No no, in-game you only see one chapter at a time and it gives you things to do that generally match what you’d be doing anyway. The aim is to do them, to unlock bits of your free season armour set. It’s pretty straightforward.
All right, you guys have set my jittery mind at ease. I am back onboard with seasons. For now.
Heh, after my unfortunate sojourn (unwitting) into the sordid depths of non-Hardcore mode, I got my HC seasonal Wizard to 70. I always love leveling Wizards, but struggle to make them high-tier viable. The meta for the gear/abilities never is quite what i would like to play, and if you don’t follow a template, they are pretty fragile. And of course I squandered my free set pieces by screwing up the first time.
Ah well. Might level a WD or a Necro (again, grrr).
Finally got Tasker and Theo plus both essential jewelry peices last night. Not the fastest clearer, and no mobility skill, but farming TX is cakewalk now. 3-4 minute GR45 clears, depending on density. Gotta get some gems leveled, particularly whatever survivability gem I settle on - seems like a couple could be viable, at least until I need to slot in Stricken to keep up with DPS in high GR’s. Damage at the moment is very, very strong. Crazy good, but it’s strength is definitely single target sniping. Fun build to play, if a little busy. The combination of Reapers Wraps with Devour and Life From Death means health globes drop like freakin’ candy, which is good, 'cause I need 'em all to stay alive!
Nice. Because of my SNAFU with starting the season, it’s gonna be a while before I get any decent gear for any character, period…
Level 70! And with that, Chapter 2 of the Season Journey is complete.
Chapter 3 looks fairly simple. Mainly I have to beat three bosses on Master difficulty, including Diablo. It shouldn’t be a problem now that I’m equipped with 2 of the pieces from my Chapter 2 reward and 3 pieces from a Demon’s set.
You guys weren’t kidding. It’s not intuitive, but the equipment stats make all the difference in survivability and killing things and everything really. So what you can do is directly related to the stats you get thanks to the equipment. That’s… a really strange way to do an ARPG. It’s like the skills you chose and your level, and all that is just an afterthought. All the stuff that’s really important in other ARPGs.
Getting better gear to make the numbers go up is pretty integral to an ARPG, especially in the endgame. Diablo’s itemisation is a bit weird in that it puts so much emphasis on the primary stat, but even so, it’s not true that your skill choices don’t make any difference. They absolutely have to synergise with your gear to push further.
I guess the difference is that your gear tends to drive your skill choices, until you’ve had a long time to farm. I’m currently playing a massively sub-optimal DH build, as far as the meta goes, because I have a quiver that means rapid fire has no channelling cost and another item that massively increases its damage. So my skill build is built entirely around that and Vengeance.
Exactly. Because you can change your build on the fly, you pretty much have to. In other ARPGs, it’s usually a real hassle to change skill/ability choices, or it’s not really possible at all. Here, it’s totally fluid, but the trade off is that the decisions are now focused on the intersection of the skills and gear, with both being freely changeable.
It makes for less defined and unique characters, but ultimately much less frustration. Your character, of whatever class, will go through many different forms as you level and move into endgame stuff, stabilizing only when you have the dialed-in meta configuration you want for max performance.
GR64 ~8min. Need to work on some survivability. Squishy if I miss a Bone Armour or Decrepify rotation…
Yeah, I’m in the GR50s now and killing power has never been an issue. It has always been the frequent one shots. Well, that and the ramp up. If I don’t have resource my defense goes down and the significant drop to my dps makes getting more resource much more difficult… I dropped my dps significantly for defenses and still the problem is dying, not killing.
I can’t for the life of me get a Taskers to drop, however, so the build isn’t yet functionally complete. Oh, and please, RNG, just one Ramaladni’s. Thanks.
I would love to do a hardcore character, but I’m so casual and careless in my play that I always manage to die in some completely unlikely situation that I can barely recognize how it happened. In my current non-hardcore playthrough of a necromancer, I had my first death in Act III (I like to play the full game when I return after a long hiatus) from a fallen maniac in the Keep Depths after not even noticing that my health was in jeopardy. Just bam I’m dead. Unforeseeable.
Then, by the time I’m maybe familiar enough with the game to know where to be cautious about dying, I get bored and stop playing again.
Finally beat the main story with my daughter and started the season in Adventure mode.We LOVE adventure mode so far. And we didn’t stop playing until almost midnight. We blasted through our first rift last night which was fun. This is way better than slogging through the story.
Yeah, my deaths in softcore play so far have been numerous and random with every character so far. A lot of times I’m not even sure why I’m dying. And if I die again, then the answer usually is that I need to upgrade my gear. I’m not sure how I would handle that in hardcore. I guess upgrading my gear would become even more important in hardcore. To upgrade it constantly after every 2 or 3 levels, just to make sure I’m not falling behind. I imagine it won’t be as bad once you finally hit 70, because then you control your own fate by choosing the difficulty. So you just don’t increase the difficulty unless your gear calls for it. But on the way to 70? I imagine that’s where all my hardcore characters would die.
Eventually you get a sense in HC of what situations are dangerous. There are always the out of the blue one-shots, which is why I pretty much always slot the passive “get out of death free” ability, and sometimes other item-derived second chances. The two things that have been my bane in HC over the years are spike damage, number one, and getting trapped, number two, though often two precedes one…
HC does limit your build choices a little bit in that you pretty much have to slot a movement ability like Teleport or Spirit Walk, or use a cube slot for the boot ability to walk through stuff at the very least. You also often may want to slot or wear one of the immunity abilities/amulets, further affecting your range of choices. And yes, you absolutely should upgrade constantly while leveling IMO, if you are playing HC.
My problem in HC is pushing beyond the plateau you easily hit after 70, where you can’t get past Torment I-IV reliably. My first HC character that made it to 70 long ago is still around, my WD, and the best I’ve been able to do with him IIRC is GR40. I think I can do more, but I get distracted by Seasons and don’t really grind out the stuff I need. And I’m sort of slow on the uptake; it took me forever to actually level up legendary gems or really to realize how vital they were.
But really, the key to enjoying HC is accepting that you will lose characters, and to enjoy the leveling process when you do. You never want to croak, but if it’s a huge traumatic event for you, you should not be playing HC in the first place.
Honestly, HC doesn’t sound very appealing to me in this game. HC is the only way I play in Path of Exile and Diablo 2, and other ARPGs, if it’s well designed for HC. But Diablo 3 just doesn’t appeal to me as a HC game. But again, I haven’t tried it since they added adventure mode, so maybe that improves the whole leveling up process and makes HC more enjoyable in D3. So we’ll see. Mostly I want to get at least one HC character to 70 for that achievement.
Yeah I leveled a character to 70 for the achievement and also to see how the other half live, and I didn’t get much additional thrill from it. I’ll stick to my characters that I can’t lose forever from a moment of casual inattention, thank you.
Hit GR54 last season on my HC Monk, have been mostly doing Monk HC since Season 3 or thereabouts… not died yet, but not really pushing the envelope either.
I’ve found that you get much nicer parties in HC, but yea, if you’re careless or lose internet connection you might have a bad day. Still not lost any characters though.
I’ve been playing nothing but hardcore the past 3 seasons and pushed it up to about GR85 last season with no deaths.
I don’t see the allure of playing when dying has no consequence. That said, I’ve died a bunch of times this season just getting to 70 and it’s made me want throw my mouse through my monitor a few times
Dayum! Nice work, that’s quite a feat.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m very tempted to try HC mode. Just have to force myself to take the plunge. (After I get re-acclimated to the game.)