Patch 2.0.x Breaths New Life into Diablo 3 Before Expansion

I still remember that time I put 200+ hours in my Demon Hunter without making any progress in inferno. When the game came out the balance was way off and drops rates were abysmal. They tried to fix it, but it was too little too late. I thought that they could never fix the game ... but they did.

Skills have been revamped, again. Now drops are more personalized and legendaries drop about every hours. Legendaries scale with your level when they drop so there is now much more diversity. These new items may affect the effectiveness of some skills which might lure you out of cookie cutter builds depending on what you find. This makes the game much more interesting.



For example I found a level 60 Kridershot with my Demon Hunter. Elemental Arrow became a generator an I built my character around it. And if I find something else that seems better I might change everything again.

It is really too bad that they did not release a patch like this earlier. In previous iterations it seemed like there was just no place in inferno for casual players because of all the time that was required. The only ones who reached the top were bots and no-lifers.

Anyways, the game is fun now, so I've been playing. Everything I find now will be useless in the expansion, but I'm having fun so I don't care.

Diablo III: Inferno Cleared

Inferno Clear

So I had stopped playing mostly but once in a while a would play with friends. Alone none of us was really able to do well in act 4, but with two monks with mantras and my barb with WarCry we were able to steadily advance. Once in a while we would still face a boss we would not be able to kill and that was frustrating.

We finally killed Izual and before our next session I decided to bypass the rest of the game using Sprint. I then tried Diablo alone and killed him successfully on my first try.

At our next gaming session, my friends were just glad that I could share the way-point with them and we killed Diablo together. Let me tell you that Diablo is a lot easier than the randomly generated bosses that you find in Act 4 (and Act 3 maybe ?).

Wicked Wizard

After that I stumbled on the wind-up wizard site and that gave me the motivation to try the Wicked Wind/Critical Mass combo. Basically you stack Energy Twisters on monsters and it makes the cool-downs of your other skill to replenish very fast. With enough monsters it allows to maintain Frost Nova and Diamon Skin permanently.

Without much investment I was able to steamroll Act 1 and Act 2 of Inferno. Right now my wizard is stuck in act 3, and it would require a bit of farming to get enough resists to be able to go through act 3.

The build is a lot of fun so we'll see if the upcoming patch will be able to get me back into the game.

Farming Act 1 (Not as quick as with my DH but a lot more fun)

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:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YZd680H5EE

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.

Diablo III: DH Hell Cleared

Act 2 Hell was pretty hard. I took a 1 week break from my Demon Hunter at that point. I had 35k hit point , with a lot more Vit than Dex. Overall it was a very annoying act. Bosses and champions would be very hard not only because of their Boss/Champion abilities of because of their natural abilities. Like those cat who are invincible when the jump or the lizard who go underground, or the zombies that run super fast. I took a one week break from my DH at that time. I came back and just ran through the act to Belial. I tried to kill him many times with a friend, my friend had only 22k life and would get one shotted. This was before the 1.03 patch so monsters had a small damage bonus in multiplayer games. We even had trouble getting past the snake part at fist. After that we had customized our build just to get trough that part but did not manage to kill the boss in its final form. We must have tried a about a dozen times. Later it took me 3 attempts(solo) to kill him. My friend managed to kill him alone too (I don't know how many tries). He got the achievement about not getting hit once.

After that Act 3 was easy. I got my level 60 just before Azmodan. Somewhere in Act 3 I discovered Screaming Skull and it made everything in Act 3 a lot easier. I allowed me to kill bosses that I would not have been able to kill without it.

After that I bought cheap level 60 hand crossbows on the gold auction house. Both have +10 Discipline! I allows me to stay invisible a lot longer.So I finished Act 4 with even more ease than Act 3.Reaching level 60 also allows you to stack nephalem valor which gives you better drops and more gold. When I finished Act 4 I realized that I had only 22k Max hit point remaining, I guess I swapped a lot of gear get more Dex and resists.

Here is my current build, I think it is very good since I did not die since Act 2 Hell and I just recently finished Leoric at inferno.

Adventuring Build

Passives:

• Tactical Advantage: Used to GTFO.
• Night Stalker: Gives me more Discipline when I crit. Used to be untouchable.
• Sharpshooter: Combo with Night Stalker. Could use Archery with hand-xbows instead but I like the garanteed crit when starting a fight.

Actives:

Primary: Evasive Fire/Covering Fire

If use correctly this skill is amazing. Useful to kite monsters and projectiles. The automatic back-flip can be a life saver. Also 3 hits equals 3 chances to get a critical hit and gain Discipline.

Secondary:  Elemental Arrow/Screaming Skull

Screaming Skull is in my opinion much better than Nether Tentacles. I did not get to try Nether Tentacles until after the 1.3 patch nerf and I don't see why people stick with it: it hits only once now.

 With Screaming Skull, I feel like the Demon Hunter in its pre-launch preview. Its time to show those monsters who's hunting who! Screaming Skull has 40% chances to fear enemies and it works on randomly generated champions and bosses. IT EVEN WORKS ON INVINCIBLE MINIONS! Its better than stun: it makes them run in the opposite direction. USE IT.

The only trick is that monsters must see you otherwise they just stand there. So you must not be using Smoke Screen at the same time. While in smoke screen use evasive fire. When you run out of Discipline, switch to Screaming skull. You can alternate Screaming skull and Covering Fire while visible. I've been able to kill bosses with invincible minions and many other dangerous bosses/champions with this strategy.

Also another warning: non random bosses (those with a name and hidden properties) are immune to fear.

Slot 1: Smoke Screen/Lingering Fog

To be invincible.

Slot 2: Preparation/Battle Scars

To be invincible more often, to heal. I must say I'm tempted to try Backup plan.

 Slot 3: Multishot/Fire at Will

Wipes the screen of any ordinary monster. I would use Suppression Fire  but I'm kicking so much ass right now that I don't need so much discipline.

Slot 4: Rain of Vengeance/ Flying Strike or Stampede

Not sure which one is better, Stampede does more damage and knocks back champions and minions. Flying strike can stun anything.

Note: My gear was, red, green, blue and yellow, it was pretty ugly over all so I decided to dye everything the same colour.  Next time I'll try an other colour, yellow is not amazing.

Diablo III: DH Nightmare Cleared

So its been more than one week since Diablo III. Obviously I've been too busy playing in my spare time to update this blog. I just cleared nightmare with my Demon Hunter. I used this build to kill Diablo.

Basically, Thunder Ball and Impact for the stun. Caltrops(Tortuous Ground) was more useful against monsters outside of boss fights when there is not enough space for Vault. Multishot to deal with groups of monsters, also outside of boss fight.

When low on health while health globes/potions were unavailable , I used Shadow Power with impale to regain some health.

Before Act 3 I was able to kite everything in the game. After that, some very annoying monsters have the ability to charge/Jumb on you which completely nullifies the effects of Vault and Caltrops. That's when I added the stun and ShadowPowers. I died a lot to those monsters anyways. At first it seamed that there was no ways for me to beat champion packs of these types.

The stun was also very useful for boss fights.

So right now I'm back to Act1 again, in hell this time. I switched a few skills, I really like the Tactical Advantage / Evasive fire combo. Makes me run very fast.

Diablo III: Weapon DPS Not To Be Trusted

Its important to note that the DPS shown while hovering a weapon does not take into account magical properties on other equipment. Everyone will see the same DPS for the same weapon. However, a faster, lower DPS weapon might actually give you more DPS in your character sheet than a slower weapon with higher DPS if you have other equipment with + damage stats.

While playing the open beta, I found that +damage rings (2-4 dmg) made a big difference with my crossbows. This will probably be the first thing I buy from the town npcs when the game comes out.

Dual wielding makes you alternate between weapons and gives you an attack speed bonus. This causes the +damage stats from other equipment to make an even greater difference.

Also be careful, if one weapon is too weak compared to the other; dual-wielding actually lowers your damage. If one of the weapons has a lower DPS it's better if its the faster weapon, because dual-wielding will give the other weapon the attack speed bonus and the faster weapons takes less time in the cycle. This article explains it and contains a video demonstration: http://www.osirisguide.com/diablo-3-dual-wield-guide/.

Even if they don't dual-wield, I think Wizards and Witch Doctors will be greatly affected by this because it looks like endgame off-hand items might provide a considerable portion of the raw damage while the weapon will set the attack speed. I had not realized all this while playing the open beta so I did not verify it yet.

Also its good to note that, for some characters, faster weapons will regenerate resources faster and that, for the same DPS, faster weapons waste less damage between kills.

Anyways, sometimes there's really no way tell which weapon is better other than trying them on the battlefield. Or just take the cooler one.

Diablo III: Weapon Distribution By Class

As I said in a previous post, the Demon Hunter was my favourite class in the Open Beta. The other classes were a lot of fun to play but the Wizard was disappointing and I don't like the Witch Doctor's style.

I've been rethinking all this because the Demon Hunter does not have so many weapons available. Two handed weapons cannot be equipped and one handed melee weapons cannot be dual-wielded. Using melee weapons limits your choices of skills, but switching to a melee build could be fun once in while.

One thing I like about random action RPG is doing my best with whatever the games provides me. I also like being able to use the items I find. Changing my build or play style to fit the characteristics of my gear is part of the fun, for example if I have a big slow weapon with a Barbarian, furry generation is going to be slower but individual skill uses are going to do more damage, requiring less furry to kill a specific monster, how do I deal with that? But what are the chances that, playing the Demon Hunter, I find a one-handed weapon that's better that's better than two hand-crossbows or one bow/xbow and a quiver.

That would mean that a lot of time I would find great drops ..... that I can't use. "Oh this sword is awesome, too bad I'm a Demon Hunter". And that's not cool, even the damn Witch Doctor, that skinny old man, can run around with big two-handed weapons.

Let's see hoe the classes compare in numbers.

I gave a generous 0.75 points where a class cannot use an offhand weapon.

One could argue,  "It does not matter which item you find, you can trade them at the auction house". But the problem is that even if you are going to trade, the same phenomenon will happen on the market, 4 classes will each be fighting for around 10 weapon types; while all the Demon Hunters will mostly be fighting for 3 weapon types. At least we could say that the Demon Hunter might spend more time trading than the other classes who can mostly use what they find.

There is also the matter of crafting "plans". Plans are recipes required to craft the end game weapons. I will be happier if I can find a plan for a weapon I'm going to use. When the other classes find a plan, it will most likely be for an item they can use. When the Demon Hunter finds a plan, it will most-likely be for a weapon type he has no use for.

Diablo III Open Beta

I never got a key but I was able to play the beta this weekend. It was great. Now I know which class I'm going to be when the game comes out. I tried the Wizard first. He was ok but when I tried the other classes I thought that he did less damage. For some reasons the bonus percentage of damage on his skills are lower. He would have been my favourite.

My preferred classes in order are:

1. The Demon Hunter.
2. The Barbarian.
3. The Monk.
4. The Wizard.

Its a Beta and it was only the very first part of the game. so we never know.

Anyways playing was fun I would say that the game seem to fullfill my expectations. For me Diablo I was a very very very good game. I played it recently and still enjoyed it, even if it did not age so well (walking in town and looks bad on my wide screen).

When DiabloII came out I had a lot of expectations. I still remember the first 15 minutes y played. I found it very ordinary, I had played other games since Diablo I and expected some improvement. Today I still have a "meh" feeling about it. Also I really like the story of the first Diablo: battle vs good and evil, going deeper and deeper into the Labyrinth, until you reach Hell and fight the last boss. The story in Diablo II becomes rather silly when they tell you, "You know, the angels made a mistake when imprisoned the demons into the stones, actually the demons wanted to be into the stones and even now that you defeated some of them you must destroy those stones because they are bad somehow". In Diablo I, the ex prime evils had been banned from hell by other demons and later imprisoned by Angels and humans into stones. In Diablo II, hahaha it was a joke, the demons happened to be good actors they wanted to be in the stones all along and the the angels were fooled. How convenient for the writers who can now just ignore some of the stuff which was told in the first game . Anyways maybe I got something wrong, but the point is that it killed it for me story wise. Previously I might have bought a book related to the game but after Diablo II I just stopped trying to follow the story. I'm saying all that but in the end I stilled played lots of Diablo II. It was still a very good game. I did a few ladder runs which was a lot of fun. I would play a lot one week after a ladder reset and see I how far I could get into the ladders. However I would not play so much once my characters were able to solo Baal at hell. I know some people continued to farm after that ... 

Anyways back to Diablo III, in contrast I find Diablo III very polished. The "don't put something that's not fun in the game" philosophy seems to work very well and the Beta was a lot of fun to play. I even restarted an other barbarian in the same weekend just to play with my friends who were lower levels. Its fun and action packed. The graphics are super fine, the physic is awesome. *BANG* Zombies can fly if you hit them hard enough. I loved it. The game seems very polished. I will play it for years. I probably wont need to upgrade my computers in the next 5 years or so because even in 5 years I'm convinced there will be thousands of players online and a welcoming community to go back to.