Do you guys remember vanilla Diablo 3? Didnt we have these exact same problems?
-Bad rng. Drop chances were really bad there too and on top of that could roll stats totally useless to your class. What else can be said, talt is now a meme.
-Failure to create instances. There were times on D3 where you could not create games due to traffic and that was on a game owned by a large company like Blizzard
-RMT and bots. Since RMT was actually a problem created by Blizzard itself via the RMT marketplace, botting was definitely a problem.
-Bad class balancing. In the beginning of D3, it was the Age of Wizards as well. Barbarians and monks were absolute garbage due to bad weapon damage scaling and as melee classes, required them to take large amounts of damage for long periods of time. Wizards could either a) perma freeze crowds from full hp to dead b) long range kiting with spells that dealt aoe damage in a large radius or c) become nearly invulnerable to damage via the use of force armor, lowering hp, and stacking hp regen.
-No real use for grouping. In the beginning, grouping actually hurt more than helped. Mobs got stronger, money was split, and it was a hassle waiting for people to leave the game so you could create a new session if you were âfarmingâ a particular area.
-Questing was boring. The first playthough could be seen as some as amazing. Idk, I wasnât one of them, but some swore by the Lore. The 2nd time, not so much, as it got repetitive and by the time you got all the classes to 60, you might wanna puke at the thought of doing another quest. This was on a game with an established history, had actual Lore and iconic characters. ToS has no such thing. I have a 210+ character, and several others in the 160+ range, yet to this day, I couldnât tell you a single thing of what the storyline is about.
-Lack of âend gameâ. Now this could be forgiveable in a Diablo game, because from as far back as I can remember, Diablo has always been about loot. So you could think of it as âend gameâ acquiring the best possible gear for your characters. ToS is not a Diablo clone, so it canât and shouldnât rely on this. And it canât because they havenât released the entire game yet, with no roadmap or detailed plans even on the horizon, people canât be assed to collect the âbestâ gear when it can be outclassed by some white weapon that drops 100% off some level 600 bunny.
-Seemingly uncaring devs. âWe got Jay Wilsonâedâ floated around the Blizzard forums for a long time. And lately, Ive been seeing, âWe got IMCâedâ. This is a problem. At least Jay Wilson had a face and made a fine scapegoat. The current disatisfaction seems to be directed at THE ENTIRE COMPANY.
But the question is, will the things Blizzard did work for ToS as well? For example, if they removed all forms of trading, took down the marketplace and threw so much silver at us that it became next to worthless, would it make the game better? Would the bots go elsewhere as there was no longer a need for their âservicesâ? Increased drop chances to make up for lack of marketplace?
Class balancing. Letâs face it, melee in this game is a â â â â job and as ET has shown, noone really has to do it. But some of us will, because that is what we like. D3 greatly increased the damage on a lot of their skills as well as improving on their functionality. Their scaling was always a % and not flat scaling, so I am sure that gave them a lot of leeway when they tweak their numbers. Should ToS switch to % weapon scaling as well or would that break their current plan of how they never intend for all circles to be viable at every level?
Taking a step away from D3 comparisons, letâs take a look at a different Blizzard game, WoW. Or rather a specific aspect of it, respeccing and dual specs. You could respec on WoW for ingame currency. Everytime you respec the cost would go up, and would drop a little every month. In more recent years (relatively), they added the option for a character to have up to 2 specs âsavedâ that could be switched back and forth. Personally I loved this feature, but even before then I had probably spent close to 20k gold (a lot at the time) respeccing trying to theorycraft and optimize my builds to personal taste. Using swordsmen as an example, leveling as pure tank is just cancer on this game. You might shine in dungeons and missions, but currently we can only run 3 of each. There are grind parties that might want you, but that is towards the âendâ of the game and has little to do with levels 1-220. Arguements for resetting circles aside, what about if you could save an additional build per character. You can devote 1 slot to leveling/dps and the 2nd slot to something more party oriented.
There are some that might argue that noone would buy character slots anymore but is that truly the case? After all it is only 1 more build? Lets say if you mess up, you still have 1 slot to salvage your character with. Or if you didnât make a mistake, you now have 1 build you can have peltasta with or even a full tank, instead of losing 1 circle of your âdpsâ build. IMC will lose profits? Maybe. Might sell fewer char slots, or the tp will be spent elsewhere, who can really say? Is this a case of the f2p model creating more harm than good?