Tal Rasha's for Wizard is the easiest set dungeon, in my opinion.
Do not be surprised if you master it on the first time without even really trying. I personally did not know I had to kill the rockworms in order to master it, wasn't aware they actually counted for the 'kill all enemies' objective, as they were part of a separate, additional objective.
I had enough time to run from the very end of the set dungeon, after realizing i had 5 or 6 enemies left to kill... go back without using blink (walking, since I know blinking won't always let invisible/burrowed units 'aggro' you and appear to attack), and kill every rockworm after only half-remembering where they were and waiting for them to pop up. Took ~25 sec to find the very last one, still finished with enough time, mastering it on my first attempt.
Invoker Crusader is also ridiculously easy. Just get hit by stuff.
Skills can be divided in two categories. Primary animations (also referred to as "using an attack turn") and secondary animations(also referred to as "not using an attack turn" or "not having an animation").
The difference is that primary animations are always shown. There can't be two primary animations played in parallel.
So if for example you channel Disintegrate (primary) and then hit the button to cast Magic Missile (primary), it will interrupt your channel. If you mash the Magic Missile (primary) and Arcane Orb (primary) buttons at the same time, you will always get either one, never both with one action.
Secondary animations are shown if possible. That means they are animated when you don't do anything else anyways. But if you are currently busy, the action is carried out anyways, without the animation.
So if you channel Disintegrate (primary) again and cast Explosive Blast (secondary), it will not interrupt your channel. If you mash Explosive Blast (secondary), Diamond Skin (secondary) and Magic Missile (primary), all of them can be cast at the same time, without any delays or queueing.
Basically, secondary animation means it does not interfere with your other skills. Usually if you have 2 attacks per second, that means if you spam two primary skills, each of them will be casted once a second. If you add a third primary skill, each of the three will be casted once every 1.5 seconds.
If the third skill you spam is a secondary instead, your first two skills will still be casted once a second. So in terms of actions per second, that skill is for free.
Ray of Frost, Disintegrate, Arcane Torrent - a spell with a primary animation breaks your channeling. A spell with a secondary animation doesn't.
[TL;DR] - Skills with secondary animations don't interrupt you casting other stuff.
Channeled spells, as well as spells that cause your character to move in a direction (Charge, Teleport, dash) are always in the primary animation category. You will have to test or google other spells you want to know about. Threatening shout / battle cry are also always shown animation-wise.
There is currently a bug with Charge that allow you to cancel the animation by hitting the 'force move' hotkey near the end of the animation after you arrive at your destination point to be able to cast spells faster subsequent to using charge. This is being fixed in 2.4.1 however.
Say there is a mob with 1 million hp left. You crit the mob for 30 billion. The mob dies. What happens here?
1) The mob takes 30 billion damage.
2) Game checks for death, 1,000,000 - 30,000,000,000 < 0 = true, so the mob dies.
The game does not do it this way:
1) Damage number calculated (30 Billion)
2) Game checks for death (1M - 30B)
3) Mob takes 1 M damage, 29.9B damage discarded and damage number shown revised to 1M
This does not happen.
If your templar takes 30 billion damage and does not have the Invulnerability token (tooltip states 'cannot die', but in reality, they cannot take damage), he takes 30 billion damage and dies.
Unity rings? Templar takes 15 billion, you take 15 billion. The only reason you didn't double-die the first time is because you were a Crusader, since Indestructible has 5 seconds of 'immune to damage' after it procs (Also applies to the respective passives of Monks and Barbs I believe).
If you were playing, for example, a Wizard, which does not have _X seconds of invulnerability after cheat-death passive (they gain a shield, but can still instantly take damage again and die to stacked molten explosions, which will easily outdamage the shields gained, for example), the first time in this video you'd have likely died twice and instantly been wiped.
So yea, don't wear Unity and put one on your follower without the Immortal follower token. You can still wear a Unity ring, just take it off your follower unless you give Him/Her the Invulnerability/Immortality token along with it.
This has killed Hardcore players who don't know how Unity works over the years many times, and you aren't the first person to post about it and thinking it's a bug.
Now you know, chalk it up to learning about a new legendary and roll another hero, with a new piece of knowledge to wield along your renewed journey; Your deeds of valor will be remembered. Hopefully, so will Unity mechanics.
Thud is an overlay and nothing more. Its everybody blizzard should do but doesnt because we do have THUD, blizzard employees use it as well.
Please post your source/evidence of blizzard employee's using/advocating use of THUD. I have looked into some of the features, and while some are definitely beneficial to gameplay, I would not want THUD in its current state to be completely integrated into D3. I do encourage the use of THUD for competitive play, as it helps to reduce some of the non-essential/counter-intuitive RNG elements present within GRs (which become significantly more prominent at higher GRs). THUD can help competitive players create a more level ground upon which to compete, and they do so by analysing data in real time; the decision to go left/right is not made by a computer/program, but the program does aid the human player to make the decision.
I think it is imperative that Blizzard take a stand on the matter of THUD use, as it is clearly a topic which splits the community. I don't think that THUD users should be punished as harshly as botters straight off the bat, because they are vastly different advantages. One allows farming while the player is AFK (sleeping/work/etc.) and is often used for lengthy durations; the other provides more detailed information on the player's surroundings, allowing them to use their time more efficiently while actively playing.
To be clear, I am for features/extensions which provide the player with more decision-making power, and against any element which makes that decision for the player.
THUD features I openly support (I do not use THUD, but do familiarise myself with the features of the program):
- Skill calculation details (it's basically a read-out similar to that provided on D3Planner)
- Arcs and circles (displays radius marks which the player can use to set up their positioning for buffs like zei's)
- Orbs on minimap (displays orbs on the minimap, so you don't run past them and miss out on your rift progress)
There is a feature which ... ... ... is unfair in a competition of non-THUD vs THUD user:
Monster dots on minimap show how many monsters are within the detection radius. ... ... ... My main issue however is the detection radius itself. Based upon the image I am viewing, the detection radius would have an effective range which exceeds the player's FOV; If this range were matched to ~85% of FOV, I would not have an issue with it.
Saw this post and had a lot of thought and agreement with it.
I go more in-depth with actual mechanics and loss-gain benefits of THUD vs no THUD users on the first two of PsykStrike's 'supported features'.
As for the third? Orbs, yes, I agree with that, nothing to get into detail about, whatsoever.
Orbs on minimap would be great.
Also go into the unfairness of the minimap vs detection radius actual visibility range and inherent disadvantages by those with different aspect ratios throughout.
Totally agreed with this post. The first 3 components are useful, very useful, but nothing you can't do without D3planner.
If you had a second monitor that had d3planner up and you imported your hero every gear change, you would actually get far more info/stats than THUD gives you (referring mostly to the damage calculations of your skills.
D3planner will give you calculations including passives, legendary procs, skill AS breakpoints and how much you need to reach that next breakpoint for what amount of damage increase you will attain by reaching the breakpoint... etc etc.)
D3 has needed this info for years. They refuse to give us a test dummy in town, even, let alone a DPS meter for ourselves.
Fine, we'll have a website calculate it all in another window, with extreme detail. Or an overlay calculate it all, with far less detail, but on the same window.
You aren't going to check your skill damage in combat any more than you would ALT+TAB and check out d3planner mid-combat to check your skill damage.
Both are used, basically, exclusively while in town and swapping between different weapons and checking for upgrades/synergies.
Timesaver, not an advantage giver. You can calculate it all by hand if you really want, the "player who uses no THUD or d3planner", you will not be at a disadvantage in combat.
~Arcs and circles, yes. What the hell is a yard, in Diablo? Seriously, what the hell is 50 yards on 1920x1080?
How about on 1280x720? 1440p?
Some of these things have zero indicator buffs or debuff auras/icons on the mobs.
Cyclone strike -> Implosion pulls in mobs from, let's see... 36 yards. Where, in, the, HELL, is, thirty-six, yards. The monk aura that affects enemy mobs has a 30 yard range, so if you stop exactly when you see that aura indicator on enemy mobs, you must then advance another 6 yards to be in range of pulling exactly the zombie pack 36 yards away, without pulling the elite extra health illusionist Mallet Lord pack that is 40 yards away from you.
People will say 'lulz just practice more scrub', but nobody knows exact ranges all the time.
This game does not provide range 'arcs' like games such as WC3 did (press chain lightning on your far seer, you get a transparent-ish blue circle with the Far Seer Hero at the center, and the circle has a radius that is precisely the size of the spell's maximum castable range. If the unit is inside the circle, you can hit the spell and rain lightning upon their forsaken souls. If they are not in the circle, you know immediately that you are not in range.
As I said, Diablo 3 lacks any kind of range feature (besides the fact that skills have ranges.) Range is a static number property of spells in Diablo 3, with no other implementation or confirmation process as to you actually being in this range.)
Not even in the campaign, or FAQ, blizzard beginner tips/tutorial website, or the instruction manual for the game is 'discerning range' alluded to as a necessary skill or a method to estimate it; there is not even an official post on a 'standard x yard range is this distance from this spot to this spot' picture.
Thank god somebody made that Demon Hunter in town picture a long time ago. Click the spoiler to view it.
A point to note: a 4:3 monitor can see 30 yards down-corner, 60 yards to an upper corner. This is due to the isometric, non-top-down camera angle.
So, 50 yards to a mob that is below your character (lower corners of monitor) is not in the expected, same-but-opposite-side location as 50 yards to an enemy above you (top corners of your screen). This makes range really really hard to figure out on-the-fly.
Also to note, 16:10 resolutions see 17% more of the battlefield than a 4:3 monitor does. ON EACH SIDE.
If we are gosu enough and can see all 4 corners of our 16:10 monitor at once, we are seeing 68% more of the battlefield at once (en totale, including all 4 directional bounds, implied as the corners of your monitor) than a dude with a 4:3 monitor.
This same 16:10 aspect ratio monitor is only showing, per corner, 90% of what a 16:9 would show. So, again, if we see all corners at once with our eyes, there's another (10% * 4 =) 40% increase in what we can see from our character to the edge of our gamescreen.
I'll let you do the math for how bad 4:3 AR visual range is when compared to the 1080p monitors at 16:9. (Hint, 25% in each direction.)
Combine that with the fact that the camera makes it such that seemingly 'equal' amounts of space going at a down angle are actually only half the in-game 'yards' distance of the 'same' spot, just going up instead.
Don't get what the hell this chart is? Isometric camera what the hell is that? How can two equal distances not be equal?? Wat??
Ok, here's a demonstration. Follow along at home, click the spoiler.
Go get a piece of paper.
Fold it in half twice and unfold it, so you have the center of the paper where the two folds meet, you can mark it with a pencil or pen as the center if you want, on both sides of the paper.
Now, lay the paper with the long side on the top and bottom of the sheet (like the shape of your monitor.)
Now grab a pin or a pencil or a sharpie (let it bleed to both sides), and put a hole (or sharpie mark) somewhere in the lower right quadrant of the paper. Wherever you want.
Draw a straight line from the center dot to the hole you made in the paper.
Now fold the bottom half of the paper up, so you have a "taco shell" shape, and line the paper edges up and crease it.
Mark the hole onto the top right quadrant by simply penciling or crayon (hah, nobody uses crayons anymore.) to color through the hole you made, onto the piece of paper behind it.
Now unfold the paper so its a monitor shape again, with a hole on the bottom right, quadrant, and a mark on the top-right.
Draw a straight line from the center dot to the bottom-right dot, and draw a separate straight line from the center to the top-right dot.
Same distance, right? Get a ruler if you want or you think I'm a lying sorcerer to confirm the distance is the same from center to both spots.
In Diablo 3, the distance from the center to the top-right hole/mark IS DOUBLE the distance from the center to the bottom-right hole/mark.
How the hell are we supposed to calculate range with this??? We don't. We let Turbohud draw a circle for us at 50 yards in all directions (for zei's.)
This feature is not a cheat, it's an improvement, in my opinion. Diablo has zero built-in resources for learning range. Zero.
And isometric camera, hah, yea, good luck bud.
If somebody thinks this is cheating...do i need to put a sharpie on my monitor to draw zei's circle out? Would that be considered 'cheating'? I'd always have Zei's 50 yard range indicator up on my screen.
Hell, just get those plastic films teachers used to use on the school projectors in the classroom, with the dry-erasable markers and tape it on your monitor.
Done with d3? Flip it over the back of the screen. No marker damage to the monitor, and I know more than other players about zei's max range for damage boost maximization.
I now have an advantage. Is this cheating? Is this unfair? It isn't software, as when THUD software draws a circle on screen for you.
It's a hardware circle, and even though Blizzard bans third-party 'software', did I not gain an unfair advantage still? Is it ok because it's not drawn by software, but THUD circles are not okay because they are? In fact, the distinction is irrelevant: they do the same exact thing.
So, circle ranges It is a useful feature that should be allowed or implemented by Blizzard, especially since they cannot expect us to compensate for the camera angle doubling yardage ranges above the x-axis.
This feature should be implemented. So agree again great feature.
P.S. Say for example I run in 1920x1080 and you run in some garbage 4:3 resolution on your old CRT.
I have another unfair advantage over you, I can see double the area around my character vs what you can see around yours (25% more in each direction to the monitors corner borders.)
Is this also cheating?
What about super-widescreen monitors that go up to 21:9 This is like a cinema projector screen, ust so you can imagine how widescreen it is. No blackbars stretching or cropping will be needed when the DVD comes out, you'll have the true cinematic viewpoint the director made the film with.
And you'll see a metric fuckton more of D3 than the pitifully un-wide, lesser, plebeian monitors.
It's not software, and Blizzard isn't going to ban you for using your new Projector screen to play their game. But it gives me a huge advantage.
And this will always exist in Diablo 3.
So, saying anything 'third-party software giving advantage' should be banned no matter what... well, it's silly.
Shall we ban anybody laying in 16:9 when there are 4:3 players on the leaderboards too?
People take Blizz posts too literally. "Third-party" "software" = must be banned regardless of function or availability of advantage attained also being obtained without the third-party software.
Bots let you double or triple your playtime and always do most efficient xp runs during real play-time and farm mats/keys while you're away or sleeping off the 4-day adderall binge you did at season startup. Come back and farm some more GRs and hey you're top 10 player you're the best! ... Except not.
THUD provides about as much of an advantage as does having a more widescreen Aspect Ratio monitor/resolution provides you, at least for the 3 features supported by PsykStrike
The only thing that breaks the competition is the vision/detection range.
If the minimap dots were only visible up to the players visual range (i.e. the resolution of his or her monitor from the center to the outside edge or corner, depending on the direction he's heading, obviously), this would be fine in my opinion.
You could see mobs on the screen at the same time as a THUD user could see them as dots on the minimap.
I played RTS games for years, years, and years, before Diablo 3. I am far more comfortable judging the size of a force with radar/minimap dots than looking at actual 3d-ish-isometric view models that sometimes do not contrast very well with the terrain/colors and could be misleading, at least for myself personally.
As an example, think about the very, very dark rifts, and you've got a bunch of Zombie pukers stuffed into chokepoints, and a WALLER elite just for fun (the wall is quite dark.)
Sometimes I can't see walls made by WALLER on the super-super-dark-blackness-of-the-void colored rift floors. They're both just too dark.
Or, the cave levels ~ but not any cave level, it's an ICE cave level. What do we get? Of course, tons of freaking elites with FROZEN.
I literally cannot see those 90% of the time without THUD (it will show a red dotted outline around the Frozen particle/spell's Area of Effect. It's not that I can't react or don't pay attention, but sometimes the color matches the terrain in a snow level pretty much perfectly and it's impossible to avoid without that outline there.
We all know Blizzard messes up on shadow outlines with similar colors. Check out your buff stacks on Live server right now. Sorry, you have how many stacks of Firebird's? or Tal Rashas? White text on white background, works about as well as Frozen in an Ice Cave. THUD gives me the outline blizz is adding to Text/number indicators on buff/stack icons next patch, but gives me that outlinefor things that can kill me, but shouldn't, as they are basically invisible.
Again, these are just my thoughts, mostly in agreement with PsykStrike's well-written post.
I don't think minimap dots at same range as visual monitor resolution range are an extra advantage vs looking at the edge of the monitor (this is where you have to look to see the minimap anyway. We're both looking at a edge of the monitor in this situation!) and not having the minimap dots.
For me, this is what I am extremely accustomed to in other Blizzard games, and what I would prefer, personally.
Thus, I may have bias in that it isn't unfair to have dots as the same range as your character's vision range, as they show the same thing, just one as some dots in a small compact area (minimap), and one as a real-scale representation of the battlefield, as some 3D sprites shown on the battlefield itself, The area your eyes must scan is larger without minimap dots, but you get a much better depiction of range (Zei's, etc.) in the non-THUD users' case; you can also immediately detect the monster type and more quickly formulate whether to sit and kill, avoid and pass them, or group them up and pull them with you to the next pack of stuff.
This is a reasonable tradeoff for either playstyle and should be left to the user to decide.
Minimap dots show total mob amount/force size more easily, and in conjunction with upcoming map features, all in a compact area of the minimap. Thus, you can plan your route whilst you see upcoming trash packs and dynamically move and group or kill on-the-fly.
No minimap dots, you can always see what monster types are incoming (Will it be a mounted armadon at the chokepoint? Are the mobs in the next room something you should pull into this room to clear both at once?
Nah, there's like 100 Oppressors in there.
Can't tell either of those things with THUD minimap dots, but you can if you watch the screen instead of the minimap), you can see the size of the force (same as THUD can).
So, my thoughts on it is the minimap dots do not really do anything special, they do one thing better than without them, and some things worse if you are focusing on them instead of the world on your screen, in acceptably qualitatively equal benefits/losses for each option.
Neither is overpowered, and it is more personal preference. Hell, some people don't ever look at the minimap, with or without THUD, or even in a WarCraft 3 or SC2 game (or league of legends or CS:GO or... ad nausem).
Some folks are very good as visually scanning the isometric field, and can instantly decide whether to skip, kill, have them follow you to another pack, etc.
Conversely, some, such as myself, or those with heavy RTS backgrounds, thrive on minimap dot spotting in order to more closely focus on map terrain and relative mob pack sizes, so we can look at routes while we check out incoming amounts of mobs; only really ever looking at the isometric battlefield when we are in range to fight, really.
THEN we see what mobs these are, and then waste precious seconds deciding whether to skip, clump, fight, or make them follow you to another pack, etc.
What's My Point?
Minimap dots are basically equal and pure preference to scanning the visual battlefield ahead/around your hero, so long as neither has a larger field of vision than the other. No bigger advantage than having a widescreen monitor vs somebody who has a 4:3 CRT.
Ranges in this game are completely fucked sideways as pertaining to how many yards away something is in isometric view, with any downward location of the x-axis being half of the equiangular upward distance.
As THUD currently does have 'maphack' esque things, that is the main issue of contention I can see.Then again, I could also once again argue it's the same as having a wider monitor.
I concede it is a controversial feature, however, but still hold that it's silly to cry about it when the game gives you 100% more visual space by going from a 4:3 AR to a 16:9 AR, and that's okay but map reveal (which is mostly based on cached rift / known rift layouts...as im sure you've noticed rifts are not exactly random at all, and often have the same dead-ends and layouts, same paths that lead in a big loop to waste your time, etc.
It's more like drawing the known map when it matches the current GR floor, it fills in what it knows, and where variations can occur, it stops drawing.
If the map is always one layout, then you get the full 'maphack'. A person could easily memorize all of these if they tried. Everybody who runs enough GRs has memoriozed some of the maps already. "Ok, the giant hell rift always has a dead-end when you are in the top center, and choose to go up the incline to the left path. And heading the other path to the top-right, always leads to the next floor of the GR after a small stretch of straight pathing."
You know what I'm talking about! :^) THud just knows more patterns like this. It's not really a maphack, though it is a map-fill-in tool once it matches the rift with rifts it knows.
I conclude this post once again finding myself agreeing with PsykStriker. Thanks for the post, and I didn't intend to write even 1/10 of this length of post, but you got me thinking in-depth about your points.
Doubt anybody read this far into my post, but hey if you did, thanks.
Press Shift+O and join the largest communities. Reddit, and your class (i.e. "Wizards" or "Witch Doctors" always have people. Just say you're level xxx and youre running (bounties, rifts, etc.) if anybody would like to join you. You can also ask for a powerlevel and just get a 10-minute 70 and have adventure mode games up.
1) all of them. you will literally get 100+ mails with all your items. I am not sure about follower's items, you MAY want to put those in your stash just to be safe. They probably get sent too, though.
2) Yes, you dont have to take all the mail at once. But you do only have 30 days (from your first login, after season end, I believe) to take them, then they get lost and deleted. They don't want you to use mail as inifnite stash space, so it won't stay there forever, but you will have some time to figure out what to salvage in your NS stash and what to keep etc.
3) I dont know, but I would imagine it transfers over from season to NS. Just a guess on this one though.
Wizard Arcane Orb. Just don't use DMO. Triumvirate/unstable scepter/Orb of Infinite Depth. Stat your rings for CHC and CHD. Crown of the Primus in helm (all runes on time warp active.)
I did this on the first try with something like 7 minutes remaining.
If you're already a wizard playing DMO orbit, keep the same spells, except change teleport to wormhole so you can skip to elites. You won't be 1shotting GR 70 elites for 10 billion HP crits, but you'll do just fine.
After trying several Wizard Fire Builds involving hydras, twisters, disintegrate/deathwish/etched sigil etc., I just decided to go back to orb. It worked perfectly. Super easy.
Half my gear didn't even synergize with the ORbit build and was leftover from trying disintegrate/meteor. Still, easy as pie.
Here's a screenshot of my D3 armory (since I will be changing gear soon now that I've done the conquest..!):
In the cube:
Triumvirate, Helm of the Primus, Unity (and a Unity + Immortal Token on follower.)
I had a chance to fear on my helm as well. It's actually extremely annoying and I ended up gambling for a new one. Since you stack area damage and concentrate enemies inside the bubble, you don't really want them to run away.
It's not particularly harmful, but it does slow you down when they separate from the pack, and it is quite annoying. I was surprised how often I noticed it being irritating in rifts before changing helm.
But as Astrayon said above me, take the helm if its an upgrade, just don't roll something INTO a chance to fear, as it's not beneficial to you as DMO.
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Do not be surprised if you master it on the first time without even really trying. I personally did not know I had to kill the rockworms in order to master it, wasn't aware they actually counted for the 'kill all enemies' objective, as they were part of a separate, additional objective.
I had enough time to run from the very end of the set dungeon, after realizing i had 5 or 6 enemies left to kill... go back without using blink (walking, since I know blinking won't always let invisible/burrowed units 'aggro' you and appear to attack), and kill every rockworm after only half-remembering where they were and waiting for them to pop up. Took ~25 sec to find the very last one, still finished with enough time, mastering it on my first attempt.
Invoker Crusader is also ridiculously easy. Just get hit by stuff.
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You do realize that this is not the official Battle.Net forums, right?
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/5386227/
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Hire the Templar, he'll help you in finishing the campaign.
His name's Cormac, and he's glorious.
There are no seasons on console version of D3, meaning you have never even done the campaign once? Go do the campaign.
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Diablo 2.4.1 Items
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:^(
Really?
:^(
1
Here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1e6-0STmUmiD30X8Mgf8FN766q0lI6k_JNNemYxsH--k/htmlview?sle=true#
(not the same spreadsheet linked on page 1.)
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Thorns 100% does not proc from pets.
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Skills can be divided in two categories. Primary animations (also referred to as "using an attack turn") and secondary animations (also referred to as "not using an attack turn" or "not having an animation").
The difference is that primary animations are always shown. There can't be two primary animations played in parallel.
So if for example you channel Disintegrate (primary) and then hit the button to cast Magic Missile (primary), it will interrupt your channel. If you mash the Magic Missile (primary) and Arcane Orb (primary) buttons at the same time, you will always get either one, never both with one action.
Secondary animations are shown if possible. That means they are animated when you don't do anything else anyways. But if you are currently busy, the action is carried out anyways, without the animation.
So if you channel Disintegrate (primary) again and cast Explosive Blast (secondary), it will not interrupt your channel. If you mash Explosive Blast (secondary), Diamond Skin (secondary) and Magic Missile (primary), all of them can be cast at the same time, without any delays or queueing.
Basically, secondary animation means it does not interfere with your other skills. Usually if you have 2 attacks per second, that means if you spam two primary skills, each of them will be casted once a second. If you add a third primary skill, each of the three will be casted once every 1.5 seconds.
If the third skill you spam is a secondary instead, your first two skills will still be casted once a second. So in terms of actions per second, that skill is for free.
Ray of Frost, Disintegrate, Arcane Torrent - a spell with a primary animation breaks your channeling. A spell with a secondary animation doesn't.
[TL;DR] - Skills with secondary animations don't interrupt you casting other stuff.
Source: Mechanics And Game Information Compendium (Official forums)
(ctrl+F 'secondary animation')
Channeled spells, as well as spells that cause your character to move in a direction (Charge, Teleport, dash) are always in the primary animation category. You will have to test or google other spells you want to know about. Threatening shout / battle cry are also always shown animation-wise.
There is currently a bug with Charge that allow you to cancel the animation by hitting the 'force move' hotkey near the end of the animation after you arrive at your destination point to be able to cast spells faster subsequent to using charge. This is being fixed in 2.4.1 however.
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There is overkill in Diablo.
Say there is a mob with 1 million hp left. You crit the mob for 30 billion. The mob dies. What happens here?
1) The mob takes 30 billion damage.
2) Game checks for death, 1,000,000 - 30,000,000,000 < 0 = true, so the mob dies.
The game does not do it this way:1) Damage number calculated (30 Billion)2) Game checks for death (1M - 30B)3) Mob takes 1 M damage, 29.9B damage discarded and damage number shown revised to 1MThis does not happen.
If your templar takes 30 billion damage and does not have the Invulnerability token (tooltip states 'cannot die', but in reality, they cannot take damage), he takes 30 billion damage and dies.
Unity rings? Templar takes 15 billion, you take 15 billion. The only reason you didn't double-die the first time is because you were a Crusader, since Indestructible has 5 seconds of 'immune to damage' after it procs (Also applies to the respective passives of Monks and Barbs I believe).
If you were playing, for example, a Wizard, which does not have _X seconds of invulnerability after cheat-death passive (they gain a shield, but can still instantly take damage again and die to stacked molten explosions, which will easily outdamage the shields gained, for example), the first time in this video you'd have likely died twice and instantly been wiped.
So yea, don't wear Unity and put one on your follower without the Immortal follower token. You can still wear a Unity ring, just take it off your follower unless you give Him/Her the Invulnerability/Immortality token along with it.
This has killed Hardcore players who don't know how Unity works over the years many times, and you aren't the first person to post about it and thinking it's a bug.
Now you know, chalk it up to learning about a new legendary and roll another hero, with a new piece of knowledge to wield along your renewed journey; Your deeds of valor will be remembered. Hopefully, so will Unity mechanics.
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Saw this post and had a lot of thought and agreement with it.
Also go into the unfairness of the minimap vs detection radius actual visibility range and inherent disadvantages by those with different aspect ratios throughout.
Totally agreed with this post. The first 3 components are useful, very useful, but nothing you can't do without D3planner.
If you had a second monitor that had d3planner up and you imported your hero every gear change, you would actually get far more info/stats than THUD gives you (referring mostly to the damage calculations of your skills.
D3 has needed this info for years. They refuse to give us a test dummy in town, even, let alone a DPS meter for ourselves.
Timesaver, not an advantage giver. You can calculate it all by hand if you really want, the "player who uses no THUD or d3planner", you will not be at a disadvantage in combat.
~Arcs and circles, yes. What the hell is a yard, in Diablo? Seriously, what the hell is 50 yards on 1920x1080?
How about on 1280x720? 1440p?
This game does not provide range 'arcs' like games such as WC3 did (press chain lightning on your far seer, you get a transparent-ish blue circle with the Far Seer Hero at the center, and the circle has a radius that is precisely the size of the spell's maximum castable range. If the unit is inside the circle, you can hit the spell and rain lightning upon their forsaken souls. If they are not in the circle, you know immediately that you are not in range.
Thank god somebody made that Demon Hunter in town picture a long time ago. Click the spoiler to view it.
Also see: http://www.diabloii.net/blog/comments/diablo-iii-the-art-of-distance for explanation on these ranges and circle if you don't understand it or the axes. Very good writeup there already.
A point to note: a 4:3 monitor can see 30 yards down-corner, 60 yards to an upper corner. This is due to the isometric, non-top-down camera angle.
Also to note, 16:10 resolutions see 17% more of the battlefield than a 4:3 monitor does. ON EACH SIDE.
Combine that with the fact that the camera makes it such that seemingly 'equal' amounts of space going at a down angle are actually only half the in-game 'yards' distance of the 'same' spot, just going up instead.
Don't get what the hell this chart is? Isometric camera what the hell is that? How can two equal distances not be equal?? Wat??
Ok, here's a demonstration. Follow along at home, click the spoiler.
Go get a piece of paper.
Fold it in half twice and unfold it, so you have the center of the paper where the two folds meet, you can mark it with a pencil or pen as the center if you want, on both sides of the paper.
Now, lay the paper with the long side on the top and bottom of the sheet (like the shape of your monitor.)
Now grab a pin or a pencil or a sharpie (let it bleed to both sides), and put a hole (or sharpie mark) somewhere in the lower right quadrant of the paper. Wherever you want.
Draw a straight line from the center dot to the hole you made in the paper.
Now fold the bottom half of the paper up, so you have a "taco shell" shape, and line the paper edges up and crease it.
Mark the hole onto the top right quadrant by simply penciling or crayon (hah, nobody uses crayons anymore.) to color through the hole you made, onto the piece of paper behind it.
Now unfold the paper so its a monitor shape again, with a hole on the bottom right, quadrant, and a mark on the top-right.
Draw a straight line from the center dot to the bottom-right dot, and draw a separate straight line from the center to the top-right dot.
Same distance, right? Get a ruler if you want or you think I'm a lying sorcerer to confirm the distance is the same from center to both spots.
In Diablo 3, the distance from the center to the top-right hole/mark IS DOUBLE the distance from the center to the bottom-right hole/mark.
How the hell are we supposed to calculate range with this??? We don't. We let Turbohud draw a circle for us at 50 yards in all directions (for zei's.)
This feature is not a cheat, it's an improvement, in my opinion. Diablo has zero built-in resources for learning range. Zero.
And isometric camera, hah, yea, good luck bud.
If somebody thinks this is cheating...do i need to put a sharpie on my monitor to draw zei's circle out? Would that be considered 'cheating'? I'd always have Zei's 50 yard range indicator up on my screen.
Hell, just get those plastic films teachers used to use on the school projectors in the classroom, with the dry-erasable markers and tape it on your monitor.
Done with d3? Flip it over the back of the screen. No marker damage to the monitor, and I know more than other players about zei's max range for damage boost maximization.
I now have an advantage. Is this cheating? Is this unfair? It isn't software, as when THUD software draws a circle on screen for you.
It's a hardware circle, and even though Blizzard bans third-party 'software', did I not gain an unfair advantage still? Is it ok because it's not drawn by software, but THUD circles are not okay because they are? In fact, the distinction is irrelevant: they do the same exact thing.
P.S. Say for example I run in 1920x1080 and you run in some garbage 4:3 resolution on your old CRT.
I have another unfair advantage over you, I can see double the area around my character vs what you can see around yours (25% more in each direction to the monitors corner borders.)
Is this also cheating?
So, saying anything 'third-party software giving advantage' should be banned no matter what... well, it's silly.
Shall we ban anybody laying in 16:9 when there are 4:3 players on the leaderboards too?
People take Blizz posts too literally. "Third-party" "software" = must be banned regardless of function or availability of advantage attained also being obtained without the third-party software.
THUD provides about as much of an advantage as does having a more widescreen Aspect Ratio monitor/resolution provides you, at least for the 3 features supported by PsykStrike
The only thing that breaks the competition is the vision/detection range.
If the minimap dots were only visible up to the players visual range (i.e. the resolution of his or her monitor from the center to the outside edge or corner, depending on the direction he's heading, obviously), this would be fine in my opinion.
You could see mobs on the screen at the same time as a THUD user could see them as dots on the minimap.
I played RTS games for years, years, and years, before Diablo 3. I am far more comfortable judging the size of a force with radar/minimap dots than looking at actual 3d-ish-isometric view models that sometimes do not contrast very well with the terrain/colors and could be misleading, at least for myself personally.
I literally cannot see those 90% of the time without THUD (it will show a red dotted outline around the Frozen particle/spell's Area of Effect. It's not that I can't react or don't pay attention, but sometimes the color matches the terrain in a snow level pretty much perfectly and it's impossible to avoid without that outline there.
Again, these are just my thoughts, mostly in agreement with PsykStrike's well-written post.
I don't think minimap dots at same range as visual monitor resolution range are an extra advantage vs looking at the edge of the monitor (this is where you have to look to see the minimap anyway. We're both looking at a edge of the monitor in this situation!) and not having the minimap dots.
Minimap dots show total mob amount/force size more easily, and in conjunction with upcoming map features, all in a compact area of the minimap. Thus, you can plan your route whilst you see upcoming trash packs and dynamically move and group or kill on-the-fly.
No minimap dots, you can always see what monster types are incoming (Will it be a mounted armadon at the chokepoint? Are the mobs in the next room something you should pull into this room to clear both at once?
Nah, there's like 100 Oppressors in there.
Can't tell either of those things with THUD minimap dots, but you can if you watch the screen instead of the minimap), you can see the size of the force (same as THUD can).
So, my thoughts on it is the minimap dots do not really do anything special, they do one thing better than without them, and some things worse if you are focusing on them instead of the world on your screen, in acceptably qualitatively equal benefits/losses for each option.
Some folks are very good as visually scanning the isometric field, and can instantly decide whether to skip, kill, have them follow you to another pack, etc.
What's My Point?
Minimap dots are basically equal and pure preference to scanning the visual battlefield ahead/around your hero, so long as neither has a larger field of vision than the other. No bigger advantage than having a widescreen monitor vs somebody who has a 4:3 CRT.
It's more like drawing the known map when it matches the current GR floor, it fills in what it knows, and where variations can occur, it stops drawing.
You know what I'm talking about! :^) THud just knows more patterns like this. It's not really a maphack, though it is a map-fill-in tool once it matches the rift with rifts it knows.
I conclude this post once again finding myself agreeing with PsykStriker. Thanks for the post, and I didn't intend to write even 1/10 of this length of post, but you got me thinking in-depth about your points.
Doubt anybody read this far into my post, but hey if you did, thanks.
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Press Shift+O and join the largest communities. Reddit, and your class (i.e. "Wizards" or "Witch Doctors" always have people. Just say you're level xxx and youre running (bounties, rifts, etc.) if anybody would like to join you. You can also ask for a powerlevel and just get a 10-minute 70 and have adventure mode games up.
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1) all of them. you will literally get 100+ mails with all your items. I am not sure about follower's items, you MAY want to put those in your stash just to be safe. They probably get sent too, though.
2) Yes, you dont have to take all the mail at once. But you do only have 30 days (from your first login, after season end, I believe) to take them, then they get lost and deleted. They don't want you to use mail as inifnite stash space, so it won't stay there forever, but you will have some time to figure out what to salvage in your NS stash and what to keep etc.
3) I dont know, but I would imagine it transfers over from season to NS. Just a guess on this one though.
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Wizard Arcane Orb. Just don't use DMO. Triumvirate/unstable scepter/Orb of Infinite Depth. Stat your rings for CHC and CHD. Crown of the Primus in helm (all runes on time warp active.)
I did this on the first try with something like 7 minutes remaining.
If you're already a wizard playing DMO orbit, keep the same spells, except change teleport to wormhole so you can skip to elites. You won't be 1shotting GR 70 elites for 10 billion HP crits, but you'll do just fine.
After trying several Wizard Fire Builds involving hydras, twisters, disintegrate/deathwish/etched sigil etc., I just decided to go back to orb. It worked perfectly. Super easy.
Half my gear didn't even synergize with the ORbit build and was leftover from trying disintegrate/meteor. Still, easy as pie.
Here's a screenshot of my D3 armory (since I will be changing gear soon now that I've done the conquest..!):
In the cube:
Triumvirate, Helm of the Primus, Unity (and a Unity + Immortal Token on follower.)
If you prefer to see all the stats and stuff on my gear: http://www.d3planner.com/511752803
Insanely easy, if you'pre a wizard you already have all the gear.
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I had a chance to fear on my helm as well. It's actually extremely annoying and I ended up gambling for a new one. Since you stack area damage and concentrate enemies inside the bubble, you don't really want them to run away.
It's not particularly harmful, but it does slow you down when they separate from the pack, and it is quite annoying. I was surprised how often I noticed it being irritating in rifts before changing helm.
But as Astrayon said above me, take the helm if its an upgrade, just don't roll something INTO a chance to fear, as it's not beneficial to you as DMO.
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WD piranhado activates it only if the mobs are actually 'moved' into the Tornado, not if you cast right on top of them.
Any Black Hole rune should activate it. Wave of Force should as well.