Yeah, but if you overdo/overtune it you will be geared too quickly with exactly the gear you need (and when there is gear you need that is starting to limit builds, inescapable up to a point in any game) and start to lack meaningful progression through gear, besides being alt unfriendly which is not per se bad if think sorc farming in D2. Which hurts less if there are other meaningful ways to progress independent of the gear.
Still it is hard to balance right since player preferences on how easy it is to gear up is also different per player, where in the end also both a player playing 15 hours a week and those who play 100 h a week can feel they are making progress and are rewarded for their time invested.
What do you think skills gonna use as variable? It will depend and shift with the skill type and itâd be easy to understand when you read the tooltip.
One spear can have 620-890 damage range yet have some magic capacity or +130-463 imbue damage, yet this weapon will affect different classes by efficiency already. Tooltip of one skill explaining 275% of weapon damage and another pointing at 130% of magic capacity or imbue damage is hardly anything different than previous installment. This isnât confusing.
Regardless of how new you are to the series, you should be able understand this small split. You canât tell if a weapon stat is good or not in an ARPG without practical knowledge of how variables get processed and perhaps breakpoints. Otherwise you learn along the road once you compare items and show resilience to stay and grind at endgame after killing Diablo once.
Thereâs no need for extra splits that unnecessary complicate stuff.
Iâve made my own research on topic and I am telling you Diablo loses a lot of player base due to its complex Math. Thatâs it.
What many folks miss is that you can have simple Math and complex min/maxing at the same time, like in HS. And that should have been the goal in D4, not duplicating the crap D3 itemization.
Q1)How long (on average) should it take a fresh char to gear up to proper build playing normally (2-3 hours a day)
As example, hammerdin, using dual spirit, 10 +skill, viper magi armor, no Anni & Torch.
Q2) How long (on average) should then the same character takes (from fresh) to get near optimum BiS gears & stats?
e.g Beefy up hammerdin with enigma, good roll Anni/ torch, Hota/CTA, shako 20 or more +skill
If you have time, 2 more questions.
Q3) How long is it acceptable if you havesuper poor RNG to gear up from start to gear up proper build
Q4) How long is it acceptable if you have super poor RNG to gear up from start to gear up to get near optimum BiS gears & stats?
Same answer to all, as long as the game makes you feel rewarded and that you move forward while you put the time in, it can take years and you will not mind if are having fun. As soon as you do not feel that reward as a player anymore or your struggle accomplishes anything, one hour is too long. It is why Beefhammer still enjoys D;I and others ran away depressed.
So it is about how you design the progression, not the end for that or how long it takes. basically it is the devs resources that decide how much he can put in and how many levels to progression, theoretically it could be infinite. Even endgame is about progressing, unless the endgame is fully based around normalized PVP or other sports play where everyone is equalized
That is one of the main problem with D3 endgame, too many players stop progressing meaningfully at a relative early point in it and run away since they feel their time is not valued anymore unless they play the meta while others still love playing that meta. The faster you make progression, able to skip it entirely and/or the more meaningful it feels at start and the bigger the steps become, the harder it gets to keep feel of progression meaningful and lasting though in general, while you still want them invested.
I know a lovely conundrum to solve with all those different players, then again nobody said game design was not hard or a profession.
Such numbers are also just to illustrate.
If gloves are 10% of the drops normally, increasing it to 30% (without any special affixes) seems reasonable though. 3x the amount of gloves.
The targeting has to be fairly significant to matter though. Trading offers endlessly higher % chance to get exactly the item you want. Kadela and the cube offers absurdly higher chances of getting the items you want.
Item targeting should not offer odds anywhere close to that, but it also has to offer enough to be worth bothering with the item targeting.
I am not particularly a fan of item targeting. But it clearly is something many people want, to mitigate RNG as you say. The game probably should offer some of that, without removing the RNG core.
Which is what should not happen. Randomness should be at the core of the loot system.
That definitely would be the case with such crafted items.
Some do, yeah. Dont give such players what they want.
No such affixes should exist.
The idea that 10 year olds, or grandmothers can only play simple games is silly.
It is often also used (by Skelos as well as others) about so-called âcasualâ players, pretending that âcasualâ players want simple or easy games. Leading to the false conclusion that to bring in more players, the game must be dumbed down.
There is no particular reason a âcasualâ player should want that though. Only thing needed to make a game âcasualâ friendly, really is that it must be possible to play the game in shorter sessions.
Take the Souls games as an example;
The âdifficultyâ is not anti-casual in any way. The obscure gameplay systems are not anti-casual.
The inability to pause the game? That is very anti-casual.
It is a bit more than that. It is a term that says the weighed (less random) items are weighed in a way that benefits the player (that is the âSmartâ aspect), giving them more of what they want.
Nothing sensible about it tbh.
There is no reason why a necro should not be able to use a bow.
Nor use any affix to some degree.
Sadly, that likely is what happens if trading is one of the options. Gear targeting and crafting just wont be able to compete with a crashed market.
Exactly. Trading creates a bad gameplay loop. Replacing the item hunt with wealth accumulation. Watching a number go up steadily, to get the exact items you wanted.
It simply should not be part of the loot acquisition design.
Crafting risks doing much of the same. At least if you can craft specific items with specific materials. Unlike a player market, the crafting system cant crash at least, which is something, preserving the cost of the crafted items throughout the game. But the gameplay loop is similar.
But most people do understand basic math. There is no problem.
Which continues to be a lie. You can upgrade your character without any math.
Green Arrow => Equip. Woohoo, your character was upgraded.
If you on top of being able to see green arrows (does D3 have color blind settings btw?) then also understand enough Math to know that 800% > 10%, then you are golden!
I specifically answered that it is a quite simple game. That doesnât require any complex math. Just like D2 and D3.
No.
There is nothing to struggle with in D3 in the beginning.
Well, the controls of real-time video games is always a struggle for people who never played a video game before.
But math is not causing any meaningful struggle.
Should we make D4 into a turn-based game, so new players struggle less?
I bet more people would struggle with D1 than D3. Not because of math however.
WHICH IT IS! That is the green arrows, the floating dmg numbers, the character sheet etc.
But you know what⌠I guess we have a solution here. I am all in favor of Blizzard adding an in-game calculator to D4.
The numbers aspect (not to be confused with complex math) comes not from the âAâ but from the âRPGâ obviously.
I have not seen a single person ever, who want complex math in A-RPGs tbh.
There are no A-RPGs which require complex math today.
Any examples?
Yeah, agreed.
Bad design.
Speaking of tooltips.
Blizzard really should improve tooltips to show actual dmg numbers.
Like Fireball: Deals 130% wpn dmg (which should be âwpn spellpower dmgâ instead) + 5000 dmg (which comes from skill rank etc.). Cost: 20 mana. 15% base proc chance. Tags: Fire, Projectile, Ranged, Spender, Direct dmg
And then below the basic information about how the dmg number is calculated, show something like: Current values: 8613 dmg. 18.6 mana. 10% crit rate. 40% crit dmg. 10% CB chance. 20% proc chance
Kinda like D3s Damage number on the character sheet. But calculated individually for each of your skills - taking into account your gear, skills, passives, attributes, paragon and all that.
Of course, not taking into account conditional effects. Often legendary and unique effects. Such as âif you are standing in your own dmg AoE effect, Fire Projectiles deal 20% more dmgâ. The tooltip cant/shouldnât really take that into account, since it is conditional.
It doesnât unnecessarily splits it. It creates more interesting weapon designs. Creates more diversity in which types of weapons different builds desires.
Those are very worthwhile benefits that outweigh the increased complexity.
But I am aware that you just want to replace all affixes with Dmg and Defense, kinda like the early version of D4 shown at Blizzcon 2019. Or D:I with its Combat Rating.
Those are still terrible however.
The only one missing it seems to be you tbh. The math in D3 IS simple.
~100 hours. Including lvling and all that of course.
With that kind of BiS gear, probably many hundreds of hours (in which time you would of course also have found plenty of gear for other characters, so it would not be many hundreds of hours per character). And of course stuff like Enigma shouldnt exist in any shape or form.
~150 hours
However, guaranteed items thorugh crafting etc. is not needed here. We just need âgood enoughâ gear, and some sensible item enhancing + item targeting.
Havenât found viper magi armor after 150 hours? Well, fair enough, but you are pretty much guaranteed to have found a rare armor that might be a bit worse in some ways and a bit better in other ways, that can work as a perfectly viable substitute.
In theory, endless time.
It is okay never go get actual optimal BiS.
As long as you can get close enough that it doesnt really matter.
Maybe you dont ever find an Anni, or a Hota, but then you have found a bunch of alternatives, that are nearly as good for your build.
How long to get those substitutes though. Well, more or less the same time as to get the actual BiS.
The goal should just be an itemization system where there isnt 1 best item. I mean, technically 1 item will be best, for any specific build. But there should be many items that are close enough that it just wont matter. No Shako, well, then use one of the other 20 helmets that offer similar power.
The way to get there is to make item affixes broad enough that you dont end up with super specialized items that only work for 1 build, or 1 class. As long as affixes work broadly across many builds and classes (but not universally), getting decent gear, even toward the high end up the gear progression, just gets immensely easier. D2 did that reasonably well. Until they added OP runewords at least.
I know that all white knights suffer from game related denial syndrome, but this one is too much fun haha.
As long as complex min/maxing is possible the more simplified Math would always net you more players. Look at HS for example. The game manages to be âeasy to learn, hard to masterâ without absurd Math values. The same philosophy has to be applied to aRPGs.
I thought we wanted the same thing - Diablo getting more popular - but it looks like your white knighting has blurred your thinking and your replies arenât objective at all.
Did Cyberpunk 2077 dumbed down the game when designing weapon stats? Will they dumb it down for CPO?
I donât think your statistics on aRPGs could be of any reliable source, authority or a standard. When companies have their own metrics for target audiences, your small scaled information with low amount of examples will be ignored.
For a start, try to reach and collect statistic of players who share their first experiences at facing the Butcher in Diablo 1 and Diablo 3. That could give you an idea if math or design matters first clearly but I have no hope. I believe youâll manage to ignore this bit just to drag this discussion more. At least it could be interestingâŚ
People talk about how hard the Butcher was in D1 when they first fought him but 7 year old me figured out the AI was dumb as a rock and got him stuck on the stairs down to the next level.
We already went over this. You apparently dont understand what game rules mean. No complex math is needed for understanding the rules in D3. Nor in HS.
It helps in HS if you are able to do basic subtraction, so you know when HP reach zero. But since the game tells you anyway, it isnât that important after all.
It is needed. People have problems figuring out how to upgrade their character properly which is reduced to Math rules. You are in complete denial and I have no idea what is the culprit. No other poster here is on your side, canât you see?
In your 16k posts. You are discussing Diablo mechanics in these trying to figure out what works best for the game. We have over 1k replies to one another discussing Diablo related stuff. Are you the real Shadout or you are some impostor?
Understanding the concepts of the game is likewise not part of the game rules.
Game rules is stuff like âhow to equip an itemâ. Or âGreen arrow means higher sheet DPS, toughnessâ etc.
You are rather talking about playing the game well.
It does not require math, let alone complex math, to learn how to upgrade your character, nor to understand the concept of upgrading your character. You are given all information needed to learn that within minutes of starting the game; after finding your first item, that represents an upgrade. Which you then equip. That is all there is to it.
Learning how to optimize your character benefits from some very basic math (such as 800% dmg > 10% dmg). But still no complex math.
Understanding the concept boils down to game rules (stats, itemization etc) which require complex Math from the player in order for him to upgrade his character. As someone above said - open a calculator. Or as I said - look at all those players referring to planners and third party tools in order to know what/how to upgrade.
Instead of the Math to have reduced numbers and calculations in D4 they went the other direction - complicating stuff unnecessary. This is outdated design. Look at Hades or LA. Itâs all pure action there. D4 on the other side will require players to use third party tools and lose time in stupid calculations.
What the affixes do, are part of the game rules. Understanding which affixes to use, is NOT part of the game rules.
Add a calculator in-game?
Anyway, it isnât needed in D3. The person mentioning a calculator merely said that there was nothing wrong with having to use a calculator in a game. Which I definitely agree with.
You personally might need to do that. But that doesnât mean it is needed to play the game, or to upgrade your character. Which it factually is not.
You are still trolling. LA got as much (or rather as little) math as D3.
Okay, so we needed to write 50 posts for you to finally agree with what I wrote? Thereâs no need to troll when you are biased.
Now, at least we can move forward in a more productive way. Imagine the following: All affixes arenât in English, but in some alien language that you canât translate. So, you play that aRPG in an alien language and you have no idea what you are doing when equipping items/skills since you canât translate the language. Thatâs what happens with someone lacking Math skills - he canât progress in the game and he loses interest.
The above should not happen when the Math rules could be simplified so that complex min/maxing could still exist.
