Diablo III

Well if you have a friend, you could get carried through torment 6. 1-70 in 30 minutes.

But that just ruins the fun.

Holy Imperius... my WD is comfortably running at Torment VIII now. Helltooth is such an OP set.

I'm not sure how I could reasonably progress much farther, though, at least without some kind of super-optimized gear composed entirely of Ancient set items.

edited 16th Sep '15 7:19:56 AM by Fighteer

I deleted the Wizard and am going with a barbie now. A guy barbie.

He has the personality of cardboard, but is beareable enough that I can focus on spamming Leap because WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

x several

I never liked getting run through the previous games. The only thing more boring than killing Diablo a zillion times for 1% better loot was standing around watching somebody else killing him a thousand times.

Adventure mode is pretty cool though, enjoying that.

And as much as I love hitting people with my board and sword, holy shit I can play crusader as some holy full-plate Magical Girl, nuking people with Love(?) and Justice? Sold!

Magical Girl + Full-Contact Magic is how I see the female monk as. But it's just as amusing to watch the snark fest from the Crusader.

Getting back to my sleepiness problem while playing Diablo 3, I am wondering if I'm just simply having a burnout playing hack and slash games or that game overall, because admittedly, once I got the game, I waltzed through two playthroughs using fem!Wizard and fem!Barbarian without breaks. Does that factor to how I get sleepy when playing the game? Because when I started out, I wasn't at all sleepy.

I wonder if I just leave Diablo III alone for awhile, play other games in interim, and then come back way later, I won't be as sleepy? Because I remember replaying Diablo II several times in my life, but never in repeated successions like this.

edited 16th Sep '15 6:53:21 PM by ChrisX

I'm now working on my Barbarian. I have squeezed out enough optimized gear to run at Torment V, using 2-piece Raekor's, 2-piece Wastes, and Concordance as my ring effect, so I'm rotating between Whirlwind (Dust Devils), Rend (the cold version), Cleave (Rupture), and Furious Charge (the lightning version). It works well enough, but I'm looking forward to completing at least one set so I can switch to RoRG.

There seem to be so many good choices, though. Wastes is obviously what you want for uber Rend/Whirlwind fun — needs a lot of Fury gain to support it, seemingly. Raekor's is interesting; the idea is obvious: you charge around like a nutball through as many enemies as possible, but it doesn't seem like it would work super well on bosses due to getting stuck on cooldown constantly. The Earth set with Lut Socks is the classic "leapquake" build; that looks super fun and comboes well with the Berserker passive that increases damage at max Fury. There's at least one more that I can't remember now and can't access while I'm at work.

Any preferences from you folks?

edited 21st Sep '15 11:15:12 AM by Fighteer

I'm a fan of Raekor's set. While single target damage is it's weakness, I find the Teardrop gem can offset that somewhat. Haven't tried the redesigned IK, and while I have a full set of Wastes haven't used that yet.

I'm a huge fan of Leapquake, but Raekors and WW are better builds for pushing greater rifts.

I am seriously running out of Stash space for all the set items that I'm trying to build up for my various characters. It's to the point where I want to throw away some of the starter set pieces (Cain's, Blackthorne's, etc.) because I'm probably not going to roll a new Int-based character any time soon.

edited 21st Sep '15 2:33:12 PM by Fighteer

I just make storage characters.

x5: I'm trying this out: Lut Socks and Unity in Kanai's, then 3-pc Earth + 5-pc IK + RORG. Mainly because I don't have F/R for my Barb yet: if I'm survivable enough, then I'm thinking that F/R with RORG in Cube might increase my damage output by a lot.

edited 21st Sep '15 5:05:59 PM by Pyrite

Does Unity on your follower combined with the legendary relic that makes them never die give you permanent 50% damage reduction?

Apparently so.

Fighteer: yep. And it is glorious.

Yup. Unity combo used to be essential for pushing high greater rifts.

"Used to be?" What replaced it?

I think F+R for the huge damage boost, as things can hurt you if they're dead. Now people can cube Unity, but I've seen a lot of people cube Convention now.

Convention is good but requires an entirely different style of gameplay. To take maximum advantage of it, you need four different active skills with a different element each and it's hard to find appropriate synergy effects. For example, the Wastes set favors Rend + Whirlwind with a ton of passives; at best you can manage 50% uptime on Convention's bonus, and F+R isn't going to help you much.

I think the best synergy for Convention is with a Wizard using Tal Rasha's.

edited 23rd Sep '15 9:23:11 AM by Fighteer

F + R, yeah. That, and just a little bit more survivability. Unity combo is still used, it's just not the default use-this-or-fail-hard.

So, paragon levels, advice? I'm a bitching paragon four at the moment, not sure if this matters more for my main or my alts. Closest thing I've encountered were the badass levels in Borderlands 2 and you gain those from the get-go, not at the level cap, so I'm used to having like +3% to all my stats on all characters.

edited 23rd Sep '15 11:41:12 AM by Rotpar

Paragon levels should be treated like a cumulative bonus for continually playing the game. They aren't a defining aspect of your character, necessarily, but there is a wide gap in performance between, say, a Paragon 0 character and a Paragon 100 character. The latter could have (pulled out of a hat) +125 primary stat, +2.5% critical hit chance, +5% life, and 2.5% reduction to all ability costs.

edited 23rd Sep '15 11:48:38 AM by Fighteer

Fighteer: honestly I use Convention with my UE demon hunter. It boosts both my cold Evasive Fire and when it switches to physical, my Multishot.

It's still very good even if you don't use all the elements. At worst it can boost your hardest hitting skill every 10 seconds or so.

Any trap stats? Resist still as absolutely critical as in the previous games?

By far the most important secondary stats in determining raw damage output are critical hit chance and critical hit damage: they act multiplicatively with all other stats and CHC has synergy with a lot of skills. Attack speed is also multiplicative but not to the same degree.

Once you have gotten damage stats maxed, your other choices are mainly between survivability and longevity. Increasing your max resource and reducing resource costs are good for spender-heavy builds. Increasing movement speed is really good, both for clearing content faster and escaping from deadly situations. Life per hit is the most critical recovery stat, with life per second generally falling behind. Area damage is mainly intended for pet builds; it's not something to go crazy on.

The intent of the design of defensive stats: armor, resistances, and life, is that a linear increase in any one of them confers roughly the same increase in survivability as any other, related to their weighting. Life and life % are synergistic, obviously. Block is only really important for Crusaders, who are designed to be tanky, and dodge is no longer found as stats on gear. Your primary stats increase defenses: Strength and Dexterity increase armor and Intelligence increases resistances.

Armor increases defenses against all attacks, and resistances increase defense against specific attack types. For example, your defense against fire damage is equal to your armor % value times your fire resistance % value. (If you have 75% armor and 75% fire resistance, your total fire resistance is 93.75%.) The current iteration of the game is very good at keeping all of the defensive stats within a reasonable par of each other.

On gear, though, you want primary stat, critical hit chance, and critical hit damage over everything else — those are the kings of damage output. After that, focus on multiplicative effects: damage type bonuses are good, skill bonuses are okay if you don't mind that you may have to reroll them for synergy, and item set bonuses tend to be insane.

One thing to remember is that there are no longer type-immune mobs, with the exception of a very, very few named rares in Westmarch subzones, and those may have been changed since I haven't encountered them in ages. You won't be penalized for focusing on any particular damage type.

In terms of incoming damage, the game is pretty good about spreading those out, so you won't win just by stacking up one particular resistance type.

If there is a "trap" stat to be found in the game, it's probably Thorns. Absent a couple of very specific gear combos, its damage output is not significant and it has no defensive value. You can't spend Paragon points on it, however, so it doesn't really matter.

edited 23rd Sep '15 12:29:46 PM by Fighteer