Greedy Goblin

Monday, December 5, 2011

The most useless stat ever

In Diablo III gear can have several stats. Magic Find is one. This stat will take the place of other useful stats, so the Magic Find gear will provide lower damage and survival than "normal" gear. This is mostly a dummy stat, the item with MF is simply disenchant fodder.

Yet I'm sure we'll make our biggest sells with this crap. Why? Because our best buyers, the M&S - by definition - is unable to understand the game mechanics, or simply doesn't care. What is the problem? You can obviously kill stronger monsters in normal gear than in magic find. So why don't you kill those?

The only place where magic find would have any use is a stonewall boss. A boss that is much-much stronger than anything before. So you could massacre earlier monsters but can't kill him. So you farm best gear from the old ones. Considering previous experience with Blizzard games and official communication about Diablo III, they don't want to place stonewalls into the game, want even casual players to complete it.

So while arthasdklol farms lvl 32 monsters "for cool stuffz", the smart ones will be killing lvl 35 ones (assuming the same time commitment). The same scheme goes up to the last endboss. After the endboss, there is no game. Diablo III is not an MMO, it's a single-line game, after you kill the endboss, you get a "you won" cinematic and game over.

Who would want MF gear? At first "professional" farmers. The "" means that they are not just standard goldsellers, but players who came up with the bizarre idea of getting a steady real money income by playing the game. So after they killed the endboss, they will start farming the world elites for gear and sell it. They would need MF gear, but they won't buy it. They want to sell, not to buy. Their scheme is to farm for money, so they will farm their own MF gear.

The other group is the one that will make us rich: the M&S who "need" better gear to "progress". These kiddies will farm the second or third difficulty to "get geared" for the last. They will buy the MF gear.

Also, there will be punks who want BiS after the game is over, so they can't even theoretically use it. They just want it to show off. However I doubt if they will buy MF, they will buy the "l33t stuffz" themselves.

There is one group I can imagine that will use MF gear for good: hardcore characters that advance extremely carefully not to be killed. Such guy farms safe monsters until he is geared enough to consider the next area safe (here "safe" is way beyond "doable" which is enough for normal progression). Too bad that such characters can't use the real money AH.

So the suggestion for today: if you get a piece of MF in Diablo III, check for the AH if you can sell it well. Probably you can. Just don't ever try to use that crap, keep that privilege to the M&S!

31 comments:

Unknown said...

You're assuming that there are no disrepancies like Mephisto or Pindleskin in the time commitment/reward curve. It's not that the next boss is a stonewall one, it's just that those two are quickly reachable, very easy to kill and as bosses have a high chance of dropping good gear.

JacktheManiac said...

Did you even touch Diablo 2?

Diablo (the series as a whole) is NOT WoW. It's a single player game with optional multi-player (in which monsters are stronger when player count rises).

Anyway, while indeed, just to clear the game, magic find is useless, it's purpose lies with more than just providing hardcore players and loot hungry M&S.

In Diablo 2, increased magic find served the purpose to gather BiS gear for organize PvP purposes.

Diablo doesn't have engame, that's true. But people are gonna farm the best gear in order to make the best character, to succeed a PvP, to farm stuff (like the stones of Jordan in Diablo 2, if something similar comes up) in Inferno, etc...

Third, M&S. That, I can somewhat agree with you, if indeed they come over from WoW. However, there's a flaw here.

Will they really come over?
Assuming they do, who will they brag to? They might play single player, or join games with other M&S. Casual players and more hardcore (the mode in which you cannot resurrect if you die) players will play closed game in their own groups.

The way Diablo 3 is made, it's hard to predict

1: Who will M&S Play with (Solo or multi? If multi, where, with who, what kind of games?)
2: Will they have the skill to go past normal mode?
3: Once they beat Diablo, will they actually care to continue playing, when it will be mandatory, to find good games to get involved with the community, or stop?

From nightmare and onward, only good players will be there. Organized runs and PvP battles (duels) will be made by players, for players. Look at League of Legend. If you're bad, you get yelled at, treated like shit, harassed, verbally abused. And that's organized by the computer.

They're not going to be able to find someone to carry them through inferno.

Believe me, alot of normal people who wants success don't want shit to do with retards. Retards will be abused if they act like retards. They will be isolated from the groups.

Unlike WoW, these games are easy, because you don't depend on 9 other people, nor need a perfect execution to kill a boss. You go, you avoid stuff, you grab health globes, chug a few potions, you slay, you win.

M&S won't have anyone to show off to.

And will they really see and approach this like they see WoW? I'd agree that no.

Okay, the most retarded may, but then they are so retarded I prefer to believe they don't exist.

Still, they won't have stuff to show off, nor as many occasions to show off, compared to WoW.

Will you make a good point, there is much you don't take into account.

Alot of people farmed MF BiS gear in DII to have the best gear possible, to win at organized PvP, etc... to have the best character, plain and simple. We've already discussed how goals you don't agree with are not necessarily moronic, too.

Looking at my post, there is alot of stuff I said. I might contradict myself, but this is a shaky subject. I mean, it demands we predict the behaviour of M&S in a game totally different from WoW, with the only basis for theories BEING WoW. So, we might not have enough data to believe they will actually go for BiS gear.

Xaxziminrax II said...

In the event there are no stone wall bosses, both MF and the extra stats of non-MF gear are pointless, unless you are using extremely behind-the-curve gear.


If no bosses are stone wall bosses, then MF gear is the only viable gear, since getting more stats would reduce a 100 second fight to an 80 second fight. With the extra stats of non-MF, after five bosses you'de be one boss ahead of everyone else, but everyone else would have better drops for selling.

What it boiled down to in d2 was player skill. Since sufficient skill can be used instead of extra stats, skilled players built heavy mf sets, because every other stat was irrelevant. With high levels of mf (I remember a 500% threshold for mephisto, which wasn't too demanding to achieve), you can get drops from that boss that other players can't.

Clan runs in d2 went something like this: bunch of high stats players, 1 mf player, others beat down the final boss, mfer stayed back and got the last-hit: epic rain for the clan, very low risk of failure.

Soge said...

You are missing a fundamental factor in Diablo 2 design - You don't need to kill a monster with lvl X to drop lvl X stuff - There is some variance in the item levels that are dropped, so you might find yourself getting, say, level 37 gear from the 33 monsters, and getting them faster than from the level 37 when using Magic Drop stuff. Besides, you are essentially trading a marginal increase in some stat for a substantial increase in the drop rate. A 1% performance increase can be safely sacrificed for a 20% drop chance increase.

skeddar said...

I have to disagree with you in some points. MF was not really an option in D2 during leveling. Maybe if you found a Gull dagger (100% MF) early on you would put it in the second slot and swap for the killing blow.

But aside from that, as Mika said, you'd wear MF gear only for particular cases, wehre you could farm one boss easily, but would struggle afterwards. Maybe you need a better weapon to increase killspeed. It's faster to kill Eldricht and Schenk with mediocre gear and hope for a good weapon, than finding one from regular monsters.

At 200% MF nightmare it would maybe take 5 runs to get a set or unique item. It is not guaranteed, that it's an upgrade, but the runs only take 2 minutes maximum,so it's not a big deal. As those monsters give a good deal of experience (better than normal playing) it is not a stupid approach. Afterwards you could most likely breeze through the rest of the act to the next "sweet spot".

In end game as it will be in Diablo 3, using MF is an optimization problem. In Inferno difficulty, all regular monsters are one level above you (bosses and champions 2-3 I guess).

For simplicity, let's say every monster has the same percentage of dropping great items. Let x be the probability of a good drop and t1 the time it takes to kill a monster with MF gear, t2 without:

If (MF/100*x)/t1 >= x/t2

it would be better to wear MF gear.
If you want to be precise, you would need to add a constant to take the time running to the next group of monsters into account.

For Diablo 3 Blizzard said it wouldn't be farming only one region, it should be rewarding to play the game, not grinding one spot over and over again. For MF that means you should wear all the MF gear that still allows you to kill the monsters in a reasonable time (see above) and neglecting only that much defensive attributes, that you aren't killed.

As you can actively dodge arrows and magic attacks (not like in WoW) you can wear more MF the better you are.
(Unless dodging wouldn't be neccessary in your regular gear, but that's unlikely)

Anonymous said...

I cannot agree with you on this one. Have you ever played D2? There were (are) certain classes/specs, which are good for MFing such as frost mage / hammerdin or a barbarian. It's not like you have to kill the best monster possible to get the loot which would be able to be sold for thousands of gold.

Babar said...

Did you ever play Diablo 2 Gevlon? A huge part of any gear choice was cramming in as much MF as possible while still being able to kill at a reasonable pace. MF did also have a diminishing return, so after 500ish %, more MF was usually not worth it.

End-game Diablo 2 was all about running specific bosses or a few select areas for a chance to drop the best gear and runes. Obviously if you get 4-5 times the chance of good drops, while only reducing your killing speed by 20%, that's a great trade-off. MF at lower levels usually wasn't worth it though.

Making a general statement like saying MF is useless, while having very little experience with the franchise, seems almost like something M&S would say, rather than a goblin.

Gevlon said...

If you have completed the game and still farm for "better gear", you are a complete idiot (unless you are doing it for selling)

Azuriel said...

If you have completed the game and still farm for "better gear", you are a complete idiot (unless you are doing it for selling)

/facepalm

You do realize that at some point you are calling yourself an idiot for even playing an MMORPG, right? Playing WoW past Deathwing in LFR mode makes you a complete idiot, by your argument. Same with your premades in random BGs. What does it accomplish? You have beat the game already.

...unless... wait a moment! It might very well be possible that these games can support player-generated goals and "win conditions!" Who would have guessed?

Babar said...

But again you don't understand Diablo 2 at all. If you completed Hell difficulty, you finished the game. However, you could still play your character. And you still have the Pandemonium event left. And even if you had a character that could do that, people still continued doing runs to get either better gear, or to get gear for other characters to have fun with.

Almost anyone who plays Diablo 2 now have completed it, but the fun is trying out new characters and new builds, some which require very specific gear that can only be found by farming high level areas.

Diablo 2 is all about gear. People play it because they like the feeling of finally finding a great piece of gear they can either use themselves or trade for something they need. I'm sure this is not for everyone, but it's just the same as farming for an achievement in WoW. It's also just the same as making a ton of money in WoW that you don't need at all. It's a personal challenge, which doesn't interfere or bother other players at all.

You're trying to make fun of something you don't understand or don't have any experience with.

Gevlon said...

@Azuriel: LFR is a joke. Deathwing HM is the end of the game and playing PVE after that is stupid.

Also, "player defined goal" can only be something non-trivial. Farming gear is trivial. You already killed the boss, you surely can kill it 100x more times. What's the point?

Anonymous said...

By saying such thing, you mean the whole Diablo2 endgame playerbase were idiot.

Do you seek for debate here, because from what I see, your profound certitudes leaves no place for such thing.

Can't you admit the architecture of Diablo is nothing like Wow, and one can find interest in continuing the game after Baal Hell ?

Maybe Diablo is just about getting the best possible gear, by farming and trading. If so, then it will target a differente audience (which you will not be part of)

Given your point of view, the auction house will not be of any use, since "no one will play after finishing the game".

Anonymous said...

Why do you use alts then? With this logic while playing WOW you should:

A) Install the game
B) Create 1 toon and level it to 85
C) Join a raiding guild and kill Deathwing
D) Get the gear from current PvP season
E) Uninstall the game and wait for another xp-ac/content patch as there is nothing more to be done and all other things are just for farming idiots (titles / items - just bunch of pixels)

Why you don't do it this way?

Glotan ... you are either getting old or or something hit you in your head because your posts today makes no sense.

And you forget 1 thing - people play games to have fun. If it's fun for someone to kill certain boss again and again to get better item it's perfectly ok.

With the atitude you show in your post people who has finished Street Fighter 4 on highest difficulty level should never ever play this game again... but guess what most of them do because they find it entertaining ...

As I say your logic fails today even more than usualy.

The more I read your blog the more I see fail in this whole "Play 2 win" attitude.

Riptor said...

I think M&S will have a really hard time in Diablo as it does not cater to them. I highly doubt your average WoW M&S will even get remotly close to finishing D3 (although, they will probably concider the game done after the First Playthrough on normal and go back to spamming /trade..)

Gevlon, you should really take some time to play D2 or get yourself a D3 Beta Key.



oh yeah. 25 man hc Runs "beat the Game".. everything else is just practice.

Caramael said...

Diablo 2 is about maxing out your level, skills and gear. And for a lot of players it's also about being able to solo everything in the game that way.
An MF alt is one of the tools used to reach those goals faster.

Tzimisce said...

You could be right Gevlon, but you assume that you will not farm, as you did not do it in WoW. If we accept this assumption, than you are right, because you will not use that stat, as you would not use resilence in PVE. However, you have a great point in suggesting to sell MF gear, as in the earlier times, they will sell for fortunes, despite they are just tools and not end items.

KhasDylar said...

Lot of talking here, I'll drop my two cents here too.
@Gevlon
When do you consider, when have you completed a game, for example Diablo III? If you saw the ending cinematic, after you killed Diablo (or whoever will be the endboss) on normal, you won? By far not! There are more difficulity levels, which you didn't even touch. If you consider completing a game by clearing it on the easiest mode, you are missing out a lot of content.
On the other hand: what do you consider as goal by playing Diablo III? Again if you only want to see the "you won" video after beating the archenemy, you only complete like 20% of the game. What is your goal in Diablo III? Of course, you are right in that, if you killed everything on Inferno and still farm for your own gear, you are a complete idiot as you clearly don't need more gear - for PvE. Your example with Deathwing Heroic is a bit flawed: if I kill it once, it does not mean necessarily, that I can kill it next week again. Much depends on my group, the others I play with. Maybe next week we bring in some new guy, who messes up something and we fail to kill the boss.
I say, there is room for farming gear after you completed the game (and by that I mean, I killed Diablo on Inferno): you farm for better gear to be able to kill a boss faster, thereby getting more loot / hour to sell and you farm for better gear, to be able to replace as much as you can with MF items and still be able to kill hard bosses, thereby killing the boss in the same time you killed it earlier, but you get probably better loot (to sell). So I think it is very goblinish to farm for better gear and to use MF gear after you completed the game.
But as the main point of your post says: yes, one can (and hopefully will) make sell a lot of MF gear ot M&S, who have not the slightest idea, what MF gear is used for - heck, it could be MF gear which prevents them from killing harder bosses, so they will farm for or buy more gear (from you)!

@others MF gear won't work like it was in Diablo II: your MF gear only works for your own loot, so there's no point for a group to bring you, if you are in MF gear from tip to toe - they won't benefit from it at all. Unless you pay for them with good gold.

About player defined goals: remember Ulduar hard modes in WoW? All of them was some slight change in the game mechanic, not like Heroic modes today: you did not have to click your portrait and switch on harder content, you only had to push a button (which clearly said not to push it). This was in my opinion the nearest to player generated content as if you see these hard modes closely, they don't really required attention or additional work on developer side (just remember the Herald of the Titans achievement, where you have to kill Algalon in ilvl226 on lvl80: you can always set such goals for yourself, something like the Undergeared project). And what was the player reaction for Ulduar HMs? At first the forums were full of whine posts, saying this is a bullshit, "why don't you give us real hardmodes Blizz fufufuuu". And what was the player reaction on long term? On my realm people are forming groups even these days into Ulduar to do hard modes there. Why don't you see such PuGs for ICC or TotC or any other raid (not even current expansion raids, like BoT or BwD)?

Grim said...

Deathwing HM is the end of the game and playing PVE after that is stupid
By that logic beating Diablo III on Inferno is the end of the game and nothing less. So beating it on a lower difficulty and then keep farming for better gear is acceptable.

Anonymous said...

You will most probably get deep into the game when released and find yourself playing long after defeating the endboss, such as many people did during Diablo2 gold age.

Now, question is : why ?

I'm pretty sure you'll find something attractive for you to blog about. May it be gear farming or trading.

I also believe that if you plan to blog about Diablo3, you will definitely not stop blogging about it the day you reach the last boss in Inferno mode. Because you will understand there is more than finishing the game.

Yet, if you are right, it's a shame because Blizzard would have spent so much work for us to play only few weeks/months compared to the multiple years so many players
have spent on Diablo2.

Goodmongo said...

@Gevlon, why do you contradict yourself so much? You claim beating Diablo on a lower difficulty setting means the game is over but then say that you need to defeat Deathwing in HM before WOW is over.

So which is it? Defeating the end boss at any difficulty level? Or only at the highest difficulty level? At least try to be consistent.

Gevlon said...

"completed the game" = "killed endboss on highest difficulty"

Alleji said...

Disregarding goals other than killing the end boss, what if the game difficulty is balanced around having gear X% better than what you will on average get playing normally?

For example, you'll play up to lvl 35 without MF and then gradually find the game too difficult because your gear is far below what is required? That will slow down your progress significantly.

And if you wear +50% MF the whole time, it will reduce your DPS by 5%, but make the difficulty curve much smoother, your gear will be adequate at 35 and you won't slow down.

Bobbins said...

Magic Find - 'The most useless stat ever'

Why do you rate gold find as not as useless as magic find. I would tend to beleive that gold find less desirable.
Gold find versa Magic find? Guess we will have to see which is better when the game is finished.

Anonymous said...

D3 sounds like D2 which is more than 10y old by now... If the best blizzard can come up it's really sad.

Anyone know where the original developers of D2 and WoW are ATM?

Michael said...

Hi Gevlon,

I think you're missing the fact that there's no grind to push through to get to the fun part. There's no particular virtue to being at a higher level. You have as much fun playing from 10-20 as from 30-40.

The fun in diablo comes from a) the gameplay itself, which doesn't change much from level to level, b) feeling like you're growing more powerful as you play, from leveling up and gearing up, and c) random bursts of happiness from epic loot drops.

From that perspective, higher damage/survivability beyond what is necessary to continue to progress is useless. It's like in wow if a boss needs 80k raid dps to beat enrage, then gear that moves you from 90k to 100k is pointless, you've already met the requirement.

Since just playing is fun, and just playing will automatically cause you to progress, the best way to improve your fun is to increase your random bursts of happiness from random drops. You do that by balancing damage output gear (for more chances for an item to drop per time) with magic find gear (for better drops), to maximize your epic drops per time.

Magic find gear is not useless, it's fun. If you're not playing for fun, there are probably better things you could be doing with your time. :P

JacktheManiac said...

@ Anon 05 December, 2011 17:44:


"
Anyone know where the original developers of D2 and WoW are ATM?"


Hopefully you'll read my answer... Some/a couple ofD2 developers are now a part of Runic Games, developing Torchligh 2, which will be an awesome Diablo clone coming soon by the way. Of course I'm getting both DIII and TL2.

Anyhoo, as for what Gevlon said... no endgame in Diablo 3? Continuing to play after you kill the last boss is dumb?

The play2win mindset can be used at different levels in different ways. For some casual players, like me, it's using and developing working and efficient strategies to reach/clear a goal, like finishing the game, etc.

For some, they use every shorcut they can to be the one and single best, who stand atop all others.

Normal people change strategies after they see the one they use currently didn't work after a couple times. Often they will ask on the internet what the working strategy is.

M&S just bash their heads against the walls.

I have to disagree; you've finished a game when you seen the "true" ending cinematic some games offer. If it doesn't need to clear a higher difficulty level, then you've cleared the game. In Kingdom Hearts 2, this mean filling in all the journal entries in normal mode (i.e, 100% complete, and you need to beat Sephiroth for that).

Or clearing the game in the hardest mode also gives you the ending (which I did on my first playthrough) showing Birth By Sleep.

Additional harder modes are just to increase longevity. Some games I don't want to replay through immediatly on harder modes because I don't feel like it. Doesn't mean I didn't clear them. If I didn't then I would want to play again.

But "clearing a game" is a somewhat subjective thing to define precisely. Will there are criterias, these may vary from person to person, some may not have X criteria but have Y and vice versa.

I explained in my first post how we already discussed on that blog that player created goals and even achievement farming are not moronic because fun depends on the person and cannot be defined objectively.

If someone enjoys farming gear, then it is not stupid. If he goes the wrong way about reaching his goal, such as NOT using magic find gear on cannon fodder enemy and bosses, he is moronic.

That said, there is also the PvP scene, who min maxed everything in DII, and will do so again in DIII. To be the very best. It demands time and effort I'm not willing to put in, but you won't find me here (you'll find me and my buds teaming up in Inferno and kicking Diablo's ass, though) but some min maxers will find alot of fun in doing this. What's wrong with that?

Finally, runes (obsidian, Fire, etc) are something you want for your skills to do what you want them to do.

Anonymous said...

"On my realm people are forming groups even these days into Ulduar to do hard modes there. Why don't you see such PuGs for ICC or TotC or any other raid (not even current expansion raids, like BoT or BwD)?"

Answer: because your realm sucks.

People PuG Ulduar for a similar reason as ICC: legendary, mount, and achievement. Personally, I also like some Ulduar transmog, but ICC also has some ince ones.

On my realm people have PuGed HC content forever. FL HC, BoT/BWD HC (10 mostly), ICC HC (10/25), TotC HC (10/25), Ulduar HC (10/25), even Naxx (10/25) after they removed the immortal/undying achievement. DS is also heavily PuGed since wednesday afternoon when I logged on. LFD and LFR are also PuGed. These are even PuGed when the content was still relevant, but you need to have the achievement on your main (in case of FL everyone was 6/7 HC anyway), or convince RL of your skills, and usually one fail and failbot is kicked. As I already stated especially ICC is popular because of the mounts and the legendary. TotC has no legendary, and neither do 4.0 raids have such whereas Ulduar is popular probably because of the legendary, and I expect to see tons of FL HC PuGs even on bad realms like yours. They drop more reagents for the legendary than normal, and are nerfed to the ground. And if my guild does not want to do alt run I prefer to PuG some hard content: the morons won't get in (they don't have achievement on their main), we don't have to boost those then whereas in normal this happens all too often.

And to the fellow who believes the game starts at 25m HC raiding: In 4.0, with the exception of 1 maybe 2 fights, 10m HC raiding was more difficult than 25m HC raiding.

As for MF, I haven't played D2 or D3 beta but it seems like Adventurer's Journal or Potion of Treasure on gear. Which means you are less powerful in combat. On high end that can mean the difference between death and defeat (you want to min-max there), but if you'd wear this gear on content which you can farm (are overgeared for) the question is then what is quicker: wearing your the BiS gear you got and zerging the content faster in hope to gather gear to sell (make profit), or having the MF gear and farm. Therefore, your whole argument depends on how Blizzard has balanced the stat, how powerful it exactly is. You can also sell the MF gear later on after you used it since there is no BoP/Soulbound gear.

Azuriel said...

@Azuriel: LFR is a joke. Deathwing HM is the end of the game and playing PVE after that is stupid.

Considering you are (historically) unlikely to be capable of killing heroic Deathwing, isn't any PvE action on your part stupid, by that argument? What sense does Play2Win make when you can't win?

Also, "player defined goal" can only be something non-trivial. Farming gear is trivial. You already killed the boss, you surely can kill it 100x more times. What's the point?

And yet you played Spider Solitaire, normal Solitaire, and likely any number of single-player games more than once. "The point" is amusement, relaxation, immersion, escapism, time wasting, or any number of other things.

Look, I understand you are unwilling to cede this otherwise obvious point because it would undermine your M&S thesis. How could someone judge the AB bridge-fighters if we acknowledge they might not care about honor gains? But that is exactly the point: you can't. If you knew they were going after honor or the respect of their peers, then yes, you can call them M&S for doing so badly/inefficiently. But if they aren't, then you can't.

maxim said...

"Inferno" game mode seems to be designed to be a series of stonewalls.

Well, if it's not i'll probably decide that Blizzard has maxed my goodwill credit in terms of sloppy game design.

Anonymous said...

I like the concept of setting my individual difficulty level by getting non-combat stats like MF.

I encountered it in WoW when I leveled my Twink from level 80 to 85: the account-bound items were far weaker combatwise than easily available quest items, BUT they gave me +10%xp per piece. I decided to go for "tougher" fights and more XP per mob because it was more fun and slightly more efficient.

If you carry that concept even further you can create interesting choices that might seperate good and bad players in the same difficulty environment.

Anonymous said...

WoW has spoiled you.

trying to solo hell mode on 8 player difficulty is one of the most rage inducing things I've ever attempted(did not complete it either).

I quit trying because I would have had to MF farm better MF gear, and then farm until I got the right high-end gear.

the difficulty in diablo 2's hell mode is not to be underestimated. to solo it in 8 player mode, you pretty much had to have perfect gear and an optimized build(and they only recently added the ability to change your spec to the game).