Emerald even better than Ruby in weapons for the crit, though I guess it depends on the situation maybe. I usually put green gems in the pointy things.
emerald isnāt so good until you have high enough crit chance for it to matter. Iāve found the best bet for a twink is the topaz or whichever one is thorns actually. Up until level 50 or so having a highest ranked thorns on your weapon means pretty much everything runs up to you and kills itself. Then you start playing the game at that point.
Keystones are a guaranteed drop once you play on a high enough difficulty. If you are speed running greater rifts, you should be playing on a high enough difficulty.
Fair enough. I was just reporting what Iāve observed, and Iāve never gone higher than Torment 3.
Oghier
4225
This game got a lot better. I havenāt played since shortly after launch, when I hated it. The new dev team turned this back into Diablo.
The season format is awesome. I started a wizard, and soon after remembered one of the things that make this series great ā you can find legendary items so fantastic they become the focus of your build. In my case, it was a Crown of Primus. My DelRasha-spec has soloād up to Greater Rift 46 so far, but I need some better gear to get much further.
Again, Iām just amazed how much better this game is now. Iām glad this thread convinced me to have another go at it.
Oghier
4226
I thought that, too. It turned out not to be the case, though. To remove the level requirement, you have to level a legendary gem (gem of ease) to 25. That takes me a little over an hour. Socketing that Gem into an Ancient Legendary weapon, then handing a 4k DPS weapon to a level 1 alt is, wellā¦ itās beyond twinking. Itās almost a console command. /level 70
Heh, I guess so. I never got a gem above like five or six, as I never ran GRs much. I always have trouble getting my dps up on my characters. 15+ million toughness, no problem. Above 500k dps? I struggle.
EDIT: Though I have to say, I guess most people play differently than I do. I get all the classes to 70 before optimizing one, so by the time I get a character geared to run Grifts, I have no need of leveling.
KevinC
4228
I really despised this game when it came out. I disliked the lack of any sort of meaningful decision. I hated what the Auction House did to the gameplay (despite their strenuous objections, at least initially, that it had no impact at all. Hah.). And the worst crime of all, the gear was so dang boring.
I tried it again when the expansion hit, and while I felt it had definitely moved in the right direction (the AH removal along with the drop changes that coincided with it), it was still lacking any real hook and I didnāt play long. I never even made it to L70, actually. I went back for this latest patch/season, however, and feel like that game has finally started to come together. Iām having a lot of fun with it! The loot is so much more interesting and that really works well with being able to extract and equip powers from Legendaries. Now itās tied the loot game in with the character building game in a way that was very much missing when it originally released.
I think the guy who took over for the expansion is really doing a bang-up job, especially given the (IMO) anemic base he had to work with. I really hope the game gets another expansion, I feel like that could really take it from Good to Great for me.
I think it was very brave of them to remove the Auction House. I suspect there was more than a little bit of internal politics about it, and it would have been easy to make the non-decision to leave it as it was (game breaking, as far as Iām concerned). The rest of the improvements have been splendid, and frankly above my expectations, but that was the first and hardest step.
As you say, big kudos to those managing the updates.
As popular as it is to blame specific people who worked on D3 at launch, I wonder if there wasnāt a certain amount of post-WoW groupthink going on at Blizzard. Things like economy balancing are critically important for a game like WoW, so naturally you need to set a target optimal legendary droprate per North America per day and balance that accordingly with your projected level-capped player time.
Iām not saying itās right, but Iām saying I can see the logic path of how you could get to those high-level design decisions.
I still liked it at launch because the moment-to-moment gameplay is so damn good, but yes, absolutely itās a much better game now. Kanaiās Cube is a brilliant mechanic that really ties the whole room together, as it were.
Thereās a great GDC talk on the stuff that happened at Blizzard to cause the large gameplay shifts in Reaper of Souls: http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1021776/Against-the-Burning-Hells-Diablo
TLDR: They changed core aspects of the game for offline console audiences and found that some of their core assumptions of what made Diablo fun were wrong. They took those learnings back to the PC version and expanded on them. Lots of interesting insights, such as how the simplified UI for comparing items gave them a better idea of what made an item exciting and different.
Unfortunately they never reconsidered what has always been my biggest problem with the game - running it on their servers. The console version is a clear demonstration that itās completely unnecessary to the design, but theyāve clung stubbornly to it nonetheless.
Iām not sure about unnecessary. Technically, sure, but in terms of community and intangibles, the console version has a very different vibe. People I play with on PC discuss playing on console and they generally disliked the experience (except for the social/couch aspect) because itās so uncontrolled. Jump in a game and get instantly powerleveled 1000 Paragon levels, stuff like that. The battle.net system at least keeps a sort of lid on that stuff, which is important for a lot of people.
Which I have never understood. Who plays with random people on Battle.net? Why?
Some of us have no friendsā¦ sob
I donāt. And yeah, to me, it makes little difference if you cheat your way to level bajillion on your machine, for your own fun. But a lot of people like to see their accomplishments rated against people on the same level field, and I can understand that too. Some folks are pretty competitive that way.
I pretty much played this all weekend. Played a bunch of different characters in adventure mode, and even made it most of the way through Act II of the campaign with a barbarian. I first leveled him up to about 18 in adventure mode, and was then able to play the campaign on whatever the third difficulty level was. After a while doing that, I bumped it up to the 4th. So, needless to say, Iām having a lot more fun with it. I like how you can change the difficulty. And I like the bounties and rifts. What I donāt like is how you have to play all 5 bounties in one sitting in order to get the big reward. I sometimes simply donāt have time for that, and it will discourage me from playing at all if I have limited time.
Ender
4238
Is there a big reward for doing all 5? I think if you just do the bonus one (which rotates as you complete) you get the extra cache.
The reward is the cache. Thereās no special reward for clearing every act, but even having to do all five bounties in an act is a significant time commitment and doing individual bounties really doesnāt do anything meaningful.
Ender
4240
When I need the mats, I just join a public game and we all split up and do 1 or 2 solo. Fast way to get the mats.
