I started with a full defensive CM build with Crystal Shell, Prismatic Armor, and the CD reduction rune on frost nova, as well as Cold Blooded, CM, and Evocation as passives that were unchanged throughout. I took the fight time and my char sheet dps to compute the DPS Multiplier, which is the effective dps gain of the build. For example, at 100k dps using the full defensive build I would expect an effective dps of 247k. I also computed relative DPS of each spec meaning switching from Prismatic to Storm Armor increased dps by about 36%.
And in case there's any confusion, 'x' in the table means that skill was used.
| Storm Armor | Shocking Aspect | Pinpoint | Shards | Prism | DPS Multiplier | Relative DPS |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2.47 | 1 | |||||
| x | 2.78 | 1.13 | ||||
| x | 2.99 | 1.21 | ||||
| x | 3.01 | 1.22 | ||||
| x | 3.36 | 1.36 | ||||
| x | x | 4.06 | 1.65 | |||
| x | x | x | 4.25 | 1.72 |
The interesting information is that Storm Armor is about a 36% dps gain over prismatic armor. When you add Shocking Aspect it's a 65% dps gain over prismatic armor and about a 36% dps gain over pinpoint barrier. Adding Diamond Shards further increases the dps gain but it's only about a 4% dps gain by itself when you use Shocking Aspect. The dramatic decrease in survivability for the fight makes it very not worthwhile, but that could easily change depending on the fight. Rak for example, would probably be just fine with DS or prism.
I also expect the values for Shocking Aspect to be dependent of crit and attack speed, since it only procs on crits and higher attack speed should lead to more procs from WW, so with 50% crit, I'd expect the damage to increase by about 16%, or I'd expect the total dps gain to be about 90%, for a relative dps of 1.9. With a crit % of 52% I would expect Shocking Aspect to double your dps over prismatic armor, roughly speaking, with the same APS of 1.965 or so.
For reference, my stats at the time of the data collection were 104k dps buffed (110k with pinpoint), 1.965 attacks per second, 20 APoC, 1298 LoH, 1.5% Life Steal, 641 resist all and 4588 armor unbuffed, with 40.5k hp and 43% crit with Scoundrel. I also had about 400 life per second regen, just to complete the stats.
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I was usually advising people to buy Chanto's, but it seems that ever since the 50m guide appeared a couple of days ago people have gone crazy. I tried to follow up on the prices and it seems that this 50m gear will now cost you about 100m, everyone just got crazy and bought the exact items from the guide and people are putting them up for more money because they realize a higher demand. You might be lucky by sniping a decent Chanto set, but I feel it's extremely overpriced by now.
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You want to hit the next break point in terms of attack speed, which is 2.51 (you're at 2.41 now). You would just need 6% more IAS for that, easy to get on one of your rings. Whatever you do, try to get above 2.51 APS and not lower than that, it'll greatly enhance your CMWW performance. You have three items with APoC, two are sufficient; you could look into a black weapon instead of the Chanto weapon and then get a new source (Triumvirate with APoc). Reason being that your Chanto set is really sub-par: the weapon offers no great affix, only it's DPS is fine, and the offhand is really poor, extremely low damage and 7 APoC is a bit too low, try to get 8-9 at the very least. And Chanto sets seem to be incredibly stupidly expensive ever since the new 50mil CMWW guide came out last week, every single Chanto item I looked at yesterday was insanely overpriced. But if you buy a black weapon, make sure that you hit the 2.51 APS (i.e., by getting an IAS dagger or just getting another ring with IAS).
After taking care of that, you should get more EHP; aim for 4000-4500 armor and 600+ allres, both of these stats are fairly low. Diamond Skin greatly benefits from armor/allres EHP and not so much from life, therefore don't get any more life, but try to up allres/armor. You could, for instance, try to get some of these stats on your rings as well, or on your bracers (could even craft the new bracers) and get the 9 IAS on your rings instead.
For more input on the CMWW basics and mechanics and breakpoints and everything read the CMWW guide, for some ideas on which items you could buy take a look at the wizard gear guide.
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Short answer: yes.
Long answer: the gauntlets, if they have +30% frost damage, give a 25% damage increase on all damage dealt with this build (not 30% because Cold Blooded + FB damage is additive and not multiplicative). Then you need to add the other stats on the gauntlets: 5-6% cold damage, which will give you 5-6% more damage if using a black weapon, obviously a bit less if you have lots of bonus damage items (Zuni boots, Tal amulet, Triumvirate) - but still worth it. So Frostburn Gauntlets will always give you something between 25% and 30% flat damage increase. Load your char into d3up.com, look at your gloves' DPS percentage - for most people it's 10%. If you have super trifecta gloves it might be a bit higher. For my chars it's even only 7-8%, so there's no question about the value of FB gloves. Jaetch said for him FB didn't make sense, but then his gear is also out of this world.
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This post is so full of tinfoil hat, conspiracy, assumptions, and blinded by pure hatred towards Blizzard.
1) If Jay Wilson was to blame for all the mistakes in Diablo 3, why did they put him on the new project (Titan)? So that he can make the same mistakes again and ruin another, new franchise? That's the tinfoil hat version. Why not accept the fact that Jay Wilson is a game designer with a lot of creativity (and there is no creativity if there is no room for error/mistakes!), but he's not someone to maintain a game for the next 10 years? After Jay Wilson quite and the community literally went on a crusade of hatred on the official forums, there were blue posts and messages from Blizzard saying they were shocked about this. I can't find it right now but you should read this. I think people went a bit too far with their JW hatred.
2) Inferno was made hard because Blizzard listened to players, listened to players who said they wanted a super hard endgame. That's why they even said "we think it'll take months for players to clear Inferno". Then players complained about Inferno being too hard, and Blizzard listened to players once more, and nerfed it (something they have done many many times in the past, btw). Players cry "make it hard", Blizzard makes it hard. Players cry "make it easier", Blizzard makes it easier. Players cry "make it harder", Blizzard adds MP levels to make it harder. Seriously, it doesn't matter what Blizzard does - haters gonna hate.
3) Diablo is by its nature a game that's made for bots. The "perfect, efficient" player is sitting in front of his PC and playing exactly like a bot would. It is unbelievably hard to distinguish hardcore, efficient, determined players from bots. But my two opinions are that i) botting is not nearly as rampant as in D2, WoW, or many other games and ii) I don't care about botting because D3 is not competitive, and for me the main parts of the game are solo play or playing with a circle of RL friends, it's not like an MMO where I see the bots in public games.
Seriously, I'm totally fine with everyone having their own opinion, but I hope it's not too much to ask people to think a bit about what they write before making wild accusations beyond any sane reasoning.
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Now, some of the console games appear to be more casual than PC games, fair enough. And it's okay if some of you say "I don't believe in coincidence, this was planned". I'm not even gonna call tinfoil hat here, I grant you this opinion as a true belief and not a conspiracy theory.
But if Diablo 3 was really designed for consoles, or even just with having a console port in their mind, I don't get many of their design decisions:
- Why do you have to move with "click on the screen" rather than "WASD" like in 1000 other games whose movement is easier to port to console?
- Why did they design so many spells that need you to click on the screen (non-PBAoE effects for example, like Blizzard)? I just started playing a WD recently and I think 90% of the spells are terrible to use with a game pad. How will you easily control the direction of Zombie Bears, Corpse Spiders and stuff? How will you tell where your Acid Clouds or Toad Rains are going to pour down on the enemies? All this is so much centered around mouse input, why did they do this?
- Why are they so reluctant to in introducing more auto-pickup, even though the community calls for it constantly? How are you even going to pick up items on the console without auto-pickup?
- Why did they revolve the entire interface completely around mouse usage, where a more keyboard-centered interface (as supported by almost every other game out there today) is so much more difficult to port to the console? Just think about WoW, which is already playable via game pad - people have done that - and people who don't use the keyboard but mouse for certain things (like moving, skills) are being laughed at. They actually went *against* what would have made for an easily portable, almost console-ready interaction.
There might be some more, but these are really things I can't understand. And also the "linearity" thing that comes up all the time is something that I don't get, plus the notion of "everyone is on the same screen anyways". If you're running with 4 WW barbs, you might all be in one place, but most of the time I play with ranged classes and we're always separated quite a lot. We even split up so that elite packs with Molten, Plague, Mortar and so on don't kill us all together. And if I'm the CMWW wizard, my group is always a bit behind me or fetching mobs from outside the screen, kiting them into my freezing circle. In MP games I really rarely see all my friends on the same screen. And as I mentioned a couple of times already: Keep 2 or Crater 2 or many other areas are such a dead-end street mess - it's a love/hate relationship. I don't like the always same looking Rakkis Crossing, but I also don't like to waste time by finding a dead-end street all the time.1
1) I also have concerns about MF, as I mentioned sometimes I think it's too high with 625% max and somehow got out of Blizzard's hands. Therefore, I'd welcome a revamp, and your idea provides a reasonable base to provoke thoughts about how to tackle this.
2) I like that you kind of turned MF into a system which is similar to the new 1.07 crafting (one fixed stat) - it shows that there's not all hope left and deep down there may still be a bit inside of you that enjoys at least a part of Diablo 3, even if it's just the occasional crafting (I know you're short on materials b/c the current system is also meant to take all the stockpiles of mats away from the AH hoarders).
My concern, however, is that it may not go far enough. The new crafting idea is a nice beginning, but there's still way to go. I also really would like to see a system that finds a balance between the super efficient high MP high-end gear professional players and the average casual gamer; while the latter gets one legendary per week, the pros find a bunch of them every hour. The gap between pros and casual is too big, in my opinion; if it would be just a bit closer, both would be happier. However, as I said, the idea has some good food for thought. Could be tweaked into something really nice.
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For me it's completely the same. Like, all what you wrote. The only difference is that I don't think the game is to blame, it's just me.
Recently (yesterday or so) I read somewhere else on these forums that "WarCraft 1 was so freaking hard, all of today's games are easy as pie". I had to laugh when I read this. I remember well how I managed to finish WarCraft 1 about 20 years ago, and it felt like a major achievement. For the sake of super nostalgia I installed it a couple of years ago and did another play through. WarCraft 1 and difficult? This game is ridiculously easy. Finished both campaigns in a few hours without any restart or problems or so. So what's the difference? Did the game became weaker over time? No. The difference is that I have 20 years of experience playing computer games. So many things that I mentioned in my wizard guide, for example, aren't even things that I learned in D3, but from all the other ARPGs, MMOs, RPGs that I played. Still, much of this information is news to people; and so is the implementation of these mechanics in the game.
If you install and play Diablo 1 and 2 again, and try to compare them objectively to D3 (well, I don't think the average human mind is capable of doing that, but let's give it a try) - I don't think that Diablo 3 is weaker, worse, less polished then Diablo 1 or 2. This is not me "guessing", but I actually did this last summer. I'm a sucker for nostalgia and have a lot of old games installed, even some 20+ year old DOS games running in emulators. And this is why I defend Diablo 3 so often on these forums: many of the complaints are from people who expect too much, who don't evaluate the game in its current state, but compare it to the feelings they had when playing Diablo 1 17 years ago. That's just not fair. And even though I can see some of the changes that you want as changes that I'd like to see, too, I tell myself that this is 2013. Furthermore, you can't design a game with the main focus on 30+ years old players like us with 20+ years of gaming experience; most of my friends I shared the D1+D2 gaming experience with don't even have a gaming PC anymore.
It's a complicated matter, and please trust me that whenever you bring up criticism on these forums there's a part inside of me that says "yes, he's right". But then I think "what would this change mean in the long term development of the game, why hasn't Blizzard implemented it this way, and what would other players with a different playing style think about this"? And oftentimes I realize that there's a good reason for Blizzard to do things the way they do.
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He's talking about the amount of "original information" in your video... which is - sorry to say that - zero. I watched your 10 minute video and what I got was "run VoA only". It was mentioned several times already, for example here: http://www.diablofan...monic-essences/ or here: http://eu.battle.net...opic/6635413868 and a couple of hundred times more even before the patch hit.
If you had brought in any new ideas people would be a bit more grateful, but this looks like you're trying to get new Youtube followers by stealing others' ideas and declaring them as yours. In particular, running one single dungeon is not a "route" and having to watch a video for something that can be summed up in half a sentence is odd and feels a waste of time to many people. Here's an example of what you can call a route: http://www.diablofan...ith-65-75m-xph/
No hard feelings, you put a lot of effort into your videos, but this was a letdown.