Diablo 3 has been a game fans have wanted for over a decade.
The final product was far from perfect and received harsh criticisms from fans. I've played over 350 hours of Diablo 3 since the launch of the game exclusively
on my Barbarian. The game has gone through a few patches with each patch
creating a significantly better game. I want to focus this post on how Blizzard
can help improve the game even further through some minor changes.
Random Number Generation (RNG) is a player’s worst
nightmare. The obvious reason why people despise RNG is that they have no
control over it. My marketing professor once told my class that negative word
of mouth is about 7 times more powerful then positive word of mouth based on
human behavior. This means that players notice the negative aspects of RNG much
more than a good RNG effect unless that good RNG is on the extreme of good. So
how does RNG work its way into Diablo 3? Well first, rare quality items that
drop can have anywhere between four to six magical properties (stats).
There are hundreds of different properties that can be chosen from but only a
handful is useful to a player. After these magic properties are chosen, they
can roll a range of numbers depending on the item level or monster level. The
last patch allows for more items to drop with the highest possible range of
stats but I believe Blizzard can do more.
The last patch updated one of the magical properties to
actually provide some benefit to the player. Bonus to Health globes would
originally increase the amount of health orbs that drop from monsters by a
small amount. While on paper this sound nice, in actual gameplay it was
useless. In order to see a benefit the player would need to stack the stat or
rely on healing through health globes which only dropped at set intervals based
on champion monster’s health. This type of healing is something that players
can’t really control and thus found other ways to recover health such as
finding items with life on hit which returns health based on how often the
player hits an enemy. The last patch made the Bonus to Health globe property
include an increase to health potions. Blizzard was able to kill two birds with
one stone because players were complaining about potion’s not healing enough and
health globe bonus was a useless property. While the health globe property is
not a stat players will automatically look for when searching for upgrades, it
now provides a nice bonus.
Thorns Damage is a magical property that deals damage to the
enemy whenever the player is struck. However the amount of damage is minimal
compared to the amount of damage a player can dish out even if that player had
stacked the thorns damage property on all their gear. Blizzard can easily buff
this property by having it scale to a degree from the player’s primary stat. I
do not expect it to be the main damage source but it should deal enough damage
that it is viable for a tank build to try to stack it on their equipment.
Increase Pickup Yards affects how far you can be away from
gold and health globes to pick them up. With 0 increase pickup yards, the
player has to manually walk over every gold stack and health globe which
becomes a pain (this is something I learned very recently when I upgraded my
boots which was my only source of this property). My solution to this is to
increase the base pickup radius to about 6 or 7 yards and change the property
to Pickup Tiers. There would be 3 tiers and each property would add a plus one
pickup tier. Having no pickup tiers will only pickup gold and health globes
within 6 or 7 yards. A plus one Tier
would allow for auto pick of up health potions, gems, and tomes of secrets.
Another plus one tier (Tier 2) would allow pickup all magic quality (blue)
items within the base radius. The final Tier will allow for auto pickup all
rare items. Now the problem with this approach is that some people do not
pickup magic items or do not pickup potions. Any easy way to rectify this is to
have an option on the character sheet which allows the player to check off the
items they wish to auto pickup such as only gold or item level 63 rare quality
items, potions and gold. It would take some work to program this into the game
but I believe it would be a feature appreciated by the fans.
After playing World of Warcraft (Blizzard’s cash cow) for
many years, I expected Diablo 3 to contain some of the same interface options.
There should have been an interface option that allows the player to select builds from a list that players has assigned so switching specs would become a
much more fluid experience. I can see this becoming a requested feature when
PVP becomes available because the builds will change so much since
PVP will be a whole different game. An equipment manager would also be
necessary with PVP since I am expecting Blizzard to have a new set of gear that
is specific to PVP. Also having another set of gear means we will need more
stash space. I’m surprised Blizzard hasn’t already implemented a feature where
we can pay real life money for more tabs in our stash. I’m sure many people
would be outraged at the idea of having to pay for more space but realistically
creating more space means more data for the servers to maintain which does cost
Blizzard money.
There are few other minor changes that Blizzard should make
towards Diablo 3. The first is releasing more transparent information in game
with regards to life on hit and life steal. From what I’ve noticed there
doesn’t seem to be anywhere in game to let the user know that life steal has a penalty
on it while playing the higher difficulties. It would be nice to show the
actual life steal amount on the character sheet and an explanation when
hovering over the stat. Also proc coefficients should be explained somewhere so
that the user can begin to understand how various abilities and life on hit
actually work. The argument Blizzard would make is that, many users would
become confused by the technical math behind the game but realistically I
believe having some of that information readily available could help users make
better decisions. Another stat that needs to have light shed on it is average
damage. It makes a huge increase in your damage when compared to other stats
such as your primary stat or even critical hit chance yet there is no explanation
to as how average damage helps to increase your damage.
The final few minor changes I would like to see are in
regards to the leveling system. I think followers should be shared across all
characters on an account. Players should be awarded for leveling another
character after maxing out their first character and using a high level
follower could provide some incentive. The Paragon leveling system could also
use a few tweaks to make it worthwhile. I honestly do not think that gaining 3%
magic find and gold find makes hitting Paragon level 100 worth it. Instead it
should be something unique such as allowing the user to have an extra
passive ability or maybe even allowing an ability to use two runes. Paragon
leveling system is counter intuitive for anyone who wants to have multiple
characters since the Paragon level is specific to each character. Blizzard
could alter the system so that your magic find and gold find carries over to
other characters but not your primary stat or any other bonuses such as the
extra passive so you can still farm efficiently for items on any character.
Diablo 3 had a rocky start but Blizzard has shown the fans
that they are willing to put in more effort through patches to make the game
that fans have been waiting for since Diablo 2. Every game has its flaws and
Diablo 3 is no different but thanks to Blizzard’s dedication post launch they
will be able to minimize those flaws. My goal was to address some minor issues
that are overshadowed by the major issues of PVP combat and lack of end game
content and hopefully will be addressed in a future patch.
