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Diablo

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101–110 of 128 posts

Re: Diablo

#101

Diablo is the original "anti-souls" game. The slot machine mechanics, the lacking of significant strategic elements and sense of hollow progression have always been key factors for my dissatisfaction with it. That said, the beautiful / dreadful / horror vibe and simplicity of the first game to this day regularly pull me in – only to ultimately dissatisfy me greatly. Each time. To me there is just "no there there" - a…

[deleted]

Re: Diablo

#102

Diablo is the original "anti-souls" game. The slot machine mechanics, the lacking of significant strategic elements and sense of hollow progression have always been key factors for my dissatisfaction with it. That said, the beautiful / dreadful / horror vibe and simplicity of the first game to this day regularly pull me in – only to ultimately dissatisfy me greatly. Each time. To me there is just "no there there" - a…

The beauty of Diablo is the RNG dungeons and overall feeling of character progression. Souls games are effectively a static level layout with enemies respawning in the exact same place, however it gives the feeling of overcoming hard challenges (more or less by design). So yes it is "anti-souls" but it's because it attempts to deliver a unique experience with every playthrough, although I agree that this has been lost in the ARPG genre in favor of formulaic quests and slot machine mechanics since Diablo 3.

Re: Diablo

#103

Diablo is the original "anti-souls" game. The slot machine mechanics, the lacking of significant strategic elements and sense of hollow progression have always been key factors for my dissatisfaction with it. That said, the beautiful / dreadful / horror vibe and simplicity of the first game to this day regularly pull me in – only to ultimately dissatisfy me greatly. Each time. To me there is just "no there there" - a…

Thank you! I always felt that Diablo was a step backward in computer RPGs, and it never grabbed me the way that Baldur's Gate did; even though the vibe is great as you noted. The randomized dungeons just feel like a treadmill of same art and room layouts, no characters to talk to or memorable events.

Somehow I WAS snared by "Book of Demons," which looks a lot like a diablo clone but with some card mechanics and a unique feature when you can choose the length of a dungeon (specify a number of minutes) to tailor the session length to the time you have.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/449960/Book_of_Demons/

Re: Diablo

#104
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that material in any way?

Consistently defeating the Dark Souls boss requires skill. You have to learn how to beat it. The improvement comes from within yourself, and your ability to recognize what you are doing wrong. Knowing how to beat a boss is like a puzzle or a skill, even if it's a trivial skill less useful than a party trick. You have to analyze the boss, form a strategy, and adjust your strategy until you reach the desired outcome. D…

That’s what superficially different about them. But in both cases you’re just killing time playing something fun. The difference is only whether you prefer rolling dice or learning some useless skill.

Re: Diablo

#106

Diablo is the original "anti-souls" game. The slot machine mechanics, the lacking of significant strategic elements and sense of hollow progression have always been key factors for my dissatisfaction with it. That said, the beautiful / dreadful / horror vibe and simplicity of the first game to this day regularly pull me in – only to ultimately dissatisfy me greatly. Each time. To me there is just "no there there" - a…

I've always loved this series. The problem, as I see it, is that the focus is always on tweaking the "endgame." I just find this to be silly. Once you get to the endgame it's pointless, and people basically blaze through the base game on purpose. And once you get there it really is no more than a slot machine that caters to people with serious gambling addictions. You run the same dungeons over and over again, someti…

Forget the endgame, how many hours of my life can I spend comparing one piece of equipment to one very-barley-sort-of-slightly-better piece of equipment until I've cycled through literally hundreds of pieces of equipment, each promising an imperceptible improvement to my ability to kill another thousand samey bad guys?

I don't know how many hours exactly, but I know I hit that limit sometimes in my early 20's.

Re: Diablo

#107
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that material in any way?

Consistently defeating the Dark Souls boss requires skill. You have to learn how to beat it. The improvement comes from within yourself, and your ability to recognize what you are doing wrong. Knowing how to beat a boss is like a puzzle or a skill, even if it's a trivial skill less useful than a party trick. You have to analyze the boss, form a strategy, and adjust your strategy until you reach the desired outcome. D…

[deleted]

Re: Diablo

#108
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that material in any way?

Consistently defeating the Dark Souls boss requires skill. You have to learn how to beat it. The improvement comes from within yourself, and your ability to recognize what you are doing wrong. Knowing how to beat a boss is like a puzzle or a skill, even if it's a trivial skill less useful than a party trick. You have to analyze the boss, form a strategy, and adjust your strategy until you reach the desired outcome. D…

[dead]

Re: Diablo

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Once you get to the endgame it's pointless, and people basically blaze through the base game on purpose. And once you get there it really is no more than a slot machine that caters to people with serious gambling addictions. Feels like you're missing the point of end-game players. It's not the slot machine. It's pushing further and further into end-game content. It's a race to see who can dive deeper into dungeons…

I don't know how you do it, but I'm actually fascinated by it. I like watching Diablo players rant on YouTube, but for me the game pretty much ends after the campaign too. I wish it didn't because I find the campaigns great. Even just exploring the map and all the different atmospheric elements. It just feels too short. I don't want to optimize my character. One thing I loved about D3 was that the entire skill tree w…

One way I look at it is by the time you beat the game for the first time unless you've done quite a bit of side content, you still may not be a high enough level to unlock all of the abilities. You've only seen a fraction of the unique items floating around since most don't even drop until World Tier 3 or 4. You've likely only gotten the chance to play one or two themed builds based around the items which have dropped. You've probably not touched the paragon board or glyphs which can change things up quite significantly and enable a number of other builds that aren't really viable without the boost. I'm "only" level 78 on my main and I'm still upgrading glyphs and working my way through the paragon board. Or I was before the season started, and now I'm playing a fresh barb instead of sorc.

I wouldn't mind more free respec opportunities, but I don't think it's exceptionally expensive. Just verified on my 78 sorc that it would cost just over $1MM gold to reset all of my points. That's maybe 3-4 dungeon runs. However to reroll an attribute at the enchanter, it's now costing me above $1.5MM for a single role, it also requires forgotten souls. Refunding skill points is much cheaper than upgrading end game gear! It also took me an embarrassing amount of time to realize you don't have to reset all skill points. If you right click on a skill it'll remove it one point at a time for under $20k / point.

Re: Diablo

#110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

World events with online players have the potential to be much better. I'm hopeful it'll evolve over time. That being said, D4 is not even close to being balanced perfectly. There are orders of magnitude of power level in difference between classes and builds. At least if you measure them against "end game content" and not the campaign which can be completed with any class / skill selection.

Right, it's not currently balanced well, and the massive amount of nerfing in the last patch was to work to address that. Thankfully, it looks like they realized the patch was bad. They just announced in their fireside chat that they were wrong to prioritize balancing over fun, and they're working to fix it.

They addressed that by making my main class (sorcerer) which was already the weakest class even weaker! I'm sure it'll get tuned relatively quickly, but this patch hit hard.
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