3301

Javazons were one of my favorites. And 8 player hell-viable too! Just took a little Crushing Blow and that self-replenishing unique Javelin (just to remove the annoyance of having to carry a bunch of regular ones and the need to restock).

Which makes me appreciate the D3 decision to remove the need to buy/pick up projectiles. Having to worry about arrow/bolt counts with the Amazon in D2 sometimes got really annoying.

Heh, this isn’t the first discussion about D2 to break out in this D3 thread. And as I’m sure you know, thread derailment is a proud Qt3 tradition.

3302

It’s not a good idea to pump vitality in this case, but actually dexterity. With ~50% or higher block you have a much better chance of survival (potion then teleport), rather than relying on a tiny health pool, taking a couple of hits, then dying anyway.

Actually your argument was to pump points in energy not in dex.

Yes sorc who use shield should put point into dex up to a certain point depends on whatever shield they are using.

but beyond that, there isn’t anymore points to dump points into dex, vit is pretty much a point dumper, you should never choose to put points in energy over vitality.

My sorc was using Blackoak shield which pretty much is have freebie dex tossed in so dex wasn’t even that important.

Oh yeah I love Meph run a lot more than Bhaal run since I can solo it in less than 3-4 minutes a run compare to baal.

3303

Optimal build for each build was (90% of the time) put stats for gear then dump into vitality. A handful of real exceptions existed like block builds and the energy-shield sorc (which was a specific type of sorc, not all sorcs).

Sorc putting pts into energy and Amazons into dexterity is what the game manual says, not what made sense.

I don’t know what the vast majority did. It doesn’t matter though, because like 2e D&D, Diablo’s stat system was very counter-intuitive and made it easy to gimp your character by doing what seemed logical (sorcs want energy! barbs want strength!). A system that misleads the majority of casual players is not a good system.

Second, my “essay” was a small sampling of the many variations in builds people actually used in the game, in hell difficulty, with success. In this thread I did not read someone mentioned the Charged Bolt sorceress, a skill thought useless by the unwashed masses playing their lightning nova sorceresses, but ludicrously powerful when properly built and used, even in hell difficulty- a build that put nothing into vitality.

I made a charged bolt sorc (maybe that’s the mention you saw), and I pumped vitality. Energy is actually entirely trivial with certain easy to acquire gear and infinite mana potions.

3304

The Sorceress got so little health out of pumping vitality that an Act 5 Hell mode unique or even champion could take her out in a few hits. And without teleport you were unlikely to run away even if you survived a couple of hits, because those final area uniques were super fast.
It’s not a good idea to pump vitality in this case, but actually dexterity. With ~50% or higher block you have a much better chance of survival (potion then teleport), rather than relying on a tiny health pool, taking a couple of hits, then dying anyway.

Yes, block sorc was viable but the drawback was the block hitstun animation (which you don’t mention). If you weren’t doing block sorc, the reason you pumped vitality is because there was nothing else good to pump. Unless you specifically made an energy shield sorc, which was more or less killed by 1.10 introducing synergies, using energy shield was a very BAD idea for a reason mentioned by idrisz. You don’t want damage to also cripple your ability to cast spells.

I don’t know how long you played, some of this sounds like vanilla D2 theorycrafting, but several years after 1.10 (in my experience) sorcs never used energy shield unless they focused their build around it, which they rarely did.

3305

I don’t even know half of what you people are talking about.

3306

Me either. I thought there would be some interesting D3 info here. I was wrong.

3307

On a related Diablo III note (wait, what?) I hit level 13 with my Monk in the beta. That’s Monk, Barbarian, and Wizard that I hit 13 with and I really, really like all three enough to play for my first character, so I’m honestly not sure where to go.

Skills I really like with those classes (some skills I liked but didn’t want to spend an entire thread page one, these are the ones I can’t imagine doing without, though I suppose eventually I’ll have to):

Wizard-
Electrocute is amazingly powerful and fun to use!
Arcane Orb (especially with the double range rune) is incredibly satisfying.
Arcane Torrent looks really cool and is effective as well. DEVESTATING.
Frost Nova is very handy, especially when you get that first rune that makes the Frozen effect chain. Crazy good to combo that with Electrocute.
Diamond Form I don’t use as the beta is pretty easy for a level 10-13 character, but it’s very powerful and also an amazing visual effect.

Barbarian-
I will never, ever get tired of Cleave with the rune that makes cleave’d targets explode and damage nearby enemies. Ever. Two handed weapons for the win!
Ground Stomp is very complimentary to the Barbarian style, and never gets old.
Leap Attack is probably the most useful ablity in the Barbarian arsenal.
Also, seeing those big double yellow damage numbers fly around when you score crits is something I will never tire of seeing, and as such the Ruthless passive (+5% crit chance, +50% crit damage) skill is my favorite passive the Barbarian has access too in the beta.

Monk -
I absolutely adore Exploding Palm! It’s incredibly entertaining. Every third hit causes the enemy to gain a glowing hand icon over their head, and for the next three seconds they take bleed damage and if they die (and they will becuase you are probably still pounding on them) they detonate and hit everything around them. As you keep attacking with this skill, each hit generating spirit for more powerful attacks, the chain of explosions makes you feel like a powerful martial arts master. A must.
Special note that the other spirit generator I really like is the very fast Fists of Thunder with the chain lightning rune, but you can’t beat explosions!
Blinding Flash is just as powerful as it sounds, especially when you get mobbed. That first rune even extends the blindness duration.
Tail Lash Kick looks really cool from an animation point of view, and watching the front line of skeletons and zombies be flung backwards and explode from the HUGE damage hit is excellent.
Fleet Footed (passive) is probably the most useful passive in the beta in a very under stated way, just because it gets you from foe to foe quicker and lets you build up those crazy chaining XP bonuses from killing a lot of guys quickly and in sequence a little easier. Also, you can cover a bit more ground faster, which might account for how I leveled my Monk up a bit quicker than the other classes.

The Witch Doctor and Demon Hunter are actually pretty cool too, but I haven’t gotten them very high yet to make any decisions. I did hit 10 with the DH this morning before work, it’s a cool class but the one I’m least interested in (not any fault of the DH, I generally tend to shy away from bow/ranged heroes in these types of games. If I want range I also want magic!).

A quick thought I had about runes I’d like to share. Looking at the runes I couldn’t help but think they are all awesome, but why are some going to take getting into the 50’s to unlock? I know they have a dead zone from level 30-60 to address, but what about THIS? What about instead of unlocking a specific rune at a given level for a given skill, you instead get to CHOOSE what rune to unlock for that same skill? You still unlock runes in the same progression, but this would let you pick a given rune (out of the 5). I think that would be more fun than seeing the rune effect you are most interested in won’t unlock until level 37 or something. Just a thought.

Anyone else in the beta have any favorite skills or classes they wanted to talk about?

3308

Sadly, some of us aren’t part of the beta 1%.

3309

It’s so weird to me that I usually love the straightforward brick in most of my games, but haven’t really taken to the D3 Barbarian at all. I loved playing the Barb in D2. What happened to me?

3310

It’s actually a bit hard to tell how powerful stuff is in the beta. By the time you get a lot of the cool skills, you are way over your target’s level and almost anything will kill them. So, for instance, I’m not sure that arcane torrent will actually be devastating at higher levels, even if it slaughters everything quite effectively in the beta.

Powers with ‘on death’ effects are crazy powerful in the beta since things die so quickly it easily activates and the resulting damage is usually enough to kill all the nearby monsters. At higher levels, there will be more time between monster deaths, and when it does go off the resulting damage probably won’t be enough to kill the nearby targets.

Ray of Frost is disappointing in the beta, since most of the other spells do similar damage but aren’t restricted to single-target. On the other hand, it is instant-hit, and you can apply the slow effect to a large number of monsters quickly by playing it back and forth.

3311

My argument was and remains “no, everyone didn’t just dump points into vitality”. That’s the gist of it, but there was of course more nuance to it than that …

Where stat points went depended on the build you were going for. Exactly the opposite of the claim that everything went into vitality after gearing requirements. After the 75 into strength (tower shield) and whatever you needed to maintain a respectable block percentage at your level into dexterity, everything else did indeed go into energy.

And of course there was a point in pumping dexterity. You had to keep pumping dexterity to maintain a good block percentage as you leveled (your level was part of the determining formula, for all classes that made use of a shield, not just the sorceress). The rest went into strength for the shield and into energy to feed your spell spam and mana shield (your real health pool). If you wanted a block higher than ~20% by the time you hit level 50 or so, you couldn’t dump all or even most points into vitality.

The sorceress got so little health out of every vitality point that it was a huge waste of attributes. No one I knew, or have ever heard of, or even heard advocating, aside from a few hardcore people, actually did this.

I even knew people who pumped up strength on their sorceress, to wear the massive high end armors, boosted by the armor skills and the Merc aura to effective levels (in the thousands). Even this made more sense than the vitality claim - especially in softcore, where people just didn’t give a damn about dying occasionally (or, a lot, in some cases I’ve witnessed).

And please recall what the original point of contention was (well, one of them). That everyone apparently just dumped points into vitality, on every class, after meeting gear requirements. That’s the fantastic claim that got me to speak up in the first place.
Thankfully I don’t see anyone defending the ludicrous claim that only a few cookie cutter builds were viable in hell.

3312

So now in the D3 beta you can get runes to slot your powers? If so, Ill update and play the beta again. last time I heard they were only dropping in act II which you never got to.

3313

Runes are no longer an item. Instead, “runed” versions of skills unlock at specific levels automatically. Which ones unlock is pre-determined, so you won’t be able to play around w/ all the variations, but you’ll get to see 13 of them :P

3314

That is not the optimal build, not by a long shot. Putting points into vitality on anything other than a Barbarian (shouts) or a melee Amazon is utterly worthless. Even on the latter you were going to prioritize dexterity above vitality, for the shield block.

And are you kidding me with the manual thing? If you wanted to hit anything in hell (remember attack rating?) and if you wanted to actually do damage as well, you needed to pump dexterity on an Amazon, of course you did. Like me and another person have mentioned already, you had Amazons running around with as much dexterity as they could get. Hell on softcore the idea of putting points into vitality on a bow/crossbow Amazon makes about as much sense as pumping energy on a Barbarian. Your Valkyrie was your tank (your merc the secondary tank), especially after it got improved in the patches, and your dodge/evade skills. Pumping vitality would mean you did squat for damage.

There was nothing illogical about the D2 stat system. You did want strength on Barbarian (hit rating, armor, damage) - you also wanted vitality which got enhanced by shouts, but you didn’t dump everything there after gear. That would have been gimping your character.

I made a few Charged Bolt sorceresses myself, though only on softcore, and I never put a single point into vitality. Between the Merc, teleport, mana shield, block and relatively careful play, who needed a tiny health pool that lasted for about two seconds in hell?

As for what the majority did, obviously I don’t know for a fact, but having frequented D2 related forums, and having played the game from release till 2007, I have somewhat of an idea …

The shield stunlock wasn’t a big issue for the sorceress because your block percentage never went much higher than 50%. It was actually pretty difficult to get stunlocked, and this fear was mostly exaggerated. It happened to me just a handful of times in a couple of dozen sorcy builds.

And I already explained why the reason mentioned by idrisz does not reflect my own experience in baal runs (which I actually stopped doing relatively quickly, too damn boring). As I mentioned above, I played on and off from release till 2007, the last time I touched the game. Vanilla theorycrafting, seriously? I’m talking about Act 5 hell, runewords and Baal runs, in vanilla? rolls eyes

Finally, you never focused your build on mana shield. As I already explained before, +skills took care of it after a single point. Just as with telekenesis, by the way, in the same tree, and which every self-respecting sorcy needed to get, but no one pumped or focused on either.

…

At this point I’m getting seriously tired of the argument, and it’s completely irrelevant to D3 anyway (except as an excuse for a particularly developer who did not work on D2), so let’s remember what started it in the first place:

The claim that everyone, every class, put points into vitality after gear, everyone did this, no exceptions, and this was the most awesome idea in the world. Even if I acknowledge that some of you actually did this, and thought it was a good idea, the thousands of people who posted on forums and which I encountered in game would seem to indicate this was not a universal thing to do, or thought to be optimal by all. At the very least, there are two people in this thread who say this wasn’t the case.

The claim that only a handful cookie cutter builds were viable in hell difficulty - hmm, I wonder why no one is defending this one?

Now, please, return to the regularly scheduled D3 discussion, before we upset BleedTheFreak even further!

3315

D2 arguments in this thread are terrible; please stop.

I got BetaMax last night. I really enjoyed every class this time through, with the exception of Witch Doctor, which was only mediocre this time through. It seemed my mana ran out much faster this time, although whether that was due to my gearing for exp for the run to 13, that the zombie dogs did less damage and required me to do more, or if mana costs were increased.

Counter to my usual predilections, a Wizard might be my first playthrough character in retail. There was nothing in the beta as satisfying to me as Orbing a huge crowd of monsters. Monk’s Fist of Thunder was awesome as well. Demon Hunter was better for me this time, too.

MikeJ’s point about perceived power levels and being over-leveled for the content after the first run-through is right on, though.

I have heard that Blizzard was/is really unsatisfied with the beta and that launch will be delayed until later in Q2 or longer while changes are made; YMMV about the accuracy of such rumors.

3316

This is not the first sidetrack into D2 discussion in this D3 thread - why pretend that it is?

The people arguing would seem to indicate some degree of caring.

But …

I actually agree, and am more than willing to stop it.

3317

I borrowed a co-worker’s beta account info and played all five toons to 13 last Dec and felt the same way about those three classes. Still not sure which one will be my first. And, yeah, electrocute was lots of fun.

3318

Whoa! Where did you hear that? That’s very much NOT the sense I get from posts by Jay & Co. for sure, or from the various fan sites news posts of late. if you could expand on that thought I’d be interested in getting more details.

3319

Yeah, that is a silly rumor. The beta we are playing is not the same as the internal version Blizzard is playing. It has been stated over and over again that 1) we are just stress testing servers, not testing the actual gameplay and 2) release date is being announced in the coming weeks by Jay Wilson AND Mike Morhaime. Diablo.Incgamers has a “source” inside Blizzard that has said the release date could be announced as soon as Monday.

3320

You’re reading that wrong. Blizzard is using the beta to test their servers, but we are obviously playing a short section of the real game. They have internal builds ahead of the beta, but that’s just because they don’t patch the beta every single day.