Diablo III - It's official

[homerdog]

My main character is a level 64 barbarian, but this weekend I started a Witch Doctor and got to level 49. Double XP weekend . Also most of that was on Torment 1 since I had some legendaries in the stash that the Witch Doctor could use.

Now I'm at the big "Butcher" guy in the cage of fire. Have died many times here... closest I got him was to about 1/8 life, then he stood on top of a healing well preventing me from using it and I slowly burned to death

 

[Grall]

Actually may be it is only me but overall female characters look better in the games.

It's the female's lot in games to look pretty.

Personally I prefer the male wizard and demon hunter, primarily because I don't like the female voice actors for these classes. In two years I haven't spent more than ten seconds or so with any of the others, so I really don't know how the voices compare between sexes, nor am I all that certain how the feminine counterparts actually look like...

I hope the fem witch doctor isn't as spazzy/parkinson-like as the male. I think I would enjoy witch doctoring considering their skill set (summons, magic, which was what was cool with D2 necromancers, which WDs resemble strongly), however the art style for WD armors and weapons simply SUCK. I don't enjoy looking at a walking garbage pile as I play...

Templar I prefer the female, for both voice and the physical appearance. The male's voice sounds so utterly...boring. Detached. He speaks like a traffic warden or something like that.

When it comes to wizard versus demon hunters... I dunno. I actually prefer wizards' play mechanics and offensive skillset over that of the demon hunter. SO OFTEN I am just all out of hatred with my demon hunter, and the hatred generator skills all do pitiful damage. I also feel like my AoE suck as demon hunter; single-target DPS feels strong but I don't quite know what to pick for AoE (and there's so many situations that require AoE in Diablo games.

Strafe is visually unimpressive, it just doesn't pack much punch really, there's elemental arrow - ice, but the arrows only split down-stream; if a wall of enemies rather than a column come at me, it's not much use. Multishot is so DAMN COSTLY. A couple bursts and I'm all out of hatred.

Wizard regens resource MUCH faster, and chain lightning is a great AoE, plus it regens resource. Most other skills also have inherent AoE effects or runes that grant them. Plus, very high damage. It's the defensive skills that are boring/lackluster IMO...

 

[Malo]

I just loaded this up again after not playing for almost a year I think? My highest was a 46 Barb, which is now 52. It's certainly changed a bit. The drops are just crazy now in comparison, at my level it's primarly rare, with some blues and I've actually had 6 legendaries last 2 days? That's 6 times my previous amount.

I like that almost all of the drops are more geared towards your class, but I guess there's no more "hey this would be good on my Monk", so I find I just sell or salvage everything I don't use.

So there's no more Normal, Nightmare, Hell etc? It's replaced with the difficulty levels? I guess Diablo (once you've finished it the first time) is about doing wherever you want with your party (or solo) for runs. You can just reset the questline anyway so it actually makes more sense the way it is now.

Hard say if you have some rares from RoS but I don't have that and I'm going through the entire thing on Hard now, seem to be doing fine.

 

[Grall]

Hard isn't so hard really if you just have a decent understanding of how the game works. Some of the enemies' attacks can be fairly nasty (like the demons that drop like meteors from the sky mostly in outdoor areas of act 4; if an elite pack of those land straight on you you'll probably die outright), but other than that, hard is more like normal, while normal is easymode for newbies.

 

[Malo]

The Butcher just dropped Messerschmidt's Reaver for me, should be some fun playing with that

 

[homerdog]

I finally beat The Butcher on Torment 1 with my level 49 Witch Doctor. Well technically I didn't beat him, since my brother jumped in with his level 63 Demon Hunter. It was an outright slaughter, and I got a good piece of legendary gear from it to boot

 

[Grall]

Looked at the list of banned D3 character names at a glance, and it seems "vagina" is twice as bad as "hitler"...

You're also not allowed to call your character "agnostic", which I find rather bizarre. Especially as I don't think you ever even see character names in multiplayer D3 games - isn't it your battletag only?

Of course, I suppose "agnostic" isn't an allowed word as battletag either then. How about "existentialist"; also banned? ...Nope, but considering the precedent, it certainly ought to be.

 

[AlphaWolf]

You can see the names of characters that your friends are playing.

 

[Grall]

Ah, thank you.

 

[liolio]

I finally beat The Butcher on Torment 1 with my level 49 Witch Doctor. Well technically I didn't beat him, since my brother jumped in with his level 63 Demon Hunter. It was an outright slaughter, and I got a good piece of legendary gear from it to boot

That would have been quite a feat, actually even getting there at lvl 49 is quite great.
I got my ass kicked a couple of times by Nathael yesterday night in master difficulty with my wizard.
It is lvl 69, though I've no paragon level on the EU servers and my gear ain't great (or optimized, all the sockets on my gear are vacant).

Grall you might be right about the wizard, actually even the defensive are great I read more about possible builds there are some really clever uses of mirror images (which cast Black holes). A lot of builts use lot of slot on "magic weapon", "x armor", etc. with really few (like 2 + teleport) active skills but there are others ways around /builts.

 

[liolio]

I noticed that the game has just been updated

They improved hatred/fury generators for Barb and Demon hunter that hit ~single targets among other balancing acts and fixing.

 

[pcchen]

I noticed that the game has just been updated

They improved hatred/fury generators for Barb and Demon hunter that hit ~single targets among other balancing acts and fixing.

I have yet to try but I hope that makes my barb's fury generation better. Right now my barb has to rely on "standing-in-fire" style fury generation, but that's getting impractical after T2.

 

[homerdog]

It seems that the quality of yellow gear is improved from when I first started playing a week and a half ago. Has anyone else noticed that? Or is it something to do with the Reaper of Souls expansion which I didn't have for the first few days?

 

[Grall]

Level 61+ drops are vastly better than level 60, so if you dinged into the expansion levels a week ago that should explain your discovery...

 

[homerdog]

I did notice that with my level 64 Barbarian, but the Witch Doctor isn't even 60 yet. Guess I'm just lucky

I love playing the Witch Doctor. I have a little routine that will totally wear out crowds of enemies on Torment in a hurry. Summon 4 flaming zombie dogs and a stinky gargantuan, and enable the passive ability that summons those little psycho dagger weilding skeleton midgets. Throw a few firebombs that spew after landing, then create a taunting wall of zombies in the middle of the crowd, and firebat the hell out of them. Liberally apply Soul Harvest with the slowdown rune and repeat as necessary

 

[Malo]

Hard isn't so hard really if you just have a decent understanding of how the game works. Some of the enemies' attacks can be fairly nasty (like the demons that drop like meteors from the sky mostly in outdoor areas of act 4; if an elite pack of those land straight on you you'll probably die outright), but other than that, hard is more like normal, while normal is easymode for newbies.

I found I had to bump up the difficulty as my experience with the Barb and my equipment got better. Going through it on Master now and doing ok. Currently lvl 60/12.

 

[Grall]

Tried torment for the first time, and all i got are 4 weaksauce legendaries, half of which are level 65/68, and random yellows. I am NOT wading through stuff, for sure! And this was in a party where all of the other players were paragon 150+... I am still not 50 myself.

Did bounties instead of quest mode, and experience and gold was hugely HUGELY better. Still unsure if gold income actually is enough to keep ahead of the gem drops - probably not, as the already ridiculous costs increase exponentially. I still haven't managed to craft even ONE max-level gem, and I've sunk like 12 millions into trying to get there... Feh.

This really ought to get changed. Either nerf gem drops HUGELY or cut crafting cost hugely. Suggest the former, actually...

 

[snarfbot]

once you get into the higher torment levels gold starts rolling in at an insane rate. even if you blow through bounties in normal mode youll wind up making a good chunk of gold.

the worst thing is pulling gems from sockets. that can get pricy if you wanna compare 2 items for instance.

 

[iroboto]

Is anyone else having major frame dips with Reaper of Souls?

I don't even know what part of my PC is teh bottleneck, my frames will drop to 0 upon opening specific menu layovers, and rifts are pretty much more or less killing my PC.

I am likely going to move D3 to my SSD drive to see if that improves some of the initial loading problems, and I'm almost tempted to get more RAM cause 4gb is clearly not enough.

My CPU also might be a bit weak, sometimes there is so much stuff happening on screen at once with 4 players and a large group of rift mobs, I drop to about 3 seconds stuck on a single frame at times.

 

[Grall]

Only real dips I've seen - other than the persistent, bizarre 30FPS crashes that happen randomly throughout the entire game regardless of how little is going on - are on the bridge area in act 3. There FPS lags brutally for no real discernible reason.

Seems there's some bizarre coding bottleneck somewhere in the D3 engine causing this that they're never bothering to fix, seeing as it happens even on 4+GHz PCs with the fattest GPUs available. I guess they're simply too busy rolling around on top of piles and piles of money to bother.