According to what @Anuiran posted on the home page Blizz has created something ingame called the "Infernal Machine".

I think this is a great idea and will give the masses something to do while grinding away at our Paragon levels. I gather from what "some assembly required" means is that we will have to find whatever pieces (ala Pony Staves) are required to build this machine. The possibilities are endless. This harkens back to the old D-clone days of D2 (and Uber Tristram) I miss those days.

Although I have no idea what this will entail I really don't believe that matters...we will do it anyways (won't we? That's right.) According to the post there is reward for killing the "Uber bosses". I invite you all to comment and speculate on whatever portion of this you would like.

What do you think the rewards will be???
What bosses?

I am f-ing stoked for this one...it will surely be a test (at least I am hoping)

On a side note:

I remember the insane preperation for even thinking about doing Uber tristram in D2 and sometimes that wasn't even enough.

I am giddy as a school girl!! OMFG I cannot wait!!

Don't dissapoint me Blizz!!! (please) 8-D

1) craft "goblin staff"
2) find treasure goblin
3) allow him to run away and open portal
4) enter goblin's portal
5) fight "King of the Goblins"
6) drops uber lewt

LOL probably not though.

Posted by DHAdmin at 09/13/2012 05:42 PM

As long as the boss fights are interesting and fun I will be happy.

The possibility of gaining large chunks of EXP while doing this I think is almost paramount to wanting to do it...aside from the fun factor.

I am hoping that these drop tradeable(sp) charms or something similar to torches like they had in diablo 2. Check it out if you aren't ffamiliar with these items. They are pretty awesome.

Posted by Metta at 09/13/2012 05:52 PM

1) craft "goblin staff"
2) find treasure goblin
3) allow him to run away and open portal
4) enter goblin's portal
5) fight "King of the Goblins"
6) drops uber lewt

LOL probably not though.

That would be interesting to see for sure!!

I merely interpreted the "some assembly required" line as a way of saying "if you want to clear this area you need BIS in all 11 places".

Assemble yourself before you mess yourself, in other words.

Otherwise, if it's a material item sink, that would certainly provide a way to stabilize the essence and brimstone markets.

I love the idea of having to find set items to access it however unlike the staff i want them to be a one time use.
So you do it once and start finding the items again

Thanks Champ cant take the credit fo it though the duck in my avatar brought it up

I'm just hoping that new legendaries are implemented and only drop during this event . So it keeps the players onto the game and grinding that item for it .

I would love to see charms drop, but I fear that those are something, if we see them at all, that we'll get in D3X1. I've been trying to figure out just how they'll incentivize the boss fights and I can't come up with anything. Guaranteed Legendary drops is a terrible idea unless it is just so brutally difficult and time consuming that it would introduce very few into the economy. An account bound Legendary would be great though. The boss(es) will obviously grant a large amount of experience (and assembling the parts will be sure to do so as well.)

When I saw the teaser, I was quite sure that it would be a 1-time use item, quite like in D2. However, boss farming is something that they have tried to get away from in D3, so I expect to see an incentive to play through an act to get the item needed... but how they do that, I don't know yet. NV style stacking buff from completing quests? Hundreds of parts that drop from each named boss?

I had a lot of fun assembling the parts to the Staff of Herding, so I look forward to whatever they do decide - the assembly should be fun, and I'm quite sure Uber-Tristram or whatever they have in mind will be brilliant too. =)

I imagine being thrown into a sort of portal room upon use of the item where you get to choose which Uber boss you want to take on, probably not just Act bosses, but bosses like Skeleton King and Maghda. Maybe there will be an Uber boss progression you have to go through before you can reach Diablo. I imagine they will not do much environment work to get this thing working, so they will probably come up with some way to reuse the boss rooms (or potentially outdoor environments too?) they've already designed.

Edit: Oh, I also imagine that the items themselves that you have to collect will be account bound so that they are not sellable, however I wonder how they will combat selling a completed portal and subsequent boss kill... seems like those can't be the sorts of things they like to see.

No matter what it is, it's going to include an incentive to run Act IV, right?

Could it be a collective server effort? After X Demon Hearts have been collected and salvaged by all players (could even salvage into Brimstones if they're rare enough), they trigger a server-wide event where a portal opens in all active games to an uber room. They could broadcast messages to the server at a certain level (99%) and keep a public counter on the battlenet website so everyone knows how close the server is to triggering an uber event. It could be fun to be a part of 10,000's players all flocking to the server at once in anticipation of an uber event triggering even at peculiar times.

I like @tilgare idea of having complete Act runs causing the boss to drop a key item maybe with probability scaling with the number of players in the game where a 4-player full clear absolutely guarantees the drop. It could be as simple as requiring one from each Act Boss. If a 4-player group runs the entire game in Inferno, they would get rewarded with an opportunity to open 4 portals - one to each uber boss. The first infernal portal in a game opens to uber Butcher, the second to uber Belial, etc. That would make uber Diablo a truly enormous accomplishment.

How does WoW handle major boss events? They may be borrowing from their other games and not only Diablo 2.

I like your idea @ecocd of clearing act 1 to unlock Uber Butcher, etc. The problem I've come up with with the logic behind my idea is that someone capable (and thus the target audience) of farming act 3/4 Inferno is not someone who would enjoy going back to Act 1 where the loot is crappier and less frequent... thus, maybe the increased monster power option has something to do with it. Perhaps at maximum, there is a flat and insanely difficult difficulty that is flat all across the board - they indicate that it will give greater rewards, so that solves the problem for players uninterested in farming act 1. It also means you need to progress through and clear Inferno to be capable of farming the items needed to unlock Uber bosses (and perhaps you cannot change monster levels until after you have killed Inferno Diablo.)

I think they will need to make solo vs. multiplayer roughly the same since they want you to play how you want to play with no incentive either way. Also, the time required to clear A1-A4 Inferno would be pretty hefty, so similar to NV, your stacks would reset upon entering a new act anyways. The benefit of letting players pick up items along the way instead of a buff (say, fragment #1-20 of named bosses throughout act 1 combine to make Butcher's Eyeball which opens up a portal to Uber Butcher) is that you're not punished if you've got to go run to work or take care of the kids, you can hop back in where you were and continue from piece #15.

@tilgare I like the specific item number. They could be Occult Summoning Pages or something. The specific item numbers is reminiscent of those pages that drop from the ghost ship thing in Act 2. What if they randomly drop page numbers, but they could be traded in-game, though not AH'd? Would that still create botting issues or would that create a flurry of trade activity as people constantly swap the duplicates they have to someone else's duplicates while trying to create their own set?

It's probably just going to Whimseyshire v. 2.0, but there are a lot of really creative ways they could go about it. I'm very curious now!

Oh, and I forgot to address WoW boss events. I'll over simplify since there are complex systems that change how things work in many cases. For everything below, think of entering an instance portal as effectively the same thing as creating a game in D3.

Both 5-person and raid level bosses are in dungeons. With 5-man bosses, you can kill them each once a day. In raids, you can kill them once a week. If you kill boss 1 with Joe and his friends, you can join a raid that has killed at least boss 1 and continue on with boss 2-8. There are also world bosses that appear after at least x amount of time and last until killed (thus resetting the timer). The idea is that these are for a full raid group. These appear in the world and players can contend for them, killing players of the opposing faction or trying other means to kill the other group so that they can instead gain the benefit of killing the boss themselves.

Many years ago, there was an in-game event that rallied the effort of both opposing factions to gather resources and embark on an epic quest line that took a great deal of time to complete. Once the resources had been gathered, a player who had completed the quest could open the gates to the sealed temple and the raids were made available to players. These raids were still for 20 or 40 players and 3 day(?) or 1 week lockouts respectively. The effort was on a server level (with 50+ servers per region) and once it was open, it was open for good on that server. They didn't seem to like the idea because they never did it again.

There have also been raids that you had to gain reputation with groups before you were capable of entering. You do quests and turn items in to gain more rep, and at a certain level, they give you what you need to enter.

Today, there are prerequisites that force you to kill things in a certain order, such as clearing a normal raid before moving on to the heroic version of bosses. The final boss requires that you have killed all the rest of the bosses on heroic (all in the same week) before you can attempt the final boss on heroic.

The current raid content brings you to familiar places in the world, but they are inside of an instance (or dungeon, beyond a portal) that only gives you the illusion of being back out in that same open world area (as opposed to the massive persistent world that actually exists where all players on the server can run into each other). The boss fights can have scripts and events (think Belial changing between phases 1-3).

I don't really think there is anything that could be used from WoW in this case. You can't have the same sort of war effort because all it would be is that bar in game or on the website that slowly rises because you can't tangibly see other players effort, just your own. Because D3 isn't an MMO, there is no place that all US/EU/KR players congregate - even chat is limited to 100 per room. The effort also couldn't just drop the boss into the world somewhere because there isn't a shared world, everyone is in their own instance. Of course, your idea of a portal opening for a period of time in the entire region would work out, but such a limited engagement is more of the MMO style and less your standard online multiplayer game. It would, of course, have to be a repeatable effort or the portal would just sit open for anyone in the future which seems silly.

Any how, all of that is way to complex and doesn't seem like what is in store for us... but maybe something here will spark an idea for someone else. =)

If they could be traded in game, I reckon that wouldn't make it any better - they might as well be auctionable if they're not account bound. If they didn't want them account bound, then it would just make life unnecessarily more difficult.

I think we can expect, at the very least, that bosses will drop important items you have to collect, and that you will be encouraged to not just boss farm, but explore the world. Any other ideas how they might accomplish both goals?

Posted by DHAdmin at 09/14/2012 03:10 PM

I was literally about 10 minutes off from ringing the gong and receiving the Legendary mount on my server. It still hurts to think about :(

Wasn't there an 8 hour window where anyone could turn in the quest? Or did you show up like right after that period ended? =( Sucks no matter what though, it's one of the few times they've given such a limited supply of anything in game... it'd be really special if you still played to have a scarab!

Posted by DHAdmin at 09/14/2012 03:10 PM

Anyway, on the topic of WoW raids it got me thinking about how cool would it be if these "Uber Bosses" allowed more than 4 players. I doubt it would happen but for some reason the idea of a mini WoW raid (just the end boss) with 8 players could be fun.

That's a great idea, it'd be neat to have a larger collaboration to make the bosses feel that much more difficult. For as difficult as it has been for them to balance 4 player games... well, we can wish!

Posted by DHAdmin at 09/14/2012 03:47 PM

Yeah I think it was 10 hours... can't really remember! All I know is I barely missed the cut off time.

Yeah, that was it! Huge bummer. I thought it was a pretty neat idea, I wish they'd do something similar again... maybe with slightly higher potential for rewards.

For people in this last group, 1.0.5 is bringing the "Monster Power" system. The details of this system will be outlined as we get closer to 1.0.5, but in short this is a callback to the Diablo II ”players X” option, allowing you to increase the level of challenge for increased rewards. Our hope is that we can make Inferno easier while simultaneously providing new ways for top-end players to gauge their increasing power in tangible ways.

This is a direct quote from the Official D3 site. The whole idea of the players x option is VERY exciting to me. Note the increased rewards comment....happy times to be had by all.

@gnawol Time to put our "party" hats on compadre.

@Baldy got my hat on, lets roll!

Oh yeah , looking forward to patch 1.0.5 ...thing are only going to get better :)

Posted by gnawol at 09/15/2012 03:24 AM

@Baldy got my hat on, lets roll!

Those aren't wizard hats are they?

@tilgare That is more than I could've ever hopes for in knowing about WoW bosses. It sounds like there might be a little inspiration that can be pulled out of that system, but it really does seem to be built fundamentally on a different structure. There might not be much that can be transferred there. No wonder WoW is so addictive. You get essentially guaranteed rewards for the time you put in. That's much better than the real world where years of work might go unnoticed and unrewarded regardless of how much time and effort it takes.

Could be interesting atleast they "trying" to make things better, with anyluck theres more suprizes in 1.05