ~$500 per character. both said they got bored and want to cash out.

as many have pointed out. there are ~ 2000 people in public games at prime time during the weekdays, comapare to ~ 20k, 30k just couple weeks ago. xfire shows that there are less people playing. sure these are small sample size, but the trend is that less people are playing due to design around RMAH, loot sux, repair cost, GAH costs, lack of social interface, IAS nerf (I cant imagine how people feel after spending like $100+ on those IAS gears)...

this is just a guess, but i think if u have act 3, 4 capable gear (ie. good end game gear)and want to cash out, and be done with this game, better do it soon, like with in the couple weeks. u could probably sell ur gear for exchange rate of > $5 USD / 1 million gold. less people playing = gold heading toward $1, 2 per million gold. that 20million 1h, xbow will worth a lot less. i suppose the draw back is that u cant farm if they buff loot down the road, but what are the odds of that?

obviously there are wild cards, had they not increase the repair cost. gold would have been worth a lot less than the $4 per million that spammers are advertising now, used to be $20+ per mill a month ago from spammers. if blizzard makes gold scarce, and nerf loot even further. less people will be playing, lower demand = gold value go down. if they buff loot. gears supply goes up. gears price will drop, both gold and RMAH. i dont see what blizzard can do to keep the ratio of USD to gold high.

just my 2cents

[SexyMF]

I hate real money in this game. All trading should be social.

I'm up to Act II Hell with a level 55 Barbarian. I can't get anywhere. The elites mobs are impossible. Plagued arcane something something elite with three invul minions to support it. All this in a very small cave. If you do manage to kill an elite by kiting they experience and loot doesn't match the effort. This blows. What's the point?

Why can't I play the game? Must I go to the auction house and spend money just to get to the next act? Should they close the auction house and just add direct credit card facility to the game? - please pay $50 to clear this cave.

Frustrating

[Manicdan]

the jump from normal to nightmare was a joke. cause you atleast know whats going on. in normal its your first pass through so you get a suprise and it kills ya. but in nightmare i didnt have ANY problems. i just died a few times by accident.

hell however got quite tough and i liked it. there were a few elite packs that my friend and i had to skip cause they put out too much damage for us glass cannons. but that was also before i researched every little detail to my class, or spent any money on real gear. i think i used lvl 40-50 gear all the way to 60.

i bet for 5000g you can replace any slot with something quite nice or specific to a job, thanks to all the lvl 50-60 rare gear the people find in infero that they cant sell for crap, so it almost always gets vendored for <1000g

[Philip_J_Fry]

thats exactly what i am doing. leveling my lvl 23 DH. playing new class is actually quite fun. gears are dirt cheap. i got like 2.2 million from playing a crappy barb thats stuck on act 2 inferno, around 5 quest into act 2.

the diablo 3 economy is fudged up. who actually gets 10+ million gold from playing? and no auction house does not count. i am talking about collecting 10million gold as u play. its obvious that all the gold comes from botters, exploiters, dupers ...etc.

btw just login and saw a spammer offering $3 per million, checked their website and it was actually $3.66 per million. gold is going to be worthless. liek i said if u have decent gear and want to uninstall. sell ur gear quick.

good post on diablo 3 economy:
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/5884438554

lol just saw this:
D3 taken apart

[Manicdan]

interesting read there on the economy, however he misses a few major details

items are not leaving the game. i think whats going to happen is what happens in WoW every time a new tier comes out. right now there a probably a few thousand high dps weapons. in a month there could be 10x as many. so does that mean people who payed 10m gold for one now, could replace it for 10k in a few months? very likely. however on the opposite side of that, how much gold does each person have? right now i earn about 50-100k gold per hour, by selling everything i pick up, or flat out from gold.

the reason no one "earned" 10m gold is because you dont trade gold, you trade goods.
like i said i find 50-100k gold, but i dont get just gold, i might also find a weapon worth 100k, so i sell it. a few more items get sold for what people can easily earn finding on the ground, and eventually i can buy something worth 10m.

back to how much gold people have then. some purchases were overpriced, and might not resell very well. others i buy for half the price i end up selling them for. so there may not be much gold leaving from the AHs 15% tax. the big dumb part of this economy is that its not a zero sum economy. in wow you buy something, make it soul-bound, and now its worth nothing. gold constantly comes in and goes out. but in d3 gold comes in, then only changes hands.

2 ways to bring this back to normal:

1) raise the AH tax to something serious, like 25-50%. it needs to be high enough that using the AH should always be a loss if you bought gear from it. drops will still be worth something, but not nearly as much.

2) make gear soulbound or destroyed over time, but make the disenchanting mats useful to half build gear of similar quality. this is so gear is constantly coming and going from the game, and will make prices way less inflated for higher levels.

[zanzabar]

I hate real money in this game. All trading should be social.

I'm up to Act II Hell with a level 55 Barbarian. I can't get anywhere. The elites mobs are impossible. Plagued arcane something something elite with three invul minions to support it. All this in a very small cave. If you do manage to kill an elite by kiting they experience and loot doesn't match the effort. This blows. What's the point?

Why can't I play the game? Must I go to the auction house and spend money just to get to the next act? Should they close the auction house and just add direct credit card facility to the game? - please pay $50 to clear this cave.

Frustrating

as a barb act2 is one of the hardest early on due to the wasps and the anti melee poison, but as a barb you have leap with the armor rune and ignore pain. you need those and a 2 hand weapon and you should be golden. for under 100k you can get a 600-800 dps lvl62/63 with reduced level requirements and rape the all of hell. when i was leveling my barb i did it without the reduced level weapon and it was still easy once i got those 2 skills and a bit of all resist (and poison resist you need it for act3 or the plague guys will destroy you.)

diablo games are also about loot so if you want to advance without trading it will be very hard, and since they increased the repair costs 4-7x with lvl 53 gear and up i feel for you. the repair increase s melee since we leave alot of durability on the battle field since we get hit.

thats exactly what i am doing. leveling my lvl 23 DH. playing new class is actually quite fun. gears are dirt cheap. i got like 2.2 million from playing a crappy barb thats stuck on act 2 inferno, around 5 quest into act 2.

the diablo 3 economy is fudged up. who actually gets 10+ million gold from playing? and no auction house does not count. i am talking about collecting 10million gold as u play. its obvious that all the gold comes from botters, exploiters, dupers ...etc.

btw just login and saw a spammer offering $3 per million, checked their website and it was actually $3.66 per million. gold is going to be worthless. liek i said if u have decent gear and want to uninstall. sell ur gear quick.

good post on diablo 3 economy:
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/5884438554

lol just saw this:
D3 taken apart

in raw gold pickup i get about 150-200k per hour once i get stacks, and i run about 14k in repairs an hour if i do not die on my barb, then i also get drops. with blue lvl 61+ i salvage them and the blue inferno crafting material sells for about 1800-2k each were the items are mostly under 800 and near 500g. and in the RMAH it is about $50 for a 10mil item that is common.

interesting read there on the economy, however he misses a few major details

items are not leaving the game. i think whats going to happen is what happens in WoW every time a new tier comes out. right now there a probably a few thousand high dps weapons. in a month there could be 10x as many. so does that mean people who payed 10m gold for one now, could replace it for 10k in a few months? very likely. however on the opposite side of that, how much gold does each person have? right now i earn about 50-100k gold per hour, by selling everything i pick up, or flat out from gold.

the reason no one "earned" 10m gold is because you dont trade gold, you trade goods.
like i said i find 50-100k gold, but i dont get just gold, i might also find a weapon worth 100k, so i sell it. a few more items get sold for what people can easily earn finding on the ground, and eventually i can buy something worth 10m.

back to how much gold people have then. some purchases were overpriced, and might not resell very well. others i buy for half the price i end up selling them for. so there may not be much gold leaving from the AHs 15% tax. the big dumb part of this economy is that its not a zero sum economy. in wow you buy something, make it soul-bound, and now its worth nothing. gold constantly comes in and goes out. but in d3 gold comes in, then only changes hands.

2 ways to bring this back to normal:

1) raise the AH tax to something serious, like 25-50%. it needs to be high enough that using the AH should always be a loss if you bought gear from it. drops will still be worth something, but not nearly as much.

2) make gear soulbound or destroyed over time, but make the disenchanting mats useful to half build gear of similar quality. this is so gear is constantly coming and going from the game, and will make prices way less inflated for higher levels.

raising the AH regresivly to 25-50 will make things cost more overall and keep people out of the higher end more, for you r idea to work they need to make it so over 1mil it gues up, then 10mil it goes up again or some other progressive model as that will depress the cost of higher end items.

2) making things soul bound or destroying them will make things cost alot more and be much more rare, as of now the prices are depressed since second or third tier gear is cheap. diablo games do not have set quest rewards or boss drops, if it did it would not be a fun game. the game is not wow and trying to make it so will ruin the game. back in d2 the currency was SOJ rings, there was a set amount of rings in the game that could exist and once they were all dropped there were no more. then in LOD it was runes and those would not drop in a reasonable amount unless you got a group of characters with the forge quest and broke the soul stone for one person to get a good rune, this lead to people crashing games doing diablo runs and soloing the quest and taking every ones one time loot drop from it and running off, or people bottling the 1st boss in act5.

inferno was not intended for the masses or for people who do not want to crawl through it, there will be elites and champs that you cannot kill and you have to remake or avoid them, this was always the case with diablo games and just how it is, the main game from normal through hell is easy and every one should beable to clear it with minimal AH use but then in inferno it is like running uber and clone content in d2 and most people never knew it was there and then of the people that knew how to get there is was so hard that only a few people ever cleared it all, this time they made it so any one can try and all that happens is people that is to hard. they did steel the AS off items and remove most of the involn builds and that was ty but for gear and the economy it is allowing alot of peoplle through act2 and blizz did not expect the clear rates that they are getting so if anything the AH is working to well (they did make everything much easier and but cost more in repairs to run to get people into inferno but not drive gold to worthless already and give a low chance of lvl63 items in act1 so you can make money there to fund running acts 3+)

[Manicdan]

the higher AH tax wouldnt make things cost more since no one would have the gold to buy it. it would be slow at first, and you might see a spike in prices. but people have only 1 way to make money, and that way also gets more gear in the game. so lets imagine all prices doubled due to the tax. people would then have to earn twice the gold. and in that process they would also have to see twice as many gear drops while they earn twice the gold. so the AH now has twice as many things on it to cover the costs, and with more competition, prices go down. now over time as people buy and sell things, they dont get as much gold coming in from the AH, and cant afford prices, and so they must come down as previously stated.

for the destruction or soulbound gear. the point is that gear NEEDs to leave this game. and theres only 2 ways for it to happen. blizz gives us a reason to do it. or a new expac comes out with better gear and all the current stuff is only worth its vendor prices. which do you think will happen?

[zanzabar]

i still do not see how removing gear from the game will make things better. unlike wow there are no set drops and with random stats the chance of getting a good item is really low. if you get a good drop it is still worth alot and if you get a partially good drop it is ok in sales. when you make things soul bound it means that you have no gold value in gear, and while things are getting cheaper by the day now other than a few things like tyrials might with perfect stats have gone up the vast majority of items (especially weapons) have been taking a huge drop in price.


you should not expect to get the greatest gear in a diablo game right off the bat.

[SexyMF]

Why are there merchants in the game if they are worthless? Only used for repairing gear.

I refuse to buy gear just to pass a level. It's borderline cheating. Everything within the game should be sufficient to complete the game.