High-end content can be generally broken into three categories:
Running bounties. Used for grabbing unique mats for extracting legendary powers. Also used for farming keywardens.
Running rifts. Used for grinding loot. You will likely spend most of your time here.
Running Great Rifts. Used mainly for farming and levelling gems, but, depending on the GR level, you usually get a decent end-boss loot drop, too. Pushing GRs is really how you make a “statement” of how well-constructed your build is; if your build sucks, a GR a level above your comfortable rift level (ex. GR torment 4 when you’re running rift torment 2 or 3) will quickly inform you about any deficiencies.
Regarding what torment level you should run at: don’t worry about times for rifts. Grind at a level where you feel comfortable. There will come a time when the rift is just too easy, then and only then bump up the difficulty one step. Ideally, you should never be sweating bullets in a rift, but you shouldn’t be on auto-pilot, either.
My rule for GRs is this: if I can’t clear it in less than 10 minutes (ideally 7-8), then I shouldn’t be pushing higher until I can.
In a way, crafting is also its own thing. You get mats from bounties, but also the keywardens. And you can do some neat stuff with the cube (also an activity unto itself, unlocking all the various powers).
Running complete bounties is specifically for the cube :)
Yes, but collecting powers is fun in its own right and bounties have other rewards as well. They are related things, certainly, but “running bounties” undersells it.
I think you’re misunderstanding me; that’s what I’m saying: bounties are where you build up extracting mats. And slotting the right powers is an integral part of a build.
Banzai
6230
Bounties also have items and plans that only drop in bounties that are pretty useful. In addition to getting the crafting materials.
Someone mentioned it above: there are probably about half a dozen recipes (except for gem combining recipes) that are useful… and, unless you’re desperate to swap out a really crappy piece of underlevelled gear, none at 70. Born’s is about the only one I find helpful to get through 20-35 or so.
Banzai
6232
I use the sage’s set at 70 for extra death’s breaths pretty often, and RoRG, Avarice Band, Reaper’s Wraps, and Illusory Boots often find their way into either my armor or the cube.
I’m working on a HC necro now and I don’t want to use the free set for her, as I don’t want to lose it when I eventually die. Starting from scratch at 70, I’m finding some use for the plans I got from bounties.
Kadath
6233
We’re doing Torment 13s now, GRift 65s. Top of the world, furthest I’ve even been,
Grinding the Gem of Ease to 25 was totally worth it, by the way. After giving my new Demon Hunter a Legendary level 70 1 hand crossbow, I was able to blaze through Act 1 bounties on Sunday night. Then Monday night I got through Act 2 and 3 bounties. And last night, I got through Act 4 and 5 bounties. And just doing that, I’m now level 54, but now things are powerful enough that Torment 2 was becoming too hard, it was taking a long time to take down enemies with a 1 handed weapon. If I’d been able to find a 2-handed bow to start this journey with, I bet it would have gone even faster and lasted longer. I did switch to Torment 1 for Act V bounties.
I don’t know what I did but the keys are all gone from my map in Adventure mode. Any idea what I might have done to get rid of them? I did kill a key master in Act 1, but he didn’t drop anything. And after that, all the keys disappeared from the maps, so no more keymasters for me.
EDIT: Oh I see. According to Diablo Wikia they only start showing on the map after you reach level 60. So they must still be there, just not visible on the map yet.
Just had a major, major breakthrough yesterday in my Necro character power. Only able to rise to T3 I somehow managed to get a full set of Trag’oul armor and resolved to don it even if it lowered my stats somewhat. My existing damage was between 610K and 620K and my defense was 6M or so. I was fighting hard to hold my own in T3. So with Trag’oul set I rework my skills to make use of blood attacks, switch to a 1H scythe and offhand, and my damage fell to about 430K while my defense rose to about 9M due to a lot more vitality. I’m unsure how this would fare, so I take a trial run on an Act I bounty and I’m seeing very dramatic offensive results. My Bone Spear and Bone Spirit are now uber powerful. My Corpse Explosion is a nuke. I one-shot Skeleton King in T3 and realize I can up the difficulty. I go to T4 to finish the Season Journey. I one-shot all bosses in T4, the Keyholders and Magda. In GRs, my previous best time was about 10 mins on GR15. I now did the GR20 run in 5 minutes to finally take the rewards. I’ve never had this kind of dramatic shift in power before. Just astounding. Now I question whether I should continue to advance up the difficulty ladder to where I’m at parity again or farm at T4 to quickly gather tons of resources?
Oh, and to answer my own question earlier, the seemingly best way to max out DB gathering is to wear the Nemesis Bracers which allow you summon an elite enemy every time you use a shrine or pylon. With my current dominance in T4 these give me at least double the number of DBs I’d ordinarily get in a NR or Bounty run. Great stuff.
Man I wish there was a Diablo 3 thread just for folks who don’t care much about numbers and just like to faff about and blow things up. I mean I’d make one, but I imagine I’d mostly be talking to myself. And I can do that right here at my desk just fine, thank you.
Diablo 3 is a weird beast that way. In one way, they completely de-emphasize the numbers compared to Diablo 2. All that matters is one number: your DPS number. And then on top of your DPS number, there’s the orange properties from legendary items that don’t get figured in, and those are almost completely by feel.
So then numbers don’t really matter in D3, right? Just get your one DPS number as high as possible? Well no, because there’s this whole other set of numbers to do with the difficulty. Basically whether you blow shit up and kill enemies is completely dependent on what difficulty you’re playing on. So any discussion of Diablo 3 is unfortunately always going to be intimately tied to what difficulty level you’re playing on, and how long it takes to beat monsters, because monsters always scale to your level on Normal, but how much stronger they get only depends on what difficulty scaling you’re playing on.
So yeah, I’m flummoxed by how much numbers discussion there is for a game that’s basically about blowing monsters to bits. But it’s inevitable because on Normal difficulty, anyone will be killing anything left and right. And once you get to 70, that’s probably true up to Master difficulty. But higher than that, it’s all reliant on numbers. Your equipment, which lead to your stats, which lead to how how a difficulty you can play, which is measured by how quickly you can beat monsters.
Some of us are going really slow! I’m leveling up my first season character, a wizard, and my build is basically “passive damage buffs and Disintegrate.” It’s great at exploding monsters – I did all of Act 3 on Master, but it gets dicey at times, so I’m not sure if I can move to Torment quite yet.
No, I mean I get it. I understand that at its core D3 is a hamster wheel of pursuing better gear to kill more powerful monsters so you can get better gear to kill more powerful monsters, just continuing to spiral upwards. It just doesn’t matter as much to me as it does to most other folks. I don’t blame anyone for that, it’s me who’s out of step, I just kind of get bored reading this thread. Which would probably tell me to go find a new thread, were I the type of person who could take a hint.
No, I was agreeing with you. My eyes also glaze over most posts in this thread. Especially when people start using acronyms and numbers as shorthand. It’s just unfortunate that it’s hard to talk about this game on a forum given how cool it looks. Same with Grim Dawn. That’s even more impressive to behold than Diablo 3 when it comes to the way monsters die and explode and go careening towards the camera when they die in an explosion sometimes. But that is hard to talk about more than once. The thread for Grim Dawn gets kind of quiet while people are playing it.
My bet is you can roflstomp at least up to T7 and likely higher.
It’s the inevitable long-term outcome of any progression-based RPG discussion. You’re just playing along merrily, when one day, you just can’t get past one hurdle. Then you crack open your browser to see how other people did it, and from then on, you’re lost to the rabbit hole of builds, and theorycrafting, and numbers numbers numbers.
Yep, once you get to 70 and start equipping sets and legendaries, sheet DPS becomes meaningless. It does not reflect said bonuses, it does not even reflect bonus elemental or skill damage on a regular yellow items.
Diablo has put too much emphasis on green sets. I wish there were no predetermined “sets” and a thousand more legendries so people could experiment on more different combos instead of following a recipe. This coming from a guy with close to 1000 hours in the game, maybe I’m just tiring out of D3. I currently enjoy Grin Dawn a bit more, but I only have over 300 hours in that so maybe at 1000 I would feel the same.
