Diablo 3 patch 2.3.0 Reddit Q&A highlights

Quoting from Kevin’s post below:

We aren’t currently planning a stat squish or a change to damage numbers display though both have been discussed. This is something that we monitor.

Hi and thanks for the question. You’re not the first to ask this question and I would love to do so however we made very specific changes to the game to make the controller work on console.

Not only did we add an evade move but we also changed how some of the skills function and how the camera behaves. Adding controller support for PC would require bringing those changes as well which is not feasible. So no sadly we won’t be bringing controller support for PC.

The inability to see important buffs that affect your moment-to-moment gameplay is something we want to address.

We have been avoiding simply adding more buffs because having a large number of buffs on the screen is not only visually unappealing, but it can be just as frustrating to locate the buff that you care about in a sea of buffs.

I view buffs broadly in 3 categories Category 1: “Always On” buffs. Really obvious ones are the Multiplayer buff, or when there is a Community event in place. These buffs are great to know, but they take up one of your precious buff slots. Monk Mantras are a slightly less “always” version of this. If I’m in a party with a monk wearing Inna’s, suddenly all players in the party have half of their buff slots tied up.

Category 2: “Reassuring buffs”. These are buffs that you want to know they are on you, but they don’t affect your moment to moment gameplay. A good example of this would be Storm armor on the Wizard, or Frenzy stacks on a Barbarian. Many times you want to know the skill is working correctly, but you aren’t checking on the buff in the heat of combat

Category 3: “Moment-to-moment buffs”. These are the buffs that actually affect you moment-to-moment and are usually the source of complaints. Focus and Restraint are a great example here.

Overall our goal is to find alternate ways to communicate Category 1 and Category 2 buffs so that Category 3 buffs can take center stage on the buff bar.

We don’t have anything to share at this time, but I assure you that with the introduction of all the extra powers players have from Kanai’s Cube, combined with new legendary items that make you powerful but require some degree of buff tracking (vyr’s / chantodo’s comes to mind) the desire to address this is greater than ever.

I realize this is a hot topic right now in the community and I know a lot of people are eager to understand how we determine the right rewards for single player versus multiplayer game modes. I’d like to go in depth on this question especially.

For us it is an issue than the efficiency of groups who are stacking XP% don’t get to wear their awesome, face-melting gear. The game should be about slaughtering monsters to get rewarded with epic loot. It’s a lot less fun when you don’t get to do the slaughtering.

Exacerbating the situation isn’t experience farming itself, it’s how different the activity is from other activities in the game. I was listening to State of Sanctuary and one of the hosts actually mentioned this – in 2.1 XP farming wasn’t considered as big a deal, not only because the rate of XP gain wasn’t as large, but more importantly, XP was a natural by-product of trying to get legendary items, blood shards, or generally melting faces. Today, the activity that maximizes your experience per hour is no longer the same as the one that maximizes blood shards and legendaries with a poweful build. Because the activities aren’t the same, it forces players to choose between playing the core game as it was designed and wearing XP% gear in a specifically calibrated environment. We agree that these activities need to be re-aligned again, and that’s what we’re re-examining.

Some people have asked if our intent in changing experience sharing in Patch 2.3.0 was to better balance multiplayer rewards. Functionally speaking though, there isn’t a difference before and after the patch. Players can still wear the exact same amount of bonus XP gear and perform about as well in Greater Rifts. The difference is that before only 2 people would be getting all the benefit. How the rewards are split is a separate topic from whether XP gear provides too much benefit.

Let’s talk philosophy. We want people to play together. I think everybody understands that groups should be better than solo, but there’s debate about how much that difference should be. If I’m playing by myself and then a friend joins me, I should be a little bit better off, right?

The issue is that this is only true when you and your friend are exactly the same power level. Realistically, in Diablo III, the power level of players varies widely. You may be in full Ancient gear with your 6-piece set bonuses and all the appropriate complementary legendaries while your friend only has their 4-piece bonus and a non-ancient weapon. Is it okay for your friend to join your game and your experience to be worse?

We took a long look at the way the game has evolved over the last three years and made a judgment call: as much as possible, we want a friend joining your game to make your experience better, not worse. People shouldn’t feel they need to inspect you when you join a public game and your friend that stopped playing for two months shouldn’t feel like a burden for wanting to play with you. Generally, you should prefer to have company in your game than not.

Then there’s the suggestion that we should remove the 30% bonus to experience gain in multiplayer. It comes from a well-intentioned place. However, once you examine all the sources of advantages in multiplayer groups, that 30% experience bonus is the least significant. It’s easy to pay attention to because it’s the most visible of the multiplayer bonuses, so it’s also perceived as the most advantageous.

Here are the main advantages to playing multiplayer and farming experience:

Adding an extra person increases potential damage up to 100% or more, but monster health only increases by 50%. Similarly, in a 4-player game, monster health doesn’t scale to four times the amount in solo; it only goes up 2.5 times the amount. This is clearly a greater benefit than 30% experience. Another source of advantage for groups is skill synergy. When groups are synergizing their group buffs and enemy debuffs to their maximum, the advantage provided blows the 30% experience bonus out of the water. Finally, another source of advantage for farming XP is being able to have some people in XP% gear. As noted previously, the problem here isn’t that the XP% is averaged, it’s that the XP% gear has such a positive effect at all. The fact that it’s averaged now just means everybody benefits, which is better than only the people wearing the gear benefitting (despite everybody contributing). It also removes the social awkwardness of arguing over who gets to wear the XP gear. If you feel that XP% gear shouldn’t be this good in the first place (regardless of whether you’re in a group), then that’s fair. My long explanation is to explain why we are happy with the 30% bonus in groups, but we are examining the other 3 major contributors to see what we can do there to shrink the gap between solo and group play while still keeping group play better – even when your undergeared friend joins.