Squee
4861
Been messing around with a thorns crusader too (Been a while since I’ve played D3 and a buddy of mine got back in to it as well, good reason to make some season characters) and it’s kinda interesting. My most played and favorite character is a spin to win barbarian, but I have to say thorns crusader looks like it has more potential. I’m doing reasonably well with it in torment 8 with far from optimized gear, still using a generic yellow shield, don’t have good/leveled legendary gems, haven’t got fully crafted normal gems to socket, nothing in my cube yet, etc. Kinda sad it isn’t as thorns-y as a D2 thorns paladin (Popping abilities and smacking things with a shield as opposed to just waddling out and everything instantly dies when it touches me) but still fun, and reached this point a lot easier than my barb did.
Been having a pretty good time with Grim Dawn, too. Haven’t been playing it too heavily since I’d like the final patch and achievements added and all that jazz, but oddly enough it’s been complimentary to D3. D3 works great for shorter bursts and playing with my friend, Grim Dawn has been better for prolonged play. First time I messed with Grim Dawn I didn’t play on veteran, but after playing a new character on veteran that’s absolutely the way to go.
Weird, I thought I posted this stuff yesterday but it’s not showing up for me. Oh well, forging ahead…
For some reason my Monk isn’t grabbing me, and I petered out around level 50 or so. Not sure what it is except he feels pretty weak and I’m not enjoying the leveling process. But maybe part of it is my leveling technique - I’ve been running rifts, since in Season 4 that was the way to level; now however I have read that with the addition of the massacre bonus you get outside of rifts people seem to think leveling up by doing bounties is faster. Anyone have thoughts on that?
Also, how feasible is it to achieve that Wizard spec for someone starting from scratch? I’ve played so little of the Wizard class, but my main impression of it is that they’re fragile. I would love a tanky Wizard spec that also dishes out the damage.
Oghier
4863
Bounties award significantly more experience than they used to, but rifts are still better. You do need bounty materials, though, so it’s still a reasonable way to level. This guy covered leveling in 2.4 pretty well.
Wizards can be very tanky. They got a bunch of new toys this patch that increased both their damage and mitigation enormously. The popular builds are in Delsere’s Magnum Opus, and they’re based around either Energy Twister or Arcane Orbit as the damage skill. The AO build is melee. Wizards and Crusaders are the top dogs this patch.
I’m not sure how to open my game to a specific person, but I’d be happy to run you through a few Rifts to level you up. You can have any set pieces I get, too. My tag is Oghier1213. (That offer is open to anyone on QT3. I’m not an experienced powerleveler, but I am closing on GR70, so I should be able to distribute a fair amount of experience).
Had a friend in Torment X powerlevel a new char for me.
Went from 0 to 70+Paragon 103 in 2 hours.
Course, this wasn’t in Hardcore mode.
Was going to try a Thorns Crusader, but do not really have the gear for it yet.
Probably going back to my Hardcore Monk – slowly gotten to Torment 7 now, with 40 hours played. (70+P203)
I’m going slowly this season, as I’ve got a lot of other stuff on my plate. Rebirthed one of my wizzies and got him back to 70, but then started futzing around on a new WD. My goal is to try different combos of skills and gear than I’ve done in the past, rather than defaulting to MOTS, to keep it interesting. I’m terrible at focusing on one character after 70 to really get to the meat of the game, and I disperse my energies over a host of leveling characters, most of which I don’t even like (like, ugh, the Crusader) because I have a mania for completeness.
Oghier
4867
It transforms a non-seasonal character into a seasonal character. You’re reset to level one, with zero paragon (unless you’ve earned in-season paragon on another character), and your inventory is stripped and mailed to your non-seasonal mailbox. So, you don’t actually lose anything permanently, but you start ‘fresh’ with that character. It basically preserves your hours played. There is no other compelling reason to use the feature.
I see.
I guess I could use that to avoid having to suicide all my old characters once they get transitioned to non-seasonal, just to have enough room in my char-list for new ones.
That’s what I used it for. But you only get three, so if you want to redo one of each you have to kill off some. No big deal in D3, really, as it’s just the hours played that is really preserved. You could just kill 'em off and make a new one of the same name of course.
Thanks for the offer, but I might not need it.
Playing a Wizard has clicked with me in a way that playing the Monk didn’t. Part of it might be that I’m strictly keeping the difficulty on Expert mode and running bounties and getting massive massacre bonuses. The Wizard’s killing power is a lot of fun to play with. I rolled one last night and am up to around 45 or so, and digging it. Maybe I should up the difficulty but it’s so satisfying just creaming the mobs and having the only worry be how big a massacre bonus I can rack up.
The simplest way to make D3 not fun is to play on too high of a difficulty. If mobs aren’t exploding all around you in terrified fountains of body parts and shattered weapons, you’re doing it wrong.
Tman
4872
I need to ask a stupid question. I keep seeing references to Crusader thorns, and I’m playing one right now in Season V - Just reached level 70 with paragon 15, and I’m not seeing any “thorn” on skills at all - although I do see it referenced on certain weapons / trinkets.
Can you share your build on your Crusader? I’m flying blind and looking for any tips.
There are a bunch of links to Thorns crusaders upthread.
It shows up as a secondary property on your items. You might not have any, but keep an eye out for it on drops and you’ll see it.
It’s also utterly useless until you start collecting the Crusader’s Invoker level 70 set. Then it’s all you care about, heh.
Lantz
4874
Thorns is - Melee/Range attackers take %x/xxxx damage
There’s a lot of items that can roll with this attribute and various equipment and things that boosts the damage. Thorns builds just are all about loading up on as much of this damage as possible.
Up to a point, yeah. But you have to get to at least T1, preferably IV, it seems, before you can get the drops you need at any reasonable pace. Otherwise, like me, you end up spinning your wheels at low Torment levels forever.
Yeah, but you can do T1 in any ol’ l70 yellows, and T4 in decent yellows, so long as you have a build that isn’t actively terrible.
Squee
4877
Yup, absolutely this. Thorns isn’t worth touching until you get the invoker set. With the invoker set it starts being pretty fun. http://www.icy-veins.com/d3/crusader-endgame-thorns-build-with-the-invoker-set-patch-2-4
That’ll keep you covered. You can make do without having the whole enchilada, but the invoker set itself is the most important piece. Once you start filling in more and more of the items you can keep upping the difficulty. You’ll primarily be dealing your damage through regular retaliatory thorns damage with only 2 pieces of the set, the 4 piece bonus only really helps once you find the belt, and the 6 piece set bonus is when you really start to take off. It turns your LMB attack from just a “Thorns buffing ability” to a single target laser for knocking down elites and rift bosses.
Still leaning on the D3 pretty hard lately. I typically casually graze on D3 and don’t even worry about seasons, but since a buddy of mine started it up again I’ve been going nuts. Thorns crusader can effortlessly tear through torment 10 now and I’ve been grinding grift 50s to level up legendary gems for the season journey thing. Still missing an aquila cuirass, but survivability isn’t really a problem for me at the moment so I’m not too worried. Character’s also reaching the dull point where there isn’t much room to grow beyond finding better versions of items I’ve already got, so I’ll probably just try to do the seasonal stuff to get the extra stash tab and then bug out and play Xcom 2 when that hits.
Still cracks me up how D3 is my most played game in a long-ass time. I’m pushing 600-odd hours on it now I believe, across all my characters. That would put it far and away more than any game I’ve played on Steam, for example. I don’t often play it as heavily as I have been the past month, but it’s something I’ve had installed and toyed with every since the vanilla release, which was massively increased with the 2.0 patch and the expansion. After playing vanilla a while I wouldn’t have anticipated I’d still be playing it, but they’ve really improved it a lot.
It took me 200 hours until I realised this.
It is also worth noting that playing the correct way with shit exploding everywhere also happens to be the fasted progression path as drops and XP actually come faster.
Yeah, they figured out a nice dovetail between fun and catassing a while back. I’m one of those that liked D3 to start with, but they’ve done a really nice job post-2.0.
I do think there’s something to be said for harder content, aspirational content, like D3 1.0 or old-school WoW (or hell EQ1 or NetHack or whatever you want to go back to), but D3 v2.4 is pretty great, no doubt.
LockerK
4880
The tying of stash space to such a high tier of the season journey is starting to take its toll on me, I think. RNG on loot doesn’t bother me, but RNG on having to get the right rifts to keep pushing forward or needing a specific piece of very rare gear isn’t particularly fun. I’m at the point where I basically need to find an Akarat’s Awakening to push the Thornsader any higher, and after 20-25k blood shards and countless shield upgrades I haven’t seen a single one. Hoping they revisit (and lower) the requirement in future seasons.
