Glutton for punishment is what comes to mind.
The guest players actually had some really good questions. But the answers provided to these questions were like terribad. One of the players mentioned how “high maintenance” the playstyle of DMO is (and Vu mentioned that it does require a lot of key clicks). It’s that exact playstyle that turned me off to DMO when I tried it. It’s the thing that annoyed me with Rain of Vengeance with the Natalya’s set. But I guess the spam some skill to reduce the cooldown of this other skill to get the damage boost is the current flavor.
I don’t know… after the whole Critical Mass perma-freeze keyboard spamming sort of play, you would think they could come up with game play that is actually a little bit more engaging than this. Oh wait, this team keeps repeating the same mistakes so it is par for the course.
Then watching the Greater Rift part was like: “how can they even keep a straight face about the design of Greater Rifts” especially when the community manager kept dying and you can see the player psychological aspect of clicking over the “Revive at Corpse” option with the death penalty. I seriously thought they would’ve learned how terrible a design that was in Inferno vanilla in the initial patches.
Yes, I agree that in softcore, death needs to have some sort of meaning. The root cause problem again goes back to the design of Greater Rifts with infinite scaling, and where there is a point where ones damage and mitigation are coming from the gems. The community manager didn’t have the correct gems (ones leveled to at least rank 25) which is pretty much required once you start doing over Tier 40 rifts.
The problem is that the margin for error narrows greatly at the limits of the actual gear. Incoming damage thus comes on extremely quick and you need to have a fairly high level of recovery to sustain outside of potions and health globes. Thus the one shot death they’ve tried to avoid in the past (after that was a issue in original Inferno due to the poor quality of gear that dropped), is a recurring frustration of players the higher up they push. And again, it’s a poor and masochistic design because one can easily replicate this at lower tiers by using junk and/or lower level items.
If death weren’t dictated by this poor design, a penalty makes sense. But watching players hovering over the “Revive Corpse” option and anxiously clicking it while it is grey out, is just not what I call a good design to begin with. I know they mentioned that baking in the penalty into the timer doesn’t work well in co-op. Myself, the other reason I don’t constantly push Greater Rifts is that I do not believe in death zerging through one. This video play through also highlighted how much beneficial group play really is. Nevalistis’ monk would generally have no business being in a Greater Rift north of Tier 40.
One of the guest players brought up an interesting point about Greater Rift Guardian fights sometimes taking much longer than it took to clear the actual rift. Vu’s response was something I did agree with; that those fights should be more interesting (mechanically and AI wise) as opposed to just stacking them with a lot of health points. But as he mentioned, that was his opinion meaning that someone else higher up prefers this boring bigger numbers approach to difficulty.
Which led into a question about the Hellfire Event. IMHO, I would not have an issue with the tedium of the event if the effort required, justified the reward. The current RNG layered aspect involved with crafting either the ring or amulet, is the root cause issue with players generally looking for ways to reduce the tedium involved. 100% drop rate of keys at T6 does not solve that issue. Neither does having pointer indicators on the map from the getgo to make finding the keywarden easier.
What the D3 devs need to do is get their head out of their rear and make it worthwhile again to fully clear out zones; you know, make it worth it for players to slay monsters getting to the destination. But since that isn’t the case, it amounts to a waste of time from many players perspective; thus chasing down a keywarden that could be anywhere on the map and not have a key drop, becomes a tedious affair.
That led the player to bring up another good question about the Campaign. I seriously didn’t think this team would throw it to the wayside the way they did. This is coming from someone who was a strong proponent of having an open waypoint design from the get go and couldn’t believe they decided to go with this complete linear design in a loot farming game. Thus when adventure mode was previewed, I said “finally”. But I didn’t expect them to treat the Campaign the way they did. This team needs to revisit a lot of their original design decisions and rethink stuff like boss runs, and generally giving players a lot more options to play the game. Funneling everyone down to Greater Rifts is one of the poorest decisions (out of many others) yet to come out from this team.
One of the guest players also brought up the issue of “Greater Rift Fishing”. Vu said he personally doesn’t like “fishing” but he ended up going off on a tangent about wishing there was better variance in the Greater Rift Guardians (basically, more engaging fights similar to Orlash). I think that is only part of the issue. The other issue is with mob make up within an actual rift. Basically, the core issue is that difficulty of a specific tier, is not uniform. Contrast this to how maps are in Path of Exile. When you get a level 70 map, you know exactly what kind of difficulty will be presented. Again, the D3 team uses a lot of designer bullshit talk regarding RNG and learning from their past mistakes with how they used it; the problem is their designs are still very much dependent on this excessive amount of RNG.
It’s not like I don’t get what they are trying to accomplish (randomness in what spawns in what are already a limited amount of tilesets that they needed to use to reduce the level of dead ending). Part of the problem was as noted before, unavoidable damage plus the fact that some mob types, deal a greater amount of damage period relative to other mob types. Some of these mechanics are frustration inducing as opposed to actually being a test of player skill (which in this game, isn’t saying a lot).
The real problem I had with Vu’s response is that “there will still generally be fishing” due to the high variance in the composition of rifts. Congratulations for basically confirming in a round-a-bout way that your Greater Rift design has flaws as a challenge mode where the designer objective is to make sure that the mode is generally on a level playing field. Really, these guys are beyond terrible at their job.
