Diablo III: What even are numbers

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Incoherence: May 22, 2004; POYO AND TEAR

Lorini posted:

I don't recall Blizzard ever selling DLC for D3 or Wow or Starcraft for $15 so I think you're going to wait awhile.

The expansions are sort of "DLC", I guess.

# ¿ Jun 30, 2017 00:40

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# ¿ May 5, 2024 16:45

Incoherence: May 22, 2004; POYO AND TEAR

Fried Watermelon posted:

lol enrage timers on champions and rare monsters

"hey guys lets let the WoW team build Diablo"

A ham-handed attempt at making people not just build completely defensive and spend 15 minutes slowly plinking down elites (which is what happened anyway).

The Greater Rift time limit serves the same purpose but no one seems to mind as much; likewise, the death timer in GRs disincentivizes throwing your body at things until they fall over.

# ¿ Jul 6, 2017 21:27

Incoherence: May 22, 2004; POYO AND TEAR

MrSargent posted:

I haven't played D3 in quite some time and the wife and I want to put some hours into the Necromancer for the new season. What is the fastest way for us to level up together? I would like to hit 70 relatively quick this time since neither of us got to experience much after that since the season reset and we stopped playing.

Chain run rifts on Hard. If Hard is too boring, do Master or T1 (not Expert). I think Halls of Agony is slightly faster, but significantly more boring.

At 61, take your first Death's Breath and upgrade the blacksmith, then craft level 70 2H weapons until you get one with -level requirement.

Keep the biggest ruby you have in a socket in your helm. You can also pick up a free Leoric's Crown by running the campaign up to Leoric (after level 13 I think? for the socket), but I don't think it's actually worth it.

# ¿ Jul 20, 2017 23:49

Incoherence: May 22, 2004; POYO AND TEAR

Katamari Democracy posted:

I would like to argue doing bounties on the difficulty so you can have enough act materials to put into the cube. You will need those act bounties.

I feel like, especially if you do the challenge rift once you have a seasonal character, you won't need bounty mats during the initial gearing process (because you'll be able to cube a few important items based just on those rewards). By the time you need more bounty mats for rerolls and such, you'll be able to stomp them on T10 and get a lot more per unit time.

The only exception might be if you're playing something like WD which can sustain long massacre chains.

# ¿ Jul 21, 2017 00:33

Incoherence: May 22, 2004; POYO AND TEAR

Guilty posted:

Basically you want to maintain a 10 (armor) to 1 (resistance) ratio. The further you deviate from this ratio, the lower your ehp is. A barb with 20k armor and 1k resistance is less tanky than one with 10k armor and 1k resistance (probably not precisely true, but true enough)

That's fairly misleading. Each point of armor is a constant percentage gain in EHP, as is each point in resistance, and they multiply together. If you have the choice between N resistance and 10*N armor, which is actually fairly rare, you do want to try to keep a 10:1 ratio, but that rarely actually happens. The barb with 20k armor and 1k resistance is definitely more tanky than the barb with 10k armor and 1k resistance, but less tanky than a barb with 15k armor and 1.5k resistance.

Armor affixes come with relatively lower values (ancient amulets go up to 125 all res, I think?), so even on an int class, which will have a bunch of all res from primary stats instead of armor, it's generally not worthwhile to choose an armor affix over an all res affix, regardless of ratio.

# ¿ Jul 21, 2017 07:37

Incoherence: May 22, 2004; POYO AND TEAR

bio347 posted:

Man, the Seeker of the Light set gameplay is dire. Particularly with suboptimal gear.

I can't keep Falling Sword off cooldown enough because its landing strike obliterates half of what it hits... but I can't bump up the difficulty because I get smooshed without perma-Akarat. And FS still costing wrath to use in a set where it's entirely possible to run out is unforgivable. The refund bracers are incredibly troublesome because you can drain a full wrath globe on a boss before the hammers start despawning (again, no perma-Akarat) which means you lose your defenses because you need hammer hits for cooldown and the actual wrath to spend. And to top it off, hammers have no visual impact and their hitbox is frustrating.

I managed to scrape together a Roland set last night and it was really nice to play a build that didn't just get squished instantly if you caught a pack at the wrong time.

Granted, in the hour or so I played Roland, I got a second Unity, the second piece of Endless Walk (I was using F/R before that, which was interesting), an ORotZ to cube, and a Johanna's Argument that wasn't almost the worst possible roll, so maybe I could go back to the hammer build and be a little stouter, but I sort of don't want to anymore.

# ¿ Nov 14, 2017 21:35

Incoherence: May 22, 2004; POYO AND TEAR

GoGoGadgetChris posted:

The Thrill seems pretty dang easy once you're a few hundred paragons into the season and can string a LoN-less LoN build together.

The other thing that makes it easier is that so many builds have designated weapons now. I got The Thrill on a crusader by putting random legendaries in every armor slot and then using Condemn weapons.

# ¿ Nov 20, 2017 03:17

Incoherence: May 22, 2004; POYO AND TEAR

Efexeye posted:

edit: please forgive the noob question but i can't use Unity as a solo monk without a follower, correct? i really hate followers but unity seems pretty key to pushing into 100GRs

Oculus Ring is also a pretty good reason to have a follower.

# ¿ Nov 30, 2017 20:47

Incoherence: May 22, 2004; POYO AND TEAR

tqilamknbrd posted:

Is there a discord or something for pc players?

*I just got a seasonal necro up to 70 and would love to play with goons sometime soon

Join the LLJK community. Not the clan, the community.

# ¿ Dec 2, 2017 02:40

Incoherence: May 22, 2004; POYO AND TEAR

Star Man posted:

Patch 2.6.2 should be a revival of the pre-season days when we used a constellation of crafted set items on a single character.

It's ironic that everyone hated the old crafted-gear recipes where you needed a particular white item or a particular trash drop from some random mob type, but now they require bounty mats and absolutely no one uses them because no one wants to burn bounty mats on what's usually an entry-level piece.

Reaper's Wraps used to be nice to have on fresh 70s who hadn't gotten their resource-conservation legendary yet.

# ¿ Dec 11, 2017 04:15

Incoherence: May 22, 2004; POYO AND TEAR

Hobold posted:

I used to click on Haedrigs little box all the time, but I've finally cut way back on that. Only took several years.

You may as well collect the free experience from the notes at some point in the leveling process. Same with the one in A3.

# ¿ Dec 12, 2017 04:42

Incoherence: May 22, 2004; POYO AND TEAR

Larrymer posted:

The way it's set up now is not really optimized for anything but adventure mode (aka bad for campaign). If you have a game open and there are other people near your same level (not sure how close they have to be but the window seems very small, if not the same level), on the same difficulty, same type of character (seasonal vs. non-seasonal) it will let them join you. This works much better at level 70 (max level) when everybody plays on the same difficulty and adventure mode is 1 game type that's split into several other subtypes (bounties, rifts, GRs, etc). Really though, play the campaign exactly once and then do adventure mode from there on out.

You can also party up with people and then join a game together and do it that way.

Even then, the set of things you can readily get a pub game for is fairly small in Adventure Mode: mostly just a couple different breakpoints for rifts and bounties. Everything else is usually just a private game that you get invited to: join communities (like the LLJK community, which is kinda dead now because we're late in the season but will come back when the next season starts) to find those more readily.

# ¿ Jan 2, 2018 00:16

Incoherence: May 22, 2004; POYO AND TEAR

A Buff Gay Dude posted:

You gotta bunch of dudes and flail away at the big pack to maintain wrath regen. You should always be full if you have all the gear. You do have all the right gear?

This works until you get to a RG at a sufficiently high GR level that you actually do run out of wrath before it dies, at which point your life becomes very difficult because all your defensive cooldowns drop off.

# ¿ Jan 3, 2018 22:46

Incoherence: May 22, 2004; POYO AND TEAR

Nehru the Damaja posted:

Is DPS actually more important than how hard it hits overall? I got the impression that unless I'm using like a signature spell/resource builder attack/basic attack/whatever, my attack speed really doesn't matter a ton because I just want my AOEs to build off the biggest possible damage number so all the multiplicative things become huge.

Many builds have a preference for 1h vs. 2h, which makes a substantial difference in attack speed. Other than that, DPS is king: attack speed affects how fast you cast your resource spending attacks, and a bunch of other nonintuitive things.

# ¿ Jan 7, 2018 20:11

Incoherence: May 22, 2004; POYO AND TEAR

boar guy posted:

i just mean running a new set of gems from 1 to 60+ and redoing the royals for gear slots. im probably just being lazy but i do want to try that set. still no traveler's pledge either

I don't think you need a new set of royals unless you want to run a different stat: the armory makes an attempt to regem your current set's gems into the new set.

Legendary gems, sure, you have to level those up if they're different.

# ¿ Jan 11, 2018 00:00

Incoherence: May 22, 2004; POYO AND TEAR

sector_corrector posted:

Do I not understand how multiplayer works, or is there no way to just hop into a game without being invited or being in a clan?

The other way is to set the game to "public", which will put you in a group with random pubs who selected the same options you did. In general, public games are only really good for bounties and rifts at specific difficulty breakpoints; the game will tell you how many people are in the pool for that difficulty + game tag.

# ¿ Jan 18, 2018 02:18

Incoherence: May 22, 2004; POYO AND TEAR

GoGoGadgetChris posted:

I was reluctant to follow an icy veins guide for a while, saying "I wanna make my OWN thing and not just follow some guide!!" but eventually I realized that was lame and it's not like Leap Quake was some dude's discovery, the devs specifically created the class, gear, and powers so that it would be one of the ~6 viable barbarian builds.

There is nothing new under the sun. Copy a guide and kill Alot the Simple-bodied more fast like

And the Diablo dev team tends to buff underpowered sets rather than nerf overpowered sets, so this becomes more acute over time: maybe around RoS release you could come up with some sort of cute gimmick build that'd be competitive with a 6 piece set, but nowadays the set bonuses are all so ridiculous that it's hard to not use them (even LoN builds are fairly uncommon now, and LoN builds are even more of a pain in the rear end to construct than regular set builds).

# ¿ Jan 18, 2018 23:02

Incoherence: May 22, 2004; POYO AND TEAR

GoGoGadgetChris posted:

The Thrill was a drat fun conquest to do.

The Thrill was disappointingly easy on crusader, which seems to have an abnormally powerful set of weapons for each skill you might use in a set build: I equipped the Condemn weapons and random oranges in other slots and was able to two-shot elites.

# ¿ Jan 19, 2018 04:18

Incoherence: May 22, 2004; POYO AND TEAR

Seamonster posted:

I do wish they'd change that dodge% into something meaningful - all it is right now is just inflated toughness values that don't have any substance behind them.

At least it means you can prioritize your other gems over Gogok.

# ¿ Jan 20, 2018 00:21

Incoherence: May 22, 2004; POYO AND TEAR

Well, I never got an ancient Golden Flense for my crusader, or even a spare one from rare upgrades to reforge into an ancient. I decided to go burn some of my non-season mats to get one for posterity. Second rare upgrade is a Golden Flense. Third reforge of that is a loving primal.

Thanks, Diablo RNG!

# ¿ Feb 12, 2018 10:38

Incoherence: May 22, 2004; POYO AND TEAR

Mustached Demon posted:

It probably got buffed the gently caress up this season like everything else. Instead of a wet paper towel roll it's like more of a sack of oranges.

It's basically running around bopping things on the head repeatedly like a kid with ADD until they fall over. Very survivable as long as you're continuously hitting things. Not the flashiest or most cerebral build, but it was a lot more effective for me than hammers or Condemn.

# ¿ Feb 13, 2018 06:03

Incoherence: May 22, 2004; POYO AND TEAR

DrSeRRoD posted:

It's not as strong as the other three sets, but it's very easy, lazy, and flexible in the skills you use.

I'm probably playing Necro next season, but the Corpse Lance/Land of the Dead builds seem really awkward to play, so I'm hoping to bonemance my way to the season journey and then call it before I have to push much higher.

# ¿ Feb 20, 2018 01:36

Incoherence: May 22, 2004; POYO AND TEAR

Hopper posted:

Like "use item x with kanai's cube to strip the legendary power". Yeah fine but do I farm the item at lvl 70 at the first possible difficulty I.e. do these items have fixed stats or do the stats change when they drop in higher difficulties etc.

I don't know of such a guide, but it'd be nice to have all the weird mechanics written down somewhere.

Legendary properties (the orange text with the diamond next to it) do not get any more powerful at higher levels, and you can cube an item of any level to take its power with the same effect. On the other hand, you shouldn't use the Upgrade Rare or Reroll Legendary recipes on a sub-70 item or else you'll get a new item of the same level.

Legendary items have random stats within a given range at each level (you can see the range by holding alt, and see the range on a linked item by alt-clicking it). At level 70, you'll rarely see two "better tiers" of legendaries: ancient (30% higher stat ranges on numerical stats like weapon damage/mainstat/resistance, but not percentage stats or legendary properties), and primal (fixed stats equivalent to a max rolled ancient; you have to clear GR70 solo before you even have a chance to see these).

Difficulties above Torment 1 all drop the same things; you just get more of them at higher difficulties (at the cost of exponentially higher mob health and damage): see chart. 2 piece Shadow should be more than enough to get you into low Torment.

# ¿ Feb 27, 2018 08:35

Incoherence: May 22, 2004; POYO AND TEAR

My objective for the season is to not use Corpse Lance, so I've managed to drag my dumb bullshit Inarius Poison Nova build to T12 so far. I guess Bloodtide Blade is a thing, but RGs are already the scariest part of the rift so it's probably bad to make my single-target damage worse?

# ¿ Feb 28, 2018 02:21

Incoherence: May 22, 2004; POYO AND TEAR

obi_ant posted:

How come I can only go up to level 47 for greater rifts? I now have to beat each one to get another 2 levels of difficulty?

You can unlock higher GR levels in two ways:
1. Completing a GR within the timer unlocks higher GRs based on how fast you beat it: it uses the old key upgrade logic, so the +2 breakpoint is 4:30 left, and so on.
2. Completing a regular rift gives you the equivalent GR level plus 2, so if you finish a T13 rift you get access to GR62.

Once you get past GR62 from a regular T13 rift, yeah, you have to unlock them one or two at a time.

# ¿ Feb 28, 2018 04:02

Incoherence: May 22, 2004; POYO AND TEAR

Kyrosiris posted:

E: I guess I don't how CoE is such an onerous thing while Oculus Ring is similarly important and I never see anyone complaining about that.

Oculus Ring and Ess of Johan are different because there's nothing else useful you can put in the follower gear slots (with Unity in the second ring slot).

# ¿ Mar 1, 2018 20:38

Incoherence: May 22, 2004; POYO AND TEAR

Alter Ego posted:

I have given Kadala thousands upon thousands of blood shards and she still refuses to grant me a Zoey's Secret.

Forget Diablo, forget Malthael, Kadala is the true final boss and the most evil character in this game.

This season's White Whale for me was Oculus Ring, which is annoying because (a) it's a follower item and its stats are mostly irrelevant so literally any Oculus will do, and (b) it's a huge potential damage increase when pushing GRs that you can't substitute with anything else.

# ¿ Mar 5, 2018 21:46

Incoherence: May 22, 2004; POYO AND TEAR

Kyrosiris posted:

Legendary powers inside Kanai's Cube are always the highest potential value they can be, to avoid the necessity of doing precisely that. Your cubed Dawn is the best its cluck chance can be, which IIRC is 60%.

With the exception of that one DH belt where Blizzard thinks the highest value is the most valuable, but the build that uses it wants the lowest roll.

# ¿ Mar 5, 2018 23:06

Incoherence: May 22, 2004; POYO AND TEAR

euphronius posted:

I can't blame them for trying. rMt is real and not going away.

Yeah, if you were going to do an AH, you may as well have a real money conversion, because it's not like people wouldn't have figured out ways to exchange D3 gold for real money anyway, and the whole point of the ingame AH was to cut out the third parties like d2jsp.

The real mistake was that Diablo 3 had a beta that lasted more than a year and at no point did they (a) think deeply about how the existence of the AH might negatively affect their endgame content loop, or (b) change the beta offering such that people could actually test Inferno A1 and tell them how much it sucked rear end.

# ¿ Mar 7, 2018 01:19

Incoherence: May 22, 2004; POYO AND TEAR

exquisite tea posted:

I think the furthest I ever got doing Inarius was ~GR85 with a CE build when the Necro was first released, I liked that quite a lot. Necro is cool but kind of finicky to play imho, their best builds are all so very fragile and cooldown-dependent. I also am not a fan of super passive builds either so Bonestorm doesn't appeal.

I did successfully drag my "I'm not gonna play a Corpse Lance build" Death Nova Inarius necro to GR75, but the last couple levels were rough, and I'm not sure where the big upgrades would be that'd take the build much further than that.

# ¿ Mar 7, 2018 19:00

Incoherence: May 22, 2004; POYO AND TEAR

Aranan posted:

1) Is there any reason to choose one of the mercenaries over another? The skills seem kind of minor. Maybe certain followers have better legendary items available to them?

The enchantress has AoE CC.
The templar has a bit of healing and resource regeneration.
The scoundrel is bad and never used.

Most of the important follower legendaries are jewelry and can go on any of them (Oculus, Ess of Johan, Unity). All of them have the same legendary relic affixes (follower cannot die, 50% follower skill CDR, access to all skills), and you want to use the "cannot die" one in all cases. Follower DPS is irrelevant, so it doesn't really matter if you don't have the right mainstat on their items.

quote:

3) I don't fully understand how Ancient items work. Is it just a chance that an item spawns as an Ancient version of its normal self, and that just means... what? Higher numbers? I saw someone link an item with all kinds of {[(brackets)]} around it--is that some kind of ancient ancient item?

10% chance on any legendary drop. Ancient means that counting stats have a 30% higher range (i.e. mainstat/vitality/resists, not percentage stats like crit chance). If you link an ancient item, it shows up as {[Item Name]}.

You might have seen a linked primal ancient, which are ancients with guaranteed max stat rolls: these show up as {{[Item Name]}}. You have to do GR70 solo to be able to get primals to drop, and they're a 10% chance on each ancient drop once you've unlocked them.

# ¿ Mar 8, 2018 05:45

Incoherence: May 22, 2004; POYO AND TEAR

DrSeRRoD posted:

This week's Challenge Rift is a HoTA Barb... in all yellows. It was surprisingly not as hard as the DH/Necro ones, but I thought it was funny after talking about lovely CRs that this guy is only rocking yellow items.

You're racing against the player's recorded time, so if the build is lovely and slows you down, it probably slowed the recorded player down too.

That DH Multishot rift sucked mostly because the recorded time was pretty close to optimal given the build and rift layout, so beating that time was challenging.

# ¿ Mar 13, 2018 00:57

Incoherence: May 22, 2004; POYO AND TEAR

Dameius posted:

Honestly, this is where playing in groups really shines. If I'm desperate enough, sure give me your vendor trash and I'll just reforge it until it becomes useful and that will be a lot faster than waiting for RNJESUS to bless me.

Yeah, you may as well ask. Souls are generally not anyone's bottleneck, so you're not asking much of them by asking them to drop any garbage CoE they see: if they get really pissy tell them they can have one of your garbage legendaries in return.

# ¿ Mar 14, 2018 23:41

Incoherence: May 22, 2004; POYO AND TEAR

WhatEvil posted:

They should really just give Orek a new voice line where he says something like "When you have proven powerful enough, a primal energy will flow through you and powerful artefacts will become available to you." and then change it so that "Level 70" now says "Level 70 (Unlock Primal Item Drops)" or something. Then just a text box that pops up when you finish GR70 to let you know that Primals are now available and explain what they are.

The easiest thing to do would be a seasonal achievement for solo GR70 with the reward being "unlocks primal item drops". They already have a bunch of them for lower GR levels.

# ¿ Mar 20, 2018 09:19

Incoherence: May 22, 2004; POYO AND TEAR

Devonaut posted:

Can Blizzard just send me an email every morning with a very large number in the subject line, and the number gets a little bit bigger every day?

And then every 4 months it resets to a much smaller number.

There's always the classic Progress Quest.

# ¿ Apr 9, 2018 20:33

Incoherence: May 22, 2004; POYO AND TEAR

Darkhold posted:

It always overwrites the previous enchantment which to answer your previous question is why you want to use the highest lvl possible. There's not much point to using up a 75 if you can get an 80 in there with just a little more work.

In general, this is why the differing requirements for weapons/jewelry/armor aren't relevant: by the time you actually have an item worth augmenting, you can easily have access to level 60-70 gems.

I seem to always use Bane of the Powerful as my first gem for augmenting: you're likely to level it anyway just because it's always your first dropped legendary gem (so depending on how lucky you are, you'll probably put levels into it just because you have nothing better to level) and it's at least okay for any build.

quote:

Make sure to use the correct ruby/emerald/etc It's almost a rite of passage to screw up and throw the wrong color in there at least once.

To save you the trouble: The stat you gain from the augment is based on the color of the gem you put in. If you want strength, you need to put rubies in.

# ¿ Apr 22, 2018 20:34

Incoherence: May 22, 2004; POYO AND TEAR

George posted:

If Blizzard ever figures out how badly they hosed up with tone and atmosphere in D3 we can push boundaries again, but as long as it exists as a sidecar to WoW I'm going to remain disappointed.

It is 2018 and you're out here talking about color palettes.

# ¿ May 11, 2018 20:29

Incoherence: May 22, 2004; POYO AND TEAR

Mymla posted:

Story and atmosphere were a large part of why I enjoyed diablo 2 so much. Diablo 3 could've been a much better game if the story was good, or at least not so intrusively bad that literally deleting it was a selling point for the expansion.

The story didn't really explain much about Diablo 2's longevity, though. The three most common grind spots were Pindleskin (a random unique with no story impact), the cow level (a jokey "bonus level"), and Baal, and most people did their best to avoid the story while leveling (because it was slow, not because it was in-your-face about how bad it was like D3's).

Diablo 2, like Brood War, got its longevity by accident. Blizzard wasn't planning on making a game that ~~obsessive people with too much time on their hands~~ botters would still be playing 10 years later. With D3 (and SC2), they were trying to emulate what they thought made D2 successful, and it turned out that they got that part so wrong that RoS "saved" the game by discarding basically all of those things.

# ¿ May 13, 2018 10:01

Incoherence: May 22, 2004; POYO AND TEAR

John Murdoch posted:

I'm more for it than against it, but there's definitely a lot of little pitfalls and oddities caused by the way everything's set up. It's hard to actually compare certain rune choices because of how varied the effects can be and certain legendary effects clearly synergizing with one over the other. If you bother to level normally, they unlock in what feels like a random order except when they don't and the "most powerful" ones are sequestered to the right side of the list. Most class abilities are spammy and fun to use, but then the rest tend to be fiddly, long cooldown uber powers that don't really fit the breakneck pace of the game and just leads to everyone stacking CDR to make them permanent anyway. Some mobility powers are cool and fun, others are . The way that the game scales also makes getting results out of experimentation difficult and unrewarding after a point.

I'd say the core of the system is fine, they just need to expand and refine things while also getting a little more wild so the abilities are more appealing unto themselves and not just because once you completely XYZ set they get a 3000000% damage bonus that lets you jump six difficulties ahead.

Yeah, I think that their decision to focus their power creep into set bonuses has caused some undesirable side effects: every time they make a balance pass, or make a new support legendary for an existing build, it funnels people further into those set bonus builds. LoN was a thing for awhile to allow people to construct non-set builds, but there are only so many non-set legendaries and there are only 1-2 viable LoN builds you can make per class. The necromancer is actually the worst about this, because somehow they managed to make three sets that are all used for a Corpse Lance/Land of the Dead build.

The skill/rune system actually works okay while leveling, because you get an opportunity to actually mess around with them on a semi-even footing. And, at some point, you're not going to be able to get as far in an infinite-scaling system as someone who uses a min/maxed build, so it's natural for those choices to narrow as you get higher. But I feel like build diversity should have been more of a goal.

# ¿ Jun 6, 2018 02:47

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# ¿ May 5, 2024 16:45

Incoherence: May 22, 2004; POYO AND TEAR

Bust Rodd posted:

Necromancer�s current state is an indictment of long cooldown abilities in an ARPG more than a gear//itemization issue?

It's kinda both: the LotD/Corpse Lance build is more palatable when there are viable alternatives. Some people might really like the gameplay where you nuke everything on screen every 90 seconds and then run like a scared little goth baby the rest of the time. If you're that person, great!

# ¿ Jun 6, 2018 03:18

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