Gratz on putting Malth down and completing story mode @Rock8man! Now the real game begins! As mentioned above, really the ultimate goal of D3 is to push GRs as high as you can go, but there is immense satisfaction just working up the torment levels and conquering TX or TXIII when a few days earlier everything one shot you and you couldn’t do any damage. Then a few days after that you fly through TXIII with such ease that you are cackling with glee as screens of enemies melt before you.
The answer is gear and to a certain extent, paragon levels. Paragons will come, don’t get too hung up on them, they won’t really make or break a build.
Gear is more important. Firstly, every item in the game that is not legendary or a set item, beyond 70, is ultimately trash. Unlike Path if Exile or other ARPG’s where a top notch yellow can be a a best in slot item, you will never, ever have a yellow BIS, no matter how perfectly rolled. Sure, it may be the best thing you have at the moment, but you will still eventually replace it with a similarly rolled set or legs item. D3 is built around sets and legs. Also, as long as you are playing torment, then pretty much everything has a chance to drop.
Bounties and rifts are how you get gear and equip the cube. A complete set of bounties in each act drop the mats you need for cube recipes, as well as get you access to some act specific legendaries (which may or may not be important for you. Biggest one to be aware of is Act I Ring of Royal Grandeur, which reduces set requirements by one. Very good item, depending on your build or where you are in progression). Get the mats to use the cube to extract and equip complimentary powers from legendaries - think of the cube as three additional equipment slots where you slot legendary powers, one weapon power, one armour power and one jewellery power.
You also need Death’s Breaths for many recipes, again these will drop naturally from elites in bounties and rifts. The higher the difficulty, the more chance for more DB’s to drop. You can never have enough DB’s. Rifts and GR’s will also drop blood shards. These are used at Kadala to gamble for gear. You want legendaries and set items from Kadala and she will make you work for them. Early on, don’t bother gambling for weapons or jewellery if you can help it - it is too expensive and there are other crafting methods to get those that end up being more efficient.
Most important thing with Bounties - do them quickly! Generally, the mats are the goal, get in get out, get on to the next one. They are not really meant to be ground out. More mats drop at higher difficulty, sure, but don’t take more than 15-20 minutes to clear an act of bounties otherwise you are just hurting your efficiency and overall drop rate. I typically aim for an act clear in 10 minutes or so - 40-50min for a complete Act I-V clear. This is where grouping, even public groups, is a massive efficiency multiplier. If you play with four teammates and it each takes you 10 min to clear an act, but you split farm and do different acts simultaneously, you achieve in about 15 minutes what would take you nearly an hour solo! You do have to be mindful of the difficulty to ensure your DPS can handle more players increasing monster HP, though.
I’m just gonna quote myself again, because all this is still relevant info, I think and will guide you to the world of progression to TX.
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.
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 Cuirass1 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.
Every weapon you use should have a socket. Every single one. You should never ever be rocking a weapon with no socket. A socket with an emerald trumps any other affix and you should always roll a socket onto any weapon upgrade, if it does not already have one.
In a perfect world, you will save the Ramaladni to use on an ancient weapon. Every time a legendary drops, it has a 1/10 of being an ancient version, with much higher affix ranges. What you want to be farming for is an ancient version of whatever weapon you have settled on for your build, re-roll it for the best naked DPS output (exceptions can apply), which includes rolling an existing socket off in favour of additional damage affixes, then apply Ramaladni to that.
Direct responses:
Adventure mode exclamation marks = bounties.
Yep!
5 bounties = ingredients
Yep
keys on adventure mode locations = ?
A Keywarden exists on these levels (always the same). KW’s are a unique boss that have a chance to drop Infernal Machines. Infernal Machine’s open portals to fight uber bosses, who drop special mats required to craft Hellfire Rings or Hellfire Amulets. Each KW drops a different Infernal Machine that opens a different portal to a different set of uber bosses. Infernal Machines are used in Tristram in Leah’s house next to the healer (click on the door and you will break it down).
Hellfire rings are useless garbage. Hellfire Amulets can be best in slot as their special ability grants an additional passive. Particularly good if you are not running the Endless Walk ammy/ring set.
Diablo symbol on adventure mode locations = ?
Designates a boss location/fight.
Ingredients combine to let you extract your powers via the Cube
Correct
Ingredients let you craft hellfire rings and amulets
Correct - but the ingredients for those are dropped by uber bosses, see above.
Ingredients let you assign powers that you extract?
Extracted powers can be freely assigned. But mats are used in a variety of cube recipes, from reforging legendaries (to get better rolls or a chance at a legendary, to swapping a given set item to another piece in the same set, etc, etc.
Keys let you play Greater Rifts
Correct, drop in normal rifts from the guardian
Greater Rifts give you legendary gems
Correct, and additionally, completing GR’s in time give you the ability to level your legendary gems.
Legendary gems can be slotted into rings and amulets
Correct. Any ring/ammy without a slot is useless because of this.
In order to level up Legendary Gems, you run more Greater Rifts
Yup
Legendary Gems give you a lot more power, so you can run even more powerful Greater Rifts
Yep. Well, to a point. Extreme GR grinding gets a bit more involved (paragon grinding, gem grinding, gear augment grinding), but those folk are pants on head crazy.
Get to GR70 in order to unlock ancient items
Nope. Any legenday at any time has a 1/10 chance to roll as an ancient with higher affix ranges. After completing a solo GR70, 1/10 ancients can roll as a Primal, with perfect rolls (note the affix range is not higher again, primals just guarantee perfect rolls).
