You hit the nail on the head - my weapon only has 560 DPS.
The notable stats on my current weapon are:
+619 Life on Hit
+7 AP on Crit
Socket (with +60% Crit Damage gem)
I have considered upgrading my weapon to something with more damage, but what stat can I afford to lose?
Honestly, all of them are fair game, depending on what the rest of your gear looks like.
AP on crit is the highest priority, as you can only get it on wand/hat/source, and you can't get the latter since you're using a shield. I do not think a single AP on crit mod is sufficient (I mean, the build still works, but it feels really crappy), especially at 30% crit, while two mods should make it flow pretty nicely.
Life on Hit you can outsource to your jewelry. Get a big chunk of LOH on your amulet, maybe a bit on a ring, and call it a day. It's a really strong modifier, for sure, and fills in the gaps where Diamond Skin gets blown out, but as you gear up those gaps become smaller and further between.
Crit damage is only as good as the damage it's multiplying. Your wand has really poor DPS, and you're using a shield, giving crit damage very little to multiply; back of the napkin calculations say your 60% crit damage gem is doing about as much for you as 75 base DPS. I'm pretty sure you can find a weapon with more than 640 DPS and some AP on crit without breaking the bank.
Short version - get as many mods off of your weapon as you can and stick them in other slots, because weapon mods are some of the most valuable in the game and it's a waste to blow them on stats you can get more than enough of elsewhere.
You really, really need to look at the rest of your gear when evaluating weapons. If I use my current gear, for example, your current 664 DPS sword with a 70% gem in it is stronger than then 930 DPS axe. If I had your weapon, and bought that axe, I would have been spending millions for a downgrade.
You need more crit to enable Frost Nova on phase beasts. If you have enough should be able to interrupt their attacks with Nova spam. They really shouldn't be causing you problems without Fire Chains or Shielding (plus random mods to make either one a problem).
The only real 'issue' is that stacking crit chance and crit damage is the only competitive way to build your characters at the moment. Even if you have zero skills or passives that interact with crit, crit chance and crit damage is still the correct way to build.
The main difference, compared to attack speed, was that attack speed was clearly the best way to build from the very first item, while crit isn't obviously the best way to build until you've gotten a handful of items.
The most powerful spec with unlimited funds is a 4-set Natalya's Demon Hunter, but I don't think you can hack that with 'only' 100 million.
After that, Barbarian is clearly the most powerful class, and 100 million should be more than enough money to ignore mobs and Insanity down elites. I don't think Wicked Wind Wizards are too far behind, and you can gear one out pretty nicely on that budget.
I don't think non-WW Wizards or Demon Hunters scale terribly well with gear (they're more sexy for being strong while undergeared than going nuts with great gear); Monk doesn't have anything on the level of Overpower/Revenge/Insanity, and Witch Doctor...ok, I don't understand Witch Doctor at all, so if it gets totally nuts at high gear levels someone else will have to fill you in.
Basically if you enjoy Barbarian, gear your Barbarian, you should have no problem at all cobbling together a set that can blow up the entire game without trying too hard at that price point.
I'm not sure if the proc rate was bumped up from 0.1 to 1, or if the tick rate just went through the roof when they changed how dot effects work, but Twister is doing broken things with procs at the moment; it's not quite at Natalya's set or Insanity levels of broken, but it's up there.
For phase 1 and phase 2, you'll have to pop cooldowns to deal with all the snakes - so to make it easiest on yourself, bring a bunch of cooldowns. I brought Diamond Skin, Frost Nova, and Wave of Force, with the 15% CDR passive; it made dealing with the snakes much easier.
Against Belial, you pretty much have to learn to flawless him without excellent gear. Personally, I'm not that good at the game, so I just swapped gear to be tanky enough to take more than one hit - 450 resist all with 40k HP and Force Armor / Obsidian Skin did the trick.
Spells that deal a damage-over-time type effect currently have a bug where they are unable to crit. This is a known issue that is on their radar to fix.
Attack speed affects cast speed. It does not have any effect on the damage spells deal beyond that you can cast more of them more quickly. A single Hydra or Blizzard will cast faster with IAS, but will not deal additional damage. This makes IAS very useful for kiting or signature spam, but it's not nearly as important for Hydra / Blizzard build; certainly not as important as the listed DPS boost would imply.
Rare items have all (weighted) random mods on them. It was not remotely difficult to get a bunch of rare items without +vit on them in beta.
Unique and set pieces will likely have lots of +vit, so you'll have to skip those for obvious reasons.
Unless this build strategy becomes very popular it should be pretty trivial to pick up, say, +int / + health regen rares with other useful mods, since you won't care about armor or resists at all and will explicitly avoiding health. Hell, on quite a few pieces of armor +int and +health regen are the only stats you actually care about, besides stuff like MF and GF; you could run around in blues at near full power.
I didn't play with floating numbers on, but I did tend to get a lot of health regen affixes (especially in previous patches where you were guaranteed +3 regen from the rare crafted belt) and it certainly felt like it was coming in continuously, the same way Arcane Power and other resources come in continuously instead of in discrete chunks. The same was true for DoT damage, which was very obvious when playing a Witch Doctor - health bars creeped down continuously under the effect of the DoT, but you only saw a damage floater every half second.
Thinking about it, I would assume all the regen / degen mechanics work the same way - more or less continuous damage with half second cumulative floaters.
So if all that is true, a low HP, high regen, Energy Armored Wizard should be incredibly difficult to kill with packet damage, but will likely explode instantly when affected by any DoT effects. The question, then, is how common are DoT effects, and if there's anything else we're missing.
Top of the line chest armor (or an amulet) can provide up to 599 health per second in natural regen; misc armor peices and rings can give up to 342. A full set of perfect regen gear gives 4618 health per second. Since at base health you'd take 541 damage per hit, that means you'd regenerate the damage taken every 0.117 seconds.
Weapons, off-hand items, and amulets can also provide up to 959 health restored per hit. Couple that with items that have a high tick rate, and you'll restore nearly two hits worth of damage for each hit you take.
I'm not sure what could kill you in that circumstance - a very high tick rate DoT? Getting completely swarmed and bursted? I'd really like to know.
The big big question on these mods is which ones are exclusive to each other; from beta it seems pretty clear that the different +elemental damage attributes don't all show up on the same weapon, for example; are mods like Str/Vit and Strength also exclusive?
The other thing I'd like to point out is the end game gold and magic find values. The top tier of MF values for assorted armor pieces are 18%, with 40% available on your amulet. You're not going to be stacking massive amounts of magic find onto your characters at those numbers.
I've done some rough calculations based on what we know of late game items so far from data mining, and 5000 DPS is really low.
100,000 DPS with late game gear looks very doable, and if modifiers stack in just the right way, 1,000,000 DPS might not be out of the question.
For a rough approximation - base weapon damage, from weapon plus rings plus weapon damage mods, should get up around 2000 DPS. Multiply by about 20 for your primary damage stat; you can at least double it again from attack speed (and possibly go much, much higher), and triple it from crit damage - which gets you to right around a quarter million DPS before getting too fancy.
In the absence of any gold sink, the rate of inflation would be incredibly high at the beginning of the game, and gradually taper off asymptotically over the life of the game. This is simply because, at a fixed gold drop rate, there's a much larger relative change in the amount of gold early on, when people do not have a lot of gold yet, than later on, when the economy is flooded. More rigorously, a first order approximation of inflation is dM/M (where M is the amount of gold in the economy), and M is just the integral of dM from the beginning of the game until now. M goes to infinity as the time T goes to infinity, so dM/M goes to zero.
If you have something resembling a percentage tax rate (for example, 20% of gold drops go to repair bills, on average), then the economy behaves exactly the same way, albeit with a slightly lower price level. The rate of inflation is unchanged - if the tax rate is r, then the rate of money growth would be (1-r)*dM; and since the total amount of money is the integral of dM, the total money would be (1-r)*M; and inflation would be (1-r)*dM / (1-r)*M, or once again dM/M.
A fixed rate of expenditure would function the exact same way to a first order approximation. However, a more nuanced view shows that it gives higher inflation. When costs are fixed, the percentage of your income going to the gold sink will drop as you get better at the game and your income increases; so as players advance further, your gold sinks do less, and inflation accelerates. This is what a lot of traditional gold sinks in MMOs (like having to pay for armor and weapon upgrades from vendors) look like - and they end up making the inflation problem worse.
What you actually need to stabilize your economy is a gold sink that takes very little gold early on (because you need to accumulate some amount of money in the economy if it's going to function at all), but increases as people progress in the game, until eventually your gold sink takes 100% of gold drops in the very late game.
Taxes are incapable of doing this in any reasonable fashion. Instead your game needs to provide a service uniquely attractive to veteran players on which they will happily spend all their money. Gambling in D2 actually did a really good job of this pre-LoD; all your gold converts to items, which simultaneously sinks gold and generates more items (which pushes prices down as well) and thus fights inflation on both fronts. Crafting could also do this, in theory, but if gold is the limiting reagent in crafts then crafting materials are worthless.
D3 accomplishes this through the 15% transaction tax on the auction house - by taxing expenditure in the player market, instead of gold drops, they eventually sink 100% of excess gold drops through that tax alone. Essentially, as more gold drops, prices increase - which increase the total gold sunk - until you eventually hit an equilibrium price level where the inflationary pressure from gold drops exactly equals deflationary pressure from auction house taxes.
The other gold sinks honestly do not matter; if all you care about is keeping prices in line in the player market, the auction house is sufficient.
Apologies for this being a bit long winded, but at least it thoroughly covered the basics to the best of my knowledge. If you remember nothing else, remember it's not the quantity of gold sinks you have, but the quality, because a poor gold sink does nothing while a well designed one can curb inflation on its own.
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Honestly, all of them are fair game, depending on what the rest of your gear looks like.
AP on crit is the highest priority, as you can only get it on wand/hat/source, and you can't get the latter since you're using a shield. I do not think a single AP on crit mod is sufficient (I mean, the build still works, but it feels really crappy), especially at 30% crit, while two mods should make it flow pretty nicely.
Life on Hit you can outsource to your jewelry. Get a big chunk of LOH on your amulet, maybe a bit on a ring, and call it a day. It's a really strong modifier, for sure, and fills in the gaps where Diamond Skin gets blown out, but as you gear up those gaps become smaller and further between.
Crit damage is only as good as the damage it's multiplying. Your wand has really poor DPS, and you're using a shield, giving crit damage very little to multiply; back of the napkin calculations say your 60% crit damage gem is doing about as much for you as 75 base DPS. I'm pretty sure you can find a weapon with more than 640 DPS and some AP on crit without breaking the bank.
Short version - get as many mods off of your weapon as you can and stick them in other slots, because weapon mods are some of the most valuable in the game and it's a waste to blow them on stats you can get more than enough of elsewhere.
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The main difference, compared to attack speed, was that attack speed was clearly the best way to build from the very first item, while crit isn't obviously the best way to build until you've gotten a handful of items.
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He's playing a Barbarian; Barbs can drop an A3 elite pack in <15 seconds once they hit 35k DPS or so.
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After that, Barbarian is clearly the most powerful class, and 100 million should be more than enough money to ignore mobs and Insanity down elites. I don't think Wicked Wind Wizards are too far behind, and you can gear one out pretty nicely on that budget.
I don't think non-WW Wizards or Demon Hunters scale terribly well with gear (they're more sexy for being strong while undergeared than going nuts with great gear); Monk doesn't have anything on the level of Overpower/Revenge/Insanity, and Witch Doctor...ok, I don't understand Witch Doctor at all, so if it gets totally nuts at high gear levels someone else will have to fill you in.
Basically if you enjoy Barbarian, gear your Barbarian, you should have no problem at all cobbling together a set that can blow up the entire game without trying too hard at that price point.
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Against Belial, you pretty much have to learn to flawless him without excellent gear. Personally, I'm not that good at the game, so I just swapped gear to be tanky enough to take more than one hit - 450 resist all with 40k HP and Force Armor / Obsidian Skin did the trick.
1
Attack speed affects cast speed. It does not have any effect on the damage spells deal beyond that you can cast more of them more quickly. A single Hydra or Blizzard will cast faster with IAS, but will not deal additional damage. This makes IAS very useful for kiting or signature spam, but it's not nearly as important for Hydra / Blizzard build; certainly not as important as the listed DPS boost would imply.
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Unique and set pieces will likely have lots of +vit, so you'll have to skip those for obvious reasons.
Unless this build strategy becomes very popular it should be pretty trivial to pick up, say, +int / + health regen rares with other useful mods, since you won't care about armor or resists at all and will explicitly avoiding health. Hell, on quite a few pieces of armor +int and +health regen are the only stats you actually care about, besides stuff like MF and GF; you could run around in blues at near full power.
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Thinking about it, I would assume all the regen / degen mechanics work the same way - more or less continuous damage with half second cumulative floaters.
So if all that is true, a low HP, high regen, Energy Armored Wizard should be incredibly difficult to kill with packet damage, but will likely explode instantly when affected by any DoT effects. The question, then, is how common are DoT effects, and if there's anything else we're missing.
0
Top of the line chest armor (or an amulet) can provide up to 599 health per second in natural regen; misc armor peices and rings can give up to 342. A full set of perfect regen gear gives 4618 health per second. Since at base health you'd take 541 damage per hit, that means you'd regenerate the damage taken every 0.117 seconds.
Weapons, off-hand items, and amulets can also provide up to 959 health restored per hit. Couple that with items that have a high tick rate, and you'll restore nearly two hits worth of damage for each hit you take.
I'm not sure what could kill you in that circumstance - a very high tick rate DoT? Getting completely swarmed and bursted? I'd really like to know.
0
The other thing I'd like to point out is the end game gold and magic find values. The top tier of MF values for assorted armor pieces are 18%, with 40% available on your amulet. You're not going to be stacking massive amounts of magic find onto your characters at those numbers.
0
100,000 DPS with late game gear looks very doable, and if modifiers stack in just the right way, 1,000,000 DPS might not be out of the question.
For a rough approximation - base weapon damage, from weapon plus rings plus weapon damage mods, should get up around 2000 DPS. Multiply by about 20 for your primary damage stat; you can at least double it again from attack speed (and possibly go much, much higher), and triple it from crit damage - which gets you to right around a quarter million DPS before getting too fancy.
1
If you have something resembling a percentage tax rate (for example, 20% of gold drops go to repair bills, on average), then the economy behaves exactly the same way, albeit with a slightly lower price level. The rate of inflation is unchanged - if the tax rate is r, then the rate of money growth would be (1-r)*dM; and since the total amount of money is the integral of dM, the total money would be (1-r)*M; and inflation would be (1-r)*dM / (1-r)*M, or once again dM/M.
A fixed rate of expenditure would function the exact same way to a first order approximation. However, a more nuanced view shows that it gives higher inflation. When costs are fixed, the percentage of your income going to the gold sink will drop as you get better at the game and your income increases; so as players advance further, your gold sinks do less, and inflation accelerates. This is what a lot of traditional gold sinks in MMOs (like having to pay for armor and weapon upgrades from vendors) look like - and they end up making the inflation problem worse.
What you actually need to stabilize your economy is a gold sink that takes very little gold early on (because you need to accumulate some amount of money in the economy if it's going to function at all), but increases as people progress in the game, until eventually your gold sink takes 100% of gold drops in the very late game.
Taxes are incapable of doing this in any reasonable fashion. Instead your game needs to provide a service uniquely attractive to veteran players on which they will happily spend all their money. Gambling in D2 actually did a really good job of this pre-LoD; all your gold converts to items, which simultaneously sinks gold and generates more items (which pushes prices down as well) and thus fights inflation on both fronts. Crafting could also do this, in theory, but if gold is the limiting reagent in crafts then crafting materials are worthless.
D3 accomplishes this through the 15% transaction tax on the auction house - by taxing expenditure in the player market, instead of gold drops, they eventually sink 100% of excess gold drops through that tax alone. Essentially, as more gold drops, prices increase - which increase the total gold sunk - until you eventually hit an equilibrium price level where the inflationary pressure from gold drops exactly equals deflationary pressure from auction house taxes.
The other gold sinks honestly do not matter; if all you care about is keeping prices in line in the player market, the auction house is sufficient.
Apologies for this being a bit long winded, but at least it thoroughly covered the basics to the best of my knowledge. If you remember nothing else, remember it's not the quantity of gold sinks you have, but the quality, because a poor gold sink does nothing while a well designed one can curb inflation on its own.