how do you manage invulnerable elites ? i'm struggling to help my friend because darts don't get through minions. Same with illusion elites (like the 4x Illusion/Teleport/Lava/X bees we very often get at the beginning of Act II), where splinters don't go through, and where, due to kiting and teleporting, my friends have a hard time AoE'ing.
do you have any ideas on how mobs decide who they want to focus/attack ? This would help me much on managing/trying to remove the invulnerable ones from the blue/yellow so my friends could kill him fast and nice
which companion are you bringing when soloing, if any ? I'm used to bring the templar, but i'm sighing every time he stays in the lava. I only recently realized that i could force him out by moving "out of screen", but he's just getting on my nerves sometimes.
does the "confusion trick" work when playing in a group ? what do you mean by "confuse and GTFO so you get full duration" ? If it's ranged based (ie attack something in X yards) then should i ask my melee friend to move out temporarily ?
i find it difficult to choose between using a 1H/OH or a 2H, and it's even harder for me to compare a 1H with a 2H (given an OH) when browsing the AH (as the comparison tooltip only shows once you possess the item).
regarding crit and critdmg, i'm quite surprised by your point of view, because from the math i've done (i like theorycrafting, that's maybe why i'm a bad gamer *smiles*) it seems that with my toon the "weights" are 55 int ~ 9% crit ~ 90% critdmg ~ 40 weapon dps. So when you say to "go for crit", i'm puzzled. Any further insight on why crit is good ? Maybe because we're moving often, and rarely hitting so these hits should be harder than normal ?
1) In general, I find invuln minion packs to not be worth the time. The way I do it if I have to, is kite like crazy until I can get myself in a good position to drop my Fetish Ambush and BBV Slam Dance and DPS my heart out on him while popping Spirit Walk and then having Spirit Vessel pop. This only works if you have a short res timer and can come back before it resets and do it again once or twice more to finish it. As for illusion mobs, I handle them fine with my build. I just kite around with Unbreakable Grasp and do quick shots and move. Again, this is where having really high attack speed comes in. I can shoot off three darts and move and kite until my snare gets them far enough away to do it again. Rinse and repeat while dodging obstacles. Not exactly the easiest thing to do, but it can be done. I've killed illusionist packs in Act 4 without dying once.
2) I'm pretty sure they just focus whatever is closest to them and attacking them. I don't have any other info, though.
3) I bring the Enchantress because she can charm, disorient, buff my attack speed, and put a reflective projectile shield on me that is visible enough to where I know when I can run into a fireball or arrow and watch it shoot back at the enemy. I like her a lot.
4) The way the charm works is a little funky in that if there are players nearby, the mobs will sometimes still attack them while charmed or run at them and then turn around and just do stupid stuff. If there are no players around, the mobs tend to just immediately turn and beat up on each other. And since it's a limited duration of 12 seconds on normal mobs and like 3 seconds on elites, you want that full uptime. To get the most benefit, I tell my group to stay out of the area entirely and I go to one of their bodies or portals or whatever, let them pop my Spirit Vessel, wait like two seconds, then pop the charm and generally get gibbed immediately afterwards. Then the mobs have nothing to target but themselves and you get the full duration. It works great in all scenarios, group and solo.
5) Screw 2hs IMO. It could just be me, but I like my mobility. 2h are just way too slow. You give up a lot of attack speed by going 2h. I think the only way I could swing it is if it was a naturally fastish 2h, had amazingly high dmg, and had an AS modifier that put it into the slow 1h range at least.
6) I didn't mean to say ignore int. I just mean to pay attention to those bonuses on those slots and go for them on top of int and w/e you build for. It's just a reminder to look for those stats, but you can choose any slot and then go to the drop-down menu and see what possible bonuses you can get for that slot.
And np. Glad to help.
Edit: Btw, your testing on the Crit versus Int depends on your damage. I put on a helm with 90 more int but 4% less Crit, and I lost like 800 DPS or something.
went to can't kill shit in act II to currently farming and completing it!
just made a small change, replaced BBV with AC (bigger area rune) because I don't have enough dps to kill a blue/yellow straight away without kitting anyway, and because AC helps with the trash
Glad to hear it! I definitely understand small swaps. I made one myself:
I've been farming Act 3 and 4 and I've slightly swapped up two things to make it work better now. 1) My AS got too high so I have to use Spiritual Attunement with Spirit Vessel and Pierce the Veil to keep my mana up now. and 2) I swapped out Zombie Wall and put in Fetish Army with Fetish Ambush. Spirit Walking into a pack and dropping the Fetish Army Ambush does CRAZY damage, and then they can tank afterwards while being right on top of them as I dart back away. I've found it way more worth it than any other Fetish ability now while farming.
So I now use: (Inferno Farming)
Runes:10/20/30 - Spiritual Attunement / Spirit Vessel / Pierce the Veil
LClick: Poison Dart (Splinters)
RClick: Grasp of the Dead (Unbreakable Grasp)
1: Spirit Walk (Jaunt)
2: Mass Confusion (Unstable Realm)
3: Big Bad Voodoo (Slam Dance)
4: Fetish Army (Fetish Ambush)
To the OP, Very nice and detailed post, thanks for that. I had a question about your inferno farming/progression build, is that designed for soloing only or also groups in mind? I can't help but notice the lack of AoE.
Thanks. I look at as both because 1) If you're soloing, you need the stuff to stay away and live while being a glass cannon. And in groups, you're doing your group more good by keeping the mobs off everyone and doing heavy single target DPS than you'd be letting more hits get through and doing more AoE. However, if you're farming Act1 with a group and your tank can tank everything fine, I'd change the darts to Rain of Frogs and Wall of Zombies to Lob Blob Bomb, and then just stack all mana regen runes and spam AoE from the back.
Did you at all notice an issue with spirit walk? I've been trying to solo her for a long time now and Spirit walk fucks me all the time. I hit it, move away and still die/proc passive. I'm guessing it's the cleave she has killing both forms of me, but that really sucks that our "save" doesn't do anything.
Yep. It's like I told the people I was playing with, "DBLO is the first &*#$&^ to kill me through Spirit Walk." She'd catch up to me while sprinting away and swipe me sometimes too. I'm not sure if it's the cleave / the fact she hits so hard / or if it's the times she gets random dot swipes and it's just ticking so fast that one tick pops you out of spirit walk and the next one kills. It doesn't happen all of the time, but I definitely know what you're talking about.
Did you solo inferno diablo or kill with group/friend?
I ended up killing it with a group. We did a ton of tries duo/trio also and got it to like 10% of Phase 2 while we didn't have the four of us on. But ultimately when we did it, everyone was on and wanted in and so we four-manned it.
Hey man, glad to see this is working for you as it seems a really unique build compared to the normal stuff we're seeing from a lot of people.
I would love to try out your build a bit, honestly I've been doing a lot of solo grinding, hit 60 last night and been having some fun with some different things.
In inferno, did you ever go up against a fast champ pack solo? I started hitting some really crazy ones in Hell A3 in the basement of the tower and wow just died for an hour straight trying to figure out a way to deal with Fire Chains/Fast/Frozen Licker things(the ones that grab you with the tongues), and I would really have to;
1) Stutter step every single other click to have all 3 of them miss their tongue pull
2) Kite back a ton, though didn't help much since they're fast with a tongue pull
and still it took me an hour of trying different builds and pull/engage/kite strategies in order to kill them. And I still had to kill them on two separate attempts because after I got one good kite off the other two caught up and ugh, chains.
What kind of things can you do against something that is faster than you, and can pull themselves and/or teleport to you?
Anyway thanks and appreciate your write-up!
I honestly don't know if there is a good stand-up way to handle super fast mobs for any class. If I encounter a pack that problematic, I do the charm trick until I kill off all the minions but one, and then I use the Hex totem / Wall of Zombies / Unbreakable Grasp / Spirit Walk to stay away and DPS.
Nice write up. What is your take on using Firebomb? Imo it's the coolest of the primary skills, but is it viable in your opinion?
Honestly, going into D3, I was planning on using Firebomb as my main attack. I just thought it would be good from reading about it. But I never ended up finding a use for it. Looking back, I'd say the Ghost Bomb glyph makes it a cheap mana cost, really wide aoe that lands starts where you target, which could be useful in some situations. That's all I can think of, though.
I have a few questions that I have yet to be answered, so I thought I'd ask them here.
I am WD in act 2 inferno atm, not really trying to get any further since I feel the challenge is enough here atm. But I have just some fundamental questions about game mechanics for a WD.
My current stats is like: 17k dps / 3k armor / 36k hp / 832 mana / around 350 all res. Running with a wd knife and mojo.
I have been up at 20k dps, going IAS nearly going oom just spamming darts :P, but then thought that going a more tanky build would be better. I can see how your build works, but am just wondering if you know how the weap dmg is actually affecting spells.
Atm I think of 2 scenarios, where #1 is that it's based off the "damage" on the char screen, and #2 where the dmg is the mean value of your weapons damage ratio (for example 100-200 dmg, would be 150).
Secondly I was going to ask if you think I should drop some hp for dps gear, and still keep my res, or if I should just drop them both and go all out dps?
Good post, and upvote for you
Edit: And did you ever run with mf on your gear, or did you just progress with max dmg output?
As far as how damage is calculated, I can only speculate myself but I think I'm right. It's definitely not from the Details sheet damage, as you can see if you hover over it that it says that's the damage per second of the listed factors (crit, AS, etc.) And I know two things for sure. I'll use Poison Darts as an example. For Poison Dart Splinters, it does 60% weapon damage each. Since weapon damage is a range for every weapon, like mine is 279-695 and then my OH is 100-393. That makes my weapon damage 379-1088. Now, I also know that my hits aren't the same every time. So it's clearly not using the average of the weap damage. The weap damage is randomized per hit as a # and then the dart takes 60% of that number, and then your int and all other factors come into play and up that # to what you see. That's what I believe.
As far as your gear goes, I'd recommend going as heavy DPS as you can while not completely trashing Vitality. I value it like 30-35% as much as Int in Inferno. I've recently started wanting more dex, actually. I'd rather dodge. And I never wore MF gear leveling up. I hardly wear it now unless I'm doing a run where I'm popping chests or something because I need the DPS gear to kill the stuff. In your case, I'd get AS in every slot that it comes in first, and then I'd focus more on int than the vitality and swap pieces that give more int and less vit. Resists are nice but I worry about them last, if at all. The way I play, I'm a glass cannon with a lot of good abilities to avoid taking hits. I'm not in it to survive but to be able to kill my targets at all costs.
Hey man I just wanted to say I tried out your build and it is beautiful!
I run with a barbarian, have been since launch. We're farming inferno act 1 and going to progress into act 2 soon.
He recently found Manajuma's Mojo and it has 8% increased damage to poison darts so it was a score!
Can't wait to get further into inferno and start stacking that attack speed and see the crazy damage.
I modified a couple things because he's running a tank spec, but they run hand in hand.
Thanks! This is going to help us progress quite a bit.
Glad to hear it! I never ran with a barb so I understand tweaking a few things.
I forgot to add that you can swap the Fetish Sycophant rune for Spiritual Attunement if you have mana issues. Fetish Sycophants are just a filler tank-type rune IMO that's better than 20% less damage taken cause 20% won't prevent a one-shot but a spawned fetish taking the hit instead will.
Just a question. I have been pretty much set in using my current build which is allowing me to farm Act 4 Hell difficulty pretty easily. As such, I am not that familiar with other skills and how to use them.
Wanted to ask what is the general strategy when approaching a mob if I were to use your Inferno progression build ? Im assuming approach mob, drop grasp, put up wall, start poison darts. When is a good time to use fetish army, and how do you regen enough mana to make pierce the veil not make you run out ? Any other tips ?
Thanx !
Hey, the way I do trash is:
Drop snare in between mobs and you.
DPS til mobs are near escaping snare.
Drop wall on closest one to you.
Back up and re-snare.
Repeat.
For blue/gold named:
Same concept but use spirit walk to run next to everything and charm every time it's up. Use fetishes when you get into a predicament and need them to tank. Or use them at the start for a harder initial burn cause they'll tank and give you more stationary time. If it's a really tough pack and you can't fight straight up, pull a pack of normal mobs near the named but not on top of them. Then position yourself to be in range to charm them but not the named. Now let the mob hit you and pop your spirit vessel. Wait about 2 seconds and then pop mass confusion right before you die so they have maximum charm uptime on each other (no time wasted being charmed and going for you.) If you do it right, you'll charm only the normals, die, and they'll kill the named. You can charm the named too but it won't last long on them.
I'd say my gear is pretty good now. I think I was one of the top people to hit max level and so I was able to make a lot of money off even 600+ DPS weaps at the time. I used that to buy some gear and I've also farmed some / have friends that have thrown WD gear my way. My damage on the detail sheet is 37653.45, but it was like 28k when I did Inferno Diablo. I have 22.9k hp. And I have 2.54 attack speed. 997 Max Mana.
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1) In general, I find invuln minion packs to not be worth the time. The way I do it if I have to, is kite like crazy until I can get myself in a good position to drop my Fetish Ambush and BBV Slam Dance and DPS my heart out on him while popping Spirit Walk and then having Spirit Vessel pop. This only works if you have a short res timer and can come back before it resets and do it again once or twice more to finish it. As for illusion mobs, I handle them fine with my build. I just kite around with Unbreakable Grasp and do quick shots and move. Again, this is where having really high attack speed comes in. I can shoot off three darts and move and kite until my snare gets them far enough away to do it again. Rinse and repeat while dodging obstacles. Not exactly the easiest thing to do, but it can be done. I've killed illusionist packs in Act 4 without dying once.
2) I'm pretty sure they just focus whatever is closest to them and attacking them. I don't have any other info, though.
3) I bring the Enchantress because she can charm, disorient, buff my attack speed, and put a reflective projectile shield on me that is visible enough to where I know when I can run into a fireball or arrow and watch it shoot back at the enemy. I like her a lot.
4) The way the charm works is a little funky in that if there are players nearby, the mobs will sometimes still attack them while charmed or run at them and then turn around and just do stupid stuff. If there are no players around, the mobs tend to just immediately turn and beat up on each other. And since it's a limited duration of 12 seconds on normal mobs and like 3 seconds on elites, you want that full uptime. To get the most benefit, I tell my group to stay out of the area entirely and I go to one of their bodies or portals or whatever, let them pop my Spirit Vessel, wait like two seconds, then pop the charm and generally get gibbed immediately afterwards. Then the mobs have nothing to target but themselves and you get the full duration. It works great in all scenarios, group and solo.
5) Screw 2hs IMO. It could just be me, but I like my mobility. 2h are just way too slow. You give up a lot of attack speed by going 2h. I think the only way I could swing it is if it was a naturally fastish 2h, had amazingly high dmg, and had an AS modifier that put it into the slow 1h range at least.
6) I didn't mean to say ignore int. I just mean to pay attention to those bonuses on those slots and go for them on top of int and w/e you build for. It's just a reminder to look for those stats, but you can choose any slot and then go to the drop-down menu and see what possible bonuses you can get for that slot.
And np. Glad to help.
Edit: Btw, your testing on the Crit versus Int depends on your damage. I put on a helm with 90 more int but 4% less Crit, and I lost like 800 DPS or something.
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Glad to hear it! I definitely understand small swaps. I made one myself:
I've been farming Act 3 and 4 and I've slightly swapped up two things to make it work better now. 1) My AS got too high so I have to use Spiritual Attunement with Spirit Vessel and Pierce the Veil to keep my mana up now. and 2) I swapped out Zombie Wall and put in Fetish Army with Fetish Ambush. Spirit Walking into a pack and dropping the Fetish Army Ambush does CRAZY damage, and then they can tank afterwards while being right on top of them as I dart back away. I've found it way more worth it than any other Fetish ability now while farming.
So I now use: (Inferno Farming)
Runes:10/20/30 - Spiritual Attunement / Spirit Vessel / Pierce the Veil
LClick: Poison Dart (Splinters)
RClick: Grasp of the Dead (Unbreakable Grasp)
1: Spirit Walk (Jaunt)
2: Mass Confusion (Unstable Realm)
3: Big Bad Voodoo (Slam Dance)
4: Fetish Army (Fetish Ambush)
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Of course. I was just not at my home computer at the time I wrote this and I was having a brain freeze.
And for mortars, I shoot like two auto attacks and then move a bit over and over until they're dead. Just need a lot of room to work with.
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Thanks. I look at as both because 1) If you're soloing, you need the stuff to stay away and live while being a glass cannon. And in groups, you're doing your group more good by keeping the mobs off everyone and doing heavy single target DPS than you'd be letting more hits get through and doing more AoE. However, if you're farming Act1 with a group and your tank can tank everything fine, I'd change the darts to Rain of Frogs and Wall of Zombies to Lob Blob Bomb, and then just stack all mana regen runes and spam AoE from the back.
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Yep. It's like I told the people I was playing with, "DBLO is the first &*#$&^ to kill me through Spirit Walk." She'd catch up to me while sprinting away and swipe me sometimes too. I'm not sure if it's the cleave / the fact she hits so hard / or if it's the times she gets random dot swipes and it's just ticking so fast that one tick pops you out of spirit walk and the next one kills. It doesn't happen all of the time, but I definitely know what you're talking about.
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I ended up killing it with a group. We did a ton of tries duo/trio also and got it to like 10% of Phase 2 while we didn't have the four of us on. But ultimately when we did it, everyone was on and wanted in and so we four-manned it.
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I honestly don't know if there is a good stand-up way to handle super fast mobs for any class. If I encounter a pack that problematic, I do the charm trick until I kill off all the minions but one, and then I use the Hex totem / Wall of Zombies / Unbreakable Grasp / Spirit Walk to stay away and DPS.
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Honestly, going into D3, I was planning on using Firebomb as my main attack. I just thought it would be good from reading about it. But I never ended up finding a use for it. Looking back, I'd say the Ghost Bomb glyph makes it a cheap mana cost, really wide aoe that lands starts where you target, which could be useful in some situations. That's all I can think of, though.
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As far as how damage is calculated, I can only speculate myself but I think I'm right. It's definitely not from the Details sheet damage, as you can see if you hover over it that it says that's the damage per second of the listed factors (crit, AS, etc.) And I know two things for sure. I'll use Poison Darts as an example. For Poison Dart Splinters, it does 60% weapon damage each. Since weapon damage is a range for every weapon, like mine is 279-695 and then my OH is 100-393. That makes my weapon damage 379-1088. Now, I also know that my hits aren't the same every time. So it's clearly not using the average of the weap damage. The weap damage is randomized per hit as a # and then the dart takes 60% of that number, and then your int and all other factors come into play and up that # to what you see. That's what I believe.
As far as your gear goes, I'd recommend going as heavy DPS as you can while not completely trashing Vitality. I value it like 30-35% as much as Int in Inferno. I've recently started wanting more dex, actually. I'd rather dodge. And I never wore MF gear leveling up. I hardly wear it now unless I'm doing a run where I'm popping chests or something because I need the DPS gear to kill the stuff. In your case, I'd get AS in every slot that it comes in first, and then I'd focus more on int than the vitality and swap pieces that give more int and less vit. Resists are nice but I worry about them last, if at all. The way I play, I'm a glass cannon with a lot of good abilities to avoid taking hits. I'm not in it to survive but to be able to kill my targets at all costs.
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Crit Chance: 12%
Crit Damage: 111%
-Resists-
Physical: 220
Cold: 276
Fire: 220
Lightning: 294
Poison: 220
Arcane/Holy: 220
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ty rj <3
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Glad to hear it! I never ran with a barb so I understand tweaking a few things.
1
1
Hey, the way I do trash is:
Drop snare in between mobs and you.
DPS til mobs are near escaping snare.
Drop wall on closest one to you.
Back up and re-snare.
Repeat.
For blue/gold named:
Same concept but use spirit walk to run next to everything and charm every time it's up. Use fetishes when you get into a predicament and need them to tank. Or use them at the start for a harder initial burn cause they'll tank and give you more stationary time. If it's a really tough pack and you can't fight straight up, pull a pack of normal mobs near the named but not on top of them. Then position yourself to be in range to charm them but not the named. Now let the mob hit you and pop your spirit vessel. Wait about 2 seconds and then pop mass confusion right before you die so they have maximum charm uptime on each other (no time wasted being charmed and going for you.) If you do it right, you'll charm only the normals, die, and they'll kill the named. You can charm the named too but it won't last long on them.
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