3201

You mean unbuffed sheet DPS, or practical output?

3202

The stuff in that post about healing vs toughness is no longer valid; healing was buffed bigtime in 2.1. Also crusader movement speed is no longer capped. Everything else still applies.

3203

Smart use of Kadala will save you literally hundreds of hours of farming, so know what item you are trying to get for each slot.

Can you elaborate on that, or do you just mean use Kedala to chase the bits of best in slot gear that can drop from Kedala?

3204

I stand by my statement that healing (even buffed bigtime, as you say) should be handled by paragon points and the templar. In any situation you can take Life on Hit, there is a better affix like +% attack speed or +% dmg you could reroll it to. Now if you are playing hardcore, ymmv. On softcore Diablo is basically just an engine for killing efficiently, and 95% of the situations that are going to kill you will still kill you even with 20k life on hit, because the stuff that kills you in diablo is almost always say, getting vortexed into a chain of molten explosions or something. At least, that’s what kills me.

Every item other than cache-specific ones (Ring of Royal Grandeur is the only one that is truly critical) can drop from Kadala, so using her to improve your weakest slot is great. Especially right when you hit 70, it’s easy to get some trifecta gloves/ammy/rings off her to get you going.

Any references to dps are spreadsheet paper doll numbers, because effective dps is quite a bit harder to gauge, whereas you can make at least a generalized statement about efficiency from the paper doll numbers. 1m spreadsheet dps should be sufficient to do t3 for virtually any class assuming you don’t die in one hit. I truthfully have very little idea what my practical output is, but it’s a lot more than what the spreadsheet says or the 6.7b hitpoint enemies would take a really, really long time to die. Still, you can draw some basic information from the spreadsheet that is useful for giving advice.

3205

I said the point on healing vs toughness was no longer valid, not that anyone should give up damaging stats for healing.

Also if you mouseover your elemental damage in the character sheet, it now tells you total damage for that element. Then you multiply that number by your primary damage dealer’s % increase and you get something much closer to a real number. It won’t count stuff like the firebird 6p bonus of course, but it gets you closer to something meaningful.

3206

Every item other than cache-specific ones (Ring of Royal Grandeur is the only one that is truly critical) can drop from Kadala, so using her to improve your weakest slot is great.

Is that true? I thought the class specific set items don’t drop either.

3207

I got a piece of Roland’s from Kadala the other day.
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/item/rolands-mantle

3208

I have gotten 2 pieces of Firebird, 2 pieces of Vyr’s, and 1 piece of Tal Rasha from her since the patch, so she definitely drops them. I believe the only stuff that she can’t drop are the cache specific items, but I admit I do not know that for a 100% fact. Maybe someone has gotten a royal grandeur or a blessed gloves off her, but I’ve never seen her drop those and believe that I read a blue post awhile back saying those were the only things she would not drop.

3209

What level gems are you assuming here? I’ve been working on my Witch Doctor for a while and I’m only at 900K. Is gems my only issue or is there some obvious path to improving my character I’m missing?

3210

Well obviously maxing out your topazes and your emerald would help, but I realize that takes time. At a cursory glance: Switching to a 1 hand/offhand setup is almost always superior for endgame gear. The 10% crit chance on the offhand and the bonus damage are almost always better. The problem here is you will burn through a lot more resources, but your build doesn’t seem very mana intensive. You’d almost certainly get a little vitality in the bargain, but finding a 1h/offhand combo might take some time. Getting crit chance instead of vit on your Assassin’s Band (assuming that info is up to date) would certainly help. Your amulet is probably the single easiest piece to replace, cause you can get 32% more crit damage and some crit chance there. Also not sure why your bracer has arcane damage either :) Anyways all those would push your dps over a million for sure. Also sometimes I forget that my paragon level contributes a pretty fair amount of dps, and that I can max out gems right away, so I probably have a slightly rosy view on hitting a million.

3211

Thanks for the advice.

I had a 1 hand/offhand setup an hour ago, but then I saw that switching to a 2-hander I had lying in my stash that got boosted in 2.1 would be a pretty massive DPS boost. I need to find a better 1H weapon.

Your amulet is probably the single easiest piece to replace, cause you can get 32% more crit damage and some crit chance there.

I just gambled that one when I saw my wizard’s twilight ward was less than ideal. Guess I’ll try to gamble another one.

Also not sure why your bracer has arcane damage either :)

Yeah, that’s a wizard piece I never got around to fixing…

3212

There’s an amusing gear combo from 2.1
A Boon of the Hoarder legendary gem (I got it from a goblin lair) and Goldwrap (a belt). The former grants a 25% chance for a gold explosion, the later increases your armor by picking up gold. The key here is the word ‘explosion’: Take that literally. The two items result in toughness in the hundreds of millions (at one point when I looked I had north of 300 million.) As an added bonus it’s quite lucrative too. Note that mobs in Grifts DO NOT drop gold, so it doesn’t work there.

3213

So, I haven’t played 2.1 yet. I don’t know if I will, I’m pretty burned out on D3. But I do want to ask a question about character slots to the people who are playing seasons.

You have 12 slots. There’s really very little reason to have more than 6 characters (one of each class), unless you want to get the achievements for leveling up two of each class.

So let’s say you’ve got 6 characters, and you create a 7th for the first season, level him up to 70, and when the season ends, he becomes a regular character. You keep doing this for 6 seasons, and then you’ve got 12 level 70 characters.

Then the next season starts. Are you going to start deleting your level 70 characters?

3214

What levels are people in HC grinding at? I’ve only managed to do Master with any level of consistency, solo HC. My one attempt at T1 ended quickly as I ran screaming into a portal and never went back.

3215

I can’t really think seasons will last less than 3 months considering blizzard has to make new uniques for each one. So I guess this hypothetical problem would take about 18 months to occur. As you pointed out, theres no point in having two of the same class at 70 (since paragon exp rolls over into your non-seasonal account)… so I suppose if I have to delete a character I never play after 18 months it wouldn’t seem like much of an issue to me. I do kind of wonder if they are planning a 2nd xpac for diablo, though. I kind of want the necromancer to return. Since you’ve killed Death at this point, I’m not really sure what the endgame of act 6 would be though. Kill God? Is there a God in Diablo? I mean there are angels but God is kind of conspicuously absent from Heaven.

3216

Have you seen Heaven? It sucks. What self-respecting deity would live there? He/She/It is probably in Malibu.

3217

Hardcore characters use the same slots. And yes, no reason to keep two of the same class if they’re both level 70 at the end of the season. Unless you really hate swapping gear to try different builds.

3218

Ok, thanks for the answers. Sounds like yes, you are expected to delete your season characters when you’re done with them (unless you don’t have another character of that class already). Seems a bit nuts to me, but I guess it’s a natural consequence of all max level characters of a given class being completely identical (which also seems a bit nuts).

I was just curious!

3219

At harder difficulty levels do you try and pick a level where you might die, and then if you do tweak your build to deal with the threat. I can maybe see the appeal of playing like that - trying to pick the set of abilities to deal with a particular danger.

3220

It sounds like you’re on the verge of appreciating Diablo as something more than a game about killing Diablo. :)

-Tom