As Signs of Release™ continue to rumble about, there’s been a lot of activity from blue forum posts and Bashiok and Jay Wilson tweets. There’s been little to news up from it though, as the (apparently) impending release date has pulled in or dragged back a lot of fans.
This is a good thing on the whole; our Diablo 3 forums have been much busier the last few days, and that will skyrocket the minute we actually get a release date. The increased activity isn’t great for those of us hoping for “new” info from Blizzard, since new fans, or people who haven’t paid attention to D3 since they last got tired of waiting in about 2009, ask tons of basic questions, and those fat fish in the small barrel are the ones the CMs take their shots at.
[wiki]Bashiok[/wiki] fielded a question about the DH’s [wiki]Companion[/wiki] and the Barbarian’s [wiki]Threatening Shout[/wiki] skills. The weasel rune in Companion increases gold find by 10%, while monsters that die while affected by the TS rune [wiki]Grim Harvest[/wiki] have a 5% chance to drop more loot. Is this an unfair bonus for those classes?
[blue]The fairness comes in the trade off between taking one of the mentioned runes, and not one that allows you to deal more damage. It’s really the same trade off you make with items or gems. I guess if you were really looking to stack gold find and not worrying about anything else then maybe your class of choice would be the demon hunter, but that’s obviously pretty extreme.
For Grim Harvest it’s not the same as magic find, it’s a 5% chance to drop additional treasure of any kind. More often than not it’s probably going to be a potion, white item, or maybe gold.
Of course classes are in their intense balance testing phases right now, so there’s really no saying what may change before release. [/blue]
Click through for more tweets from Jay Wilson and some forum blueness for your reading pleasure. (Or not; I found it fairly puzzling, myself.)
Jay Wilson’s been tweeting as well, and hit a couple of issues that aren’t unknown, but that might be little-known, as I’ve seen them asked about elsewhere.
[blue]In the final version, the treasure goblins will drop rare, legendary, set items, or only will drop low qlty items (magic)? –dsantos
They can drop higher quality items. –AngryRobotics
Will matchmaking try to pair players of similar gear together? –@TheCrazyValheru
similar skill ranking, which is affected by both play skill and gear. –AngryRobotics
Hey man, just wanted to say I got the BETA a few days ago, I love your game to death. Just 1 Q, will there be class intros? –RaptorsFan60
yes, each class has an intro in the 2D animated style that appears in the intro cinematic we released. –AngryRobotics[/blue]
Blizzard CM Kaivax has been fielding a fair number of D3 questions of late, often about [wiki]Hardcore[/wiki], which he says he played a lot of in D2. I’ll take his word for that, though I do wonder sometimes, since most of his thoughts and opinions about HC in D2 disagree with everything I ever thought or observed of others during my years of heavy HC play.
He’s at it again today, and I can’t say if I agree or disagree with his comments on this one since I’m not sure what he’s saying. Honestly, can anyone distill this into something other than “could be yes or no?” Please do so in comments if you can. Quote:
[blue]So would you consider HC mode a mode based more on time or skill (or some combination of the two)?
Kaivax: Yes — if you look at the whole game as a difficulty curve, and there are spots where the difficulty suddenly rises, hardcore players will want to play the area just before those spots for as long as possible before taking chances.
But perhaps the curve won’t have sudden, steep increases. Perhaps it will be quite smooth.
And if it isn’t smooth, per se, it might still be difficult to anticipate where the big steps up in difficulty are. They don’t have to be at the pause between difficulty levels. Those sharp rises could be seven pulls in, or seventy pulls in. [/blue]
I did like this last exchange between a fan and Bashiok; while it doesn’t tell us anything new, it does address the generally content-lacking state of their official dialogue of late.
[blue]Honest question. Why do you guys let all the rampant speculation go on in the forums? is it just to drum up hype? too much to stop? –jeremysnow2
What would you recommend we do? It’s a forum. It’s for discussing things people want to discuss, and they want to discuss that. –Bashiok
Thats fair, I suppose i get fustrated sifting through the missinformation getting to constructive/funny/informative posts. –jeremysnow2
I’m all for dispelling rumors, but at this point it’s really out of our control. Only a release date can fix it. 🙂 –Bashiok
that was a lie now I think about it. After release will be “PVP now?” “how about now?”. then “Where is the exp?” “how about now” –jeremysnow2
Good point… 😐 –Bashiok[/blue]