Saturday, July 21, 2012

Diablo III: The Infernal Farming Game

It's been one month since my last post. So what happened?

Act 1 Inferno

I beat act 1 shortly after my last post. In terms of difficulty act 1 inferno feels like it should it feels like the next step after Hell difficulty. My Demon Hunter was not and is not built as a glass canon but I had to be careful with some monsters who could kill me in one shot like the beast with a charge ability.

I tried the first part of Act 2 after beating Act 1 and as I had heard it was much harder than act 1. Even in Hell I thought that Act 2 was painfully annoying compared to Act 3 and Act 4. So I did what every body does in inferno: I farmed Act 1.

At first it was fun, I was still getting use to nephalem valor and  I was upgrading my gear a lot. I farmed act 1 to the point where nothing was able to one shot me and I could take down the butcher under two minutes easily without being touched.

I would do lots of areas of Act 1 to kill bosses. Whee I ran out of good zones for bosses I would kill the butcher and start an other game. Items that were not upgrades were either sold to the merchants (item level bellow  61), salvaged or sold to the auction house. At some point the price for a single essence did rise to 2k gold!

Act 2 Inferno

Act 2 was a pain in the a** again. I did alternate advancing into Act 2 and farming Act 1.

Act 3 Inferno

So I started to advance into Act 3 after finishing Act 2 when something very disturbing happened: I died in one shot to a single mob. You have to understand that I had farmed for weeks and I had not built my DH as a glass cannon. I compromised getting dps and spent millions on equipment with hight armor and all resists. I also had twice the discipline as a normal Demon hunter with +10 on each crossbow and my cape. I had thought I'm going to do this the right way I want to be able to take a few shots. But what was the point?

That's why so many demon hunters end up building glass cannons, because it seems so ineffective to try to do anything else. After all you got all that dodge potential and you can turn yourself invisible but even with a high investment in gear mobs will still one shot you.

Its incredible what you can do with the right gear but the amount of farming necessary is just beyond me. Here's an interesting video of a demon hunter who can tank Inferno: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kBLJQuIEyY

I will never do this because at that point I just stopped playing my demon hunter.

Here is a photo of my DH. I usually used a more defensive helmet but found the skull recently and thought it looked good.

Next

So what did I do next? I rolled a Barb. From my experience its much easier to play with the Barbarian than the demon hunter. And for a lot cheaper you can do a lot more.

To level a character fast the trick is to search on the auction house with - level requirements. That way you can equip a level 60 weapon at the end of nightmare for example, blast throught the Nightmare and Hell.

When I reached inferno followed this guide:

Yes, with only 400k worth of gear, this guy managed to finish inferno. Keep in mind that there has been a lot of gold inflation since then and that the price of life on hit items did rise a lot.

I did manage to buyout gear almost as good as in the video for 1 million at the time, and in one weekend I managed to advance  into Act 3 Inferno and I killed Ghom without any problem, while there was monk running in around in room because he was not able to stand in the fumes without dying.

It sounds fun but for one million I could only afford to have a low dps (13k). And killing bosses alone takes a looonnnnng time. I would say that alone I was able to kill 50% of the rares and champions of Act 3. But with my friend monk around we were able to kill almost all bosses, sometimes one of us would die or have to run (me most of the time, except for Ghom). We were both using skill to buff each other and reduce the damage of enemies. The build I used with the most success had furry and vengeance only as damage dealing skill all the rest were defensive abilities. The monk was doing most of the killing when we played together. My WarCry with the last rune was quite usefull to him and I always use it anyways.

I don't think I will finish inferno. For this to be enjoyable I would to have more chances to crit but gear with good stats, high armor and hight resist and critical hit chances is waaaaay too expansive.

With only 5% base chances to crit, a lot of build are not possible. A lot runes give something when you crit.

Not Fun Anymore

Yes, its not fun for me anymore so I stopped playing.

No sense of progression

The main problem I think is that there is no sense of progression after Act 1 inferno. 99.99% of items that drop are wothless junk. Where ever you are in inferno you find items between level 50 and 63. Common! 50!!!?? That's around when you finish nightmare! And when you move to Act 2 and Ac3 you just get a higher ratio of items above level 60 but monsters have 2 or 3 times the health and damage. So most people just farm Act 1.

If Act 1 dropped only level 60 items, Act 2 level 61 items and so on, then it would be fun playing. But I guess they just wanted to make good drops very rare to force people to use the auction house.

Also what's the point of white items after normal? Its just a pain to have to drop them on the ground when I accidentally picked one.

Plans and crafting

What a failed opportunity. If only good plans dropped more often, I could have tried to craft. That would have given me the illusion to be doing something, to progress. But I only found only a few "fine" plans for other classes. As for ordinary "Exalted" plans, I would probably not have tried them because they would be a waste, but I only found the shield and the mail anyways. I FOUND THE SHIELD SEVEN TIMES! WTF! WHERE ARE THE OTHER PIECES WHY NOT DROP A DIFFERENT PLAN EVERY TIME.

Also they should just have removed the gold cost on crafting, the value of ingredients would rise and the market would balance itself automatically.

To much crowd control on bosses

Some bosses can immobilize characters permanently in inferno. Also some abilities like fear are buggued with some monsters. For example, the dot of fire horadric construct would trigger "fear" multiple times per second. I was using juggernaut so the boss could not kill me because of the 15% life gained. My barb was just stairing at the wall and I was waiting for the enrage to kick-in and kill me.

I recall reading somewhere that bosses should not have more than one control ability but Blizzard does not recognize many of the crowd control  abilities as crowd control.

Enrage timers

What a stupid idea. Your having an epic battle with boss. You  are about to finish it, the programmer, a sore loser, comes in and says, that's enough, you die. That's just not fun! That's not even logical.

Bad Nerfs

They decided that some things should just not be as good in Inferno. Many skills and item affixes become completely useless because they just don't pass the minimum requirement for inferno: they just do nothing. For example if a skill has a knockback value bellow  21 it will just not work at all on bosses in inferno.

In the mean time some affixes like critical hit chance and life on hit are king.

Here is a screenshot of my wizard. I just finished Hell with him and equipped some stuff I had found with my DH and Barb. I don't really play him seriously.