+ Inferno is tough, and toughness is what I wanted. The fact that it's taking me forever to beat the game is a great and rare achievement. Too often, games come and go too easily without any real challenge to look forward to. Some people claim that it isn't hard, it's just cheap. I disagree. These people die to enemies that have arcane enchant, desecrator, or frozen because they simply don't run when they have to. It's all about gear + skill + strategy. I believe that if you become good enough, you can overcome the difficulty. I like the fact that the game has a difficulty setting that "seems" impossible, but little by little, I feel I'm getting progress.
This is so wrong on so many levels. Inferno isn't hard at all, because for something to be hard, it requires a certain amount of skill to overcome. Inferno is nothing about skill but all about a massive gear check.
There's simply no defense when it comes to Inferno, because Blizzard themselves (Jay Wilson, Bashiok and many others) have affirmed that they didn't test the mode extensively, only that they played it to feel how comfortable it was, then they doubled the difficulty and shipped it like that. Funny thing is, even with the un-tweaked Inferno, no one in Blizzard's QA managed to beat Inferno.
There's a truckload of reasons as to why Inferno is really cheap, here's some of them:
- The baseline damage for enemy attacks is completely out of proportions. While enemies in Act I have a 10K - 50K base damage (with Butcher being the highest damaging enemy, by far, on Act I), from them onwards it becomes a shit fest. Act III has damage varying from 30K - 110K, Act III has damage from 50K - 140K and I shudder to think how much baseline damage Act IV enemies have.
- The previous point means that Melee builds have to focus exclusively on damage mitigation and self heal to be viable on Inferno, and even then, some elite/champion mob combinations overcome whatever DR and heal you have. Case in point, my barb has 11K armor, 63K HP, 600 resists and 24K DPS (Sword and Board build), I can overcome almost any enemy on Act II with enough patience, but I still suffer a high amount of damage (the Nagas themselves deal 5K damage, 8K if they're elite) which requires a pretty close management of the CDs of damage mitigation skills such as Ignore Pain and Leap (With Iron Hide).
- Which brings me to my next point: There's no build variety. People that are actually managing to complete Inferno with much trial and error, are sticking to the so called cookie cutter builds. DHs go full glass cannon (with Smokescreen and Preparation for kiting) because there's no chance of avoiding one shots on later acts, Wizs are semi glass cannons with a bit more survival because of Force Armor, but still have to rely on Teleport for kiting and survival. Barbs and Monks go for mitigation and self heal build, because unless you have godly Act III/IV ilvl = 63 gear, you can't really survive without DR and WDs rely exclusively on Infinite Bears or CC build.
- Let's talk about the elite/champion mobs for a little while. I don't mind the whole getting four affixes deal on Inferno, nor them having hidden boosts as well (yes, they do get inherently superior stats to their normal counterparts, like double damage, increased movement speed up to 100%, etc.) but what really is proving how broken Inferno is, it's not only some of the most cheapest affixes but also the cheating AI scripts:
- Invulnerable Minions: This is probably Blizzard's biggest contradiction. Jay Wilson was adamant against the immune enemies on Diablo II, because he felt that they broke the very concept of Diablo since no enemy should be unkillable. And what do they do? They create mobs that have 3 - 4 minions (6 - 8 if Horde affix spawns) that have an invulnerability shield, meaning there's no way to damage, snare, stun, dot or aggro kite them. While this can be overcome with some penetration skills (like Nether Tentacles on the DH), for classes that have no skills like that, these mobs are unkillable (WD suffer the most from these).
- Fast: This mod shouldn't be a problem, because what it does is to give a mob %50 movement speed. Unfortunately, this mod has a tendency to spawn on mobs that are naturally very fast already, like Spiderlings, Accursed, Soul Rippers, etc. Meaning that not only they're unkitable, it's pretty much impossible to actually run away from them since Fast affix also means an invulnerability to any kind of snare ability.
- Shielding: Not usually a problematic mod in early difficulties, it becomes one the biggest nuisances of Inferno, especially for melee characters. Why you ask? Solely because of Enrage times. While some enemies have pretty long enrage times (+ 5 minutes), there's also a substantial amount of mobs that have short enrage times (>2 minutes) and there's really not much you can do when they spend over 75% of those 2 minutes being completely invulnerable to any kind of damage. This mod is especially ridiculous when paired with enemies that have natural invulnerability animations, such as the Dune Threshers on Act II or the Demonic Tremors on Act III.
- Reflect Damage: This didn't use to be a problem for me, even with my high DPS DH, because it was a matter of just kiting and healing accordingly. What really set off my alarm was in an Act III fight against a group of Reflect Damage Demonic Tremor mobs. My gear was 100% repaired, I didn't get hit once nor killed by that mob, and my gear was in the red in some pieces. What I want to say is: Reflect Damage destroys your gear, which is either a pretty massive bug or a pretty shitty design decision. This isn't a problem now, because repair costs are low, but once they up them to 5 - 6x their current price, there's no way I'm ever tackling a RD mob again. It's not going to be worth 30K gold to take them down.
- As for the cheating AI part, this really depends on the affix combination, but the biggest offenders are Vortex + Arcane and Vortex + Jailer + Desecrator mobs. The first is mostly due to the poor design of the initial Arcane sphere, since it has all the Damage Over Time of the full beam, so the AI uses Vortex in the exact moment that they put up an Arcane sphere and they Vortex you right into the sphere meaning that you take over 100K damage per second (my barb went from 63K HP to 0 in less than 2 seconds, even with Ignore Pain). There's not really anything you can do to overcome this, especially on very open areas where there's no background in which you can annul the effects of Vortex.
- I don't mind restart timers, as they're less penalizing than losing entire chunks of XP like on Hell D2, but there's something unique to Inferno mobs that's pisspoor design: Random elite/champion mobs regenerate full health after a few seconds. There doesn't seem to be any rule or specification to this, because random mobs with random affixes can either regen their health in the usual fashion (2% HP/second when out of combat) and some go from near zero health to 100% health in a flash once you die.
I don't condone Zergrushing enemy mobs to overcome them, but when some mob affixes makes them pretty near unkillable or unkitable and have this random full health regeneration, you're basically standing in Leave Game territory here.
- Instant attacks with zero animations, especially when they come from off-screen. This is probably one of the worst designs I've ever seen in a videogame since it really has no place in anything that should be about skill. Soul Ripper tongue attacks (that travel faster than the speed of sound), Oppressor charges, Reborn Fallen (from Fallen Shamans) insta attacking you during the rebirth animation, any kind of mob with the Teleport affix, since the attack animation happens during the Teleport animation, etc.
- And last, but not least (at all), comes my biggest nuisance in all of Diablo III (not just Inferno): The stupidest hit mechanic/hit box ever created in this genre. They call it latency check, I call it bullshit check.
- There's no way to manually dodge a melee attack once the animation starts, because Blizzard made the enemy melee attacks as 100% hit animation. This means that you can be 10, 20, 30 yards away from an enemy and still die with that extremely short ranged slow melee punch they throw at you. It's frustrating to no end to die from an attack that you vaulted away from when the animation started and when it ended you were on the other side of the screen and still got hit (this still happens with 60 ms latency).
- The hitbox around the character is the size of a truck. I think the game checks you as a Colossal Gordor enemy, since projectiles connect with you even if their trajectory isn't near you. Probably the biggest offender in this field is the Winged Morlok's fireball on Act III. If you're unlucky enoug that the fireball is even looking at you when it's 10 yards away, you'll get hit by it no matter what (even if you vault away again).
- This means that basically, the only way to actually dodge proficiently in this game is to use CC skills or pray that your "Dodge" stat activates, which makes this just another massive gear check.
This is all I've got to say regarding Inferno being Hard. There's nothing hard or skill worthy when it all comes down to a massive gear check. Anyone with godly ilvl = 63 gear will faceroll Inferno, no matter your class, skill build or actual gaming skill. Anyone with shitty ilvl = 60 gear or below will get constantly raped by every enemy, even if your gaming skill is quite substantial.
I love Diablo III, been playing it for over 200 hours and I can't get enough of it, but please, let's try and be objective when it comes to trully analizing the game for what it is.
