Bashiok carpet bombed the forums today with some information on magic find, game difficulty, and the monk.
First, a disgruntled player voices his concern that the game and monster encounters are becoming too easy. It’s an interesting theory considering we really haven’t seen the majority of the game. Bashiok, unafraid, responds with this:
[blue]Depending on the random affixes a champion or rare enemy rolls up, they can be extremely challenging.
I’ve seen a barbarian spend (literally) five minutes trying to kill an “ice” skeleton mage with the “teleporter” stat. Meaning the mage is casting his normal ice spells which slow your character and he’s able to teleport and effectively kite you forever. And they do. The barbarian could only get close enough to do a couple hits before the mage would teleport and continue its barrage. But the barb never gave up and it became this self contained little event, completely random, but made it so much more than just plowing through enemies. When he finally defeated him we all cheered, it was an extremely gratifying little encounter.
Now of course if it was a wizard or witchdoctor with a lot of ranged attacks, maybe not such a big deal, but throw affixes like “thorns” and “vampiric” on a rare creature and again you’re looking at an involved fight.
So, yeah, the champions and rares truly are like mini boss fights if they roll some affixes that happen to specifically challenge your class or skill set.[/blue]
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To see Bashiok’s other responses on this topic click on ‘source’ above.
On the topic of magic find, Bashioks reiterates a point that I’m certain he’s explained in the past:
[blue]I think the trick with magic find, or any sort of tertiary stat that doesn’t directly relate to player power, is to make sure that it’s an actual trade off. A lot of times and specifically for certain classes in Diablo II you could stack magic find and still be perfectly able to fight and kill. So what it really comes down to is properly weighting stats on items and ensuring that if you do want to stack something like magic find, that it’s clearly going to limit your power in downing enemies. Auto-stats to a degree also help out in this regard as you can’t effectively stack stats as easily to offset the loss of stats coming from items that might otherwise help keep you alive or kill at an acceptable pace.
That said magic find isn’t fully drawn up yet, there’s not a complete pool of itemization where we can begin tweaking balance to a degree where we can ensure MF doesn’t get out of hand. It could turn out that we need to take an alternate approach, but, if I had to guess simply weighting the stat properly would be enough.[/blue]
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Click through to see his thoughts on the Monk’s dueling ability.
Bashiok leaves fans with something to think about in a thread trashing the Monk’s theoretical dueling abilities. The poster contends that a kung-fu style fighter like the Monk stands no chance against a character like the Barb. Bashiok, in his infinite wisdom, leaves us with this:
[blue]Let’s put up a duel real-quick. Okay. So Monkey vs. Tangerine. The monkey has claws and teeth, the tangerine has an innate desire to entice animals to eat it, carrying the seeds far away to grow new trees. The monkey bites the tangerine. The end.[/blue]
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