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Diablo III Thread 2.0

43K views 763 replies 29 participants last post by  Iron1 
#1 ·
Don't know if any of you guys that used to play this had heard about this, but Blizz made some pretty big changes ahead of the upcoming expansion.

Basically they:

1) Totally redid the difficulty system. Normal/Nightmare/Hell/Inferno are gone. Instead we've got a bunch of new difficulty settings culminating in Torment, which then has a slider from 1-6, functioning kind of like Monster Power did previously. Essentially, the higher you go, the harder it gets but the more loot/gold/xp you get. Also, you don't have to run characters through the story 3 fucking times to get to 60 anymore. If you want, you can start a fresh character and run through on Expert or Master and level up way faster. You can also lower difficulty on the fly if you get stuck somewhere, and you can raise it by just jumping out to the main menu and then get right back into the game.

2) Redid loot (again). Drop rate are way buffed, legendaries actually drop kinda regularly now, and the game takes your class into account when rolling the stats on some loot, so you'll see more actually useful shit and less +Strength +Dexterity boots. They also redid a ton of the legendaries so they actually have cool and unique effects instead of just bigger stats. My friend found a legendary which on hit, summons a treasure goblin that follows him around collecting white items. After it collects a certain number, it drops a rare or legendary item. There are others that summon shit to fight for you or give you some kind of AoE. You know, actual fun shit.

3) Changed paragon levels. Instead of getting a bonus to magic find or whatever it was they did before, each paragon level gives you a point you can spend in one of four categories of buffs - stuff like pumping your main stat, movement speed, crit chance, max mana, etc by a small amount. On top of that, your paragon level is account wide, but the actual points are per character. So if you get to paragon 20 on your wizard, when you start a brand new demon hunter, he'll have his own 20 points to spend on whatever.

4) Closed the auction house and real money auction house! This one actually doesn't take effect for a couple of weeks, but yup. No more auction house since it's actually possible to find good gear in game now.

5) Overhauled a ton of skills for all the classes. They completely replaced some abilities altogether, and a lot of skills had their runes reworked entirely. There's a lot more freedom in how you build your character now - you don't need to use the one true build just to make it through the game, and a lot of the new/changed skills are ridiculously fun.

6) Crafting actually produces useful gear now, and they unified all the crafting mats. No more having half your stash filled up with all the different level crafting mats. They actually did the same with potions too: There's just one type of health potion now and it restores 60% of your health, period.

Here's a video explaining it:

I gotta say, I had given up on this game a few months after launch because once you hit 60 it was horribly unfun. Inferno was a fucking grind, you never got any decent loot, and anything worthwhile on the auction house cost 50 million + gold. My friend had good things to say about the patch so I decided to give it a shot and...damn. Kudos to Blizzard for listening to the community and putting in the effort to do such a major overhaul of this game this long after release, and for removing the RMAH cash cow.

Within the first two hours I had replaced pretty much all my level 60 wizard's gear with better stuff from drops, including a couple of pretty rad legendaries. This is how the game should have launched, but better late than never. I'm actually considering picking up the expansion now, where before that was about as likely as getting a legendary drop prior to this patch. :rofl: Definitely check it out if you enjoyed the vanilla game but got burnt out on the utter bullshittery of the endgame.
 
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#37 ·
Found a pretty effective wizard build for mowing through Act 1 on Torment 2, even with pretty mediocre gear. I found a nice two hander the other night, and I have a few pieces with +arcane damage and +Disintegrate damage, but overall my stats are nothing to write home about. Even so, with this build I was able to move through at a really good pace with only the occasional death to the inevitable waller/vortex/arcane/desecrate jerks.

Wizard - Game Guide - Diablo III

Basically you find some monsters, drop a Stop Time bubble in front of you, then drop a Blizzard on top of that, then just blast away with Disintegrate while they feebly try to get at you. With Astral Presence, Power of the Storm and a little bit of Arcane Power on Crit, you can channel disintegrate almost indefinitely. Procedure's the same for elite packs, except you pop Improved Archon and just burn them down before they start dropping acid pools and what not everywhere.

The only isssue with it is that Time Stop isn't that useful against bosses, and if it's a fight where you have to move a lot and you can't continuously channel Disintegrate, your effective damage drops quite a bit, and you might start running into the enrage timer. But since there are no more Nephalim Valor stacks anymore and you can change skills whenever, it's not a huge problem.
 
#39 ·
I started a new character last night on the normal difficulty level. Certainly a better game than it was. Picking up cooler loot and I haven't lag died once (i guess they fixed that long ago though).

I never played through the whole campaign because I got so frustrated with it.
 
#42 ·
I hit lag like 2-3 times which was weird as shit! The single-but-multiplayer is dumb as fuck IMO.

Anyway the chain lightning shit on wizard is fucking awesome :lol:

I think I'll bump up the difficulty next time I play because normal is just too easy.
 
#46 ·
I got a legendary hat for my barbarian that not only makes you immune to poison damage, but heals you for 13% of whatever poison damage you would have taken...

...brb, going to take my revenge on those fucking Act 2 wasps. :hungus:
 
#47 ·
Bump, because this has been a tremendous amount of fun since I've been playing again.

I'm currently rocking a barbarian (Level 24, searching for the second sword shard in act 1 - between playing Hard and the EX bonus, I'm cruising) with a 1-handed Axe that deals a fair amount of damage to begin with (~36 and change DPS, which at the time I got it was hands down the most I'd seen), has a whole bunch of other useful abilities, but also summons some sort of spirit beast to fight next to me about 10% of the time when I hit something, which given that I'm a Barbarian is quite a lot. It's awesome. :lol: I'm leveling up to the point where I'm beginning to occasionally find other items with similar DPS and I'll be sad to rotate out of this one. :lol:
 
#48 ·
Does anyone else feel like the loot changes might be throwing off the game balance? When I originally played through on normal, it was a pretty good balance of easy normal monsters, challenging special monsters, and difficult bosses. I remember that fighting Belial in particular made me really think about what I was doing. I planned every move, saved health orbs until I really needed them, planned specific times for using Ignore Pain, etc.

This time, I started in Hell difficulty at level 40 or so. It was pretty easy, so I bumped it up to Inferno, and then when I hit 60, Torment I. I'm still mostly breezing through, so I might bump it up again soon. I don't think I have gear that is especially epic, and my skill set wasn't thought out particularly in depth. Belial and Cydaea went down like bitches without me even having to try. If Azmodan is the same, I'm trying Torment III.
 
#52 ·
This time, I started in Hell difficulty at level 40 or so. It was pretty easy, so I bumped it up to Inferno, and then when I hit 60, Torment I. I'm still mostly breezing through, so I might bump it up again soon. I don't think I have gear that is especially epic, and my skill set wasn't thought out particularly in depth. Belial and Cydaea went down like bitches without me even having to try. If Azmodan is the same, I'm trying Torment III.
I'm wondering if it's the XP bonus in play right now, actually. I started a new Barbarian in Hard, was fine for a while, but then had to drop it back to Regular right around the quest or the Skeleton King's crown. Then, as I leveled up further and further, I was able to get back to hard. I'm now a level 26, Cain just died, and I'm trying to rescue Tyriel, and I'm pretty much mowing things down in Hard mode. I' remember beating the game in maybe high 20s when I first played it and my Wizard who's still in Act 3 from her Nightmare playthrough is like Level 42, and I'm on pace to get into the 40s before the end of this playthrough, I think.

The barbarian has been fun (Whirlwind is just a blast, especially when coupled with a weapon that gains life on hit) and I'm sure part of it is I'm just getting better at pairing weapons and abilities and abilities with other abilities. But I'm kind of curious to try another Wizard and try to play a little more tactically instead of rushing into the middle of everything.
 
#49 ·
Work had this for $20 so I snagged it because why the fuck not? Any advice for which class to roll first? I usually like an overall mix of long-range and close-range combat but it's been a LONG time since I've played a PC game like Diablo (probably since D1 and that had 3 classes to pick from)
 
#53 ·
I think they purposely reworked it so that if you have a handle on the game you can safely play on hard/expert/master, even on a sub 60 character and level up way faster. Doubly so if you already have some gold/gems/a leveled up blacksmith from a previous character to work with.

I started a witch doctor from scratch the other night on Master difficulty and got to level 7 or 8 within a few minutes. Once I get him to a level where I can start crafting some gear and handing down higher level gems I'm sure the levels will start flying by. It's a nice change, because playing through the easier difficulties 3 times on second or third characters was super tedious.
 
#54 ·
I think they purposely reworked it so that if you have a handle on the game you can safely play on hard/expert/master, even on a sub 60 character and level up way faster. Doubly so if you already have some gold/gems/a leveled up blacksmith from a previous character to work with.

I started a witch doctor from scratch the other night on Master difficulty and got to level 7 or 8 within a few minutes. Once I get him to a level where I can start crafting some gear and handing down higher level gems I'm sure the levels will start flying by. It's a nice change, because playing through the easier difficulties 3 times on second or third characters was super tedious.
I kind of wish the Stash and blacksmith/gems DID'T carry over, or could be optionally shut off to just that one character. Starting a new game with 60k gold and a high level blacksmith just seemed a little unfair, and I kind of miss the feeling of having to scrape by and feel like you needed to horde your gold carefully to buy a cool item.
 
#56 ·
You could always throw away your gear and cash!

So at Torment II, I didn't even break a sweat killing Azmodan. He pretty much just stood there while I hacked away at him. I don't want to bump the difficulty up any further, though, because the yellow-text monsters are really dangerous now.
 
#58 ·
Then your only option is to start a spreadsheet tracking the gold, gems and crafting mats earned by each character so you know how much you're allowed to use on a given dude. :rofl:

Now that you mention it though it would be kind of cool to have the option to start a character totally from scratch.
 
#60 ·
Also re: leveling new characters on higher difficulties. I really dig the new Paragon system. Playing my 60 barb and wizard with the 50% xp buff, I've racked up quite a few paragon levels, and it's pretty neat to then start a new witch doctor or demon hunter and be able to throw him a bunch of extra Str/Int/Dex, move speed, life on hit, etc.
 
#62 ·
Yes, they were separate in D2. I remember, because my friends and I used to have to open a private game and hold it open for each other while we dropped stuff on the ground (or gave it momentarily to each other) and came back with another character to collect it.
 
#68 ·
And gold only stacked to 5000 or something, and it took up inventory space, so eventually you had to leave your king's ransom laying around in piles over by Farnham. :rofl:

I remember one time I was playing online and offered to dupe a sword I had for this guy, but I don't think he spoke English. I put the sword on the ground to do the potion trick and he started going for it, so I picked it up quickly. "YOU GIVE SWARD!?" he said. I explained that I would but he couldn't pick it up yet. Put it down again, he goes for it. Pick it back up. "YOU GIVE SWARD!?" We went on and on like that for a while until I just gave up and let him have the fucking sward.

Oh, open BNet. You were great.
 
#69 ·
:lol:

One of my more thought-provoking early internet experiences was actually on battle.net. I'd forgotten all about this until this thread, actually. I was playing on battle.net multiplayer, and I forget the class but I was playing a character named Jamal - I forgot why, but something vaguely Arabian Nights seemed to fit.

So, anyway, I start talking to this guy, and we start a multiplayer quest together. We played for maybe an hour or two, I think, and got as far as the Skeleton King and the Butcher before I had to call it a night for some reason.

As we played, however, we were shooting the shit, and over time it gradually became apparent to me that 1.) my co-player was black, and 2.) he assumed I was black, because of my username. It was kind of a surprising realization - I'd given him zero other context, and he just came to that conclusion and seemed a lot more comfortable playing nerdy video games with some random black kid than some random white kid. Once I realized he thought I was black I didn't do anything to change his mind - I didn't give a shit personally and I didn't see the point - but I just thought it was really interesting, and it was a really blunt first-hand realization of the truism (and back in '97 or whenever the net was so young it was barely a truism) that you didn't know WHO you were talking to on the other side of the internet.

So, thank you, Battle.net, for a thought-provoking life lesson. :lol:
 
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