A long time back, I had posted a small series on the concept of power in gaming.  Interestingly, I had another post that talked about D3 in that regard.  When RoS came out, the concept of monster power went out the door and instead new difficulty tiers were added to the game.  4 on easy mode, then 6 in Torment, which were near equal to MP 1 through 10 but had some additional tweaks.

Greater Rifts (GR) went above and beyond that, with a scaling difficulty that had no cap.  A T6 normal rift was around level a level 30 GR.   People were hitting GR 40-50, so the difficulty curve was outside of “normal” content.  Quick aside, GRs were a pain because you needed to complete a normal rift, get trail keystone, then do the realm of trials just right, to get the correct difficulty of GR, then get lucky in the GR for the appropriate tileset and monster density.  It took 4 times as long to get INTO a GR as it did to complete one.

2.3 added up to Torment 10, which I think is something like GR47.

More to the point, take a look see at the difficulty chart above.  The health of an enemy is directly tied to the amount of time needed to clear a rift.  Assuming you have infinite health, all you need is more time for your damage to equate to the enemy’s health.   You can see an exponential increase at the tail end. It’s not to diminish the increase previous to that tail end, it’s a challenge just getting into T6.  It’s when you start comparing one level to the next that you really get to see a massive jump in difficulty.  Every increase in Torment level is a near doubling of enemy HP.

Enemy damage is more linear, as player defensive stats are much more limited.  Due to the system mechanics, there’s a point where you simply cannot take any more damage and a single off hit will likely kill you.  Which is what people are seeing at very high GRs right now, stacking massive defensive skills that scale multiplicatively (e.g. +50% armor).

Here’s a graph that better demonstrates those trends.

Greed

Part of the farming of gear path is collecting a decent set of Focus and Restraint rings.  Combined, they are one of the largest sources of damage for nearly all players.  So much so, that even a poorly rolled set of stats is likely better than the best rolls on other rings.  Given that rings are a pain to acquire, the best bet is to use Death’s Breath and the cube to try and find some.  This is a great way to collect Puzzle Rings, especially if RNGsus is not there that day.

Putting a Puzzle Ring into the cube gives you a portal to Greed’s realm, which is mostly just a gold run with a few treasure goblins along the way.  Greed, the final boss, can spawn 5-8 goblins total for her fight, so it’s a so-so loot run to get through.  I run it with my brother and we usually end up with a few legendaries each for minimal time invested.  That and about 150m in gold per run.

The thing about Greed is that it’s a good test of player builds.  You need to burn down the goblins before they run away and you need to survive Greed’s attacks at the same time.  We’d started off at T1 a while ago and we’ve moved up the difficulty since.  I’m able to clear T10s but his Barb is just starting to do T8.

You’d think that was a reasonable gap but due to the scaling below, it’s nearly 5x the hit points on an enemy and double the damage taken.  And T8 isn’t exactly a cake walk either, so the idea that he still needs to boost his DPS by such a large margin is fairly interesting.

I’m rather entertained at the scaling in D3, not having paid much attention to it when GRs first came out, due to the PITA mechanics to start one.  Now that GRs are more readily available, I think the challenge of pushing yourself for 1-2 more levels is a decent incentive to keep trying.  It’s clearly not for everyone but with a ceiling that is continuously moving, it always feels like you’re making progress.

We have a decent sized lot for a city house, and we share the backyard with the neighbour, so all told mowing the lawn can take about an hour.  I don’t mind the act really, it’s ok exercise and a clean yard is certainly nicer to look at.  The issue is that my neighbour doesn’t go outside, at least not in the backyard, and it’s terribly overgrown.  She also had a pool at one time and when she got rid of it, just let the weeds take over, and that’s crept all over the place.  So now, while I mow my lawn(+25% weeds), I’m also mowing her weeds (+5% lawn).  The good news is that it’s getting more and more overgrown so there’s less of her yard to mow.

Fences make good neighbours I hear.

Bounties

I need some better gear rolls on my Monk to keep moving along.  For armor items, it’s best to just keep trying with Kadala and bloodshards.  For weapons, the cube is the way to go, but that needs the act specific crafting mats (5 of each, plus 50 forgotten souls), and that’s far from cheap.  My rings, that’s death breath farming sadly.  The good news is that a solid source of bloodshards also comes from running bounties, which is the only way to get crafting mats.

You get extra materials from T 1-6 (3 per) and then an extra one from T7+ (4 per).  Combined with the rotating bonus cache per act, you should be getting 8 per full clear.  After a couple runs, I’ve come to the following conclusions.

• I need to make more sacrifices to RNGsus.
• Run the bounties alone. If someone else is there, move to another one.
• Movement speed is key, ignore everything that isn’t the target (except maybe Keywardens)
• Since you’re moving so fast, is has a big impact on what skills you use. Things that stack are likely not going to work out well.
• The bonus cache is only awarded upon turn-in, so you can clear all the bounties and wait
• The last two points combine for this one. Some classes are really bad at certain bounties, in particular the “find level 2 and clear”.  If you can’t do those efficiently, skip to another act.
• Boss kills should saved for last if possible, so people can shared the extra boss loot chest.
• Pay attention to the shrines. Bandit Shrines are pretty common and you do not want to click one alone.
• Act 5 bounties are some of the absolute worst the game has to offer, and it’s 99% due to the way tilesets are built, with everything extremely cramped and lots of multiple exits.
• Don’t bother opening the caches until all the bounties are done. Saves clicking.  Unless you have bag space issues.
• I need to make more sacrifices to RNGsus.

I spent enough time last night in bounties to try to reroll my weapon 5 times.  Each one was progressively worse than the other.  Ugh.  Combined with ~3000 bloodshards and no upgrades – heck, there wasn’t even an item I would have had to consider as an upgrade.

But bad luck can’t last forever and I did make a decent hit to my paragon levels, surpassing what I had in non-seasons.  So that’s a small win.

First weekend after a long week’s worth of work and my eldest changing schools.  It rained ALL weekend, which actually was pretty good all told.  In the run up, I had 3 games of hockey, the last on Saturday which the wife and kids came to see.  It was a nice day out but nothing too hectic (aside from the aches on Sunday).  It’s a much different pace compared to the spring and it’s one that I’m thankful for.  I guess I’m being more conscious now of my actions than I was previously.  Reading up on the art of mindfulness.

I am not a religious person by any means, though I’ve been more akin to the concepts of karma and zen for a while.  I much prefer the eastern styles than the western & middle eastern guilt/punishment based approach (I’m being very generic here.) Something for another post as my thoughts mature on the subject.

Player vs Character

In recent years, games have learned to focus more on the player than the character.  Gone are the old D&D days of a character being completely segregated from another character being played by the same person.  More and more things are shared across – achievements, pets, costumes, skills.  FF14 takes this to the extreme, where a change of weapon changes you classes but more are taking some sort of middle ground.

D3 uses a shared stash across all players.  I find it rather limiting truth be told, since the amount of options per character are substantial and you have 10 characters per account.  Gone are the days of Tetris in Diablo2 but I’m still juggling tons of items.  One thing I do like is how legendary gems work.  If it’s in the stash, it can’t drop.  Easier to focus farm specific gems that way.

Making an Alt

Further on this point, I need to farm a few materials from time to time.  I’ve made a set of gear for my monk to do this but it’s a few minutes time to set up each session and remember to not muck up for the next GR run.  My brother asked about powerleveling and it dawned on me that the only real limit to an alt is their level, not their gear (if you’re the same class).

The Gem of Ease makes easy work of this as well, giving about 1750xp per kill and allowing you to equip a level 70 item on a level 1 player.  So both of us ranked up the gem, found a legendary with a gem slot , and got a few more items to help out.

• Cubed Leoric’s Crown (for max bonus)
• Helm with a socket and max level Ruby (41%x2)
• Cain’s set (the level 23 version). 2 or 3 pieces, depending if you have the RRoG or not (30%)
• Hellfire Ring and Amulet (both equipable at level 1) (45%)

Sitting at ~160% experience, we hit up a T6 new game with both alts.  Searching for a Curse Chest event is key, as they continually spawn new enemies at the appropriate level.  One event and we both were around 47.

Then we started dying in a single hit and had to drop the difficulty.  A few more cursed events to get into the high 50s and Halls of Agony 3 is the way to go.  While we tried with the alts, it was obvious that a few runs with high level characters would be best.  I think it was 3 runs to go from 60-70.  All told, around an hour total, compared to 6 hours or so doing it the first time.  Which is even less than when the game came out.

I’d actually be curious if it’s possible to do with a GR…

Anyhoot, we now both have alts.  His alt is better than his main it seems.  Mine is just a lightning jet for farming Death’s Breath.  A few minor tweaks through additional play and I was able to clear a T4 rift in about 2 minutes, collecting about 50 DB in the process.   I need some better rolls to move up the chain, which funnily enough means I need more DBs!

To go full circle, I used my high level character to make the material needed for an alt to get to max level in about an hour.  I have to say, this is a nice bonus to players as the leveling portion of the game is really the most boring once you’ve gone through it.

Way back when, in 2012, D3 launched to some fanfare.  The core gameplay (combat, movement, art) was good but the underlying mechanics needed a lot of work.  The auction house in particular highlighted the issues with the core mechanics.

It’s a simple fact that people, en masse, will take the shortest route to their goals, often without regards for that path’s difficulty.  If it takes 30 minutes of farming, or 2 days of questing, I’m going to farm, even if my eyes bleed.  Blizz learned this rather quickly with WoW, which was why it was so strange to see the same types of errors at launch.  So, while the “max level game” was balanced around a set of specific numbers for player statistics, players needed to find gear to meet those requirements.

Problem 1.  Gear drops were completely randomized, with massive scales.  You could get a bow with intelligence, or a legendary dagger that was worse than what you were using 10 levels beforehand.  There’s a rule in gambling, where you have to let the player think he can win.  Streaks make them put more money on the table.  Because D3 had such massive swings of RNG, you ended up looking for less than a fraction of a percent of all gear.

Problem 2.  Scaling of content was inverted and had plateaus.  Typically, you have a scale that increased as you move farther into difficult content, requiring progressively more and more gear to get to the next rank (i.e. torment).  Not so at first, where just getting to the starting line was a massive effort, and the climb from that point was rather small.

As both problems were number problems, people started doing math.  If 1 person farming gets 1 decent item every day, then 1000 people farming get 1000.  The Auction House circumvented all farming, and with a little luck, you could go up exponentially in power in a few hours of scanning the AH.  The downside was that if you did that, then you were at max gear and didn’t really have a reason to keep playing – gear was the only goal.  You could either farm it through eye-bleeding runs of Act 3 (cause screw Act 2 &4, and Act 1 dropped lower quality items), or farm the AH.  That was about it.

D3 Today

Different story today.  Gear itself is still a goal, but it’s not the only one.  Seasons are here, ladders, sets that provide very different build options, transmog and achievements.

The original problem of gear drops has been mostly solved through “smart drops”.  About 80% of what you find is gear specifically designed for your class with stats you can use.  The stat ranges themselves are much more narrow.  Legendary items impact playstyle with interesting effects.  Legendary items can also roll as “ancient”, providing a ~10-20% boost in power.  You can craft meaningful gear, farm rings and amulets through uberbosses, run bounties for crafting materials/unqiues (of which most have interesting rewards), or run rifts for an increased chance at legendaries and sets.  Kunai’s Cube and Kadala even let you gamble specific materials for a chance at something better.  There are MANY paths to increasing your power now.

The second problem of scaling is also fixed, where there are many levels of difficulty and moving through the first few is rather quick.  A few crafted items and drops and you can move up 2-3 levels in a shot.  A few hours later of decent drops, or gambled set and you are in the mid-game.  A week or 2 later, you’re in the later difficulties.

Session So Far

Given I am running an S4 monk, and I want to run a U6 build, I have a particular gear plan in mind.  I needed specific items to complete that set.  When I hit level 70, my path was as follows:

• Craft a set of rare equipment
• Increase difficulty slightly
• Run regular rifts & gamble with Kadala for Uliana’s set until I have 6 pieces (including duplicates)
• Use Kunai’s Cube to transform duplicate Uliana items to the ones I need
• Continue to gamble on belts and bracers for specific items
• Collect rare Fist Weapons and upgrade to legendary, hoping to get 2 specific items
• Complete basic set, and continue to gamble/upgrade for Kunai Cube support items
• Re-roll some stats for improved power
• Collect/upgrade legendary gems to rank 25

That part took a few hours, enough to get Paragon level 200 or so.

Sessions Now

Given that I have the basic set required for this playstyle (and 4 bank stashes of stuff) I can now do Torment 8 at a good level of comfort.  To continue to move up, I now need to optimize and collect some final pieces of gear.

• Craft a better Hellfire Amulet
• Upgrade set items to Ancient (mainly through Kadala Gambling)
• Find a better Restraint/Focus combo
• Upgrade legendary items to ancient through Kunai Cube
• Re-roll stats as appropriate
• Farm Death’s Breath with second gear set to help with Kunai’s Cube work (current gear set for that)

That list seems simple, I know.  Each step in the previous section was minutes long, or a few hours.  I didn’t care about the numbers as much as the item itself.  Now, I need better numbers.  Example:  Uliana’s Pants.  They are the most common drop and I’ve had ~20 or so thusfar.  Only 1 was ancient mind you, but it has decent stats.  So that means that each individual step in this list is likely to be measured in days.

It’s a long tail but every session I make some progress.  And that progress is what keeps people coming back.

I’ve been out of commish for a bit.  Off work til the start of the fall.  Just way too much work and a rather nasty case of burnout.  Ugh.  So most of the past few weeks has been about resting up.  It’s an odd thing, something a little wonky with the body.

In that time, I’ve filled the time with other things.  I’ve started painting some miniatures from my various board games, starting with Star Wars Imperial Assault.  I forgot how much time each one would take… around 30-60m per from start to finish.  That’s a fair chunk of time but well worth it.

I’ve also popped some time in FF14, hitting 60 with my White Mage.  I’ll write about that a bit later.  I also decided to try out Skyforge, which is in open beta but if you can read through that lie, it’s launched since it’s taking your money.

Business Model

Free to play, though I’m a bit confused as to the model.  Progress is based on getting crystals to move across a character progression track.  If you subscribe, you get 50% more crystals/credits while playing, which is a rather big boost.  The kicker is that there’s a weekly cap on the amount you can get, so you’re really only buying time to get to that cap.  And the cap doesn’t scale with your “level”, so it’s much harder to get at the start of the game than later on.  Otherwise, you can get an alternate currency for small upgrades, nothing too big.  It’s possible to play the entire game for free though, as I’ve yet to see anything that would be completely locked out to non-paying players.

Combat

It’s more or less Neverwinter but with crappy auto-attacks and more classes.  Movement and positioning is rather important.  It’s smooth but there are certainly bugs.  I’ve died from single shots more than a few times.

Interestingly there are 3 roles, tank, DPS and support.  DPS is what you’d expect, though a little low on stuns for my tastes.  Support gives out shields and there are no heals.  I cannot understand any group-based game that doesn’t have heals or stuns.  Tanks are the same, using temporary shields and taking a beating.  They are HP sponges, not tanks.  In solo based game play, it works ok.  In the 3 man content, you can get by since the damage is manageable.  In 5 man play, there are some serious balance issues.  Tanks have it easy, DPS really are the weak point since support can’t ever top anyone off.  And because the game is more or less a free-for-all up until group play, most DPS are pretty bad at what they do.

Avoidance is a really important part of the game, with really big hits coming from big enemies, bosses with 1 shots too.  There are tells to show it’s coming but with a ton of particle effects, sometimes it can be hard to track.  Plus the bugs, where tells won’t show.  I miss telegraphs.

So if you ignore 5 man content, it’s pretty good.  But the entire end game is 5 man content (and eventually larger group content).  Ehh.

Progression

There are 2 ways to progress – the Atlas and through Prestige.  The Atlas is a node-based progression map, one per class and another shared across all classes.  You unlock nodes with colored crystals, which you get from completing content.  Think FFX’s progression model.  The scaling is a little odd, where you have nodes with +7 and others with +75. Moving across the class-based Atlas unlocks more skills and talents, allowing some customization.  I will say that of the 2 classes I’ve played, the actual skill unlocks are poorly balanced.  Talents aren’t too bad though.  Moving across the atlas enough to unlock another class is about 2 weeks worth of work.  You can try out classes in a simulator but actually taking 2 weeks, or even a month, to play the class that you want seems odd.

Prestige is gearscore, plain and simple.  All content is gated by Prestige.  You can also unlock Prestige counts through the Atlas. Just like gearscore, stat balance is not taken into account.  It has less issue at lower score levels but at higher ones… wooo it’s a big deal.  As a tank, I went up ~5% of Prestige while I also upped my Health by 20%.  It made a world of difference in gameplay.  Low end game play is around the 3K mark, with mid-game coming in around 5K or so, once you unlock group content.

Further to this, since Prestige gates all content, it also acts as a level.  This puts a barrier between players while leveling.  Scaling is coming, which is good.

MMO or Not

It’s a lobby game with extremely limited chat and group functions. There’s a guild system, called Pantheon.  There are more than 4 people in the shared zones but group zones are limited in size.  The main town has everyone standing under a giant globe.  I like Neverwinter’s model of distinct zones, which brings some life to the world.  Even Marvel Heroes has more MMO to it.

Art/Style

This is high marks.  The game looks great and is only 10 gigs.  There’s enemy variety, colors, good music and the locales are neat enough.  The sci-fi fantasy setting really works here, with a bit of a tech/wizardry setting too.  Bosses are fun to watch and the screen is often filled with effects.

Overall

This is a launch and I have found dozens if not hundreds of bugs.  Most are innocuous, but there are plenty game crashing bugs and combat bugs that just kill you outright.  There are also some rather significant balance issues that need to be worked out.  The Kinetic and Witch/Warlock classes are miles beyond the others in terms of DPS output.  Classes on their own lack diversity in skills and balance.

It looks pretty and plays smooth but  it’s a solid 2-3 months out from being ready for the prime time.  It fits the drop-in/drop-out market, which isn’t one I’m a big fan of.  There’s a semblance of breadth but no depth.