DiabloFans

1.0.5 is live, have fun blowing things up everyone!

I like Shadow Power for RD as WizArt said, but with 2.8% Leech and life on hit I don't need it. If your fire resist/LoH is low you shouldn't be stafing into molten or you'll get fried pretty quick!

Nah. This works great. HA/EA is boring, this works just as well You should try it!

Hello guys! I started a thread over at incgamers so I'll post one here too.

In 1.0.5 (so far on the PTR), the DH saw some lovely changes. Strafe had its cost reduced, Perfectionist got buffed, Gloom got quasi-buffed, Sentry got buffed and we can have 2 out vanilla, we got cool new pets and other stuff. Strafe also got the ability to WW through mobs, meaning you can cram in a lot more hits.

First, the skills overview:

Passives
Archery, Vengeance, Nightstalker
Variants: Perfectionist (gear dependent)

Nighstalker fuels discipline as you rake in the crits from various skills (mostly Strafe)..

Actives
1) Chakram - Shuriken Cloud; free damage, 33% proc scalar, breaks destructibles for you, and looks awesome
Variants: none

2) Strafe - Demolition; strafe into mobs, it will AoE lots of them for great damage (see: demolish), 50% proc coefficient
Variants: none; Emberstrafe would be great if the fire trail could proc crits and did more damage, but alas it does none of those things and behaves similarly to the nerfed Trail of Cinders.

3) Shadow Power - Gloom; Mitigates damage and heals for tough spots
Variants: probably none, only possible with very high-end gear and LoH

4) Companion - Bat; Hatred regen
Variants: Boar (gear dependent)

5) Preparation - Punishment; use it as your hatred extinguishes to fill it back up
Variants: SS/Vault if 2H Crossbow, see further down

6) Personal choice:
Sentry - Chain of Torment; The chain has a 75% proc coefficient (LoH, Crits) and deals good damage
Sentry - Guardian Turret; plop one of these in a mob to WW inside it
Rain of Vengeance - Dark Cloud; free damage that follows you
SS - Lingering Fog
Vault - Tumble, Acrobatics

-- You will use a 1H:
** 1H/shield for crit chance on shield and defensive stats
** 1H/Quiver for hatred regen on quiver, IAS, and crit chance
** 1H/1H for maximum life/hit and other goodies at the cost of crit chance and defense

-- Depending on playstyle and character durability, you may need at least one skill like SS or Vault to break Jailer, etc. Some DHs will just be able to tank through getting CC'd, though.

Video of functional 1H/Shield with no Life on Hit, 40k dps (courtesy Poekel):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=MVbpj0zR_yI

So of course, you'll gear with defense in mind. You'll need LoH. Get your crit chance high to fuel discipline (1H crossbow with Archery for +10%, btw). Use discipline to fuel hatred. Use hatred to fuel strafe. Use strafe to explode things.

Also, strafe can get "+% increased crit chance" on Cloaks and stuff like SoJ.

Happy demolishing!

Quote from Molster

Quote from Peace

Quote from Molster

Quote from Peace

Ew.

They're really trying to squeeze as much money out of D3 as they possibly can, aren't they? It sickens me that they have to pull this maneuver just to bribe people into maintaining a WoW subscription. Personally I have nothing against WoW, but when it takes large hits from SWTOR, Blade and Soul, and GuldWars 2 I'll be jumping with joy.

They're treating Diablo 3 as a tool, and that upsets me.

why? they are one company... this is what a company should do. They fact they that came up with this idea is very impressive.

It isn't impressive. It's actually an extremely obvious business decision. They turn Diablo III into a gimmick to attract a dying WoW subscription base, and then smother the news with a new cinematic and lore video. It's a dirty trick, and you can't deny that.

No, its not a dirty trick, its a fantastic and smart idea. Its getting people like me, who were done with wow to pay or a FULL YEAR, it was the push I needed to keep playing, thats not dirty, thats smart on them. If we didnt want to keep playing, we still wouldnt.

Hands down its a smart move, and no "dirty". Use a high profile product to increase profits... uhh... thats the point of a company.

I don't think you understand. This move isn't brilliant; in the world of business, this move was commonplace. A high-school student interested in business could've pulled this one off.

You yourself admit to "keep playing" simply because you want D3 for free. Now they've gained a WoW subscriber. It's as simple as that. They're going to milk D3 for all its worth just to play the numbers game with competing MMOs. It saddens me that they need to exploit one of their own games to do so, especially a game that's generally regarded as the "tertiary option" of Blizzard games. They're throwing D3 in free like a salesman throws in an extra car wash after your 5th visit, and frankly that's just sad.

Quote from Molster

Quote from Peace

Ew.

They're really trying to squeeze as much money out of D3 as they possibly can, aren't they? It sickens me that they have to pull this maneuver just to bribe people into maintaining a WoW subscription. Personally I have nothing against WoW, but when it takes large hits from SWTOR, Blade and Soul, and GuldWars 2 I'll be jumping with joy.

They're treating Diablo 3 as a tool, and that upsets me.

why? they are one company... this is what a company should do. They fact they that came up with this idea is very impressive.

It isn't impressive. It's actually an extremely obvious business decision. They turn Diablo III into a gimmick to attract a dying WoW subscription base, and then smother the news with a new cinematic and lore video. It's a dirty trick, and you can't deny that.

Ew.

They're really trying to squeeze as much money out of D3 as they possibly can, aren't they? It sickens me that they have to pull this maneuver just to bribe people into maintaining a WoW subscription. Personally I have nothing against WoW, but when it takes large hits from SWTOR, Blade and Soul, and GuldWars 2 I'll be jumping with joy.

They're treating Diablo 3 as a tool, and that upsets me.

It's like GuildWars' cape customization, except called a banner.

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/File:Cape-designer-interface.jpg

If it's anything like the previous games and combined with what we know, we can guess what comprises those 32 minutes of cinematic and/or 22 minutes of machinima:

-Main intro cinematic (i.e. intro to Act 1)

-WD intro cinematic
-Wizard intro cinematic
-Monk intro cinematic
-Barb intro cinematic
-DH intro cinematic

-End of Act 1 cinematic
-End of Act 2 cinematic
-End of Act 3 cinematic
-End of Act 4 cinematic
-Final cinematic

Roughly something like that. Some of the above could fall under the 22 minutes of "gameplay footage" in-game machinima video content. There could also be 5 or 6 more than this, we just don't know.

Did we always have Conflagration? I can't remember seeing it a few days ago.

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/class/wizard/passive/conflagration

wat

My understanding, which is by no means official but at least probable, is the following:

If 2+ Monks have the exact same mantra, the higher-level Mantra takes effect.

If 2+ Monks have the same base mantra but different runes, the unique effects will stack. Consider the following:

http://us.battle.net...ntra-of-healing

1) Your party has 2 Mantras of Healing active. One is runed for Heavenly Body, the other for Time of Need -- these both add an effect in addition to the base life regeneration. Those 2 perks will be active, but the base effect of life regeneration won't be doubled. The result of these two auras would be 106.4 life per second, resistances, and vitality.

2) Your party has 2 Mantras of Healing active. One is runed for Heavenly Body, the other for Sustenance. The game will take the higher base effect -- that of Sustenance. The result of these 2 auras is 292.7 life per second and vitality.

The above rules apply exactly the same for Barbarian shouts. Shouts and Mantras stack of course.

I knew there were placeholders for a few reasons:

1) As stated there were missing item attributes
2) Missing images for all legendaries (all legendaries had the same look, these visuals were also the level-1 base armor visuals)
3) Missing descriptions on mystic formulae
4) Too many gaps in craftable items and blacksmith recipes

It's good to finally get official word on it; just another PR mistake though.

We're all a little pissed off at the delay, the PR, and the ridiculous hype behind game, but what do you think is the driving force behind delaying a game that -- across 3 demos, gameplay movies, and the beta -- looked reasonably "ready to go"?

I think that one of the reasons behind the delay is that the developers weren't expecting as many bugs as they got. The beta wasn't even intended for bugs, yet the vast majority of Vasadan posts are dealing with bugs of only the first 1/3rd of the first Act, and nothing has been patched regarding Battle.net interface issues. Obviously we're going to see bugs upon the official release, but I expect them to take this extra time to actually work on the game.

We've seen a slight adjustment to the DH resource (Hatred behaves similarly to Spirit now) and apparently they're still messing around with runestones. They've got a console version on the backburner, but that's an entirely separate development team.

Basically: is this delay the result of bugs, skill design and balance (damage vs. weapon damage), or excessive iteration (on runestones for example)?

Personally I think it's all of the above. As some of you may know, Gear of War 3 was delayed about 5 months. In that time the developers polished the game, especially the multiplayer experience. I can't wait to see how the developers use this time. Maybe they'll improve upon the story, upon PvP, upon gems, skills or items, or maybe they'll over-iterate and fail miserably. Regardless, none of us will be playing the final Diablo III at New Year's Eve 2011.