Diablo IV - A Return To Darkness

I’ve caught a few, bloody useless

The reward system in the early tiers (I & II) doesn’t seem to give purpose to doing other than the big events if legendary loot is what you are seeking. The chance of finding legendaries seems incredibly small compared to past games. I’m thinking that’s because they can’t have similar drops from non-world events that you can get by killing a boss or doing a gathering legion or something like them.

It also has the side-effect of pushing people to create their own legendaries via aspects. Unfortunately, that is also gated behind crafting ingredients that are also rare to come by.

I haven’t changed a piece of my gear in a couple days now (maybe a weapon, but certainly no armour/jewellery). With the amount of playing I’m doing, that’s not a good sign.

On another note, for classes that can carry an alternate weapon like rogues and barbs, do the stats on the alternates work even when you aren’t using the weapon? I’m thinking they do outside of the direct damage itself, but that would be odd for the barb because they’d give four weapons worth of extras. What’s the verdict out there?

I’ve caught a couple, including one I trapped in a corner in a dungeon, but aside from some horse barding, they’ve never dropped anything of note.

Did the level 50 capstone dungeon today. After breezing through World Tier 1 that was no joke! Took me a few tries to kill the Council and I was all happy about that until I realized I had more dungeon to go! Died to the Curator 3 times and had decided to try one last time and I downed him. Good times! World Tier 3 is a bit of an adjustment. I also met the Butcher the first time, while doing a regular dungeon. I started fighting him and thought “why is this boss so hard?” and then I realized who it was. He got me good. Someday I will get my revenge!

You get the bonuses, including the innate bonus of the item but you don’t use the damage unless you are using the weapon. I have no idea about barbarians except their arsenal system lets them use whatever weapon per skill so they can switch it around for their build but their damage calculation probably incorporates all their weapons in regards to the number of bonuses they get.

Barbs get the bonuses from all equipped weapons.

My Sorc took a big step forward when I switched from my Chain Lightning leveling build to a Firewall build in her early 50s. Some people have noted that firewall falls off in T4 in favor of Ice Shards, but it is absolutely fantastic in T3 (50s and 60s).

That is important info to keep in mind. I remember not doing much with my barb during beta other than boosting the dps of the alternate weapons, since every skill I used was based on a single weapon type. I was doing the same with my current rogue until I had a feeling that something was up when my current crossbow (not used) gave 74 dex plus additional points to all skills and it changed my stats. Then I was all over it, ensuring that I socketed some gems and I’m now paying attention to the bow weapon.

My Lvl17 Rogue using couple of traps, barrage for arrows and cold imbuement got a solid beating yesterday by a dungeon boss Blood Bishop. Died five or six times, and was tempted to change difficulty to WT1. I found that I was just not able to deal good damage, and then suffer huge damaging blows at the same time. I had been trying to get a common set of six skills going for all scenarios, but finally for this encounter I switched to a bow skill (from an item) Penetrating Shot that did some decent damage. Then it was about constant movement to not get hit, and to whittle down the boss health bar with penetrating shots, poison traps and reducing AoE damages as much as I could. Just barely survived, and then came out of dungeon with lot of self-doubts, and immediately got jumped over by a mob, and with my skill slots still set for massively damaging a single enemy, couldn’t handle it and died again.

I learned an important lesson that for properly playing rogue in WT2, I have to be fully prepared to switch skills for bosses. I spent a few skill points in shadow shield for damage reduction and rapid fire for dealing damage and was able to handle bosses much better.

I also got the rogue specialization, which is very much like the Diablo2 assassin style, where you hit a few times with basic attack to build some combo points and then unload through the main core skill.

I am feeling little better about the skill upgrade plan now. By the way, this may be known to everyone that pressing “S” brings a skill-table pop-out screen and from where you can assign keys to the quick slot. I didn’t know and was trying out the skill upgrade screen to change the quick slots.

It is also a 2-Handed weapon giving you +100% bonus on it’s aspect. Thus it is your goto for your primary aspect. I personally use Bladedancer there and my Twisted Blades are massive from it.

I started doing WT4 at 65 and at 67 can join world bosses and they go down pretty fast. I was actually a bit disappointed how fast a legion event boss died and we were all 70ish at the time. Was hoping open world stuff would stay hard since 4 is the last tier we got. Thankfully nightmare dungeons have the modifiers though, that crap gets really hard past tier 21.

btw if you want some really good stuff, just go to wt4 during a helltide and follow some people around grabbing cinders. then hit a mysterious cache for massive gear increase.

all my gear is focused on ice , defense, or resource saving. I guess I need to start saving fire gear if I wanted to switch?

Couple of questions for the group.

Does anyone know the in-game mechanic for when multi-player events are involved. I’m not talking about people forming groups, I’m talking about when you see something going down on the map and there are others there or others join you and you’re level 40 and here’s a level 30 and there’s a level 20… am I making this up? How do they calculate the combat if we’re all hitting the same mobs?

With regard to aspects on your legendary gear, does anyone know how it plays if you happen to have two of the same type? Say… something creates a barrier (?) for you that lasts 10 seconds and 30 second cool down before it happens again. If I have two of that type aspect do I trigger a second barrier before the 30 seconds for the first expires?

I tried two of the same legendaries - you get the stats, but it grayed out the legendary power of the one with the worse legendary stat roll. So you can’t stack them.

Dumb newbie question: is the only way to make parties to walk up to people you see and try to invite them? Is there no matchmaking functionality?

Everything is scaled to your WT and your level for you. If you are just roaming along not in a party it’s your WT and level that the mobs are at, if someone is not on your WT they are not able to be in the same outdoor instance as you, only those on your tier are with you.

In a party you have to match the WT of the lowest member and everything is set to that WT, with a cap at the level the WT stops (I think 50 for WT2).

I don’t need to leech off anyone. Ended up I just needed a few upgrades on gear and my new glyph to unlock and things are mostly back to the same with the added danger of having only barely enough resits to stay positive on some and at -20 on my cold. My bad for going to WT4 and immediately doing a World Boss.

Man the enemy hp in campaign is tuned way too high to be enjoyable. If you don’t get lucky and get aspects that almost double your dps it’s a fucking chore to get through (druid, not sure how it is for other classes).

Overall I agree with @stusser , there’s too much friction in the early game.

Well - the good news is, you get to go through it all again in a few weeks, when the next season starts.

And I agree completely - I completed the game with a druid, on WT1, and it was a slog.

It oddly gets easier in the midgame when you have more skill points to start synergising and when you get more legendaries. My solution is to run WT1 to finish the campaign with the easiest class, then do the other classes with a mount and up to 10 additional skill points and I believe 9 potions plus some aspects ready to go from level 1. Plus you get to skip the campaign.