Blizzard fails at game design

Did the controversial title make you click through? Good. That was my intention. Before you start hating on me, give me a chance to make my case. I don't really think that Blizzard fails at game design and the title is more tongue-in-cheek than deadly serious. But some of their design decisions do make me scratch my head. It is said that true love has both highs and lows and there's a love-hate relationship between me and Blizzard. There are many occasions in which I cussed them to hell but many more in which I praised them. This little article is meant to question some parts of their game design so bear with me if you will.

With Diablo 3, Blizzard has always maintained that their goal was to encourage a vast number of builds and equipment choices, such that no particular build would shine above all others and no piece of equipment would be mandatory in order to advance through content. It turns out that their plan didn't pan out too well. Here are a few reasons why.

1H vs 2H
Normally it shouldn't really matter which kind of weapon you use. It would come down to personal preference and specific builds which favor one type of weapon or another. Unfortunately, in Inferno it's almost impossible to play as a melee class without a shield. This excludes 2H weapons and makes 1H + shield almost mandatory. To my horror, I heard that even Wizards, Demon Hunters and Witch Doctors are using shields instead of their class-specific off-hands.

I'm sure there are literally tens of players who go against the norm and use 2H weapons but those are the exception. A shield provides too many benefits to give up in favor of slightly more DPS on a 2H weapon: block, armor, life, resistances and other desirable stats.

I would argue that the same thing is valid for 1H vs dual 1H. Though you will get more damage from dual-wielding 1H weapons, the tradeoff might be too big.

Take my Barbarian, for example. Until Act 2 Nightmare he bullied his way through using a variety of weapon setups, including 1H + shield, dual 1H and 2H. But he hit a wall right about that point and I was forced to change both his spec and his equipment to 1H + shield. After that, his problems ended.

Blizzard wanted to stay away from mandatory equipment setups but they failed in this noble endeavor. Unfortunately I don't have a ready solution for this. If I recall correctly (and hopefully I'm not seeing this through rose-colored glasses), Diablo 2 handled this better by offering a much wider build variety, where any combination of gear could be viable. Of course, some were more efficient than others but on the whole you could still finish Hell with a non-mainstream setup.

Strangely, I like D3's DPS system. Translating weapon DPS into skill DPS is very simple and intuitive. But this introduces gremlins into the system. And frankly I don't have any idea how Blizzard will manage to chase those gremlins out.

Crafting
Crafting is supposed to be something exciting, that players find a lot of fun to engage in, as well as a convenient gold sink. Unfortunately, crafting in Diablo 3 leaves me cold. I leveled my Jewelcrafter to some extent and now I regret it. I was hoping to flip some gems and this worked well for a couple of days until commodity auctions were disabled. After that it became useless. Flipping gems is unprofitable now and crafting gems for myself is... meh, since I can usually buy them cheaper from the AH.

Luckily I didn't level the Blacksmith at all, but if I had, I wouldn't find any use for him. From what I can determine, the Blacksmith is only useful to a small niche of players who have figured out how to take advantage of certain crafted items on the Auction House. That's cool but the vast majority of players doesn't engage in AH warfare.

Then there's the small group of players who don't use the AH for certain reasons, preferring to craft their own gear. Unfortunately, until the late 50s you'll be better off buying very good gear directly off the AH so they are still wasting their time and gold.

Blacksmithing does come in its own at max level, but again, only if you invest a lot of gold in it first, buying rare recipes and expensive mats. Even then, there's no guarantee that you will get good stats on an item.

Personally I just don't want to bother with crafting. It is too unappealing to me but I'm hoping this will improve in future patches. Hah, ironically it almost seems like Diablo 2's gambling system was more appealing to players than Diablo 3's crafting system, despite the fact that results were a lot less predictable.

Crafting mats
Another thing that failed, in my opinion, is the market for crafting mats. The only ones that are worth something on the AH are level 60 ones. In other words, Normal, Nightmare and Hell mats are completely useless. I don't even understand why people choose to salvage their items and then sell the mats on the AH. You are losing money people! On the flip-side, those who know how to exploit this will profit by buying cheap mats, crafting certain niche items and selling them on the AH. Once again, these people are a very small minority.

Even at 60, things aren't rosy. The prices for the 3 types of mats are dysfunctional. Leaving aside the fact that Inferno mats are several orders of magnitude more expensive than their lesser counterparts, Exquisite Essences (magic) are 8-10 times more expensive than Iridescent Tears (rare)! How the hell is that even possible? I find it ridiculous.

Blizzard designed crafting in such a way that the demand for lesser materials is much higher (up to 10 times in fact) than that for rarer materials. How messed up is that? Something needs to be done here: either decrease the drop rate of rare items (something that I would hate), or tweak the number of mats of each type required to craft a recipe.

Conclusion
These are just some of the nits I wish to pick right now. While Blizzard is an awesome company with a lot of top-notch talent, they are still human, and humans make mistakes. They have frustrated me on many occasions with what I perceived as stupid design decisions but their games have also entertained me like nothing else. With Diablo 3 they went through several iterations and radical changes in game systems but unfortunately all is not well in the magic kingdom. But this is nothing that a few major patches and an expansion or two can't fix.

Fallen Tooth drop rate increased?

I wanted to post this a while ago but I got sidetracked by other things. I believe that the Fallen Tooth yield rate from salvaging magic items has increased some time after beta patch 16. Fallen Teeth are rare (yellow) crafting materials that are used for some rare recipes.

I remember distinctly that at some point during the beta, Fallen Teeth were "nerfed" to a 5% drop rate. By "drop rate" I mean, of course, the chance of getting one when salvaging magic (blue) items. Well, after patch 16 I noticed that all of a sudden I was getting a lot more Fallen Teeth than before, and noticeably so, on all my characters.

Here's a screenshot which shows how many Fallen Teeth I got after salvaging 185 items.

So I got 185 Subtle Essences but also 22 Fallen Teeth. This roughly indicates a 11.9% drop rate but because the sample size is small, I can assume it's closer to 10%.

If this is indeed true, it means that the yield rate has been doubled. Was this ever mentioned in the patch notes? I don't recall. Has anyone else noticed this? Will Blizzard "nerf" the yield rate back to 5% or is it here to stay?

More open beta auction house adventures

The open beta this weekend has been both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because a lot more people have had the chance to play the game. A curse because the servers are very erratic and the Auction Houses (both Gold and Real Money) are more often offline than functioning.

Yesterday I talked about how the previous evening I managed to more than triple my Beta Bucks in about 10 minutes. All that action happened on the Real Money Auction House.

Yesterday and today I switched my attention to the Gold Auction House (GAH).

One strategy that worked really well is that I kept an eye out for some special rings sold by one of the vendors in the game, namely Radek the Fence on the north side. The best rings in the game are the ones with 2-4 damage and an additional stat. For me, personally, the additional stat that works best with all classes is 5% increased attack speed (IAS). However, other people prefer attributes that are beneficial to their own class.

I bought 4 rings with +5 Strength in addition to 2-4 damage, as well as 6 rings with 5% IAS in addition to 2-4 damage. Honestly I was expecting the IAS rings to sell better but I was wrong. One of them did sell quickly but the biggest (and quickest) sellers were the +5 Str rings. I assume that Barbarians were very popular this weekend.

I spent 2084G x 4 = 8,336G for all 4 rings. I sold them for a total of 31,122 (varying amounts each) but essentially under 10K gold. I decided not to be greedy because it seems most people try to sell stuff for insane amounts of gold (tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands). I turned a very nice profit of 22K gold.

Even the 5% IAS rings aren't a complete loss at this point. I sold a single ring but that one already made up for more than half the cost of all 6 rings. If I sell the other 5 at a loss I will still turn a profit, overall.

Rings are not the only thing I traded. I also sold a bunch of hand crossbows that the same vendor sells. Since vendor items are generated randomly, sometimes these crossbows can have very good DPS rolls on them, occasionally over 19 DPS. These are probably the highest DPS 1-handed weapons in the beta. No wonder they are very prized. Myself, I have a couple of 18.3DPS hand crossbows on my Demon Hunter. So whenever I found 17+DPS crossbows on the vendor, I bought a few on them and flipped them for a higher price on the GAH.

Finally, crafted shoulders also sold for a nice profit but again, shoulders don't drop from monsters in the game, so the only way to obtain them is via crafting.

When trading on the Auction House I try, as always, not to flood it. I will post 1 or 2 of the same item but not more. I've already noticed that there are hundreds of hand crossbows for sale so probably others have also figured the crossbow thing out.

I might have sold a lot more had the Auction House been stable. Alas, it was mostly down for me so I couldn't even check on my auction, much less post items.

While these are good Auction House strategies for the beta, I'm skeptical that they will continue to work in the full game, at low levels. That's because people will outgrow the early levels very quickly and items which seem powerful now will be underpowered in a few short levels. For now, I'm just enjoying these little ways of making some extra gold in the beta.