Diablo is dead. Long live the Hero of Tristram. Or something, I barely know what the story in Diablo is about.
Act 4 starts with Iskatu, and I've expressed my worry about the fight before. Turns out I was completely overestimating it. It's a pretty intensive fight, since you don't get any breaks, but I probably never got below 70%. Even with his nasty debuff and desecration(?) the fight was easy.
Confident from that, I ran straight into dual elite packs. Luckily one of the packs was harmless (those small shadows that barely hurt) and the other was maybe a bit above average. Still, I didn't want to take any risks, so I pulled them back to the start and did some zone jumping any time I got worried.
From hard, I ran into harder. Next pack was Subjugators with Molten and Horde (don't recall the other affixes). Even non-elite, these hurt. This group hit me harder than anything I'd run across in my HC adventures. I got as low as ~10% (don't think the passive ever triggered though) while I was slowly kiting backwards to the entrance. Once I got that low, I just started running fast as I could to the entrance. After that, I proceeded to cowardly zone jump back and forth, waiting on and using cooldowns. Maybe I could have taken them without zone jumping, but it would have been risky as hell, and I wasn't about to do that this close to the end.
Turns out the Subjugators was as hard as it got. The rest of the elites were of low-average threat. I never had to do any more zone jumping. As expected, Izuael and Rakanoth just fell over. Rakanoth can hit kinda hard, but with my def values and high LoH it's simply not an issue. Izuael is simply overnerfed. His charge that once upon a time used to one-shoot most players, took maybe 5% of my hp.
For Diablo, I actually decided to change my build. I switched Mantra of Evasion to Mantra of Conviction [Overawe], because I felt it was more important to get the fight over fast, and things don't hit that hard in the Diablo encounter. I also switched Tempest Rush to Blind [Faith in the Light]. I felt that Tempest Rush simply had no use in the encounter, and Blind would increase my dmg output, as well as provide a CC.
The Diablo fight was fairly uneventful, except that I did get caught in a cage once (I was rusty, hadn't fought Diablo in weeks), but as I suspected, it did not take me down to 1 hp. Instead it took maybe 30% of my hp, and when I saw that, I knew there was nothing in the fight (except a DC) that could take me out.
Having leveled every class to 60 in the past, and now finished Diablo Inferno on Hardcore mode, I feel close to finished with the game. At the very least until 1.05, which I'll certainly be playing for a bit, but I doubt it'll be enough to keep me playing. Instead I'll probably be returning to World of Warcraft, which I haven't played for like 6 months now. I've been wanting to play it ever since MoP launch, but I felt that I had unfinished business in D3 to clear up first.
If you're crazy enough to have read all of this, thanks for that, and glhf.
You might react on my loss of 100 resists, but the gain of 900 armor makes up for it. The big thing is of course the huge HP gain, as well as the extra dps. I'm very happy I got these upgrades before starting Act 3.
Act 3
Act 3 was never a big worry for me, for several reasons: It's the act I'm most familiar with, and it doesn't have any critically hard bosses anymore (the way Ghom was a patch or two ago). Most elite packs were pretty harmless to me, but there were also some nasty ones. In Fields of Slaughter I had my first scare when I encountered a pack of Demon Tremors. I took it very careful against them, but luckily their affixes weren't too bad.
The next bad encounter was against a pack of Fallen Soldiers. It's an easy base enemy type, but this pack had Molten, Fire Chains and Vortex. They kept spamming Vortex on me; finally I was down to 20% HP with no cooldowns available before I got control of the fight by running them around a medium sized circular object. Doing that, the vortex would pull me into the wall, instead of into their area of fire. This was the first time in Inferno difficulty were I thought I was gonna die.
Just before engaging Azmodan, I ran into my first elite pack of Phasebeasts. They did force me to run back through half the map to the entrance, to reset the fight. But once that was done and I could fight from a corner next to the map entrance, there was nothing to worry about.
As expected, none of the bosses gave me any problems. I'm proud that I managed to finish the act without skipping any elites, or resetting the game. I'm also happy Near Death Experience never got a chance to trigger, though it came close a couple of times.
Act 4 is coming up, and as I've mentioned Iskatu is by biggest fear, which I'll be facing at the very start of the act. If I can get through that, I see no reason I should fail to finish the final act.
I figured it could be fun to share my experiences here.
Intro
My first ever HC character was a wizard, that died in Act 2 Nightmare some months back. This monk is my second try, I started him maybe 1 month ago. I have a very well geared Monk on SC, so I know the class and am very comfortable with it.
I hit 60 and finished Hell about a week ago, and since then I've farmed Act 1 Inferno maybe some 20-25 hours. I got lucky and found a legendary, which sold for 3 mil.
I've played solo from the start, and plan on finishing solo as well. I don't feel I can trust other players in public games. I'm looking to finish Diablo before 1.05, because I think things will be much much easier after that (on MP0, which most or all HC players will use I'm guessing).
Build and gear
I run with a fairly standard Monk build, but with Tempest Rush instead of Blind. I find Tempest Rush to be extremely important, because it allows you to escape straight through mobs if you're surrounded and want to get away. I'd never play progression without it. I also have the Near Death Experience passive, but so far it's only triggered once on Hell difficulty, before I reached 60 (I had just picked the passive up, and way playing a bit too aggressively). I dual-wield two fast weapons, with high focus on LoH.
My rough buffed progression stats are: 7k armor, 870 resists, 44% dodge, 58k hp, 1650 LoH, 16.5k dps. I estimate I have 5-6 mil invested in my gear and gems.
Tonight I finished up Act 2. I only ran what was necessary, no extra caves or anything. I did kill everything I encountered though. Some elite packs took quite a while to kill with my low dps, but I was never in any real danger. With my stat values, I could stand in desecration, poison, arcane sentries and pretty much anything else. My biggest worry was Frozen combined with CC affixes like Vortex or Jail. I did get caught in Frozen a few times, but there was never enough dmg going on for it to be very dangerous to me. The biggest challenge was when I encountered two elite packs at same time. If it'd been too bad, I could have bailed out and reset the game pretty much any time, but I was able to deal with it.
I was a little bit nervous against Belial. His regular attacks certainly don't hurt (the big attack hit me for 11-12k, which I healed up from in two seconds with my high LoH), but the phase where he places poison pools on the ground can be scary. I suspect that I can survive like 3-5 hits of them, but I wasn't about to try that out.
Future
I plan on doing Act 3 in a day or two. I'm not really worried about it, none of the bosses should be an issue. The biggest danger should be nasty elite packs of phasebeasts towards the end, but I think I can take most combinations on straightup with my stats, and if it gets too bad I think I can escape to a previous lvl fast enough with my Tempest Rush. Other than that I have to be careful against suicide bombers in The Keep and the huge packs of mobs one can encounter in Fields of Slaughter. I've spent so much time in Act 3 Inferno on my main Monk, so I feel pretty comfortable.
My real worry is against Iskatu at start of Act 4. I dunno if I'm overestimating him, but in the past before I geared my SC monk up enough, it was always a tough battle against him. With my low dps, I need to be able to sustain against him, I can't burst him down. Other than that I of course have to be careful with certain elite types in Act 4. I'll be aiming to always fight dangerous packs close to an exit, so that I can reset cooldowns and heal up as necessary, as well as reset the game if it's simply too dangerous.
I think Diablo will be an easy, but nerve-wrecking fight. The only danger should be getting caught in the cages, but I'm fairly certain I'll survive even if I do get caught. Nevertheless, with my dps the fight will last a long time, which leaves more room for mistakes.
Any thoughts or input are welcome, especially regarding Iskatu, or if there's anything else I need to be extra careful about that I haven't thought off. I'll post again once I've done Act 3.
Finished up Inferno yesterday, using Acid Cloud (with the extra range) whole way through. It's a wonderful spell. I played around a bit with bears in Inferno as well, but I don't like that they're so slow, and have extremely low range. I imagine they're stronger against single targets than Acid Rain though.
I do 15-16 mil/hour on my well geared monk. But that's clearing the whole act, I don't have optimized farming runs (can't be bothered running same small route over and over again).
Enjoying the game is more important than exp/hour.
Can I have some advice about kill Inferno Rakanoth?
I'm having a lot of troubles with every build that I try.
My WD has around 25k hp, 300 resistances (not high but I think it has nothing to be with rakanoth) and 40-50k dps
The problem it's that he kills me on every time that teleports to me (insta-kill).
Id like to recieve some good advice/build to beat him
Thanks
My WD has twice your HP, and twice your resistance, and the teleport still one-shots me. Still, I killed Rakanoth first try. I simply went at him with my normal pet-focused build, trying to kill as fast as possible. He first teleported on me when he was at some ~50% hp, and my Spirit Vessel triggered. I kept nuking, and at 1% he teleported on me again (killing me) but half a second later he died from the Acid Raid dot on the floor. This is with 31k unbuffed dps, so with your 40-50k you should certainly be able to do the same.
So hard to find decent info on skills... wish there was a good wiki around that collected all info.
Anyway, I'm closing in on 60 on my WD and I've fallen in love with Acid Cloud. I've heard people talk so much about zombie bears, so I thought I'd change to that at lvl 54. Tried them out, but I find AC killing stuff much faster for me. I dunno, maybe it's different in Inferno somehow.
To my question: How does AC interact with LoH, crit, crit dmg and haste? Can the spell crit? Is it effective with LoH? I'm guessing haste only makes it so you can spam the skill faster?
This is totally off topic but i have one thing in my mind about Fists of Thunder - Thunderclap. The tooltip says you will teleport to the target. Altough.. if i have understood correctly the meaning of teleporting, you should just spawn to targets location. But with Thunderclap you cant teleport to the target for example in dungeons where there is holes in the ground and your target is on the other side of the hole.. it will not teleport you to the target. Or in act2 the sand wasps spits out the small insects and when you "teleport", the small insects will still hurt you. Not sure how is with waller affix elite packs.. does it teleport you away from walls? Shouldn't >teleport< work totally different or am i just mistaken?? I hope you know what i mean... sorry for bit bad english. Thanks, Peace!
-Babu
It works how it works. What word would you choose to describe the current function? Also, you can "teleport" over the wasp missiles in act 2, so not sure what you meant there.
one of em for sure. I took a stat sheet damage loss of about 7k going to my super cheap 1.3m won's (845 dps, 22% lightning skill damage, single dex roll, no crit damage/socket) yet i can repeatedly kill siegebreaker a good 10+ seconds faster over my other weapon with crit damage and a socket. A good 900+ dps won's w/ crit damage socket would be amazing but I can't afford it.
Based on your post, I did some testing. I compared these weapons (only including relevant dps stats):
Weapon 1 (my normal offhand): 766 dps 1.50 dagger, 140 dex, 86% crit dmg
Weapon 2 (a very cheap WKL bought for 120k, used in offhand): 658 dps, 1.40 fist, 150 dex, 62% crit dmg, +5% lightning dmg, +24% dmg to lightning skills
Against Ghom Inferno:
Weapon 1: average kill time 37s, 7s spread
Weapon 2: average kill time 33.2s, 13s spread
Weapon 2 seems superior, but Ghom is a rather RNG based fight (as you can see on the big spread). I next went to Siegebreaker Inferno:
Weapon 1: average kill time 33.5s, 5s spread
Weapon 2: average kill time 26s, 6s spread
Again weapon 2 takes the win, by a large margin.
So basically this "crappy" 120k WKL is increasing my dmg output by 10-20%. I can't wait to see what a good WKL will do. Oh and for reference, the WLK decreases my character spreadsheet dps by 5k. As another sidenote, I managed to pick up a legendary on one of the Ghom kill tests.
Am I the only one that thinks EP is still a bad joke compared to Barb's cleave/rupture?
Monks apply the debuff manually one target at a time for explode on death.
Barbs with cleave/rupture explodes anything in a forward arc with killing blows - with primary attack.
Uhh... you do realize the difference between the skills? EP explosions are based on the targets HP, while Cleave is based on your own dmg. Against elites, it should be rather obvious which one is the superior skill. There's a reason no barbs use cleave in Inferno.
Melee wizards only make good "tanks" when fighting huge groups, which obviously isn't always possible. For any other situation, monks are most certainly superior (assuming similar ratio between dps/tank stats).
While it'd be nice for 2h to be viable, I can't see myself ever playing it. It's just so painfully slow. Had enough of that while leveling my barbarian alt.
Diablo is dead. Long live the Hero of Tristram. Or something, I barely know what the story in Diablo is about.
Act 4 starts with Iskatu, and I've expressed my worry about the fight before. Turns out I was completely overestimating it. It's a pretty intensive fight, since you don't get any breaks, but I probably never got below 70%. Even with his nasty debuff and desecration(?) the fight was easy.
Confident from that, I ran straight into dual elite packs. Luckily one of the packs was harmless (those small shadows that barely hurt) and the other was maybe a bit above average. Still, I didn't want to take any risks, so I pulled them back to the start and did some zone jumping any time I got worried.
From hard, I ran into harder. Next pack was Subjugators with Molten and Horde (don't recall the other affixes). Even non-elite, these hurt. This group hit me harder than anything I'd run across in my HC adventures. I got as low as ~10% (don't think the passive ever triggered though) while I was slowly kiting backwards to the entrance. Once I got that low, I just started running fast as I could to the entrance. After that, I proceeded to cowardly zone jump back and forth, waiting on and using cooldowns. Maybe I could have taken them without zone jumping, but it would have been risky as hell, and I wasn't about to do that this close to the end.
Turns out the Subjugators was as hard as it got. The rest of the elites were of low-average threat. I never had to do any more zone jumping. As expected, Izuael and Rakanoth just fell over. Rakanoth can hit kinda hard, but with my def values and high LoH it's simply not an issue. Izuael is simply overnerfed. His charge that once upon a time used to one-shoot most players, took maybe 5% of my hp.
For Diablo, I actually decided to change my build. I switched Mantra of Evasion to Mantra of Conviction [Overawe], because I felt it was more important to get the fight over fast, and things don't hit that hard in the Diablo encounter. I also switched Tempest Rush to Blind [Faith in the Light]. I felt that Tempest Rush simply had no use in the encounter, and Blind would increase my dmg output, as well as provide a CC.
The Diablo fight was fairly uneventful, except that I did get caught in a cage once (I was rusty, hadn't fought Diablo in weeks), but as I suspected, it did not take me down to 1 hp. Instead it took maybe 30% of my hp, and when I saw that, I knew there was nothing in the fight (except a DC) that could take me out.
Having leveled every class to 60 in the past, and now finished Diablo Inferno on Hardcore mode, I feel close to finished with the game. At the very least until 1.05, which I'll certainly be playing for a bit, but I doubt it'll be enough to keep me playing. Instead I'll probably be returning to World of Warcraft, which I haven't played for like 6 months now. I've been wanting to play it ever since MoP launch, but I felt that I had unfinished business in D3 to clear up first.
If you're crazy enough to have read all of this, thanks for that, and glhf.
Gear upgrades
I got lucky with a few AH sells, and so I managed to replace a few of my gear pieces. Stats have changed like this.
Before: 7k armor, 870 resists, 44% dodge, 58k hp, 1650 LoH, 16.5k dps
After: 7.9k armor, 770 resists, 47% dodge , 75k hp, 1450 LoH, 20.2k dps
You might react on my loss of 100 resists, but the gain of 900 armor makes up for it. The big thing is of course the huge HP gain, as well as the extra dps. I'm very happy I got these upgrades before starting Act 3.
Act 3
Act 3 was never a big worry for me, for several reasons: It's the act I'm most familiar with, and it doesn't have any critically hard bosses anymore (the way Ghom was a patch or two ago). Most elite packs were pretty harmless to me, but there were also some nasty ones. In Fields of Slaughter I had my first scare when I encountered a pack of Demon Tremors. I took it very careful against them, but luckily their affixes weren't too bad.
The next bad encounter was against a pack of Fallen Soldiers. It's an easy base enemy type, but this pack had Molten, Fire Chains and Vortex. They kept spamming Vortex on me; finally I was down to 20% HP with no cooldowns available before I got control of the fight by running them around a medium sized circular object. Doing that, the vortex would pull me into the wall, instead of into their area of fire. This was the first time in Inferno difficulty were I thought I was gonna die.
Just before engaging Azmodan, I ran into my first elite pack of Phasebeasts. They did force me to run back through half the map to the entrance, to reset the fight. But once that was done and I could fight from a corner next to the map entrance, there was nothing to worry about.
As expected, none of the bosses gave me any problems. I'm proud that I managed to finish the act without skipping any elites, or resetting the game. I'm also happy Near Death Experience never got a chance to trigger, though it came close a couple of times.
Act 4 is coming up, and as I've mentioned Iskatu is by biggest fear, which I'll be facing at the very start of the act. If I can get through that, I see no reason I should fail to finish the final act.
Intro
My first ever HC character was a wizard, that died in Act 2 Nightmare some months back. This monk is my second try, I started him maybe 1 month ago. I have a very well geared Monk on SC, so I know the class and am very comfortable with it.
I hit 60 and finished Hell about a week ago, and since then I've farmed Act 1 Inferno maybe some 20-25 hours. I got lucky and found a legendary, which sold for 3 mil.
I've played solo from the start, and plan on finishing solo as well. I don't feel I can trust other players in public games. I'm looking to finish Diablo before 1.05, because I think things will be much much easier after that (on MP0, which most or all HC players will use I'm guessing).
Build and gear
I run with a fairly standard Monk build, but with Tempest Rush instead of Blind. I find Tempest Rush to be extremely important, because it allows you to escape straight through mobs if you're surrounded and want to get away. I'd never play progression without it. I also have the Near Death Experience passive, but so far it's only triggered once on Hell difficulty, before I reached 60 (I had just picked the passive up, and way playing a bit too aggressively). I dual-wield two fast weapons, with high focus on LoH.
My rough buffed progression stats are: 7k armor, 870 resists, 44% dodge, 58k hp, 1650 LoH, 16.5k dps. I estimate I have 5-6 mil invested in my gear and gems.
Armory: http://eu.battle.net...8/hero/20237412
Act 2
Tonight I finished up Act 2. I only ran what was necessary, no extra caves or anything. I did kill everything I encountered though. Some elite packs took quite a while to kill with my low dps, but I was never in any real danger. With my stat values, I could stand in desecration, poison, arcane sentries and pretty much anything else. My biggest worry was Frozen combined with CC affixes like Vortex or Jail. I did get caught in Frozen a few times, but there was never enough dmg going on for it to be very dangerous to me. The biggest challenge was when I encountered two elite packs at same time. If it'd been too bad, I could have bailed out and reset the game pretty much any time, but I was able to deal with it.
I was a little bit nervous against Belial. His regular attacks certainly don't hurt (the big attack hit me for 11-12k, which I healed up from in two seconds with my high LoH), but the phase where he places poison pools on the ground can be scary. I suspect that I can survive like 3-5 hits of them, but I wasn't about to try that out.
Future
I plan on doing Act 3 in a day or two. I'm not really worried about it, none of the bosses should be an issue. The biggest danger should be nasty elite packs of phasebeasts towards the end, but I think I can take most combinations on straightup with my stats, and if it gets too bad I think I can escape to a previous lvl fast enough with my Tempest Rush. Other than that I have to be careful against suicide bombers in The Keep and the huge packs of mobs one can encounter in Fields of Slaughter. I've spent so much time in Act 3 Inferno on my main Monk, so I feel pretty comfortable.
My real worry is against Iskatu at start of Act 4. I dunno if I'm overestimating him, but in the past before I geared my SC monk up enough, it was always a tough battle against him. With my low dps, I need to be able to sustain against him, I can't burst him down. Other than that I of course have to be careful with certain elite types in Act 4. I'll be aiming to always fight dangerous packs close to an exit, so that I can reset cooldowns and heal up as necessary, as well as reset the game if it's simply too dangerous.
I think Diablo will be an easy, but nerve-wrecking fight. The only danger should be getting caught in the cages, but I'm fairly certain I'll survive even if I do get caught. Nevertheless, with my dps the fight will last a long time, which leaves more room for mistakes.
Any thoughts or input are welcome, especially regarding Iskatu, or if there's anything else I need to be extra careful about that I haven't thought off. I'll post again once I've done Act 3.
Enjoying the game is more important than exp/hour.
My WD has twice your HP, and twice your resistance, and the teleport still one-shots me. Still, I killed Rakanoth first try. I simply went at him with my normal pet-focused build, trying to kill as fast as possible. He first teleported on me when he was at some ~50% hp, and my Spirit Vessel triggered. I kept nuking, and at 1% he teleported on me again (killing me) but half a second later he died from the Acid Raid dot on the floor. This is with 31k unbuffed dps, so with your 40-50k you should certainly be able to do the same.
Doesn't matter if you have pets or some tank in melee, if you're standing at range he still teleports on you.
Anyway, I'm closing in on 60 on my WD and I've fallen in love with Acid Cloud. I've heard people talk so much about zombie bears, so I thought I'd change to that at lvl 54. Tried them out, but I find AC killing stuff much faster for me. I dunno, maybe it's different in Inferno somehow.
To my question: How does AC interact with LoH, crit, crit dmg and haste? Can the spell crit? Is it effective with LoH? I'm guessing haste only makes it so you can spam the skill faster?
It works how it works. What word would you choose to describe the current function? Also, you can "teleport" over the wasp missiles in act 2, so not sure what you meant there.
Based on your post, I did some testing. I compared these weapons (only including relevant dps stats):
Weapon 1 (my normal offhand): 766 dps 1.50 dagger, 140 dex, 86% crit dmg
Weapon 2 (a very cheap WKL bought for 120k, used in offhand): 658 dps, 1.40 fist, 150 dex, 62% crit dmg, +5% lightning dmg, +24% dmg to lightning skills
Against Ghom Inferno:
Weapon 1: average kill time 37s, 7s spread
Weapon 2: average kill time 33.2s, 13s spread
Weapon 2 seems superior, but Ghom is a rather RNG based fight (as you can see on the big spread). I next went to Siegebreaker Inferno:
Weapon 1: average kill time 33.5s, 5s spread
Weapon 2: average kill time 26s, 6s spread
Again weapon 2 takes the win, by a large margin.
So basically this "crappy" 120k WKL is increasing my dmg output by 10-20%. I can't wait to see what a good WKL will do. Oh and for reference, the WLK decreases my character spreadsheet dps by 5k. As another sidenote, I managed to pick up a legendary on one of the Ghom kill tests.
But with that said, it's still my favorite class.
Been wondering the same. Would be awesome if anyone has done the reseach into new legendaries for monks and could share the results.
Uhh... you do realize the difference between the skills? EP explosions are based on the targets HP, while Cleave is based on your own dmg. Against elites, it should be rather obvious which one is the superior skill. There's a reason no barbs use cleave in Inferno.
While it'd be nice for 2h to be viable, I can't see myself ever playing it. It's just so painfully slow. Had enough of that while leveling my barbarian alt.