One of the most important issues for me is the balance between rares and uniques - D2 was a much more interesting game when the best rares >> best uniques, and I'd love to see Blizzard emphasize rares again in D3.

Some of this bias may be due to the fact that I loved building duelers in D2, and, Post-LoD, uniques made it so that the vast majority of mid and high level duelers looked the damn same. Granted, there was still some room to throw in a good rare or two (w00t for still having a fine dual leech ring or two hangin' around on a mule!), but mostly gearing was a fixed, cookie-cutter issue. BO-RING.

ANd besides, I'm sure most of us remember how excited we were the first time we saw a rare Exec drop!

This is pretty vague, but balance is the most important issue to me. D2 has been imbalanced in so many areas for so long. Patch after patch, Blizzard could never get it right.

Item balance is a huge issue. First and foremost, I'd like to see something done about the main way items are obtained by putting an end to that Boss Farming shit. Take away Boss uber-drops altogether (first time boss kill giving a good drop). Make it so people have to run areas and kill mobs to find items, not just teleport to a boss over and over. Do away with the magic find modifier. Rares should have the potential to be the best items in the game. Since uniques and sets are pre-defined, characters are built around them. I hate hate hate the fact that every character uses the same few uniques/sets and the rest are garbage. Make the crappy uniques usable (almost all uniques are completely worthless, especially at their level requirement) and the godly uniques less godly. I guess I'm not sure how I'd like to handle uniques/sets. I hate it when items are so rare that you can't ever hope to get them but I hate that some items are so common that everyone uses them. In my ideal world, every character would use rares almost exclusively with the occasional unique/set. Ranting like a spaz, moving on.

Character/skill balance needs to be done right, too. Why the fuck did they ruin WW and make Blessed Hammer so godly? Isn't there a balance somewhere? Cant they test the characters/skills/builds enough to find the necessary damage (or whatever it takes) tweaks to put each character on equal footing?

I hope they don't make the leveling too easy or too fast and I hope they have a ladder.

I agree 100% with everything said already. Im hoping the game is hard (atleast for the first few months). Lately it seems as if they are making games easier and easier.

This is a really interesting question...

I think the most important single issue to me is security of Battle.net from hacks and any type of bot. I do sympathize with Sully about all characters looking the same in terms of gear, but the main problem with Uniques and Sets was that the economy was so saturated with dupes and botted items. Shakos are quite difficult to find legitly, and I've honestly never found a Levi in my entire time running Baals etc (And I used to help on Ponys runs to kill Baal for him)... I guess I'm saying I don't really mind the current system, as long as it is kept legitimate, and that Ladder resets happen on a more regular basis.

An excellent thing Hell Unleashed added was that 90/95 Uniques needed to be found from extremely difficult bosses on extremely long runs.. I remember that it took 5-6 hours to do a legit Baal run from WSK, and honestly, thats the way it should be. People SHOULD die on a regular basis, even really good players.. so I suppose difficulty is also very important to me as well.


TPPK ruined the game, chicken was fucking pathetic, so was maphack. I admit to using these hacks in my time on D2, but I guess as I matured, I realized that they really took a lot away from the game.

So yeah, Security, followed by the ladder resetting fairly often (No more than 6 months), followed by difficulty.. those are my hopes for D3.

PS: Although I was really doubting at first when they announced D3, I think I've realized that really, Blizzard can be counted on to make this game right. I cannot think of a single game they have made that did not surpass expectations of their target audience, and they are aiming at Diablo players now. I really do not think we have anything to worry about. I would prefer to have Blizzard do this than any other game company I can think of.

I used maphack in 1.08 and 1.09 for the full light radius and monsters on minimap but that was all. It was so widely accepted that it didn't seem like a "hack" to me.

Of course chicken mod was lame as hell and I even remember some SZ ladder guys using it on their barbs in CS.

nothing worse than chicken hacks in BvB duels

game wise, nothing is more thrilling than a good duel. I hope they try to make PVP balanced across the board ie: lowbie duels to high duels. I didn't mind all barb duels pre xpac, but they could work on making chars a little more well rounded.

oh...and I agree with Art. Rares should be the most powerful equipment, so we dont have the same cookie cutter builds PVP. .09 Classic bvb was basically all uniques and sets....yawn. Tweaking was just as fun as dueling...

The MOST important thing to me I suppose is hacking. Security is #1. They did a good job for a long time but things fell off hardcore once the game hit the back burner. Hopefully they are learning from D2.

Whats this chicken mod everyone is talking about?

#1 thing to me like stated above, get rid of botters and fucking 250 mf runs a night type farming shit. That was ridiculous

Security is also huge, is this game going to be Pay2play?

Chicken mod was this addon for d2loader which allowed you to automatically exit the game when your HP dropped below a certain point. Barbs used it in CS all the time when they got IM on them during a mid WW and were unable to stop. I refer to this as under skilled.

Wow that's lame.

all i hope is the damage ratio pvp is good. I want some of those clean 1 hit kills if i can beef up a skill tree for one type of attack.

here's an old screenshot I dug up. This was after my #1 barb died and we all were trying to get #1 Duke/Duchess. Most were zons and at the time of this screen of_Northwestern was the #1 duchess. Of course I passed her later to hold the title.

This is a classic example of someone using a follow bot pally with fanat/conc aura always on. She was also confirmed to have chicken hack, but unfortunately for her, she timed out it didn't work so well.

I will admit, I played d2 at 640x480 for so long it's sad. It just looked better in the channel when it didn't say "Expansion" above your head.

Sol clan forgot about those guys! Wait Dumb_mother was in Sol?

I agree with everything mentioned already. As for level requirements on items, I never really liked that idea. Just have stat requirements for the items so as long as you have good charms and gems you could potentially sacrafice armor to use an amazing weapon at a low level.

hey look at that i was in that game weeee

The two biggest things that ruined the game for me were as everyone said, the cookie cutter aspect, even though some of those old rares were godly enough to always be good.

and second, not just any hack, but the hack on y2k, when they were able to log in as you and steal your crap. I haven't really kept up with the community (if someone on dzone admitted to being the mastermind) but you left me alive with no stuff vs killing everyone else off, which I found funny, but not less disheartening when I realized the roll back would cost me level 87.5( number 1 alive ) - > just barely 83. It basically killed my will to live, just like the WW change would have done anyways shortly since I was a WW lance barb.

Since I am 'hardcore' in WoW, Glad and killed Kil'jaedin, I am only moderately confident that they will be able to deal with these issues without introducing some carebear aspect. As long as we can respec our toons when they realize that XX is OP, I think that should alleviate a bunch of my concerns.

i forgot about that zon, yeah that was the like less than 6 mo period where follow/auto skills on pally worked online, i loved solo'ing cs w/her- she got queened long before i died though but was #1 duchess for a bit i think. i didn't use chicken though that char i tppk'd anyone i saw using dupes in the cows with after a massive duping wave to try and thin out the supply when i was pissed about my queening. the follow bots had chicken on them for sure but that was because they were just following~~

Never used any hacks except m/h basically for monsters and exp shrines etc..

No hacks would be nice but give it time someone will have one.. they'll find something sooner or later and ruin it all just hope later.

I wanna be able to PK just like we did in d2 classic. I dont mind losing your portal when you back to town and hit hostile but please no fucking waypoint timer bullshit.

Oh yeah I want color hack too -_- best times ever.

chicken mode won't go away

you can just scrape the screen for the lifebar... I could make one for you guys in ~5 minutes if you wanted.

I think I'm done w/ hardcore. It was good when we played it but is insanely tainted now. They'd have to bring it back in such a huge way and stop at least the hax that ruin your playing experience

Are u kidding? Sc is just hording items and killing things with no fear and nothing to lose

if they have a 100% system for detecting 3rd party programs like they claim a new version of battle.net will have then we should be ok from hacks

respec is all i want.