5864

Also at a certain point, even drops become irrelevant. Once you have the crafting materials, it’s often easier to find the items you need by spending blood shards on rares, then upgrading them in Kanai Cube. I was able to outfit my Necromancer with that entire 70+ outfit of antiques and sets in just a few hours that way; with all of my items ancients, even.

5865

I seriously need to learn this shit. I need to ‘play smarter, not harder’, but I still play like a n00b even at high GR/Difficulty because it’s simply easier (for lazy shitheads like me) than learning all this new stuff they’ve added since 2012.

5866

Is that something Maltheal drops, I hope? Tell me I don’t need to jump through a million hoops just to get this game’s horadric cube.

The cube was one of my favorite aspects of Diablo 2. Upgrading old unique items so that they could be played on Elite and then on Hell difficulty? That was my favorite recipe, and the most useful.

God, I spent more time on the Arreat Summit website than I did in Diablo 2, almost. And I always had it on that page while I was playing so I could Alt-Tab to it. Is there an equivalent website for Diablo 3 that has a pleasing layout and lots of cool information like that? Hopefully something better than the Wiki that Google takes me to?

5867

No way I would push GR70 just for a shot at primals in HC! They are just not worth it. Unless your goal is to push as high as possible anyway.

5868

It’s pretty easy to get, and the good news is, once you get it, it’s automatically unlocked for all your characters.

5869

Negative, cube is located in the Sescheron Ruins, act III, top right. Just go there anytime and find it. You’ll need bounty mats for it to be of any use though, so you need to polish off the story content to get access to it.

edit - ninja’d

Worth pointing out, btw, don’t dilly dally in getting the cube on a fresh 70. Like legendary gems, slotting a couple of legendary effects in the cube is a ginormous power booster in and of itself.

5870

Yeah, this is where I am at. I’m almost done with Act 2 on my Mac, and just started act 2 on the PS4. The console commands are just that much better and more intuitive. Except for inventory management. That part just sucks.

I joined a few Communities on PS4 for D3 as well.

5871

It’s also worth mentioning that this is found and used in adventure mode, not story mode. But even though the cube is physically in adventure mode, the legendary powers you extract and utilize for each character carry over to story mode as well (if you ever actually return to story mode with a character that’s already completed that is).

5872

@Rock8man, I was once like you, btw, meticulously clearing every map, pounding away for 3 minutes on a blue pack, kite, attack, kite, attack, kite attack…

Then I started playing with a co-worker and he just blasted through everything, never stopping, always on to the next objective, powering through rifts barely pausing for those white trash mobs I would spend hours killing. If it took more than 10secs to kill a pack, you were playing too high difficulty. White mobs are trash - farm elites, bosses and guardians.

A few days with him and I was like - ‘holy fuck, I think I have been playing ARPG’s wrong!’. I am cured of that disease with D3, but I still fall into it all the time with PoE. That said, I am far from a theorycrafter myself and just follow community advice on how to put various builds together. There is some really amazing gear synergies built into the game, but you’ll never know it if you play at with a one legendary for every four hours of banging on the same mob playstyle.

I do agree with the principle of ‘play how you like’ and I think D3 is damaged for it’s ‘sets with complimentary legendaries rule forever’ design principles. I don’t think it encourages build diversity or experimentation. Everyone just checks Icy-veins for the new season hotness and rolls with that. But one thing I have learned is that to get shit to drop you need to clear fast. Clearing fast = more RNG rolls. More RNG rolls = more gear.

Maybe the new challenge dungeons will mix it up and encourage some build creativity, but I doubt it - I can’t imagine the rewards will be there. If there is no incentive to do a challenge rift, why am I doing it? Bragging rights, I guess? Meh, if I wanted a pixel perfect rift run for bragging rights, I’d be doing those GR90’s I don’t have the patience for.

I would love, LOVE for them to do a set-less season, or at least one with the Legacy of Nightmares as the only set option.

5873

One of the barbarians in the Ruins of Sescheron is, in my experience, the most relatively hard hitting creature in the game. Seen a few hardcore characters die to that while farming bounties of all things.

5874

I still prefer to play like Rock8man. I don’t care if it’s ‘wrong’, this is why I advance so slowly. The only reason I’m as far as I am with a couple character is because I’ve put a lot of time in.

My first 1000ish hours were 100% spent simply leveling up all classes twice (one guy and one girl per class), and this was before they implemented stuff like Alt advancement points, and even tracked (or made public anyway) a lot of the stats they do now. Hell, it wasn’t even until I played my first season late last year that I even tried the ‘blast through everything, go go go’ method of playing. And while that method is certainly more loot-rewarding, I like to take my time, smell the roses, and just pick apart every nook and cranny.

I’m slowly (not so slowly anymore) adapting though, I mean, once I get a few full sets of something, I end up blitzing through maps to simply keep my temporary effects going 100% of the time, so it sort of forces my hand.

5875

That npc nearly got me several times whilst playing HC, so I can confirm :)
Good thing I was on my Monk.

5876

I wonder if it’s been changed. It took people by surprise as they would be running a speed build without their death passive (it’s just t6 right?). Never ever run without the 2nd chance passive. I always got especially nervous when using a Hellfire amulet with a death passive. I wonder how many people have died after switching one out and forgetting to re-equip their passive?

5877

You should never do that anyway, lest ye be slain by the lagmonster.

5878

How many of you sissies are playing this on console?

I fired up a non-season wizard a couple days ago, and now when I look the GR rankings, I have no competition. As in “no” competition, because no-one else is leveling a wizard in the Qt3 clan.

Which tells me:

  • Clan doesn’t extend to console
  • Everybody is theorycrafting their necros
  • Nobody in the heavily-populated Qt3 clan plays any more
5879

I can certainly tell you that while I’ve been playing this Witchdoctor on Xbox One, the only people I see on my friends list who are playing these days were all playing Necromancers. And yesterday when I logged on, there were three level 70 necros.

And no, I haven’t fired up the PC version since me and my friends abandoned it 3 months after release after deciding we didn’t like it.

I tried convincing them to come back to the 360 version (“Believe me guys, there’s no auction house, you get legendary items all the time, the game is much more fun with a controller”) but no one believed me, so intense was the displeasure at launch Diablo 3 on the PC, which we all wasted $60 on at launch.

5880

I own it on Xbox One, but 99% of my playtime is on PC. I forget what characters I have on my console, one is a Barbarian, but I forget the others. I’m only Torment 4 or 5 I think. I don’t find the experience as engaging as the PC version, so I haven’t fired it up in a while.

5881

Yeah I’ve been leveling up my necromancer on Xbox but just fairly casually. Getting a feel for all the skills.

5882

Same, here. He did me in twice in 1 season, so I avoid tend to avoid him.

5883

Yeah, Maltheal kept killing me, so I had to turn it down to Expert to finally beat him. And even then I had to use the right thumbstick dodge move a lot to finally get through the fight.

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to listen to the audio at all in the second level of the Pandemonium fortress. Audio was working on the Xbox, but when I was streaming to Windows 10, it wasn’t working. So I have no clue what happened in the story at the end. :(

I did start Adventure mode and went to get the cube. At Torment V. It took a long time, but I finally got it.

I’m not sure I get the point of playing on these harder difficulty levels. No legendary drops at all, unlike on Master and lower levels. And I only got 3 rare items, all of them crap. Most of the items that dropped were gray, which has never happened before.

Once I got the cube, everything in the game is pretty nicely explained, including the recipes. Except, all the recipes require some new fangled ingredients I’ve never seen before. And there was no explanation as to where to find them. I’m assuming maybe these ingredients only drop in adventure mode maybe, or on Torment difficulty maybe. Who knows.

I feel my desire to keep playing with this character waning. Paragon levels don’t seem like a good incentive to keep playing. Once you’ve reached 70 or finished the story, … I don’t know. I tried the really hard levels briefly. Like Torment IX or something like that. First enemy I saw one shot killed me. So that’s not a real option, obviously.

Maybe I’ll start over with a hardcore character. That should make it interesting.