Diablo III

I enjoyed the Witch Doctor but... it never felt quite the same. I like throwing exploding spiders and dogs at people, but my heart belongs to a Blood Golem.

Careful; he might take that literally.

HAHA - good point.

Also, I miss my ARMY OF MINIONS. Any RPG, I like having a horde between me and the foe.

I sense.... death, in this place.

In this place? You mean this thread? Oh, that's probably me you're sensing, I really need a shower. Yeah, sorry about that.

Anyway, I have to wonder how the event encounters with necromancers (such as Mehtan in Acts II and V) will play out when the necromancer is finally rendered playable. "Call yourself a necromancer? You couldn't even re-animate that snake you just stepped on."

Speaking of the previous games, why were Holy Bolt and the Paladin's Sanctuary Aura only anti-undead when the majority of the enemy forces were demons? :S

Because type-limiting abilities lets them be OP in some cases and useless in others, in theory balancing out. Video game designers love the concept, but ask World of Warcraft Paladins how it worked out in practice. Related, see elemental resistances. How much fun is it to run into a mob that's immune to your build, or that one-shots you because you didn't gear for its damage type?

(Note: There are still a few type-specific abilities in WoW, but they are either artifact powers, and thus transient to the current content expansion, or are utility/CC rather than damage related.)

edited 20th Jan '17 8:30:18 AM by Fighteer

I liked that bonus that the Paladin's Exorcism spell used to have; it would always be a critical hit if the enemy was undead or a demon.

Before that though, I think it just only worked on undead and unholy enemies, at all.

I remember when Holy damage was so uncommon that no enemies were resistant to it, meaning that Retribution Paladins, for very brief and specific moments, could actually be semi-useful. This was in classic, of course.

Back to the topic, I hated the element-immune mobs in harder difficulties of Diablo II and am more glad than I can say that the system was removed in D3.

It took a few patches and it went kicking and screaming.

I know we are talking monster Elemental resistances, but this talk reminds me of being terrified of Fire in D3 a few years ago because of Andariel's Visage.

And no dyes for legendary items, so my Demon Hunter looked really stupid using that helm with Natalya's chest.

I remember not liking the fires that were set up here and there in Diablo II. So I can fight these powerful Demon Lords and Archdevils and walk away with just a few scratches, but I get killed by a little bonfire? Like that makes sense. >.>

Don't stand in the fire

Yeah, most notable in D1, where the only undead (unless you're playing Hellfire) were skeletons and zombies, and were found at the latest in level 6. A bit strange considering the knights you find during the last levels were supposed to be King Leoric's knights and therefore could have been classed as undead if the developers had wanted.

In D2, it varies from act to act but I think that, overall, things are more evenly distributed. Even Act 4, which takes place in the homeland of demons, managed to have a good number of undead and beasts to fight. In Act 2 in particular, I think the majority of the enemy forces were undead.

D2 Holy Bolt and Sanctuary at least had other uses... Holy Bolt can be used to heal allies (I don't think it gives enough healing to be used in cooperative, but hey), and Sanctuary removes the physical resistance (even immunity) of undead enemies (although this is a Guide Dang It!), useful if your paladin mainly does physical damage. Personally, my paladin only has them because they're a prerequisite to Holy Shield and Conviction, although I have Sanctuary in one of my hotkeys (since I've been forced to acquire it, why not give it some use?).

It was annoying in D2 because each class usually had limited options in terms of available damage types. Some classes had more (for example, the sorceress with her three trees of skills), but usually with a cost of many skill points. It required to plan in advance (which means Guide Dang It!). My sorceress, for example, uses cold (Frozen Orb) and fire (Hydra); she has some trouble with the occasional mob immune to both of them, but I just can't afford to put points into the lightning tree outside of Static Field.

I have the feeling that it wouldn't have been as much of a problem in D3, given that classes had even in vanilla several available damage types, with many different skills, five possible runes for each skill (many of them changing the damage type), and the possibility of changing them when out of battle without any cost. An enemy immune to your main skill? Just use another of your skills. Of course, it would have rendered impossible the current builds that focus on one damage type and focus on affixes than give +X% to whatever damage type.

Flavour-wise, of course, element-immune mobs are necessary (even if maybe D2 took it too far by making almost every enemy immune to one type of damage). I personally would have found strange to attack those things made of ice that could be found in all caverns from D2 Act 5 using cold attacks, for example. Nowadays, in D3 I find strange to attack enemies with the same element they're throwing at me. Granted, an enemy made of one element isn't the same thing as an enemy who uses that element, though...

edited 21st Jan '17 3:43:20 AM by morenohijazo

As you noted, the crucial problem in D2 is that the points spent to design your character's build are a permanent investment; you can't switch them around if you suddenly find that your Fire build is completely useless against a particular monster.

What makes it problematic in D3 is twofold: inconvenience and power levels. Inconvenience, because the devs have yet to put in build swap hotkeys, and so redoing your loadout one skill at a time is a pain in the fucking ass, never mind how much it disrupts the core flow of gameplay. Power levels, because you might have a Torment X lightning build (for example), but your fire build is only Torment VI capable, and now you not only have to painstakingly swap everything out but now you also have to drop the difficulty four levels. And what happens if you run into one of these mobs in a Greater Rift?

Lore must be secondary to gameplay in these situations.

Regarding the problem of switching out builds and changing difficulty levels to cope with different classes of monster, it seems that Patch 2.5.0 will be the one that introduces the promised Armoury, in which you can store up to five builds per character - equipment, gems, active and passive skills and associated runes, Kanai's cube abilities - and swap between them in an instant. Still requires going back to town to do, but it's easier than swapping out pieces of equipment and skills one at a time. It may not completely address the concerns just mentioned, but seems like a step in the right direction.

Other changes that are apparently in store for Patch 2.5.0 that I know I regard as positives are finally getting rid of the concept of Bonus Acts for bounties in Adventure Mode (it sounds as though, in essence, there's just one cache for each act now, but it will have the same contents as the Horadric and Bonus Caches combined), which should make getting crafting materials in multiplayer games with my usual multiplayer, er, players rather easier. And, pertinent to my first post to this thread, three of the Set Dungeons are being tweaked; the Unhallowed Essence dungeon is having its map re-designed to make it more likely that the enemy density will be conducive to hitting 20 enemies with a single Multishot six times, the Armor of Akkhan dungeon will require hitting 10 or more enemies with a single Condemn 10 times instead of 12, and the Delsere's Magnum Opus dungeon will now require tagging 20 enemies with Slow Time four times rather than 30 enemies three times, which should take a lot of the sting out of that dungeon. (And may make the Vyr's Amazing Arcana dungeon the new That One Level among Wizard dungeons.)

No word on when it will go live, though. (Best guess, the next change of seasons.) Or when the Necromancer DLC will be released.

I saw those patch notes. Very promising. The Bonus Act idea is neat, but in practice it mostly means you feel really bad about doing a Bounty set in an Act that isn't the bonus one, even if it's the one you need the cache from.

That's exactly what happened in my most recent multiplayer session; we didn't have time to do a full cycle of 25 bounties, but we hadn't done a full set of Act I bounties at that point in the season, and evidently it was either the fourth or fifth act to get the bonus cache when we started playing, so we finally gave up and only got half the Khanduran Runes we might otherwise have had. As you say, bonus acts are an interesting idea, but frustrating if you don't have time to complete a full set of 25 bounties since most of the cube recipes require equal numbers of all five horadric cache crafting materials.

The patch notes were updated this morning; looks as though Blizzard have taken note of the screaming I, and indeed many other players, have done about the Uliana's Strategem set dungeon and changed the objective from tagging 21 or more enemies with Exploding Palm three times to tagging 15 or more enemies with Exploding Palm four times. Which, given the number of failed runs where I never seemed to run into groups of more than 15 or 16 enemies, would have meant I'd have mastered the dungeon a lot more quickly than I did if that had been the goal all along. Still, some of the set dungeons were already tamer when I mastered them than they were when they were first designed (Raiment of the Jade Harvester and Firebird's Finery leap to mind), so I shouldn't complain.

(Looks as though they're also increasing the damage buffs/effect durations for some of the armour sets: Roland's Legacy, Inna's Mantra, Zunimassa's Haunt, and especially Delsere's Magnum Opus. I can't imagine buffing the latter will make it rival the Firebird Archon build as the build of choice for top tier Wizard players, but it might make it viable again.)

I have been very annoyed by the Might of the Earth set dungeon this season, because to complete that part of the champion objective I need to finish a set dungeon, and my Barb is so overpowered for the dungeon that I practically one-shot the elites. Therefore, it's next to impossible to earn the objective credit, which is to use leap, then stomp, then quake on every elite.

I could strip off a good chunk of my gear to do it, or equip a different set and try a different dungeon, but it's just so damn annoying. I can do GR60 but I can't get the mastery for a set dungeon because I kill things too quickly. /sigh

Anyway, First Look -- Patch 2.5.0. It's nothing we don't already know, but in a nice condensed blog post.

edited 16th Mar '17 11:34:16 AM by Fighteer

There's a fair few Set Dungeons in the game where it's actually a disadvantage to be too powerful, and that's one of them (others include Natalya's Vengeance, Inna's Mantra, and Spirit of Arachyr); the best thing I found was to take Paragon points out of offensive buffs (Critical Hit Chance and Damage, Area Damage, etc.) and hope I hadn't then gone too far in the other direction. (For the Might of the Earth dungeon, this wasn't a problem, though, as I was pretty low level when I cleared it.) Others, like the Firebird's Finery dungeon, require emptying Paragon points out of defensive buffs (or just don't equip a Talisman of Aranoch).

For me, the Champion objective I fell short of clearing this season was "Beat a T10 rift in under 6 minutes"; despite getting all four Wizard sets by season's end, somehow I never managed to get a build going that was quick enough for that. (Until I got an Aether Walker to drop on my last run of the season. If only it had dropped weeks ago.) Oh well, it's only a portrait frame...

The "press release" for the new patch may not include anything we didn't already know, but I'm still looking forward to it, partly because of the Armory and the crafting materials storage and partly because I've started gravitating toward several of the armour sets that are getting buffed with the new patch - the Roland's Legacy-centric "Sweeper" build for Crusader, a Delsere's Magnum Opus build for Wizard, and there's speculation that an Inna's Mantra build with Exploding Palm for Monk might finally break the Raiment of a Thousand Storms' stranglehold on the Greater Rift leaderboards (just as Manald Heal as part of a 6pc Tal Rasha/4pc Vyr build broke the Firebird Archon stranglehold on the Wizard leaderboards, though with Manald Heal getting debuffed, that might be only temporary).

With the new season scheduled to start a week from Friday, I'm guessing the new patch will be released either this Tuesday or next Tuesday (always seems to be Tuesdays).

edited 18th Mar '17 10:37:31 AM by mlsmithca

As predicted, Tuesday was new patch day. The crafting materials storage tab is definitely a good thing, now my characters' inventories and the stash tabs are less crowded. It also means that every character in each of the four categories - softcore vs. hardcore and seasonal vs. non-seasonal - can draw from the same stockpile of crafting materials. Haven't made much use of the Armory just yet, but I've been doing a bit of tinkering with the builds for various classes, so it's something I can see myself using eventually.

As for said builds, I can't speak for the newly buffed Zunimassa set (despite gravitating toward that set when I first started playing Witch Doctor, I don't have most of the support items needed to get the most out of it; I use Jade Harvester these days, partly because I don't have any Ancient Arachyr pieces or the required support gear for the more useful Helltooth builds) or the Shadow Impale build for Demon Hunter with the new legendary power for Holy Point Shot, but the change to the Rumble rune for Seismic Slam has made the "Leapquake" Barbarian build very useful, the Roland's Legacy buff has made the "Sweeper" Crusader build at least a bit more competitive, the Inna's Mantra buff has given Inna's-based Monk builds a noticeable shot in the arm, and while I'm not sure the Delsere's Magnum Opus buff will make it competitive with the Firebird Archon and Lightning Hydra Tal Rasha/Vyr builds, it does seem to allow my DMO/Explosive Blast Wizard to clear Rifts a bit more quickly.

Still can't quite get to Level 70 in Greater Rifts, so no Primal Ancients yet (not that I'm expecting to get many, if any, even if I do reach Level 70) - my Marauder's Demon Hunter build stalled at Level 69, irritatingly enough, and almost every other build has been stalling at around Level 62. However, I haven't actually started augmenting any of my Ancient items yet, so that's probably all that currently stands between me and Level 70.

Bring on the next season...

edited 22nd Mar '17 4:41:22 PM by mlsmithca

My best GR so far is 60 on my Seasonal Barbarian with Leapquake build.

I like the Armory; the one problem I see is that I don't seem to be able to transfer builds between characters. Up until now, I've had (for example) one Wizard for Tal/Firebird and another for Lighting/Vyr, and whatnot. To copy the builds on the same character would require transferring all the gear I use for those builds to that character, implicitly wiping out the other one. It's kind of awkward to set up. There just isn't enough Stash space to store all possible builds for all classes.

Depending on your Paragon levels for non-seasonal characters, I'd imagine you could probably push the Leapquake Barbarian a few levels past Greater Rift 60, assuming that's of any interest. (I've said it before, I'll say it again: I have no aspirations toward getting on the Greater Rift leaderboards, but I'd like, if possible, to "qualify" for Primal Ancients.) My Leapquake Barbarian isn't quite as fast as my Whirlwind/Wastes Barbarian, but I find the build more fun to use.

I agree that not being able to transfer builds between characters for the Armo(u)ry is a bit of a hassle; I have two characters for each class except Witch Doctor (and that will change when the season begins) and my stash is already more overcrowded than the London Underground (or Paris Metro or New York Subway or Tokyo Metro or Singapore MRT or etc., etc.) at rush hour. Though I only have a few duplicate items - my two Demon Hunters primarily use Marauder's and Unhallowed Essence builds, so I have two each of Yang's Recurve and Dead Man's Legacy for the Multishot builds that both can use - that's all I have room for. No room, for example, for a second Wand of Woh and Orb of Infinite Depth to allow for one Wizard to use Explosive Blast with the Delsere's Magnum Opus set and the other to use it for the "Flashfire" Tal Rasha/Firebird build.

Since I don't have the seasonal chops to get through Champion, never mind Conqueror, the only way I'm likely to get more stash space is by buying the Necromancer DLC when it finally hits the market (I'm not holding my breath for it to be released in the second half of this year, not given Blizzard's track record for release dates) since it includes two extra stash tabs. Might be worth the money for that reason alone; the Necromancer class itself would just be icing on the cake. (Surely storing Necromancer items won't take up two entire stash tabs on its own... will it?)

I've got enough survival on the Leapquake Barbarian to push past GR 60, maybe, but not enough DPS. What would really pump up the build, I think, would be an Ancient Blade of the Tribes that I could Ramaladni. Until that happens, though...