so new play-style is run around not even attacking... O.o
Reminds me a lot of the Wand of Woh build that wizards use. Look up a video, that's all they do is Explosive Blast, just like this. The rest of their skills are self-buff, cc, or mobility.
First of all, my DH is my alt character. Play her when I get a chance, but she is definitely second fiddle.
Played her a LOT in vanilla. But I haven't really played in the expansion much. I'm needing some help getting started -- I have been having trouble finding some builds for fresh 70's, does anyone have any recommendations?
Well, seeing as how I have all the main classes softcore + hardcore barb, wiz, and crusader...I don't see myself having a lot of free space for seasonal :-(
I took down Azmodan in t5 yesterday just to see if I could do it (he went down really fast too) but it seems like most of my damage is exceptional burst, but I'm kinda feeling like a glass cannon. Can't survive bounties / rifts on T4, T3 can be challenging to survive on sometimes. Should I drop any of my damage for toughness boosting items?
Currently gambling to find more pieces of Akkan's, but no luck there.
Finally, as I have a couple days off work, I've got time to answer to a few guys. I think I answered all of the ones that weren't already answered.
Quote from Kintner
Wearing pretty much the best gear I have. Have a few other items including a Votiya's, Kassar's, and a Final Witness.
Needing some help with build plus advice on what to spend my shards on. T1 is on farm, T2 can be a struggle. Any help would be appreciated!
If you're running a lightning-based build without 6pc Akkhan's, hammers are the way to go.
Firstly, you want to gem your gear properly. I generally tend to prefer rubies. Then some reforging. Reforge falling sword damage on your shoulders to allres. Reforge the blessed shield damage on your helm to blessed hammer damage. Reforge the life on hit on your legs to 2 sockets. Reforge the fist of the heavens damage on your shield to blessed hammer damage. Reforge the shield bash damage on your boots to blessed hammer damage.
Definitely doesn't have to be a lightning based build. I'm just trying to find a build I can roll with. Been trying to get some reforges done. Got the pants and the shoulders done, reforged the shield but I'm having no luck with that. Trying to upgrade rubies and get them in my chest / pants.
Any suggestions on an actual spec? I tried changing to Hammers, but it feels weaker than Fist. Any suggestions on what to spend my shards on?
Great guide! Actually saw the link on a link from another gaming site and actually inspired me to dust off my old wizard for a bit.
Any chance I could talk to of doing a barb build as well later? Or possibly a money making guide? Current bankroll is only around 6 digits atm, so flipping isn't really an option.
Would anyone be able to please help me in-game with my barb? I've been loving this spec, but so far I'm stuck in Act 1 Inferno. I've cleared Act 2 as a sword and board. I'm really at a loss on what to work on. As well as what to do to actually come up with the ridiculous sums of money I need to buy anything worthwhile. So far I can typically waiver around 500k-1,000,000. Any help would definitely be SO appreciated!
My ID code is Kintner#1362.
Someone was kind enough to add me today, I clicked accept on the friend list and the person's name disappeared entirely from the friends box. Don't know why they're not on my friends list. Can't remember the name.
Would anyone be able to please help me in-game with my barb? I've been loving this spec, but so far I'm stuck in Act 1 Inferno. I've cleared Act 2 as a sword and board. I'm really at a loss on what to work on. As well as what to do to actually come up with the ridiculous sums of money I need to buy anything worthwhile. So far I can typically waiver around 500k-1,000,000. Any help would definitely be SO appreciated!
I can understand where you're coming from Kintner as I do remember the days of Vanilla Diablo 2 but here's the issue.. as you already said. You don't expect those problems to exist and we as the community should not have to endure a lackluster game for a year before it gets good. It's called learning from you're mistakes and Blizzard is doing a damn good job at doing quite the opposite. When you've had a game that (after some work) is critically acclaimed for it's insane depth of gameplay and replayability, and combine that with 10 years of observations of the players opinions and how the game evolved to suit needs... just to go and make another game and take 10 steps backwards. I for one refuse to lower my expectations and look at it in retrospect as something we should have expected from the beginning. When you go out to the store and buy something, you expect a product that was created for TODAY'S market, with TODAY'S innovations and technologies, not the late nineties.
Sometimes it's acceptable to make these kinds of mistakes when a new company takes over a franchise and tries to reinvent the wheel but this is not the case. This is Blizzard taking the userbase for a ride in their nostalgia-mobile and dropping us off in the ghetto 20 blocks from home hoping that we'll last long enough to make it back to where we should have been right from the beginning. We deserve better.
A lot of people have already given up - that is a fact and Blizzard knows this. They've acknowledged that they made a mistake and thought the content they had for the playerbase was sufficient but proved not be. Sure the game has it's good points.. you would have to be a completely bias fool to say that Diablo 3 doesn't have a good foundation TO BE a good game. Problem is that there is a fairly large group of people that have the opposite bias that can be seen on most game forums, and is evident even in this thread. The type of person that looks at a game they like and are so blinded by their zealous defending behaviors to see fault in what they are defending, and instead trying to poke holes in people's expectations and memories to try and make their precious game look better. Even late into the production of D3 Jay Wilson was saying "We went back and played the game and a lot of the things people remember never really happened" but you know what? I played the game religiously for 3-4 years, and even a week ago me and my friends decided to go do a complete playthrough and my memory seems pretty fitting.
So lets do this, instead of (no offense) making posts like Kisho's and Mormolyce trying to look at the negatives to try bringing Diablo 2 DOWN to Diablo 3's level, lets remember Diablo 2 and Diablo 3 AS THEY ARE NOW and make subjective comparisons because frankly I'm tired of the excuses people make for Diablo 3's lack of meat and potatoes when even Blizzard has acknowledged that fact.
I was trying to point out that a lot of the nostalgia is ill-placed.
I agreed with you that it isn't what it should be.
I'm cautiously optimistic about any expasion pack that may come to be as LoD is a huge reason why D2 is so fondly remembered. LoD fixed the train wreck that was D2. Hopefully Blizzard learns from all the mistakes they made, just as they did 10 years ago.
/sarcasm
It seems like a ton of people wish D3 was a D2 clone, because "it was better".
This brings me to a couple of comments...
-I remember Arctic gear dropping from hell Baal, and 99% of rares in the game being junk..
-I remember having to carry around a tome of tps and id scrolls(or talk to cain) to identify these crappy items just to find out that they are only valuable as ground decorations or gold... which had only 2 purposes in the game...(repairs and resurrecting mercs)
-I remember the only story for D2 (other than the cut-scenes), occurred if you manually listened to each npc, during which you could do NOTHING.
-I remember only a handful of viable end-game builds
-I remember having to farm for HR's which were rare as !@#% just to trade for gear that made your cookie-cutter build efficient.
-I remember much less dynamic combat.
-etc..
How can people say that this game sucks in comparison?
-Because Arctic gear was good for something. It had something that most gear pieces of that level didn't have, so if you happened to want to use it to an easy legit play through, it was available to you. Sure what the boss dropped was junk for you, but it wasn't always junk to everybody else.
-So now you don't have to carry around tomes of tp/id but in a regular run in Diablo 3 you most likely aresalvaging or selling over 100 pieces of loot just to keep up with repairs and make a tiny bit of side gold, which in this current economy is completely useless seeing as the most you'll come out with is 60-100K. What's different here?
-This is personal preference, but I enjoyed the story of Diablo 2 a lot more. Sure it was less convenient to listen, but at least it wasn't chocked full of predictable cliche's which makes the convenience of D3's story telling a lot less impressive.
-You remember wrong. The pally alone had Hammerdin, Auradin, FoHer, Smiter, Zealer, and charger, all playing much different then the rest. The amount of viable builds a paladin could go alone not to mention the less-viable but still workable builds almost surpasses the TOTAL amount of viable (very unique) builds that Diablo 3 players have options to. (And I'm not talking about changing Arcane Orb for Blizzard and calling it a new spec either).
I'll take time on this one since I really want to remind players how much variety D2 really had. I've already listed off the major Pally builds.. so.
so by my count you've got over 29 different builds that play completely different from each other and that's just from memory... Now I don't know how big your 'handfuls' are but I'm fairly sure there are only about a 'handful' (9 at best) viable builds in D3.
-Atleast the high runes were there and not there in mass. Apart from duping, if you got something as rare as jah, or bur, or god forbid you even got a ZOD or a Vex you felt GOOD. you KNEW you just struck gold but at the same time it could only net you 2 maybe 3 top tier items that didn't use those runes as runewords. You didn't find a 1900 DPS 2 hander just to sell it for 200 million gold just to look at the pretty numbers.
- Combat may have been less dynamic but the focus of Diablo 2 was on how you built your characters and what they could do. In Diablo 3 all you have is the dynamic combat and it stops there. The items are boring and generic ( Main stat, vit, resist all, IAS, CRIT, crit dmg on EVERY SINGLE ITEM YOU COULD GET IT ON), and the character development stops at the skill system.
To put it into perspective, lets look at shields. In Diablo 3, if you're going to use a shield it's going to be stormshield.. and that's about it - if you're using much else it's pretty subpar and there are thousands of shields similar to compare. In Diablo 2, Stormshield was a staple piece of gear for those in melee, the DR it provided was unparallelled with any other shield, but apart from its small bonuses and fast block rates that's all it was good for. Depending on your spec, you didn't always WANT Stormshield. You wanted HoZ, Spirit runeword, or lidless eye, exile, a specific rare shield or a few others.
To someone who is a veteran to the ARPG genre you could introduce them to Diablo 3 and I can confidently say that in less than 100 hours you could fully understand the scope of the game. you could understand what affixes you want on every character you play, you could understand the play style of every single build in the game and what items you want. Put that same player in Diablo 2 and I can guarantee that in the same 100 hours they could maybe learn 2 builds and what items to get on those builds to optimize them. I can almost guarantee that most players who play Diablo 3 or browse the forums couldn't even name me one D2 build gearset in completion without looking it up.
That is what makes Diablo 2.. SO much better.
Just want to point out...all the stuff you named in your post wasn't D2. That was LoD -- which included 7 patches over a year, an expasion, and then 3 more patches over 2 additional years, and then several more patches adding in additional content over the next several years.
At this point in development, we are so much farther than we were in D2 at the same time.
Necros had 1 viable build until patch 1.07 -- a full year after release. And to make this build, the necro had to be powerleveled basically 60 levels and was still unable to solo. Bone spells didn't scale past normal. Posion spells all relied on the necro having high melee stats, which was basically impossible to achieve in classic. Summons were 1 shot by mobs in Act 3...even with 20 skellies and 20 skelie mastery. Necro was forced to be a support character as a curser.
Paladins were a mess for a long time. Were they support/buffs? Were they DPS? They were similar to pallies in classic WoW. Auras or GTFO. People would rage in a hell game if a pally joined the game and didn't have high level auras.
Amazons could do bowazon, but required you to have a REALLY good rare bow. People would save their imbues for 3 good bows if an amazon was their main, wait till at least 75 and then try to roll 3.
Sorcs could do decent for a while -- Static Field was imba early on. Meteor was their only big damage spell for several patches and most monsters in hell had 75% fire resist which crippled them. Most were Teleport / static field support until 1.04 -- notice that was almost a full year after release...
Barbs were kings until 1.04. Dual leech rings + whirlwind + a lance. Any other build wasn't viable. A barb was the only character until 1.04 that could solo all of hell difficulty.
D2 at release was considered a huge insult to the Diablo series. Gold was worthless. The only thing that mattered was SoJs which people could easily get for a long time with magic find + gambling, especially if you had a Manald Heal and Nagelring.
Unique items were awful and capped at level 31 with Silks of the Victor Ancient Armor. There were no charms, no runes, no jewels, gems were awful (couldn't get socketed items with magic properties). People only used rare generated items until LoD. In classic, yes they were guaranteed to drop a unique/set quality item, but most of the time it was level 14-25 level garbage, and you would be in the 60s.(I think I could have filled several mules with Isenhart's set, let alone just the stupid breastplate)
Character builds were almost always the minimum str/dex to wear gear, and the rest vitality. Not a lot of variety.
Oh yeah, and once you made a decision about a skill point, it was set it stone. Even though a ton of early tactics were balanced out and fixed, they didn't refund your talent points. You were forced to reroll.
Should we have picked up where LoD left off though? Yes. I'm just suprised at all the nostalgia compared to actually remembering how bad D2 was for the first entire year. How ticked off the fanbase was and how many people made 'threats' if the expansion didn't fix all the issues.
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Played her a LOT in vanilla. But I haven't really played in the expansion much. I'm needing some help getting started -- I have been having trouble finding some builds for fresh 70's, does anyone have any recommendations?
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When seasons are released, are we still going to be capped for character numbers?
Will I have to delete a character that I have leveled and geared to make a seasonal character?
Just wondering if this has already been answered, have not been able to find the answer yet.
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http://us.battle.net/d3/en/profile/Kintner-1362/hero/43967933
I took down Azmodan in t5 yesterday just to see if I could do it (he went down really fast too) but it seems like most of my damage is exceptional burst, but I'm kinda feeling like a glass cannon. Can't survive bounties / rifts on T4, T3 can be challenging to survive on sometimes. Should I drop any of my damage for toughness boosting items?
Currently gambling to find more pieces of Akkan's, but no luck there.
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Any suggestions on an actual spec? I tried changing to Hammers, but it feels weaker than Fist. Any suggestions on what to spend my shards on?
0
Wearing pretty much the best gear I have. Have a few other items including a Votiya's, Kassar's, and a Final Witness.
Needing some help with build plus advice on what to spend my shards on. T1 is on farm, T2 can be a struggle. Any help would be appreciated!
0
Any chance I could talk to of doing a barb build as well later? Or possibly a money making guide? Current bankroll is only around 6 digits atm, so flipping isn't really an option.
0
Someone was kind enough to add me today, I clicked accept on the friend list and the person's name disappeared entirely from the friends box. Don't know why they're not on my friends list. Can't remember the name.
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My ID code is Kintner#1362.
0
I was trying to point out that a lot of the nostalgia is ill-placed.
I agreed with you that it isn't what it should be.
I'm cautiously optimistic about any expasion pack that may come to be as LoD is a huge reason why D2 is so fondly remembered. LoD fixed the train wreck that was D2. Hopefully Blizzard learns from all the mistakes they made, just as they did 10 years ago.
3
Just want to point out...all the stuff you named in your post wasn't D2. That was LoD -- which included 7 patches over a year, an expasion, and then 3 more patches over 2 additional years, and then several more patches adding in additional content over the next several years.
At this point in development, we are so much farther than we were in D2 at the same time.
Necros had 1 viable build until patch 1.07 -- a full year after release. And to make this build, the necro had to be powerleveled basically 60 levels and was still unable to solo. Bone spells didn't scale past normal. Posion spells all relied on the necro having high melee stats, which was basically impossible to achieve in classic. Summons were 1 shot by mobs in Act 3...even with 20 skellies and 20 skelie mastery. Necro was forced to be a support character as a curser.
Paladins were a mess for a long time. Were they support/buffs? Were they DPS? They were similar to pallies in classic WoW. Auras or GTFO. People would rage in a hell game if a pally joined the game and didn't have high level auras.
Amazons could do bowazon, but required you to have a REALLY good rare bow. People would save their imbues for 3 good bows if an amazon was their main, wait till at least 75 and then try to roll 3.
Sorcs could do decent for a while -- Static Field was imba early on. Meteor was their only big damage spell for several patches and most monsters in hell had 75% fire resist which crippled them. Most were Teleport / static field support until 1.04 -- notice that was almost a full year after release...
Barbs were kings until 1.04. Dual leech rings + whirlwind + a lance. Any other build wasn't viable. A barb was the only character until 1.04 that could solo all of hell difficulty.
D2 at release was considered a huge insult to the Diablo series. Gold was worthless. The only thing that mattered was SoJs which people could easily get for a long time with magic find + gambling, especially if you had a Manald Heal and Nagelring.
Unique items were awful and capped at level 31 with Silks of the Victor Ancient Armor. There were no charms, no runes, no jewels, gems were awful (couldn't get socketed items with magic properties). People only used rare generated items until LoD. In classic, yes they were guaranteed to drop a unique/set quality item, but most of the time it was level 14-25 level garbage, and you would be in the 60s.(I think I could have filled several mules with Isenhart's set, let alone just the stupid breastplate)
Character builds were almost always the minimum str/dex to wear gear, and the rest vitality. Not a lot of variety.
Oh yeah, and once you made a decision about a skill point, it was set it stone. Even though a ton of early tactics were balanced out and fixed, they didn't refund your talent points. You were forced to reroll.
Should we have picked up where LoD left off though? Yes. I'm just suprised at all the nostalgia compared to actually remembering how bad D2 was for the first entire year. How ticked off the fanbase was and how many people made 'threats' if the expansion didn't fix all the issues.