Diablo III - It's official

Taking a peek at D3 last night I encountered one of the new treasure goblins last night. They were running around dropping masses of blood shards instead of gold!

 

@Malo - it's the new patch. You have a couple new types of gobs now in addition to the old, one is the blood thief you encountered. There's another that drop crafting recipes, and an "uber gob" critter as well that drops better/more treasure when killed. All have a chance to spawn the greed realm portal.

 

Played a few rounds at T4 difficulty...I died, but still could beat the rift quite easily.

Got the grin reaper mask for my WD...still figuring out what I can do with it!

How much toughness do you guys have? How much is recommended for T6?

 

My WD uses the mojo that redirects 25-30ish percent damage to my zombie dogs. It helps with survivability, but I still can't do very high torment levels because my damage-dealing is too low. It takes a LONG time to grind elite packs down on T3, much less anything even higher, too long. I'm also unable to reach higher than say, GR16-18 in the trial. I could probably finish a higher rift in time though, but I tend to just choose to upgrade my gems instead of struggling on.

 

Reached GR level 20 on T4 in the trial and finished it in time...but also choose to upgrade my main gem.

I found the Grin Reaper mask and really think it helps me a lot. I am currently experimenting with my built and already find a nice modification:

when the skeletons are summoned, they also use the attacks I am using - but only a few of them, not all are possible. For instance, they use all the primary attacks it seems. But they also use the zombie bears for instance. But what works quite well: I included now the spider queen attack. I can only summon one of these at a given time, but it seems that my friendly skeletons can summon as much as they want!! So I did runs with 15 fetish and 10 spider queens running around and finishing basically everything in my way.

I have one slot where I am experimenting atm, but can't find anything good so far: I hoped the skeletons also summon the giant...but they don't. I replaced it with the bears...and it seems to work quite well. But I am still searching for an improvement like the spider queen...any ideas?

My toughness is about 11.8 million. My attack is about 640k. But my life per second is only at 340k or so...this is quite low, but it seems that this is not so important for T4.
I also hit paragon level 93...still a long way to go.

Also, grinding for good gear is meh!

 

Diablo is essentially one big grind for gear, there's not really any other point to the game once you pass through the campaign for the first time.

 

I know! But I want good gear noooow!!!

 

Ok, I find another good skill for the Grin Reaper mask: when I change my Acid Cloud Rune to the Lob Blob one: I can only cast 3 at any given time. So, the mimic cast those quite often and it seems again (similar to the spider queen) that they don't have a number limit...not 100% sure yet, but it is funny having an army of spider queens, fetish and blobs around the screen killing everything!

Yesterday I did the 'kill Malthael' bounty mission...Malthael is imo the hardest boss around. On T4, I killed him, did not die (was a lot of luck involved) but the battle took like forever

I really hope that I find the Zunimassa stuff...I want my fetish to stay! I have a lot of Jade Armor stuff (I guess for pieces) already...but I am not sure what to do with it.

I need a better belt first!

I still have one skill slot open where I experiment: at the moment I use fetish army...but the cool down time is just a bit to long for my taste. So I am searching for a better skill. I once used Soul Harvest...I need to check this out today.

 

I use now Soul Harvester with life regen rune in my open slot.

This really helps me to boost my toughness up to 12.5 mill (when I hit 5 enemies) and my damage up to 708k.

With this, I tried T5: completed the five bounty missions and completed a standard rift. It was tough and I died couple of times...but it worked.

I really need to find better legendaries...in my last few runs I got nothing useful!

 

In a public rift last night and we ran across dozens of different gobs scattered around one of the large act 2 desert maps. Way too many escaped, but I still came away with 100s of gems and over 1k blood shards. Never seen anything like it before.

 

I found a new legendary gem which deals 2000% weapon damage over 10s when I hit an enemy...I like it!

Also found a legendary gem, where my minions deal 15% more damage...holy shit! I need another legendary ring with a socket!!

 

Yes the new gems are fantastic, especially when you hit level 25 on them and you get the extra power. It can take many souls to get a socket on a ring though, it's one of the rare rolls when transmuting.

 

So, is it possible to get a socket from transmuting?
Does this depend on which property one tries to change?

 

@Billy Idol
Yes. Click the button with the question mark next to each property in the transmute window to see which affixes you can roll if you change that property.

You will need a lot of imperial gems too if you're unlucky with the dice, so don't burn all your marquises combining larger versions. Make imperials of the color you need for that piece of jewelry (you can socket your necklace too with epic gems), then gain a couple transmute achievements while trying to get that damn woman to give you a socket...

 

Thanks...I'll try it out.

Just got finally the legendary ring which decreases the number of set pieces which you need to get the bonus.
I have 5 pieces of the Jade amory...not sure if I want to go that route.

I also found a second zunimassa set piece: now I have 740k damage, 13mill toughness, 600k life regen...with soul harvest this goes up to 800k and 14mill. I hope I get more Zunimassa set pieces, but I want to keep my Grin Reaper mask, so I am happy about the ring...TGR for the win!

T3 is autopilot, T4 is ok, T5 I need to be careful. So here my question: is there any bonus in grinding in higher Torment levels? Or can I just grind in T4? I know I get more experience and gold...but is the chance higher getting legendaries?

 

Yes, your MF bonus (which affects legs, and now ancient legs) goes up with higher torment levels.

 

There's a question mark in the game settings next to the difficulty level you have selected which shows all the percentage modifiers.

 

Ok, finished the bounty missions again, got again the ring with set req decrease, modified it to get a socket...nope

Meh. But this ring was still a bit stronger. Pushes my toughness to over 14 mill!

With this, I tried a T5 great rift lvl 22 and finished with over 5min left! That was cool

Bad thing: got again the zunimassa boots...nooooo, I need the other pieces!

 

Just so you know the difficulty rating you're on for torment levels has no bearing on greater rift difficulty. That is purely based on the grift level.

 

I've decided to take a step off the stats grinding in Diablo 3 and orient myself more toward what's fun. So my holy shotgun crusader build got reversed back to the Capt America build, and my wizard's firebird has changed to a mixed Vyr and Tal Rasha build (both maxed out), with the wand of Woh. I've mixed dmg types so I can abuse the one passive that stacks against mobs taking different dmg types compared to everything being fire with the firebird build.

The crusader is definitely a lot more fun now, realized I really haven't played him since I got that holy shotgun build tweaked. Everything for that build centers around keeping his wrath fueled and just right-clicking to blast enemies. It's boring. It's also very very powerful when your primary attack is a constant 900+% dmg.