What does this game offer over Diablo III?

I'm not. But I'm talking about the stat system.
Not doing what I said in my post is nothing but stupid, as you would just gimp yourself without actually achieving any kind of different playstyle. In d3 gems are found right from the start, and you can actually customise your character the way you want to, without gimping yourself if you don't take the '1 true path' that was so mandatory in D2.

(Note, like I said in the post below, yeah you can put your points in differently for different gear, but every build came down to 'pump enough into str to wear equip, get dex for block chance and maybe some accuracy -> pump the rest into vitality'.)

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GusTheCrocodile wrote:

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Tagek wrote:

The thing is, diablo 2 never had any stat choice. At all.
What you did was you picked the optimal stats, so enough strength to wear your armor, and enough dex (~75) to get max block. Then you'd pump the rest in vitality.
All builds but perhaps that one soso build NEVER put ANY points into energy, because it was useless.
Everyone followed these guidelines, and if you didn't, you were just dumb.

Eh, I get what you're saying kind of: I've never like the kind of stat allocation system D2 used, and I don't particularly miss it, but I think you're rather overstating things. If not cloning the generally accepted "optimal" build makes you dumb, then everyone who wasn't running a meteorb sorc or hammerdin is dumb. Fuck that line of thinking.

I always put took energy on my casters to at least 80 and often over 100, and they still beat hell just fine. I had a max-Berserk barbarian with several hundred points in strength, killed Baal no problem. Characters only have to be good enough, and especially if you aren't going to spend years trading for the perfect high level items, then actually, getting some extra points is fine for most stats on most builds. Late game, sure, maybe your sorc won't end up needing that energy, but late-game isn't the only part of the game.

Anyway. For me, the one thing that worries me about D3's stat system is that it may restrict your ability to direct your character into an unusual build, instead making you basically wait until you get lucky with drops. But I've yet to see whether that's actually a problem and I'm not going to assume it is - I suspect the auction house, for a start, will do a lot to keep gear acquisition smooth.

You're missing my point. Every build in D2 just put stat points into str and dex to wear their equipment and get good block chance, and you pumped the rest into vitality.
Yeah, you can put some into energy if you want to, but it servers no true purpose whatsoever.


I think it does exactly that, allow you to customise your character the way you want to. (And thus, unorthodox builds if you like)

You can literally equip nothing but vitality and have +1500 or something to vitality by the end of the game.
Or you can do the exact opposite and get +massive amounts of damage. Or you can get a shit ton of dodge, or a mix of everything, etc.

There are no stats you NEED to have just to equip your gear.

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Tagek wrote:

You're missing my point. Every build in D2 just put stat points into str and dex to wear their equipment and get good block chance, and you pumped the rest into vitality.
Yeah, you can put some into energy if you want to, but it servers no true purpose whatsoever.

No, I'm not missing your point, I think it's a less than excellent point, badly made.

The fact that you stoop to using arbitrary value judgements like "true purpose" while acting like you're speaking objectively shows that. Serves no true purpose? What, other than giving you mana? Other than making your early and midgame not shit-boring because you're refusing to put points in energy in case it's "wasted" for the final few percent of the game?

Your preferences are not a "true purpose". They're just your preferences.

You can always put points into energy if you want too, but it's really bad for making a viable character.

In diablo 3 you can distribute the points in whichever way you like, adapting to your playstyle, without having a technically gimped character for it.

Characters with points in energy aren't "technically gimped". Please understand what the word technically means - in this case that would mean you had some kind of rule that shows, unquestionably, that what they're doing is bad. But there is no such rule. There's just "every point in energy is one less point in vitality".

Which is true, and obvious, of course. But if some people prefer having a few more points in mana rather than a few more in health, they aren't wrong, and they certainly aren't technically wrong.

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GusTheCrocodile wrote:

Characters with points in energy aren't "technically gimped". Please understand what the word technically means - in this case that would mean you had some kind of rule that shows, unquestionably, that what they're doing is bad. But there is no such rule. There's just "every point in energy is one less point in vitality".

Which is true, and obvious, of course. But if some people prefer having a few more points in mana rather than a few more in health, they aren't wrong, and they certainly aren't technically wrong.

No, but you're still gimping your character.
Besides having a little extra or less mana not being a very interesting choice in the first place.
As I said, in D3 you can choose between meaningful stats, and distribute them how you wish without ending up with a character that is less powerfull.

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Tagek wrote:

Besides having a little extra or less mana not being a very interesting choice in the first place.
As I said, in D3 you can choose between meaningful stats, and distribute them how you wish without ending up with a character that is less powerfull.

I don't really see how there's such a big difference in how meaningful the choices are. It's still "a small increase in one stat vs a small increase in another stat".

I can't see, for instance, that even if you wanted to make a melee wizard, you'd stack any stats other than intelligence and vitality, same as if you were building a more "standard" wizard. Armour and dodge are no doubt useful as defences too, but you can either put points in Str/Dex and only get defence, or put points in Intelligence and get defence plus damage. At this point, it seems to me that everyone's going to put all their points in their class's damage stat, and vitality.

But I don't know how the equations work out, so who knows, maybe there are more interesting choices in there than it would seem at first glace.

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Tagek wrote:

No, but you're still gimping your character.

Lol okay dude, you keep telling yourself that. Repeating your initial assertion over and over is not an argument, so I'll leave you to it.

I'm talking about the end of the game here.
You might've had a little bit more mana to play with at first, but ultimately your character is less good than he could have been. This would've been an even bigger problem in D3 because blizzard wants everyone to participate in the endgame.

And they said they would make it so that you can choose to go full offense, or full defense if you want to if that fits your playstyle. There wasn't even an offensive option in D2, you could just choose to hit a littler bit better (which was pointless if you had good gear anyway) or pump some into energy (which again, was pointless besides in the early early early game) or just everything into vitality.

You know, after spending a bit of time with the POE Beta the past few nights I kind of have to revise my thoughts on the entire skill tree/skill system a bit.

Originally, I said that I disliked the "passive" part of the skill tree. To a point, I still do. I wish there were some actives thrown in there or to work towards. However, I also grew to like the options I could pursue.

Now a lot of people have said POE's tree is an illusion of choice. It's just a mess of buttons to click and only one true way will be discovered in time which makes everything else pale by comparison. I don't really see it that way. I've actually began to compare the very classes you begin as to the characters of FF7 in terms of playstyle. You start that game with party-members you have pretty good idea of where to go down, pathwise. He could be the DPS, maybe another would be better suited to healing on initial impression, but you could also change the sword-wielder into a magic fiend and the healer to a sort of cleric tank. That is how I've begun to see the classes: a Duelist starts off surrounded by natural talents that helps new players get accustomed and feel in a "safe zone" while you could in a few levels begin to branch off towards playing a more tank style role or magic role. You can in a way, "dual class" your Duelist if that makes sense.

Now I'm only on Cruel difficulty but I'm going to assume the possibility that the Bandit quests in Act II that have various rewards depending on how you do them can help your character out. This is pure speculation, but I'm going to say that somebody that sticks around to playing it safe with their class doesn't need the skill point more than wanting the extra health, mana, or resistance coverage while those that are more radical have a few extra points to devote towards where they want to pursue.

One thing I'm hoping POE takes a cue from is how D3 has those "events." The Jar of Souls, the Matriarch's Bones, they remind me of spontaneous quests such as Gharbad the Weak, Zhar the Mad or Halls of the Blind from D1 and I personally love accidentally running into those. Something that gives more to do is never a bad thing in a game like this.

As for Merveil vs. Leoric, I'm going to have to say that I enjoyed the build-up to Merveil more than I did to Leoric. Being a "Skeleton King" I can kind of guess that this will have two possible visual outcomes on what I'll see. When I see the "Merveil's Daughter" enemies? I really do not want to see what their mother may look like. Also the ambience in the caverns lends itself very well to anticipation, I find.

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Tagek wrote:

I'm talking about the end of the game here.

Haha, yes, that much is very clear. I'm talking about the whole game, not a small portion of it. If the late game is your priority when optimising, great, that's fine, but it's not the only valid thing to care about.

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Tagek wrote:

And they said they would make it so that you can choose to go full offense, or full defense if you want to if that fits your playstyle. There wasn't even an offensive option in D2, you could just choose to hit a littler bit better (which was pointless if you had good gear anyway) or pump some into energy (which again, was pointless besides in the early early early game) or just everything into vitality.

You say there wasn't even an offensive option, then you list the offensive options. Fundamentally the choices were there, the numbers were just not big enough - or to look at it another way, the numbers were too dwarfed by endgame gear and crazy runewords (like Insight in the case of energy). If they'd wanted to, they could have made strength more important for melee characters and energy more important for casters just by paying better attention to the value you get per point in those compared to the value you can get on the gear they were adding.

I hope, at least, that they've learned from D2 and won't be so eager to override their stats system with bonuses from other things this time around.