5342

Bravo. :)

5343

Anniversary even runs until the end of Jan, so get in quick! I don’t think console or PC will matter much as I think it is best to do the Anniversary content on a fresh toon, otherwise it is trivial. It won’t take more than 2-3 hours anyway.

5344

Awesome, will do on PS4 then with a fresh toon. Thanks for the heads up on the end, I would’ve totally missed it.

5345

Most people who tried both prefer the PS4 because using the controller is more fun than the mouse. Gives a more immediate connected feeling of control, and combined with the dodge it’s sweet - as I’m sure you know.

But I can’t go past the higher res, anti-aliasing, and higher frame rates on PC. :)

I’d love to see controller on PC, maybe they’ll do that one day since they are bringing seasons to console starting s10.

5346

Is everyone in the QT3 clan? You’re all more then welcome to join me whenever I am on, but there never seems to be any QT3 folk online at the hours I play currently. Other side of the world and all…

But really, solo bounties at some point become a tremendous waste of time. Once you are running bounties solely for the mats, which you need for cube recipes (particularly when you get to the point of trying to re-roll pieces for ancients), you just need to get them done quickly and a group effort splitting drastically reduces the time. I can tell you from experience that, unlike something like Overwatch or League of Legends, grouping in D3 is almost totally painless. Folk won’t talk to you all that much unless it is to perhaps communicate a special gob, or vault portal, they will happily drop shit they don’t need if you ask or tell them you need an item and you almost certainly won’t get abused unless you`re obviously only there to be carried for free mats or you collect bounties out of order, costing them bonus caches. Other than that, people just join your game, do their shit, complete all the bounties with you then go their separate ways.

You’ll go from clearing all bounties in 60 minutes to 15.

5347

Yeah, there is usually one or two clan members on whenever I’m playing. I’m on the same side of the world as you but only ever see you idling in Battlenet, never really in-game. :)

I might try a new experience and open up to the public during bounties, and see how I go!

5348

At this point in the game’s life, there’s really no need to look at guides. I mean, you can if you’re into that, but I’d just use whatever skills and runes you like while levelling. I tend to just put them where they make the prettiest lights. On Normal/Hard it’s very hard to die and most your dps on the way to 70 will come from your gear.

All of that is non-operative if you’re playing Hardcore, of course. You’ll need a few defensive cooldowns for HC.

You’re not gonna need to start any serious skill min/maxing until you hit 70 and start moving up the difficulty tree.

5349

Well, they’re different games, you see, so they couldn’t possibly bring controller support, offline singleplayer, or any of the other benefits the console version offers to the PC version, even though they’re adding pretty much everything that they insisted defined the PC version to console. Or at least, that’s the response they’ve given so far, and I doubt that’s changed.

5350

You are completely right…but this is why I greatly prefer GD to D3.

I know…I should just play that if I like it better…

5351

Speaking of the journey, what do you have to do to get credit for completing (not mastering) a set dungeon? I blew through one, but didn’t get the credit for ch5 of the journey.

5352

Typically:

  • To complete a dungeon you need to successfully complete all the objectives
  • To master a dungeon you need to successfully complete all the objectives and kill all the mobs in the dungeon.

Note, it is not just a matter of blowing through the dungeon and killing everything, pay attention to the objectives that appear ion the screen and right hand side when you enter. Typically it will require a particular skill selection, rotation and often DPS tweaking to retire objectives.

You can help people out, or have people help you (which is tremendously helpful at times for mastery as you can concentrate on objectives while the helper cleans up after you. Doubly so as the dungeons are more often than not a puzzle exercise in DPS/defence management. Sometimes you need to lower your DPS to complete the objective (say using one skill to group enemies before using another skill to kill them - too much DPS makes the first skill kill everything). Lowering DPS too much can then make mastery a pain as clean up can take too long.

Also keep in mind, as I discovered, that only the person activating the dungeon gets credit. Normally, that would seem obvious (a barb helping on a monk dungeon won’t get credit), but for example, me and another wiz both ran the same set dungeon with the same set. He activated it and was awarded completion, but I wasn’t. :(

5353

So does a controller and dodge make it play like Victor Vran?

So how does someone know if they are playing effectively vs that they have the difficulty too high? That was one of my problems - I just didn’t know if when things took a long time to kill if I was playing substandard or had the difficulty set wrong.

5354

Ah, I thought you had to do all the objectives for mastery. Yeah, I’d have to lower my dps quite a bit to do this one (might of the earth). Not sure I really want to go to the trouble.

Appreciate the info, though.

5355

Just take the gems off your gear, or swap to a lower DPS (ie poorly rolled) weapon, or reset paragon points during the attempt. Usually all or some combination of that is enough to get the job done.

5356

I would generally say that if it is taking more than 5-10 seconds to kill an elite pack, your effective drop rate/efficiency is suffering. Bosses and Guardians can vary and take a little longer.

The exception to that can be getting into Torment levels to begin with. You kind of want to be playing T1 as soon as possible as some items won’t drop otherwise, but that is usually trivial for a even fresh 70 with either at least a two piece set bonus and/or proper crit chance and crit damages rolled onto gear (helm, ammy, wrist, bracers, rings).

I also can’t overemphasis the importance of crit in D3. The vast, vast majority of builds (I can only think of one exception) fundamentally rely on crit hit and crit damage - that is your power scaling. If an item can roll crit, your goal is to get crit on it via the mystic, or replace it with a version that has crit - preferably both hit and damage. Your crit needs to be at 40-50% and crit damage at 300%+. Though in fairness, sometimes a socket for a beneficial legendary gem may be the better option during progression and until a better item drops.

It almost does not matter your build, you will generally be served well by the following advice:

DPS slots:
Rings and ammys - main stat, socket, crit hit chance, crit damage
Wrists - main stat, crit hit chance, crit hit damage
Bracers - main stat, crit hit chance, relevant elemental damage
Weapon - socket for an emerald for crit damage
Helm - main stat, socket, crit hit chance

Survivability slots:
Shoulders, Torso, Pants, Waist, Boots - main stat, vit, resist all, life%, armour

It’s kind of why the itemisation of Diablo 3 is pretty crap. It is so heavily reliant on main stat, crit and sockets that they are mandatory on any item that can roll them, making other affixes irrelevant as they are comparatively useless.

5357

Thanks for all of the info. I guess what I mean by the above question is that if it is taking more than 10 seconds to kill an elite pack, how do you know if it is because you didn’t spec your character well, aren’t making good use of abilities, etc vs. just having the difficulty set too hard. In the first case I’d like to figure out how I could do better, but in the second case it’s time to set the difficulty lower since you’re already playing the best you can.

5358

Eventually, perhaps. Certainly not right away. I am melting Torment 6-7 with nowhere near that much of either. It also depends on other gear. Crit is just one multiplier. There are plenty of other ways to get multipliers in this game (for instance I got the two ring set focus and restraint today…one gambling and one as a drop). Don’t want people to think if they don’t have those kinds of numbers they are screwed. Also, some of the bonuses from seta and items are positively massive.

5359

Are you talking after L70? Generally it’s going to be all of those things to some degree, so change whatever you can that gets the result quick. ;)

Likely you can’t instantly get better equipment, so check ‘details’ section of inventory and see what the biggest bonuses are, then arrange skills to complement those. Or read up on a build. :)

If it’s still slow going then drop difficulty.

From 1-70 I just slot whatever items increase damage, spec skills to give enough resources to spam spenders, have a mobility/escape skill of some kind, and then set the difficulty down if it’s taking too long.

5360

Yeah, ultimately, this game is about sets. That aside, the most powerful you can be with whatever gear you have equipped, is with stacked crit. Build your sets and complimentary legendaries, then stack crit on all of them - there is pretty much no substitute.

Along the way, sure, a set bonus may well trump crit, but generally I presume everyone is aiming for sets anyway.

5361

Ah, good question. I guess it comes down to your average engagement time. If your average elite engagement time is 5-10 seconds, I would think you are at the right difficulty for progression. Progression being, “where is my drop rate optimised”, vs pushing being “how high can I actually go”.

Now your engagement time is also also a function of your skills and play-style, so yeah, that can have an effect. Generally, your skills should be optimised to your gear. If you have a few legs or items that boost an ability or element, look to stack that ability and element for best results. If you are confident your skill selection is leveraging the bonuses from your gear, then you are all good. Set the difficulty for a short engagement time accordingly while farming. The rest comes from getting your rotations right. And, to be fair, that can be annoying. I really dislike some rotation playstyles and they don’t gel with me. I am playing wiz this season and the free set is Firebird, but I just dislike the playstyle of that one for some reason.

Also damage mitigation is important - eventually. I talked about this in the Path of Exile thread, but that and D3’s structure ultimately made me realise that to be successful in an ARPG you need a couple of things. DPS, damage mitigation and to optimise for clear speed in order to progress. We have talked about the first (sets and crit, baby, crit) and the third above. The second, damage mitigation, D3 tries to make important during progression by breaking skills up into categories - primary, secondary, defence, etc, as they unlock. Now, the first thing you will do is turn on advanced mode which lets you put any skill anywhere (and by proxy stack all the same skill ‘type’ on all slots). That can make it easy to forget you need to slot a damage mitigation skill or two.

Sometimes the best defence is a good offence (stupid DPS) and that can get you reasonably far in D3, but sooner or later, even though you one-shot whites - all of them will also one-shot you. Many items in D3 will amplify defensive capability by stupid amounts. Aquila Cuirass is a good example - 50% damage reduction when above 90% primary resources! Brilliant if your build hardly uses any spenders. There are dozens of items like this in D3, custom built to compliment the sets on offer and every leaderboard build is leveraging one or more to a certain extent. The effect of this is that sometimes, regardless of DPS, you will be stuck at mid torments until you get that damn item that will make the survivabillity difference. The trick is recognising that and spending all of your crafting mats on trying to acquire that item, which, to be fair, requires fore-knowledge of what is available to begin with - annoying for a casual player.

So, D3 progression is get to 70, craft and re-roll items to crit, cube complimentary items, acquire legendary gems, farm or complete journey for set pieces, re-roll them to crit, acquire complimentary legendary damage mitigators/DPS multipliers, re-roll those to crit, win.

Win is typically faceroll torment X. After that comes grinding for ancients and pushing GR’s, of which some moderate amount is required to complete seasonal journeys.