Ah, I should've done this earlier, but time's so limited before the holidays and playing RoS is so much fun. But since the server's down and my client just crashed, it's time to post my $0.02. Some of this might not be new for some of you, I foreshadowed some of it in the general forum, and much of it might have been said by other people somewhere else. If you just wanna see my current build, skip to the end.
I'm focusing exclusively on the stage between level 60 and 70 pre-legendary (as I still haven't found a single useful legendary drop, believe it or not; 3 useless drops altogether).
1) Leveling to 70
This is pretty straightforward. Pick any skill combination you like. Really, screw efficiency and play what you think feels good. You can just play on a lower difficulty and you'll get there eventually; even if you level 60-70 on normal, it'll probably take you a few hours. As some others have said, you can finish the campaign on normal and do bounties on expert or so. I personally leveled up on master until 67-68, at which point it was just not possible anymore - switched to normal to finish act 5 and did some bounties on expert. If you wanna be super fast, test your favorite "fastest" build on the PTR, it'll be fine until 70. What helps tremendously is a big ass life leech weapon. Use it while you can...
Gear-wise, I almost replaced nothing while leveling up. I'm sitting at 300k/300k unbuffed on live, so not bad but also not the super wealthy guy in OP gear. Some of the stuff is viable even quite some time on level 70, but more on that later. Don't spend any time on upgrading gear while leveling - it's just not worth it. Every time you empty your inventory, just quickly glance over the item; if there's one with all green numbers then go for it, unless it's a weapon (no life steal).
2) Reached 70 - what now?
Gearing up (I'll put this in spoiler because many know this already):
First thing you wanna do is bump your toughness. There are some easy slots for this. For example, legs: you're probably using Inna's right now, right? Get rid of them and find legs with int/2 sockets and either vit or allres, and try to reforge it to have all these 4 stats. I put all my core tab paragon points in movement speed to compensate for the loss of Inna's. Next slots are shoulders (relatively easy to get an upgrade) and bracers (depends on what your 60 bracers look like). Chest took me quite a while, it's not a huge upgrade. Helm and orb are difficult: you might lose some DPS if you have decent gear on live, but you need APoC on both slots (there's no APoC on wands anymore). Note that for orb it seems like you can get 5 primary affixes (4 primary+socket which can be reforged), so don't spend a lot of money before you get one of these. As for the weapon, you're looking for a 1700-1980 DPS, int, socket weapon (fourth stat to your liking, I prefer vit). You want an emerald in your weapon, because crit chance is still high, but crit hit damage got nerfed (there's no crit
Belt is the last thing I replaced. Even a perfect rare will lose a lot of DPS against almost every Witching Hour, but you get A LOT of toughness. I keep my WH and equip it if I lower difficulty by one level (it's really that much of a difference). And the other items that are difficult to replace are jewelry. I got insanely lucky and replaced mine already, but I know some people who're still using 60 rings on Master.
Last but not least, the gems: everyone I've seen just put diamonds in every slot. It'll bump your allres from 700 to 1000ish, unbuffed. Add Prismatic Armor and your toughness gets really high. Primary slots are, in my opinion, too valuable to be wasted with armor, so it's all about allres in gems, vit on every possible slot, and life% on shoulders/belt. Many get to 500k life and 5-10m toughness (buffed!) quickly.
Do bounties to get Blood Shards and buy your upgrades, don't craft items. It's too expensive. Rather save the materials (and gold) for reforging and upgrading gems - you need a lot. Unless you have a few million gold too much on your bank account, pick up every blue item and salvage it; Arcane Dust is always the scarce resource.So, let's get to the interesting part: how to make progress!When you start RoS, you can easily play Master at first. Master is too easy at level 61, yeah, we all get it. At level 70, Master is damn hard until you get decent gear. This is because there are three things you need to take care of:- Make sure you have enough Arcane Power to cast your skills - the days of Archon/CMWW are over!- Get a decent amount of healing - there is no more life steal- Take measures to prevent losing health - build up your shield somehow.Focus on these things first, then DPS. So, what can we do about it?For Arcane Power, I personally felt that 2 APoC pieces are pretty much mandatory at the start, or at least make life a lot easier. Passives like Power Hungry, Astral Presence, and Prodigy provide a little help. You can also use one of the AP-refilling signature spell runes (Shock Pulse - Power Affinity, Spectral Blades - Siphoning Blade, Electrocute - Surge of Power). And there are some other ways, like Familiar - Arcanot. I personally felt that 20 APoC and 45% CC are way better than all the skill-based AP regeneration methods combined. But share your opinion if you feel differently!As for healing, I am still looking for the right twist. I personally prefer to play "at my limits" from time to time, which involves long fights, making life after kill kind of useless. If you're going for maximum efficiency though, LaK might be your stat. Health globes drop a lot and are being used strategically - so stacking health globe bonus on secondary stats might be another strategy. As for life per second and life on hit, I have no idea which is better, in which situation, and for which build. I put all my points in these two stats in the respective paragon tabs, which gives me a good basis and lets me tank even difficult mobs on Torment 1 right now, but it's all a bit "guesswork" as to which stats let's me do that. If anyone has any more insights into "LoH vs. LPS", I'd love to hear about it!Last but not least, there's the shield. Many people say Dominance is a must-have passive. Well, it kind of depends; if your nemesis are rift bosses, they are often isolated without any adds to kill and fill up your Dominance stack. I personally learned to live without it. Again, if for you it's all about efficiency and you don't mind skipping bosses/tough elite packs, then by all means go for it. My two favorites for gaining shield are Magic Weapon - Deflection and Spectral Blade - Barrier Blades.My current build:Foreword - I know there are some OP spells, like the Arcane Torrent proc rate is supposed to be amazing, and Meteor deals a shit ton of damage. I personally am not a fan of kiting, and I don't like spells with a delay. I want to click and see stuff happening (preferably monsters dying). I always come back to Wave of Force - I found this skill to be absolutely insane. Given that you have a decent AP regeneration, you can spam it like crazy. For bosses, I hit Spectral Blades more often, obviously. The last two skills are often switched out: Instead of Familiar, I sometimes choose Diamond Skin (with any rune), but to be honest, the DS shield every 15 seconds is just not good enough. And yesterday I've used Arcane Explosion a lot instead of Black Hole. But I adjusted my gear to get some Wave of Force and Arcane damage bonus, so I'm going full Arcane now.Like I said, I'm decked in all rares, no legendary yet; but with roughly 10k healing and 12m toughness Torment 1 is absolutely doable, I can facetank 90% of elite packs and don't even need to move sometimes (yeah I'm lazy and I have a slow reaction sometimes). It also makes Unwavering Will super useful (and a good excuse for why I didn't move!) I tried Torment 2, and I survive all mobs and about 50% of elite packs, but it's just too slow (some 700k buffed DPS or so). And some damage elite combos just eat my face.
All stats change all the time; I have a stash full of gear to switch out things and experiment. You'll never see me doing two runs with exactly the same skill+gear ;-) I'll try to add some more things if I have the time; unfortunately I won't because of the upcoming holiday...
Edit: Messed up BBCode that let a paragraph disappear... fixed
When you start RoS, you can easily play Master at first. Master is too easy at level 61, yeah, we all get it. At level 70, Master is damn hard until you get decent gear. This is because there are three things you need to take care of: Make sure you have enough Arcane Power to cast your skills - the days of Archon/CMWW are over! Get a decent amount of healing - there is no more life steal Take measures to prevent losing health - build up your shield somehow. Focus on these things first, then DPS.
Do you know what this reminds me? Release of Diablo 3, Everyone get pwned on inferno, everyone go for max allres\hp\defense skills, what happened next? Blizzard nerfed hell out of inferno, everyone completely (almost except few exceptions on some classes) begun ignoring def skills. And now (on live) everyone just run rampaging killing mobs before most of them can strike even once. I have feeling that same thing gonna happen with RoS
Also, 10k healing - you talk about Life on hit? Or regen?
When you start RoS, you can easily play Master at first. Master is too easy at level 61, yeah, we all get it. At level 70, Master is damn hard until you get decent gear. This is because there are three things you need to take care of: Make sure you have enough Arcane Power to cast your skills - the days of Archon/CMWW are over! Get a decent amount of healing - there is no more life steal Take measures to prevent losing health - build up your shield somehow. Focus on these things first, then DPS.
Do you know what this reminds me? Release of Diablo 3, Everyone get pwned on inferno, everyone go for max allres\hp\defense skills, what happened next? Blizzard nerfed hell out of inferno, everyone completely (almost except few exceptions on some classes) begun ignoring def skills. And now (on live) everyone just run rampaging killing mobs before most of them can strike even once. I have feeling that same thing gonna happen with RoSAlso, 10k healing - you talk about Life on hit? Or regen?
Keep in mind that when D3 was released, there were no MP levels. This is not about increasing survivability because the last difficulty is too hard; this is because we need to adjust to the fact that life steal supported glass cannon play as Archon or CMWW is not possible anymore. I don't see why Blizzard should nerf anything like they nerfed Inferno after release.
And about the 10k healing: Healing is a new meta stat on your character screen, consisting of a mixture of life per second, life on hit, life after each kill, bonus to health globes, and life per spirit/fury spent. I'm paragon 111, and just from the two paragon tabs I get already about 7k "healing"; about 2400 for life on hit and 4500 for life regeneration. (I'm guessing numbers here, can't log in right now).
When D3 was released, you wanted to get to Inferno because that was where the high level stuff dropped. Furthermore, Inferno act 1, act 2, and act 3/4 had different levels of gear progress; Blizzard's idea was that you needed to farm act 1 for a while to be able to progress to act 2, and so on. That was a bad decision in hindsight: people don't want to be forced to play one certain kind of "endgame", having no access to 75% of the content. Therefore, everything was nerfed - a bit too much, arguably. Soon people realized that everything was super easy (unless you played self-found), and it was just a matter of raising DPS to insane levels and doing the most efficient rungs to maximize MF and paragon (act 3 runs). Blizzard realized that people didn't use defense anymore, so Monster Power was introduced; which backfired, as MP0 was the most efficient one, discouraging even more from stacking defense.
This was finally fixed in 1.0.8: higher MP levels gave better loot and XP, but required a high amount of survivability. However, several builds (CMWW) or itemization flaws (life steal) offered a way to neglect this once again: for CMWW, you could just stack IAS+CC+APoC and with relatively low stats you'd be able to not only survive on MP10, but only help others survive on MP10 (and those could then go pure glass cannon again, killing everything for you). The other thing is that life steal let you neglect defense to a certain extent as you could increase your survavibility by increasing your DPS. That's why life steal had to go.
Okay, coming back to your initial point, finally: of course there is gonna be some tuning; Blizzard always goes through buff/nerf circles. I just think that your analogy to D3 on release doesn't hold up, because you're able to explore the entire content, and the only "exclusive" thing are some Torment-only legendaries. But this is fine; in D2 there were many legendaries that casual players could never acquire. It's like the crit Mempo in D3. It's okay if certain items are out of reach, they actually are part of the long-term motivation for many players ("eventually I will get there"). The release mistake was that making Inferno so insanely hard forced players to run a specific act for weeks before they could progress. This is absolutely different now.
in D2 there were many legendaries that casual players could never acquire.
what items? Everything in diablo 2 was available to everyone, except few items that dropped only in ladder, which had only one restriction - internet connection to play on battle.net. After level ~70 (which was not impossible even for casuals) you have same chance as everyone to acquire anything. Except maybe ubers, for which there was additional requirement (party) - which was still available to any casuals if they wanted it.
in D2 there were many legendaries that casual players could never acquire.
what items? Everything in diablo 2 was available to everyone, except few items that dropped only in ladder, which had only one restriction - internet connection to play on battle.net. After level ~70 (which was not impossible even for casuals) you have same chance as everyone to acquire anything. Except maybe ubers, for which there was additional requirement (party) - which was still available to any casuals if they wanted it.
All items that required high-level runes, for example. I'm talking about acquiring these items 100% legit.
But I don't wanna go too far off-topic here, this is a different topic (that was discussed in General Discussion several times already ;-)).
I just made an interesting discovery: Frost Armor - Crystallize gives me more EHP than Energy Armor - Prismatic Armor (after 3 melee hits, ofc).
My stats (when standing still, with Unwavering Will active) are 1331 resist, 5670 armor, and 485k life. Buffed in a fight I'm at 11.3k toughness with both armors, Frost Armor even a little bit more (marginally). It's interesting because EA:PA comes with a drawback (-20AP), while Frost Armor is AMAZING: I feel that the freeze procs quite often especially against melee maniacs like phase beats, and it even adds frost damage. I therefore switched to a multi-elemental build (lightning weapon, Frost Armor for ice, Heat Wave for fire, and Barrier Blades for Arcane - +20% damage).
Now I'd like to have the formula for toughness; is that known somewhere?
Thanks for all the +1s, good to know that some of the info was news to some of you. I'll keep you posted.
"Crafting seems useless" sounds a bit too harsh. It definitely is too harsh ;-) But every crafted items costs you material worth about ~50-100 salvaged items and 125k gold (IIRC). It's better to save this in the beginning, because you get the same stuff for just 5 Blood Shards, which is nothing. However, one exception: it seems that buying helmets for Blood Shards doesn't give wizard helmets, thus no APoC. Wasted about 250 shards for this. Therefore, here you might have to craft wizard helmets here. Missing on the 10 APoC is not an option here, you want a wizard helmet.
I have not tried the lightning meteor intensively because I didn't like meteor at all (I mainly tried the last two runes). I tried and all-lightning build with Paralysis and was not convinced by this passive, to be honest. But I also need to add that this is more an option for kiting builds, just like Temporal Flux, and right now I don't have kiting on my mind.
Some people are complaining about the difficulty of RoS, and I personally think it looks like it's almost unbeatable hard, but I like it. I died many many times today while playing Torment 1, need to work on my build a bit more, but also on healing and EHP. At some point you ask yourself: "Am I just a bad player? Can I avoid this by going full kiting?" I personally think kiting has its limits in RoS. Many elite packs come in large numbers (like 7 monsters), which means there might be 7 arcane traps, 7 of the new "enchanted plague" lines on the ground, and so on - in many situations even unlimited teleport wouldn't help you to stay out of trouble. You need to have very good defensive strategy to handle the incoming damage, lots of it is simply not avoidable.
Oh and yeah, mobs die too fast on lower levels and difficulties. A rift boss on Torment 1 in a 3 player game has 1.1 billion HP, just to give you an idea of what you're looking at on higher difficulties. That's why I personally feel that all these "on kill" triggers are useless.
I just made an interesting discovery: Frost Armor - Crystallize gives me more EHP than Energy Armor - Prismatic Armor (after 3 melee hits, ofc).
My stats (when standing still, with Unwavering Will active) are 1331 resist, 5670 armor, and 485k life. Buffed in a fight I'm at 11.3k toughness with both armors, Frost Armor even a little bit more (marginally). It's interesting because EA:PA comes with a drawback (-20AP), while Frost Armor is AMAZING: I feel that the freeze procs quite often especially against melee maniacs like phase beats, and it even adds frost damage. I therefore switched to a multi-elemental build (lightning weapon, Frost Armor for ice, Heat Wave for fire, and Barrier Blades for Arcane - +20% damage).
Now I'd like to have the formula for toughness; is that known somewhere?
i've been saying this since before the ptr/beta. Crystallize gives almost as much ehp (or in your case even more) than prismatic but its so under used. In addition you also get another 12% melee reduction and freeze chance. The only drawback is in areas we're there's a lot of range attackers and no melee ones, it may not proc to 3 stacks.
Regarding the difficulty, I dont have ros beta so I cant speak too much on it but a buddy does so i've been trying different difficulties with my lv 60 characters. I ran torment 2 (60) and it was pretty easy, torment 3 (60) was nice but they have so much life (2.7 times more than mp10 live on torment 3 (60) ).. I also ran Expert (70), and that was pretty difficult, not in terms of monster life but how hard elites hit.
A friend of mine just asked me for screen shots of my gear, and I thought maybe some of you might be interested as well, for whatever reason. All rares, but some of them pretty nice already (quite satisfied with the rings :P)
I just made an interesting discovery: Frost Armor - Crystallize gives me more EHP than Energy Armor - Prismatic Armor (after 3 melee hits, ofc).
I'm not so much worried about melee damage then I am all the elemental damage that's so much harder to avoid..
I agree. But keep in mind that melee hits are only needed to activate the three stacks; the armor bonus you get works against everything, including elemental damage.
Yeah, there are some cases where Crystallize didn't trigger and I was screwed, like some Blood Ogre Mages or whatever they are called in Tower of the Damned. But in general I feel pretty good about it - it also adds frost damage for my multi-elemental build and freezes enemies quite often.
I just made an interesting discovery: Frost Armor - Crystallize gives me more EHP than Energy Armor - Prismatic Armor (after 3 melee hits, ofc).
I'm not so much worried about melee damage then I am all the elemental damage that's so much harder to avoid..
[p]I agree. But keep in mind that melee hits are only needed to activate the three stacks; the armor bonus you get works against everything, including elemental damage.
Are you sure this is so? I know Armor mitigates Reflect damage but I was pretty sure it had no effect on pure elemental attacks. I struggle much more often vs things like Thunderstorm and Plagued/Desecrator now that it's impossible to avoid the damage entirely.
Belt is the last thing I replaced. Even a perfect rare will lose a lot of DPS against almost every Witching Hour, but you get A LOT of toughness. I keep my WH and equip it if I lower difficulty by one level (it's really that much of a difference). And the other items that are difficult to replace are jewelry. I got insanely lucky and replaced mine already, but I know some people who're still using 60 rings on Master. Last but not least, the gems: everyone I've seen just put diamonds in every slot. It'll bump your allres from 700 to 1000ish, unbuffed. Add Prismatic Armor and your toughness gets really high. Primary slots are, in my opinion, too valuable to be wasted with armor, so it's all about allres in gems, vit on every possible slot, and life% on shoulders/belt. Many get to 500k life and 5-10m toughness (buffed!) quickly.
Sounds real fun Bagstone. Cant wait to play RoS myself. I dont have beta but Im already fun with the new build possibilities in ptr.
Also, 10k healing - you talk about Life on hit? Or regen?
Yes. Okay, let me elaborate to clear this up:
When D3 was released, you wanted to get to Inferno because that was where the high level stuff dropped. Furthermore, Inferno act 1, act 2, and act 3/4 had different levels of gear progress; Blizzard's idea was that you needed to farm act 1 for a while to be able to progress to act 2, and so on. That was a bad decision in hindsight: people don't want to be forced to play one certain kind of "endgame", having no access to 75% of the content. Therefore, everything was nerfed - a bit too much, arguably. Soon people realized that everything was super easy (unless you played self-found), and it was just a matter of raising DPS to insane levels and doing the most efficient rungs to maximize MF and paragon (act 3 runs). Blizzard realized that people didn't use defense anymore, so Monster Power was introduced; which backfired, as MP0 was the most efficient one, discouraging even more from stacking defense.
This was finally fixed in 1.0.8: higher MP levels gave better loot and XP, but required a high amount of survivability. However, several builds (CMWW) or itemization flaws (life steal) offered a way to neglect this once again: for CMWW, you could just stack IAS+CC+APoC and with relatively low stats you'd be able to not only survive on MP10, but only help others survive on MP10 (and those could then go pure glass cannon again, killing everything for you). The other thing is that life steal let you neglect defense to a certain extent as you could increase your survavibility by increasing your DPS. That's why life steal had to go.
Okay, coming back to your initial point, finally: of course there is gonna be some tuning; Blizzard always goes through buff/nerf circles. I just think that your analogy to D3 on release doesn't hold up, because you're able to explore the entire content, and the only "exclusive" thing are some Torment-only legendaries. But this is fine; in D2 there were many legendaries that casual players could never acquire. It's like the crit Mempo in D3. It's okay if certain items are out of reach, they actually are part of the long-term motivation for many players ("eventually I will get there"). The release mistake was that making Inferno so insanely hard forced players to run a specific act for weeks before they could progress. This is absolutely different now.
But I don't wanna go too far off-topic here, this is a different topic (that was discussed in General Discussion several times already ;-)).
I just made an interesting discovery: Frost Armor - Crystallize gives me more EHP than Energy Armor - Prismatic Armor (after 3 melee hits, ofc).
My stats (when standing still, with Unwavering Will active) are 1331 resist, 5670 armor, and 485k life. Buffed in a fight I'm at 11.3k toughness with both armors, Frost Armor even a little bit more (marginally). It's interesting because EA:PA comes with a drawback (-20AP), while Frost Armor is AMAZING: I feel that the freeze procs quite often especially against melee maniacs like phase beats, and it even adds frost damage. I therefore switched to a multi-elemental build (lightning weapon, Frost Armor for ice, Heat Wave for fire, and Barrier Blades for Arcane - +20% damage).
Now I'd like to have the formula for toughness; is that known somewhere?
I think, I need a beta key somehow
http://eu.battle.net/d3/en/profile/Sol77-2972/hero/66110450
Thanks for all the +1s, good to know that some of the info was news to some of you. I'll keep you posted.
"Crafting seems useless" sounds a bit too harsh. It definitely is too harsh ;-) But every crafted items costs you material worth about ~50-100 salvaged items and 125k gold (IIRC). It's better to save this in the beginning, because you get the same stuff for just 5 Blood Shards, which is nothing. However, one exception: it seems that buying helmets for Blood Shards doesn't give wizard helmets, thus no APoC. Wasted about 250 shards for this. Therefore, here you might have to craft wizard helmets here. Missing on the 10 APoC is not an option here, you want a wizard helmet.
I have not tried the lightning meteor intensively because I didn't like meteor at all (I mainly tried the last two runes). I tried and all-lightning build with Paralysis and was not convinced by this passive, to be honest. But I also need to add that this is more an option for kiting builds, just like Temporal Flux, and right now I don't have kiting on my mind.
Some people are complaining about the difficulty of RoS, and I personally think it looks like it's almost unbeatable hard, but I like it. I died many many times today while playing Torment 1, need to work on my build a bit more, but also on healing and EHP. At some point you ask yourself: "Am I just a bad player? Can I avoid this by going full kiting?" I personally think kiting has its limits in RoS. Many elite packs come in large numbers (like 7 monsters), which means there might be 7 arcane traps, 7 of the new "enchanted plague" lines on the ground, and so on - in many situations even unlimited teleport wouldn't help you to stay out of trouble. You need to have very good defensive strategy to handle the incoming damage, lots of it is simply not avoidable.
Oh and yeah, mobs die too fast on lower levels and difficulties. A rift boss on Torment 1 in a 3 player game has 1.1 billion HP, just to give you an idea of what you're looking at on higher difficulties. That's why I personally feel that all these "on kill" triggers are useless.
A friend of mine just asked me for screen shots of my gear, and I thought maybe some of you might be interested as well, for whatever reason. All rares, but some of them pretty nice already (quite satisfied with the rings :P)
http://i.imgur.com/CiNlS0o.png
http://geeksmirage.com/blizzcon-2013-diablo-3-reaper-of-souls-ros-roundup-hots-preview/
I agree. But keep in mind that melee hits are only needed to activate the three stacks; the armor bonus you get works against everything, including elemental damage.
Yeah, there are some cases where Crystallize didn't trigger and I was screwed, like some Blood Ogre Mages or whatever they are called in Tower of the Damned. But in general I feel pretty good about it - it also adds frost damage for my multi-elemental build and freezes enemies quite often.
Yes, armor mitigates everything. It also says so in the tooltip, something like "reduces all damage".
Armor is like All resists, it mitigates everything.