Diablo III

PoE is waaaayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy more ridiculous for a hardcore character than D3. There is nothing in D3 that will one shot you from offscreen… D3 hardcore is actually pretty well done, there is a real sense of inching upwards and pushing the limits. You can still get caught out with a combination of inability to move and spike damage, but it’s not even in the same universe as PoE in terms of spike damage and completely unfair gotcha mechanics.

True enough. The mechanic that makes hardcore tolerable in PoE is that when you die in hardcore, they turn your character into an immortal/softcore character. I usually don’t play them anymore, but they sit there, alive in a different way. So it doesn’t seem as bad.

PoE is much closer to the genre’s roguelike roots in that you can and will die to some bullshit until and unless you know to mitigate that risk beforehand, aka rewarding player knowledge.

…yeah, I play softcore PoE. Fuck all that :D

Still a great game, but you’ve got to shake your head at the lost opportunity on expansion packs. Blizzard created a great framework with D3 and could have continued to pump out new expansions at $50/pop for many years to come. It could have continued to grow vibrantly, using POE’s model. Instead they’re letting it gracefully die.

It’s weird, isn’t it? That’s not too say they have not done a good job supporting it over the years, because they have. But they have left revenue on the table for sure.

What Blizzard should do is let people buy ingame items with real money - kind of like a house where you have an auction.

They’ve done a fantastic job supporting the game, absolutely. But it could have been so much more.

Bite thine tongue.

It’s hard to believe that they introduced the in-game store with the Rise of the Necro patch if they don’t plan to sell any more packs for D3.

Wow this challenge rift is stunningly dumb. Apparently they believe it’s fun to stick you with a character setup made by Forest Gump and you have to beat their rift time.

I feel like I’m being trolled.

Yep, Challenge Rifts are just more set dungeons in a sense. They are a puzzle in that you need to work out how the build works and experiment with it to figure out how it works. The upside is that you don’t have to work around the developer’s sense of what a ‘fun’ experience might be to demonstrate a set’s capabilities - instead they are just a rift and you know the original dude/tte just wanted to do the rift as fast as possible.

So do two things on your first couple of attempts:

  • take your time and experiment to see how the build does its damage and how it mitigates incoming damage. Look at the gear, then the passives, then the skills and work out how they interact.

  • expose the rift floors, take a screenshot and mark the location of the elite packs. Completing rifts quickly is about one thing and one thing only - getting to the next eilte pack as fast as possible Outside stupid high GR’s, white mobs are trash and not worth your time.

I have not complete it yet either and I plan on giving it another crack, but there is a limit to my patience. The typical rewards are:

x8 each act bounty mats
300 bloodshards
249/228/87 white/blue/yellow mats

If you can do a full TX bounty clear in a 4 man group in 20 minutes, then run a couple of TXIII rifts or GR after that, I reckon your on par with trying a challenge rift three or four times, so at some point the rewards don’t represent a good time investment unless you are also chasing the bragging rights.

I mean, I was within like 30 secs of the time but it was just stupid. The gear and skills are just nonsensical and seems to have almost no synergy or purpose. Having played multiple monk specs including dumb ones that just don’t work very well as you go higher this has to be one of the most useless and boring ones I’ve ever seen.

Where do you go to start a Challenge rift?

When you start a game session in game settings, it is a new selectable section below story mode and adventure mode.

Oh wow, had no idea. I knew they existed now but figured I’d stumble across it eventually. Thanks!

Do you get better material for completing bounties if you complete them on a higher difficulty?

Right now I’m finally on Chapter IV of the Season, and I’m left with doing a bunch of things on Torment IV difficulty. I briefly tried it out last night by going to Torment IV and starting a Nephaelum Rift. I was dying constantly at every elite enemy, and it was taking forever. (Btw, I had no trouble at all at Torment II, so somewhere between 2 and 4 is where my current equipment is). So I clearly need better equipment in order to do so. I do have some plans for equipment I could craft if I had more crafting materials. I know difficulty affects drops from monsters, but it wasn’t clear to me if it affected bounty rewards as well.

You get more - Diablo 3 Difficulty Overview

Up to 16 at T13.

So on that chart “Horadric Cache Materials” is the line relevant to material in bounties, right?

Looks like there’s no benefit to playing above T1 if I want to get more material from bounties, unless I go T7 or above.

Correct

Yeah, remember when everyone was all like, “Yeah, Set Dungeons are the best! Keep iterating on that idea, please!”