The Mog Blog

Diablo III is a great game. It’s a great game but it has a nasty flaw.

It feels like the huge majority of people out there are feeling rather burned by Blizzard’s attempts to balance the game. With changes being made to nerf classes in order to bring them in line with the others, most are sharing woes and despair with the hardest difficulty in the game, Inferno. One has to sit down and ask: Why the need for these changes?

Thinking back to my time playing Diablo II, Phantasy Star Online and other identical dungeon crawler, loot finding games, things were not complicated back then. Hours upon hours are wasted, hacking away at mindless AI drones, hoping that lady luck with the random number generator will drop you some good items. Sometimes you get lucky, and end up with something that will significantly boost the abilities that your character can unleash.

To draw some examples from Phantasy Star Online (the game that I know like the back of my hand), you had a bunch of regular weapons, then you run into those rare weapons with special attacks attached to them. Sometimes you’ll run into weapons that only come in as a rare. Those that have played PSO will know that rares are indeed fairly rare to find.

Better not blink!

Having your hands on a very good rare weapon can easily change how you play your character. A very good rare weapon can make you into a god. Finding certain rare items will only enhance that fact. Once you hit that point where you’re attacking so fast, be able to withstand any attack that comes your way, and be able to destroy anything without having to rest, you’re pretty much a bulldozer from hell. Nothing can stand up against you.

That’s the draw that leads to the addiction of these types of games. Being able to find all this gear to become the ultimate bad ass of whatever world you were in. It was reachable, it was possible, and it’s something that I choose to come back to years later.

But Diablo III lacks all of this.

A recent forum post after the 1.03 patch came out has become the attention to many Diablo III players. While some of these points are a little exaggerated (I mean, I don’t really find farming bosses to be fun), the writer of the original post does make a good point.

With the 1.03 patch, item drop rates, further class adjustments, and a huge nerf on attack speed has sent many people on an outrage. It further solidifies the fact that Blizzard is planning on optimizing the game to the point where everything must be streamlined and to limit the amount of strategies that are seen to be as “poor play.”

Personally, I have been pigeonholed in Act 1 Inferno for well over two weeks (I blame E3 for some of that). Most of it is because I simply cannot acquire enough gold or gear to advance further into Act 2 without dying a horrible death. I play a Wizard, a melee Wizard to be exact. I may be able to survive better by changing my skills, but why should I have to? The experience and fun that I get as a Melee Wizard is something that I can’t get as a Monk or a Barbarian.

After the 1.03 patch, the repair costs for your equipment has been increased by almost 6x. This was to discourage players from attempting fights with the wrong strategy and to skip them if the enemy is too strong. While gold is not something that is too hard to come by, having a repair bill of 25,000 is a good chunk. I actually ended up in a situation where I could not pay the full repair bill. Broken equipment is as good as having nothing equipped in that slot at all. If I didn’t have an existing high level alt, I would not be able to play the game until something were to sell on the AH.

And that’s what really bugs me about all of this. I don’t feel like a god at all, and I certainly don’t feel like I could ever be one. It feels that if people were able to destroy everything without fear of death, despite earning the right to wield that power, Blizzard will find some way to slap it down. If I were to buy items from the Real Money Auction House, I would feel pretty afraid to make such an investment. It has already happened, after all. Blizzard did nerf the Increased Attack Speed stat by 50% (though to their credit, they did give everyone a head’s up).

Thinking about these changes, it made sense. Attack speed was very dominant. Destroying objects does get a bit boring and tedious to extract every piece of gold and gear from them. Some classes are more powerful than others.

But then you sit there and realize: Who the hell would throw a nerf bat at a god? Because that’s why you play these games: To become a god. So what if something is broken? We don’t need to nerf it. If anything, bring everything else up.