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The only duping method I heard of is using the Blizzard "I got hacked!" restorations and using the profits to buy more copies to repeat the process. However, it's still hard to believe Blizzard isn't catching on to how the hell a fresh account suddenly got so much gear on it for free from friends just to get "hacked" immediately after.

Then again, the fact items seem to be duped more than gold (is gold is even being duped) might point at the above not being the problem, but rather something more similar to what was shown in the video. After all, if you just used restorations then how come they only dupe items rather than just dupe gold.

Basically, whatever is being used for duping is a huge blunder on Blizzard's end no matter how you look at it. The only explanation for how something like this can happen is Blizzard simply not caring enough about this game. They've had a very long time to figure out what the hell is going on (as in, since gem prices started to plunge, which was already quite too late), yet the prices are still dropping meaning the mass-duping is still going on.

Best would be to dual wield. More killing speed, less gold spent. If you insist on gimping yourself, there are many ways you can go, but since none of those builds are about maximum efficiency (because they aren't using the most powerful abilities of the sprint/whirlwind build), don't expect much depth and useful information regarding efficiency from their corresponding guides. After all, you can try optimize any build, but in the end if you keep optimizing it you'll just end up finding yourself back into using a sprint/whirlwind build with dual-wielding. The question is how much you want to optimize vs how much you are wiling to gimp yourself, and that is not something anyone can help you with.

The 200k is what I think would be minimum in 1.0.5 for MP0 act 3, which is all you need to do in order to farm XP and loot at a reasonable rate. To farm loot faster you'd need MP1 act 2, but if your paragon level is low I wouldn't recommend it regardless of your gear. Of course someone who just reached 60 for the first time and didn't waste any gold on worthless crap should have more like 700k with no farming done whatsoever. The 200k was just so nobody has an excuse for why he can't afford a sprint/whirlwind barb and needs to try other options. Especially considering that with any kind of budget your farming ability will never match that of a sprint/whirlwind barb, because if you can't equip a sprint/whirlwind barb properly, you definitely can't equip anything else either.

You don't need to be viable MP1-3. You need to be viable MP0. And again, if you can't afford to gear a sprint/whirwlind barb to do something, you defintiely can't equip anything else to do it with the same budget. Maybe you could equip a tank barb to do it, but he'd do it so slowly it won't be worth it in any way whatsoever. And besides, if you can do act 3 MP0 that's all you need to do until you can afford gear to farm other stuff faster (and even when you can afford the gear, you probably should stick for act 3 MP0 for a very long time, as the benefits of higher MP are few to non-existent while the farming time is greatly increased with each MP level even if you never ever die).

Saying you can't afford to properly gear a barb and therefore you're going to play another class is like saying you can't afford a car and therefore you're going to have to go buy a truck, which is in reality will cost much more just so you can travel around at a slower speed.

Same as best farming class for top end gear. Sprint barb is overpowered at all gear levels (except very poor gear levels where you can't even afford simple crit rings that don't cost much more than vendor price). Basically, if you have 200k gold or more, you should not have a problem to build a sprint barb that will farm better and faster than any other class can do with the same budget.

Not sure if 200k can get you to efficient act 3 mp0 farming with a barb, but if a barb can't do it with 200k then nobody can. In any case, even if you can't do very efficient farming with your budget, you should just give up DPS for the sake of being able to survive act 3 mp0, and that can be probably be done even with only 200k. Your DPS may be terrible but you will be able to kill stuff without dying, and every drop will be able to roll lvl63 affixes which means the number of quality drops (aka with possible lvl63 affixes) goes up at by more than 10x so as long as you take less than 10x longer to kill stuff you are probably profiting from slowly farming act 3 over quickly farming act 2.

All the "non gem sink" guys need to wake the F up. There is absolutely no connection between lack of gem sink (which may or may not be needed regardless, but that's a different discussion altogether unrelated to the topic at hand) and the current gem prices.

You can't point towards unused gems as people upgrade theirs. The highest gems are actually the most absurdly cheap ones. As in, the AH price divided by the jeweler total crafting fee for the same gem is lowest for radiant star gems.

People quitting the game makes no sense. There can't be so many people who use radiant stars quitting over people who actually reached the point where they want to start using them (heck, only a select few people use radiant stars outside of helm/weapons).


While it's obvious supply is greater than demand and that's why the prices are lower, that's not a real answer. That's stating the obvious. The real question that needs answered is how is the supply increasing beyond demand.

After all, if supply grows slightly greater than demand for whatever reason, everyone who considered crafting gems immediately stop crafting them as they can buy them cheaper, and thus the supply no longer increases. That said, supply is increasing compared to demand, which makes no sense if we assume the only way to obtain radiant star gems is to craft them for >15mil a piece.

The only explanation is people obtaining gems outside of crafting. AKA duping or other shady activity. I thought at first that this had something to do with the times where selling gold on the RMAH was unavailable or impractical due to high minimum price and thus gold was converted into gems so that it can be sold, but since nowadays selling gold is a non-issue, it doesn't really explain why the prices keep dropping. Therefore the only thing I can think of is duping on massive scale. Maybe it has something to do with the 10$ Diablo 3 copies as that can seriously increase the "create account, take lots of stuff, give them away, claim you got hacked and use your restoration, sell profits on RMAH and use money to buy more Diablo 3 copies" trick as it becomes 6 times less risky. Alternatively, it could simply be a new glitch in 1.0.5 that allows duping.

In any case, I believe that the gem price issue is a big f-up on Blizzard's end. Not on the game design side, but on the technical/security side of things. Someone is creating gems for less than the crafting fee and thus the market gets flooded, and there is no legitimate way this would happen in 1.0.5 conditions (where gold can be sold directly on the RMAH at the same fees as gems).

Quote from Banorac

Stop asking for nerfs. Ask for buffs instead.

Good idea. Give all characters +40% movement speed and remove sprint. Buff monster movement speed by 40% as well as they'd need that buff to compensate so they can't be so easily kited. That sort of solves the problem. Of course, if you don't like that, the only way is to nerf sprint itself.

Movement speed is just too important, especially due to how effective and easy running MP0-1 is.

Why do you think anyone here is crying? Most are playing a sprint/whirlwind barb themselves... Saying it's overpowered is simply stating an obvious fact (at least obvious to anyone who has a clue about this game). It doesn't matter if it's "just PvE" (especially when there's an RMAH and it's a Blizzard game that needs to live up to Blizzard standards, which it currently doesn't do well at all).

Should they nerf it? Probably, otherwise nobody in his right mind would play any other build, missing a lot of the potential fun that this game could have had. And don't go telling me "but you can play those builds". Even Blizzard agree that you should have fun while trying to be effective, and not limit your effectiveness in order to have fun, and there's a reason both me and Blizzard think that way. As to why they haven't actually implemented this way of thinking into the actual game I don't know. Maybe Jay and Wyatt just shouldn't have had their jobs. Maybe it's something else. But bottom line is anyone with his head on his shoulders agrees that if everyone who care about being effective use the same build then there's a problem.

In high mosnter power (where monsters have a ton of HP so they don't die fast), runing into any pack and spamming sprint/br will do the job. At lower mosnter power (where you're actually being efficient in terms of xp/hour as normal monsters don't take so long to kill) you'll need overpower momentum to help you, and cooldown reduction on passive which was already very helpful in 1.0.4 (you don't need a defensive passive at low mosnter power).

Yes, all points towards skorn being the issue. 90k DPS with skorn is not enough for life steal and 800 loh just doesn't cut it with such a slow attack speed. Sell the skorn for a decent dual-wield setup (strong main hand (high DPS with 1-2 (3 if you're really rich) damage stats but no ls/loh, weak stat stick offhand with LS and maybe LOH along with as much dmg stats as you can afford) and you'll already see a huge improvement without investing any additional gold.

By using a skorn you're giving up on one of the big factors that make the sprint/whirlwind barb overpowered.

You can't compare act 1 mp0 monster HP to act 1 MP1 HP, because jumping to MP1 also increases the monster level from 61 to 63. Nobody should even think about farming MP0 act 1/2 as that's an incredible waste of time (even if you have to sacrifice lots of DPS to do that, you should still do it and go farm act 3 MP0 instead). In act 1/2 you can only compare MP>1 to MP1 (MP0 there is pointless as it's extremely easy an unrewarding due to monster/item level). In act 3 you can compare to MP0 as well.

As for download links, seems like mediafire changed some stuff there (this is pretty new, they have been working for years just fine). I'll try looking for a new place where I can easily host and share files without too much hassle.

EDIT: OK, I hosted it on our Arma 2 Israeli community website storage...

http://agamer.netai.net/mp_level.xls

Your calculations are off. If you have +140% exp, another 10% would put you at 150%, so 2.5/2.4=1.0417 or 4.17% more exp/hour, of course then reduced by the increased clear time due to higher monster HP. Check my excel files, it does exactly what you're trying to do, except with (hopefully) no errors.

Due to mediafire giving !@#!, I uploaded it to our Arma 2 Israeli community website's storage:
http://agamer.netai.net/mp_level.xls

2000 armor > 100 resist in practically every situation (use EHP calculator to verify!).

That said, though, it doesn't matter how much gold you have invested if you have it invested wrong. If your monk has good life steal and life on hit while your barb does not, no wonder your barb dies so easily. Also, are the monk stats after skill/passive bonuses? If not, then obviously he's even tankier compared to your barb that probably uses no defensive skills/passives (you really shouldn't in 1.0.5, except maybe bloodthirst). Besides, 90k DPS is quite high if you're using a stat stick off hand with low DPS, but quite low if your off hand has the same DPS as your main hand.

Depends on how you judge overpowered. If you judge it by "kill faster and survive better than anyone ever did in this game with no gear" then no, he's not. However, if you judge it by "kill faster and survive better than anyone with equal budget gear", then yes, he is very much overpowered! Not nearly as overpowered as in 1.0.4, but definitely quite overpowered.

The only adjustment you need to make is have more survivability than before in case you are missing some, even if it means to lose some DPS. Then, with the same investment, you will still out-class any other class/build with the same amount invested in gear as you.

Quote from Philippos

I can't believe the idiots playing this game still haven't figured out that CHARACTER SHEET PAPER DOLL DPS doesnt mean jack shit when youre actually playing, due to thousands of variables and differences in play

Or more specifically a bug/design flaw in how some skills only use the main hand weapon while the character screen DPS shows the DPS for both weapons. "Normal" skills scale off of character screen DPS just fine, and "other variables" are rather small. Of course, for a sprint/whirlwind barb, most of the damage is from a "non-normal" skill called sprint run like the wind, which is exceptionally non-normal, as not only it uses main hand damage only, but it also alternates in which weapon it uses for its speed, so some of the time you'll be doing main hand damage at off hand speed (which can be good or bad depending on the speed of your main hand vs your off hand, and thus means you will do more DPS with slow main hand and fast off hand even if your character screen DPS says the same).

2 sprint barbs with 100k character screen DPS will have the strong main hand with stat-stick (low DPS high stats) offhand kill much much faster than the one with 2 identical weapons.

If you're only using "normal" skils, such as cleave/frenzy/bash/whirlwind/hammer of the ancients/seismic slam/etc, then you can gauge your damage capability by your character screen DPS just fine. Of course, good barbs don't use those skills as their main attacks...

I don't think 1.0.5 barbs with overpower are stronger than 1.0.4. Even though at MP0-2 it's easier than 1.0.4, I'm slower because I lose WotB much more often. Even with overpower momentum and even at higher monster power so monsters have more HP I still can't keep it up as I could in 1.0.5 (though when I played a bit in a group on MP4 I could keep come somewhat close to 1.0.5 uptime on WotB). Of course the coefficient nerf didn't only affect fury, it also affected life on hit, which I had to replace with lifesteal that is much less effective than what life on hit used to be even with quite good gear.

Getting the same healing as before is quite costly, and getting the same WotB uptime is virtually impossible (even with full attack speed crit gear and overpower momentum I'm not sure you can compete with a 1.0.5 barb that never paid more than 10k for a single item in terms of WotB uptime).


By the way, what is "act 3 full clear"? If you mean clear everything from start to finish including all dungeons (which isn't very efficient), even for sprint barb it takes quite longer than that. If you mean alkaizer run then I'm still not sure as I haven't timed my runs (only measured 30mil exp/hour in 1.0.4 but that was with whirlwind disconnects etc and didn't count the total number of runs).