3961

Joe, I think they designed the D3 skill system with you in mind. You should do well enough just experimenting with skills and runes as they become available, and going with what seems to work for you. If later on you want to optimize things to get the best synergies, there will be lots of resources available.

3962

Some min-maxer will break everything down into formulas and excel sheets to achieve 0.0001% more efficiency. Not exactly how I would spend my time.

3963

That’s why you just do what they tell you to do. If you’re a powergamer, that is.

3964

I was theorycrafter in Age of Conan, and I never followed other people. Powergaming that way is like doing science, you make theories and test things. You have to reverse engineer the rules that govern the universe of the game. Perhaps theorycrafting is more like phisic theorist. No doubts there are powergamers that just follow “plans” created by others. This don’t means everyone is doing that, somebody has to write these scripts, and there you have my theorycrafters friends :D

3965

I was in a co-op game today with some guy who was trying to figure out if he was getting ripped off for kill experience being grouped with two L12’s while he was L7. He ignored me when I told him how little kill experience mattered compared to quest experience. Good job Blizzard. As if people needed any more encouragement to rush through maps as fast as possible.

3966

There’s definitely an experience cut-off. I brought a level 12 or something into a game with some middle-levels, and got zero experience for kills. Though this is only evidence that lower level monsters provide no experience, which makes sense since there is gear that gives experience points per kill. If I had gotten experience I could blow through low level content and still get 25xp per kill.

3967

you can get gears that give +x experience per monster kill. on my lvl 11 demon hunter I got a total of +30 experience per monster kill which adds up very fast.

Got one whole level just by doing 2 and half floor worth of monster before Skeleton king at lvl 10.

Also having +experience per kill helps your entire group, since +experience per kill is average across the group(magic find, gold find as well), so if one person have +30 experience per kill gear on in a coop 2 player group, both player get +15 bonus xp per kill.

3968

Try soloing the start of the chapter with your L12. I just tried it and also got 0 exp even wearing +xp gear so I think you’re running into an xp cap not a shared cap.

3969

I’m going from my limited testing of the mechanics from beta weekend, I was never actually in closed beta.

3970

the +xp is added to the total before any of the reduction is made for the level difference.

so if a mob is worth like 50xp, it’s now worth 80xp, but if you are much higher level than the mob, you end up getting 0 xp, similar to getting 0 xp from gray mob in WOW.

3971

Does anyone else in the beta that played over the weekend think that Blizz may have made the drops a bit more friendly? I’ve never picked up a rare from a mob (aside from the skeleton king) until this weekend and got 4 in about 5 hours of gameplay.

3972

TV commercial is out.

3973

Yeah, I got 2 rares to drop from normal mobs in a run-through this weekend. I don’t recall that ever happening before.

3974

Cough, cough, I think I feel a case of ebola coming on for the 16th and 17th. Might have to stay home and recuperate, certainly wouldn’t want to spread it to my co-workers.

3975

I think you may have given it to me too John.

3976

At my current gig there is an intern starting on the 14th they would like me to train. I told them I hope he is really smart or they are fucked because diablo 3 is coming out on the 15th. There was much laughter.

They thought I was joking.

3977

Yeah I’ve already took vacation for that week. I wasn’t taking any chances that my company would know what that week was, and crack down on sick outs.

3978

I didn’t take the entire week off or anything, but I am taking off that Tuesday. I’ll run into town at midnight the night before and pick it up, and probably install it too, but then I’m going to bed. Servers don’t go up until 2am here for me in this time zone, so I’ll get some sleep and let them work the first 6 hours of “kinks” out.

Hopefully this won’t backfire on me as most of the time I’d have been at work the servers are unavailable anyway…

3979

If I already have the beta installed do I need to also pre-download the release client?

3980

Yeah, the beta is a wholly seperate installation. Just remove it. I suppose it’s possible the \My Documents\Diablo III folder (with it’s screenshot sub-folder and the config text file) might get used if the real client detects it, but it’s not like my settings were super important so I deleted that, too.