Quick Jump:
* Gear-Based Gameplay
* Loss of Character Control
* Spawning
* Tactical Fighting Arenas
* Lack of Tactical Combat
The biggest problems with combat against elites are, thankfully, pretty easy to concisely lay out. The fixes, however, are not so easy.
Every pack feels mostly the same. This isn't due to a single factor, but a few mashed together.
1. The mods are too homogeneous.
2. You're locked into a skill set so you're basically tackling each pack the exact same way.
3. There is nothing truly tactical occurring.
4. At a point, the game is fully about gear, and gear only.
The biggest problem is that instead of giving players an opportunity to take down a strong opponent in a variety of ways, the elite packs, in essence, steal all options from the players. Elite packs effective nullify the purpose of having different skills and different skill builds in the game. They steal control of your character. They make large portions of combat pointless. They pigeon-hole players into cookie cutter builds and completely eliminate any possibility of variants or odd-ball builds, unless that player is grossly overgeared.
They make combat 100% about gear, 0% about tactics and strategy.
Let's take a peek at a video. As I mention elsewhere in this blog, this video gets super fucking cute about half-way through so stick around, faithful viewer.
The Problem(s) with Elite Combat (Video)
Let's talk about the whys, and then break down any defense that could be said for this type of gameplay.
Gear-Based Gameplay
"You got the gear, so you want to use it on something powerful enough to make it worth it" is, I believe, the argument for going with WoW-style progression in an ARPG. I happen to disagree. Gear is meant to augment the skills of the player, to allow them leniency in builds, to do wacky stuff if they want. This is not what gear does in Diablo III. In Diablo III, gear doesn't augment skill, it replaces it.
Now, the video above: a barbarian fighting elites in Act II inferno. An argument I've already had about that video is that my barb is undergeared. I laughed pretty hard at that.
Sure, maybe. I don't know what the rubric is for that particular area. All I can tell you is that if I grit my teeth and take it, I can get through it. I got through Maghda and the sewers with that gear and skill loadout.
But let's look at that defense, I'm undergeared. What you're telling me is that in order to progress through content, I have to overgear. That's the main defense I see for any criticism of elite encounters. "Well, if you'd have spent 200 dollars on this badass sword in the RMAH like I did..."
Thus, if you aren't completely burning through elite packs like they're paper, you aren't doing it right. Which I agree with. Which is sad.
You're either overgeared or undergeared. That is the real rubric to elite combat: you either kill them within the batting of an eyelash (like my barb does) or else you get killed by them (like my wizard does). There's no in-between with a progression system like this. This is why the original idea for inferno was so, so much better.
In fact, the game doesn't really open up at all until you get some at least partially-uber gear. You can't do anything you want to do unless you overgear the content, and even then, you can only do a little bit of what you want to do, in terms of gear itself and builds.
What do boss mods in general do?
1. Hurt you.
2. Make you lose control of your character.
3. Both.
That's pretty much it, and number 2 just fucking sucks. It's a hatred of mine in video games. As George Carlin would have put it, a "psychotic fucking hatred". It's like playing super mario, and the game will on occasion change what the "a" button does.
That's artificial difficulty. You're unplugging the controller, and then plugging it back in, and saying "Wow wasn't that tough?!". Snares, fears, roots, stuns, these are all stemming from a distinct lack of creativity, foresight, and the ability to design a game tactically. I'm sorry but this is the big no-no button for me (as a player) and it was pushed with vigor. Sometimes playing Diablo III gives me nightmarish (HA!) flashbacks to my time playing as a shaman in PVP in WoW. (You can't do that yet Can't do that while stunned You can't do that yet Can't do that while stunned) NOT A FUN TIME. But I digress.
No! I don't digress!
Loss of Character Control
As so eloquently stated above, this is artificial difficulty. The analogue of unplugging someone's controller while they're Zangrief'ing your ass in street fighter.
So a monster makes you lose the most basic aspect of gameplay: interaction. Interaction is the heart of what a video game is. An elite can make that interaction null and void. You cannot game this. And thus we attack the next phantom defense:
You have to gear for it! That's how you game it!
If you want to avoid being CC'd or losing control of your character, yes, you have to gear and skill for it (for the melee at least). Think about that defense, and the horrible flaw that it is.
You have to specifically find gear, eat up item budget, to retain control of your character. In a video game.
Think about that. That's not gaming a system because it isn't a system. You can game waller. You can game missile dampening. You cannot game nightmarish, jailer, frozen, stunned.
Now, I understand. I imagine myself ringed with devs in some conference room in Irvine and I would be given the piss very thoroughly. But this, as a player, is what I think and feel.
Do I think there's a need to completely remove CC from the game? Of course not. Despite what I've said. I just want to see a new kind of crowd control, one that isn't just cheap artificial difficulty, one that you can game and work with. One that requires skill and strategy, and has nothing to do with gear.
When I say "new" crowd control, I don't mean new CC in Diablo III. I mean new in gaming.
Spawning
There are those who would argue that this section isn't a problem, that I should "learn to play", that they enjoy it. But some people are stupid, can we agree on that? Some people have the most shallow thought patterns and rarely break the clouds, preferring to skim lightly over the water of mediocrity because the sun is reflecting off of it and it's shiny. I tend to run a bit hotter, and a bit deeper. If you know what I mean. Insert a creepy wink here.
Ok. Monster spawning. This is an issue, and I would again refer to the video link I posted above. It's a pretty good video for this entry, I think it describes a lot without me having to say a word. There's four points I want to hit on for monster spawning:
1. The action of spawning itself.
2. The location of spawning (and double-packs with added superuniques).
3. Checkpoints and waypoints.
4. The amount of spawning.
1. The monsters are just there, generally. I'm at a bit of a loss just what I want to say here, which is a bad sign, but there's this: sometimes, elite packs are just on you. Especially, say the sewers in act 2, accursed with fast and teleport. They're just there and you're dead. I really don't like that. The sand golems and sand imps, they have a spawning animation so you're at least given a heads-up. Or there'll be mortar missiles flying across the screen, you'll be suddenly walled or jailed without knowing what the hell just happened. Things like that bother me. I have ideas for this but they're elaborate and probably not practical. I'll tuck them away for later. Wishlist stuff.
2. I've been trying to work out just how elite spawning operates, what the rules are, and I think I have it fairly down. At least down enough to comment on. Let me just cut to the chase: they spawn too close to each other, or else on top of each other. This isn't cool. This isn't cool for leveling, it isn't cool for progression, and while some would argue that it's cool for farming, I would say it isn't.
It almost seems like a bug. There's a behavior to it. It's always a rare pack and a champion pack, never two rares or two champs. It goes with the randomization of the area. I think that there's set points on map tiles where there's X% chance for an elite pack to spawn. Maybe there's two points in the map tile, maybe there's 50% chance to spawn an elite, and an additional roll for 5% chance to spawn a second pack, maybe this is on purpose, I can't tell. There's no way for me to figure that out without the source code. Drives me nuts.
Anyway. There should at least be a limitation on range. There should be a limit on how close they can spawn to each other. Take nightmarish into account. Fleeing behavior, monster AI. Take a barbarian in a narrow corridor with waller and arcane enchanted into account. You need space. If you want tactical combat, you need to frame the encounter. The place where the elites spawn? It needs to be an arena. It needs to have some kind of logical boundary if you want this to work. When they spawn on top of each other you are not dealing with a tactical situation. This isn't balanced, you didn't balance inferno to have us fighting against eight boss modifiers. Tactics, strategy, builds, gear, player options are all just tossed right out the window.
I don't know. I wish there was at least some sort of visual indicator that I am about to enter an elite encounter. That would be quite nice and fancy. Something in the playing field, not in a UI element like the minimap.
3. Now, let's talk about waypoints and checkpoints. The game utilizes lazy loading and a buffering system, so whenever you start a game, it's loading assets. This makes the game laggy. Very laggy if you're thrust right into combat, because the game is also then loading animations and sounds.
So, naturally, there are a lot of waypoints and checkpoints in the game where you have us spawn right in the field of combat. Know what sucks more than loading up the game, say right outside the chamber to the butcher bossfight, and there's an elite pack directly on top of us? I don't know. It just plain sucks. It's not fun and it's not fair. It's not "Risingred doesn't know how to play" not fair, but "I haven't even started loading these assets yet" not fair. No amount of skill or gear will help you with that.
I had thought that the waypoint system would allow us to return to our last checkpoint from town. This would help a lot for these unfair spawns. Oh, and stop spawning elite packs directly on top of waypoints and checkpoints would help. This has serious griefing potential, which I enjoy, but it probably isn't necessary. I feel like I'm the one being griefed. The video below is me right after hitting "resume game".
Spawning on a Waypoint Upon Game Loading (Video)
Spawning on a Checkpoint with a Harsh Mod Combo (Video)
Now imagine that monk in the first video, not level 60, not overgeared, not in nightmare. Yes, that monk is dead.
Imagine that barbarian in the second video, not farming, but just trying to progress through the content.
4. Amount. Some areas, much more than others, have what I would call an asinine amount of elites. I slog through act 2. It is easily my least favorite act. The monsters have the most obnoxious behavior imagineable, the monster combinations are just plain harsh and not fun, and there's an asinine amount of elites to deal with. When you're leveling, it's just monotonous as hell. I have a very hard time getting through the ZK dungeons because it seems like every corner, there's an elite pack that I'm not enjoying fighting, but I have to get through them to progress. Every corner. Last time I ran the assassin dungeon, there were thirteen elite packs.
Fucking THIRTEEN. They were often incredibly close to each other, and I would encounter them literally every minute. One's down, okay, moving on. Oh, wait, no I'm not, because here's fucking four more.
I don't even understand how you arrived at the point in design where you would do this. It seems contrary to so many other design choices. Let me show you what's happening. This is one sample. I took a monk through nightmare in a zk dungeon just to show you this. This is real-time, watch the clock above the minimap. I didn't enter game and re-roll the dungeon for that perfect example (THIRTEEN). I just went in and started recording and this is the result. I used vault of the assassin because I was doing MF runs in there in nightmare, hoping to find legendary patterns. Yes. I used this dungeon over anything else in the entire game because it's efficient for farming low-level patterns. Because there's so many goddamn elites crammed in.
Elite Density (Video)
Nine elites. And this was on the low end of the spectrum for how many elites you can encounter in this dungeon.
Nine. Nine elites in one dungeon.
And that's just one dungeon in one area of the game. I'm not saying reduce the number of them. I'm saying spread them out. If you are leveling a mildly undergeared/underleveled witch doctor through a dungeon you need to go through that has thirteen packs of elites in it, you're going to get pissed, frustrated, and you're going to stop playing. It was torture going through act 2 in hell on my wd.
Tactical Fighting Arenas
Or the lack thereof. "But it was like this in Diablo II!"
As the smarmy Bashiok would be quick to point out, "this isn't diablo 2 dude".
Diablo III has features that Diablo II did not. Like stairs (outside of the arcane sanctuary, but that didn't work out too well, did it?). Multiple levels with line of sight playing into the mix. Crumbling bridges that narrow the playing field. Things like that. Destructibles, the ability in the most shallow sense to change the combat field. Fire grates in the halls of agony that cause a ridiculous amount of damage in inferno, ticks of damage don't sync up with the graphics, large groups of monsters spawn in the grates, etc. *ahem*
Boss modifiers do not take into account where they are being used. I am bound to think this is either by design or a design oversight. Waller, Arcane Enchanted, Frozen in a narrow corridor. With big mobs like berserkers or brickhouses.
I'm hesitant to go into this since I truly believe that a lot of my boss modifier suggestions would alleviate a lot of this. You have a semi-tactical environment with traps and things like that, but we can't really use them to effect. Particularly against elites. It could be fun but, currently, it just seems tacked-on, ignored, and shallow.
Sure, you can game pillars every now and then, and sometimes stairs, but that's about it. Diablo III's tactical gameplay (well, it could be tactical) could be bolstered by its engine and the inherent abilities that it has. Using the environment, like it lies about on the box.
However, what I do want to go into is areas that are just...I'm sorry, just screwed up. Sometimes this is due to the narrative, bugs, other issues that didn't pass QA. An example below:
Hahaha, Nephalem!
Ah, honesty. This is not a tactical situation. This is, in fact, unfairly dangerous to the player, and quite obnoxious. The most tactical area of the game, talking pure terrain here, is likely Maghda's boss arena. I think we know why that is.
"But, Azmodan's giant face is part of the story!" Ohh. Oh man. Don't get me started on the story. But as far as technical aspects of games go, I'm all about fusing narrative and gameplay into one fluid, functioning experience. This, however, is not how to do it.
What tactical map tiles are in the game (mostly in Act I, as the other acts seem to go more for aesthetics than gameplay) make the unappealing elite combat a small touch more interesting. It gives you a chance to think about your surroundings, plan, execute the plan. It keeps you engaged as a player. Like in the defiled crypt, the fountain tile where the middle has two angels holding hands with the water billowing down, the tile is in a cross shape with mid-level stairs, the fountain is a hole that you can't walk across. That's a tactical tile. I like it a lot. I wish I had a screenshot of it but the above shit photoshopping job sapped me of the will to gather it.
(Hey, I'll have you know I cropped, edited, and watermarked over 150 screenshots of legendary items today, give me a break.)
As it stands, for the majority of the game, there's two types of map tiles: narrow corridor, huge open area. There's little breaks between this, like the stair tiles in the defiled crypt, leoric's halls of agony, etc. But mostly...this is it. Narrow corridors and huge open areas.
They don't mesh well with the current combat systems. Boss modifiers and these map tiles go together like cookies and piss. There's not much of anything to game in the actual terrain itself. I would at least ask that desctructibles and traps, the likes of things like that, are brought back to the drawing table to see if there's been any fresh ideas. There's more potential there than you may have found during development. As a player, I'd appreciate it.
I'm only listing this here because it's part of the problems that I perceive with elite combat. I touched on it but I go much deeper into this in a separate post.
Thanks for reading, guys.
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