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Yeah, you guys are absolutely right about bosses (when I added the subtitle "for AoE PvE" I basically meant "for non-boss PvE"). For part of the game they might be manageable with just Cleave spam, but after that this build is going to require some pretty fundamental changes (by which point it won't even be recognizable as this build any more) when it comes to boss time.

As far as defense in higher difficulty levels though, well, of course it remains to be seen, but I think that if necessary there's room for some minor tweaks that would take you all the way through Inferno.

Brimueller: "completely avoid the majority of defensive skills available"? Because I took only Threatening Shout and skipped Ground Stomp, War Cry, and Ignore Pain? Ok, I guess you could say I took only 1 of the 4 defensive active skills, but then again, heck, I took no more than a quarter of the offensive active skills too, for that matter. Given that regardless of difficulty level you need to kill enemies to stop them from hurting you and to progress through the game, I find it hard to imagine Blizzard requiring a significantly higher proportion of defensive skills than offensive skills relative to the respective numbers available, especially for a build that produces defense via offense thanks to a large amount of life leech.

Also, I chose Threatening Shout over Ground Stomp, War Cry, and Ignore Pain after much thought. The uptimes on the Ground Stomp stun and Ignore Pain are so low that they're too situational to serve as the mainstay of your defense. War Cry is worth more thought, but if you compare unruned War Cry to unruned Threatening Shout, the former halves physical damage at best, while the latter halves all damage. Runes may bring War Cry up to a level comparable with unruned Threatening Shout. I think it makes sense that Threatening Shout would provide better damage reduction than War Cry to balance out the fact that Threatening Shout costs fury instead of generating it, has half the duration, and only works to maximum effect when all enemies attacking you are within 25 yards. So for some builds War Cry might be better, but I like Threatening Shout for this build because its three disadvantages are non-issues (it's not a fury-hungry build and is based around having all your enemies at point-blank range) and because its rune slot allows for further expansion of your defensive capabilities if necessary (i.e. you can use an obsidian rune when the going is easy, and pop in a golden rune for an additional doubling of survivability when the going gets tough).

TLDR version:

If more defense is needed, replacing Threatening Shout's obsidian rune with a golden should do the trick. As far as passives, Tough as Nails looks attractive, but there's no telling at this point whether it'd be advantageous to sacrifice +30% damage (and thus a large amount of healing via Bloodthirst) for +100% armor. I guess it depends in large part on the relative prevalences of physical and non-physical damage in the hardest (non-boss) parts of the game.

Sorry if someone's already come up with and posted this build here; I couldn't find it in the last few weeks' worth of threads, but I might have missed it. To me this idea seems so good that I doubt I'm the first to think of it, but then again everyone seems to feel the same about their own build and they're all different, so who knows.

Conceptually this build starts with Bloodshed (alabaster Battle Rage), which I'm really excited about because when used with an AoE attack its total damage output scales with both your crit rate and the square of the number of enemies near you. This dovetails perfectly with the fact that the barb not only has two massively crit-increasing runes but also has four possible effects that pull enemies towards himself (like a vacuum, hence "hooverbarb"), while no other class has any, I think. The barb also has Bloodthirst, which gives a nice big chunk of life leech and goes a long way towards changing the "offense/defense tradeoff" paradigm into a "have your cake and eat it too" situation, especially when you add in a damage-reduction skill that gets more mileage out of each point of that life leech.

So to abuse Bloodshed as much as possible, we want three things:

1. a spammable AoE attack
2. as much crit% as possible
3. and as many enemies nearby as possible

Conveniently, the only fury-generating and thus infinitely spammable (semi-)AoE attack, Cleave, also provides the keystone of our efforts to get as many enemies nearby as possible, via Gathering Storm (indigo). Thus we get point #1 and some of point #3 in one skill. Of the other three hoovering skills, Call of Arreat (crimson Leap Attack) is the best as it has the widest radius by far and is tied for the lowest cooldown, making a nice way to get the ball rolling.

Next, the fact that we'll be surrounded by tons of enemies serves perfectly to fuel the two crit machines: Best Served Cold (alabaster Revenge), which takes advantage of those hits we're taking while providing even more health gain, and Killing Spree (crimson Overpower), which will probably be available constantly thanks to the combination of high crit rate, large number of targets, and AoE attacks. Not to mention the fact that both of these provide more AoE damage and thus more crits, more Bloodshed, and more Overpowers.

Finally, to stretch every point of Bloodthirst and Revenge health gain, a damage reducing skill. On the conditions that you don't have a whole lot else to do with your fury and that all your enemies will be close to you, which they will thanks to the constant hoovering, unruned Threatening Shout looks to be as good as runed War Cry, leaving the rune free for, say, some MF via Terrify (obsidian).

As for passives, other than Bloodthirst, Ruthless is an obvious choice, and as for the last, well, I like Brawler as it should be active pretty much all the time, thereby providing the largest damage boost and thus (via life leech) health gain.

In summary:
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/barbarian#bYcdUh!abU!caYZaZ

As a fundamental rule, AoE damage is the most efficient way to kill (and thus also the most efficient way to gain health when using life leech), but there's a problem: enemies won't always be conveniently packed into tight, dense balls. One solution is chaining abilities like Electrocute; the uniquely barb solution is hoovering, which simultaneously provides another benefit via abilities, i.e. Revenge, that trigger when you're hit.

Bonus note: to demonstrate the power of this idea let me try a simple back-of-the-envelope calculation. Assume clvl 60, level 7 runes, and just for simplicity a 0% base crit rate and a +50% base crit damage. That gives us a total crit rate of 5% (Ruthless) + 27% (Best Served Cold) + 22% (Killing Spree) + 4% (Battle Rage) = 58%, with crits doing +100% damage thanks to Ruthless. If you've got just five enemies in your frontal arc, a single Cleave will do 120+4*60 = 360% weapon damage, times 1.58 to account for the expected increase in damage from the crits themselves, yielding 568.8% weapon damage. The expected 5*58% = 2.9 crits also deal a total of 2.9*55*5 = 797.5% weapon damage via Bloodshed. Add those numbers to get 1366.3% weapon damage, i.e. an average of 273.26% weapon damage per target (+60% from Battle Rage and Brawler for a total of 437.22%). In reality it'll be higher because your base crit rate will be a lot better than 0%, and you should be able to hoover in more than five enemies, but even 437.22% AoE weapon damage per Cleave (cheaper than free in terms of rage) ain't bad, no?

The first solution that comes to mind is to make it so that wearing one set item increases the drop chance of other items in that set for you.

Are there any ways yet to buy and download it without having to install Steam?

The current state of http://www.torchlightgame.com/ is confusing me, since the news box says the game isn't up yet "on our site", but there are "buy now" links at the top of the page.

And "it's not up on our site" implies that it may be up on other sites, which would mean that the file itself is ready, which would then mean there's no reason they can't post it on their site.

D2D for example says Torchlight is available, but I'm hesitant to enter my credit card info out of a fear that after I pay, I'll get a message saying "oh wait, it's actually not ready yet."

The "the demo isn't ready yet but while waiting you can demo the game at our partner sites" thing also doesn't make sense for the same reason. Has anyone found a place to download the demo (without Steam)?

Of course, I could just wait a day or even a couple hours and this will likely all get sorted out, but it's fun to be part of the action as it's happening

For what it's worth, it appears they've already implemented or at least thought about implementing a mechanic by which a skill can be switched from one mode to another, staying that way until it's switched back: Ritual of Blood as mentioned here.

Perhaps the same mechanic could be used to switch between different types of Zombie Dogs, with perhaps more types being unlocked as you put more points into the skill.

Hi guys,

I'm working on a kick/trap hybrid assassin, level 49 now, and so far it's been a lot of fun. Maxed DTalon and almost have Death Sentry maxed. Pretty soon I'll have to decide where to put the next bunch of skill points.

Now, I'm not playing hardcore, but I'm a wuss, and like to have a good meat shield to take some of the heat off. Or two, actually (including merc). So I'm thinking of putting some more points into my shadow companion. The question is which one.

So far I have 1 point in SW and none in SM. My SW has been dying a lot lately. I've heard lots of pros and cons both ways. The way I understand it is this. They're the same in all regards except for:

1. SW gets increased defense, and slightly (+4 per level?) increased resists as it's raised in level, whereas SM gets no defense but faster resist increases for the first 5 points
2. If you put a lot of points into it SM gets good gear, whereas SW's gear doesn't change
3. SW uses only the skills you are using yourself, whereas SM uses whatever it wants

The guide that inspired me to make this character says SW is way better, but I'm not 100% convinced. Any other opinions?

I was hoping to also post this on the Battle.net forum, but over the course of many moves I've long since lost my DII CD key Too bad you can't post with another Blizzard CD key.

Anyway. As we all know, attack speeds and other speeds in DII are based on integral frame counts, giving rise to the phenomenon of breakpoints, by which +20% IAS might not increase your actual attack speed at all, or by as much as 100%.

I hope this is fixed in DIII so that +20% IAS increases your actual attack speed by 20%; I imagine this will be the case (has there been any confirmation?)

For the rest of my post I assume that this will be fixed in DIII (some might disagree with my use of the word "fixed" but honestly, if +20% IAS doesn't increase your attack speed by 20%, there's no way that's desired behavior).

The next question that arises is this: imagine two characters, otherwise identical, one with a +42% IAS ring and one with a pair of rings, each +20% IAS. Which one should attack faster?

I feel that fundamentally, the correct answer is, "whichever one the player expects to attack faster."

So the key question is, which one would the player expect to attack faster? In other words, would the player expect multiple +% modifiers to combine additively, or multiplicatively?

I conjecture that serious/habitual RPG players (henceforth, group A) would expect multiple +% modifiers to combine additively in this case (because they did in DII, at least in the case of IAS, and same with some other RPGs), whereas the remaining players (henceforth, group B), if they think about it at all, would expect multiple +% modifiers to combine multiplicatively (because that's how math usually works).

Since group B players by definition, do not have a voice on this forum, we tend to forget their existence, but they do make up a large part of the player base (especially if we count all players not just all Battle.net players).

But anyway, I don't have a definite answer as to which makes more sense, additive or multiplicative combining. I do, however, have three points:

1) It would be easier to inform the group A players that "no, they combine multiplicatively in DIII, not additively" than it would be to inform group B players that "no, they combine additively in DIII, not multiplicatively," because group B players don't tend to read manuals, patch notes, etc., let alone fan websites about games.

2) Which is more fun? I think that having multiple +% modifiers combine multiplicatively is more fun, because we all like getting more powerful, especially superlinearly. I know that I always look for ways to combine things multiplicatively in games, because it's exciting to grow synergistically. Don't say that "that would make IAS overpowered," because the numbers could always be changed slightly to compensate.

3) Which is more consistent? Note that there are already situations in DII in which multiple +% modifiers combine multiplicatively. An example from my favorite class: +% damage from Tiger Strike and Dragon Tail. So one might argue that it's counterintuitive for only certain modifiers, like IAS, to not work like that.

Any thoughts?

As intmain() says, it's now gone from alpha to beta, and especially for all of us chomping at the bit for Diablo 3, it's now a fun way to spend a couple hours!

I played through it yesterday and felt some of the old addiction that I (we all) felt for the Diablos. As you can see from the screenshots it's now dark except for a circle of light around your character. Also there's about 6 times more content; you can actually save; tons more enemies and items; and a (dummy) town.

This might merit a new news post, but I unfortunately don't have the privileges to make one.

Ah! You already did! Man, do I feel silly now. Thanks for the reply, that goes straight to my desktop. :thumbsup:

Quote from "Holyknight3000" »

I have Caldeum already done, seems the post was on the second page of this forum

http://www.diablofans.com/forums/showthread.php?t=14841

Thats the caldeum Locations wall. Granted the fiery runes might not be as clear but i hope thats what you were looking for.

HK

I love your Locations series, Holyknight. Please keep up the good work!

Would you consider doing one using Caldeum?

http://www.blizzard.com/diablo3/world/environments/caldeum.xml

I extracted the background from that page and have attached it. It's my favorite piece of art to come out of Diablo III so far--I'd be stoked if it inspires you to make a wallpaper!

I'd buy it, and if it came with the collector's edition, it would be the deciding factor that would make me buy the collector's edition (I usually don't).

Pastel blue would be awesome.

Quote from "DefiledVisions" »

They should add some neon effect to the logo so it really shows of its hellish features in UV light.

And that's a brilliant idea.

That would make a sweet wallpaper. Especially with those moving waterfalls.

I'd say that if you've ever felt even a bit scared while playing a video game, that's a good sign of immersion. Because there's obviously no threat to your actual person.

I've felt that a few times . . . Half Life single-player most notably, also at one point in the original Unreal demo. Also somewhat when opening the Butcher's cage in D1.

Hmm, I would love to talk with one of the engine/back-end folks who's working on this. I don't see why they can't

1. have physics actors (corpses in particular) fade into inactive decals instead of just disappearing when they fall off the FIFO visibility queue, and
2. come up with a clever process to merge multiple overlapping decals into one when necessary for performance reasons

Hi guys! I've been regularly checking the site for a while (when is there going to be an RSS feed for the news on the front page?), and finally decided it's time to join the forum.

I've been a Blizzard fan since Tides of Darkness, and especially enjoyed Lord of Destruction and WoW (although Reign of Chaos was a little too micromanagey for my simple mind to handle). I'm a strong believer in getting along--it makes me sad when Blizzard fans fight angrily (nothing wrong with friendly debate of course) over Diablo vs. WoW, and now the Diablo III art direction.

My biggest dream for Diablo III: that the classes are drastically different enough from each other that playing with each one is like playing like a different game!

Oh, and I live and work in Japan.