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Ascended crafting and account magic find set to shake up Guild Wars 2 economy
ArenaNet's resident Guild Wars 2 economist John Smith and game designer Linsey Murdock posted a detailed dev blog today outlining big changes to the game's magic find and crafting systems. The first big change comes in the form of account magic find -- Magic find will be granted only by guild buffs, utility infusions, and consumables and will be account-wide and permanent (up to 300%). Magic find on existing items will be replaced with the option to select stats for that item. Ascended weapon crafting is the second big change. Players will be able to level their crafting skills to 500; the professions that produce weapons will make use of a new refinement system and ascended inscriptions to create new ascended weapons. Ascended armor crafting is due later this year. Both changes are expected to have a big impact on the Guild Wars 2 economy, with Fine and Masterwork salvaging items seeing increased importance due to account magic find and the value of weapons and armor fluctuating thanks to ascended crafting. Smith noted that ArenaNet doesn't intend to apply such big modifications to the Guild Wars 2 economy very often but that some features are worth adding due to the value added for players.
The Soapbox: Diablo III's endgame is fundamentally flawed
Diablo III was arguably the biggest online game release of the year, but its predecessor's decade of consistent popularity left some pretty big shoes to fill. Despite being the most pre-ordered PC game in history and selling more than 6.3 million units in its first week, Diablo III has started to seriously wane in popularity. I've seen over a dozen friends stop playing completely in the last few months, and Xfire's usage stats for D3 have dropped by around 90% since June. Guild Wars 2's timely release accounts for some of the drop, but there's a lot more going on than just competition. The Diablo III beta showed only the first few levels and part of the game's highly polished first act, and soon after release it became obvious that parts of the game weren't exactly finished. PvP was cut from release, the Auction House was a mess, and Inferno difficulty was a poor excuse for an endgame. Poor itemisation made the carrot on the end of the stick taste sour, and the runaway inflation on top-end items is crying out for some kind of ladder reset mechanic. But there is hope for improvement, with new legendary items, the Paragon level system, and the upcoming Uber boss mechanic taking a few steps in the right direction. In this opinion piece, I look at some of the fundamental flaws in Diablo III's endgame and suggest a few improvements that would make a world of difference.
Play together, loot alone in Diablo III's 1.0.4 patch
What would it take to get you to give Diablo III another go? A whopping patch, perhaps? Blizzard is banking on it. In the game's upcoming 1.0.4 update, the team aims to revamp more than a few major systems, so Senior Technical Game Designer Wyatt Cheng took to the official blog to lay out the plan. For starters, Blizz wants to boost the number of folks playing co-op. That means nuking magic-find averaging in co-op matches; in 1.0.4, you'll benefit from your individual looting bonuses, and monster health will be shaved incrementally as more players join a game. The patch also nerfs elite monster pack difficulty, makes regular mobs tougher but buffs their drops, fixes terrible weapon drops (especially weak two-handers), adjusts damage-over-time skills, and reduces repair costs by 25%, the last of which ought to make endgamers happy. The devs are likewise "making a metric-ton of changes to classes," so expect more Battle.net blog posts in the near future.
Blizzard releases details for Diablo 3's big 1.0.4 patch
Blizzard has been promising for a while that Diablo III's patch 1.0.4 would be a Capital B D Big Deal for the game, and a blog post from developer Wyatt Cheng seems to reinforce that notion. What's missing from this particular post is specifics about the sweeping class changes the devs have been talking about, but apparently that's going to be a whole 'nother blog, so fear not. Some major features of the patch are below, with the whole blog after the cut. Magic find and gold find will no longer be averaged in multiplayer games. Monster health will now be a flat increase of 75% health (per player), regardless of the game's difficulty level. No more Out Of Time enrage timers on elites or healing to full after you die a few times. Normal monster HP is increasing by a slight amount, but the chance of finding rare items on normal monsters is being increased by a factor of four. To close the gap between normals and elites, elite HP will be reduced slightly. Weapons of ilvl 61 and 62 can now roll weapon damage that extends to numbers currently reserved for ilvl 63+. Use of two-handed weapons will be encouraged by new sets of affixes. Repair costs of high-end items will be reduced by about 25%. Problem affixes like Fire Chains and Shielding are being adjusted, and Invulnerable Minions is gone, baby, gone. A tentative release date of the fourth week in August.
Blizzard wants your Diablo 3 Magic Find feedback
Diablo III players have had a few weeks to get to level 60, and Blizzard's recent patch to smooth over some of the difficulty hikes has made sure that more adventurers than ever can hack and slash their way through Inferno, the game's ultimate difficulty level and best source of loot. Players have discovered that it's efficient to keep a second set of gear in their bags loaded up with Magic Find, the stat that boosts your chance to find rare items, and swap to it when Elite/Champion packs or bosses are at low health. Unlike WoW, loot is calculated when a creature dies, not when it spawns, thus allowing players to benefit both from the good stats on their main gear and the MF on the gear they switch to. Blizzard considered this an unintended but allowable way to play; now that the method is well known out in the wild, though, players are feeling forced into playing this way, and the devs know it. To that end, they've announced that they're working on a solution to the gear swapping problem and explained a few of the choices they're mulling over, replete with pros and cons for each. And they want your feedback! Comment on the blog post with your thoughts and which change you'd personally like to see. Keep in mind, though, that regardless of which change is made, the devs are planning to boost MF for everyone so that no one feels penalized by whichever change makes it to launch. Full blog post and link, after the break.
