5162

The funny part is, for the other classes, the skills used to kill enemies so fast, I never felt the need to know how much damage each skill did. But with the Witch Doctor, every enemy takes so long to kill with each skill, it would be really useful to know which of the skills is the least bad.

5163

What? I dunno what you’re doing man, but my WD is a murder machine. MURDER.

5164

Until you get some of the unlocked runes, the basic WD skills aren’t going to light the world on fire. That’s pretty true of every class, at least to me.

It’s also very different if you are starting for realsies from scratch, without the benefit of things like gems etc. Gear is 99.9% of Diablo, and the stuff you are going to find on your first run through, especially at low levels is going to pretty much suck.

/shrug. My WD is fairly ridiculous, and I can sort of tool around maps and yawn, and everything dies. Keep with it.

5165

God yeah, I forgot about runes. Keep it up Rock8, the WD is just amazing.

5166

@Rock8man, you’ll likely want to turn on Advanced Tooltips ASAP. There’s nothing advanced about them, it’s just basic fucking information, like how much damage your ability does. Same with the “advanced” feature where you can actually pick multiple skills of the same category. You basically have to take the language in this game as if it’s written for Grandma’s First RPG.

Other than that, Witch Doctor damage is fine and comparable to other classes, it just comes down to your weapon. Weapons in D3 are just stat sticks, they don’t do anything mechanically on their own.

5167

In D3, weapon DPS is king - everything scales from that (for the most part, until you get to 70 and start equipping sets with other item interactions). However, while leveling and presuming non-legendary, always equip the best DPS weapon you have and as soon as you get one with a socket, insert a ruby. Rubies will typically out-perform Emeralds until you actually begin to work on your crit chance which you won’t really do until you are 60+ and moving towards endgame content and torment levels.

Every five levels or so, craft a new weapon at the blacksmith if an improvement has not dropped as you can easily fall behind the DPS curve if your current weapon’s ilevel is too low. You should have plenty of mats if you have been salvaging.

And yeah, I also find WD underwhelming until some of the skills and runes begin to open up. At max leve. they are epic beasts with the right builds though.

5168

It’s the same for wizards, you can totally stick a sword in their hand but they’re still going to shoot enemies with those ice laser thingies. Also you don’t want those notification doodads, that’s just screen clutter. Unless you’re a numbers geek, in which case you would have already had those all those damage indicators active.

5169

What is the right build for a WD? I have tried them several times and always find them tedious and boring. It seems like they kill stuff so slow compared to other classes.

So what are the skills to take with what ruins?

5170

As others said, the advanced tooltips show that. But if you want more stats, don’t forget the Details button!

5171

This forum needs sigs so that I can make mine “time spent playing Diablo III not playing a Witch Doctor is time wasted”. Then I would have some sort of embedded link to my Witch Doctor’s online profile. And an animated gif of him chucking out jars of corpse spiders. It would be the coolest sig ever.

-Tom

5172

I can’t get behind that. Until witch doctors can go all John Woo with a pair of handheld automatic explosive crossbows while rocking some kickass high heels well, they’ll always be second class to me.

5173

Monk since Season 2.

My first D3 char was witch doctor tho, so did all the game up till the expansion with that one.

To get the best details for the game I’d recommend using TurboHud overlay.

5174

Since I played the console version, I haven’t touched the PC version. It is vastly inferior, IMHO. I do still own it, I suppose, but I just love the console version so much more.

On the other hand, coming straight from so many hours of Grim Dawn, I have to admit, the graphics on D3 are not as impressive to me anymore. Grim Dawn is very pretty, and it also came out a few years later, so that’s to be expected.

But one thing I immediately love about the console version over even Grim Dawn is the interface. It’s a circular interface, and there’s no more inventory tetris. Grim Dawn has those auto-sort buttons that make inventory management pretty easy, but not as easy as not having any inventory tetris at all. Console Diablo 3 just limits it by total number of items you can carry. There’s a lot less loot that drops, and when you get something, it gets marked my a star in your circular radial menu, so you can straight to that, compare it to what you’re wearing, and press a button to designate it as junk. Then whenever you get to a merchant, there’s a button to “sell all junk”. It really streamlines a portion of these games that I never even realized needed streamlining until I experienced it for myself. And then once you play it this way, you realize, “wait, why on earth was I spending all that time playing inventory tetris? What did that add to the game?” And the truth is, it added nothing. You can still combine gems and compare inventory stuff in this radial system, but it just takes less time. So it keeps the fun stuff, and doesn’t make you bother with the meaningless stuff.

Of course, the TurboHud overlay you’re talking about might do this as well, so maybe this is already in the PC version for all I know.

5175

For people who don’t mind buying from cdkeys.com, they have the Diablo 3 Battlechest for just under $21.

5176

The 20th Anniversary Event started today. It’s pretty fun - spoiler tags for anyone who wants to be surprised.

[spoiler]Basically, they create a multi-level (like 16-20) dungeon for you to hack through. It’s accessed by traveling to Tristam and going to the “Old Ruins”. Wander around until you find a 16-bit-looking town portal and then hop inside.

The gimmick is that they put a filter over the screen that pixelizes the screen to evoke the original. It doesn’t actually DO anything to the gameplay - that’s still D3 - but it’s a fun effect. I guess they change the HUD to be evocative of the original too.

What’s really great is that they bring back a lot of the original D1 sounds and soundtrack, and THAT more than the graphics really got me into the nostalgic mood with the game.

Hack all the way down to the bottom of the dungeon and you get a cool legendary gem and a bunch of achievements.[/spoiler]

5177

I did not have a chance to played with the Event yet. I am looking forward to doing so later today. One other thing this update did was provide a 64bit client running on DX11. There are a couple of new video settings that made the visual better than before.

5178

When does the new season start? Will the Anniversary Event be included in the season?

edit:

Season 9 begins Friday, January 6 at 5:00 p.m. PST in North America, 5:00 p.m. CEST in Europe, and 5:00 p.m. KST in Asia.

5179

Anniversary event was a neat diversion for an hour. It’s worth doing once.

5180

I did it on the PTR and was unimpressed. Glorified Rift with a graphics filter applied. Maybe worthwhile as a new toon, but trivially pointless with a geared 70. Useless gem reward at then end, so only other reason to do it is the cosmetics or 5 minutes of nostalgia value before you tire of it.

The fact that this started by some of the devs as an unofficial side project and the Necromacer was only started on a few weeks leading up to Blizzcon seems indicative of Blizz’s attitude towards D3 - it ain’t revenue generating so it’s an afterthought they barely care about.

5181

Oh it’s definitely pointless in that you won’t get any upgrades. But like I said, it was a neat thing to do once. You get a bunch of achievements and a nostalgia injection.

It’s been completely obvious that Diablo3 wouldn’t get a second expansion for several years now. Kanai’s Cube is a major expansion-level feature.