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Quote from romique

Quote from HabeasPorpoise

1 x ($64.99) RAIDMAX Blackstone series RX-700AC 700W Continuous Power ATX12V V2.3 / EPS12V V2.91 80 PLUS BRONZE Certified Modular Active PFC Power Supply

700W is a little too much. A friend of mine runs 2xGTX560Ti SLI with an OCed i5-2600k 4.5GHz on a 750W PSU. If you don't plan on using CrossFire and overclock, 550W will be more than enough. Maybe you can save some money here. Aside from that everything seems to be fine.

While Raidmax wouldn't normally be my first choice, I think that this power supply is a reasonable choice for this build. Particularly if you do the mail-in rebate, the price is good for the value. He could probably shave $20 from the cost of the PSU, but this PSU is partially modular, can potentially support crossfire, can probably run slower fan speed (due to less heat from the capacitors because a smaller portion of max wattage is being used) and is unlikely to be the source of any difficult-to-solve problems. To me, that makes it worth the extra cash.

Looks reasonable to me, though I expected to see the Boon of Bul-Kathos passive trait used. I get that that's your forum handle, but it's a little confusing. Hehe

I'm not a huge fan of Inspiring Presence because it encourages you to stay out of combat and regen health. The being said, it's not totally useless -- it just lends itself to a playstyle with more downtime than I prefer.

I think I'd rather take the Revel rune for Overpower over Crushing Advance. You have both Overpower and Revenge for clearing groups, so I'm not sure how much value you'll find in thorns damage vs. another way to get a big heal when you need it.

Quote from Kyrenin

What's the reason in going so far as to avoid knowing it is the better question.

Regardless of the process, which I'm not disagreeing with, it is of interest to know the % of all possible builds that are deemed "viable" as that will indicate Blizzard's success in their implementation, as stated by them. It's also of interest when naysayers claim d3 isn't complex enough in its pure # of builds. It's also of interest when companies claim there are ____ions of ____, to know just how accurate their claims are.

I also disagree with the idea that a single rune change isn't worth investigating. Numerous runes change the functionality of a skill so drastically, that they are separate skills. Disregarding at the skill level is premature.

In fairness though, I don't know that it's helpful to consider each skill-rune combination as unique. Most runes don't really change the character of the skill enough to warrant that imho. The realistic difference between two otherwise identical builds with a single rune difference where one does +10% damage and the other does +10% movement debuff is pretty small. Is it fair to consider them entirely separate builds in the context you're talking about? Certainly if one is viable, the other is as well simply because there is about a hair's width of difference between them.

Quote from Nivius

(skill*runes)*(remaining skills*runes)*(remaining skills*runes)*(remaining skills*runes)*(remaining skills*runes)
...
i dare you to find any errors.

How about that you're counting skill1_rune1 + skill2_rune1 and skill2_rune1 + skill1_rune1 as two different setups?

Kyrenin is correct to use combination, which is described here: http://en.wikipedia....iki/Combination

Quote from Kyrenin

Those numbers are all incorrect by such ridiculous margins, they're insulting. Over 8 quadrillion for just the barb, seriously?

([SkillCount] choose 6) * 6^5 * ([PassiveCount] choose 3)

Barb = 22 & 16 = 324,906,785,280
DH = 23 & 15 = 357,158,561,760
Monk = 21 & 13 = 120,679,663,104
WD = 22 & 17 = 394,529,667,840
Wiz = 25 & 15 = 626,593,968,000

Total: 1,823,868,645,984

However, I think it should be:
([SkillCount] choose 6) * n^6 * ([PassiveCount] choose 3),

where n is either 5 or 6 depending on if you are counting unruned or not. It should be n^6 because you have six skills with n runes, that's n*n*n*n*n*n permutations. You use permutation and not combination here because order actually does matter in this case since skill5_rune3 and skill4_rune3 are different.

Reason for Edit: I realized that my opinion on Kyrenin's calculation being correct was premature.

I mostly agree with everything in the OP, except for wiping the buff on death. It'd be one thing to lose one instance of it or something and that'd make survivability a higher goal, but losing the whole thing would be far too punishing imho. If you want a harsh penalty for death, hardcore is available. I bet that very few softcore players will be complaining about death penalties being too lenient come release.

As far as how NV stacks, I think that the max number of stacks should basically be a little less than what you get from a full clear of an act. If this was the case, killing the boss should wipe at least some of the buff to prevent you from clearing act one normally and then just skipping everything else to kill the other act bosses for bonus drops though.

It's really hard to say what will work at endgame and what won't because of how little we really know, but the main thing I notice is that you don't have any movement abilities. I'm thinking this might be important for closing in on ranged enemies hiding behind melee enemies or terrain, for dealing with the mortar affix on rare mobs, etc. It also may not make a whole lot of difference. It's hard to say without seeing what Inferno actually looks like. Leap, Sprint, Furious Charge or Ancient Spear could potentially fill a gap here if one exists, but you'll certainly know if you need it by the time you have to make that choice anyway.

I'm not sure how useful movement speed debuffs are going to be for a melee character, so the Impunity rune on Threatening Shout might be worth swapping for the attack speed debuff rune. Other than that, it looks good. I'd do my best to stay near 60 fury so you can pop two Seismic Slams if needed because you don't have any other "oh crap" skills and the stun chance is only 70%.

I forgot to mention in my previous post, if you plan to build your own then this is probably a good place to start. It's a few months out of date so the listed components' prices may have changed in some cases, but the base build target was $600. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/core-i5-overclock-performance-gaming,3097.html

Again, I'd go with 8 Gb of ram (currently about $35 on Newegg vs. $25 for 4Gb in the linked build) because the prices have dropped so much. The graphics card market has changed somewhat since that build, so I'd also consult here, which is current as of March 2012: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-graphics-card-review,3107-3.html

You don't need that much CPU or graphics muscle for D3 or Minecraft though, so you can save a few bucks and/or get an SSD by going for cheaper alternatives if you want.

If you're willing to do some research and are good with your hands, building your own is the definitely the most cost effective and rewarding way to go. Do not skip the research part though or you risk getting components which don't work together (it's a good idea to post links to them all on a forum so people can tell you if you need to change anything) and/or damaging them during assembly. Whether you go the diy route or buy a pre-built system, here's where I'd start.

Forget the minimum specs as even the recommended specs for both D3 and Minecraft are relatively low. Get a CPU with 2-4 cores that run at 2.6 Ghz or better. Aim for 8 Gb of DDR3 RAM (preferably a 2-stick kit of 4Gb each to leave room to upgrade to 16 Gb when the price inevitably drops even lower, though 16 Gb is way overkill for current software).

Make sure you get a video card that's meant for gaming. It doesn't have to be top-of-the-line, but it shouldn't be for offices. If you buy a pre-built system without a video card, you *might* be able to add one, but it really depends on there being enough unused wattage on the power supply and most pre-built systems tend to cheap out on the PSU (which is a bad idea imho -- you should probably spend at least $60 on a PSU for a gaming machine and that's if you get a very good deal).

Unless you plan to overclock, just make sure your motherboard has any particular features you want (IE USB 3.0 if you want that, extra power through USB to charge your ipod faster, etc.) and you should be able to get a good one for $60ish. You should also be fine with a cheap case (again, if you want certain features like front USB 3.0 ports, that's where you should focus, but otherwise just go cheap) and you should be fine with the heatsink that comes with the CPU so long as you don't buy a bare CPU without one. If you do plan to overclock, that's a whole ball of wax that you'll need to do your own research on, but definitely ignore this paragraph in that case.

Other than that, if you want amazing loading times you can look into an SSD boot drive (a 60 GB should be plenty for Windows 7 + Diablo 3 + Minecraft, but you'll still probably want a regular hard drive for general storage), but they take some research and effort to set up properly.

There's tons of good info on tomshardware.com about just about everything you might ever want to know about PC's and how to build them. As far as where to buy stuff, I'd recommend newegg.com as they tend to have extremely competitive prices and solid customer service.

Nice post. As a bit of a number-crunching min-maxer myself, this article looks like a solid starting point and I think you've laid some good groundwork here.

I think the next step would be to talk more about build synergy. You touched on it briefly as far as why it's probably not optimal to load up on six attack skills, but there's a lot of room to expand. For example, you could talk about how a skill might be mediocre on it's own while it might be powerful in combination with certain other skills. You could also examine the pros and cons of a focused build such as a Barb crit build, a Monk dodge build or a Wizard Arcane Power regen build vs. more general strategies like taking the six "strongest" skills. It also might be worth talking about how gear fits in, though we don't know all of the affixes yet.

Quote from Antirepublican

It used to blow, but now it lasts 6 seconds!

Fair enough. I don't know that I'd take both blizzard and meteor in that build though, unless they both have cooldowns which aren't listed in the calculator.

So once every 15 seconds, you can cast a blizzard or meteor or two for a low AP cost? But you have to take Diamond Skin (which I personally think kinda blows), and you can't take damage-buffing runes for Blizzard or Meteor? Hardly seems broken to me. Am I missing something?

(BTW, your link doesn't seem to work properly for me as it isn't filling in passives or runes.)

I feel like it's only fair to give Blizzard the benefit of the doubt here. None of us has played the game beyond level 13. Think of any MMO or ARPG you've ever played, and imagine trying to determine what endgame would be like if you could only play the first 20ish% of the level cap. You also aren't allowed to use any information you know about itemization, high-level party dynamics or end-game skill synergy. If you could get even close to determining how much damage each individual skill that you know almost nothing about other than the tooltip should do, you're a smarter person than I.

Blizz keeps saying that they are in the middle of their intensive balance testing phase, so I expect to see skills get nerfed and buffed seemingly at random. Good. If they weren't doing that, I'd be worried. I want as much of this stuff finalized before launch as possible. Before the final balancing phase, I'd expect skill power levels to be all over the map because all they're trying to do before then is get skills in the game and working. Balance is meaningless until all of that work is done, so it's zero surprise to me that some classes and skill/rune combinations are massively overpowered relative to others at this point in time, but I certainly hope they don't launch that way just because they're afraid people will assume WD is terrible because blizz nerfed som of their skills two months before release.