Great post man! I’ve read the substance of it elsewhere on the webz but that’s a real resource you posted. Should be able to mark or archive that somehow.
Very interesting. Thanks! So Kadala and crafting yellows. I can do that.
My Xbox controller constantly pulls upward, so the menu systems in Diablo 3 are now REALLY tough to navigate. There’s no Dead Zone, and it’s really, really sensitive. So choosing the right property I want to enchant at the Mystic is really tough. Usually I pick the one right above or below the one I want. So it really helps if the one I want to change is at the very top or the very bottom!
Wow, all these hard-learned tips for the boatload of D3 newbs just now showing up. Our sweet, summer children :)
Oh and there are a few legendary gems that may well help with mitigation at TIV - Esoteric Alteration, Molten Wildebeests Gizzard, Moratorium and Mutilation Guard.
You’re also going to want Simplicity’s Strength ASAP, which is a huge, huge boost to your damage output. The gems are easy to get, just set the Greater Rift to level one and you will cream it quickly, just to get the gems. They are guaranteed drops from the Greater Rift Guardian, until you have one of each. Get sockets on that jewelry and go to town.
I probably missed quite a few affixes, by the way. Some of which may be handy in the short term, like life on hit on your weapon, particularly on the generator monk (which is what the Raiment/Shenlong combination is affectionately known as). The combination of the building attack speed from the set and passives with LoH can keep you sustained until you get some of the other mitigation peices. Life on kill and life regeneration on gear, on the otherhand, is generally not worth worrying about.
It’s not crazy at higher gear levels to make a mixed set with Sages for farming deaths breath, but sadly yes most of the crafted pieces are useless outside of a few.
Must…have…more…DB’s!
Ha, I just made a similar blunder when I replaced an existing rare chest piece with a new better legendary set piece (Blackthorn’s) I just got from Kadala. I went to remove the gems from my existing chest piece and did so, placing them in my new chest. Then I went to my paper doll to insert the new chest, but there was the old chest still there! Turns out that I somehow removed the gems from my still good rare leg piece (both had two gem slots) via destruction of the item. Luckily I was able to craft a suitable replacement on the first try so my loss of resources was minimal, but still… How does one do that? I knew what I was intending to do and I’m usually a very deliberate and precise person. Thank god it wasn’t a critical piece for an entire gear strategy.
One thing to consider: If you craft a rare item with a lot of attributes (4 or 5) but it’s missing one key thing, like main stat, don’t just ignore it and keep “rolling” new items. It may be cheaper and easier to go to the mystic and change one of the unessential stats your item contains to the missing main stat. That’s often not as expensive, at least in resources, as rolling new whole items. Might cost a little more gold, but that tends to be more abundant most of the time.
I hit my max carry on the currency that Kadala takes (630). So I went to her and kept buying wrist bracers. All crap yellow ones not anywhere close to the green ones I’m using from the Demon’s set. The very last ones I bought were a Legendary item. It’s special orange property is that I get a 358% bonus to damage for 5 seconds or something after I’ve frozen or stunned a target. Technically they do a lot less damage than the green set item I have, but my Templar does occasionally stun enemies, so the special property would hit at that time. Hmmmm.
What a waste of 630 simolians though.
Btw, thanks to the free preview weekend on Xbox, I don’t have to put in the disc while I’m playing. I’m free! Free to put in whatever disc I want!
You’re lucky you got a legendary item at all. I just spent ~430 blood shards on shoulders and got nothing. That’s the way it goes. Previous two times I used her for chest and pants I got one on the 3rd and 1st try respectively.
If your new bracers do “a lot less damage” than your old ones, you definitely want to keep the old ones, sorry. Unless I’d say if your special property is important to your build or is so good it’s practically indispensable (something like the Illusory Boots I just got today; those are nice).
With a few new legendaries and other improvements I got my damage up to over 400K and moved up to Torment II today. Still don’t have any Necro oriented set pieces yet, so I hope they’ll start dropping in the ranks of Torment.
It’s important to note there is nothing else to spend the simolians on though, gambling is their sole purpose.
I presume you lucked into these:
Until you get your 6-set, these are potentially a great interim upgrade for you. Which green set item are they replacing? I highly doubt they are going to be better than these. Remember, that 358% damage bonus is not reflected on your sheet DPS! So when the tooltip says they are worse, it does not take into consideration any legendary or set proc effects, bonuses to elemental damage, etc. Sheet DPS is basically a rough measure that considers your mainstat damage bonus, weapon DPS, attack speed, crit hit chance and crit hit damage. It’s not a smart enough algorithm to take into account the vast array of special effects that gear interactions may additionally provide.
As to ensuring procs on those bracers, you can’t rely on the inconsistency of a follower, so you need to do it yourself and flex your skill choices to make use of the bonus while it makes sense (depending on where you are in your progression, ie it won’t make sense once you get your 6-set). Monk has a variety of skills that reliably apply the trigger stuns, blinds or freezes:
- First of Thunder with Wind Blast rune
- Blinding Flash - AOE blind, with a variety of utility runes depending on what you may need - more damage, extended blind, resource regen, etc
- Crippling Wave - Tsumani
- Cyclone Strike - Wall of Wind
- Seven Sided Strike - Pandemonium
- Sweeping Wind - Master of Wind
- Mantra of Retribution - Indignation
- Mystic Ally - Water Ally
- Epiphany - Ascendance
And your Relentless Assault passive synergises and adds even more damage to stunned, frozen and blinded enemies.
Keeping in mind also that a stunned, blinded or frozen enemy is also an enemy that is not hitting you, they are an important CC/mitigation tool anyway and I imagine you already have one or even more of those skills on your bar. In many cases, simply switching to an appropriate passive turns an item from ‘meh’ to ‘woah’!
Note that this item becomes useless once you get your 6-set, as the set bonus damage to Dashing Strike and your generators will far, far outweigh any benefit of sticking with Tempest Rush.
So I’d be dashing striking around a bit to begin grouping a bunch of mobs up, banging on them for a bit to build resource, cyclone striking them to suck them all into a big group, AOE blinding flashing them and them tempest rushing the clustered group into oblivion. Or something like that anyway. That would be using up a few skill slots though, so you could leave a couple out to ensure room for a mantra, ally and mitigation skills like Epiphany, Breath of Heaven, Inner Sanctuary etc, but you should see the gist. :)
Thanks for all the enthusiasm, @sharaleo. Although I already play every season, it’s awesome to see all these tips. Really enjoying them.
Yeah, reading all these tips from @sharaleo really reinforced how many viable (not necessarily optimal!) ways to play the game if you just want to melt faces with different gear combinations. I’d looooove those bracers for my tempest rush monk but I’ve just gotten too used to my SSS build.
What is the best strategy for farming high level gear? Is it just rifts on the highest difficulty you can efficiently do them at?
Is it better to kill all the mobs for just get to the end as fast as possible?
I find reading the thread to be the best strategy personally. Others may disagree.
I’m not sure about farming but relying on drops is rather inefficient. I find the easiest way to get armor is through Kadala, and for specific weapons to cube a rare to a legendary but I still haven’t found a great formula for rings and amulets.
The answer is speedrunning, cube crafting and gambling. Crafting is great when you are targeting an individual piece - upgrade rares or reforge existing legendaires to get better rolls and or ancients. Same with gambling, though once you get to the stage of trying to get all replacement ancient gear, initially stick with gambling for armour peices as they are much cheaper and spend your mats upgrading/reforging weapons and jewelry.
Speedrunning is just any variation to your build that encourages getting into and out of rifts, grifts and bounties as fast as possible, typically with a focus on a buffed movement skill so traversal is super fast and targeting a difficulty where a typical elite engagement is in the order of a few seconds.
The goal is to get from one elite pack to the next with as much speed as possible, ignore everything else. Speedrunning a rift should take no longer than 4 minutes, preferably closer to 2. In this way you are maximising the number of chances for gear to drop. There is lots of stuff that supports these builds - Nemesis Bracers, In-Geom, Illusionary Boots, Warzechian Armguards, Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac, Bane of the Powerful is more useful for speedrunning than pushing, etc. Some build excel at this - DH UE, WD Perma-Chicken, Monk ranged Wave of Light, and some are less so, like my current Necro Rathma build - ymmv.
You kind of need the mats from bounties and rifts for any crafting anyway, so a speedrunning variation is always a good idea. Also, by the time you have built up a couple of hundred paragon levels or so, switching out some items for those that support speedrunning become a lot easier as the paragon can cover some baseline damage and mitigation.
Oh and the oldest rift speed farming trick in the book, if your speed build is squishy because you switched out a few mitigation items for speed items - slot the Boon of the Hoarder legendary gem and wear or cube a GoldWrap belt - instant invincibility in rifts ftw!
So I should target a 2 minute time on running rifts for farming? I guess I better done down the difficulty level quite a bit.
Well…to a point. Ideally you want to be running 2 minute TX rifts, or even TXIII once you really get going! But you need a good setup and paragons to get there start with, so chicken and egg! I probably would not go below TIV for farming as you still want decent drop rates, but even a fresh 6 set with complimentary yellows and a compliment of legendary gems should be pretty much creaming TV-VII.
And 2 minutes, while an admirable target, is still uber quick, some builds just won’t get quite that fast. The first three builds I mentioned will all do it - heck I’ve done ridiculous 90 second clears at TX with perma-chicken (the most fun build in the game, IMO)! But I’ll have to be content with 4-5 minute clears with my current Rathma Necro as it juts lacks the mobility.
My plan this season was a perma-chicken WD just for farming, incidentally, just because that build is so darned quick. You can easily solo the ‘kill all the bosses in 20 minutes at TX’ conquest, hence my choice as an alt. That and it also runs Int as mainstat, so gear drops are transferable without a wasteful re-roll.