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.)
The impale demon hunter is super overpowered.
I discovered Corpse Lance with Ricochet for my Seasonal Necromancer and I got to say I have never enjoyed mowing through mobs as much as I do with this. Costs me nothing in Essence and after I get a few corpses going I can just keep shredding them like they were so much paper. Nothing else I’ve used compares to it for sheer power. Not great against the bosses when there are no corpses to harvest but awesome in rifts.
Working my way through chapter 4 of the season and enjoying this necro more so than my regular one which used a different skill set. Is Corpse Lance as good as I think it is?
Yeah it’s a pain; I’m thinking you’d want to take the Golem that can give you a bunch of corpses as the skill does shred bosses quite well too when it has something to work with.
SamS
6057
ABC- Always Be Corpselancing.
Finally hit 70 with my seasonal necro - the wardrobe has been a blessing to let me quickly change between my low level experience gain set (Cain + Born + Leoric’s Helm) and my high level set to take out bosses.
Favourite thing coming back to this after so long are all the new areas and monsters I’ve never seen before - I would be happy if Blizzard just kept adding new areas like the Shrouded Moor to the game forever.
That’s a good point. I do use Command Golem but switched out the Flesh Golem for Bone Golem at one point for the extra damage. But come to think of it, after that I started using the active skill a lot less so maybe I should switch it back for more corpses. I like it!
Since Blizzard made the characters in D3 fungible commodities, I have zero attachment to any particular one. One 70 in a class is exactly the same as any other 70. It’s the gear that’s different. Hell, you don’t even see the character’s name usually.
PoE is waaaayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy more ridiculous for a hardcore character than D3. There is nothing in D3 that will one shot you from offscreen… D3 hardcore is actually pretty well done, there is a real sense of inching upwards and pushing the limits. You can still get caught out with a combination of inability to move and spike damage, but it’s not even in the same universe as PoE in terms of spike damage and completely unfair gotcha mechanics.
True enough. The mechanic that makes hardcore tolerable in PoE is that when you die in hardcore, they turn your character into an immortal/softcore character. I usually don’t play them anymore, but they sit there, alive in a different way. So it doesn’t seem as bad.
PoE is much closer to the genre’s roguelike roots in that you can and will die to some bullshit until and unless you know to mitigate that risk beforehand, aka rewarding player knowledge.
…yeah, I play softcore PoE. Fuck all that :D
Still a great game, but you’ve got to shake your head at the lost opportunity on expansion packs. Blizzard created a great framework with D3 and could have continued to pump out new expansions at $50/pop for many years to come. It could have continued to grow vibrantly, using POE’s model. Instead they’re letting it gracefully die.
It’s weird, isn’t it? That’s not too say they have not done a good job supporting it over the years, because they have. But they have left revenue on the table for sure.
