We'll add some more End game type stuff in this post once we're solid and confident enough on the mechanics and rewards for your efforts to weigh in on them.
With UEE you no longer have to go through the story four times and deal with Normal/Nightmare/Hell/Inferno game modes. You now level faster and the game scales the enemies based on your current level. The old difficulty levels were scrubbed and a new system has been instituted:
Normal, Hard, and Expert modes are available from the start. Master Mode is available after completing Act 4, and Torment Modes are opened up after reaching level 60.
New to UEE is that you can change the difficulty up or down one level from the pause menu without having to make a new session. You can change it as many times as you like, but only one level up or down from the original session’s setting.
Torment difficulties also increase the chance of a legendary drop over previous levels.
"Power Leveling" an alt
Only one character needs to get through the story to unlock adventure mode for the whole account. It's a better way to level a second character because you don't have to wait for story characters, you can jump around the map at will, and you gain things for end game. I just do the bounties and save the keys for doing rifts at level 70. You also earn a ton of Blood Shards during this process which you can spend at 70.
So, the best way to power level an alt is to get to level 21 or higher with your new guy and then throw a big ole Red gem in their weapon(s) and helmet. (Level 21 items start having gem slots)
By the time your main character is level 70, you should have a bunch of marquis and a few imperial rubies laying around. Toss them in your stash for this new low level guy.
Once you're 21-24 range, either craft or loot yourself a fast attack speed weapon and a helmet that require level 21. If they have a slot, toss the biggest ruby you have in the helmet, and the second biggest in your weapon(s). If they don't have slots, head over to the Mystic and look for which property you can replace through enchanting for a slot and then gem them up.
Once you're doing an insane amount of damage for your level and gaining at least 30% more XP than you normally would, crank up the difficulty and go Hog Wild!
Also, if you want you can craft up a Cain's set for the bonus XP. You'll only really need to make one set, and then just stash it when you're done. The next time you level someone they can just grab it from the stash and not care about the stats because you'll be wrecking things anyways.
Why a fast hitting weapon you ask? You're going to kill things with one or two shots, might as well make those one or two shots go fast.
What about paying to remove the gems, isn't that a waste of money? Nope, when you get 10-15 levels along, craft up or loot a better base weapon/helmet and salvage the old one. The gem comes out free! (Unlike Vanilla D3 where it would be lost and you would yell at your dog.)
Once you’ve played through the campaign and defeated Malthael, you unlock Adventure Mode for all of your characters (Hardcore and regular mode separate, of course). No need to play through the story four times with each character! Just select “Adventure Mode” from the game settings where you would normally select what act of the story you want to be in.
In adventure mode bounties and rifts are introduced. Five areas of each act will have a goal like “kill 150 enemies and a specific Unique monster” or “Clear level two of a random dungeon”. When you complete that bounty, you’re given a chunk of XP, gold, Blood Shards, and Rift Key fragments. (more on the last two below). If you clear all five bounties on an Act and talk to Tyrial, he’ll give you a “horadric cache” which contains semi-random drops (Some items are more likely to drop in specific act caches), and usually more rift key fragments.
You can tell the areas on the map that have bounties by the gold exclamation point on the location. If there is a chest under the exclamation point, you’ll earn double Blood Shards in that Act.
Of note, you now can bring up the map and hop to new locations regardless of where you are in the game. No need to go to town, then hit the waypoint there to get to where you want.
So what’s with the key fragments? If you have five key fragments (on you or in your stash), you can open a Nephalim rift from the obelisk in town. Just walk up to it and activate it. Rifts are randomly generated terrain and enemies with a higher than normal amount of Champions and Elites. (PS3 and X360 versions are limited to the terrain and enemies from the Act you are in). Your goal is to clear enough monsters to get the Rift Guardian to spawn. There’s a progress meter on the left side that moves along as you kill things. Once it gets to 100% the Guardian will spawn near you and attack. When you defeat the Guardian and take your loot, you can keep exploring the rift or head back to town and turn in the quest to Orek. He is a blue, ethereal being who is standing near the obelisk. He will reward you with more XP and gold, and the rift will close in 30 seconds.
Blood Shards are a currency used to “gamble” with Kadala, another new NPC in town. When you talk with her, you can select the type of item you’d like, and she will list her price at the bottom. Your blood shard total is listed by your gold on the bottom left. When you ask for the item, she randomly generates one and gives it to you. Many an angry and even a few joyful posts have been made about the items she gives. Just think about it like even more rough crafting that has the potential to be a Legendary or Set item.
UEE Console Exclusives
Mail - You can mail items to offline friends so they don’t have to join your games in order to trade. There is a mailbox in town and it will have an envelope icon over it if you have new mail.
Gifts - Sometimes when loot is dropped, there will be a gift dropped. This is an item for someone on your friends list. When you pick it up it goes into your bag slot on your inventory. Bring up your inventory and activate the gift to send it to your friend. They will find it in the mail and it will be a random item. The item isn’t rolled until the recipient opens it and they stay in the mailbox for 30 days. This means people will often not open a gift until they are level 70 to try for the best items in game.
Nemesis - When a monster kills you it can later invade the game of someone on your friends list, along with a shadow copy of you. Should it defeat you or anyone in your party, it will escape and then grow stronger so that the next person it invades will also have a copy of you with it. This can progress for multiple rounds before it is retired. You can tell a Nemesis is coming to your game by the sounding of horns that herald them and the rumbling of your controller.
Apprentice Mode - When a lower level character joins a higher level character, the lower levels’ stats will be boosted to make them able to play near the ability of the higher one. This way you can have a buddy join you while he’s leveling up and you’re just grinding for gear. The lower level player will still get loot appropriate to his level as well, so no worry about looting things you can’t use.
a. Armor and Weapon Crafting
You've stayed awhile and looted things, but you just can’t find an upgraded set of bracers. Or you’re running a new character and you hate that its not geared out early on. Fear not, the blacksmith is there to help!
As mentioned earlier, you can salvage items at the blacksmith and by doing so you will gain crafting materials. Early on, the blacksmith only has a few plans but you can buy him upgrades and he will learn new plans. Check out the “train” section of the blacksmith interface for the costs of training him and what you’ll gain each time you train him. Also, when you’re upgrading the blacksmith, you’re not picking ONE of the plans listed there during the upgrade. The first time through. I thought I had to pick a single item for him to train and was kind of freaking out that I was possibly ruining my future plans or that I had to coordinate with Hog to make sure we covered the items we’d need between us. You’ll actually get all the plans; they’re just listed there so you can see what’s coming in that upgrade and check their stats.
To craft an item talk with the blacksmith and hit the button with the anvil icon. Then select between armor and weapons. You can cycle around and pick out any weapon/armor you like. When you highlight an item, it will show you below the blacksmith’s picture exactly what’s needed and how much of it you have. You can also compare that item’s base stats to the item you currently have equipped in the matching slot.
Each time you craft something, it will be allocated a number of random properties like the loot system described back in the basics section. You can find the amount of random properties listed in the compare screen along with any attributes that are standard. Because of the random nature of crafting, you may want to craft a couple of times to see if one is better than the other. It’s essentially a loot drop, you just have a say in what type of item you get.
Of note, blacksmith plans and upgrades are shared across all of your characters. So once you teach him a plan your new guys can craft up stuff from the get go.
b. Jewelcrafting
Gemcrafting differs slightly in that you can keep upgrading gems by combining them with one of the same type and an increasing amount of gold for each tier of gems.
Once you find the gemcrafter during Act 2 in the story mode, he will be available in all of your main towns across all characters. And just like the blacksmith, his designs are shared across all characters as well.
Gems can be fitted into sockets on items to further customise them to your liking. Adding a gem to the helmet and weapons have different effects than adding them to any other item.
Diamond - White
Helmet: %Cooldown Reduction
Weapon: Extra damage to Elites
Elsewhere: Resist All damage types
Emerald - Green
Helmet: Bonus Gold find
Weapon: Critical Hit Damage
Elsewhere: Dex
Ruby - Red
Helmet Bonus XP
Weapon: Damage
Elsewhere: Str
Topaz - Yellow
Helmet: Bonus Magic Find
Weapon: Damage to melee attackers
Elsewhere: Int
Amethyst - Purple
Helmet: %Life
Weapon: Life per hit
Elsewhere: Vit
In both gem and weapon crafting, you will also loot plans which allow you to craft legendary items, sets, and top tier gems.
c. Enchanting
New to the Reaper of Souls so UEE as well is Enchanting. Once you find the Mystic in Act 5, she’ll be available in town with the enchanting and transmogrify services.
Enchanting allows you to take one of the stats of a weapon and “re-roll” it for a different/better result from the available options.
Head over to the Mystic and talk with her. Under the enchanting section of her interface, select the item you’d like to change. Once you select it, it shows you on the right side of the window the properties that you can choose to try and change. Highlight a property and you’ll see at the bottom of the screen a button that will show you all the available properties and their stat ranges, for your currently selected property.
Once you’re happy about trying to roll a replacement, check the bottom left of the screen for the cost of doing the enchantment. This price will go up each time you try on an item, FYI. Also of note, once you choose a property to try an enchant on, you cannot enchant any other property for that item.
Ok, you’ve got the materials and a property you want changed selected. Go ahead and hit the enchant button and wait for the progress bar to go forward, but don’t get all button happy! Once the progress bar goes across, you’re given 3 possible results. You get to choose which of the three you want applied and there is no confirmation popup, so be sure about what you select.
d. Transmogrify
The other new service offered allows you to change the appearance of your armor and weapons in exchange for gold. The kicker is if you want the fancy ones from Legendaries, you have to find the item first!
To do a transmogrify, head to the Mystic and change to her Transmogrify interface option. Select the armor/weapon you want to change and you’ll see options on the bottom right. As you browse the different options your character’s appearance will change on the top left to what it would look like on your character.
Once you’re happy with your look, check the price listed just above all the options and if you’re happy confirm the change.
For extra style points, don’t forget to dye everything to match!
a. Options Menu
You’ve gained some more skills now and you’re starting to figure out what ones you like and don’t like, but if you’re like Hog and I were, you want more info and more options. Just so happens there are menu options disabled by default that will help you out.
Pause the game, go to the Options, and from there select the Gameplay section. Most of these will be self explanatory, but there are a few that should be noted.
Elective mode - This allows you to assign ANY skill to ANY button. That means you can have any amount of spells from any category; you’re not stuck with the default of one from each. This also allows you to fit the buttons to a way that fit your playstyle.
Display Player names - This can help you keep track of your character and any friendlies wandering around. I like it on, but some feel it it clutters things up. Try it out and see what you think.
Display damage/healing numbers - Red numbers pop up on hostiles as you hit them, and green numbers pop up on you when you're healed by something. Hog runs with just the Damage ones, but I like to see how effective my self healing is.
Show Advanced Tooltips - This is a must. This tells you exactly what each skill does including the actual damage numbers and durations. Without this you’re almost guessing which skills are better.
Video Version
b. Advanced Stats
When you bring up your inventory you’ll see a button listed at the bottom for “character details”. In that subscreen you’ll see all the in-depth details about your character. Your core stats, how those affect things, other stats like Attacks per second, Critical hit chance, Critical hit damage, etc. Scroll through them and take a look. The details about each item are in the black box on the bottom left.
Once you get the hang of things, and as you progress through the different game levels, you’ll want to make sure to pay attention to more than just your core stats. Here’s a few you’ll want to follow:
Critical Hit Damage - Often abbreviated ChD, it’s the amount of damage you do on a critical hit. Your base amount is 150% of normal damage and it can be increased with items and skills.
Critical Hit chance - Often abbreviated ChC, it’s the chance an attack has to deal critical damage. Your base is 5% and you can increase this through items and skills.
In many cases increasing ChC and ChD will actually increase your damage output more than just bringing up your primary stat. As such, many builds focus on abilities that boost critical hit chance and damage.
Damage Reduction - This is a function of your armor. The higher this is, the less damage you take from all attacks.
Elemental resists (fire, poison, etc) - This is brought up by skills, items, and your Int. stat. Increasing your resists allows you to take less damage from specific damage types in addition to your damage reduction.
Those are just a few of the stats in that screen and we suggest you take a moment to review them if you’re having trouble with an area of the game. Often times players will focus purely on doing more and more damage and hit a wall where they can’t kill everything before it kills them. Resists, armor, and life regen play a big role later in the game.
A lot of people are picking up or moving over to the console version of Diablo III: Ultimate Evil Edition and are either unfamiliar with the genre or are confused by the slight differences between the console version and the PC version of Reaper of Souls.
The first thing we recommend to everyone is to play the game for 30 minutes or more. Get a feel for things, try a couple of classes out, gain a few levels, and get some loot. This will make this post a lot easier to follow as you will have at least some basic understanding of what we’re referencing.
We’ll start with some basic info about the game and progress to more advanced things from there. We will also add a section for advanced/end game details to show you what you’ll want to be doing once you’re level 70.
The Basics
a. Basic Stats
There are 4 basic character stats: Dexterity (Dex), Strength (Str), Vitality (Vit), and Intelligence (Int).
Each point of a stat does the following:
Dex adds to your dodge chance (on a sliding scale) and adds 1% damage for Demon Hunters and Monks.
Str adds one point of armor and adds 1% damage for Barbarians and Crusaders
Vit adds to your life. Under level 35, it adds 10 life/point. At 35 it adds (your level) -25. So at level 60, it’s adding 35/points of life.
Int adds 0.1 to all of your resistances (fire, poison, etc.) and adds 1% damage to Witch Doctor and Wizard’s attacks
The stat that adds damage for each class is called that class’ Primary Stat. This is the stat that you’ll generally want to focus on picking up for your character.
Video version
Notice those three icons with numbers below your character? Those are from left to right: Damage (sword), Toughness (shield), and Healing (++).
Damage is how much damage you do with your attacks and is calculated from your weapon’s damage number, attack speed, critical hit chance, critical hit damage bonus, and primary stat. Toughness is a rating derived from your armor, health, resistances, and dodge rating. Healing is drawn from effects that cause you to gain life: life on hit, life per second, life after kill, and bonus health from health globes.
Watching those numbers as you progress and get better gear will give you a rough idea of how your character is doing. I say rough because there are things that are not factored in, such as items that boost certain skills, playstyle, etc.
b. Loot System
Loot, that’s why we’re all here isn’t it? Killing monsters and getting loot. But do you know how the loot system works? When you or someone near you kills a monster or breaks an object, a “roll” (random number check vs a probability table) is made to determine if loot is going to drop for you or not. If the check is in your favor you get loot. Next up rolls are made to determine what the loot is (axe, sword, etc), what quality said item will be (normal, magic, legendary), and then the stats on the item are rolled. Speaking of the stats, most things are random but the Primary Stat (as mentioned above) is heavily favored to be picked for your particular class. So Wizards and Witch Doctors will mainly see +Int items, Barbs and Crusaders +Str, etc.
Having a higher Magic Find stat skews the rolls for loot quality farther towords legendary end of the scale, but in the end we are all at the mercy of the RNG. For more info on the Magic Find stat see the advanced info below.
Loot quality is color coded from worst to best:
Grey (broken)
White (common)
Blue (magic)
Yellow (Rare)
Orange (Legendary)
Green (Set items)
Video Version
c. Inventory & Inventory Management
Now you’ve got your character going and you’re looting things. Good good, now what do you do with all that stuff?
When you pick things up you’ll notice the left side of the screen near the bottom the item name and some upwards and/or downwards arrows. Those arrows are generalized indications of if it’s going to increase or decrease your damage, toughness, and healing. Early on you can pretty much blindly go by those arrows. We suggest paying attention to the info on the items though, so you can see why it changes those stats. Once you know why it’s changing them, you can make better choices to suit your playstyle.
There is a “quick equip” feature you can make use of by using the “up” on the D-pad of your controller. It can be handy when something looks to be an obvious upgrade or you’re just leveling and don’t really care about the specifics.
Later in the game I like to see all the items’ stats before I equip them. Bring up your inventory to get a better look at the loot you’ve collected. Your total inventory is split up by the slots the items can be equipped in (all helmets are shown in the helmet armor slot, etc.). If there is an item you haven’t looked at yet, that slot will have a gold star on it. Move your left stick to highlight that item slot and then select it. You can compare stats on the items in your bag vs what you’re currently wearing by hitting the button listed at the bottom. Looking these over will give you a feel for what the items are doing and help you decide if you want to change to the new item or stick with the old.
New to UEE is the “Stat range” feature. When you’re looking at your inventory you can hit the left arrow on your D-pad and see what range was available for each property on an item. So when you see that something has say +10% critical chance, you can hit the stat range button and see that the range it could have been was say 7-10%. That way you know you had a high end roll on that particular stat. Handy for telling just how good an item you got was and how hard it will be to replace it.
If you decide you don’t want the item, make use of the Junk system by highlighting the item and clicking down the right stick. This will mark the item as Junk, which is handy when you go to the blacksmith or a merchant as you can then bulk sell at the merchant for gold or bulk salvage at the blacksmith for crafting materials. In the UEE version all items you can equip can be salvaged for crafting not just magic quality and better.
Let’s say you like the item but don’t want to or can’t use it right now. You can hang on to it, but it takes up space in your inventory right? You’re limited to carrying 60 items so you may not want to carry around everything. You also might want to give things to a different character of yours.
This is where the stash comes into play.
In each town you operate out of you’ll find your “stash”. It looks like a large trunk or chest and can be first seen right next to the Inn in New Tristram. Your stash has a finite size and you can upgrade it via gold to a total of 210 slots. The stash is shared across all characters on your account (though Hardcore and regular characters’ stashes are separate), so it's a handy way to give things to an alt, hold on to things for later, or just to make room on your character.
Of interest, you can (and should) drop all your crafting materials and gems into the stash. When you go to craft an item/gem the game checks your character inventory first, then checks your stash and uses materials from there. So by unloading your crafting items into the stash, you not only make more room for loot on your current character, but you make those crafting materials available to all of your characters.
Added a small section at the tail end of post 3 regarding Rubies vs Emeralds. Didn't go deep into the math, just the basic guidelines.
Also added a second farming route video we did a while back to just spice things up, though for some reason I'm not seeing any of the videos. Ah well, if you want to see them, hit up http://youtube.com/goatnhog
EDIT: Oh, missed the forums upgrade. That explains the vids and formatting errors. Fixed things up.
We have more tutorial style videos there on the channel along with a couple funny ones from out livestreams. Not to be all self promotional or anything, but you can find us on twitter and twitch with the same goatnhog name.
I uploaded a video for the Co-Op Wizard build I use last night, Hog should be getting it all set up and live this weekend or Monday.
I've a couple things on Magic Find to add to the guide above, since that's another one that's not exactly straight forward. I'll add those tonight or tomorrow as I've got to head out for a few hours.
Thanks again or the kind words and I look forward to getting more involved here, this site has a lot more info than the official forums!
We don't play on PC. Which is a change for me since I played Diablo 1 and 2 on PC. The upside is I can easily relate to anyone trying to learn playing it on the Console and Hog had never played Diablo before, so we get a fresh perspective there as well.
Hopefully RoS will come to the 360 and if so, we definitely will be picking it up.
Magic Find
(From the game guide section of the official site)
Magic find affects the quality of items you acquire from killing enemies (but not treasure chests, vases, weapon racks, or other environmental objects). It doesn't give you a chance to get more items on a given kill – instead, it increases the chance that an item you find will be magical, and more potent than it would be otherwise. When a monster drops an item, Diablo III randomly determines the item’s quality from a chart that includes item quality and the number of affixes present. The game randomly "rolls" on each property in the chart to determine which affixes your item will get. Your magic find score is applied as a bonus to these rolls. For example, if a monster has a 4% chance to drop a 6-affix rare item and you have +50% magic find, it now has a 6% chance to drop that item. Item quality is checked in the following order: Legendary6-affix rare5-affix rare4-affix rare2-affix rare1-affix raremagic itemUsing the above example, when your roll ‘misses’ a higher-level item quality, the item generator proceeds to the next lowest item quality in the chain (in this case, checking to see if you got a 6-affix rare, then checking for a 5-affix rare, and so on). Your magic find bonus applies to each roll. If the same monster has a 10% chance to drop a 5-affix rare item and you have 50% magic find, you now have a 15% chance to get a 5-affix rare item.
What that breaks down to is the more magic find you have, the better your odds of getting legendaries and/or high affix rares. What it doesn't affect is the roll on the stats themselves. So if an item could have 50-100 Dex, magic find will not give you a better chance at getting a high end roll. You also won't get more loot, just better quality. This can be nice though in that they should sell for more if you're in need of gold.
Dual Wielding
I was leveling a new character and I spotted this oddity and remembered my confusion from when I fist started playing: I was dual wielding with a Monk and I looted a legendary that was a BIG upgrade. When I went to fiddle with the old weapons to see which combo with the new gave me the best damage, I found using only the new weapon, or the new and a shield was actually better damage than the new weapon and one of the old ones.
So here's why that is. Your damage output is averaged between the two weapons and given a 15% attack speed buff. So a 200 damage weapon and 100 damage weapon average to 150 damage. times 1.15 = 172.5 damage. You're actually better just using the 200 damage weapon and a shield.
Now of course that doesn't take into account the weapon's stats, bonuses, and on hit properties from skills where the improves attack speed can do more. But, as a general rule, unless you're looking for specific property from that offhand weapon, you want it to be within roughly 15% damage of your mainhand weapon in order to get a raw damage boost.
Ruby vs Emerald for your Weapon?
Doing some reading, it's really a case by case basis depending on what your build and gear is. The rough rule being to go with what you're build's strengths are, to a point. An Emerald's Critical Damage bonus won't be applied enough to make a difference if your Critical Chance is low, so you're better off with a Ruby. You're also benefiting more from a Ruby if you have a weapon with the +%Damage stat. Emeralds really shine (pun intended) if you already have a build that focuses on Critical Chance and Critical Damage, since you will see more crits, thus the bonus comes into play more often.
In summary, I would advise using Rubies until you start getting +Critical Chance skills/gear and then switching out to Emeralds.
c. Armor and Weapon Crafting You've stayed awhile and looted things, but you just can’t find an upgraded set of bracers. Or you’re running a new character and you hate that its not geared out early on. Fear not, the blacksmith is there to help!
As mentioned earlier, you can salvage purple or better items at the blacksmith. By doing so you will gain crafting materials. Early on, the blacksmith only has a few plans, but you can buy him upgrades and he will learn new plans. At first the cost is just gold, then once you’re on Nightmare Mode, it’s gold and pages of blacksmithing. Hell mode changes the pages to tomes of blacksmithing, and Inferno ups the tomes of blacksmithing to tomes of secrets. Each game mode adds those additional items to the loot drops, so don’t fret when at the end of Normal, you don’t have any pages of blacksmithing. You’ll be swimming in them by the end of Nightmare.
Also, when you’re upgrading the blacksmith, you’re not picking ONE of the plans listed there during the upgrade. I thought I was and was kind of freaking out that I was possibly ruining my future plans or that I had to coordinate with Hog to make sure we covered the items we’d need between us. You’ll actually get all the plans, they’re just listed there so you can see what’s coming in that upgrade.
To craft an item, talk with the blacksmith and hit the button with the anvil icon. Then select between armor and weapons. You can cycle around and pick out any weapon/armor you like. When you highlight an item, it will show you below the blacksmith’s picture exactly what’s needed and how much of it you have. You can also compare that item’s base stats to the item you currently have equipped in the matching slot.
Each time you craft something, it will be allocated a number of random properties. You can find the amount of properties listed in the compare screen, along with any attributes that are standard. Because of the random nature of crafting, you may want to craft a couple of times to see if one is better than the other. It’s essentially a loot drop, you just have a say in what type of item drops.
Of note, blacksmith plans are shared across all of your characters. So once you teach him a plan, your new guys can craft up stuff from the get go.
d. Gemcrafting Gemcrafting differs slightly in that you can keep upgrading gems by combining them with one of the same type and a page or tome of jewelcrafting, or tome of secrets for higher level gems.
Once you find the gemcrafter, he will be available in all of your main towns across all characters. And just like the blacksmith, his designs are shared across all characters as well.
Gems can be fitted into sockets on items to further customise them to your liking. Adding a gem to the helmet and weapons have different effects than adding them to any other item.
Emerald - Green
Helmet: Bonus Gold find
Weapon: Critical Hit Damage
Elsewhere: Dex
Ruby - Red
Helmet Bonus XP
Weapon: Damage
Elsewhere: Str
Topaz - Yellow
Helmet: Bonus Magic Find
Weapon: Damage to melee attackers
Elsewhere: Int
Amethyst - Purple
Helmet: %Life
Weapon: Life per hit
Elsewhere: Vit
The common opinion is to put greens in your weapons for big critical hits, purple in your helmet to boost your life (since there’s no damage boosting gem here), and primary stat everywhere else.
In both gem and weapon crafting, you will start looting plans later in the game which allow you to craft legendary items, sets, and top tier gems.
a. Nephalem Valor You may have noticed this happen, you might not have, but it’s pretty integral in the endgame gameplay, so we need to make sure to cover it. Once you’re level 60, every time you kill a pack of elites, open a resplendent chest, or complete an event, you’ll gain a buff called Nephalem Valor. On consoles this buff can stack up to 3 times, and each stack of it gives you an additional 35% Magic and Gold find. The buff lasts 30 minutes, and can be extended by killing another pack, opening a resplendent chest, or completing an event. You cannot gain more than 3 stacks though. Whether farming for loot, xp, keys, or ring parts, you’ll want to have “full stacks” at all times. Note: If you change a skill, a skill rune, or start a new game, your stacks will drop.
b. Difficulty levels You might wonder why this is down here in this section. Beating the game earlier on, you should be fiddling with the difficulty to your liking in our opinion. Burn through it on easy, or up the challenge every time you think an area is too easy, it’s up to you. But once you’re doing “farming”, this information is rather important. Here’s a chart breaking it down:
What this means is that once you’re trying to get better loot and better XP, you’ll want to be running higher Master Levels since it boosts your base XP, gold, and magic finds.
c. Loot and Paragon farming You’re now going to want to farm for more and better loot and raise your Paragon Level. Your Paragon Level is shared account wide, so all characters will receive its benefits. Each level you gain 3% bonus Gold and Magic and a slight stat boost. You can see your current Paragon Level as a blue number to the left of the XP bar, and the blue XP bar now tracks your Paragon Level. There are 100 Paragon Levels, each one taking more XP than the one prior to it.
To farm Paragon Levels, you want to be gaining as much XP as you possibly can, so you should be farming on the highest Master Level that you can handle. Loot is a bonus, but what you’re after here is big XP.
Loot farming is generally done by running through areas with large amounts of mobs so you can get as many kills as possible in as little time as possible. Difficulty wise, you want to be able to kill things at a decent rate, and they shouldn’t be killing you often. Hog and I stick with a rule that if you die twice on a run, you might want to back things down a difficulty level or check into your build’s resists.
There are various “routes” for these farming runs, always looking to maximize gains per hour played. Here’s the one we like taking currently (we'll add a couple more in the near future):
Route #2
d. Infernal Machine and Hellfire Rings On Inferno, there is a special NPC in each of the first three acts that is called a Keywarden. If you have full stacks of Neph Valor (3) the Keywarden has a chance to drop it’s key. In Act I you will find the Keywarden in the Fields of Misery. In Act II, the Keywarden is in the Dalhgur Oasis. The Keywarden for Act III resides in the Stonefort area. And Act IV’s Keywarden hides in the Silver Spire, level 1. The key will be a guaranteed drop on Master V, and the chance goes down as you decrease in Master Level. The Act IV Keywarden can drop any of the three keys as well as the plans to the device that uses the keys. This is device is called the Infernal Machine. It requires one key from each of the first three Acts to build.
Here’s a set of videos covering the Keywardens:
Act I - Act II - Act III -
Why do you want to make Infernal Machines? So you can make Hellfire Rings of course!
Once you have farmed the keys and made the machine you will need to go to Act I and select the last quest, "Return to New Tristram". Remember you need full stacks of Nephalem Valor before fighting the bosses, so head out and get three stacks and then return to town.
Behind the Healer in town is a closed door. If you attack that door, it will break and lead you to a new room. Using an Infernal Machine from your inventory while in this room will create a portal at random to one of the three “realms” that are a single room with two bosses from the game in it. Upon defeating a pair of bosses, there’s a spilling of loot and a chance for a part for the Hellfire Ring. After the fight, town portal back out and you can use another Infernal Machine in the room to generate a portal at random from the two remaining possibilities. You need one part from each realm, so having 3 machines to make a “Full Uber Run” is a good idea to make sure you get a shot at the part you are looking for.
You can purchase the plans for the Hellfire ring from Squirt the peddler right near Act II’s Hidden Camp checkpoint.
We recorded making the Portals and each of the battles here:
e. Whimsyshire No, it’s not the cow level. There is no cow level.
You’ll need to craft the Staff of Herding in order to access Whimsyshire. You’ll find it’s plans as a random drop chance from Izual in Act IV. If you are specifically farming for the plans, load a new game at Act IV, Chapter IV, Prime Evil. Make sure you’re at the start of the quest. Take the checkpoint to the Crystal Colonnade, and then to the Gateway to the Silver Spire. Run past Leah if you don’t feel like fighting, then look for the Gateway to the Silver Spire 1. From there, seek out the Gateway to the Great Span. Here you will meet Izual and if you’re lucky, he’ll drop the plans. The plans are account bound. So if you find them a second time while your buddy is still trying to get his first set, make sure to drop the plans so he can see them and yell at you.
On the consoles, you only need three parts unlike the five you need on the PC.
First off, the easy one, Wirt’s bell. Squirt the peddler in Act II’s Hidden Camp sells it for 25,000 gold. Boom, 1/3rd of the way there.
The other two items are the Black Mushroom and Gibbering Gemstone. The Black Mushroom has a chance to be in the Cathedral level 1 in Act I. It randomly spawns there and your character will actually make a comment if they “see” it growing. It’s a small level, so just keep running through it until you find it.
The Gibbering Gemstone is a tad more difficult. There’s a cave that has a chance to spawn in Act III’s Fields of Slaughter called the Caverns of Frost. On level two of this cavern there’s a chance that Chiltara will spawn, and when it’s killed there’s a chance it will drop the Gemstone. As you can see, you’re going to need some luck to get that drop.
Once you have all the parts and the plans and some gold, take them to the blacksmith and craft up your Staff!
But wait, there’s more. You see, that staff is only good for “Normal” difficulty. You’re going to want to run it on inferno, aren’t you? Well, load up the last quest in Act III on Nightmare difficulty and go talk to the quartermaster in the NE corner of the keep (right by where the followers chat with each other). He’ll have the Nightmare quality plans for sale there. They require some gold and the Normal staff to upgrade. Once you’ve done that, repeat with Hell and Inferno modes and you’ll have an Infernal Staff of Herding. It will work for all modes below Inferno.
Now to venture to Whimsyshire. Load up Act I, we suggest the last quest. Take the checkpoint to the Ruins of Tristram and backtrack North West. You’ll find a big crack in the ground with a bovine skeleton near it. Approach the remains with the staff in your inventory and have a little chat. After the chat is done, ride the rainbow to a magical land of loot pinatas, unicorns, and happy little clouds.
Unique Items in Whimsyshire:
Horadric Hamburger - Level 30 Legendary "dagger". Low damage, just for fun.
Only drops from the rare spawn: "Loot Piñata"
Spectrum - Level 30 Legendary sword with rainbow blade.
Can drop from:
Creampuff
Killaire (Team Unicorn)
Maisie the Daisy
Maulin Sorely (Team Unicorn)
Midnight Sparkle
Miss Hell (Team Unicorn)
Nightmarity
R'Lyeh (Team Unicorn)
Tubbers
A lot of people are picking up or moving over to the console version of Diablo III and are either unfamiliar with the genre, or are confused by the slight differences between the console version and the PC version.Hog and I figured it would be a good idea to consolidate all the information under one post to help keep everyone informed regardless if they just bought the game, or had an odd question and needed to track it down.I originally posted this over at the official console forums and since have had a live stream watcher suggest I post it here. Little formatting fixes here and there between the boards, and here we are. The first thing we recommend to everyone is to play the game for 30 minutes or more. Get a feel for things, try a couple of classes out, and gain a few levels. This will make this post a lot easier to follow as you will have at least some basic understanding of what we’re referencing.We’ll start with some basic info about the game that you might not notice at first to get things rolling. Next up is the move to intermediate level knowledge to help you get more from the game. Then we move on to advanced/end game details to show you what you’ll want to be doing once you’re level 60.1. The Basics a. Basic Stats There are 4 basic character stats: Dexterity (Dex), Strength (Str), Vitality (Vit), and Intelligence (Int).Each point of a stat does the following:
Dex adds to your dodge chance (on a sliding scale) and adds 1% damage for Demon Hunters and Monks.
Str adds one point of armor and adds 1% damage for Barbarians
Vit adds to your life. Under level 35, it adds 10 life/point. At 35 it adds (your level) -25. So at level 60, it’s adding 35/points of life.
Int adds 0.1 to all of your resistances (fire, poison, etc.) and adds 1% damage to Witch Doctor and Wizard’s attacks
The stat that adds damage for each class is called that class’ Primary Stat. This is the stat that you’ll generally want to focus on picking up for your character.We made a video that covers this info with some more in depth info as well: b. Loot System This is an important section. On the PC, you get more drops of less quality and with random stats. This was to encourage people to make use of the Auction House. By having more loot to offload, and good loot that you can’t actually use on your character, you were more likely to want to sell that loot and more likely to need to buy loot to suit your character.Since the Auction House does not exist on the Consoles, they had to do something different. So it was decided to drop less loot, raise the gold drop amounts, raise the overall quality of the items that do drop, and make the items that drop have your character’s primary stat.What this translates to is less junk items to sell, offset with more gold dropped, and the drops that do come, you’re more likely to be able to use. The system is not without flaws, but it would be a lot worse if we were stuck with the original system. The PC’s Auction House is going away, and they’re moving to the loot system the Console has been using since it’s launch.Loot quality is color coded from worst to best:Grey (broken)White (common)
Blue (Purple I say) (magic)
Yellow (Rare)Orange (Legendary)Green (Set items).Here’s a video that goes a little more in depth and shows some examples: c. Inventory & Inventory Management Now you’ve got your character going, and you’re looting things. Good good, now what do you do with all that stuff?When you pick things up, you’ll notice the left side of the screen near the bottom the item name and some upwards and/or downwards arrows. Those arrows are generalized indications of if it’s going to increase your offense, defense, and life. Early on, you can pretty much blindly go by those arrows. We suggest paying attention to the info on the items though, so you can see WHY it increases or decreases your damage, life, etc.There is a “quick equip” feature, but I’ve not found it all that useful. I like to see the items’ stats before I equip them. To do this, hit the back button and pull up your inventory. Your total inventory is split up between the slot they can be equipped in. If there is an item you haven’t looked at, that slot will have a gold ring around it. you can compare stats from there and decide if you want to change to the new item, or stick with the old.If you decide you don’t want the item, make use of the Junk system by highlighting the item and clicking down the right stick (XBOX). This will mark the item as Junk, which is handy when you go to the blacksmith or a merchant, as you can then bulk sell at the merchant for gold, or bulk salvage at the blacksmith for crafting materials. Of note, only purple and better quality can be salvaged. See the crafting section for more info regarding salvaging.Let’s say you like the item, but don’t want to use it right now. you can hang on to it, but it takes up space in your inventory. You’re limited to carrying 60 items so you may not want to carry around everything. You also might want to give things to a different character of yours.In each town you operate out of, you’ll find your “stash”. It looks like a large trunk or chest and can be first seen right next to the Inn in New Tristram. Your stash has a finite size and you can upgrade it via gold to a total of 210 slots. The stash is shared across all characters on your account, so it's a handy way to give things to an alt, hold on to things for later, or just to make room on your character.We cover all this in our Inventory & Inventory Management video: 2. Intermediate a. Options Menu You’ve gained some more skills now, and you’re starting to figure out what ones you like and don’t like, but if you’re like Hog and I were, you want more info and more options. Just so happens there are menu options disabled by default that will help you out.Pause the game, go to the Options, and from there select the Gameplay section. Most of these will be self explanatory, but there are a few that should be noticed.
Elective mode - This allows you to assign ANY skill to ANY button. That means you can have any amount of spells from any category; you’re not stuck with the default of one from each. This also allows you to fit the buttons to a way that fit your playstyle.Display Player names - This can help you keep track of your character and any friendlies wandering around. I like it on, but some feel it it clutters things up. Try it out and see what you think.
Display damage/healing numbers - Red numbers pop up on hostiles as you hit them, and green numbers pop up on you when you're healed by something. Hog runs with just the Damage ones, but I like to see how effective my self healing is.Show Advanced Tooltips - This is a must. This tells you exactly what each skill does including the actual damage numbers and durations. Without this you’re almost guessing which skills are better.See these changes in action in this video:b. Advanced StatsWhen you bring up your inventory, you’ll see a button listed at the bottom for “character details”. In that subscreen, you’ll see all the in-depth details about your character. Your core stats, how those affect things, other stats like Attacks per second, Critical hit chance, Critical hit damage, etc. Scroll through them and take a look. The details about each item are in the black box on the bottom left.Once you get the hang of things, and as you progress through the different game levels, you’ll want to make sure to pay attention to more than just your core stats. Here’s a few you’ll want to follow:
Critical Hit Damage - Abbreviated CD, it’s the amount of damage you do on a critical hit. Your base amount is 150% of normal damage and it can be increased with items and skills.Critical Hit chance - Abbreviated CC, it’s the chance an attack has to deal critical damage. Your base is 5% and you can increase this through items and skills.
In many cases increasing CC and CD will actually increase your damage output more than just bringing up your primary stat. As such, many builds focus on abilities that boost critical hit chance and damage.
Damage Reduction - This is a function of your armor. The higher this is, the less damage you take from all attacks.Elemental resists (fire, poison, etc) - This is brought up by skills, items, and Int. Increasing your resists allows you to take less damage from specific damage types in addition to your damage reduction.
Those are just a few of the stats in that screen and we suggest you take a moment to review them if you’re having trouble with an area. Often times players will focus purely on doing more and more damage and hit a wall where they can’t kill everything before it kills them. Resists, armor, and lifesteal play a big role later in the game.Here's the video covering some of the advanced stats and showing weapon speed differences:
Someone commented on Facebook that it's a Cataclysm set in Warcraft. Don't know how true that is, but...
I'm sure if it's even close, we'll get tons of people complaining they don't want Warcraft in Diablo.
Truthfully, I don't mind it. Warcraft made Blizzard a household name, and without a million bazillion different flagship series', I don't blame them for having crossovers and nods.
As a former Warcraft player, I could see that someone might think it is a little bit like the Warrior's tier armor set at the end of Cataclysm However, I think that it looks much more like what we would have expected a nephalem to look like in the first generation. It looks both angelic and demonic.
I like the both angelic and demonic like you mention. Seeing as the character class is balancing good and evil resources, I think it fits well.
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Difficulty Levels
With UEE you no longer have to go through the story four times and deal with Normal/Nightmare/Hell/Inferno game modes. You now level faster and the game scales the enemies based on your current level. The old difficulty levels were scrubbed and a new system has been instituted:
- Normal: 100% Health, 100% Damage, 0% gold bonus, 0% XP bonus
- Hard: 200% Health, 130% Damage, 75% gold bonus, 75% XP bonus
- Expert: 320% Health, 189% Damage, 150% gold bonus, 150% XP bonus
- Master: 512% Health, 273% Damage, 225% gold bonus, 225% XP bonus
- Torment I: 819% Health, 396% Damage, 300% gold bonus, 300% XP bonus
- Torment II: 1311% Health, 575% Damage, 400% gold bonus, 400% XP bonus
- Torment III: 2097% Health, 833% Damage, 550% gold bonus, 550% XP bonus
- Torment IV: 3355% Health, 1208% Damage, 800% gold bonus, 800% XP bonus
- Torment V: 5369% Health, 1752% Damage, 1150% gold bonus, 1150% XP bonus
- Torment VI: 8590% Health, 2540% Damage, 1600% gold bonus, 1600% XP bonus
Normal, Hard, and Expert modes are available from the start. Master Mode is available after completing Act 4, and Torment Modes are opened up after reaching level 60.New to UEE is that you can change the difficulty up or down one level from the pause menu without having to make a new session. You can change it as many times as you like, but only one level up or down from the original session’s setting.
Torment difficulties also increase the chance of a legendary drop over previous levels.
"Power Leveling" an alt
Only one character needs to get through the story to unlock adventure mode for the whole account. It's a better way to level a second character because you don't have to wait for story characters, you can jump around the map at will, and you gain things for end game. I just do the bounties and save the keys for doing rifts at level 70. You also earn a ton of Blood Shards during this process which you can spend at 70.
So, the best way to power level an alt is to get to level 21 or higher with your new guy and then throw a big ole Red gem in their weapon(s) and helmet. (Level 21 items start having gem slots)
By the time your main character is level 70, you should have a bunch of marquis and a few imperial rubies laying around. Toss them in your stash for this new low level guy.
Once you're 21-24 range, either craft or loot yourself a fast attack speed weapon and a helmet that require level 21. If they have a slot, toss the biggest ruby you have in the helmet, and the second biggest in your weapon(s). If they don't have slots, head over to the Mystic and look for which property you can replace through enchanting for a slot and then gem them up.
Once you're doing an insane amount of damage for your level and gaining at least 30% more XP than you normally would, crank up the difficulty and go Hog Wild!
Also, if you want you can craft up a Cain's set for the bonus XP. You'll only really need to make one set, and then just stash it when you're done. The next time you level someone they can just grab it from the stash and not care about the stats because you'll be wrecking things anyways.
Why a fast hitting weapon you ask? You're going to kill things with one or two shots, might as well make those one or two shots go fast.
What about paying to remove the gems, isn't that a waste of money? Nope, when you get 10-15 levels along, craft up or loot a better base weapon/helmet and salvage the old one. The gem comes out free! (Unlike Vanilla D3 where it would be lost and you would yell at your dog.)
Video Version
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Once you’ve played through the campaign and defeated Malthael, you unlock Adventure Mode for all of your characters (Hardcore and regular mode separate, of course). No need to play through the story four times with each character! Just select “Adventure Mode” from the game settings where you would normally select what act of the story you want to be in.
In adventure mode bounties and rifts are introduced. Five areas of each act will have a goal like “kill 150 enemies and a specific Unique monster” or “Clear level two of a random dungeon”. When you complete that bounty, you’re given a chunk of XP, gold, Blood Shards, and Rift Key fragments. (more on the last two below). If you clear all five bounties on an Act and talk to Tyrial, he’ll give you a “horadric cache” which contains semi-random drops (Some items are more likely to drop in specific act caches), and usually more rift key fragments.
You can tell the areas on the map that have bounties by the gold exclamation point on the location. If there is a chest under the exclamation point, you’ll earn double Blood Shards in that Act.
Of note, you now can bring up the map and hop to new locations regardless of where you are in the game. No need to go to town, then hit the waypoint there to get to where you want.
So what’s with the key fragments? If you have five key fragments (on you or in your stash), you can open a Nephalim rift from the obelisk in town. Just walk up to it and activate it. Rifts are randomly generated terrain and enemies with a higher than normal amount of Champions and Elites. (PS3 and X360 versions are limited to the terrain and enemies from the Act you are in). Your goal is to clear enough monsters to get the Rift Guardian to spawn. There’s a progress meter on the left side that moves along as you kill things. Once it gets to 100% the Guardian will spawn near you and attack. When you defeat the Guardian and take your loot, you can keep exploring the rift or head back to town and turn in the quest to Orek. He is a blue, ethereal being who is standing near the obelisk. He will reward you with more XP and gold, and the rift will close in 30 seconds.
Blood Shards are a currency used to “gamble” with Kadala, another new NPC in town. When you talk with her, you can select the type of item you’d like, and she will list her price at the bottom. Your blood shard total is listed by your gold on the bottom left. When you ask for the item, she randomly generates one and gives it to you. Many an angry and even a few joyful posts have been made about the items she gives. Just think about it like even more rough crafting that has the potential to be a Legendary or Set item.
UEE Console Exclusives
Mail - You can mail items to offline friends so they don’t have to join your games in order to trade. There is a mailbox in town and it will have an envelope icon over it if you have new mail.
Gifts - Sometimes when loot is dropped, there will be a gift dropped. This is an item for someone on your friends list. When you pick it up it goes into your bag slot on your inventory. Bring up your inventory and activate the gift to send it to your friend. They will find it in the mail and it will be a random item. The item isn’t rolled until the recipient opens it and they stay in the mailbox for 30 days. This means people will often not open a gift until they are level 70 to try for the best items in game.
Nemesis - When a monster kills you it can later invade the game of someone on your friends list, along with a shadow copy of you. Should it defeat you or anyone in your party, it will escape and then grow stronger so that the next person it invades will also have a copy of you with it. This can progress for multiple rounds before it is retired. You can tell a Nemesis is coming to your game by the sounding of horns that herald them and the rumbling of your controller.
Apprentice Mode - When a lower level character joins a higher level character, the lower levels’ stats will be boosted to make them able to play near the ability of the higher one. This way you can have a buddy join you while he’s leveling up and you’re just grinding for gear. The lower level player will still get loot appropriate to his level as well, so no worry about looting things you can’t use.
Video Edition
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a. Armor and Weapon Crafting
You've stayed awhile and looted things, but you just can’t find an upgraded set of bracers. Or you’re running a new character and you hate that its not geared out early on. Fear not, the blacksmith is there to help!
As mentioned earlier, you can salvage items at the blacksmith and by doing so you will gain crafting materials. Early on, the blacksmith only has a few plans but you can buy him upgrades and he will learn new plans. Check out the “train” section of the blacksmith interface for the costs of training him and what you’ll gain each time you train him. Also, when you’re upgrading the blacksmith, you’re not picking ONE of the plans listed there during the upgrade. The first time through. I thought I had to pick a single item for him to train and was kind of freaking out that I was possibly ruining my future plans or that I had to coordinate with Hog to make sure we covered the items we’d need between us. You’ll actually get all the plans; they’re just listed there so you can see what’s coming in that upgrade and check their stats.
To craft an item talk with the blacksmith and hit the button with the anvil icon. Then select between armor and weapons. You can cycle around and pick out any weapon/armor you like. When you highlight an item, it will show you below the blacksmith’s picture exactly what’s needed and how much of it you have. You can also compare that item’s base stats to the item you currently have equipped in the matching slot.
Each time you craft something, it will be allocated a number of random properties like the loot system described back in the basics section. You can find the amount of random properties listed in the compare screen along with any attributes that are standard. Because of the random nature of crafting, you may want to craft a couple of times to see if one is better than the other. It’s essentially a loot drop, you just have a say in what type of item you get.
Of note, blacksmith plans and upgrades are shared across all of your characters. So once you teach him a plan your new guys can craft up stuff from the get go.
b. Jewelcrafting
Gemcrafting differs slightly in that you can keep upgrading gems by combining them with one of the same type and an increasing amount of gold for each tier of gems.
Once you find the gemcrafter during Act 2 in the story mode, he will be available in all of your main towns across all characters. And just like the blacksmith, his designs are shared across all characters as well.
Gems can be fitted into sockets on items to further customise them to your liking. Adding a gem to the helmet and weapons have different effects than adding them to any other item.
- Amethyst - Purple
- Helmet: %Life
- Weapon: Life per hit
- Elsewhere: Vit
In both gem and weapon crafting, you will also loot plans which allow you to craft legendary items, sets, and top tier gems.c. Enchanting
New to the Reaper of Souls so UEE as well is Enchanting. Once you find the Mystic in Act 5, she’ll be available in town with the enchanting and transmogrify services.
Enchanting allows you to take one of the stats of a weapon and “re-roll” it for a different/better result from the available options.
Head over to the Mystic and talk with her. Under the enchanting section of her interface, select the item you’d like to change. Once you select it, it shows you on the right side of the window the properties that you can choose to try and change. Highlight a property and you’ll see at the bottom of the screen a button that will show you all the available properties and their stat ranges, for your currently selected property.
Once you’re happy about trying to roll a replacement, check the bottom left of the screen for the cost of doing the enchantment. This price will go up each time you try on an item, FYI. Also of note, once you choose a property to try an enchant on, you cannot enchant any other property for that item.
Ok, you’ve got the materials and a property you want changed selected. Go ahead and hit the enchant button and wait for the progress bar to go forward, but don’t get all button happy! Once the progress bar goes across, you’re given 3 possible results. You get to choose which of the three you want applied and there is no confirmation popup, so be sure about what you select.
d. Transmogrify
The other new service offered allows you to change the appearance of your armor and weapons in exchange for gold. The kicker is if you want the fancy ones from Legendaries, you have to find the item first!
To do a transmogrify, head to the Mystic and change to her Transmogrify interface option. Select the armor/weapon you want to change and you’ll see options on the bottom right. As you browse the different options your character’s appearance will change on the top left to what it would look like on your character.
Once you’re happy with your look, check the price listed just above all the options and if you’re happy confirm the change.
For extra style points, don’t forget to dye everything to match!
Video version
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a. Options Menu
You’ve gained some more skills now and you’re starting to figure out what ones you like and don’t like, but if you’re like Hog and I were, you want more info and more options. Just so happens there are menu options disabled by default that will help you out.
Pause the game, go to the Options, and from there select the Gameplay section. Most of these will be self explanatory, but there are a few that should be noted.
- Elective mode - This allows you to assign ANY skill to ANY button. That means you can have any amount of spells from any category; you’re not stuck with the default of one from each. This also allows you to fit the buttons to a way that fit your playstyle.
- Display Player names - This can help you keep track of your character and any friendlies wandering around. I like it on, but some feel it it clutters things up. Try it out and see what you think.
- Display damage/healing numbers - Red numbers pop up on hostiles as you hit them, and green numbers pop up on you when you're healed by something. Hog runs with just the Damage ones, but I like to see how effective my self healing is.
- Show Advanced Tooltips - This is a must. This tells you exactly what each skill does including the actual damage numbers and durations. Without this you’re almost guessing which skills are better.
Video Versionb. Advanced Stats
When you bring up your inventory you’ll see a button listed at the bottom for “character details”. In that subscreen you’ll see all the in-depth details about your character. Your core stats, how those affect things, other stats like Attacks per second, Critical hit chance, Critical hit damage, etc. Scroll through them and take a look. The details about each item are in the black box on the bottom left.
Once you get the hang of things, and as you progress through the different game levels, you’ll want to make sure to pay attention to more than just your core stats. Here’s a few you’ll want to follow:
- Critical Hit Damage - Often abbreviated ChD, it’s the amount of damage you do on a critical hit. Your base amount is 150% of normal damage and it can be increased with items and skills.
- Critical Hit chance - Often abbreviated ChC, it’s the chance an attack has to deal critical damage. Your base is 5% and you can increase this through items and skills.
In many cases increasing ChC and ChD will actually increase your damage output more than just bringing up your primary stat. As such, many builds focus on abilities that boost critical hit chance and damage.- Damage Reduction - This is a function of your armor. The higher this is, the less damage you take from all attacks.
- Elemental resists (fire, poison, etc) - This is brought up by skills, items, and your Int. stat. Increasing your resists allows you to take less damage from specific damage types in addition to your damage reduction.
Those are just a few of the stats in that screen and we suggest you take a moment to review them if you’re having trouble with an area of the game. Often times players will focus purely on doing more and more damage and hit a wall where they can’t kill everything before it kills them. Resists, armor, and life regen play a big role later in the game.Video Version
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We did a post for the original version of Diablo III on console on the official forums http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/10637003681 , as well as here http://www.diablofans.com/forums/diablo-iii-general-forums/diablo-iii-general-discussion/78618-diablo-iii-console-guide-to-60-and-beyond , and someone even added the first section to the Wiki. We’ve updated and tweaked it into this new post for the UEE release.
The first thing we recommend to everyone is to play the game for 30 minutes or more. Get a feel for things, try a couple of classes out, gain a few levels, and get some loot. This will make this post a lot easier to follow as you will have at least some basic understanding of what we’re referencing.
We’ll start with some basic info about the game and progress to more advanced things from there. We will also add a section for advanced/end game details to show you what you’ll want to be doing once you’re level 70.
The Basics
a. Basic Stats
There are 4 basic character stats: Dexterity (Dex), Strength (Str), Vitality (Vit), and Intelligence (Int).
Each point of a stat does the following:
- Dex adds to your dodge chance (on a sliding scale) and adds 1% damage for Demon Hunters and Monks.
- Str adds one point of armor and adds 1% damage for Barbarians and Crusaders
- Vit adds to your life. Under level 35, it adds 10 life/point. At 35 it adds (your level) -25. So at level 60, it’s adding 35/points of life.
- Int adds 0.1 to all of your resistances (fire, poison, etc.) and adds 1% damage to Witch Doctor and Wizard’s attacks
The stat that adds damage for each class is called that class’ Primary Stat. This is the stat that you’ll generally want to focus on picking up for your character.Video version
Notice those three icons with numbers below your character? Those are from left to right: Damage (sword), Toughness (shield), and Healing (++).
Damage is how much damage you do with your attacks and is calculated from your weapon’s damage number, attack speed, critical hit chance, critical hit damage bonus, and primary stat.
Toughness is a rating derived from your armor, health, resistances, and dodge rating.
Healing is drawn from effects that cause you to gain life: life on hit, life per second, life after kill, and bonus health from health globes.
Watching those numbers as you progress and get better gear will give you a rough idea of how your character is doing. I say rough because there are things that are not factored in, such as items that boost certain skills, playstyle, etc.
b. Loot System
Loot, that’s why we’re all here isn’t it? Killing monsters and getting loot. But do you know how the loot system works? When you or someone near you kills a monster or breaks an object, a “roll” (random number check vs a probability table) is made to determine if loot is going to drop for you or not. If the check is in your favor you get loot. Next up rolls are made to determine what the loot is (axe, sword, etc), what quality said item will be (normal, magic, legendary), and then the stats on the item are rolled. Speaking of the stats, most things are random but the Primary Stat (as mentioned above) is heavily favored to be picked for your particular class. So Wizards and Witch Doctors will mainly see +Int items, Barbs and Crusaders +Str, etc.
Having a higher Magic Find stat skews the rolls for loot quality farther towords legendary end of the scale, but in the end we are all at the mercy of the RNG. For more info on the Magic Find stat see the advanced info below.
Loot quality is color coded from worst to best:
- Grey (broken)
- White (common)
- Blue (magic)
- Yellow (Rare)
- Orange (Legendary)
- Green (Set items)
Video Versionc. Inventory & Inventory Management
Now you’ve got your character going and you’re looting things. Good good, now what do you do with all that stuff?
When you pick things up you’ll notice the left side of the screen near the bottom the item name and some upwards and/or downwards arrows. Those arrows are generalized indications of if it’s going to increase or decrease your damage, toughness, and healing. Early on you can pretty much blindly go by those arrows. We suggest paying attention to the info on the items though, so you can see why it changes those stats. Once you know why it’s changing them, you can make better choices to suit your playstyle.
There is a “quick equip” feature you can make use of by using the “up” on the D-pad of your controller. It can be handy when something looks to be an obvious upgrade or you’re just leveling and don’t really care about the specifics.
Later in the game I like to see all the items’ stats before I equip them. Bring up your inventory to get a better look at the loot you’ve collected. Your total inventory is split up by the slots the items can be equipped in (all helmets are shown in the helmet armor slot, etc.). If there is an item you haven’t looked at yet, that slot will have a gold star on it. Move your left stick to highlight that item slot and then select it. You can compare stats on the items in your bag vs what you’re currently wearing by hitting the button listed at the bottom. Looking these over will give you a feel for what the items are doing and help you decide if you want to change to the new item or stick with the old.
New to UEE is the “Stat range” feature. When you’re looking at your inventory you can hit the left arrow on your D-pad and see what range was available for each property on an item. So when you see that something has say +10% critical chance, you can hit the stat range button and see that the range it could have been was say 7-10%. That way you know you had a high end roll on that particular stat. Handy for telling just how good an item you got was and how hard it will be to replace it.
If you decide you don’t want the item, make use of the Junk system by highlighting the item and clicking down the right stick. This will mark the item as Junk, which is handy when you go to the blacksmith or a merchant as you can then bulk sell at the merchant for gold or bulk salvage at the blacksmith for crafting materials. In the UEE version all items you can equip can be salvaged for crafting not just magic quality and better.
Let’s say you like the item but don’t want to or can’t use it right now. You can hang on to it, but it takes up space in your inventory right? You’re limited to carrying 60 items so you may not want to carry around everything. You also might want to give things to a different character of yours.
This is where the stash comes into play.
In each town you operate out of you’ll find your “stash”. It looks like a large trunk or chest and can be first seen right next to the Inn in New Tristram. Your stash has a finite size and you can upgrade it via gold to a total of 210 slots. The stash is shared across all characters on your account (though Hardcore and regular characters’ stashes are separate), so it's a handy way to give things to an alt, hold on to things for later, or just to make room on your character.
Of interest, you can (and should) drop all your crafting materials and gems into the stash. When you go to craft an item/gem the game checks your character inventory first, then checks your stash and uses materials from there. So by unloading your crafting items into the stash, you not only make more room for loot on your current character, but you make those crafting materials available to all of your characters.
Video version
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http://twitch.tv/goatnhog
4-5 nights a week, dual cams, lots of interaction.
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Also added a second farming route video we did a while back to just spice things up, though for some reason I'm not seeing any of the videos. Ah well, if you want to see them, hit up http://youtube.com/goatnhog
EDIT: Oh, missed the forums upgrade. That explains the vids and formatting errors. Fixed things up.
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If there's anything anyone would like to see, or any suggestions, let us know!
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I uploaded a video for the Co-Op Wizard build I use last night, Hog should be getting it all set up and live this weekend or Monday.
I've a couple things on Magic Find to add to the guide above, since that's another one that's not exactly straight forward. I'll add those tonight or tomorrow as I've got to head out for a few hours.
Thanks again or the kind words and I look forward to getting more involved here, this site has a lot more info than the official forums!
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We don't play on PC. Which is a change for me since I played Diablo 1 and 2 on PC. The upside is I can easily relate to anyone trying to learn playing it on the Console and Hog had never played Diablo before, so we get a fresh perspective there as well.
Hopefully RoS will come to the 360 and if so, we definitely will be picking it up.
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Magic Find
(From the game guide section of the official site)
Magic find affects the quality of items you acquire from killing enemies (but not treasure chests, vases, weapon racks, or other environmental objects). It doesn't give you a chance to get more items on a given kill – instead, it increases the chance that an item you find will be magical, and more potent than it would be otherwise.
When a monster drops an item, Diablo III randomly determines the item’s quality from a chart that includes item quality and the number of affixes present. The game randomly "rolls" on each property in the chart to determine which affixes your item will get. Your magic find score is applied as a bonus to these rolls.
For example, if a monster has a 4% chance to drop a 6-affix rare item and you have +50% magic find, it now has a 6% chance to drop that item.
Item quality is checked in the following order:
Legendary 6-affix rare 5-affix rare 4-affix rare 2-affix rare 1-affix rare magic item Using the above example, when your roll ‘misses’ a higher-level item quality, the item generator proceeds to the next lowest item quality in the chain (in this case, checking to see if you got a 6-affix rare, then checking for a 5-affix rare, and so on). Your magic find bonus applies to each roll. If the same monster has a 10% chance to drop a 5-affix rare item and you have 50% magic find, you now have a 15% chance to get a 5-affix rare item.
What that breaks down to is the more magic find you have, the better your odds of getting legendaries and/or high affix rares. What it doesn't affect is the roll on the stats themselves. So if an item could have 50-100 Dex, magic find will not give you a better chance at getting a high end roll. You also won't get more loot, just better quality. This can be nice though in that they should sell for more if you're in need of gold.
Dual Wielding
I was leveling a new character and I spotted this oddity and remembered my confusion from when I fist started playing: I was dual wielding with a Monk and I looted a legendary that was a BIG upgrade. When I went to fiddle with the old weapons to see which combo with the new gave me the best damage, I found using only the new weapon, or the new and a shield was actually better damage than the new weapon and one of the old ones.
So here's why that is. Your damage output is averaged between the two weapons and given a 15% attack speed buff. So a 200 damage weapon and 100 damage weapon average to 150 damage. times 1.15 = 172.5 damage. You're actually better just using the 200 damage weapon and a shield.
Now of course that doesn't take into account the weapon's stats, bonuses, and on hit properties from skills where the improves attack speed can do more. But, as a general rule, unless you're looking for specific property from that offhand weapon, you want it to be within roughly 15% damage of your mainhand weapon in order to get a raw damage boost.
Ruby vs Emerald for your Weapon?
Doing some reading, it's really a case by case basis depending on what your build and gear is. The rough rule being to go with what you're build's strengths are, to a point. An Emerald's Critical Damage bonus won't be applied enough to make a difference if your Critical Chance is low, so you're better off with a Ruby. You're also benefiting more from a Ruby if you have a weapon with the +%Damage stat. Emeralds really shine (pun intended) if you already have a build that focuses on Critical Chance and Critical Damage, since you will see more crits, thus the bonus comes into play more often.
In summary, I would advise using Rubies until you start getting +Critical Chance skills/gear and then switching out to Emeralds.
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As mentioned earlier, you can salvage purple or better items at the blacksmith. By doing so you will gain crafting materials. Early on, the blacksmith only has a few plans, but you can buy him upgrades and he will learn new plans. At first the cost is just gold, then once you’re on Nightmare Mode, it’s gold and pages of blacksmithing. Hell mode changes the pages to tomes of blacksmithing, and Inferno ups the tomes of blacksmithing to tomes of secrets. Each game mode adds those additional items to the loot drops, so don’t fret when at the end of Normal, you don’t have any pages of blacksmithing. You’ll be swimming in them by the end of Nightmare.
Also, when you’re upgrading the blacksmith, you’re not picking ONE of the plans listed there during the upgrade. I thought I was and was kind of freaking out that I was possibly ruining my future plans or that I had to coordinate with Hog to make sure we covered the items we’d need between us. You’ll actually get all the plans, they’re just listed there so you can see what’s coming in that upgrade.
To craft an item, talk with the blacksmith and hit the button with the anvil icon. Then select between armor and weapons. You can cycle around and pick out any weapon/armor you like. When you highlight an item, it will show you below the blacksmith’s picture exactly what’s needed and how much of it you have. You can also compare that item’s base stats to the item you currently have equipped in the matching slot.
Each time you craft something, it will be allocated a number of random properties. You can find the amount of properties listed in the compare screen, along with any attributes that are standard. Because of the random nature of crafting, you may want to craft a couple of times to see if one is better than the other. It’s essentially a loot drop, you just have a say in what type of item drops.
Of note, blacksmith plans are shared across all of your characters. So once you teach him a plan, your new guys can craft up stuff from the get go.
d. Gemcrafting Gemcrafting differs slightly in that you can keep upgrading gems by combining them with one of the same type and a page or tome of jewelcrafting, or tome of secrets for higher level gems.
Once you find the gemcrafter, he will be available in all of your main towns across all characters. And just like the blacksmith, his designs are shared across all characters as well.
Gems can be fitted into sockets on items to further customise them to your liking. Adding a gem to the helmet and weapons have different effects than adding them to any other item.
Helmet: Bonus Gold find
Weapon: Critical Hit Damage
Elsewhere: Dex
Helmet Bonus XP
Weapon: Damage
Elsewhere: Str
Helmet: Bonus Magic Find
Weapon: Damage to melee attackers
Elsewhere: Int
Helmet: %Life
Weapon: Life per hit
The common opinion is to put greens in your weapons for big critical hits, purple in your helmet to boost your life (since there’s no damage boosting gem here), and primary stat everywhere else.Elsewhere: Vit
In both gem and weapon crafting, you will start looting plans later in the game which allow you to craft legendary items, sets, and top tier gems.
See crafting in action, along with some tips not covered in this post here:
Embed Removed: https://www.diablofans.com/linkout?remoteUrl=http://youtube/embed/coSMzRtM4IM 3. Advanced/End game
So you’ve reached 60 and defeated Diablo on Inferno mode, now what?
a. Nephalem Valor You may have noticed this happen, you might not have, but it’s pretty integral in the endgame gameplay, so we need to make sure to cover it. Once you’re level 60, every time you kill a pack of elites, open a resplendent chest, or complete an event, you’ll gain a buff called Nephalem Valor. On consoles this buff can stack up to 3 times, and each stack of it gives you an additional 35% Magic and Gold find. The buff lasts 30 minutes, and can be extended by killing another pack, opening a resplendent chest, or completing an event. You cannot gain more than 3 stacks though. Whether farming for loot, xp, keys, or ring parts, you’ll want to have “full stacks” at all times. Note: If you change a skill, a skill rune, or start a new game, your stacks will drop.
b. Difficulty levels You might wonder why this is down here in this section. Beating the game earlier on, you should be fiddling with the difficulty to your liking in our opinion. Burn through it on easy, or up the challenge every time you think an area is too easy, it’s up to you. But once you’re doing “farming”, this information is rather important. Here’s a chart breaking it down:
According to this blue post: http://us.battle.net...c/9281758533#17
- Easy = Equivalent to Monster Power 0
- Normal = Equivalent to Monster Power 2
- Hard = Equivalent to Monster Power 4
- Master I: +60% Magic Find, +60% Gold Find, +120% XP Bonus (MP 6)
- Master II: +70% Magic Find, +70% Gold Find, +140% XP Bonus (MP 7)
- Master III: +80% Magic Find, +80% Gold Find, +160% XP Bonus (MP 8)
- Master IV: +90% Magic Find, +90% Gold Find, +180% XP Bonus (MP 9)
- Master V: +100% Magic Find, +100% Gold Find, +200% XP Bonus (MP 10)
What this means is that once you’re trying to get better loot and better XP, you’ll want to be running higher Master Levels since it boosts your base XP, gold, and magic finds.c. Loot and Paragon farming You’re now going to want to farm for more and better loot and raise your Paragon Level. Your Paragon Level is shared account wide, so all characters will receive its benefits. Each level you gain 3% bonus Gold and Magic and a slight stat boost. You can see your current Paragon Level as a blue number to the left of the XP bar, and the blue XP bar now tracks your Paragon Level. There are 100 Paragon Levels, each one taking more XP than the one prior to it.
To farm Paragon Levels, you want to be gaining as much XP as you possibly can, so you should be farming on the highest Master Level that you can handle. Loot is a bonus, but what you’re after here is big XP.
Loot farming is generally done by running through areas with large amounts of mobs so you can get as many kills as possible in as little time as possible. Difficulty wise, you want to be able to kill things at a decent rate, and they shouldn’t be killing you often. Hog and I stick with a rule that if you die twice on a run, you might want to back things down a difficulty level or check into your build’s resists.
There are various “routes” for these farming runs, always looking to maximize gains per hour played. Here’s the one we like taking currently (we'll add a couple more in the near future):
Route #2
d. Infernal Machine and Hellfire Rings On Inferno, there is a special NPC in each of the first three acts that is called a Keywarden. If you have full stacks of Neph Valor (3) the Keywarden has a chance to drop it’s key. In Act I you will find the Keywarden in the Fields of Misery. In Act II, the Keywarden is in the Dalhgur Oasis. The Keywarden for Act III resides in the Stonefort area. And Act IV’s Keywarden hides in the Silver Spire, level 1. The key will be a guaranteed drop on Master V, and the chance goes down as you decrease in Master Level. The Act IV Keywarden can drop any of the three keys as well as the plans to the device that uses the keys. This is device is called the Infernal Machine. It requires one key from each of the first three Acts to build.
Here’s a set of videos covering the Keywardens:
Act I - Act II - Act III - Why do you want to make Infernal Machines? So you can make Hellfire Rings of course!
Once you have farmed the keys and made the machine you will need to go to Act I and select the last quest, "Return to New Tristram". Remember you need full stacks of Nephalem Valor before fighting the bosses, so head out and get three stacks and then return to town.
Behind the Healer in town is a closed door. If you attack that door, it will break and lead you to a new room. Using an Infernal Machine from your inventory while in this room will create a portal at random to one of the three “realms” that are a single room with two bosses from the game in it. Upon defeating a pair of bosses, there’s a spilling of loot and a chance for a part for the Hellfire Ring. After the fight, town portal back out and you can use another Infernal Machine in the room to generate a portal at random from the two remaining possibilities. You need one part from each realm, so having 3 machines to make a “Full Uber Run” is a good idea to make sure you get a shot at the part you are looking for.
You can purchase the plans for the Hellfire ring from Squirt the peddler right near Act II’s Hidden Camp checkpoint.
We recorded making the Portals and each of the battles here:
e. Whimsyshire No, it’s not the cow level. There is no cow level.
You’ll need to craft the Staff of Herding in order to access Whimsyshire. You’ll find it’s plans as a random drop chance from Izual in Act IV. If you are specifically farming for the plans, load a new game at Act IV, Chapter IV, Prime Evil. Make sure you’re at the start of the quest. Take the checkpoint to the Crystal Colonnade, and then to the Gateway to the Silver Spire. Run past Leah if you don’t feel like fighting, then look for the Gateway to the Silver Spire 1. From there, seek out the Gateway to the Great Span. Here you will meet Izual and if you’re lucky, he’ll drop the plans. The plans are account bound. So if you find them a second time while your buddy is still trying to get his first set, make sure to drop the plans so he can see them and yell at you.
On the consoles, you only need three parts unlike the five you need on the PC.
First off, the easy one, Wirt’s bell. Squirt the peddler in Act II’s Hidden Camp sells it for 25,000 gold. Boom, 1/3rd of the way there.
The other two items are the Black Mushroom and Gibbering Gemstone. The Black Mushroom has a chance to be in the Cathedral level 1 in Act I. It randomly spawns there and your character will actually make a comment if they “see” it growing. It’s a small level, so just keep running through it until you find it.
The Gibbering Gemstone is a tad more difficult. There’s a cave that has a chance to spawn in Act III’s Fields of Slaughter called the Caverns of Frost. On level two of this cavern there’s a chance that Chiltara will spawn, and when it’s killed there’s a chance it will drop the Gemstone. As you can see, you’re going to need some luck to get that drop.
Once you have all the parts and the plans and some gold, take them to the blacksmith and craft up your Staff!
But wait, there’s more. You see, that staff is only good for “Normal” difficulty. You’re going to want to run it on inferno, aren’t you? Well, load up the last quest in Act III on Nightmare difficulty and go talk to the quartermaster in the NE corner of the keep (right by where the followers chat with each other). He’ll have the Nightmare quality plans for sale there. They require some gold and the Normal staff to upgrade. Once you’ve done that, repeat with Hell and Inferno modes and you’ll have an Infernal Staff of Herding. It will work for all modes below Inferno.
Now to venture to Whimsyshire. Load up Act I, we suggest the last quest. Take the checkpoint to the Ruins of Tristram and backtrack North West. You’ll find a big crack in the ground with a bovine skeleton near it. Approach the remains with the staff in your inventory and have a little chat. After the chat is done, ride the rainbow to a magical land of loot pinatas, unicorns, and happy little clouds.
Unique Items in Whimsyshire:
- Horadric Hamburger - Level 30 Legendary "dagger". Low damage, just for fun.
Only drops from the rare spawn: "Loot Piñata"- Spectrum - Level 30 Legendary sword with rainbow blade.
Can drop from:Creampuff
Killaire (Team Unicorn)
Maisie the Daisy
Maulin Sorely (Team Unicorn)
Midnight Sparkle
Miss Hell (Team Unicorn)
Nightmarity
R'Lyeh (Team Unicorn)
Tubbers
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- Dex adds to your dodge chance (on a sliding scale) and adds 1% damage for Demon Hunters and Monks.
- Str adds one point of armor and adds 1% damage for Barbarians
- Vit adds to your life. Under level 35, it adds 10 life/point. At 35 it adds (your level) -25. So at level 60, it’s adding 35/points of life.
- Int adds 0.1 to all of your resistances (fire, poison, etc.) and adds 1% damage to Witch Doctor and Wizard’s attacks
The stat that adds damage for each class is called that class’ Primary Stat. This is the stat that you’ll generally want to focus on picking up for your character.We made a video that covers this info with some more in depth info as well: b. Loot System This is an important section. On the PC, you get more drops of less quality and with random stats. This was to encourage people to make use of the Auction House. By having more loot to offload, and good loot that you can’t actually use on your character, you were more likely to want to sell that loot and more likely to need to buy loot to suit your character.Since the Auction House does not exist on the Consoles, they had to do something different. So it was decided to drop less loot, raise the gold drop amounts, raise the overall quality of the items that do drop, and make the items that drop have your character’s primary stat.What this translates to is less junk items to sell, offset with more gold dropped, and the drops that do come, you’re more likely to be able to use. The system is not without flaws, but it would be a lot worse if we were stuck with the original system. The PC’s Auction House is going away, and they’re moving to the loot system the Console has been using since it’s launch.Loot quality is color coded from worst to best:Grey (broken)White (common)- Blue (Purple I say) (magic)
Yellow (Rare)Orange (Legendary)Green (Set items).Here’s a video that goes a little more in depth and shows some examples: c. Inventory & Inventory Management Now you’ve got your character going, and you’re looting things. Good good, now what do you do with all that stuff?When you pick things up, you’ll notice the left side of the screen near the bottom the item name and some upwards and/or downwards arrows. Those arrows are generalized indications of if it’s going to increase your offense, defense, and life. Early on, you can pretty much blindly go by those arrows. We suggest paying attention to the info on the items though, so you can see WHY it increases or decreases your damage, life, etc.There is a “quick equip” feature, but I’ve not found it all that useful. I like to see the items’ stats before I equip them. To do this, hit the back button and pull up your inventory. Your total inventory is split up between the slot they can be equipped in. If there is an item you haven’t looked at, that slot will have a gold ring around it. you can compare stats from there and decide if you want to change to the new item, or stick with the old.If you decide you don’t want the item, make use of the Junk system by highlighting the item and clicking down the right stick (XBOX). This will mark the item as Junk, which is handy when you go to the blacksmith or a merchant, as you can then bulk sell at the merchant for gold, or bulk salvage at the blacksmith for crafting materials. Of note, only purple and better quality can be salvaged. See the crafting section for more info regarding salvaging.Let’s say you like the item, but don’t want to use it right now. you can hang on to it, but it takes up space in your inventory. You’re limited to carrying 60 items so you may not want to carry around everything. You also might want to give things to a different character of yours.In each town you operate out of, you’ll find your “stash”. It looks like a large trunk or chest and can be first seen right next to the Inn in New Tristram. Your stash has a finite size and you can upgrade it via gold to a total of 210 slots. The stash is shared across all characters on your account, so it's a handy way to give things to an alt, hold on to things for later, or just to make room on your character.We cover all this in our Inventory & Inventory Management video: 2. Intermediate a. Options Menu You’ve gained some more skills now, and you’re starting to figure out what ones you like and don’t like, but if you’re like Hog and I were, you want more info and more options. Just so happens there are menu options disabled by default that will help you out.Pause the game, go to the Options, and from there select the Gameplay section. Most of these will be self explanatory, but there are a few that should be noticed.- Elective mode - This allows you to assign ANY skill to ANY button. That means you can have any amount of spells from any category; you’re not stuck with the default of one from each. This also allows you to fit the buttons to a way that fit your playstyle.Display Player names - This can help you keep track of your character and any friendlies wandering around. I like it on, but some feel it it clutters things up. Try it out and see what you think.
Display damage/healing numbers - Red numbers pop up on hostiles as you hit them, and green numbers pop up on you when you're healed by something. Hog runs with just the Damage ones, but I like to see how effective my self healing is.Show Advanced Tooltips - This is a must. This tells you exactly what each skill does including the actual damage numbers and durations. Without this you’re almost guessing which skills are better.See these changes in action in this video:b. Advanced StatsWhen you bring up your inventory, you’ll see a button listed at the bottom for “character details”. In that subscreen, you’ll see all the in-depth details about your character. Your core stats, how those affect things, other stats like Attacks per second, Critical hit chance, Critical hit damage, etc. Scroll through them and take a look. The details about each item are in the black box on the bottom left.Once you get the hang of things, and as you progress through the different game levels, you’ll want to make sure to pay attention to more than just your core stats. Here’s a few you’ll want to follow:In many cases increasing CC and CD will actually increase your damage output more than just bringing up your primary stat. As such, many builds focus on abilities that boost critical hit chance and damage.
Those are just a few of the stats in that screen and we suggest you take a moment to review them if you’re having trouble with an area. Often times players will focus purely on doing more and more damage and hit a wall where they can’t kill everything before it kills them. Resists, armor, and lifesteal play a big role later in the game.Here's the video covering some of the advanced stats and showing weapon speed differences:Damage Reduction - This is a function of your armor. The higher this is, the less damage you take from all attacks.Elemental resists (fire, poison, etc) - This is brought up by skills, items, and Int. Increasing your resists allows you to take less damage from specific damage types in addition to your damage reduction.
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I like the both angelic and demonic like you mention. Seeing as the character class is balancing good and evil resources, I think it fits well.