I egenskap av officiell fansite kan vi ännu en gång presentera en frågestund där Blizzards utvecklingsteam besvarar communityns frågor om Diablo 3. De hintar bland annat om den ännu oupptäckta fördelen i att använda life-steal samt klargör sin ståndpunkt om att inte göra PvP till en betydande del av Diablo 3:s end game. Klicka på Läs mer för att ta del av samtliga frågor.

Diablo III Questions and Answers

Design

– Do you feel that the Attack Speed nerf has fulfilled your expectations and allowed to balance the game in a way you wanted?

We’re seeing a lot more skill diversity now, but we’re going to need to do additional skill balancing to bring it up to where we want it. Increased Attack Speed caused a ton of bugs just due to how fast characters were attacking, and its strength made a few specific builds vastly superior. It was a mistake that it went out the way it was.

– Players feel that critical damage increase and critical chance feel overpowered as you can stack those stats really high and they multiply the combined effects of a whole set of character’s stats that influence the dps.

Simply doing too much damage is not enough for us to nerf something. Crit chance and damage are very strong, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with something being strong. Life steal is actually a lot stronger for instance, and has a greater impact on how people build their characters, but most people haven’t spent time investing in stacking it.

– Do you look into the least and most used skills and investigate the reasons for their popularity/non-popularity? Do you look into builds used by the best players (e.g. those who have beaten inferno) to get specific end-game feedback to make the game better for all players or do you balance the game mostly around general trends?

Yes we do take a look at all of those, and more. We take a lot into account when balancing the game.

– As soft and hardcore versions of the game have been beaten pretty quickly by some players, do you plan to continue linking the endgame to PvE mostly or, as players get bored with PvE quicker than you might have expected, will you increase the meaning of PvP and are willing to turn the game towards what community would like it to be?

No, Diablo III is a PvE game. While we’re sure many people will enjoy PvP, we don’t intend to make it the end game or promote it as the new direction for the title. We recognize there are content concerns with the PvE game, and we’d like to address those before changing the core purpose of the game and trying to target it as hardcore PvP, because it won’t be.

– Two issues have risen along with the repair fee increased in patch 1.0.3 among community. Is the current damage of durability reasonable? Take ash can for example, these are how much I need to pay for one hit (or first hit): Melee: punch $76, hit with weapon or skill $77 Range: shoot $27, spell $40  Rotten log and Stump are even more expensive

and

– We found that there is a basic damage of durability in the first hit. The damage of durability diminished after a certain level of damage. Is there any damage, durability and repair fee curve or the optimum point to repair your armor? And we agree “pay for your mistake” but even though I survive in a hard battle, I still need to pay a lot! Especially for a melee character. What mistakes did I make?

We lowered it in 1.0.3a, and we think it’s pretty good where it is right now. A lot of this “I attacked one thing and paid X gold” is from a misunderstanding of how durability works. Whenever you deal or receive damage, the game takes a look at your character, if you haven’t taken any durability damage in 60 seconds, a small fraction of durability is taken off your character; if you have already taken durability damage in the last 60 seconds, then your gear isn’t touched. If you’re fighting and fighting you’re only taking a loss of durability once every 60 seconds. Attacking a log once in 1 minute or killing 400 angry demons in that same minute will have the same repair costs.

– Are there any plans to add a Looking for Group-type interface to Diablo III?

We don’t have any plans. We think the automated matchmaker works pretty well.

– How exactly is 5x Nephalem Valor buff different from 75% Magic Find?

With the Nephalem Valor buff you also get 75% gold find, plus guaranteed rare drops from bosses.

– What are your current thoughts on enrage timers and how they are working out?

They aren’t working out very well, and are contrary to some of the new design philosophies we’re shifting to. We’ll probably remove them; it’s just a matter of when.

– Are there plans to stop Nephalem Valor stacks from going away between acts?

It’s not something we can easily address (maintaining buffs from Act to Act isn’t tech we currently have). It isn’t really an issue in most cases. We know there are some bosses (Rakkanoth) very close to the start of the Act that make it difficult or impossible to build up enough stacks before you fight them, but we can address those situations in particular.

– Have the health pools or other statistics of treasure goblins been lowered in 1.0.3?

No they haven’t.

– Can you share some statistics connected with changes in inferno difficulty? Eg. How much was the monster damage lowered, how many players access inferno now, etc.

There was a post on Reddit that actually laid out the difficulty changes almost exactly, so it’s been reverse engineered. We may release more progression stats, but we don’t have them on-hand at the moment.

– Some players farming acts 3 and 4 of inferno pre patch 1.0.3 are very disappointed by how easy the game has become after the introduction of the patch – do you feel the same? Would you consider increasing a minimum damage of monsters so that spike damage is not such a big problem but monsters can still pack a punch?

AND

– Players complaining about lowering the difficulty of inferno view health pools of inferno monsters in 1.0.3 as too low to withstand the damage output of some classes. Do you agree?

We’re very happy with the difficulty nerfs. We’re moving to a design philosophy of efficiency over difficulty. The idea being that you as a player do the things you do to be more efficient at farming items, not to overcome a steep difficulty jump. We have some changes in place to support that new philosophy already, but we have quite a few more to make before we get all the way there.

– Teleport – Reversal – This spell works so the wizard is teleported back to the spot in which teleport was originally cast regardless of distance and obstacles in the outdoor parts – is this intended that this rune should not allow teleport through walls in dungeons even though it is clearly stated that the character will be moved to the original casting spot or is this a bug?

It’s actually a known bug.

– Barbarians are reporting Inferno Diablo as non-challenging now and not even requiring to move away – Do you have any plans to make the Lord of Terror encounter more scary and challenging?

Probably not, we’re kind of ok with it not being the most difficult fight.

– Some players think that legendary items’ colour makes it easy to not see them when dropped on the floor. Would it be possible to have a brighter orange for the name of legendary items?

We have no plans to change item quality colours. We chose the ones we did very specifically.

– Regarding the changes made to drop rates for several acts in Hell/Inferno, is Whimsyshire considered an act 1 or and act 4 zone?

It’s considered as part of Act III/IV.

Suggestions

– Add more details on the profile of every character (deaths, number of Diablo kills, etc.)

The website character profiles will have a ton more info than we’d want to put in-game.

– Allow the gems to stack up to 100.

Maybe! We’ll definitely look into it.

– Some magic properties are not easy to understand, and some players have requested we add a window to further explain what that particular property does when you mouse-over it, and what benefits they offer.

Hopefully the website game guide will cover these kinds of things.

– Could you let the town healer also heal the follower and could you allow users to buy multiple potions with one click?

Sounds like a good idea, we’ll look into it!

– Could you allow players to see their friend’s hero stats without leaving the game?

The website profiles should be enough to cover this.