NOBDYH GVIE S A SHIT ABOUT DIABLO IIII
 

So, Blizzard finally introduced their latest drug at their Paris worldwide invitational event:

• set two decades after D2
• still isometric but with movable camera?
• destructible environments which can deal damage to enemies
• health orbs reduce potion dependence
• enemies and bosses can scale to hueg dimensions
• five character classes (Barbarian returns, new Witch Doctor class, others still unknown)
• male and female versions for each class
• Deckard Cain returns

The official blizzard site above has a cinematic teaser and a gameplay video up. Stuff that's yet to be clarified:

• Pricing
• Online play
• System requirements

So yeah, hurray, w00t, fucking awesome, etc

Mmmm....been waiting. Lord knows you won't find me anywhere useful when this game comes out.

ooh, I can't wait to get this. I loved the other Diablo games.

Here's a screenshot:



Watch the gameplay video, the graphics are amazing.

According to Gaming Steve, the loose release date is somewhere around 2010.

This is also from a random IGN VIP, so the truth behind this is kind of up in the air as far as I know.

Tagging on a cost for battle.net would be absolutely terrible news and fortunately for me, enough to completely convince me to avoid the online play.

I assume that "all three" means Starcraft 2, Diablo 3, and World of Warcraft.

Quoted for truth. We've discussing this a lot at the store, and I know some of my employees are going to ask for time off; it will be to no avail. I'll be havin' some vacation time! Bwahaha.

Hah, seriously. Where do you work?

I don't mind that small one-game only fee. I think it'll keep the not-so-serious players out of the loop.

I think it's silly how they check your age to let you watch the trailers. I don't think I've seen them do that before. Expecially for the cinematic, which isn't even bloody.

And by the way, anybody who isn't playing D2 with me right now is a fag.

That teaser trailer is fucking incredible.

I figured Diablo 3 was the surprise. Glad to see I was right =D Would've been pissed if they were all LOL WOW EXPANSION

Yea I'm so glad they stopped using all their time on WoW and finally followed up my favorite RPG series. I just can't believe it took them so long to get to it, I'm sure D2 sold through the roof, not to mention the free online incentive to buy it, of course that's changed.

Anyone wanna guess at the PC specs you'll need or the HD space? xD Conan required 32GB....

There was a Q&A during the live stream.

They said they do not like DirectX10, so the system reqs shouldn't be too big, since after all the goal of Blizzard is to produce games that can run on almost any system.

They also mentioned they have been working on D3 since Lord of Destruction first came out, it took them this long until they had a product they felt they could present to the public.

There were a bunch of other silly questions too, like can people still use their maphack or will they allow map editors (A: Diablo is not really a game that supports that kind of thing), how will the loot be handled (Some type of personalized drop system it seems), what about runewords (the last question of the session, with a "No Comment"), how will battle.net be handled (under production, can't disclose info).

A lot of questions that ended up with vague answers.

Of note, they did mention they see no reason why there should not be some form of a respec for your char, incase you mess up.

how wil u handl soj?!?!?!?!

wut wil happen 2 my d2 char's mf

By stealing from Q.

Here is a "summary" of the Q&A as found on diabloii.net (they were sent to Flux via ICQ as the questions came so that is why there are typos)

wtb aa apoc staff pst

A rainbow? In my Diablo? IT CANNOT BE


Seriously, though, I'm looking forward to the game just like the rest of you. But, man, that 2010 thing better be a rumor.... :erm:

Some things look good, others...not so much. But I've been playing since Diablo I. I'll have to wait and see how it turns out. Right now I'm seeing a replay of AvP in my mind rather than Aliens...

They've been working on this since LoD?! That came out seven years ago, but it is Blizzard so I guess I shouldn't be too surprised.

I played way too much D2 back in the day. In fact, it's one of the few games that I played so much that I actually regret all the time I spent playing it, and wish I could have some of that "wasted" time back. So while I AM looking forward to D3, I think I'm going to need to build up some willpower to resist playing the game every moment that I can.

Good lord this game looks like gravy. The gameplay video has me sold. Everything looks pretty damn sweet.

The work was started by Blizzard North, once they left they decided to throw away everything and start from scratch.

I'd say 2010 seems reasonable for a new game from Blizzard. Though I still wouldn't get my hopes up of it coming out too soon.

Has anyone played Mythos or have comments on it? I heard a bunch of former D2 people are working on it (and hopefully it'll turn out better than GW and Hellgate).

I never did get into the frenzy of the series like some people here, but I enjoyed Diablo II's gameplay. Of particular note from this announcement, the art direction for this new title is much... easier on the eyes. I'll be looking forward to this :)

I've never cared for Blizzard's games, but I've always admired their production and the willingness to give people more of what they want instead of 'shifting the paradigm.'

The Diablo III website is just plain awesome. Cain's journal is so hot I actually plan on reading it.

To be honest, I don't think it looks that impressive. I mean, I know there's more to the game than just the graphics, but I have a feeling that the game play will be much like that of D2 and D1, which if I'm correct to assume that, then I'll stick with playing Titan Quest: Immortal Throne. I thought that was better than Diablo anyway.

I thought the trailer was crap.

The graphics look good and I look forward to diablo 3.

Teaser: generic demonic fantasy world crap. yawn.

Gameplay Video: HOLY SHIT DID YOU SEE THAT BODY FLY OFF THE SCREEN!?!?

I heard that Eminence will be recording for Diablo 3...

Discuss:

http://www.gamingforce.org/forums/ge...o-3-music.html

My mouth was literally on the ground while watching the gameplay demonstration, though i saw the second part before the first part. I'm excited to see that it's at least this far in development and it looks absolutely stunning and the gameplay seems fun for the most part at the early stage. Glad one of my friends finally got me to play D2 it was fun after all the years.

They gotta have Sorcerer back that was one of my favorites, though Witch Doctor looks amazing as a newcomer. Wonder if it'll replace Necromancer? I hope not. Wish it would come out sooner 2010 seems so far away.

I read developer notes on diablofans.com that they plan to introduce more classes than before to diversify.

Witch Doctor probably replaces the Necro. Seems quite similar in some areas =0

I'm ecstatic about Diablo III. I was kinda stunned that they were announcing this, considering their splash a few days ago looked like the eyes of the Lich King. GOT ME AGAIN, BLIZZARD.

Can't wait to see the Sorc in action.

Gonna be packed with Blizzard games comming this fall/winter and onwards :D WotLK, SC 2 and now Diablo 3!
Just wonderfull!

Here's some guys that trully took this news with joy ;)

Enjoy!

YouTube - Diablo 3 Announce Craze!!!

I doubt they'll have more than 7-8 classes post expansion. Too many usually just turns the game into...well, WoW.

Someone at work told me that they were bummed about the Diablo 3 announcement because they were expecting Diablo World of Warcraft.

If anyone here is willing to provide me an alibi/place to stay, I have prepared 3 assault rifles and a grenade to destroy this stain.

The gameplay footage looks really good. I hope they bring back the assassin class, or at least something similar to it. I can't wait to play this in 2016.

Yay for more interactive elements. I haven't played WoW, but I did play WarCraft III and really like the scenarios where you just control the heros. Now something in the middle like that is excellent.

You mean 3016? Why lie?

I'll play this once I beat Duke Nukem Forever~

Well either way it's probably coming out after Starcraft II, which they announced first.

Of course, someone from Blizz said that SC2 isn't even coming out this year.
They're only 1/3 through the single-player campaign.

I saw release dates for D3 listed as 2010. I'm saying 2010 or 2011. Bliz has never been a company known for rushing games out. Still, the more they take their time, the better it might be. I've waited this long, I can wait a few years longer; the fact that it's confirmed gives me peace of mind~ :3:

Starcraft: Ghost?

:( Touche, sir. Touche.

On the plus side, at least we know that Blizzard isn't the type of company to risk their reputation and release subpar products. (See also Warcraft: Lord of the Clans)

Diablo 2 might not have been quite as polished, but it was a pretty decent time waster. I'm just really hoping that we'll see a return to Diablo 1's atmosphere that was pretty engrossing. Nothing like running around the catacombs only to turn a corner and find 10 acid spitters waiting to mess you up.

This video got me:

YouTube - Diablo 3 Announcement 2008 Blizzard Worldwide Invitational

Oh man, Ghost. That better come out and it better be amazing or I am going to be seriously pissed. Blizzard bought out an extremely promising upstart company just to make them work on Ghost. If they had been left alone they probably would've made five great games by now that I would have played and enjoyed.

So 5 games worth of entertainment, Blizzard. That's how good Ghost better be when it comes out.

YouTube Video

I loled. Cancer FTW

Nihilistic isn't the developer I'm talking about. Nihilistic was sucking too much so Blizzard tossed them. Swingin' Ape Studios only made one game and then promptly got bought by Blizzard, and then Ghost got put on indefinite hold after that. Screw you Blizzard! I could've had a couple of Metal Arms sequels by now, godammit!

That's what I'm thinking.

The gameplay video is just full of win. Here's hoping it comes out eventually.

I think the added physics with the graphics jump, and classic gameplay we all love plus new classes will make this pretty damn awesome.

I do hope they bring back Druid though... :|

D2 is gaining popularity again thanks to the D3 announcement. For those who've never played the game and want to, or those who've lost their CDs and CD keys, you can purchase them for $5 at G2buy.com. The site sells all sorts of farmed D2 goods and so seems a little suspect, but the CD Key aspect is totally legit. Website states that it takes anywhere from 15 minutes to 8 hours after you place your order, so it should be pretty quick.

Good deal if you considered buying the battle chest, but didn't want the extra stuff like the guides.

Totally not meant to be an advertisement or anything, so feel free to ignore if you've been playing for years, god.

I just reinstalled good ol d2 today, gonna play with from pals from work, other pals from wow, and Jaded

I had been playing Diablo 2 for the better part of this past year and then got utterly burned out on the game.

I'd had some problems playing before because I'd get annoyed at the gambling addiction subculture that arose out of the game, but I think I finally pinned down what bothers me about it. Waypoints and teleport. Convenient ways to get around, sure, but they've been taken as a sign that this game isn't about the gameplay, it's about the items.

The whole thing ceased to be fun for me when my buddy, already level 50 after a couple days of playing, told me to hurry my level-1-ass up and follow him so he could rush me through to Baal.

"And then what?", I asked. How many hours of Baal runs before I actually begin to have fun?

At least with MMO games there's things to do besides grind. These days, all anybody wants to do with D2 is get to Baal and then let their mouth go slack for hours on end.

I guess I just hope D3 doesn't make it too easy to farm bosses.

The whole battle.net/grinding/farming culture with the game is pretty silly. Once you figure out that the game is really about building and experimenting with the various character classes and skill trees, it becomes a lot more fun. For example, would you have more fun rushing a character just to get a high enough level to boss farm, or starting a dagger barbarian and fighting your way up to hell difficulty. And yes, I have a dagger barb in single player who is in the high 70s - low 80s. I've had a necromancer {and sorceress for that matter} who used a Stormshield and had 75% block. Hell, my favorite build is a skeleton necromancer. His primary skills are maxed by the time you hit level 50 and he is one of the least equipment dependent builds available.

I'm hoping they create a better public game browse system for the game than they have had for most of their previous games. Only getting see a random 15-20 games is frustrating, especially when none of them suit my situation.

I remember making a Bowadin ages ago and it was on of the most fun characters I ever had.

I found most of the fun I had was looking at all the mediocre items I had collected and deciding what sort of interesting class I could build out of it. I remember I had a staff with something like +8 to that skill that boosted mana recharge. I build a fire mage out of it, and since firewall is gay, I used Meteor and had a lot of fun mixing it with Blizzard to slow enemies down.

You guys are making me want to start experimenting again. :(

For anyone not keeping tabs on Mythos (pretty much everyone but me), the latest game being developed by the guys that made D2 and Hellgate: London, here's some updates.

A few weeks ago, this was the top news story on their website, "Flagship Studios is Still Operating - 07/16/08" and it consisted of a body text of, "Flagship Studios has announced today that despite rumors to the contrary, the company is still operating." You know that's a bad sign.

A few days ago, they posted the following story.



:(

The third class, the Wwwyzzerdd, has been revealed. Looks like Sorceress 2.0.

Also, a world map. No word yet on whether hippogriffs or wyverns will be the main method of travel.

Haha, isn't the Slow Time identical to tat Time Bomb thing the Protoss Mothership has? Cool as hell nonetheless.

Auto Stats definately make me disappointed.

The Wizard is neat, just a little too...generic, maybe?

No LAN play/forced Battle.net for multiplayer makes me very upset.

The game may be D3 in name, I'm just worried that it will not be D3 in spirit...

I can't believe this thread is three-and-a-half years old.

Anyway, I played through the first Beta quest and was pleased with it. In case it wasn't clear to anyone initially, Health orbs do drop but so do Health potions, and you can use Health potions on the fly, but there's a cooldown on them. This was important when I was approaching the Beta boss and I got swarmed. I was a bit alarmed to have to flee and wait for the cooldown to lapse, but it was a good learning experience and it's something to get used to, instead of just spamming potions like in Diablo II.

Otherwise, gameplay was great fun, brilliant atmosphere, played a lot like a merger of Diablo II and Torchlight. Anyone else play it?

Signed up for the beta months ago. Never got in. Possibly because the only games I have on battle.net are D2 and LOD. Possibly because those are the last worthwhile games they put out.

So much of the enthusiasm over this thing seems to be OMG IT'S DIABLO 3, rather than any concrete improvements on the formula. I mean, it's Blizzard, they'll sell millions of copies even if they crap in a box and send it off to stores, but "Diablo 2, except now with modern resolution support" isn't worth $60 to me, not when Torchlight 2 is, what a couple months away? (and Grim Dawn. Someday. Someday...)

I've been way too busy to play it this weekend, and I figure, I might as well play it on release (for the one day I get to play it before I get slammed with work again).

Bet yes, Grim Dawn. So far away. Titan Quest was the best of the previous generation of Diablo clones, so I can't wait to see where Grim Dawn goes (made by developers of TQ).

I've been in beta for a while and only recently I've had the chance to mess with it seriously. I've never really played a Diablo game until this and it was good enough to keep my interest away from Warcraft for a while.

Real Money Auction House is going to be interesting to see what's going on with that too. I don't plan on being a "Diablo 3 Billionaire" but I'm hoping to cover my WoW sub cost, maybe make a few extra bucks to get some games here and there.

I really loved playing Demon Hunter. The snares were taking a bit getting used to but once I figured everything out, I was tearing through some of the monsters. Haven't messed with Barbarian/Amazon a whole hell of a lot.

My life will become even less socialized on May 15th, as well.

I didn't even know this was a thing.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...ment/grim-dawn

I have never played a Diablo game before but am mildly intrigued by this. Not sure if the beta is available for Mac but assuming it is should I be giving this a look?

Well, I wasn't that far off.

Been a cool run for me. Started as a female monk, then male demon hunter then a male barbarian. At the very most, I unlocked the first runes in the primary attack and basically having a blast. The orb addition is a nice touch too but I haven't gotten around the auction house yet.

Count me in as very interested.

Oh god I don't even remember making this thread.

I played for about 20 minutes on a machine at work. Due to the crappy specs it was laggy and choppy as all hell, but the gameplay is largely unchanged from Diablo 2, it seems to me. Not a bad thing actually.

It looks like some places have broke street date and have been shipping them out (it could be just a generic warehouse picture.. as indicated by the link...):

http://i.haymarket.net.au/News/DiabloIIICEwarehouse.jpg

Pic taken from a thread on MMO-Champion.

They wouldn't even work though right? Doesn't this game require online connectivity at all times even for single player, or am I confusing it for something else?

Tried to run the beta on our laptop, no go :(. Will have to either wait until we get a new PC or the oft-rumored console version comes to pass.

Yeah, the game is always online. If it disconnects (whether on your end or the server's), it stops the playing session.

That looks like an Australian copy, judging by the age rating.

When did you try to run the beta? Beta servers closed down on the 1st with the game coming out next week.

Kinda makes me wonder, since the game is going to be online at all times (while having an active battle.net account)... how people who pirate it will be able to play. Unless someone's crafty enough to "unlock" the game to be able to play offline? I dunno, just hope that there won't be any "cheaters" and try to flood the AH with dupe items and gold and the such.

Diablo III- Wrath

A little anime treat from Blizzard.

I gotta say, Peter Chung's designs actually look pretty cool when there are no human faces involved.

Installed and ready to go. Who else is gonna be trying to hop on at midnight? I might be looking for some adventuring companions.

Back home and finally installing the game. The Limited Edition guide is pretty beefy and will give me some nice reading material while waiting on servers to pop up. Apparently they aren't doing it midnight each time zone and US will launch at 12 am PDT. Blah.

lol equipping the templar npc with a shield

Anyone have any guest passes to spare? I'd like to check the game out, but after how much time I spent playing Diablo 2, I'm wary of buying the full game and getting sucked in for hours on end.

Playing a Demon Hunter? I heard it was really affecting them the most. I did it with my barb the moment he was officially in my group and had no problems.

Jessy, are you sure this is a good idea? We all know how WoW took you away from us for a couple years. ;____;

That'd be my next class. And yeah, it's limited to the Demon Hunter/Huntress build for the moment. I'm going in as a Monk first.

Already loving the fact that I have to sign in just to play by myself. I just want to play a little solo, but due to excellent design, I am unable to do so because of overloaded servers. Awesome. Maybe once the game lets me play, I will enjoy it. Next week.

This is basically my main gripe. Why there is no option for offline play is baffling.

I played a little today when one of those infamous "errors" just popped out of nowhere. At the very most, a "smooth" playtime will be next week when some players will get over the game.

Heh, probably follow that one dude who finished the game in 12 hours, "duct taping himself to a chair"[sic].

Does anyone have one of those starter thingies that they maybe want to give to a broke terrorist?

I'm amused to see people complaining about the lack of offline play, even though it was said shortly after D3 was announced that Blizzard was not allowing for any sort of offline or direct tcp/ip play like D2 had. This was coming guys, everyone should have expected it. :)

Surprisingly, anticipation of a dumb thing does not make it seem less dumb when it arrives.

Zephyrin#1307

Add me if you like.

It was pretty hilarious to read all the reviews left on amazon and metacritic giving 1s because of the no offline mode as well as servers being unstable at launch. It's a Blizzard game... when are launches smooth with them? heh.

Now the most recent "bitch" is that some kid in Asia beat the normal mode in 7 hours. So therefore the game is now "too easy" and a "waste of $60". lol.

I've been having fun with it so far. I personally can't wait until Blizzard implements Battletags in place of Real ID soon... which is something they should have done in the first place instead of real first and last names, but meh.

Just beat the Skeleton King and put a Rare in my stash chest. BIG MONEY HERE I COME!!! (lewl)

Mo0#1466

I wish to have the friends list.

I'll post my battletag soon; too preoccupied with smashing enemies with my fists.

Fenrisulvur#1998

I'm Radez#1604 if any of you really good friends want to add me.

So even though I'll probably be terrible at this the loot aspect and a number of recommendations from local friends (who I might also be able to play this shizzle with) I've gone and picked up Diablo III. Apparently I'm Omagnus#2402.

So you guys have figured out that a DPS Demon Hunter with Bola Shot+Volatile Explosives turns normal acts 3 and 4 is joke mode right? I'm starting Nightmare tonight and am interested to see if it is still going to be useful.

I just finished normal just now too. Way of the Hundred Fists spam hell yeah. Starting Nightmare right now after these credits.

Does anyone have a US guest pass they can kick me?

I love loot games on console (Sacred 2, Borderlands, Dark Alliance, PSO, etc) but never had a PC that could game so I never played Diablo 2. When the beta for this hit I installed it and it ran like garbage (like 5 FPS, if that) so I didn't pick it up. But out of curiosity I just ran this laptop (Asus G50vt-X5, only gaming-capable PC we have) through systemlabrequirements and it says it should be fine. So I'd like to get the game so I can try to give it another go to figure out what the problem might be (thinking I might do a clean install of Windows 7 and ditch Vista that's on here), but obviously I don't want to commit to buying the game if I ultimately can't get it going.

Apparently, the game only works at Windows 7. My brother who is using a Vista laptop tried to download the client using one of my passes got denied, stating that "it needs a new OS". D3 isn't that power hungry anyhow so yeah, just give it a whirl. It's super fun.

Also: Diablo III Hotfixes - May (Updated 5/23/12) - Diablo III

Never relied too much on the Healing Mantra personally so I can say that I wasn't affected that much by the change.

I don't agree with a lot of the control-freak shit Blizzard pulls but denying Vista users the ability to play games is something I get get on board with.

Diablo 3 works not only on Vista but also XP; something else is going on there.

Did a search last night and found somewhat a solution at the euro battle.net forum. It involves turning on something called a 'secondary logon'. I'll try it on my brother's laptop later.

Weird. Hope he gets it figured out.

Also so did no one here buy it at retail? Not that I blame you, but fuck :(

I have the CE myself. The artbook is very purdy.

I have 2 more guest passes. I'll pm you the code when I come home later.

Iwata just hooked me up with a code, thanks!

But yeah, if I wind up getting this working I am going to be super, super sad that I missed the CE :(

Gigablah#1880

Current playing through Nightmare. DH with 2300+ DPS and very, very squishy.

I'll take a guest code if someone has one to spare :(

If I wind up getting the game in the next day or two I'll probably grab a retail copy anyway (gamestop credit) and if no one has hooked you up by then I can do so.

It's still downloading but I played for a when the download hit Optimal, can't quite pin down the performance issues. In the beta the title screen and character screen and all that jazz was flawless, but as soon as I got into the actual game it was running in super slow motion, completely unplayable. With the guest pass Iwata gave me for retail updating my video drivers seemed to have fixed that issue for the most part (when I played the beta I checked that and it said I had the most up to date drivers, but Nvidia lied, figures).

My problem now is really intermittent; basically in the entirety of the Tristam area it runs mostly fine with some very slight jank which is mildly annoying but totally playable. But then every few minutes regardless of where I am or if anything is happening or not I get the crazy slowdown/2 FPS for about 1-2 minutes, then it completely goes away. What's weird is that this seems to happen regardless of whether or not I have the game in 800x600 windowed with all settings as low as they will go OR if I'm running the game at completely maxed settings. It's bizarre.

Then I got to the cathederal area and the problem never happened once regardless of the setting levels. What's making it hard for me to figure out is that this doesn't seem to be the microstuttering issue that most people are having, but I'm having a hard time finding anything about my issue because I'm just finding stuff about that. If I have time before work tomorrow or when I get home I'm going to try a couple of things I found to see if I can get it figured out, saw some suggestions to run the game specifically only under a single core and some other oddly specific things so we'll see if that does anything. I also need to maybe mess more with the FPS settings, I left the background FPS at the default (8?) and I tried messing around with the foreground FPS some and I think right now I have it at 30, but looking online now it seems like most people are recommending unchecking the foreground FPS and checking V-Sync.

Goddamn it PC gaming! I'm still baffled by how I can run it at max settings randomly for no reason though (although the max resolution this laptop will take is I think 1368x768). Anyone have any other ideas, or did anyone else also have any problems randomly in that first area? PC specs (Asus G50VT-X5):

Processor 2.13GHz Intel Core 2 Duo P7450
Memory 4GB, 800MHz DDR2
Hard drive 320GB 7,200rpm
Chipset Mobile Intel PM45 Express Chipset
Graphics 512MB Nvidia GeForce 9800M GS

Dopefish do you still need a code?

No thanks, Iwata hooked me up.

Sent one over as requested to Sass. I've still got two more, for some reason my standard edition had 3 in the box. If anyone else needs one let me know by sometime tomorrow, otherwise I'll pass them forward on GAF or something.

Obviously bought the game, and I think I may have just figured out the performance issue I was having above. I have almost the same exact setup as the guy here and he was having the exact same issue (runs totally fine, then goes to total shit 1-5 FPS for anywhere from 30 second to 2 minutes, then becomes totally fine again, all regardless of settings). He found out it's basically because his GPU was overheating because the CPU was overheating, and since it's a laptop they share the same heat pipe so the GPU was essentially shutting down until it cooled down enough to kick back on.

This makes total sense because this laptop has always gotten really hot, especially when playing games. He fixed it by reducing his maximum processor state to 85% so it still gets hot, but not hot enough to shut the GPU down. I haven't slept in forever so I'll give it a long run in the morning, but that sounds exactly like all of my problems so I think that'll hopefully do it. Played for about an hour this morning and a couple hours tonight, as far as I can determine if I run the game in 800x600 windowed with everything at minimum and the foreground FPS locked at 30 it seems to run fine with no issues indefinitely. Any time I started bumping settings up it would start randomly having that problem, even if it had been fine previously, then lowering the setting down to medium which was fine before would then also start randomly crapping out as well. Hopefully in the morning with an extended run I can confirm either way; I set the maximum processor state to 80% and will go from there, the processor requirement isn't really a problem in my case, as long as I can get the game to run smoothly at hopefully at medium settings I'm totally fine with that. Again, fucking PC gaming :(

Sass has been bugging me about this thing so if I could have one of your spare passes that would be great, thanks.

Additional Spam:
Saxypunch#1846 if that's relevant or necessary, no idea how this business works


V It's mine. Got it! Thanks again.

Sending it now, is that Sass' battletag or yours?

Basically the way they're getting around unique IDs is you still log into the game with your bnet information, but before you can play Diablo you have to create a Battle Tag on bnet which is whatever name you want but it then slaps # and 4 numbers after it. Then that's the in-game tag you need to add people to your friends list apparently (I've sent a couple of requests but they haven't been accepted yet, but I'm assuming the name appears in your friends list without the numbers?). I'm not sure if your BattleTag is across all Blizzard games or is Diablo specific though, I don't play any of their other stuff.

Battletags are throughout Blizzard. About the same ie. not playing their other stuff.

Just a heads up in case anyone wasn't aware, but people playing on the starter edition (through use of the codes) are only able to play with other starter edition people. You'd have to purchase the full game to play with everyone else.

Yup, but I'd imagine most people probably know if they're down for getting the game or not fairly quickly at least. Most people I'm seeing online who were trying to get codes were doing so for the same reason I was (to see if it would run, etc).

Speaking of which I seem to have totally solved my problems! The following will probably all sound really sad but keep in mind I've played like 3 PC games in my life so I don't know shit about PC hardware. Anyway our laptop has run pretty hot as long as I can remember, which I didn't think much of because it's a big laptop. Anyway I tried the fixes I was seeing around that I posted about like reducing the maximum power allowed to my CPU, running the game only on one core, etc and performance was still all over the place regardless of high or low settings; it would run totally fine, then go down to 1-5 FPS for 30-120 seconds, then be fine again. So I looked into it some more, and apparently our laptop is specifically notorious for it's shitty heating, so much so that people have come up with crazy shit to fix it. So I grabbed some software that monitors your PC temperatures etc to see what was up.

The Internet seems to indicate that as a general rule usually your idle GPU should be around 45C and ideally shouldn't be getting higher than about 80C during game, and anything over 90C being actively bad. So of course with the software tool our idle GPU temperature was an amazing 75C and Diablo was getting it up to 105-110C :twitch: Looked online for our model which has this issue pretty well documented with people trying latop cooler pads etc with mixed results at best. Most people seemed to get it fixed by having to open it up and blow it out every couple of months, taking the back off completely and leaving it that way, OR there were a number of people who did what this video shows. What looks like a fan vent on the bottom of the laptop isn't actually a fan vent, and there's no vent at all there which is fucking amazing, fuck you Asus. As the video shows the common fix is to drill/cut out what looks like the vent (to make it an actual vent), then replace the fake mesh with actual spaced mesh for breathing room and cut one of the wires to force the fan on all the time.

So I went out and spent $10 for the mesh and a can of air, but the can of air was as far as I needed apparently; the dust wasn't "thick" inside, but there was an absolute fuckton of it. Blew it out and then played Diablo at max settings for a while, no issues. More importantly the laptop now idles at 48-50c, and Diablo gets it up to only about 72-75 now, with the highest peak I saw for it of 78-79 (never hit 80). The laptop is now also (obviously) substantially cooler, and my only issues with Diablo are with just tweaking the settings for performance reasons (everything at max and running at fullscreen runs okay but with some slight framerate drops, trying to find the optimal combination of settings to resolve).

/pcgaming rant

So I'm super happy I got that taken care of, but goddamn I had no idea how poorly this laptop was set up or that it was getting that hot. Now I can actually focus on playing the damn game!

Man, people online weren't kidding about the Auction House making in-game crafting utterly useless. I just took a quick look as I was getting off tonight (lvl 13 DH) and for a 700 gold buyout in the AH I was able to buy a 2H Bow that was way better than what I was using (and I'm too low level to equip the next level of upgrades at the Blacksmith). That seems....broken. Maybe that's just more relevant earlier on though for weaker items?

Anyway having a fucking blast, and the computer held solid all day never getting higher than about 77C, running the game in a 1024 window but with all video settings maxed. Outside of like 2 hours of Diablo 2 I've never played a PC loot game before, having a blast.

That's more relevant early on, since people are dumping their old stuff on the auction house for old levels and not really caring. The AH gets expensive quickly the higher you level, especially when you're going for the best stats.

Crafting, meanwhile, gives you something to do with items that, in all honesty, don't vendor for all that much compared to the gold enemies start to drop. It takes a bunch of investment going in but I've been upgrading at least one armor piece every five levels or so using crafting.

I guess I should also mention I have two guest passes left, so just shoot me a message if you want to give the game a test run.

Went into this pretty skeptical. Finished the demo with Monk. Pretty good, I guess, not too excited. Tried Wizard. Didn't even finish the demo area. Oh, ice beam, big deal.

Then I tried a Witch Doctor. What's this? Jar of... Spiders? Jar of spiders. Jar of Spiders oboyoboyoboyoboy

Off to eBay to generate some disposable income, fuuuuuuck

I don't usually play mage-type classes so I can't comment, but I have seen people say that Wizard starts getting awesome at around level 14/15 (assuming you unlock something at that point).

I should start referring to quantities of spiders as Jars though.

The Wizard started getting useful for me once I unlocked Electrocute. Shortly after that, it began inheriting decent equipment from my other characters, so there was a pretty significant jump in killing power and survival in the span of just a few levels.

Been playing around with Demon Hunter. Level 30 now and on Act 3. Shit got brutal and fast... well fast. Haven't had much luck finding drops that I can use. Plenty of shit for witch doctors and barbarians and classes NOT ME. Nightmare mode is going to be interesting. Hopefully I can find some actual rares and legendaries that I can use. If not I suppose they'll get saved for whenever the Real Money Auction House gets up and running.. if ever.

Wizard didn't feel too spectacular until 19 when all your skill slots are unlocked, but I guess that's kind of true for any class. It was the class I liked the most during beta though, so I've stuck with it on release. For normal though, stuff like frost nova/wave of force/arcane orb/etc lasts a long while.

Oh, and my battletag is my username #1709.

OH SHIT NO ONE TELL M00

http://i.imgur.com/J9KYf.jpg

Auction House continues to be hilarious. Just bumped my Level 22 DH from about 175 DPS to 250 and my armor from 430 to 530 for a total of about 8000 gold.

Dagger, what the hell. Hamburgers are clearly a fist weapon.

That is the best weapon so far.

Dag: I had to shed my magic finding gear because hell won't cut you slack. Went from 98% to 44%. But I more or less maintained that 98 throughout my nightmare run.

Of course the servers are going down for 8 hours right when I'm waking up on my day off. Great.

Anyone still have a demo code? Two of my coworkers keep telling me I need to get the game, but I'm worried I've burned myself out on the point & click games with how much time I spent on Diablo 2 to really enjoy 3.

Sending one your way right now.

Edit: Sent, I am officially out of codes now :P

I suppose I should give this game a try if anyone has any extra codes.

Also I am not surprised that Wizard is pretty horrible early level. The same fate was held over the Sorceress' head in D2. She didn't really get awesome until you got firewall/hydra/frozen orb and had the points in warmth to back up spamming said spells.

Patch notes (you can actually run the client and get the patch, but when you try to actually login you get kicked back to desktop to get the patch you already have, and the game crashes lol):

Monk players seem to be particularly unhappy; it seems like they have a hard time already on Inferno, apparently that nerf is pretty bad for them but I have no point of reference.

Pretty much. We're supposed to tank in some places but man. Most of the good parties I was in involved some kind of massed missile/arcane spam from afar. Takes the load off my back, I'd say. 59 monk and shit, Inferno will kick me in the ass so much.

Also this is pretty much my tactics when dealing with hordes:

YouTube Video

Servers are hilariously still down. They came up for about 2-3 hours (around 2:15pm EST) then have been back down since about 5:30pm EST. At this point I'm actually pretty pissed, we're two weeks out from launch and you've having 8 hour maintenance followed but unexpected emergency downtime? The fuck.

If you had played Diablo II online, you would understand that this is common.

If you'd played Diablo II, you'd know you could still play offline if you wanted.

I can't wait to see what problems arise when Blizzard decides to finally launch RMAH. There must be plenty of error codes that haven't been used yet.

They're probably trying to quell the "AMG I WAS HACKEDED!!11" shit first before bringing in the Real Money Auction House. Which I somehow knew that it wouldn't take long after the game launched for that to happen in the first place.

Authenticators are a pretty nice investment, but it also helps that if some people were not stupid and bought gold from gold sellers from 3rd party websites or too lazy to level and buy power leveling services, or heaven forbid not keep a clean PC or even being royally stupid and clicking on emails that say they can get free stuff if they enter their info including secret question answers and passwords.

But of course, that's all "Blizzard's Fault" I suppose amirite?

But Bliiiiiizzaaaaaard, I bought a *sniffle* weapon on your auction houuuuse and then my account was haaaaacked and the mean hackers gave all my stuff to packraaaaaat *cry* Can I *blow nose* have my $250 back, pleeeeeeeease?

Given that there are still widespread issues with people buying stuff on the AH and not actually getting it but having the money taken, or people are not getting the money for their items that sold I'd say the RMAH is going to be a total clusterfuck. Right now they're aiming for a 6/12 date which I doubt is going to happen. If that thing isn't on complete lockdown it's going to be bad; at this point with the game having been out you're not seeing news stories from outlets about people bitching for the game being down for most of a day, but when people start losing real money hoooo boy.

I should mention that I actually had my account hijacked about a week into the game launch. The funny bit is that it happened while I was actually online playing, so I got to watch myself get booted off and then have my password changed. I certainly never tried to purchase gold or anything and I only ever entered my login info through the battlenet site (which I reach by typing in the url), so that was kind of a trip. I keep a pretty clean computer and all, but I suppose the only answer has to be that I let something slip in somewhere... or something. Got control of my account within a couple minutes of being booted off, but that was enough to wipe my character clean. Anyway.

Authenticators are nice and all, but I dunno why they can't just pack one in with the game. Granted, there are mobile authenticators (which I use now), but I didn't know about them until after the fact. Blizzard should consider maybe heavily advertising authenticators on the patcher instead of the game itself. I mean, I figure you already own the game if you're seeing the patcher to begin with.

Sometimes all it takes is for them to get your email address and then brute force your account. They actually wanted to pack them in with Cataclysm, but there are people whining about them being "mandatory" and why should they be forced to use them when "stupid people" can't keep their PCs clean and all that jazz.

I wish they would pack them in with their games. Just bump the price up $10 and bam, authenticators. But I've had one since before Wrath when my sister's account got snaked. Didn't want to take the chance of mine being that way too.

Were you playing in a public game, Saka? Odds are what's been going on is a server exploit that's allowing hackers to duplicate your session ID in-game. A handful of people with authenticators have reported being hacked under such circumstances; authenticators wouldn't be able to prevent anything. So yes, this could be a security flaw that is Blizzard's fault.

[tin foil hat mode]Or maybe they're doing it themselves just to sell authenticators! Though I don't know how well that will play into their strategy of nerfing everything to the point where the RMAH is necessary, so Bobby Kotick can personally create and sell the best items.[/tin foil hat mode]

Wouldn't it put it past Blizzard doing that, actually. :P Well if there's a public server exploit, I'm not touching public games. I'll just join up with real ID/battletag friends.

With that exploit though, it makes sense now why Blizzard has it set about if you're hacked once with the RMAH, you're required to get an authenticator before you can use it again. If it happens again, its permanently disabled. Yeah, that's something they need to get fixed fast.

No, I hadn't played in any public games. One of the conspiracy theories I read involved something with achievements being publicly visible, and prior to getting hijacked I had just hit 50. But they're all just conspiracy theories for now, anyway.

Naturally, part of me wishes there was really a big exploit going on causing these hacks so that at least I could feel like getting hijacked wasn't entirely my fault. :U

Got to act II inferno this morning. Died twenty four times getting to the first waypoint. I killed maybe three hornets, and that was it. One hit takes off more than half my health! It's so much fun!!

I'm still in nightmare mode. Haven't even got the crown yet. I keep farming the area to see if I luck out and get some decent drops. Died to champions and elites a good 10 times already. Havin' a blast myself.

Since you're running demon hunter, what's your dps, vitality and dexterity? Also to improve you chances I'd getting better loot, I'd advise getting gear with magic find on them.

My gear and stats are pretty awful right now. I just spent 8,000g on a 1h handbow that doubled what my 2h-er did. The buyouts on some of this shit are ludicrous. I think my dps is something like 525 or something like that. I'll just keep at it. :P

What level are you right now? Also anything below 1,000 DPS for nightmare is going to be a pain in the ass. This is specially true for Hell and Inferno runs later on (and as Radez posted earlier, Inferno is no slouch. He has at the very least 15,000 dps and still dies easily. Then again, Wizard and all that but still. I have about 10k dps without buffs and about 22k life and STILL die from elite packs and whatnot. That's why I grind Hell for loot) and Vitality and Dexterity 'cause survivability and Dex for the damage for the DH.

Anyway, no rush. AH prices are fucking ridiculous so I suggest buying decent shit for around 10k apiece for each gear, if you can. :P

I just hit 35 earlier today, been bouncing around between D3, WoW and Mists beta, so that's why I'm not as far in D3 as most everyone else is.

I just farm that area before the crown crypts. Unless there's a better place to farm for my level?

That's generally what I do. I check every few levels to see if I can improve my weapon and various armor pieces significantly, set my search parameters (usually experience per kill+, vit+, and sockets where applicable), and 15000 buyout. I have a lot of luck with that, which I imagine is me buying hand-me-downs from higher level guys who just upgraded and want a quick turnaround on their auctions.

I'd suggest redoing completed quests, if you can. Or just farm Diablo on Normal.

My usual buyouts range from 10k-50k sometimes and I get lucky with shit I look for in what type of gear (usually Dex/Vit/Fire Resist). But man, I see Legendary shit not selling for 100k and the stats are holy shit crappy.

There's my scrub stats.

http://i97.photobucket.com/albums/l2...eenshot004.jpg

And for some reason it wants to be a pain in the ass and be tiny sooo:

Str: 189
Dex: 369
Int: 250
Vit: 358

Armor: 970

DPS: 534.44


yeeeeea, scrub.

Jesus Christ man, spend that 60k you have and get yourself a better weapon and Dex on all/most all your equipment. I actually randomly took a screenshot of my 35 DH a few days ago for something on GAF, so for direct comparison:

http://i.imgur.com/XL3hn.png

Just search in the AH for items with a minimum of X Dex etc, you can upgrade for pretty cheap. I think the bow I was using in the screenshot below probably cost me 10k at the most. Then you pretty much just want to have a Dex bonus on all of your equipment, and put Emeralds in any of the rune slots you have and it adds up very fast. On Nightmare I was floating around 1000-1200 Damage until late in Act 2 when I dropped money on a better bow. The fact that you at any point have 1h crossbow that's doubing the damage your 2h bow as doing is very concerning >_>. Other than that though our stats were pretty much identical, so your damage output is definitely the main issue. Survivability wise though as a DH there are certain things that you HAVE to start doing on Nightmare:

-You can not be hit, and should not be getting hit. This is especially true on Act 1 since there are not "surprise" bullshit enemies like the other acts. You HAVE to start kiting, you cannot just stand there and shoot at shit like you can on Normal.

-If there is any chance of you getting hit, Smoke Screen. Despite them nerfing it hard, Smoke Screen is the #1 reason by a country mile DH is even viable on harder difficulties. On paper (especially on Normal when you don't need it) 1.5 seconds of being invisible (assuming you take the rune that increases it by .5 seconds, which you must) sounds stupid, and I didn't understand it until getting to Nightmare either. But on higher difficulties that is always the difference between life and death, because for DH's even if you ignore DPS in favor of defense/resist, you're only changing from dying in 1-2 hits to dying to 3-4. You cannot take hits, and what the description for Smoke Screen doesn't clearly indicate is that it makes you completely invincible, you become invisible to enemies (de-aggros) as well as breaks stun/freeze/etc. In conjunction with the Tactical Advantage passive (60% movement speed for 2 seconds when you use certain abilities including SS) that 1.5 seconds of invincibility is all you need to survive, then be a full screen away by the time it wears off. Cannot emphasize this enough.

-Elemental Arrow. This one is probably obvious, but Lightning Ball is amazing, and should basically be your primary attack until you unlock Nether Tentacles at 59. Most people seem to go with Devouring Arrows as their primary (which I think is level 42?) which I'm using as well, but if you're in a group I found Entangling Shot with Chain Gang on it to be pretty helpful. On normal solo I would use that as well, but on Nightmare solo it tends to not be super realistic as the slowdown doesn't help as much as you might think, and the damage bonus on Devouring Arrow can get pretty crazy.

-Life on Hit becomes important on Nightmare as well, because you start running into mobs that will reflect damage you do. Nether Tentacles helps mitigate that (but that's level 59), so in the meantime Life on Hit is a huge help, and Smoke Screen saves your ass here again because any damage you do while SS is active doesn't reflect back to you.

Gear-wise generally speaking with the DH you're better off running with a 2h Bow + Quiver until at least endgame when you can start paying out the ass for 1h crossbows with high crit %. Gear circumstances not withstanding 2h weapons + Quiver will have higher DPS, but Crossbows tend to have more frequent and higher crit bonuses, which combined with the Archery passive bonus on Crossbows for crit (+50%) as well as Sharpshooter passive (crit % increase). Once you have that setup going (which requires at least level 50 to get Sharpshooter) some people prefer to run that way; on paper it's weaker than the 2h bow setup, but if you have crazy high crit chance and damage you can outdo the 2h bow setup at the potential loss of Quiver bonuses, etc. Most people seem to be leaning towards playing DH as a glass cannon in Inferno so that makes sense. Armor-wise gear primarily for Dex; as mentioned above Armor/Strength and Vitality are nice and certainly get those as well, but generally speaking those are not going to make enough of a difference past Normal so Dex should be your priority on pretty much all of your gear.

Also I wish I had figured this out sooner, but I do now agree with the general consensus of NOT fucking with Magic Find until endgame, and taking Gold Find instead. I ran with usually 90%+ MF for all of normal some of Nightmare until I had a bunch of people tell me not bother at that point since you're probably not going to find anything good at this point anyway (especially since you can buy whatever you find for better at the AH), and gold is always useful. So I basically swapped my MF and GF stats and I'm not really noticing any drop in colored drops, I've actually found 2 legendaries (which both sucked of course) and I'm bringing in a shitload more money from the same areas. YMMV on that, but I'm finding the extra gold to be waaaaay more useful.

I would buy stuff if people didn't charge asinine prices. :P 2 million gold for a yellow that looked shitty. I just bought a pair of pants that had about 20 more dex than what I have on. I'll start regemming my stuff for dex too.

Look for any equipment (save for belt, boots and shoulders) that has sockets on them. Possibly two or more so maximum effect.

EDIT: Tried another build for my Inferno run for my Monk. Involves Earth Ally to distract mobs while I shave away from the edges. It's going great so far; my older one involved just belting out damage like a motherfucker (although at a staggering low DPS rate of 15,000 with buffs).

This new build just re-emphasizes what's essential for an Inferno run: Resists. Resists, Vitality then the DPS thing. Never knew that an element resist stacks with the all-resist attribute. Holy fucking shit. Time to grind for more cash then get them dual attributes on a single piece of equipment. God, One With Everything is a life saver.

Now, if I could only get my resists up to 1,000 with buff...

I've spent a ton of time in the AH, you should be easily doubling your stats with the 60k that you have. Start setting min Dex on items with a max buyout of say 15k and go from there. I'd be willing to spend all of your money right now on a better bow as that's your choke point right now, but you shouldn't need to spend more than 15-30k at the very most at that level.

Hey Dagget are you on NA? I was actually just about to put up some stuff on the AH that was my old stuff from around your level that I can give you. The Helmet's not fantastic (you could buy a better one for dirt cheap, I was just going to vendor trash it) but both the amulet and bow go for some cash, I got super lucky on a lowball auction to get this amulet initially and IIRC I found this bow (was going to put it up for 90k). The amulet's pretty decent as well:

http://i.imgur.com/gx3lo.png
http://i.imgur.com/XWmIT.png
http://i.imgur.com/e3kQq.png
http://i.imgur.com/CZ8qv.png

Edit: I also just found a pair of boots that might be good for you, and just replaced a pair of gloves I can give you as well.

I've been selling some rares that have been collecting dust (and I know I won't use them any time soon) to get a little stockpile of money going. Bought a pair of boots that had like 80 dex compared to the 20-ish my current ones have, have to go up a level to use them though.

I'll probably farm the skeleton king to see what all goodies I can get. Probably not a lot in Nightmare mode but if I can sell it then it'll be worth it.

btw, anyone wants to add me: lagmoose#1212. You'll find me either on Diablo or WoW.

I'll try to remember to add you tonight, but let me know if you want that stuff I posted above.

Nah, I think I've been buying better recently, but I appreciate it! I know the 1h bow I have does like 84.7 damage. I'll eventually learn how to play a game the way it's supposed to be, one day. :P

Sure. Keep in mind though when looking at weapon stats that any of the stats listed below the DPS that are class-specific do NOT factor into the DPS shown; aka the bow above has significantly higher DPS than what's shown due to the Dex stat on it, etc. This also makes doing comparisons in the Auction House a real bitch right now because advanced tooltips don't show up there (where you can see the +/- %'s for life/protection/damage). So sometimes it's hard to tell if something is better or worse, for example I may find a bow that has a higher DPS but lower dex than what I'm using now, and it's very difficult to guestimate that kind of thing :/

Yeah the bow I have doesn't have any Dex on it at all, but I've been making up for it by actually finding useful shit now. Found a rare ring: Empty Star.

Str: 39
Dex: 37
Vit: 46
+30 life each hit.

It has a socket too. So I put Dex in that?

Yup. That's not a super amazing ring, but that's pretty good for your level, especially if you found it.

I think I may have worn myself out on Diablo. The game was reasonably fun up until Hell, but Inferno is just ridiculous. It's supposed to be super hard, but to me difficulty is something you can defeat with skill. There is just no amount of skill that will ever save you from crap like Arcane Enchanted Desecrator Jailer Vortex unless you have ridiculous gear. I realize loot is a huge factor in Diablo, but the gear dependency in this game is just bananas.

Plus Blizzard keeps nerfing all the really effective skills and failing to buff the ones that are complete trash. Herp.

WoW was all about gear dependency at the highest levels, too.

I've never played WoW :U

Saka, I'm sort of with you there. The automatic progression of leveling stops, and you're stuck with an incredibly incremental progression with the stats of your gear. A cat threw a firebomb at me, critical hit, 37k damage. That was with 50% resist and 50% damage reduction, so the path to success is extremely not clear to me.

Getting the gear seems to be a matter of several million gold per piece in the auction house. I think I was earning gold in act 1 on inferno at about 60k every half hour? So, basically, Diablo III is now a grind fest of several days, so meh. I figure I'll make high level gems and then start over with other classes. Maybe a team of players can leapfrog through the checkpoints of an act and just kill bosses. I found Butcher in Inferno was way easier than some of the elite mobs I encountered on the way (mortar fast waller invulnerable minions)

http://i.imgur.com/ggdGG.png

Got the bow on the right for 10k in the Auction House. I love the auction house.

http://i.imgur.com/Ba3YK.gif

But to demonstrate how the auction house won't reflect Damage runes, when you're in the auction house doing compares and selecting them to sell it shows:

-The 137.9 bow as 121.1
-The 173.6 bow as 156.8

Just something to keep in mind. As far as I can tell all other rune stats will be included in searches, etc but Damage specifically won't. Probably the same reason you can't search for +x-x Damage stats (which makes trying to upgrade rings/amulets incredibly annoying), which makes no sense and I hope they fix :/

Something else that bugs me is the level cap of 60. In D2 you could grind or farm away and still feel like you were getting something done because it took so long to hit 99. Now, it's just like... some gold? Maybe an okay item?

I went crazy earlier and spent half my fortune (which wasn't much, to be honest) on gear that actually left me weaker. Hurray, Auction House!

Eh, playing WoW for almost 7 years, I'm used to a level cap. That doesn't really bother me, I'm sure whether in a huge content patch or an expansion, they'll raise it more. Whenever that will be, heh.

After upgrading some stuff, I'm playing through the first part of Nightmare with ease. Waiting to save up about 200k before I blow 100k on a new tab for my stash. Kinda sucks farming Skeleton King as he has yet to drop a rare quality item and it's all been magic quality so far, but at least I'm surviving! General chat has also been kinda lulful, with the exception of gold spam. Not nearly as heinous as I'd thought it would be.

I got D3 a little late (a day after Daravon gave me the demo key), but I'm pretty much going into it with the attitude it's a game to have fun with for a while, and to probably play each class to get a feel of what it's like. As of now I have absolutely no interest in getting through Inferno, especially since I can't think of one grindfest game I've ever actually enjoyed playing.





Another reason why games like L4D are so great. The only reason to play is to have fun. There's no perks to unlock, no levels to gain, and no stupid hats to find.

Be advised that when you purchase a new stash tab, it only unlocks the first chunk of slots. You've still got to pay the 10k or whatever it is to unlock each additional row of slots. The third stash tab will set you back 200k.

Wonder why they limited it to 3 tabs? There's clearly room for more. Maybe it'll be an expansion thing.

Why charge gold when there's real money to be made!

It's actually kind of fun to try and apply economic principles to Blizzard's auction house. I mean, gold is being generated constantly, and I'm not sure there is a sufficient drain on it. The 15% transaction fee on the AH serves to suck some of it out, and equipment repairs eats a piece, as does crafting, but I think on the whole we're observing inflationary pressure on gold.

It's exciting to think how translating that to dollars will impact it. IE, if there's a mental threshold for an immaterial amount of real money (ie. a person stops thinking about value comparison at $1 or under), could you actually effect a translation rate between gold and dollars that highly overvalues gold? And will that lead to even more inflation on the value of in-game currency?

I'm looking forward to seeing this thing work. Or break. However it turns out.

Can't you sell Gold in the RMAH? That will be super interesting to see, especially with goldfarmers and stuff. But also what will skew things is that (I believe?) there's a $250 cap on items sold in the RMAH. Up around yesterday it seemed that the conversion from Gold to Money was running about 1 million Gold for $20. But there have already been things that have sold on the AH for what would be the equivalent of approaching $1000 in real money with that conversion. So if that's the case I wonder if we're going to have this weird squeeze where anything super crazy winds up being sold outside of Blizzard due to the $ cap, which will just leave this weird middle ground on the RMAH. Also I'm inclined to say that the value of Gold -> Money will probably drop pretty hard as well.

I expect it to be a total clusterfuck but interesting to watch.

Yeah, you can sell gold for real money. However people are still going to 3rd party sites to buy gold. Sadly, they think it's ok to do that since gold is sold in the RMAH and then get upset when they get "hacked".

I guess I'd need to start farming massive amounts of gold if I plan on making any kind of money from the RMAH, which even after Blizzards 30% cut (15% transaction and 15% processing for funds going into paypal and not Battle.net Fund) won't be a whole hell of a lot.

Got the bow on the right for 20k on the Auction House:

http://i.imgur.com/1ae1B.png

FUCK YES AUCTION HOUSE

http://i.imgur.com/z5YWO.gif

People may just wind up using the gold auction house to trade high value items while pulling real money profit from selling the gold. IE. the RMAH becomes a gold exchange, with all the gold profits from a gold auction house sale being funneled back into the RMAH for conversion to cash.

Based on the faq on how commodities work though, it seems like it could be highly speculative. Hell, you could wind up being some sort of meta character class. The only way you play Diablo is speculating on the real-world currency value of gold.

In before the 5th tab (if there ever will be one) will be half-mil. Gotta sell that Legendary item for a quick buck!

I figured they would just charge you two bucks to unlock a tab and 50 a row from there.

Hit the Butcher on Hell last night, oof.

Holy FUCK:

http://i.imgur.com/3I1I7.png

Behold the power of gold.

Apparently that's buffed, unbuffed his DPS is around 100k. Still pretty crazy.

Additional Spam:
Blizzard on Patch notes for 1.03 (later this month), sounds like they are addressing a lot of the big complaints: Patch 1.0.3 Design Preview - Diablo III

Yeah, I'm looking forward to 1.0.3 to hit. I imagine there are some nerfs or fixes to farming methods that they're not mentioning yet, but I'd be fine with that so long as Inferno becomes less dumb. Trying to group up past Act I is just terribly unfriendly.

Holy goddamn fuck, I take back everything bad I've ever said about this game. Found this in Act 1 with Inferno off the elite mob that spawns in Lacoris' (sp?) mansion.

http://i.imgur.com/wWZnl.png

Literally God Tier for my DH, cheapest comparable on the AH right now is 20 million. Garr also got a few good drops to buff him up a bit, need to get the guy some good stuff for Inferno. I still can't do Act 2 for shit though, need way more money for gear.

I just beat Butcher on Nightmare. I still have a lot of farming to do for better gear it seems. :(

The only counter to Andariel's Visage is the fact that it looks atrocious and that legendary items can't be dyed.

Good find, anyway. The 3 legendaries I've found have all been butt. It figures I wouldn't have the luck to find anything good in Inferno.

Owing to general frustration over how balls pushing through Inferno is, I've started mucking about with other classes. So far, I've got a DH just starting out in Hell and a Monk that's nearly done with Normal. I've also given Barb a brief whirl, though strangely I have no real interest in playing the Witch Doctor. The class felt really underwhelming in beta, but maybe things have changed since then. Oh well.

You guys heard about them crazy gold dupes and stealing going around lately?

EDIT: Whoops, I thought this post would merge with the one above. My bad.

Yeah, so that's a weird thing that blew up overnight. As far as I can tell this is the sequence of events:

-Supposedly a Gold dupe of some kind had been known since day 1 of the game, but very few people knew about it.

-A day or two ago on the Asian servers an item dupe became known. I'm not exactly sure on the timeframes if this has already been completed or not, but they wound up hotfixing and they stated that it was specific to the Asian servers. Where it gets unclear is they also went in and deleted all of the duplicated items as well as the original used to do so. This seems fine, but then some people also reported it was a completed 24 hour rollback, but I've seen conflicting information on that.

-It became known at least a couple of days ago that the AH timer is based on Clientside time (which is fucking hilarious, really?) so people were able to advance the clock on their PC to pull down auctions prematurely basically. At this time aside from being cancel auctions early, this had no other effect.

-Last night everything blew up; supposedly a Gold dupe made the rounds having something to do with working with a friend on cancelling auctions early, and this could also cause legitimate players to somehow lose the money they had placed bids on. This was followed by a ton of screenshots/videos of people having billions of Gold, etc.

Where this becomes a gray area is that it seems like no one will outright confirm that they've done it and it works. It's apparently super easy to edit the amount of Gold it shows that you have, BUT doing that does not actually give you the gold, just a hex edit basically. It seems like some people on GAF tried it and it didn't work, and it apparently also partially blew up because on Kripp's stream (one of the biggest players who streams all the time trying to clear HC Inferno) said that they did it and it worked. Then one of the Blizzard CM people (Bashiok) posted saying that they're looking into it, but that the gold dupe doesn't work, it's just people posting photoshops and hex edit videos as mentioned above. He said that he was wactching Kripp's stream and told him to do it. Kripp backpedaled and said that he didn't actually do it, but that a friend did and it worked.

Then there's now the conspiracy theory that it DOES exist, because Bashiok also posted that there was no hotfix rolled out last night to address that or anything, but they had to have put out a hotfix last night because late last night you are now asked if you want to be dumped into General chat or not when you login. He also said that he appreciates "the belief that server lag is secret hotfixes" which has now introduced the hilarious "lagspike hotfix" terminology.

So I dunno, it seems like there maaay be something going on, but if so seems like it's not nearly as significant as it's being made out to be. As long as we don't get a rollback and I lose that helmet kinda whatever. Also supposedly the RMAH is launching today after the maintenance which is going to be hilarious.

Edit: Well they started rolling out bans and suspensions on EU, so that's a good sign.

They're patching this morning. When I first tried to get on it said they had maintenance scheduled from 5-8 PDT, but then when I just tried logging on at 8:15 it said it's scheduled to be back up at 11 PDT.

I was all hoping to finally start Nightmare since I just got there the other day. :(

Yeah, Tuesday is usually the maintenance day. I wouldn't expect it to be up at 11 PDT either.

Also it looks like the US server dupe thing was an epic 4chan troll whaaaaaaat: So we all just got trolled by 4chan.. - Forums - Diablo III

tl;dr version:

We're starting to approach Eve Online levels of meta shit here.

Bleh, didn't know they had the servers down every Tuesday. That's just a little annoying since Tuesday morning is one of the main times I can play. =\

Yup, Tuesday is my day off during the week, and I live on the East coast so I usually can't play most of the day. It sucks. I believe it's also the WoW Maintenance day as well.

Gargle my grundle you spoogechugger.

You haven't even been on D3 in like a week, blow me!

Additional Spam:
RMAH is up, prices are hilariously all over the place as expected, but there is STUPID shit selling for $200-250 (cap is $250). High roll Stormshields are going for that which is expected, but sorry-ass stuff is going for way too much money, even middling shit is randomly going for $20-30. Good times. I did just score the bow below on the right for 100k; had 1 day 12 hours left to go, I'm assuming he left a zero off:

http://i.imgur.com/qkaSH.png

That's a pretty big upgrade for me, that damage increase there is without Sharpshooter, so my base damage without Sharpshooter is up to 36k now.

That's a fat amount of dex, but the secondary sat is of no use to DH and there's a WD-only skill on there. Add the relatively low DPS to the mix and I think that was a pretty fair deal.

Did everyone post their battletags in here? I combed through the thread the other day adding folks but there are some of you that I appear to have missed.

Unless, you know, you don't want to be my D3 e-buddy :(

Yeah, that'll happen. MF/GF are averaged out across all players so me finding your upgrades is same difference, no worries. Even with your shit being low it was still way easier running through that with you than the AI or something.


Oh yeah, mine's MrDaravon#1289. Honestly when I'm on half the time I'm away frequently and/or listening to or watching something else, so just don't be offended if I don't respond or I decline to play :p On the bow itself I think you may be at a higher end than I am where that DPS seems low, but not only was that a decent upgrade, but everything in the AH even comparable to those stats was liked at over a million (which is why I think they left off a zero, I caught it at 1d12h left).

That doesn't seem like a low DPS to me, considering that most times that I look, there are only half a page or so 1000+ DPS weapons (in the categories I look for).

http://i.imgur.com/y3AcL.png

http://i.imgur.com/tMJ9c.png

I did a quick search on AH for DH 2Hand weapons with a 100k buyout, and the top results were mostly populated by weapons in the 9xx damage range. That's not LOW, but it's not that high given that there are still 1H weapons that will outdamage it. If you had found something that was like 1300-1600 DPS for that price, now that would have been the steal of all ages.

That RMAH. I strongly considered stripping my wiz and selling everything, but when I considered that my gear wasn't actually all that great and that I probably wouldn't get enough money to make me feel like a genius, I gave up on that. Curse my inability to find great stuff.

Sure, but I don't think you realize how much 292 Dexterity raises my damage as a DH. I just took a look as well and there's stuff in the price range you mentioned, but almost all blues and none of them had Dex at all. Doing the math I could buy a blue for a 100k that has a base 1000 DPS but with jack shit all worth mentioning on it. Equipping that and giving up my 292 Dex would actually drop my overall unbuffed damage by about 2500, and that's not also accounting for the 160 Str and 96 Int boost on mine. Those aren't critical for my class, but armor/resist doesn't hurt and none of the stuff in the 100k range had bonuses approaching anything like that. At level 60 people will pay in the millions for a 2-3k DPS boost, and most of the weapons with stats similar to the one I got go for 1-1.5 million. So even though it's only a difference of going from about 34k DPS to 36500 DPS at this point it's worth dropping a million for that boost. I've been searching for 2H crossbows in that overall damage range multiple times per day for a while now, you're going to have to trust me on this :p

What were the approximate stats and item type of that item you sold for nearly $4? Just to give me an idea of which items I should be throwing stuff up on the RMAH instead of the gold one and expect to actually sell.

I honestly have no idea, 8 of the 10 things I put up in that range were middling at best. ironically the two actually good items I put up didn't sell. It seems to be all over the place in terms of what is actually selling for people (random shit sells, awesome shit sometimes not).

That's exactly what seems to happen to me on the gold auction house. Third highest DPS wand for that level currently on the auction house for a reasonable price? Doesn't sell. Some middling rare bracer with one good (but not great) stat offered for about double what it should be worth? Sold within minutes of going up.

I really hope they flesh out the auction search better. Is there any reason I can't sort by ending time for an auction? Why can't I search for a list of mods or say I want something without a specific mod? I'd also be pretty down with having a Watching list or something of that sort so I can go through a whole bunch of pages and then have a chance to compare apples to apples and see what I'm getting. How about the ability to "try on" equipment before buying it?

Am I the only person that thinks these are pretty easy additions to make to the system that would make it considerably more user-friendly?

(And, while we're at it, why can't I access the auction house from in-game. :mad: )

Welcome to the Diablo 3 auction house!

There are plenty of improvements that could be made to the AH, and Blizzard has acknowledged some of them. Still, whether or not we'll actually see them is anyone's guess. The official line has probably something to do with technological limitations, or something...

http://i45.tinypic.com/nd7uph.png

I had found this guy on my first character while going through Normal. Looked at what similar things were going for on the AH, and it was more than I've made through the entire game so far. Here's hoping putting that emerald will make it show up in more searches and I'll have :10bux: by the time I play again on Monday.

That seems pretty good, but honestly it's been a long time since I was 24 so I'm not sure. There does seem to be a market for mid-level on items the RMAH, but it is much smaller. I still haven't successfully sold anything else on the RMAH, despite listing decent items cheaper than anyone else, but then I see people selling middling items for $150 so I have no fucking clue. I honestly think part of it is stupid people not knowing how to properly search the AH or navigate through pages of items. I'll probably try to keep with it and keep listing items that I think should be selling along with maybe some random shit just to see if it works. If I can make literally just a couple of bucks here and there and get the game to pay for itself in a couple months or something I'll take it.

Datamined patch notes for 1.0.3

Of particular note is the fact that increased attack speed on weapons and other gear appears to be reduced by 50%.

To think that I was pleased to finally get my DPS over 40k.... well, back to Act I!

Fuck, was about to post that lol.

It's hard to say how much that will matter because if they do nerf/smooth out the difficulty in Inferno the AS% nerf may be fine.

Good shit tonight Garr and Term. Term found a Dead Man's Legacy, luckily for me it doesn't have the highly desired stats on it so I'm not too jealous. Also upgraded Garr's gear some so that was rad.

Also it's been confirmed that the patch IS hitting tomorrow, with a ridiculous 10-hour maintenance from 3am-1am Pacific, once again completely ruining my day off. We still don't know specifics outside of the general guidelines they posted on their blog a while back. We know IAS% is getting nerfed by 40-60% as posted above, but supposedly they are smoothing out Inferno difficulty, so hopefully that will balance that out. Assuming the leaked IAS values are true I'm going to drop from 43697 unbuffed damage to 37170 which isn't the end of the world, and anything they do to make Act 2-onwards not a kick in the balls will mitigate that. Luckily my weapon didn't have attack speed on it, and I already replaced my amulet with a high enough Dex where it more than made up for the loss. Both of my rings have 14% IAS as well as Dex though, getting enough Dex to completely make up for that is insanely expensive on rings so I'll just have to take the hit on that. Only other thing I have with IAS (aside from Quivers, which are not changing) is my Legendary helmet, but everything else on that is still so good that it's worth it.

Also I'm very excited that even though it's only a 2% change on average, we'll now have the ability to get level 63 items on Act 1. We did a bunch of butcher runs tonight, would have been great to potentially get better stuff ISN'T THAT RIGHT TERM

:shade:

Congratulations on your successful auction in Diablo III!
Item name 1 Monstrous Carriers
Time of transaction 18 Jun 2012 08:05 PM PDT
Sale price $50.00
Transaction fee $1.00
Transfer fee $7.35
Applicable taxes $0.00
Your proceeds $41.65

Item stats:
Rare Gloves - 446 Armor
+146 Str
+127 Vit
+45 Arcane Resist
+50 Resist All
+179 Armor
Level 60

I've yet to sell anything and I've been finding some ridiculously good rares lately. No Legendaries yet.

Also has anyone else had a problem with gold spammers wanting to add you to friends lists?

I still can't believe the RMAH is actually working the way it is. People are seriously buying $200+ items in a DIABLO GAME. Once you just buy all the shit you want doesn't that kinda defeat the purpose of the game? The world has gone mad.

I'm still getting some sort of weird, "Digital purchasers must wait 3 days before accessing the RHAH." Is this because I don't have one of those location verifier things, and they don't have a good error message? I was hoping to at least be able to look at the auction house to see what it was even like. :(

That's weird. I don't THINK you have to have an authenticator to access the RMAH auction house for purchases, but I'm not sure.

Jessy: aside from people being stupid, I'm sure that some people buy stuff with the intention of using it to farm more effectively to get better stuff to sell themselves.

Full patch notes! http://www.diablofans.com/news/1253-...l-patch-notes/

Nether Tentacle nerf suuuuuuuuucks for Demon Hunters pretty bad, especially coupled with the IAS nerf. Back to Lightning Ball I guess? Also I don't know much about Monks, but I've seen some people say that gaining the ability to equip the other 2-handed weapons is a big deal? Also MF not affecting what pops in chests is weird.

You have to have some form of authenticator for any RMAH action, and if you want to use Paypal you have to go in and get the text messaging verification set up as well.

I'm glad for the IAS nerf, actually, it seemed kind of ridiculous that stat having that much power.

I still think the far better way for them to handle the IAS issue was to just put a cap on it, which would have worked and not completely devalued existing items (as well as items people spent real money on).

But yeah the Nether Tentacle nerf fucking suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucks hard for DH. Like, really, really bad. Wound up spending 2 million on this, only dropped my unbuffed damage by like 400 but upped my HP about 5500, hopefully this helps :(

http://i.imgur.com/KFzP8.png

Also the new repair costs are obscene.

Man, the IAS nerf dropped my Wiz DPS by around 25%. I now have as much DPS as I did previously while wearing some MF gear. ugh.

All I can really say about the latest patch is that at least Blizzard seems to poop on everybody equally.

I am finding a SHITLOAD more rares though. I found a pretty goddamn good 1-handed Barb weapon I just gave to Garr in the 20 or so minutes I played of Act 3. Also I spent maybe 2 or so hours fully clearly Act 1 from about start to finish using a set of mf/gf gear (about 120 on each without NV, ~200 with 5x NV) that nerfed me pretty bad but I still only died maybe like twice on two different hardcore mobs and once on the boss. But in that 2 hours I cleared somewhere between 300k and 400k in straight Gold, and probably around 500-800k in actually sellable AH stuff. Also on top of that I found a pretty good helmet with high All Resist that I actually put up on the RMAH for like $18 or so (looked like it would have gone for around 1-1.5 million on the Gold AH). Also every time I went back to town my inventory was usually 60+% Rares and not blues. So at least in the loot regard I'm pretty happy, already back up to like 1.2 million after blowing almost everything on that armor not a few hours ago.

Awww yeah, my biggest sell so far!

http://i.imgur.com/KW6Du.png

http://i.imgur.com/FXuQ1.png

This is a pretty damn good guide for how to do a fairly quick runthrough of Act 1 for maximum Elite kills, etc. I just ran it and it took me about maybe 75-80 minutes using my non-MF/GF gear (which kinda sucks), and I cleared about 150k in gold/vendor trash, and it looks like maybe another 200-300k in realistically sellable items on the AH. Also on this run I found what appears to be a pretty fucking insane amulet, but to figure out a market price on it since there's nothing up quite like it, but it'll probably be in the millions. I don't want to post it here because it will make any 60 Barbarians very, very sad.

Finally finished Nightmare mode. On to Hell now for gearing up and farming. Any tips?

Also the Staff of Herding plan. Does it drop off of Normal Izual, or does it have to be another difficulty? Would having MF on help increase the chance of it dropping?

That's pretty rad; I haven't looked into it in detail or the rolls, but I know that the Stormshield is pretty much the shield to get, at least for some rolls on it.

We should totally rock that Act 1 runthrough I linked above, I've done it twice now and it's been fairly successful.

I know I'm probably a lonely scrub since I just hit 52, but anyone wanna do some Hell mode sometime later? I need to work on my gear a lot, but I've been finding some good stuff here and there. Also: fuck jailor and arcane.

Dagget, I wouldn't mind doing some Hell with you. I've got a 58 Demon Hunter in Act 3, but wouldn't mind at all dropping down to an earlier act. I'll be on in a few hours probably and will send you a friend req.

I wouldn't mind joining in on some of the Inferno action either, with my 60 wizard. I'm probably only a liability above act 1 at this point though.

Sounds good. I've got some stuff to take care of in the house and cook and all that good shit. My gear is absolutely awful, but I'm going through act 1 hell trying to find some decent stuff to sell and make gold from.

Two pieces away from making that Staff of Herding (finally got Izual to drop the book) I just need the bell and the rainbow. Yay cow level.

Is it just me or was there no link to any guides in that post?

Nice find on the Stormshield there. If you ever decide to bail out of D3, that thing will get you some monies for sure.

I wish I had good luck in finding legendaries. I found one last night while playing a low level hardcore character and it made me mad because I knew it would be worthless right off the bat. Just superstition, but I feel like finding that has lowered my chances of finding anything good while playing on my Inferno chars.

I haven't found any set pieces, either. Didn't those things drop like crazy in D2?

Oh sorry about that, here's the link: Konvict's Guide to Act 1 Inferno Farming - Forums - Diablo III

I make one or two small variations but overall it's pretty solid. you're basically replaying most of Act 1 starting from the end, but you're skipping most chunks that have little to no elites, especially in hindsight.

I gargle bleach.

http://img811.imageshack.us/img811/6829/whatew.jpg

Extremely lucky I found that. (lol editing skillz)

You son of a bitch. Why do you keep finding the uber DH gear that I need? Enjoy your tens of millions :(

Oh, cool. I've done some runs before where I start from that quest, but I just run through areas pretty haphazardly. This will be nice to give me some direction.

Now all I need is MF gear that's not terrible. I have a pretty generic set of MF gear that gets me around 200 MF, but putting all of it on tanks my stats horribly and I haven't bothered with it since the change to chests. I still get a fair amount of rares from running around with just 5 NV stacks, but trying to do goblin runs without NV sucks a bit.

Also, hurrah! I sold some more junk for $5 ($4 after blizz takes its cut). If I can keep selling things like this at a rate of one per week, it'll only be 13 more weeks until I've made back the cost of the game! Woooooooo

Oh yeah, thanks for reminding me that that achievement exists. At last, that crappy lowbie legendary xbow I found can be put to good use.

Seeing you people sell things on the AH makes me wish I'd hit 60 yet. :(

Whose fault is that?

Yours.

So. Dumb Question. If I start to farm Act 1 Hell (at least up until Skeleton King for now) for gear to try and complete the rest of the act, what should my DPS be at? I'm at about 3k (2.5 if I equip MF stuff) Or should I just equip gold find and then build my stash back up?

Also IIRC on that now that we can see item levels it has to be a Legendary that's iLevel is actually 61 or higher. Apparently pre-patch that was an issue as ilevel 60 legendaries won't always generate Brimstones, and Level 60 Legendary could actually be iLevel 60-63. I'm 99% sure I tested it post-patch with an iLevel 60 Legendary and I got 3 encrusted hoofs -_-. I've also read you can get them rarely from rares and very rarely from blues, but I Salavged a shitload of each and no go. Post patch if you're on Inferno it shouldn't take you that long to get one, and honestly if you just care about the achievement you could probably locate a shitty i61 Legendary of any type on the AH for like 50k or something.

Oh snaps and dang, I wasn't actually sure what the achievement was. I guess I'm not that interested in spending any money to buy a crappy legendary either. Oh well. :(

3k DPS isn't enough to complete Act I? How much gold do you have right now? I don't exactly recall my progress through Hell, but I don't think I really had any problems going straight through it. The damage on weapons ramps up insanely with each new level, so DPS was never really an issue. I also had my account hijacked right when I hit 50, so this was going off a mostly fresh start too.

I'm a little bit higher than that DPS and I'm getting through Act 1 Hell (getting frustrated at the minimum level for quests since I killed the skeleton king about six times before gaining a level) without much trouble. I don't think I've spent more than $5k on any piece of equipment yet and in party games I'm doing at least my fair share of damage. I did have some issues going solo when I hit a particularly nasty mob with certain stat bonuses. Think there was one with invincible minions and arcane enchanted which I couldn't slip by that made me bail on the game. Currently I'm sitting around $250k in stash after buying all the pages of the stash and upgrading the blacksmith/jeweler like an idiot.

Are you guys as annoyed as I am with how the AH has completely made low-level gems worthless? I can buy the a perfect square gem (or whatever the one is that's sitting around 350 gold) for cheaper than I can do any sort of upgrading. Why even include the low level stuff when they're so far from even being necessary? 13 tiers of gems is a joke.

Also, totally agree with the question about set items. Is anyone using them?

I'm just getting skullraped by some of those rares and champions. The game has a nasty sense of humor of wanting to throw me wallers and jailers, mixed with plague or mortar. Best fucking one was a waller, jailer and desecrate. I die like 7 times before I can kill one of the minions (yes, I know. I suck) and when I kill the main mob itself, it wants to give me crap.

At Act I Hell, DH should have at the very least about 7.5 to 10k DPS. Those elite and rare sons of bitches will rape you especially in Inferno where they have four properties. Just imagine: Jailer, Desecrator, Frozen, Arcane Sentry.

Re: Gems. I think it's good that anything below flawless is cheap because above that, you're basically paying 20k gold to upgrade to a perfect gem. And god help me if you want to reach Radiant Star status.

Re: Set items. I think most people (including me) just use the items for their stats, not to complete the entire set.

Low level gems have always been kind of useless, given that you can obtain all the way up to flawless square gems or something through loot. I think Blizz realized this and that's why they nuked the crafting costs for the bottom half tier of gems,

son of a bitch. I was in the middle of writing this when my sister emails to say her phone got stolen and now I've gotta try to keep tabs on it.

Ha ha! Now I have problems beyond shitty drops!

The auction house can be hilarious sometimes, and it is all about timing. I bought a blue hand crossbow with 876 dps, +117 dex, +40 vit for 50k. A couple of hours later, I am able to buy a yellow hand crossbow with 869 dps, +170 dex, and a little hatred regen for 50k (time remaining on this auction was 1d 12h, great timing). Since this one does more effective damage due to the bump in dex, the previous crossbow is now obsolete. I manage to sell it for 300k.

Spent 3.5 million, and I now have a full mf/gf set that's good enough for me to do the Act 1 run with and only die here and there. More of a pain in the ass than my regular gear, but with NO NV it puts me at 189% GF and 177% MF. Doing the Act 1 run still takes about the same amount of time (~2 hours) but in my first run with this gear I cleared nearly 500k in just straight Gold/vendor trash compared to 200-250k per run with my normal almost zero GF/MF gear. Awwwww yeah.

i got this as a gift, it's really fun. Playing DH on nightmare right now, I'm doing 2 1hand crossbows but I'm starting to think maybe i should switch to bow and quiver, which is the best?

Apparently someone has beaten Inferno mode on hardcore setting: It's on the BBC!

I have no life and I don't think I could ever do sit my fat ass in front of the PC enough to do that.

Also: Farming Act 1 hell has gotten easier since I've gotten a little DPS added. I'm at about 4.5k with gold and magic find. About to hit 55, so that's something!

oh shit i sold an item for $2.50 and got $1.27 into my paypal account

Suddenly I feel an urge to continue playing where before there was fatigue

Man, I hadn't realized that blizzard bucks couldn't be converted into USD. Oh well, I guess that meager $8 I have there will be used for attempting to play the market. Or it'll go into a fund for the next D3 expansion or something. Meh.

Zip: Generally speaking, a solid 2H + Quiver will beat 2 1H crossbows unless your 1Handers are amazing. The slight attack speed boost you get while dual wielding generally won't beat the higher weapon damage from a 1Hand.

Yeah, dual weilding 1h crossbow is generally only worth it if both of them are amazing, and you have crazy crit chance and damage. Only other thing I can think of that would be a bonus would be Max Discipline which you can get on one-handers, but you're probably better off going with a two-hander and a quiver. Get whichever you can get the best stats/DPS on, but generally DH's will roll 2h crossbow.

Here's an addendum to that Act 1 farming guide SD posted:

YouTube Video

Interesting, I'll give that a go. The Watch Tower is definitely good and why people added the Highlands to the Act 1 run, but I've never had it spawn with the regularity he's stating. Also I'm not sure exactly how he handles the Cemetery, he makes it seem like he just runs the one crypt, but that's not the one that's always open and all of the crypts have 2+ elites. I'll give this a go right now and report back.

One thing he doesn't do is exit the southeast side of Leoric's Manor, which I think always has an elite (and sometimes a champion pack).

I ran it a few times, it's a mixed bag. I only get the Watch Tower maybe about half of the time, but the Elite in the Cathederal is usually there. But he's right about the Tower, there's always like 5 or 6 Elites and a Resplendent Chest in there, it's pretty nuts. I don't know if it winds up being terribly more effective than the previous Act 1 run we're doing.

What I WOULD recommend we start doing though regardless is checking for the Watch Tower first thing, and keep re-loading until it pops since that seems pretty ridiculous. Then from there maybe check Cathedral 3 and then after that either proceed with pretty much what we've been doing, or we could run this list. It's kind of a toss-up for me, this way is probably technically more productive but whatever.

I wonder if you just cut out the open areas entirely. Spawn the watch tower, then do the crypts, festering woods, leoric's manor -> butcher, if that wouldn't be faster. Basically just lose the old ruins, weeping hollow and southern highlands for being too much running around.

I'm thinking I gotta invest in some MF gear that doesn't kill my DPS. I've been farming Act 1 a bit these last couple days and I haven't gotten anything worthwhile. A good number of the rares I get aren't even above ilvl 60, and I don't think I've even gotten an ilvl 63 item.

Dang, I don't have the gold for all of this.

Coool. guess i'll hit the AH for a bow and a QUIVER.
On another note I'm more addicted to the AH than the game lol. I get such a thrill when i see something is sold that i yesterday had to get out of bed and check my auctions... how 'bout them apples.

Made 8.5 million overnight on a ring, then spent most of that on this, awww yeah

http://i.imgur.com/1akrp.png

About a 2500 Damage upgrade along with a couple extra thousand health. Would still be worth it for my main gear, but this will be a BIG boost for my MF/GF set which is 199% GF 177% MF with NO stacks. Obviously that gear is not as good as my main gear, so the DPS/HP boost from this will be a big boon for that setup, and will probably pay for itself fairly quickly. Ideally I'd want crit/dex/socket, but that stuff is super expensive, even way more than what this cost :(

Edit: Ooh, spent 200k for a pair of gloves that were a slight vit/dex upgrade on my mf/gf set, but also upped my mf/gf set slightly, up to 202% GF and 180% MF.

What is your pre-Sharpshooter DPS with that crossbow?

Also, is it wrong that I want to get the Natalya chest piece just because it looks so good on the character, not being its stats are good?

I'm at work but I think in my full normal gear without SS (but with Archery) my Damage is around 43k.

ALSO more importantly I can't link to it on my phone, but everyone needs to check out the Blizzard blog, they basically straight doubled drop rates. ilevel 63 gear went from like 2.0% to I think 4.8% in act 1 alone. I'm seeing people on GAF report finding 3+ legendaries an hour, and apparently act 3 is now a ilevel 63 item paradise. Holy shit.

That's awesome! I can't wait to get home now to play for 18 hours straight. Let's grind the shit out of act 1!

I read that they made the changes today. It is going to be interesting and I imagine suppress item values (read: auction house prices) significantly. I don't know if that is a good thing or bad thing, the way the game works.

I expect that as prices plummet people will begin to be able to actually clear inferno from drops and reduced ah prices. Then the bitching will begin about lack of endgame content and variety (completely randomized dungeons would have gone a long way here) and uber gear will become way more expensive. I do think that's ultimately better than where we are at now though, better to bitch about endgame than having the majority of your userbase being not even able to get there. By all accounts D2 (like a lot of loot games) was more about clearing the content repeatedly to get better loot just to get it and to clear even more efficiently, not grinding forever just to try to even progress a little which is what we had.

Games still has a ton of issues which is apparent from the hard buffs and nerfs we are already seeing so quickly, but short-term this is probably a good direction. By a lot of accounts the playerbase has been dropping dramatically and they had to do something. I already know a bunch of people who have dropped it already and I was on the verge, but this will get me back in full-time for at least a bit. Remains to be seen how they handle it past that though.

Found my first unique today. Figures it was on my new character and a level 10 helm for witchdoctors.

Gotta say gems not putting a level requirement on equipment has made starting a new character somewhat of a joke. As soon as you get a socketable weapon just throw in a square+ ruby and one shot everything. I went from 40 dps to about 190 just by doing that, lol.

Agreed, but on the flipside at high levels the gem gains are retarded. I spent around maybe 1.5 million to get Star Emeralds in all my slots on both sets of my gear and it was only like a 250 damage improvement when I'm at over 40k as-is. They need to really buff the higher levels or something. I've seen some suggestions that either the highest levels or at new added levels it should be % gains which could also work. Right now its basically just a gold sink, the highest level gems cost in the tens of millions last I looked and I'd get like a 50 damage increase from that. The fuck?

One could argue that the biggest mistake they made was in drastically altering player progression from the way it worked in Diablo 2. In D2, you farmed to get good items to equip your next character with. In other words, you would have your magic find sorceress accumulating gear while actually playing the game with <insert character>. You would start a fresh assassin, or barb, or whatever, and make yourself a shopping list of gear that you want to equip the character with. "Well, I'm doing a dual claw, tiger strike assassin, so I'm going to need a Vamp Gaze, Shaftstop, and a couple of Bartucs to get me through nightmare for sure. Time to go shopping."

This time around, what reason would a person have to start a new character of a class they've already sent to 60? It isn't like you could change your attribute allocation this time around, and being able to change your skills on the fly has the same effect.

I guess farming to find stuff to sell on the RMAH would be reason to keep playing, but if the player base vanishes, what few people who are left will quickly outfit their five characters with the best gear, and that market will crater.

Did an act 1 runthrough off and on tonight. Demolishing Act 1 with my ~250/270 MF/GF was fucking glorious. I was finding tons of iLevel 63 rares that I literally didn't know I hadn't found and didn't even recognize at first (helms, armors, bracers, etc). Found a good bracer that was just BARELY not an upgrade, but that was about it. But on a regular basis I'm finding 1h weapons more in the 600-700 range consistently as opposed to the 200-300 range before; half of the stuff I was picking up was actually decent. In my act 1 playthrough I probably picked up around 150 drops, and the vast majority (about 75%+) were rares, not blues, and half or more were at least 61 or 62, with a good amount of 63's. Also even though I didn't necessarily find a ton of stuff worth selling on the AH, since the stats are higher on the higher ilevel items I cleared about 350k on one run from gold and vendor trash, as opposed to about 250k on a run before.

Also the reports of killing goblins with 5 stacks guaranteeing at least 1 rare drop seems to be true. Not only did I seem to be finding WAY more Goblins than normal (could be RNG, but I probably found at least 5 or 6 in my playthrough which is way more than I usually get) but I can think of at least twice when I killed them I was getting 3 or 4 rares, and one time all 3 were ilevel 63's.

Amazing.

The only reason to make a second of one class is to play as another gender or to do it in Hardcore, I guess. I'd consider that as perfectly fine, except leveling is terrible.

I can understand why they want to limit fast character progression in Hardcore, but there's no sense in killing off all the leveling methods in softcore. Honestly, the game is Inferno, and you can't access that until 60. It's so boring going through normal then nightmare then hell.

Interesting hotfix news. I suppose I'll give farming some more another try.

yup totally agree. Granted I've pretty much only played DH but since the whole stat thing is gone and there only seems to be one "right" build i can see pvp just becoming whoever has the gold to buy the best gear. sad.

*GET HOME FROM WORK AFTER HAVING 3 DAYS OF NO INTERNET DUE TO STORMS*

*DIABLO 3 SERVERS DOWN*

fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu

Yeah, I was on farming Act IV Hell with my friend, when the servers started acting funky. I got kicked off after we killed Izaul and the loot sprayed everywhere. :(

Don't worry, I'm sure all of it was witch doctor gear.

ahaha... Actually... it was. Well a dagger. had int, dex and reduce some kind of spell by 3 mana, damage to monsters on attack and I think convert attack to life.

Managed to play for a bit last night. Then today there was maintenance, then ironically right around when that ended our internet went down again. By the time it came back up I was balls deep in Theatrhythm soooooo.

So is anyone going to be around tomorrow who is down for doing some Act 1 farming? I can probably pry myself off Theatrhythm if there's going to be folks around.

Trying to figure out if I'm having more fun playing the game or just doing auction shenanigans. Nothing like buying a bow for 2k gold and reselling it for 120k within an hour. I just wonder if people on the RMAH are this dumb. :(

Edit: Just logged on after not being on for a few hours and saw my 15 minutes of AH shopping, socketing with 100 gold gems and relisting got me 200k. Not bad for my max character being level 53, and being unable to farm properly. Let's see how an investment of about $20k and ten minutes turns out over the next day.

People have bought things in the RMAH, so: yes.

Hey Daravon,

I'm at work in the morning EST, but I'll probably be around in the afternoon. If I see you online I'll just pop into your game.

I've almost broken 2M gold for the first time ever. Got to the sewers in Act II also, although by the time I got there, I was down about 100k gold from when I started from repair costs. Fucking firebombs, man. And mortars. Fuck mortars.

Daravon: Past 4 PM PST I am down since that's the time I go home from work.

Act III still kicking my ass. If you're online, I'll join your game.

I'll probably hop in in a couple of hours then after lunch. I haven't really tried progressing in the game; I can do Act 2 mostly okay though with my normal gear. But my MF/GF gear is ridiculous (I think I'm up to 202 GF and 188 MF without any NV) and is good enough to get me through Act 1 with minimal issues, so I've just been running that. I'm sitting on about 6 or 7 million right now, and I could bump my GF/MF set up even higher, but we know that they're making some changes to MF/GF in the near future so I kinda don't want to invest in that. But at the same time I don't really want to blow most of that to get a single upgrade for my "real" gear if I'm not even really using it right now. So I'm just kinda trucking along atm.

The funny thing is my "normal" gear represents only about 1k dps difference to my mf gear right now. Which you would think means I could upgrade relatively cheaply, but I can't find jack that's under 2M, and the 2M is extremely marginal upgrades.

I suspect I'm doing it wrong.

You play a Wizard right? No idea honestly. My MF/GF unbuffed damage is like 30k, my "real" gear is I think around 43k. It's enough of a difference where I won't fuck with Act 2 in my MF/GF gear, at least not solo. As far as costs go for me to get upgrades for my real set I'm looking at 2-3 million at the least for small upgrades so that sounds about right I guess?

I did spend probably like 6 million or so on my MF/GF gear though, but it's also always hard to tell how lucky I got with purchases from either set. I definitely got an amulet for both sets and a pair of gloves on my real set that I should have paid 10+ million for that I got for less than 1 million, so there's always a random/stupid factor.

Just finished act 1 Inferno with my barb, with minimal problems while playing solo. A couple of champion packs in the areas ahead of the Butcher were problematic, but otherwise I was good. Beat the Butcher on my first attempt.

Started act 2 and proceeded to get rolled by wasps.

What's your regular DPS at?

My regular gear puts me around 33k or so DPS with Magic Weapon/Force Weapon on. I get around 30k with some MF gear on (~150MF), but my survivability takes a huge hit. I lose something like 10k or 14k hp and my resists/armor take a dump. Finding gear with upgrades across the board can be expensive, yeah, but there's also been some inflation going on. 2M gold just doesn't go as far as it used to.

Still in Act 1 myself. I know I gotta try and find gear that's vit, dex and resist for my Demon Huntard. Good place to farm? Act IV hell? or should I keep trying Whimseyshire?

My resists are crap. =p I don't think any of my equipment has resists on it. I'm using prismatic armor vs. force armor because I don't think things are hitting me for 35% of my health THAT often. I took off magic weapon, so my build is charged bolt with piercing orb, arcane orb with tap the source, teleport with fracture, diamond skin with crystal shell, energy armor and venom hydra.

Basically I diamond skin as often as I can.

My DPS with "regular" gear is literally like 32k vs. 30 now. I think my critical hit chance actually DROPS with my regular gear, but my int goes up by about 100 points. My INT right now is something in the 1600's. My resists with energy armor is between 250-300? I think damage reduction is around 50% for both armor and resists. I've got around 29k life.

The main driver of my dps right now is critical hits. My crit chance is 36% with 150% damage boost. I think my regular gear ups the damage but drops the chance.

I had this fantasy of getting critical hit chance up really high and then putting critical mass on, and keeping diamond skin up forever.

I don't think Prismatic is worth it over Force unless you already have a substantial amount of resists already. Force Armor will at least keep you from being one-shot by most attacks and give you time to teleport/diamond skin yourself out. Of course, if you're trying to crit a lot to keep diamond skin off cooldown (a legit build) then that might be different...

Crit is definitely the popular way to go for now. I think I've got around 33% crit change with ~200% damage, myself. If I had higher crit chance and some AP on Crit gear, I'd probably switch to an arcane orb build.

One of my friends who plays wizard has a funky build which uses Energy Twister/Wicked Wind to crit a lot, with the crits reducing cooldown on Diamond Skin/Mirror Image/Frost Nova. It works quite well as a tank/disruption build, but he couldn't kill anything to save his life. So, there is a danger on having all your gear focused on survivability instead of DPS as well...

So I haven't played in about a week, and I load up and there's been a patch. Apparently now you can sell stuff other than weapons and armor in the RMAH. Now you can sell dyes, crafting mats, gems, etc... (still no gold yet). This is great cause now I can attempt to get rid of my excess Tomes of Blacksmithing (well I guess I could have sold them for gold, but I'm hoping to make some cash from them heh)

Well according to diablofans... you can buy and sell gold. Hmmm

No idea what tomes are going for, but apparently there's zero market in the RMAH for most craftables because there's a 0.25 minimum per item, and people won't buy even Exquisite Essences at 25 cents a pop (nor should they). Not sure what's up with gold right now, supposedly gray market prices have already dropped to something like under $2/million now, so I'm not sure there's much money to be made there.

I'm still playing here and there, but honestly I'm not sure why. The end-game and general disappointment with it has been pretty widespread (I mean fuck, there was an article on goddamn CNN about it) and they've already said that it's not something that they can really patch and that an expansion isn't coming anytime soon. I'm still playing it when listening to podcasts, but the moment Torchlight 2 hits (or maybe when Path of Exile goes open beta or I can get into that) I'm out. I've been currently stuck in the exact same spot progress-wise for over 100 game hours despite upgrading a fair bit since I first got there, which basically indicates to me not only that it's broken, but that there's no point in trying that anymore. So last night I dumped almost all of my cash into further upgrading my MF/GF set that I can run Act 1 with as well as upgrading the MF/GF on my follower (Templar, also gave him that one weapon legendary that has MF on it). If I'm playing solo with my Templar and my ferrets out I have an obscene 230% Gold Find and 212% Magic Find without ANY NV. And this is a million times more productive than actually trying to advance in the game. It's pretty retarded. Between the problems it obviously has and Bashiok pretty much saying that most of these issues are beyond patching and will require an Expansion, I'm sure eventually it'll get there but not before the first expansion which I would imagine is at least a year off at the very, very earliest. At least supposedly Torchlight 2 is in about a month, hopefully they didn't fuck that one up.

Basically, like Daravon, I just farm Act I for interesting shit but my interest is slightly waning. Sometimes I use my WD, sometimes Monk. Now I'm just trying to level 60 both Demon Hunter and Barbarian, then possibly Wizard to get the last achievement I'll probably do. Otherwise I'm here and there without any general direction to advance past Act III (my WD is getting slaughtered by Ghom every single time and Monk is basically meh-ish).

I've taken a monk, wizard, demon hunter, and barb to 60, and taken the barb and monk to act 2 inferno. Here is my problem with the game. My barb and monk absolutely roll through act 1 solo. They can barely survive in act 2. I understand that inferno is supposed to be difficult, but come on, if I can dominate act 1, I should be able to at least compete in act 2.

I'm in a similar boat, but I get cockblocked hard in Act 3 instead of Act 2, 3 seems to be the biggest sticking point. I don't see a single person talking about Act 4 difficulty since if you can get past Act 3 it's a non-issue, which is retarded. Honestly I have no interest in leveling other characters though, because I know I'm going to hit the same wall.

I have a goal of finishing act IV inferno. I suspect that once I hit that, I will drop the game hard. I may try leveling other characters, but hard-core is right out, so I feel I will lose interest pretty quick.

However, with a huge investment of cash, term and I seemed to make decent progress. We completed the catapults with only a few challenging areas.

I'd be interested in trying Ghom together. I bet we could take the bastard. Azmodan is really the only thing I'm actually worried about in Act III because he plays with the damage field thing way more than GHom does. Fuck that guy. Term, let's poop on his face.

Ghom literally rapes me in record time. The guy drops miasma like there's no tomorrow and I seriously went against him like a dozen times, to no effect. Maybe it'll be better together, why not!

Range is key. My strategy has literally been diamond shield to hit him and then run like a bitch until diamond shield respawns. We can do this. If you tank his heart-burn, I'll be all gastro-intestinal bypass on the mofo.

Worth a shot. My WD was the one having problems against him, with about 2k life a second (or some shit) shaved off when he stands looking pretty amidst the gas. Hopefully my Monk can tank that motherfucker.

I just don't think I can play this game anymore right now. It's just boring and/or frustrating every time I play now.

Word on the street is that Torchlight 2 isn't going to be until at least September (if not possibly later), so of course I just installed Diablo 2, and when I get paid this friday I'm getting access to the Path of Exile closed beta, which looks pretty rad and I've heard almost nothing but great things about. Outside of playing D2 for a few hours once about 5 years ago and a few weeks ago I've never played it, so it'll be interesting. It's actually kind of annoying trying to find specific information on the game, because the entire internet assumes you know everything about it. Only thing I'm not really a fan of is you can "fuck up" your character's build with stat/skill placement, which is one thing that's not a problem in Diablo 3. It looks like they've added a respec option in D2, but I think you have to do something to get more than one.

So yeah, I'll probably be fucking around with that and/or PoE until Borderlands 2 hits. If Torchlight 2 doesn't hit in August that ship has sailed for me, since it'll be nothing but Borderlands 2 and then Halo 4 for me until at least next year, especially since I'll need to try to squeeze in RE6, AC3, and a couple of other games in there as well :/. Godspeed gentlemen.

Respecs I think are every time you start new game+ in the first act, if memory serves correctly. I think you can only respec once per playthrough though.

And yeah, in D2 you have to stick to a certain build which means if you screw up along the way, you'll have to finish the current game and respec in the next difficulty.

But yeah, what only gets me going now if levelling up Barb and DH to 60. After that, I'm pretty much done. I assume at that time, Borderlands 2 hits and I'll be using my 360 once more.

Funny. As I mentioned to my brother earlier, the game comes out May. By mid-July, mostly everyone's interest has significantly waned. So much for waiting for a decade.

Hope to see you later, somewhere. Hopefully Guild Wars 2.

I might check out Guild Wars 2, but I never played 1, and it's release date has the same problem as Torchlight 2's for me, so it's kinda a bust. I will be all over Borderlands 2 on 360 though.

Yeah, I think I'm done too. I got to Ghom.

Nice that they finally added respeccing in D2. I remember getting to level 30 and only spending, like, 6 skill points because I wanted to pump as many level 30 skills as possible. The skills synergy system they added was also neat, though I had burned out on the game by that point.

To you guys who are quitting, I suggest selling everything you have on RMAH while you still can get some value out of it. If you decide in X months that you want to pick it back up, I can bet that you can re-outfit for a tenth of current prices.

Wizard - Game Guide - Diablo III

I think that's the build I was using on my wizard. I really liked Impactful Wave because wizards are so darned squishy and this would let me get out of pretty much any situation where I'm surrounded when combined with Diamond Skin.

I think I got up to level 53 or so before I lost interest in the character, and I was still doing pretty decent damage. I was able to hold my own in single player with no real problem, but I just didn't feel like grinding for exp, so I started a DH.

Got my monk to Act 3. I basically face tanked Kulle and Belial, then got brutalized by the first elite pack in act 3. I can't handle 47 simultaneous arcane sentries. Sadly, the only way I can upgrade my gear is by spending hundreds of millions of gold that I simply don't have, and I am not sure I am willing to run the same stretch of act 1 all day every day just to afford a good weapon.

What I've noticed in Act 3 is that they love their freeze-arcane sentry combo. My monk only can do until the catapults before he dies a billion times in succession.

Here's the Wizard build I use:

Wizard - Game Guide - Diablo III

It's pretty generic, but it works out allright as a kite-y kind of build. Spam blizzard everywhere, drop hydras everywhere, backtrack and shoot things with your signature spell. If you ever get caught, you can just teleport yourself to safety. Depending on your needs you could swap one of those skills for diamond skin.

If I had higher crit and an AP on Crit weapon/source, I'd swap out Blizzard for Arcane Orb.

Sweet, just sold my wizard's off hand source for $25, netting me $20. That ups my total RMAH proceeds to $65.

Yesterday I made a comeback to diablo and got schooled by a (i think) 12 year old who taught me how to play diablo( best quote? "please try to think a little while playing diablo"). Wish i could slap him but he gave me gear so.... I feel like a whore.

Was talking to a friend and apparently his roommate had been botting the game for a few weeks now. The game was making him roughly $10 an hour on autopilot. He's made over $1600 in the RMAH.

More power to him. I hope Blizzard sends him a W2.

I've made only like 50 bucks on RMAH. My regards to him as well.

That's the thing. Blizzard isn't actually providing anyone any income. They've washed their hands of that whole deal. Individuals are responsible for reporting and paying tax of their income on their own. I don't know if the third party payment provider (ie. paypal) is required to report cash distributions, but I think it might be. This would explain why you have to categorize the type of payment you are sending when you send it.

What I'm getting at is this dude could have potential tax liability that paypal will be reporting.

You guys hear about the glitch that made wizards invulnerable? I suppose it's patched out by now, but I logged on yesterday for the first time in weeks to mess around with it. Pretty fun! Unfortunately I managed to un-glitch myself fairly quickly and that was that.

I wish I had sold my gear when I stopped playing. It probably wouldn't have gained me much at all, but it would've been better than nothing.

The funny thing is: them Chinese found that exploit out a month earlier:

YouTube Video

Played with a party who used the exploit and finish Diablo on Inferno. That's pretty much my goal.

Now my DH is level 60 with a 90k DPS stat. I will finish Hell with her so I can unlock Inferno, finish Act 1 and finally focus on my Barb to 60 before giving this game a time to rest.

Or focus on getting a Wizard to 60 and just unlock Act 1 Inferno. However, too burned out at this point to start one from scratch. Maybe in a few months (or when the barb hits 60).

There's an open stress test weekend this weekend for Path of Exile, everyone should go check it out. I played it for an hour or two, and had more fun then I had in the last hundred hours I played of Diablo 3.

Read on the D3 (lmao) forums that the skill tree mostly consists of stat bonuses (+10 int in multiple branches for example).

The Skill Tree is insane. There's a lot of the stat bonus stuff, but it's also partly so crazy because every class shares that same tree, you just start in different locations.

Also remember that is only for PASSIVE skills; you get active skills by equipping and leveling up gems which is a whole other thing (that actually is pretty interesting).

Skill tree looks inspired by FFX.

I have no friends since everyone got bored of this, if anyone wants to play with me please add zip2kx :) I'm 60 dh who can do inferno act1 pretty solid.

I'll bite but I'm just finishing up my barbarian who is now 54. After that, anything goes.

What is your tag?

I'll skip on the Wizard on this one. Time to put this game to rest.

But WAIT! They've added profiles! Now everyone can see how much time you've wasted on the game.

Like me! Sakabadger#1709 - Community - Diablo III

I still log on because I don't have anything else to put time into right now. Basically just waiting for Borderlands 2 to come out. I think I spend more time in the auction house than actually playing, since I'm kind of at that point with my demon hunter where any legitimate upgrade for any one item slot would cost pretty much all of my fifteen million gold. I think statwise, my character is probably ready for act 3 inferno, but I don't have the skill or patience to tackle that with her.

I did manage to sell a helm on the RMAH last week for $49.99 (net $41.xx), putting my RMAH total up to $106, which is more than I paid for the collector's edition of the game.

On a side note, I installed Diablo 2: LOD a couple of weeks ago and have been playing a necromancer on /players8. Cleared normal difficulty with no experience grinding, just playing the quests straight through, at level 45 with zero character deaths. I will most likely clear Nightmare with zero deaths as well.

Just saw this article on Blizzard's security breach for all those concerned:

Blizzard Hack: A Security Guide For Battle.net Users | PCWorld

1.04 preview notes here: 1.0.4 Systems Preview - Diablo III

I'm not gonna lie, I got a bit wet reading that. I might be back on board, rumored date is 8/20.

Yeah, I changed my password and email associated with battle.net after that Blizzard Security Breach. One of the big things that concern me is they got secret questions and answers. It was kind of funny to see that no one in China was affected at all. Rumors flying about that it was the gold sellers trying to hack into the database to get all the info from people's D3 accounts since it some were dealing with real money. Tin foil hats are ready for wear!

That whole removal of Invulnerable Minions makes me happy in the pants. So many times I'd get the combination of: Arcane Sentry, Illusionist, Invulnerable Minions and Waller(or Jailer) and end up having to just restart the fucking game.

I like how Blizzard didn't decide to notify people about the security breach via e-mail. You know, for all the people that have quit the game and might not hear about it except through way of mouth. Also kinda regretting buying the digital copy now. =\


Not sure if that line from the update strikes anyone else as a weird thing for the point of a game.

A lot of games boil down to the Skinner box mentality but Blizzard is one of the few companies to be so shamelessly explicit about it. But a lot of players seem to share this perspective. Get to max level, beat the campaign on top difficulty, then the real game (of farming loot for your e-peen) begins.

And this is something that seems to be specific to Diablo, I'm sure people farm in Diablo-likes like Torchlight or Titan Quest or whatever but it's not considered the entire point of the game.

To be fair I'm pretty sure Torchlight and Titan Quest are much considered the same way.

When you log into your Battle.net account, you can now change your secret question and answer as well as get a new mobile authenticator number (if you use the mobile one)

Holy Fuck: 1.0.4 Legendary Item Improvements - Diablo III

We don't even have full patch notes for 1.04, but it looks like they may have actually gone a long way in fixing this shit, I'll eat some crow on this one (I figured they would eventually get it, but not this quickly). There's also some detailed notes on Barbarian changes in 1.04, but none of this means anything to me: Patch 1.0.4 Preview: Barbarian - Diablo III

I imagine the prices of those legendaries will further skyrocket. 2k DPS weps for a hundred mil gold? As it can't get any more expensive.

Patch preview notes for I think all the classes are up. The philosophy seems to be that instead of nerfing anything, they buffed all of the currently unpopular skills. On the DH they upped the damage on Rain of Vengeance to 75% over 5 seconds to 715% over 5 seconds which is fucking hilarious.

Did they really up the damage or did they just clarify? One of the earlier blog posts that was posted mentioned something about changing the language to make it more clear. Ie. 75% damage for five seconds vs. (with 2.0 attack speed) 750% damage over 5 seconds.

I'm glad they adopted the philosophy of buffing weak skills to be stronger rather than nerfing strong skills.

I might actually play again for a bit when 1.0.4 hits.

Hmm.

Unofficial Patch 1.0.4 Changes - Class changes, New Items, Affixes and More!! - News - Diablo Discussion and Community Forums - DiabloFans.com

Is it me, or are these buffs a little too late? It's nice that most skills got buffed, but pretty sure it wont get the majority of players back. They fucked up at launch, basically. The only chance they have now, is the PvP patch, but I doubt even that will make a big dent.

My friends list was full on launch...everyone played that game for weeks, months even. In the rare chance that one of them does come online now, it's always WoW.

Yeah I played for three weeks. Probably played D2 for like 5 years.

Biggest disappointment for a franchise in the history of gaming. Probably made the game in one year even with the long wait after the godly Diablo 2. Why do you remove almost everything that worked well in D2? Shouldnt you be expanding upon it? NOPE not Blizzard.

Hard to believe they can put out stellar WoW and SC2 and then release this.

Unofficial Patch 1.0.4 Changes - Paragon Levels, Skills and Legendary Passives - Diablo 3 Database (D3DB)

List of the new new Legendary passives, items, skill changes and Paragon Levels

Gamers are fickle. Look at the MW2 boycotts, the Sony boycotts after the PSN hack, etc. Ultimately if this patch fixes a lot of issues (which it looks like it does) people will come back. Torchlight 2 STILL not being out and Path of Exile's Open Beta being delayed also helps quite a bit here, since there's ultimately nothing filling this space right now. If they turn everything around and the game gets to where it should have been at launch a year from now most people won't remember or care how shitty it was for a few months, for better or worse.

Introducing the Paragon System - Diablo III

In-depth Paragon leveling system.

Ok, the Paragon system actually sounds interesting. This could be the first real, non-superficial improvement over Diablo 2 that this development team has managed to make.

Patch is coming tomorrow, see the absurdly long patch notes here: Scheduled Maintenance - August 21 - Forums - Diablo III

I'm only like halfway through the patch notes and this is fucking crazy. GAF is right, we're finally out of beta!

And here I was a few days ago thinking to myself, "Man, I'm glad I didn't climb aboard that boat."

I mean, I'm still kinda glad about it, but if they can keep the game fresh long-term...we'll see, I guess.

Patch is up. People on GAF are reporting way higher quality of drops, and Elites in general being way, way less fucked in general. GET EXCITE

I played for about an hour. Basically did an act 1 inferno farm run, plus Jailer through Butcher. I ended up getting about 3/4 of the way to my first paragon level and found a high quantity of yellows and blues, but I was also running with 200% base MF plus 5 stacks for most of it. Quality of my drops were better than usual, but nothing special.

Multiple people on GAF are already finding way better shit; same items as before, but with way better rolls and stats on them. Super jelly. I'll have to try to get back into this sometime this week.

I've noticed an increase in the amount of rares I've found as well. Plus it seems to be a bit easier to play as shit isn't killing me in two hits. Hopefully I can play and get some paragon levels under my belt and be a little more successful in the RMAH. Since next week the 5.0.4 patch hits WoW and then I'll be derping around on that

Act 3 is still rough, but I finally managed to kill Ghom (which I absolutely could not do pre-patch), but it still took me forever. I've started playing again, at least until Borderlands 2 comes out, so we should try to hook up. I'd imagine that we could at least get you as far as I am. Wasn't one of the things in this patch them removing enemy HP bonuses in multiplayer, or doing something with that?

Other than that I'm still having better luck rolling through Act 1 with my 200+ MF/GF gear then trying to do Act 2/3 with my "real" gear. Act 2 is kinda doable but a pain in the ass with my MF/GF gear, but I won't even touch Act 3 with that. Ultimately I'm getting way more rares doing Act 1 since I can do it so much faster, but the only downside is that most of the plans I would want for higher gems and crafting don't drop in Act 1 :/

Also with my DH I picked up a build that someone on GAF suggested which has been interesting so far. Instead of spamming Elemental Arrow (Lightning Ball) and Smokescreening anytime anyone gets near me, I've switched to Cluster Shot with the Rune where it drops grenades and does Fire damage. Then to up my Hatred regen to support that I've switched to the Bat (for 3 Hatred Regen/sec), and Entangling shot with the Rune that regens 6 Hatred per shot. I'm still on the fence about Entangling shot; with this setup being able to slow enemies is very useful, but it's slower and does less damage than Hungering Arrow. Also I dropped Caltrops for Gloom, with the Rune that blocks 65% of damage while it's active. So essentially I go into combat and with full Hatred I can get off two Cluster Arrows which will pretty much kill any normal mobs, and if it doesn't or I'm fighting Elites I'm regening Hatred like a motherfucker, and I pop Gloom which will allow me to tank maybe half of the Elites out there. And with Gloom active you get 20% of damage dealt back as health, so if I pop a Cluster Shot I'm doing 60k+ on normal and 130k+ on a crit so I'm healing fast. Then I still keep Smoke Screen for when that's not an option or it goes bad.

I'm still dying (that's the DH way), but this is a fairly interesting build. What the other guy is doing which supports this much better is he's got his natural crit chance at 30%+ and has max discipline + discipline regen with the Natalya set which makes all of that much easier. Additionally with his natural crit he can drop Sharpshooter and he picks up the Passive that reduces the discipline costs of the Cluster Shot grenades, and I think maybe ups their damage or something else as well. I'm not sure that I'm going to roll with this forever, but it is interesting. Without having his setup it's probably not quite as reliable as Elemental Arrow, but I'm doing HUGE bursts of damage in like 1-2 seconds. Also Entangling Shot is much more useful when playing in groups, so there's that as well.

So there's a major uproar going on with battle.net. Iran has blocked any and all access to battle.net from their country.

Iran's government banned battle.net's IPs

Thread about it.

A blue responded about it on the eu forums:

It was blocked because (taken from the above thread in MMO-C):


1. Promotion of superstition and mythology
2. Promotion of violence due to too much violence.
3. Abolishing the deformation in sin.
4. Demonstration of inappropriate clothing and slutty outfits for female avatars.

So what do you guys think of that? I know it's kind of a political thing and it probably belongs in the Palace, but since it's regarding Battle.net/Blizzard, I'd figure I'd put it in here.

Can't mess with Iranian law. Totally their call.

Also I hear Guild Wars 2 goes live today. Can totally imagine the playerbase of D3 going down a bit.

I play D3 every now and then, even with the major update (Paragon levels don't take my attention much). Finishing Darksiders 2, tackling GR:FS for a bit until Borderlands 2.

GW2 isn't that good. Massive let down for me. Fucking horrible community of players, and the game feels clunky.

It hasn't even been out a few hours and it's already that bad? I know it's early access for the next 3 days, when regular launch is the 28th. I suppose it's Warhammer all over again. In a rush to beat Blizzard's release dates, in turn putting out a rushed product. I wish EA would let Warhammer go free to play like they're doing with Star Wars, but meh.

One thing that you can do, because you have a legacy Nat's Mark, is wear four pieces of legacy Nat's set for the +2 disc/sec regen and replace the bat with Preparation with Punishment rune to instantly restore all hatred for 25 disc. Not much out there is going to survive four cluster bombs with some hungering arrows in between.

Yeah, the Nat set has more or less been my plan all along (although with some of the Legendary changes that may be different now), the issue is cost; a few of the pieces are super expensive.

Legacy Nat's is all pretty cheap except the ring, unless you start talking about getting critical chance on the hat and high dex on the boots.

Yeah, the ring is the killer on it. Also I didn't realize that the new Natalya stuff is actually totally different and marked differently, and has a different 4-piece bonus on is (+20 Disc). In typical Blizzard fashion their item pages haven't been updated at all (only two of the new items in the Nat set even exist as pages).

The problem is that I think I'm going to have to such a huge dive on my current equipment to equip 4 Nat pieces that I'm not sure if it's going to be worth it. IIRC the ring is pretty solid and might not be a downgrade, but everything else is (I have a Legacy double Dex rolled Andariel's Visage for example). I think I might be better off instead just trying to get some +max disc items, I actually had NONE. So I just upgraded my quiver, the overall damage on it was the same (like -11.3 or something inconsequential), I lost about 3k HP, but I got +10 disc so that's probably a good tradeoff. I only went from 46 down to about 43k as a result, and honestly even at 46k the stuff that is actually a danger to me is still pretty much killing me in 2 hits anyway, so the 3k is whatever whereas the +10 disc is another Gloom or Smokescreen most of the time.

I spent most of the day clearing Act 3; I only got one or two items that might even be worth selling (both are up for less than 1 mil right now), and due to all the deaths I only came out like 200k ahead in Gold. Right now I need to figure out how I want to proceed; I WAS able to clear Act 3, but in my "real" gear, so after Paragon/NV my MF/GF is only around 110%, which combined with my somewhat slow progress meant that I was getting higher quality drops, but way, way fewer drops than blowing through Act 1 in my super high MF/GF gear. Also I'm still going to mess around with it, but I'm not sure if I'm going to stick with Cluster Arrow; it's super useful in some situations, but then for example I hit a complete and total brick wall trying to kill Cryodea (or whatever the spider queen bosses name is) with Cluster Arrow, but destroyed her with Ball Lightning on my first go.

Right now I'm sitting on about 4.5 million, which would get me some very, very slight upgrades on most of my equipment, if that, so I'm in a weird spot right now. I think I'm going to probably faceroll Act 1 some more, or maybe actually try to upgrade my MF/GF set stat-wise and see if I could do Act 2 with it.

I don't think there's a thread for it, but a lot of people keep mentioning Borderlands 2, so here's a coupon that seems to be a pretty good deal on the preorder.

Borderlands 2 (Steam Code) Pre-Order for $40.00 - downloads, video-games, pc-game

$40 for the preorder with steam code and extra content you get with steam prepurchase. It's making me pretty tempted, though I'm still kinda wary with how disappointed I was with the last game.

I think pretty much everyone is getting it, but you may want to keep in mind that it seems like everyone is going 360 this time. Virtually every person I know is getting it, but on 360, including Skills and some other folks who went PC last time, so that might be something to look into.

It's hard to recommend or not though, because what exactly disappointed you about Borderlands 1? It was my GOTY that year, but I will say if you were playing it solo that's really not the way to play.

When I was first playing it the multiplayer on PC was broken, so I couldn't connect to any multi games. Also, each of the classes felt like the played practically identical, lack of real difficulty, 99.9% of the guns being shit, and the skill trees being trash. I was mostly hoping for a Diablo 2 FPS and felt it didn't really deliver that experience.

I'm probably not going to get it since looking at skill trees and whatnot I'm not seeing what the huge difference is between the first and what they're putting out now.

He had that Mantra rune of additional healing. About 1100 additional HP per second. Mine ran on the resists being up by 20% so my healing is rather small but the HP being shaved away goes relatively slow too.

Also, the War Cry helps. Allows more tanking goodness where needed. Of course, that goes to shit when a room the size of a Japanese apartment is filled with arcane sentries and illusions.

I just found a 9% magic find, one socket legacy Beckon Sail on the auction house for 490k gold. I immediately purchased it. It was socketed with a Star Emerald, which is currently priced at roughly 700k gold to purchase from the auction house, and costs about 600k to craft if you start with perfect squares. These people are silly sometimes. Now I can unsocket it, sell the cloak for 50k or whatever, and either keep the emerald or sell it for a nice profit.

Well, it took maybe ten tries and a little equipment adjustment (trading about 6k dps for about 350 or so all resist), but I soloed Ghom tonight. The lower repair costs are far less frustrating now.

LOL viva Iran.

Found this ridiculous fucking amulet:

http://i.imgur.com/NnzCL.png

Have it up on the AH right now at 150 million.

Jesus christ. I guess I'll have to start working on Act 2. My gear is completely awful though so I don't know how I've managed to beat Act 1 Inferno with it.

What I've started doing is farming Act 2 with my real gear, so I only have a base GF/MF of like 70/30 or so, but once I get 5 stacks I'm still not getting a ton of rares, but the ones that I am getting are frequently ilevel 62/63. The problem with farming Act 1 with my very high GF/MF gear is that I get a bajillion rares (literally more than 2 inventory pages of rares in less than one run), but they were pretty much always shit. So far I'm ultimately having better success running Act 2 with my actual setup. What's weird is with the stats on my weapon I should be able to run Act 3, but it still gives me way too many problems. I managed to beat Act 3, but died like a million times. I've made like 3 incremental upgrades to my gear since then, and I tried it a bit but I still seem to just get wrecked a lot.

For the most part, everything in Act 3 could one shot me if I didn't have Shadow Power/Gloom running. That wasn't a problem for melee enemies because they rarely got close enough to take a swing at me. Those flying, fireball spitting guys and the goat spearmen on the other hand were tough. Lots of vaulting.

Yeah, Act 3 seems to be mixed for me. I did decide go ahead and equip that amulet though, and I also upgraded my gloves. I totally didn't realize the amount of difference crit % and aps % made on them; my gloves had super high Dex but neither one of those. I'm broke, but was able to buy a good pair for 750k that shot my Damage up by like 6k (unbuffed!). Right now I'm sitting at 68k Damage without Sharpshooter on. I'm going to go back and try Act 3 right now and see how it goes.

My gear: Minerva - Community - Diablo III

I use one handed crossbows, so I don't even fool with attack speed. I'm straight critical chance + critical damage when I'm running my non-mf gear. My normal gear gets me something like 53% crit chance (including the archery bonus), and my character sheet dps shows mid-50k while using a 1050 dps hand crossbow. I picked up a 1200+ dps Calamity the other day for 20 million that put me past 70k in normal gear, but I decided to flip it for a quick 10 mil profit. Right now I'm considering just RMAHing my 40 million gold and pocketing a little cash ahead of Borderlands 2, since I know on that day, I probably won't pick up Diablo for months at the least.

Hey u MLG Pros please help me out :)
Chinpo - Community - Diablo III
this is my DH, what do you guys think i should upgrade first? I only got about a milli and im getting bored with farming act1... I got tons of yellows but most are like lvl 55s and shit so im trying to move up to act2. I got very low mf i know but i cant decided if i should drop dmg for some more mf (i got some more mf gear that i use for act1 but i still dont get better shit).

You need some all resist and critical damage. I would swap that blue ring with one that does 35+ all resist, 24+ critical damage, and 40 or 50 dex/vit. Those are usually pretty inexpensive. Also replace your blue bracer with one that adds critical chance, or perhaps a legacy (read: inexpensive) Lacuni Prowler with dex.

For farming act 1, you could most likely easily just load up on inexpensive 15% magic find/+dex items and survive fine.

Here is my guy. That is my magic find set and you can see that the only expensive pieces are the amulet (which I found), the helm (which I found), the right ring (which I found), and maybe the bracer (it cost me 1.5 mil a while back, dex+vit+all resist+critical chance on a mf bracer, yeah).

thx bruh, i'll look into it the ah see if i find something.

Minerva - Community - Diablo III

Spent most of my money (3 million) buy the new versions of the Strongarm Bracers and Andariel's Visage (I was using Legacy versions). I think I got a good deal on the Andariel's Visage at 2 million with the stats on it, I got it when it still had 1 day 12 hours left, and there was only one other one comparable in that price range. Up to 74k damage without Sharpshooter and 26.5 crit %. Trying to get my Crit % to at least 30%, at which point I'd feel comfortable dropping Sharpshooter.

Zip, you can pick up a good Dex Legacy Andariel's Visage for next to nothing (they seem to go for under 100k now) that would probably be good, you can probably get one with 160+ Dex and it'll also have 6-7% attack speed and around 2% crit chance. Seems like a good upgrade on the cheap. Same with Legacy Strongarm bracers, I got a good one of the new version for under a million, so I would imagine Legacy ones are probably dirt cheap as well.

Russ, do you find as a DH that Resists actually matter? Even when I had my resists up to around 400 I'd still get pretty much 2 shotted in Act 1, so I'm wondering if it's even worth it. Right now with my resists down to around 280 I'm not noticing a difference either way, and you can probably get gear much cheaper if you're not trying to also get all resists on it.

Skyria - Community - Diablo III

Might as well put mine up too. So I can get yelled at how bad I am. :P

I don't even know what to get my toon

Get some rings with Dex and attack speed% for an easy boost, they're pretty cheap. Honestly those shoulders are terrible, you can get something with at least 150 Dex for cheap. I'd also look into getting Legacy Andariel's Visage and Strongarm Bracers like I mentioned above, they're both dirt cheap and have good dex and crit %, and Andariel's Visage (Legacy) has 6-7% attack speed. You can probably get all of that stuff for maybe a million (if that), and that would boost you dramatically. You really shouldn't have any blues at 60 anymore.

With my normal adventuring gear, I have 320 all resist, and really I think that in act 3 it wouldn't matter if I had 75, 300, or 500. It may be the difference between getting one shot and two shot, which isn't much of a difference at all.

I agree, that's why I was wondering why you suggested he get some All Resist stuff.

In act 1 farming, it is actually useful because the enemy damage isn't outrageous. I guess he did say that he was wanting to move up to act 2 though.

i bought new bracers and immidetialy farmed something better lol just my luck.
also bought a new bow, got a amulet that added 7k dmg. so my total is around 80k dmg now. me and a internet dude went to act3 and i get one shotted by everything, maybe 2 shotted since i have some res. actually i had to switch my amulet for a 5k dmg drop but 53% all res.. but as u said, one or two shot dont really matter :(. I should focus on my barb but im already leveled my dh and crap...

If it makes you feel any better I still get either 2 or 3 shotted in act 3, so I wouldn't worry to much about that part.

I'd say that you need to choose between either getting a gf/mf set to farm act 1 with, or if you want to actually progress into act 2 don't worry about getting gear with gf/mf right now. I can't even really farm act 2 with my gf/mf setup, but with my "real" gear and 5 stacks of NV my gf/mf gets up to about 150/120 which is still pretty decent. I find that if I run act 1 with my gf/mf gear I will clear literally about 100 rares on a run, but 99% of them will be shit. Whereas in Act 2 or 3 I may only clear like 30 or 40, and to be fair they're still mostly crap, but they are better than act 1 stuff and there's a good amount of ilevel 63 drops. Also remember that you get 20%(?) of your follower's GF/MF stats, so I roll with the templar and have him loaded up with equipment that's fairly shit but has high gf/mf. So that might be something to keep in mind to help supplement your stats there if you drop those to get better gear.

yes sounds good, im dying a lot on act2 but if i play it with a partner we can do it quite well. and fewer drops but better quality as you said.

also i dont get how u got such a good price on the andarials... the us market must be inflated as hell. Prices are through the roof on the EU one

I keep hearing about how the EU and US markets are jacked up in different ways, so no idea.

I had multiple huge breakthroughs yesterday, and have completely turned the corner on the game.

Minerva - Community - Diablo III

Between a two different 4-5 million rares I found and sold doing Act 2 Vault runs, I cleared about 11 million, and upgraded majorly to the Gloves, Shoulders, and Cloak I have equipped now. Without Sharpshooter now my base damage is up to 81k and crit % is up to 29.0. Also I still have an impressively high 41k HP, and also unintentionally have 989 Life Regen a second, which combined with Gloom makes Reflect Damage elites a joke now. Also with the Cloak I now have 50 Discipline, which is a huge difference as well.

Right now I have what seems to be a pretty good Stone of Jordan up for a Monk on the AH at 15 million. However none of the stats on that ring are searchable on the AH, so I may have to drop the price on it a few times before it moves since I had to filter by lowest price like 15 pages deep to find anything even comparable to it for Monks. But in either case I'm down to a million now, but I'm starting to have good success finding middling rings and amulets doing Act 2 Vault runs so I'm clearing a lot of 200-500k items. Once I get back up to somewhere between 6-10 million I can get a quiver with crit % on it (mine currently has none) which should get my base crit % up to around 34-35%, at which point I can drop Sharpshooter which will be amazing. I'll probably switch back to Act 3 runs at that point as well. I could probably do that now, but I'm completely facerolling Act 2 so I'm just kind of cruising through that now.

whats your route for act2?

is it to start at The lord of Lies and clearing some mobs alcarnus?

Basically the main thing you want to do is hit the Vault of Assassins with 5 stacks, since there are always 5 or more Elites in there. I do what most people do:

1)Start at the Soulstone Quest (forget the exact name, but the one where the Waypoint is Desolate Sands)
2)Run any combination of the following areas to get 5 stacks:
-Sewers of Alcarnum (?) Usually has 1-2 Elites
-Black Canyon, Usually has anywhere from 1-4 Elites
-Road to Alcarnus (head across the Northeast bridge to the Cult encampment place, usually 1 or 2 Elites)

Some people will also run the Oasis area, whatever works for you. I will usually just do the Sewers and the Black Canyon area, will usually wind up with 4 or 5, occasionally 3 but not usually.

3)Go to the Desolate Sands Waypoint and find the Vault of the Assassin and clear it. The big key here is once you clear it, back out of the game and then Resume Quest. Once you do this, it will have checkpointed you inside the Vault. Take the teleporter out of the Vault to the Desolate Sands; by doing this you'll be able to see exactly where the Vault is in the Desolate Sands, so you're not having to look everywhere for it. Then from there I teleport to town, and hit the first two areas listed above. I'll usually get anywhere from 3-5 stacks hitting just the Sewers and the Black Canyon, then I'll take the Desolate Sands Waypoint. Since you know exactly where the vault is on the map, you can head straight towards it, and I'll usually hit a Elite on the way there from the Waypoint anyway. Rinse and repeat.


Also my Stone of Jordan sold! Bought a good Quiver, lost 2 Discipline, but my damage without Sharpshooter is over 87k now, and my crit % is 36.5%, so I think I'm ready to drop Sharpshooter. I'll probably run Steady Aim for now (which takes me to about 105k damage when nothing is near me), but Vengeance or Night Stalker seems potentially interesting. Going to go back to Act 3 and see how this goes.

Minerva - Community - Diablo III

OMFG. Are you for real. ITS A TERRIBLE WORD! STOP USING IT.

Basically what happened there is she got upset.

Yeah, she overreacted a little, basically.

(I do love any post that begins with "basically" and continues with a stream of incoherent jargon)

He does this OFTEN. Always START it off with that word consistently. It would seem insulting too.

Now I know what will be the topic of discussion during dinner.

(Unless you both eat separately, basically)

Basically, I bought another Calamity for 9 million and sold 30 of my remaining 31 million for real money. I'm hoping to resell said Calamity for 20 million, but if not, at least I have an 1194 damage one hander with high critical damage to use if I ever decide to turn this game on again after Borderlands 2 comes out.

LOL, we already ate. :D I cooked some delicious shrimp scampi.

Basically, I'm going to talk like this for the rest of my life.

Basically, I think Philia's posts should have "Basically," appended to it from now on.

Oh god. What have I wrought. BRB, changing the title, and my username now. :P

EDIT: Basically I forgot that only Admins can change the user's name. D'oh.

Basically you've created a monster.

Additional Spam:
Voting every post in this thread be automatically prefixed with "Basically, ". Hop to it, Acer.

Holy shit at these patch notes: PTR Patch 1.0.5 Notes - Forums - Diablo III

Fucking crazy. We're out of beta people!

Almost everything in here is amazing and awesome. Holy fuck.

Basically.

Basically since my laptop can't play Diablo triple, I'll just play Torchlight II for 20bux.

Basically the same game, only cheaper (and more expanse, no doubt).

They seem to be doing some different things. Impressions from people on the game seem to be all over the place, some people love it, and I've seen some people who were really looking forward to it actually being disappointed and going back to D3. I would have picked it up if not for Borderlands 2, shit timing on that.

I picked up Torchlight 2 using some of the money that Diablo 3 players put into my Paypal account.

I have a feeling Runic is okay with that.

Sold my immortal king helmet for 65m... first time i really got that kind of monies (could probably have RMAH it)... now i dont know what to buy lol. Got really lucky and got 1 set and 2 leg items, 3 days in a row (one on each day).

I don't know if anybody's been keeping up with it, but 1.05 hit today, and the changes in it are substantial. People in the public preview of it the last couple weeks have been pretty psyched about it overall (outside of Monks apparently still getting shafted). Came out today, full patch notes are here, it's fucking crazy:

Patch 1.0.5 Now Available - Diablo III

Seeing a ton of very skeptical people today gushing over how awesome it is with the changes to drops and Monster Power in particular. I plan on getting back in there in the next day or two (haven't played in 2-3 weeks) to check it out, but this is worth a look for anyone with the game.

Edit: Jesus, people on GAF are getting multiple Legendaries and/or plans a run now running Monster Power 3-5+, holy fuck.

awww yeah been waiting for the market to crash so i can pick up a cheap manticore and a dead mans legacy. or a amulet cant decide.

Did a complete playthrough of Act 1 on MP3, got a pretty good Stormshield like 20 minutes in. Jesus.

Scored two Legendaries on my last run on only MP2, scored this:

http://i.imgur.com/LvIt1.jpg

Having a fucking blast with the game now post-patch. Huge difference. I BASICALLY stopped playing Borderlands to play this now.

Lul i bought a Dead mans and Manticore after the patch (prices didnt drop as much as i thought tho) and im just cutting through all acts like butter. No wonder people were complaining of no end-game with gear like this.

Did u change your farming routes Daravon? If i play with mp levels i just play act1 since apparently the chances for leg. drops are the same. But lately I've been playing normal inf on act 3 since it's faster and more drops.. but there is undoubtly new energy in the game now.

I switched today to doing act 3 runs. After 1.0.5 hit I'd been alternating between doing either Act 1 or Act 2 runs on MP 2 because all of the enemies are level 63 now if you have any MP on. This morning I randomly decided to try an Act 3 run on MP2 and it was actually way easier than doing Act 1 or 2 on MP2 (which was obviously reversed before). Someone pointed out that I completely missed the fact that when you have MP on and it scales all non-level 63 monsters to 63, that happens andthen MP scaling applies. I think pre-patch pretty much all of the act 3 enemies were already 63, so with how the scaling works Act 3 is actually easier for me now.

But on any of the acts I stick mostly to MP2. MP2 is mostly easy on Act 1/2, and is even easier on Act 3. MP3 is doable on any of the acts for me, but I do start definetely dying on either certain types of Elites, or super jacked Elite combinations. Legendaries were already dropping about once or twice a day for me, but since switching to act 3 today for whatever reason they're dropping all over the place, my last run I got 4 (Ivory Tower, Unity, Zunimassa helm and Blackthorne boots). Most of them have been Brimstone trash, but I sold one for 500k and have two more I might be able to sell for that much, and a Unity I have up right now for like 4 million. Getting pretty good regular rares though, I found a pretty great Str/attack speed/crit damage/all resist/life+% ring that I've got up right now. There was almost nothing like it, I started it at I think 8 million so we'll see how that goes.

Gear-wise after I sold that Mempo I spent about 8 million on a pretty high end Andariel's Visage and a few million on a ring upgrade. Right now I'm sitting at something like 122k unbuffed damage and 147k damaged with Steady Aim active, I had already dropped Sharpshooter before the patch since my natural crit is up to around 43%. I'm sitting on about 22 million, and I have around 10 million in stuff up right now on the AH (not counting that ring) that I'm hoping I can move. I'm in this weird spot right now where to get any sort of meaningful upgrade is going to cost me 30-40 million on just about any piece of equipment, so I'm holding off for now.

HOLY NECRO BUMP BATMAN

Since Term has started playing again and has no idea what's even going on now, here's what has happened with this game in terms of patches and updates since everyone pretty much stopped playing. A few of these things were in the very last patch I posted here, but I think just about everyone had already stopped playing by that point soooo


-Paragon Levels added. They essentially just added 100 experience levels to go through that start scaling exponentially. However with each Paragon level you gain you still get your stat boosts, but also permanent +3% to both your Magic and Gold Find. As a result of this change there is now a +300% cap to MF and GF before Nephalem Valor (NV). This combined with Monster Power (MP, see below) makes Gold/Magic find stats on items more or less useless, don't bother looking for them at all when getting new gear now.

-The extra 15% MF/GF you get per NV stack is still in place, but those bonuses go beyond the normal MF/GF cap. Also since the level cap has been raised, you now also get 15% extra XP per stack. So at the max 5 stacks that's an extra 60% MF/GF/XP beyond any normal caps.

-They nerfed the hell out of Inferno over various patches. It's no longer Act 3 is impossible, it's now how quickly can you clear it and on what MP.

-Monster Power (MP) added. This and Paragon Levels are the biggest changes. I never really played Diablo 2, but apparently there was something similar to this in that. You can select an MP level of anywhere from 0 (aka vanilla, nothing special) to 10. Depending on what level you choose your rewards start scaling higher and higher, although so do the monsters:

http://i.imgur.com/WF0P0k6.jpg

As long as you are playing on at least MP1 ALL MONSTERS are level 63, which means ilevel 63 items can drop. Given that the jump from MP0 to 1 is negligible, even if you are just coming back now and suck ass you want to be playing on MP1. The MF/GF increases from MP are beyond the normal 300% cap as well, along with the NV bonuses. For example, with my Paragon Level 71 Demon Hunter playing on MP8 my MF/GF with no NV stacks is like 570% or something retarded like that. It's great.

-Infernal Machine/Hellfire Ring event added. Acts 1-3 each have a "Keywarden" (KW) that spawns in a specific zone. When killed with 5 stacks of NV active, the KW has a 10% chance of dropping their specific Key per each level of MP active (ex. MP5 = 50% chance of Key drop). With one of each of the three keys, you can create an Infernal Machine at the Blacksmith using the plans that drop from the KW in Act 4 (who only drops the plans, no Keys so you only need this once). When used in a house in New Tristam in the last quest of Act 1, the Infernal Machine will open one of three portals, behind each is a duo of buffed up bosses from the game. Similar to the KW's, once killed each duo has a 10% per MP level to drop an a specific item. You can then combine all three of those items to craft a Hellfire Ring at the Jeweler. You choose the primary stat of the ring, then each ring will always roll 170-200 of that stat, 35% bonus EXP, along with 4 random stats.

This sounds like a hassle, and it kind of is. However it's worth it at least a few times, because while the Hellfire ring is account bound, it's equippable at any level, which combined with even shit rolls on it makes it amazing for leveling up new characters. Also in theory you CAN get good rolls on it (primary stat + crit dmg/crit %/AS%), but it's mostly good for leveling purposes, and you can stick one on your Follower as well.

-Demonic Essences and new crafted items added. Elites now have a chance to drop a crafting item called a Demonic Essence. These are account bound items, and are used in new crafting recipes. The new crafting recipes are Archon Shoulders, Gloves, Bracers, Chest Armor, and Amulet. For each of these recipes you can get a recipe for each primary stat just like the Hellfire Ring (Dex/Vit/Int/Str). However the primary stat on these roll at a minimum of 200, and a double roll can clear 300 PLUS five random stats. As a result you yourself can now easily craft upgrades for Gloves/Bracers/Shoulders, and in fact crafted items of those three are easily now the Best in Slot for any class (unless you're just absolutely stuck with a set piece for some reason). The Archon Chest Armor in theory on a perfect roll is high-end, but most classes/builds will be stuck with a set piece there anyway, so it's not really worth it to mess around with that. On a similar note the Archon Amulet also potentially is a Best in Slot, but realistically you're unlikely to get that as Amulets have a fuckton more random rolls they can get on them as opposed to other pieces of equipment. Additionally the Amulet has a higher cost to craft (also requires a high level gem as well as a Brimstone); crafting amulets is potentially endgame, but save that for long after you've crafted godlike other slots. Bottomline: you can now (fairly) easily craft godlike Shoulders, Gloves, and Bracers yourself. Also should note that like the essences, any of these crafted items are account bound. Actually fairly smart on Blizzards part; since you can't buy Essences, it forces people to actually play the game and not just the AH.

-An additional level of gem was added, Marquise. They scale up just like all other levels of gems, but are astronomically expensive to craft. And as an extra fuck you, they cost 20 million to remove from a piece of armor. Only for ultra hardcore people.

-Invulnerable minions were completely removed (I actually totally forget about them), and Reflect Damage and Shielding affixes on Elites aren't constant now, you can see when they're active or not.

-Magic Find and Gold Find stats no longer average across your party. This is something else I totally forgot was even a thing, FFS Blizzard


Also patch 1.08 is coming either this week or next (has been available via the public test realm for a while now). This has some major updates, such as:
-They're HUGELY increasing mob density in all areas of all acts; the problem right now is that there is an Act 3 run that pretty much is inarguably the most efficient run in the game. This change makes it so you can run pretty much what YOU want to run. There's videos of this out there, but it fills every area with pretty much nonstop enemies, looks fantastic.
-Identify All available in town. Self-explanatory and amazing, but also highlights how sad it is that this is an exciting feature but should have been there at launch.




I never really stopped playing, and I'm always down to play with whoever if you're on; even at high levels it's generally considered more efficient to do really quick low MP runs then to do slower high MP runs, so even if you're just getting back into the game we can play. I also have a fairly low-level Paragon Monk that I'm using right now so it's not super unbalanced.

Also everyone should use Diablo 3 DPS & EHP Calculator, it's incredibly useful for determining upgrades, as well as things like "Is it worth losing 50 Vit for 35 All Resist." I've vastly improved my character and game since I started using it a few months ago, made me realize that I was looking at the wrong stats. The DPS the site shows will generally match your in-game one, but the big one to look at is your effective hit points (eHP).


Edit: Term, you can see how d3up works, for example this is my Monk's Blizzard armory profile: Dawn - Community - Diablo III

And then here's my d3up profile: Dawn | Monk | Diablo 3 DPS & EHP Calculator

The d3up site is great because it gives you what your actual eHP is, and you can create fake items and simulate changes to your existing items to see specifically how it will change your stats, so you can see if something on the AH will actually be an upgrade or not, etc. For comparison, here's a link to your monk's profile I imported to the site: Stormhammer | Monk | Diablo 3 DPS & EHP Calculator

Like I mentioned, the main problem is that your Vit is obscene, but your DPS is really low. You're going to have to make some concessions and lose some Vit and/or AR/FR to get your DPS up. Using the site I'd probably reccommend letting your self drop no lower than either 350-400k eHP but see how high you can get your DPS while making that drop. Ideally more endgame Monks try to maintain 500k EHP while hitting 200k+ DPS, but that's a ways off so I wouldn't worry about that.

For your gear outside of the weapon stuff we already talked about, you need crit % super super bad. You probably already have enough Demon Essences to start crafting some decent shoulders/bracers/gloves so I probably wouldn't worry about buying those right now (unless you're super unlucky with your crafts). You probably should ditch the Inna chest and get the Inna pants; the Inna 3 and 4 set bonus is garbage. The Inna pants are pretty much mandatory for both Monks and DH's because they give you attack %, crit %, and movement %. You are for sure going to lose some AR/Vit on that tradeoff, but it can't be helped. For the chest you can probably get a rare chest with relatively low dex but high vit/AR/FR/3 slots, then later upgrade that further. You can also try the new Tal Rasha chest (forget the name), IIRC you can't roll Vit and AR on it, but it always has attack speed % on it. Your boots are pretty good right now, and with that second ring I gave you (combined with your nat ring, which btw is a good call since you want the nat ring + boots for that 2 set bonus) you're good ring-wise. You should definitely be able to get a better amulet for fairly cheap. I think the big thing is that your weapons are high base DPS, but Shenlongs don't compete at this point, you're going to lose some on the damage number but you need to get 2 one handers that have dex, crit damage and a socket, and you also need life steal on at least one of them.

Also someone I play with on GAF who has high level monk just posted for someone else who just started playing a Monk again on upgrades they can make for dirt cheap, you might want to take a look: NeoGAF - View Single Post - Diablo III |OT5| Finally out of Beta

Also I'd strongly recommend swapping out a lot of your skills. Transcendence is pretty useless, and Resolve is probably in reality actually the most useless Monk skill (which I didn't realize at first either) since it only actually affects the specific enemy you are hitting. It's arguably useful when running ubers, but that's literally it. You should take Seize the Initiative which will immediately give you a pretty good armor/eHP boost. Then I personally run Chant of Resonance for the spirit regen, but you've got room to put whatever in there. Also I don't think anyone would recommend Mantra of Healing (it's regen is way too low to matter at any real MP level) or Mystic Ally at ALL at this point. Mantra of Conviction/Overawe is basically a free 24% damage boost, there's virtually no reason not to run it.

Past that there's some variance in skills, but the general consensus is that if you're not running a 2h Tempest Rush build, you want to be running with Fists of Thunder/Thunderclap run and Sweeping Wind/Cyclone. Bladestorm isn't an awful choice for Sweeping Wind, but Cyclone becomes way, way more effective once you're landing criticals often, which once you get your crit % up will be pretty much all of the time. And if you do wind up getting a WKL, you will pretty much have to switch to that build, since without running FoT and SW/Cyclone the bonus damage with lightning skills that you get with the WKL (Cyclones do lightning damage) is wasted which makes the WKL not as good as comparable one handers.

tl;dr use d3up, be willing to lose some vit and resists and get some crit %. With what your eHP is your DPS should be at LEAST double what it is right now.

1.08 is out, and it's fucking crazy. About to jump in myself, hearing nothing but people saying how the mob density is crazy now, and combined with all of the other changes people are blowing through shit, and getting way more drops and levels pretty much in whatever location they want to go through which is fucking awesome. It's also caused the price of gold to completely bottom out now since on the RMAH you can only sell in lots of 10 mil as opposed to 1 mil as before, but the minimum sell amount is still 25 cents, but since there's so much botting it's just made it so instead of 1 mil for 25 cents it's now 10 mil for 25 cents. This in turn has caused the gem market to fucking skyrocket, so the whole thing is hilarious.

Also Term you did a great job on upgrading your stuff! I started checking out the Diablo subreddits, and there's a super popular build going around there for high-end Demon Hunters that I checked out last night, and it's hilarious. I was doing MP10 Act 3 pretty much fine with just one minor gear change, and I could make it even better by actually buying a decent Calamity (I just bought a so-so 2 mil one to check this out) and running the other additional skills. But to give you an idea:

YouTube Video

I bought copies of Diablo III for me and Tritoch back in November, but neither of us have touched it. Maybe this would be a decent starting point, since it doesn't seem like it's gonna get any less convoluted.

If it helps there's a reddit thread here that provides some tips to new and returning players for this patch. This patch was a big one people have been looking forward to for months, it's brought a lot of people back. In my time with it last night it was fantastic; mob density is crazy, people are saying it's like D2 in that regard now. A lot of the "smaller" changes like having identify all, being able to salvage without the confirmation message, and bigger ones like it automatically putting out a message to all players in a game when someone engages in combat with an elite, goblin or keywarden are great.

As a completely new player most of that won't affect you yet, and really you can just go through the game on the first couple of difficulties really doing whatever character and skillwise. Then by the time you would probably actually need specific advice, you'll have a good enough grasp of what's going on to take that. But with a lot of the changes they've made since launch it's way easier to get into now, and is nowhere near the shitshow that the game launched at.

Definitely. It is THAT many in D2; mobs upon mobs of assholes just swarming down on you. It's fucking glorious.

And thanks for the gear and skill advice; just upping some of the gears to have a crit% and critdmg. Now it's better than the last time I touched it.

The one thing that would actually be nice about all these level 60s grinding away forever is you can probably get all sorts of gear for cheap on the AH. I remember when I played through, not long after the game was released, I don't think I wore one thing I found on my own for any significant amount of time. Most items of worth were for other classes, so I'd sell them for a bit of money, then buy things for myself with the leftovers.

I did like my trick of buying pretty good weapons with an empty socket, dropping in a ruby I bought to up the DPS, and then reselling it for, like, 10-20x what I paid for it. Paid the bills easily until I hit level 60 with my first character.

Edit: I wonder if they're eventually going to add in a transmute ability. Or something to let you sell/salvage stuff outside of running back to town.

This is what an average screen looks like after it's been cleared, the mob density is ridiculous now. These screenshots were taken within a minute of each other.

http://i.imgur.com/yC0yugh.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/c7dnL6S.jpg

Ironically Term the Spirit Stone was a high crit fire resistance Inna's helm lol. It's not quite as good as the one I got you just barely, but we're even on that now so good shit. Legendaries are all over the place now with the increased density, and I haven't even tried public games where you extra bonuses for that. People on GAF in 4 player games are clearing a total of 15+ legendaries (across all players) in single runs. So good.

haha that money dupe really fucked the game up.
"Sadly" EU wasnt effected, still disappointed that there is no end-game what so ever. Why is there no ladder? I don't get it. Yeah people will just buy best gear and win but still it can be fun for people just to do it. It's still a grinding fest with no end and all these patches do is to just make the grind easier, which once again removes the only purpose the game has.

Without getting into it, there are multiple posts on reddit, GAF, bnet, etc that I agree with as to why the dupe issue isn't going to wind up fucking things over all that much. I agree that no ladder is baffling, but complaining about a loot game being a grindfest with no end kind of defeats the purpose of loot games? Also with MP levels you can make it as hard as you want; I can personally assure you that there is no way in hell that launch Inferno was harder than current Inferno MP10.

I didn't mean the gold glitch would have long term effects, but what it did in shrot time was hilarious.

Loot games have their places but what the good ones have are some sort of secondary (or primary depending on how you see it) objective, might be a ladder or pvp or something unheard of. It's just missing that part.

That said I reinstalled D3 yesterday and switched my manticore to a calmity to give the cluster grenade a spin, was fun and really devastating.
Lacking any other game I'll probably be playing some d3 now if anyone wants to huuk up.

Yeah, short term the dupe has made things hilarious. Outside of being personally annoyed that the AH is down since I have a full tab of things I can't sell/price as well as getting myself a better Calamity, this is going to have the unexpected effect of resetting the economy. Since the AH will have been down long enough for there to be no auctions active or recent prices to look at it, it's going to be the wild west for a bit. I imagine in some ways it's going to be super fucked for a bit, but I bet some people are also going to make out on deals since anyone who isn't super into the game probably isn't going to have any idea how to price anything accurately which could potentially lead to great pickups under cost. Should be interesting either way.

this is my current build
Chinpo - Community - Diablo III

I had 20m just laying in my account so i changed some gear and bought the calmity. i was too stingy tho, i could have spent more money but I didnt.

Dont know what to get next, was thinking of inn's pants but i lose 30k EHP. Maybe a new amulet..? Dunno.

The dupe doesn't seem to have done anything to the market really, prices are pretty much like they were before. Also the new mob density + party GF/MF bonuses are fantastic and are spoiling me. If I do a good sized Act 1 run and don't get 2-3+ Legendaries it's actually upsetting.

Zip, you're running a weird ass build there. If you're going Grenades/Traps there's no reason to also have Hungering Arrow in there, it's a waste of a slot. Given that you're not even at 100k DPS I don't know that I'd even recommend the Grenades build; it'll work at any MP level I suppose, but it's really only powerful/needed at really high MP levels. At lower damage/MP levels Hungering Arrow with Elemental Arrow/Ball Lightning is the way to go, unless you're running a Strafe build for low MP runs. You may or may not want to drop the Calamity (that is a pretty decent one though) for a Manticore, or alternatively if you're going to run Grenades HA is a waste of a slot, largely defeats the purpose of the build.

Completely ignoring the weapon/skill set however, the biggest thing you need to do is drop all MF/GF gear ASAP. Given how fast you can level in public games now, along with the MF/GF bonuses you get with playing in groups now, it's not worth it at all. You'd be way better off using those slots for other things that let you tackle enemies faster or a higher MP. The other problem is that you've geared for eHP over DPS, there's no easy way on most of your slots to overcome that cheaply. Some specific recommendations (prices are based on the US AH, I can't imagine they're THAT different on EU, but I couldn't say for sure):

Helm: Mempo is the way to go, and CC ones are ridiculously expensive (I don't have one) but your Mempo is crap, it has no primary stat or Vit. For 800k-1mil you can get one with no Vit but 170+ dex, do that immediately and stick a Amethyst/Vit gem in the slot instead, even a flawless square in there will do amazing things for your eHP, getting that Dex and putting a Vit gem in there alone will give you about a 5-6k DPS and ~15-20k eHP boost. The pickup radius is nice, but you're not at a point where you have the luxury for that, at least not on that piece.

Shoulders: You should start crafting Archon shoulders/bracers/gloves asap for upgrades. Short term for 800k-1 mil you can get a Vile Ward with slightly better Dex and AR and comparable Vit with what you have.

Chest: You're a bit stuck on this one because you are going to have to lose the AR here (at least with your budget), but for a DH there's really no other choice than the Nat chest. The good news here is that since you already have the nat ring and boots you can get the 3-set dex bonus by getting one, and also even though you're going to lose the AR by dropping your current chest you can make up for it pretty easily here. For about a million you can get one with 150 dex / 50 vit and with possibly another random roll. And these always roll with 10-12% Life and 3 sockets; so with this 150 dex /50 vit rolled one if you stick three flawless square emeralds in the sockets and the set bonus you're looking at about a +7k DPS, and with the low Vit and Life % roll on it you still come out ahead of your current chest even without the AR by about 2-4k+ eHP. The Elite % is largely irrelevant (especially at your DPS #'s), very few enemies are actually considered "demons" for that bonus, and you're going to make up the movement bonus below on the Inna pants (which yes, you should get).

Belt: You're probably okay with this for right now; the Inna belt is good for DH's, sooner rather than later you will probably want to get upgrade to a Witching Hour which is best in slot for DH (and most classes actually), but those are a bit more expensive and will almost always come with a eHP loss as a tradeoff, so I wouldn't worry about that right now. At a low budget your Inna belt is about as good as you can get.

Pants: Get Inna pants. The downside is that getting a dex/vit one (90-100 dex and 40-60 vit) is going to cost you about 2-3 mil, but I would do that ASAP. You are going to lose some vit, but even the minimum AS% roll on it of 8% and the guaranteed 1% CC are enormous. Also you will lose this when you eventually upgrade to a Witching Hour, but short term this was also net you the 2-set Inna bonus of 130 dex. Figuring at that 3 mil number, you will gain 9k+ DPS on this, but you will lose somewhere around 30k eHP. If you want you can mitigate about half of that by putting vit gems in the sockets instead of dex gems which will gain you about 6k DPS but only losing 18k eHP. Also these come with the 12% movement bonus to replace the one on your chest, and puts you back at 24% with the boots (max is 25%).

Alternatively short term you could get some Blackthorne Pants, since they roll LoH and a bunch of other stats.

Boots: Your boots are actually pretty solid for your budget. To get more dex on them would start at around 2 million which isn't bad, but not worth it for you right now given much larger upgrades you can get elsewhere for that price. Getting Vit on them for sub 2-3 million would dramatically drop the Dex on them, not worth it.

Gloves: For non-crafted gloves yours are pretty decent. I probably wouldn't bother buying another pair, just start crafting them and you should get an upgrade sooner rather than later. You probably could get an upgrade on the AH for a few million, but again that money is better spent elsewhere.

Bracers: Your bracers are kind of crap, you should be able to roll a better one via crafting in probably just a few tries, you may actually want to do this before anything else. Crafting a dex one and getting one with literally any crit % on it will probably be an upgrade for you.

Amulet: You can get a way better one for cheap. Search for 100 Dex, CC, CD and either Vit or AR. On the US AH I see ones that would be pretty good upgrades for you starting at around a mil. If you're going Grenades right now you could also search for attack speed instead of CD if you're so inclined.

Nat ring: I would get one with either Vit or Life % on it instead of LoH. I see upgrades on the US AH that would net you a bigger increase for under 1 mil. I wouldn't worry about losing the LoH, because:

Skull Grasp: I'd drop this for either a Unity, or a better rare ring. Unitys are surprisingly good because not a lot of people realize how much of a DPS boost average damage is, and Unitys always roll 4.5% crit and decent LoH, enough to make up for ditching the Nat ring and the Skull Grasp. Getting one with life % or Vit will run you starting at 1-3 mil however. Alternatively you could probably get a better rolled rare ring for the same ballpark price if not cheaper, just search for Dex/Vit or Life %/LoH (if you really think you need this)/Attack speed or CD/CC, etc.

DML: Yours is okay, but you can get ones with 9.5% crit but up the Attack Speed to 18-19% for not more than 1-2 mil.

nah fuck you.


jk. Prices are way different on EU bro, the numbers you mention for different stuff isnt realistic at all 4 me atm.
As i said, haven played for a bunch of months so i just gave this build a try 2 days ago thus a lot of my gear is geared for bunch of other stuff (they are still crap i kno). I can currenty do mp3 without dying tooo much and that LoH is what keeps me alive. Did the uber bosses for the first time yesterday with a party on mp5, would never be able to solo it tho.
And as i understand it the grenade build uses ehp more than DPS so i'm not sure it's all too negativa.

yeah hungering arrow shouldnt be there, dunno what to replace it with tho since all required skills are already selected.

Thx for item lists tho I've looked at bunch of stuff u mentioned already and i cant decide, I'm sitting more in d3up and AH than the game tho lol.
The Mempo was a find just before i quit so it's free and will get a update i guess.
The pants make me lose so much eHP for just a couple of k DPS (the ones i checked) that i'm really torn if i should upgrade to inns, that innas bonus wouldnt hurt tho.

Nat ring I'm not ditching just yet since i just bought it lol, but the skil ring i'm probably changing but the unity costs shitlots.

What's really making me lose my mind is if i should ditch the tyraels one, but you are probably right on this one. Probably on everyrging esle too, thx for tips.

Also excuse the selling errors, I'm chilling a on big brown booty so it's hard to right with free hand.

Edit: been calculating a bit on d3up and chaing tyraels would really boost my ehp so i only lose 10k ehp if i switch ma pants so that might actually happen. altho only aroundish 7k boost in dps.. arund 10-11ish if i get a new mempo with 150 dex.

I think the main issue is that the Grenade build is really intended more for high MP, and none of your stats are at that level yet. You'd honestly probably be better off running a vanilla HA/BL build for a while, if you're just running MP2-3 that's totally fine. Hell, if I'm running sub-MP5 with other people that's what I switch to. Grenading is really only for when you're facetanking something at high MP. I run Grenades when I solo MP6, and even on MP6 it's probably really borderline as to whether or not that is more effective than running either HA/BL or Bolo/Trap.

Well that's what i used to run, got my manticore in my stash.
But honestly I switched to grenades for fun and I'm having fun with it so i run with it for a while :).
Also i bought a couple of new stuff you mentioned, much easier to run through now. As you said I'm gonna try crafting bracers and shoulders until i get a upgrade.
Still got 9ish millions to spend (I'm too greedy when i buy stuff lol) if i want to, might even get a better calmity.

Yeah, I'm having a good time with Grenades as well, my eHP is so high already that I'm just facetanking stuff and it's hilarious. It just scales much better to higher difficulties, but obviously if you're having fun with it do that. It's not BAD at lower difficulties, just not as effective, but whatever really. Playing in public games levels you up extremely fast now with the bonuses; this weekend I went from 73-80, didn't play nearly as much as I could have, and I don't have a ruby in my helm or the Hellfire ring equipped either, it's just way faster now. Higher Paragon levels make a HUGE difference in finding drops; I ran mostly group MP6 runs which is pretty easy for me, and I cleared 14 Legendaries on Saturday and 17 yesterday. Mostly crap, although I did find a great ~35 mil amulet last night for my Scoundrel (a Star of Azarkanth with near max chance to Freeze on hit, which is super vaulable). But the fact that stuff that could at least potentially be good is dropping is fantastic, and with the bonuses I cleared over 10 mil in just gold pickups and vendor trash. Good times.

25% extra MF/GF/Exp until Tuesday to celebrate the game's anniversary. It kinda sucks that the MF/GF isn't multiplicative, but the Exp bonus is (just like NV stacks are, which is why leveling is so fast, especially with the extra group bonus of 10-40%) so leveling is ridiculous. My Paragon 31 Monk is going up about a level a run still.

I started a fresh monk, set it to MP10, and played through 75% of act 1 solo, then opened the game up to public and we went four man from the spider cave, though the end of act 1, and all the way through act 2. My fresh monk is now level 27 after about 3 hours of play. That is exactly like Diablo 2, where you could set it to /players8 and reap experience, where the cost is only having to hit a demon 3 times to kill it instead of once or twice. When you look down and see you're getting 300%+ bonus experience, that is hilarious. It really is too bad I don't have a hellfire ring and/or Leoric ring to supplement my growth. At this rate, I might be past 60 when I finish Nightmare.

I like how when I stopped playing, a bad, low end Calamity was still a million+, now it is cheaper than +exp gear for level 15 characters. The game is definitely less terrible than it was before, and the fact that green and burnt orange items actually drop sometimes now is a plus.

Yup. I was thinking about starting to raise up a Barb to take advantage of the anniversary buff, but leveling to 60 is already super fast anyway so I'm trying to get my Monk to 50 before it runs out. Also I'd like to ideally get a few good drops to get some funds to decently gear him once I hit 60.

But yeah, the mob density stuff now is crazy. My favorite thing now is the double legendary drops, which I've had happen a few times now.

http://i.imgur.com/YnVpnaS.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/wCdafnQ.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/o7jokQR.gif

I'm having fun with this monk, using Fists of Thunder/Thunderclap and Sweeping Wind/Cyclone along with a 6/25 Won Khim Lau and about 2200 life on hit. Running MP4 inferno to start with, though I'm sure I will have to scale that back once I get towards the end of act 1 and into act 2, since I am basically geared on a budget and only getting about 50k paper DPS.

I had nearly a double legendary drop the other day, with one dropping about a full screen away from another. It was hell difficulty, so nothing to write home about. The other day, I found a low level legendary amulet, Squirt's Necklace, which has terrible stats but still sold for 2 million. Whatever, people are dumb I guess.

I just found a 272 str, 6% cc Immortal King's hat that is apparently worth many millions, and is probably the most valuable item I have found on the game. If I ever pick up my barbarian again, I guess I would regret selling it, but ehhhh, a quarter billion gold sounds better than holding some godly item just in case I ever need it in the future on a character I will probably never touch again.

Played som MP8 with a online friend, Daravon i get it now. Tanking these mobs is when the 'nades build shine. Still not getting any fucking legs tho.

Yeah, Grenades are all about face tanking, which in group play requires you to probably be on at least MP7, and more like 8+ since on anything lower a halfway decent group is just tearing through mobs. The Grenade setup totally works, but requires a bit of prep in getting the traps going and all, but it does shine at high MP.

Also Term I need to try to get you a 1h weapon; with 1.08 promoting group play a lot of people don't like it when people are running EF's (excluding Barbs in offhand, since WW won't proc offhand stuff) since it causes enemies to run off, so that's partially my bad in telling you to get one. It's not a huge deal either way though, but we should probably try to get you a replacement.

Edit: Also you actually probably want to try to upgrade that anyway, since having Life Steal on both weapons is pretty much mandatory for Monks once you start getting past MP3 or so anyway.

Just tell me what 1H to get and I'll try to get it to the best of my ability. Any required stats is an added bonus as well.

The Butcher's Sickle you have in your main hand is good; I have one in my mainhand as well that's only just very slightly better. From what I've discovered in getting my Monk up to 50 and hitting up the Monk subreddit hard is that for your Monk you pretty much want:

-A 1h with CD, LS, and a socket. Anything else you can get (like say Dex) is gravy, but you pretty much need to have those three, the CD is going to make up for not having your primary stat.
-For your offhand you pretty much want to shoot for getting a Won Khim Lau, at least provided that you're running Fists of Thunder and Sweeping Wind/Cyclone, which I don't think ANY viable Monk build doesn't already run outside of maybe a hardcore Tempest Rush build. You're going to lose sheet DPS, BUT the adds +% Lightning Damage and Lightning Skills do +% more damage are enormous, since FoT and Cyclones (which are your primary DPS output) will benefit directly. The main downside to the WKL though (aside from losing sheet dps) is that they always roll Dex so you can only get two random rolls which does force you into going with LS and an empty socket, so they're pretty in demand.

The Monk subreddit is here and the link on the right called the Monk Toolbox is what you're looking for where you can put in all your stats, and on one of the tabs (Misc or Various I think?) you can plug in the Lightning Skills do X% more damage number to get an approximate real DPS. In general that subreddit is fantastic though.

As a point of comparison, I got my offhand 775 damage WKL for I think around 20 mil, and on paper it looked like a 15k or so dps drop, but in terms of real dps it was actually a small boost AND I gained LS (my previous one didn't have it). Lightning Damage only rolls either 5-6%, but on the Lightning Skills do more damage try to get at least 20%, since that's the big one and it rolls anywhere from 15-25%. I'll keep an eye out for a decent one, I've got like 25-30 mil and any upgrades for me at this point are past that anyway so I'll grab one if I see a good deal or something.

So is everyone and their mother playing WW barb? is there a good build page so u can see what gear to try to get for your barb?

Everyone and their mother has been playing a WW Barb for 6 moths, it's clearly the best/most broken thing right now. I don't know shit about them, but the subreddit for Barbs just went up, I'd imagine there's build stuff there?

Diablo 3 Barbarians

Here's where I go for mine:

Fistfuck locustblowers

You can tell a class is broken when at both Paragon divides the IDENTICAL skill and rune setup is being used. Usually there's a split or a clear divide on some skills as you get to the higher Paragon/MP levels, but nooooope.

Also the DH sucks balls in high level group play, but playing MP10 with some super hardcore people from GAF is pretty great since they're so decked out it doesn't even matter, cleared like 7 legendaries in an hour. All crap, but still.

i know this (im not noob yo!!!! lol) but since i rejoined the ranks ALL I see is barbs. Seems like everyone that didnt leave just migrated towards barb.

It's hard to tell, I see a pretty good mix of classes in just playing random games; probably more DHs than anything actually, but that's because they benefit the most from party play since they need carrying the most honestly.

well my quest for WW gear ended quite quickly, a random dude dumped 13-16m of gear on me and said have fun.
Never expected that from a community where most seem to be douches.

Putting my DH on the backburner now (actually switched the grenade build to a perma strafe and had fun with it) and playing with this since it's fun as dicks.

such a different feeling not dying every 2-3 mobs lol.
Manko - Community - Diablo III

Ofc it's not the best gear, I need better weapons and a bit more Crit dmg and LoH, but i cleared out mp5 without too much trouble (fucking poison pits and tree sperm ssuck tho) so i'll manage for now. Free .99 always tastes good!

What is the deal here, last week 150 dex Unity rings cost 500k, today they are 10 times that. Good Natalya's Reflections could be had for under a million, now the cheapest bad one on auction house is 850k.

holy fuckballs did anyone else see all of the changes they're making for the upcoming expansion? If they actually deliver on this stuff this will finally be the true successor to D2 and the loot game king.

Bumping this since Term was talking about playing again; I'm taking a break at the moment but never really stopped. People may not be aware of all of the changes that they've made recently, and right now there is also a Public Test Realm up for Loot 2.0 (and other) changes for everyone, and there is additionally a very limited closed beta running for RoS. This is the most recent changelog for both from Blizzard, some minor tweaks have been made but nothing big. But given that some people here probably haven't even played since before they added Monster Power over a year ago they probably have no idea what's up. I have enough gold where I can get anybody who wants to get back on up to snuff in no time at all.

The tl;dr version is that Loot 2.0 combined with what's in RoS makes this look like this may finally be the true successor to Diablo 2. There's been no NDA for the RoS beta so people have been watching it played for a month or two now, and it looks like the real deal. Still have some complaints, but it's a significant improvement overall, and that's from someone who was still actively playing it.


HIGH LEVEL ADDTIONS TO VANILLA DIABLO 3 (currently available in PTR)
REAPER OF SOULS ADDITIONS/CHANGES (on top of the vanilla changes

Also all signs point to Ladders/Seasons being in the game (there's in-game leaderboard stuff for it) but it probably won't make launch. Also didn't touch on it but obviously there's a shitload of class changes, new abilities, etc. There's also like 5 or 6 additional tiers of gems added, a complete new gem type, etc.

Right now the only point of contention for most people is that they are severely limiting trading. They clearly want to get rid of botting given that they are completely killing the auction houses prior to RoS launch. Now pretty much all items, gems, etc are bind on account. These items can ONLY be traded to someone who was in the active game with you when you found them, and ONLY for 2 hours from the time it dropped (the game will indicate this on the item details). The community is pretty split on this one. Personally with drops happening mostly for your class, it kinda sucks if you're a Monk and fight a sweet Monk weapon that's maybe not quite as good as what you have, so you want to give it to your friend but he's not online and in your group so you can't. I'd like to maybe see them expand it a bit to maybe make it tradeable to anyone who was already on your friends list when the item dropped for 24 hours or something like that. At this point it seems unlikely this will change. On the plus side this encourages people to actually play the game instead of Auction Housing it, as well as play in groups.

The bounty/rift system is clearly built for you to just keep doing loot runs, and it gets rid of the campaign bullshit altogether which is fantastic. The Rifts are also crazy, they're totally random and there's videos of people finding random dungeons that are literally filled with cows, dozens of treasure goblins, etc. So the gameplay loop has been significantly tightened, which for a loot game is ideal. After watching a ton of RoS livestreams it's easily my most anticipated game this year.

Now that most people are way over and also possibly a little irritated with Borderlands 2, it seems like this thread should probably get a new title.

The sheer amount of changes Daravon's mentioned seems to make the game no less daunting for me to jump into. I've installed it and played an hour or two in. Need to find people to play the game with, but Tritoch has been disinterested. Even though I bought him his copy for Christmas. In 2012.

hjey oyu agotr a new title congratrs!

It's everything I ever wanted.

PS i love how tritoch can't disagree with what i've said and can only diss it

IT WAS FOR CHRISTMAS YOU ASSHOLE

::Implication you have a computer of some variety and not just a collection of outdated iPhones::

They are all daisy-chained together to produce roughly the equivalent of a 2009 MacBook Pro in computational power.

The game's honestly not that hard to get into; it's actually pretty simple. If you're totally unfamiliar with the game that may seem daunting, but it's really, really not. Also I approve of the title change.

If anyone's on US servers I can get you up and running no problem, I've got tons of gold and characters and whatnot.

So I bought this game (and preordered the expansion). Have I missed the boat completely or does anyone (besides Mo0, apparently?) still play this game?

Daravon does. But he's also in hiatus.

Yeah, I'm mostly just taking a break waiting for the expansion to come out, and using the time to try to finish up some other games. Starting brand new right now is probably kind of weird with the expansion hitting in about a month that will change things up quite a bit, and make the base 1-60 leveling much different. For example, right now you have to beat Normal to unlock Nightmare, then beat that to unlock Hell, etc. When the expansion hits they remove that, it's just one go through and you're just choosing the difficulty, etc.

If anyone needs help or stuff before the expansion hits (when gold and most items become account bound and the auction house goes away) I can certainly hop on to help though. The Expansion is adding a new character class so if nothing else there will be a lot of people with level 1 characters of that class day 1 there, albeit with probably a twinked ring.

GET YOUR HORSEBOOTS ON BITCHES

Not even going to bother quoting it, it's too large. Also Class Changes aren't included at that link because they're still working on how they're going to post them because apparently right now it's at 55 pages. Shit be real son. So fucking good, this is basically a 99% different game now. Also if you want to see all of the item changes and new legendaries the game guide is updated for 2.0.1 here. Some of the stuff is crazy; the DH has a set now that when full equipped gives you +500 Dex, all of your Companions at once, and any Sentries you have out actually fire your Hatred skill instead. Hilarious.

Wat

http://i.imgur.com/yg3JNrr.jpg

2-3 hours into the patch and I've gotten 4 legendaries, including this which was a straight upgrade on both of my rings on my DH that has fairly top-tier gear and ~700 hours of gametime:

http://i.imgur.com/wT1g9cY.jpg

YEAHHHHHHHHHH

6 hours today at Paragon 60 and Torment Level 5 and nothing. I get jack shit in this game.

Also you can add me and stuff. Lukage#1610

For anyone coming back to the game after a long hiatus (or if you're a new) this is a fantastic short guide to what's up:

Diablo III Welcome Back Guide - Wowhead News

Wow, you are the unluckiest bastard in the world. There's an internal timer in the game that after a set amount of time (~2 hours) if you're actively playing and haven't gotten any legendaries it starts slowly increasing the odds of you getting one until one drops. That's honestly nuts. I'm in the GAF clan, and everytime someone in the clan ID's a legendary/set drop the game broadcasts it in the clan chat (which you can disable, but it's fun seeing what people got) and that thing is going off all the time with people getting stuff. I've gotten in maybe around 15-20 hours since the patch went up and I've gotten at least that many legendaries, if not more.

I already had pretty high end (but not top or god tier) stuff on my DH, but I've already found two upgrades I'm using:

http://i.imgur.com/WaqBWIv.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/poDSLlU.jpg

Also found a bunch of stuff that wasn't quite upgrades that I gave to alts, and I found the new Nat boots, which once I can get one more piece of them will be an upgrade with the new 2-set bonus on it.

Honestly this game is fantastic now. Literally everyone I know who is coming back to is in love with it, this is the game that should have launched in 2012. Still a couple of things I'm not super thrilled about (mostly how extremely restrictive trading is) but it's fun to play, you can actually make builds around specific gear, and the addition of clans and communities is awesome. Since the game auto broadcasts found legendaries to clanmates, now everyone in the GAF chat harshly rates people's drops, and a lot of people are getting help and partying up using it. Good times.

I've just been playing around on the PS3 version lately. I get as many drops in that version than I did with the PC version: which is not at all. The AH closes in a couple of weeks. Shame I can't find something that will sell.

Anyone getting Reaper of Souls? I may try and get it when they release Diablo on PS4 as I believe I read something the next gen versions will have the expansion included too.

Change of events: shit dropped for me.

Got plans for the Seven Sins shoulders and rolled good ones the first try. And found a sweet helm too!

With the 2.0.1 patch, this game went from being slightly tedious to HOLY SHIT I HAVE TO STOP AND KILL EVERYTHING BECAUSE I NEED TO UPGRADE MY SHIT. The difficulty scale (which felt appropriate before) is now tied to a much better loot drop rate, and I've seen a dozen or so legendaries in maybe ten hours of play. At level 57 though, it seems the upgrades aren't dropping as often, and now I find myself generally stopping only for elites and champions. I had the difficulty up to expert, but it was slowing me down and I wasn't seeing the kinds of drops I would've expected for that level, despite the increased difficulty, so I have it back to hard again. I may increase it again as I get into the 60s.

+50% XP from now until RoS launches just got hotfixed in GO GO GO

So you taught the plans to your blacksmith for the Seven Sins?

OMG Daravon I started playing my mage again, and this morning someone dropped a chantodo's thingy. That's my first super-thingy in ever, I think. I was so excited. But I guess with +50% exp, now would be the time to play all the other classes.

Yeah, I played for a while with Term tonight, and in ~3 hours he want from Paragon 44 to 51 or so, it's crazy.

so, verdict? Reaper of Dongs made it more fun to play? Or did it just raise the soft cap until you don't get any good drops and you stop playing?

For me, it was both. I was pleased with all the loot I was getting until I got to level 70, then the good drops stopped dropping. The loot really starts coming on higher Torment difficulties, but since I haven't been able to bring my Wizard up to a decent enough DPS to go past Torment I by myself, I tried starting a Monk to spice things up. Nope. I haven't played in two weeks, and once Watch Dogs comes out it'll be a while before I get back into it.

It's my GotY at this point. You hit a gear wall, but it takes a LOT of time and effort to hit. I'm at like ~200 hours since RoS came out, mostly been playing DH and still haven't hit it, there's multiple pieces I'm missing. Adventure Mode is so good and game-changing that I literally can't imagine playing vanilla D3 at this point. It still has some minor issues, but this is the game it should have been at launch, and overall this is probably the best loot game of all time. The public turnaround on the game has been hilarious to watch.

Damn ok this didnt help me at all lol... You can get it quite cheap like 20 bucks from the net so i might get it anyway. Got bored of Dark souls 2 already.