While I saw this earlier and am pretty pleased, but it's only marginally useful and already too late to save us from the scourge of people farming Act IV Inferno, getting rich on items that no melee class could realistically have access to without the use of a Wizard. It's pretty obvious that even 1% of people can ruin it for everyone else.

I am finding more and more that I hate Blizzard's design philosophy. There was a Reddit AMA in which they answered most of the questions that people asked. The most significant one was in determining how they came up with the pricing gold sinks, and they priced blacksmithing and gem costs based on the idea that this theoretical playthrough would not use the auction house. Ever. And this made me (again) seriously question the competency of Blizzard designers, who appear to have no care for their own economy, especially when the game is online only. If this game were single player, I would save-state scum, not care, and cheat my weasly little guts out.

But you see, now I have to care.

It's very questionable that Blizzard would play through the game and not consider their gold sink balance based on one of the most important aspects of their game, the auction house. Of course people are going to use it. If they don't it's because they haven't looked very hard at their own game; I myself have had to tell a bunch of friends how to use the auction house, and every single time, I give them a fresh set of weapons they're telling me "omg now I actually move on with this game." Such a statement is shocking, because that means that they are not finding items slightly above their own level in the areas that they are farming, which makes solo progression impossible and meaningless. It is not possible to go through this game solo untwinked, but the game is pointlessly more difficult in a group, and in fact, there are a number of mechanics that actively discourage it: increased damage on mobs per player, shared magic find, shared gold find

I'm also quite shocked that Blizzard has done very little in terms of fixing exploits. Nerfing Force Armor was a start, not the major crux of the operation. Wizards are still running around, and Monks have gear that is at least 10 times more expensive, and depreciates faster than Wizard gear. I am literally wearing millions in gold on my Monk, and it's still not enough to do Act II comfortably, and by comfortably, I mean without raising the revive timer to 30 seconds whenever I am breathed on by a champion pack. I die more to malaria than actually getting in a fight where blows are traded, and it's not even in the game.

They said that they wanted to encourage unconventional gameplay, but their items do not encourage or even provide an option for alternative gameplay. 1.2% chance to stun on hit, exciting! +1 to Battle Orders, totally boring, we can ditch that. Serves no gameplay purpose. Buffing legendaries by giving them bigger numbers will never be enough, unless they are the best items in the game, and suddenly, it's Diablo II all over again.

Despite what Blizzard has done right, they have managed to screw things up so badly during the design process, that whatever they had no idea what to do, they just lifted the mechanics straight from World of Warcraft. I don't play World of Warcraft, but I can tell you where most of the gameplay comes from. I'm not telling people not to enjoy the game, it's a decent game, but it's not up to my standards of what I should expect from Blizzard.