Magic Find Gear Swapping
July 3, 2012 in News! by Motorskull
It’s time to let Diablo 3′s developers know what you think about in-combat gear swapping. Wyatt Cheng has written a blog post on the official site explaining the problem and some of the possible solutions.
After you’ve read the post, leave your comment in this official forum thread about what, if anything, you’d like to see changed.
OK… I think I was pretty successful in keeping any editorial comment out of the actual post.
I hate MF gear swapping. There, I said it. Being polite, I feel it’s a gamey, min-max (in a bad way), underhand, far-less-than-heroic blight on Diablo and has been since D2. I’m glad something’s in the pipe to (hopefully) squash this shit.
I support Option 4 in their list of solutions. Three minutes seems like an eternity, yes, but the zeroed out MF needs to be longer than the enrage timer or else there’s no point.
I prefer something along the lines of options 4 & 5.
Zeroing out MF for X minutes after a gear swap would be simple and effective. Concerned about accidental gear swaps? They need “lock” options for the skill bar anyway, so also include one for the gear page! High level players could just “lock” their gear and skills (separately?) to ensure no accidental swaps would kill their MF or kill their Nephalem Valor buff.
A softer solution would be to have gear swaps negate some or all of the NV stacks, but as they point out, linking the systems could propagate problems for future system adjustments.
Here we go again… more F heads taking advantage of the system and screwing things up for everyone else. Why can’t people play the game how it’s supposed to be played so Devs can spend more time improving the F’ing game than coming up with deterrents for farmers and exploiters.
Five blows goats. It would punish non-gear-swappers (read: me) who found a nice new piece of gear they would like to equip right then and there. This takes away a ton of the excitement for finding a sweet new piece of gear. DON’T TAKE MY STACKS!!!! I WORKED HARD FOR THOSE!!!!
The best option I think, don’t know if it’s possible, is to have you MF locked in as soon as you engage a boss or champion pack. And when you kill said boss or champ pack, have it unlocked again so if you find and MF upgrade from a drop, you can still equip it without a penalty. That way you have to choose to either farm with your MF gear, or not. Switching during an encounter becomes useless. This should be possible though, since they already have enrage timers built in. If you take to long killing a pack, it knows and you get de-buffed or the enrage timer kicks in and DEAD. So why couldn’t they apply this same engage method to MF? THEY CAN! They’re wizards over there at the Blizzard.
I’m not really in favor of any system that messes it up for the people playing the game how it’s supposed to be played. We’ve already had enough things changed due to farmers (my poor breakables), while I understand why they had to be changed, it still sucks none the less. So if they could implement a system where it really screws over gear switchers, and doesn’t affect legit players at all, I’d be happier than a little kid on christmas.
This is really starting to get me mad now. Reading the official forum post responses makes me want to break something, then fix it and break it again (it’s no wonder why I don’t read the forums anymore). People saying “just add in a button that lets you switch your gear load out to a different set” completely miss the F’ing point of implementing a punishment system for switching to MF gear. The ONE post I saw that would have legitimate issues with a punishment system is the dude who switched gear based on the pack, ie:life on hit gear for a reflects damage mob. But, I don’t sympathize with him at all since they want “build commitment,” why should you be special with your gear. I get punished for switching skills to cater to the encounter, so why wouldn’t you get punished for switching gear to suit the situation. Man up and work on a play style where you don’t need multiple sets of gear… this isn’t WoW, this is Diablo.
*Steps down off soap box*
…yep.
*hands Blood a beer.
Thats why I only read blue posts (actually I just let motorskull do all the dirt work and ask about changes
)
I feel so used
“The best option I think, don’t know if it’s possible, is to have you MF locked in as soon as you engage a boss or champion pack.”
Ummm… modify that. Make it “effective MF is the minimum used at any point during the entire encounter.” Otherwise, people would initiate battles with high MF and then switch over to low MF / high damage to finish battles (kinda the opposite problem from what they have now).
Ah, good call! Didn’t think of that… I like where you head is.
Wow… the official thread filled up as hard as it could. I posted here:
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/6020252133
Well, I voted that post up, for what it’s worth.
I’ve been trying to think all day of some gear change lock – where if you’ve used and attack or ability in the past x seconds or whatever, the game locks you out of changing gear, but I have to say, I like the minimum MF used in the encounter idea better.
You know, I wouldn’t be mad if they just kept it the same. I guess one of the reasons they are trying to change it in some way is because people were complaining about HAVING to switch gear and the amount of inventory space it took up. Really?! You’re trying to game the system and you want Blizzard to make it easier for you? If you are going to do it in the first place, suffer the annoying consequences of having a smaller inventory and a pain in the ass work around to do your damn exploit!
I’d much prefer if they kept it how it is now, instead of implementing some janky system. Use these resources for fixing the Black Smith, or bringing the Enchantress into the game (I know she won’t be here till an expansion
but I can dream damn you).
In other news, I’m leaving for vacation tomorrow, so I’ll be MIA!
Enjoy your vacation.
Other than PvP and subsequent balancing, I really have no major expectations for vanilla patching beyond bug fixing.
They seem to be putting a good deal of thought / worry into exploits, and as long as they don’t neglect other things, I guess I am not too upset by such tweaks. It would be disconcerting if there were any evidence of misdirected priorities (e.g. 6 month delay on PvP would be sharting the bed on the Devs’ part), but I have not really seen anything proving such bad planning.
All my hopes for major changes lie in the expansions. That is where I expect the Mystic to show up, another class, more gems / jewels, possibly a new rune, and who knows what else!?!