Diablo 3 Discussion Thread

Suprfire said:
You can try Normal difficulty speedrunning with magic find gear. I don't really time my legendary drops but i feel like its a little bit better in terms of drops over time. The caveat is low exp so little to no paragon progression
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Isn't the quality of loot tied to monster level?
 
revenant said:
yeah me too... stutter and lag.... I was wondering what the heck was going on.. noticed it last night also..
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I died a lot last night from this. It was not a few seconds of nothing, more like 10-20 seconds of punching the air and bam dead. Didn't help that my internet was going out at odd times of the day either.

Any suggestions what the best places to use paragon points for a monk? Just started one from scratch a few days ago. Have about 6-7 points for each tab.
 
chockomonkey said:
Isn't the quality of loot tied to monster level?
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The quality of drops don't change from normal through T6 I believe. In ROS, there are other currency type incentives for doing the higher difficulties. Right now, torment only offers increased legendary drop rate - which might be countered by the fact that you kill slower. Of course, the gold + xp rate is a different story. I think everyone has a different optimal difficulty based on how fast they kill and travel times depending on if you're looking for XP/Gold or Drops- and this optimal difficulty is most likely not the 'hardest difficulty you can handle'.
 
Intel_Hydralisk said:
The quality of drops don't change from normal through T6 I believe. In ROS, there are other currency type incentives for doing the higher difficulties. Right now, torment only offers increased legendary drop rate - which might be countered by the fact that you kill slower. Of course, the gold + xp rate is a different story. I think everyone has a different optimal difficulty based on how fast they kill and travel times depending on if you're looking for XP/Gold or Drops- and this optimal difficulty is most likely not the 'hardest difficulty you can handle'.
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Oh gotcha. TMYK ^_^

I naturally gravitate towards what you talk about though. I don't want to 1-shot everything, but I don't want things to take forever either. I enjoy soloing Torment 1 on my wiz with 111k dps and 300k toughness.
 
Another optimal farming point is the highest difficult where you still never die, since death removes your bonus xp pool. This doesn't mean favoring toughness over DPS, though, since there isn't much point to farming T6 at a snails pace.
 
Man... why wasn't the game like this at launch? I played the hell out of it for the first couple of months, found 2 crap low level legendaries on inferno difficulty, and 1 legendary bow for my DH that was outclassed in every way by a lot of blue items. Now with this loot 2.0, my old DH has finally seen upgrades. I rolled another character and I actually get upgrades while leveling up instead of just hitting the AH every 4-5 levels to find loot because none ever dropped. I can use more than 1 skill, because so far I haven't seen any combos that are so powerful compared to others, that it makes absolutely no sense than to use the current cookie cutter build. With the paragon points, my low level alts are essentially gods in normal difficulty, but even before I hit 60 I can ramp up the difficulty as much as I feel like(with an xp reward for doing so) to balance it out. Level 40 monk with 90 paragon points and a hellfire ring too easy on normal? Ok, play on master then!

This is a game that I feel like I can pick up for a couple hours every now and then, instead of farming like it's a second job for 8 hours a day, yet I'm still able to progress my characters without relying on browsing the AH. Instead of playing the game to get gold(or maybe an item to sell on the AH), I can actually just play the game like I played the others for fun and get gold/xp/gear as I'm doing so.

Sure, I did get over the "WOW, a legendary dropped!" pretty quick, and not every drop is useful. That's fine. Some loot can go to other characters I may not have even rolled yet. While I do have a particular set of gear that lets me blast things in T5 and not feel like I'm wasting a spot in a T6 game, I have enough other gear that I can play around with trying different skills for a slightly different play style within the same class. That's far better than just buying best in slot gear from the AH or having to dictate whatever my build happens to be, because in the past 50 hours of gameplay I haven't seen a new weapon worth equipping. Want to try a strafe life on hit build? I can do that. Maybe I want to try a frost arrow spam build, I can do that too. Maybe I want to go for fire damage on my DH, yup I can try that without totally gimping myself.

Hell, even the fact that crafting recipes drop(and crafted items are at least close to correct stats. No more crafted crossbow with strength, int, and a boost to a witch doctor skill on it would be an example) so I can gamble myself some gear for lower level characters. There's no way prior to this loot 2.0 thing that I could have had green set items for my monk at lvl 21 without just buying them off the AH. Sure, it wasn't the best, and yes it got replaced, but it was still kinda cool.

If I want to farm items, I just blast through the game with my 270k unbuffed dps DH on master(I could do it a little faster on normal, but might as well get the gold and xp bonus). If I want to farm xp for more paragon levels, I can crank it up to T3. If I get a decent group or want a challenge then T5 or T6 it is!

I don't have to stack magic find gear lowering my DPS and survivability just to increase the meager chance of finding gear that I won't bother to equip anyway, because I'm still going to have MF gear on to find something to hopefully sell on the AH so I can buy a better item from the AH.

Seriously, this is the game I wanted diablo 3 to be at launch. Something I can play every once in a while, still get some loot or even just improve characters without playing like some of those guys on twitch like it's some sort of career. I'm actually looking forward to RoS instead of wondering when the hell blizzard will do something that makes me want to even install the game. But even the guys who do want to play for 8 hours a day, 7 days a week, they still can and get xp for it. Great. I know Jay Wilson was a driving force behind the miserable state of diablo 3 since launch, and I know that when he left the diablo 3 team that things were going to change, but I didn't realize that one guy directing a game and then leaving could allow such a drastic change in the overall state of the game.
 
Can someone explain the difficulty mode change? I logged back in for the first time in months and months. Before the difficulty was mostly based off of character level and if you had beaten the previous one, but now it seems to be user selectable?
 
Ritorix said:
Another optimal farming point is the highest difficult where you still never die, since death removes your bonus xp pool. This doesn't mean favoring toughness over DPS, though, since there isn't much point to farming T6 at a snails pace.
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Since you can spawn where you died now and you get the 50% bonus XP it isn't such a big deal for 1/2 deaths per ACT until ROS hits.
 
i feel like the game is ezmode on Master now. had a ton of gold left over and bought a decent weapon on the AH and its a joke. still enjoying it either way but i dont feel it's quite as tough. im sure torment will be though.
 
delita said:
i feel like the game is ezmode on Master now. had a ton of gold left over and bought a decent weapon on the AH and its a joke. still enjoying it either way but i dont feel it's quite as tough. im sure torment will be though.
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You can turn up the difficulty in or out of game.

Also, buying a weapon off the AH and then complaining about the game being easy is just silly IMO.
 
chockomonkey said:
You can turn up the difficulty in or out of game.

Also, buying a weapon off the AH and then complaining about the game being easy is just silly IMO.
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the AH never really bothered me. the real money AH with blizzard making a profit bothered me. i took the time to play and earn the gold that i have. that's fine by me. besides once you get to 60 the weapon dps ranges aren't crazy different anymore anyway
 
VladDracule said:
Can someone explain the difficulty mode change? I logged back in for the first time in months and months. Before the difficulty was mostly based off of character level and if you had beaten the previous one, but now it seems to be user selectable?
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That's exactly it. It's user selectable with increased gold and xp rewards on higher difficulty(in addition to increased ROS currency drops for playing on a torment difficult once ROS is out).

delita said:
i feel like the game is ezmode on Master now. had a ton of gold left over and bought a decent weapon on the AH and its a joke. still enjoying it either way but i dont feel it's quite as tough. im sure torment will be though.
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So play on torment. Nothing is keeping you playing on master difficulty. Buying weapons from the AH aside(there are very few weapons buyable on the AH compared to actual drops now due to changes blizzard has made), complaining about a game being too easy when you're not even on the highest difficulty setting(there are 6 settings for toment) is just odd.
 
Merc1138 said:
That's exactly it. It's user selectable with increased gold and xp rewards on higher difficulty(in addition to increased ROS currency drops for playing on a torment difficult once ROS is out).



So play on torment. Nothing is keeping you playing on master difficulty. Buying weapons from the AH aside(there are very few weapons buyable on the AH compared to actual drops now due to changes blizzard has made), complaining about a game being too easy when you're not even on the highest difficulty setting(there are 6 settings for toment) is just odd.
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didnt know there were 6 settings for torment.

also i wasn't REALLY complaining, i was just stating how i felt about it. it doesn't bother me that it's not hard on master, i just remember the game being tougher on lower difficulities before the patch. i actually havent played in months up until a week ago.
 
delita said:
didnt know there were 6 settings for torment.

also i wasn't REALLY complaining, i was just stating how i felt about it. it doesn't bother me that it's not hard on master, i just remember the game being tougher on lower difficulities before the patch. i actually havent played in months up until a week ago.
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I hadn't played in ages till the recent patch either. Crank the difficulty up and see what happens. You don't have to waste your time finishing the game on each difficulty to unlock the next. Just change the difficulty to T3 or something next time you play. If T3 is too hard, turn it down, if it's too easy turn it up.
 
travanx said:
I died a lot last night from this. It was not a few seconds of nothing, more like 10-20 seconds of punching the air and bam dead. Didn't help that my internet was going out at odd times of the day either.

Any suggestions what the best places to use paragon points for a monk? Just started one from scratch a few days ago. Have about 6-7 points for each tab.
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Whoa... not good. mine wasn't nearly that bad.. but I swapped my mouse from an M40 to an M30 (just for the feel of it, the M40 is such an odd shape - the M30 is like a mold of my hand).... anyways I was noticing all kinds lf lag attacking and I thought maybe it was the mouse buttons malfunctioning.. jeez. I had a "teleport" stall out once and I was like ok this is not me.. something is up with the server..

as for paragon, not sure about the monk, but in general I am picking one item and loading it up each time rather than spreading it out over all the items..
 
Merc1138 said:
That's exactly it. It's user selectable with increased gold and xp rewards on higher difficulty(in addition to increased ROS currency drops for playing on a torment difficult once ROS is out).



So play on torment. Nothing is keeping you playing on master difficulty. Buying weapons from the AH aside(there are very few weapons buyable on the AH compared to actual drops now due to changes blizzard has made), complaining about a game being too easy when you're not even on the highest difficulty setting(there are 6 settings for toment) is just odd.
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So how exactly does it work? I have 2 characters in the 30's range, If i select a higher difficulty does it simply scale the difficulty relative to my level or pre-level cap is there still bands of difficulty you should be in? Like if I start a new char is there one difficulty level it needs to be at, and then another once you reach a certain level etc?
 
So I started playing as a Barbarian with a clan mate, hardcore though. Pretty fun, much better drops than before and it seems you level a bit faster now. I'm level 41 and just got to Diablo on Normal. Oddly enough I feel Normal is a bit tougher than before, or maybe it's just Act 4 being harder than I remember it being on Normal, I only ever got close to dying once.
 
VladDracule said:
So how exactly does it work? I have 2 characters in the 30's range, If i select a higher difficulty does it simply scale the difficulty relative to my level or pre-level cap is there still bands of difficulty you should be in? Like if I start a new char is there one difficulty level it needs to be at, and then another once you reach a certain level etc?
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All monsters are at your level. The difficulties just augment the monster hp/dmg while providing the respective rewards in their descriptions. Difficulty is not dependent on level.
 
Intel_Hydralisk said:
All monsters are at your level. The difficulties just augment the monster hp/dmg while providing the respective rewards in their descriptions. Difficulty is not dependent on level.
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So how does the transitions from the old level band-based difficulties? Are there difficulties within the difficulties now? Levels 1-30ish about was the normal difficulty before then you changed difficulty to a higher level, do those transitions still exist?
 
VladDracule said:
So how does the transitions from the old level band-based difficulties? Are there difficulties within the difficulties now? Levels 1-30ish about was the normal difficulty before then you changed difficulty to a higher level, do those transitions still exist?
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Not really. You can easily play on Hard from level 1. Once you get some better gear Master seems to be no issue for the most part.
 
VladDracule said:
So how does the transitions from the old level band-based difficulties? Are there difficulties within the difficulties now? Levels 1-30ish about was the normal difficulty before then you changed difficulty to a higher level, do those transitions still exist?
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You freely choose the difficulty you want to play at now, and you can change it at anytime within certain restrictions. I have just started playing myself, so I don't know what will hapen once you complete Act III/IV. But I recently upped the difficulty from Normal on my level 25 character after defeating the Butcher since everything was dying so quickly with the equipment I have now.
 
What is fun VladDracula is to have your buddy start a game on Torment VI with a low level character. Then after he is in the zone and playing, have him invite you to bring in your level 60. Those mobs still have a ton of HP, and even though they aren't a true threat to you, watching your buddy get one shotted is so much fun. Oh the thrills of powerleveling. :)
 
VladDracule said:
So how does the transitions from the old level band-based difficulties? Are there difficulties within the difficulties now? Levels 1-30ish about was the normal difficulty before then you changed difficulty to a higher level, do those transitions still exist?
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It doesn't. I don't understand what's confusing about this.

If you start a level 1 character and want to play on normal, you play on normal.

If you start a level 1 character and want to play on master, you play on master.

If you started your level 1 character on master and it's too hard, you set it back to normal.

If you started your level 1 character on normal and it's too easy for you, you set it to a harder difficulty.

It doesn't have anything to do with what level your character currently is, it's a difficulty scale, not a "your character is lvl x and should be playing on difficulty y". If you want to play the game on a higher difficulty and earn more gold and xp for it, you just do it. The entire system of beat the game on normal, then beat it on hard, then nightmare, etc. is gone.
 
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Merc1138 said:
It doesn't. I don't understand what's confusing about this.

If you start a level 1 character and want to play on normal, you play on normal.

If you start a level 1 character and want to play on master, you play on master.

If you started your level 1 character on master and it's too hard, you set it back to normal.

If you started your level 1 character on normal and it's too easy for you, you set it to a harder difficulty.

It doesn't have anything to do with what level your character currently is, it's a difficulty scale, not a "your character is lvl x and should be playing on difficulty y". If you want to play the game on a higher difficulty and earn more gold and xp for it, you just do it. The entire system of beat the game on normal, then beat it on hard, then nightmare, etc. is gone.
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Because its a drastically different system than was in place before and someone who hasnt kept up with the changes wont know the changes?
 
VladDracule said:
Because its a drastically different system than was in place before and someone who hasnt kept up with the changes wont know the changes?
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And it's been said already a few times now in the past couple of pages. Drastically different yes, difficult to understand no.
 
cageymaru said:
What is fun VladDracula is to have your buddy start a game on Torment VI with a low level character. Then after he is in the zone and playing, have him invite you to bring in your level 60. Those mobs still have a ton of HP, and even though they aren't a true threat to you, watching your buddy get one shotted is so much fun. Oh the thrills of powerleveling. :)
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Yea, I power leveled my WD to 60 within an hour. It feels kind of cheesy right now, I'm not sure if Blizz will 'fix' it. It might be amusing on hardcore - powerleveling sure is tempting on HC after you die, but be careful not to get too greedy and get 1 shot.
 
Merc1138 said:
And it's been said already a few times now in the past couple of pages. Drastically different yes, difficult to understand no.
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And yet not everything has had a clear answer in the past few pages. I understand difficulty levels you can adjust depending on your gear/skill at anytime. But what happens once you beat the final act? Is there no replaying from Act 1 with an increased level of difficulty? Do all the zones scale with your level now? Do you get to max level with 1 play through or is there grind at the end in which youll increase difficulty as your gear gets better to get the boosted exp?

Its a major change which makes it clouded to an outsider and severely affects the way the game is played.

For example if the zones all scale according to your level that would mean progress through the quests/story wouldnt affect the effectiveness of how you level wheres before you had to make the trade off for grinding gear to move to the next iteration of the game and it used to take 3 full playthroughs to hit the hardest difficulty and then you would begin your gear grind. This is a drastically different system from what im understanding
 
mgulbran said:
I know this is a crazy idea but you could play the game and find out.
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Because thats why people participate on forums and its not to get information about whether or not they actually want to actually play a game or not? Way to add no value whatsoever to the forum environment with that post
 
VladDracule said:
And yet not everything has had a clear answer in the past few pages. I understand difficulty levels you can adjust depending on your gear/skill at anytime. But what happens once you beat the final act? Is there no replaying from Act 1 with an increased level of difficulty? Do all the zones scale with your level now? Do you get to max level with 1 play through or is there grind at the end in which youll increase difficulty as your gear gets better to get the boosted exp?

Its a major change which makes it clouded to an outsider and severely affects the way the game is played.

For example if the zones all scale according to your level that would mean progress through the quests/story wouldnt affect the effectiveness of how you level wheres before you had to make the trade off for grinding gear to move to the next iteration of the game and it used to take 3 full playthroughs to hit the hardest difficulty and then you would begin your gear grind. This is a drastically different system from what im understanding
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Why are you making this so hard?

I already explained that you can play on whatever difficulty you want, whenever you want. Beating the final act has nothing to do with setting difficulty. If you want to replay a specific part of the story in act 1 on another difficulty after you've completed the game, you just do it.

You will not get to max level with 1 play through on normal difficulty.

The difficulty option changes the difficulty of the game, and with increased difficulty you get increased gold and xp rewards. That's it.

A mob on master difficulty will be harder for your level 10 witch doctor to kill than a mob on normal difficulty, and will give you more xp and gold for killing it. This is an extremely simple concept, and you keep wanting to go into non-existent details and bringing up things that are irrelevant. It's already been stated that you do not have to complete the game on normal to progress to the next difficulty. Take your understanding of the previous difficulty system and just forget it, it's irrelevant. The only thing clouding anything about the new difficulty settings is you.

Higher difficulty = harder game.

If you still can't wrap your head around this, just play the game yourself already. Yes, forums exist to discuss things, but it can't be spelled out any clearer for you other than to experience it for yourself.
 
Man, today's patch made a truly idiotic crafting change: all 1-60 set/legendary items now require TWO brimstones per craft. Apparently someone who wants to craft some Cain's boots/gloves/pants/helm for their low level character is expected to have vendored 6-8 legendaries just to get the set bonus...and all the rolls are still random so it might be an utter waste.

Just when the Blacksmith becomes fun and viable they jack the costs up, even though it was already expensive due to the nature of rolling 4-6 random affixes at a time. SMFH.
 
Mobs scale to your level, then get adjusted to your difficulty setting. That came up a few posts ago but may have not been answered clearly.

I started on Normal and moved to Hard and did exclusively multiplayer by the time I was a few quests into the game. When I killed diablo the first time I was level 50. Then I went up to Expert to farm gear and XP until 60. Played a bit more on Expert, now I am farming gear and Paragon levels on Master.
 
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Aix. said:
Man, today's patch made a truly idiotic crafting change: all 1-60 set/legendary items now require TWO brimstones per craft. Apparently someone who wants to craft some Cain's boots/gloves/pants/helm for their low level character is expected to have vendored 6-8 legendaries just to get the set bonus...and all the rolls are still random so it might be an utter waste.

Just when the Blacksmith becomes fun and viable they jack the costs up, even though it was already expensive due to the nature of rolling 4-6 random affixes at a time. SMFH.
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Actually the problem was if you didn't get the rolls you wanted you could just DE it for another Brimstone. It was almost like rerolling a legendary for free.

Although a better solution would have been to require 1 Brimstone for pre-60 Legendaries and have them DE into Tears instead of Brimstone.
 
AceCR42 said:
Actually the problem was if you didn't get the rolls you wanted you could just DE it for another Brimstone. It was almost like rerolling a legendary for free.

Although a better solution would have been to require 1 Brimstone for pre-60 Legendaries and have them DE into Tears instead of Brimstone.
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Stuff like Cain's and Born's sets didn't even require a brimstone in the first place...the only thing they needed to do was change what the low-level set items salvaged into. Now if someone finds a Cain's set plan early on they'll be like "sweet, I should craft this to help me level!" and then they'll see that they need 2 brimstones per craft, which is so prohibitively expensive that it makes no sense to even craft anything.

Everything is BOA and the AH is being shut down, now is not the time to make it more difficult to use the Blacksmith - particularly since he was utterly useless until they added the various Archon plans. I've got most of the plans and most of them produce garbage. The few that actually produce interesting lvl 60 gear (Demon's Skin, Seven Sins, etc.) still cost quite a bit of other mats even when you could reclaim the brimstone because you could craft 50 of them and still not get what you wanted from the random properties.

This was a lazy knee-jerk change, pure and simple.
 
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Krenum said:
My current build "Holy Palace" Monk

All self found & crafted items.
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/profile/Bonestorm-1619/hero/40581632
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Maybe I looked at a weird time but it's saying you don't have a spirit spender equipped? Seems like with your stacked damage bonuses it would make more sense to swap out sweeping wind for the bell to dump all of your spirit with the damage bonus up.

Also, if you have the Hallowed plans I'd highly suggest crafting a new weapon and matching shield (or another weapon) for the set bonus. Today's patch seems to have buffed them quite a bit; my friend crafted a 1320 dps hallowed fist weapon with good stats in a few attempts.
 
Drakenfeng said:
Maybe I looked at a weird time but it's saying you don't have a spirit spender equipped? Seems like with your stacked damage bonuses it would make more sense to swap out sweeping wind for the bell to dump all of your spirit with the damage bonus up.

Also, if you have the Hallowed plans I'd highly suggest crafting a new weapon and matching shield (or another weapon) for the set bonus. Today's patch seems to have buffed them quite a bit; my friend crafted a 1320 dps hallowed fist weapon with good stats in a few attempts.
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I will try out your suggestion, All I have is the plan for the axe at the moment.

edit:
Alright so I just tried it with the spirit dump, doesn't work so well, with me constantly using the spirit for dmg bonus with the mantra, I hardly have enough spirit to use it half the time. This build is more for constant damage on surrounding enemies.
 
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