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?