I started with a full defensive CM build with Crystal Shell, Prismatic Armor, and the CD reduction rune on frost nova, as well as Cold Blooded, CM, and Evocation as passives that were unchanged throughout. I took the fight time and my char sheet dps to compute the DPS Multiplier, which is the effective dps gain of the build. For example, at 100k dps using the full defensive build I would expect an effective dps of 247k. I also computed relative DPS of each spec meaning switching from Prismatic to Storm Armor increased dps by about 36%.
And in case there's any confusion, 'x' in the table means that skill was used.
| Storm Armor | Shocking Aspect | Pinpoint | Shards | Prism | DPS Multiplier | Relative DPS |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2.47 | 1 | |||||
| x | 2.78 | 1.13 | ||||
| x | 2.99 | 1.21 | ||||
| x | 3.01 | 1.22 | ||||
| x | 3.36 | 1.36 | ||||
| x | x | 4.06 | 1.65 | |||
| x | x | x | 4.25 | 1.72 |
The interesting information is that Storm Armor is about a 36% dps gain over prismatic armor. When you add Shocking Aspect it's a 65% dps gain over prismatic armor and about a 36% dps gain over pinpoint barrier. Adding Diamond Shards further increases the dps gain but it's only about a 4% dps gain by itself when you use Shocking Aspect. The dramatic decrease in survivability for the fight makes it very not worthwhile, but that could easily change depending on the fight. Rak for example, would probably be just fine with DS or prism.
I also expect the values for Shocking Aspect to be dependent of crit and attack speed, since it only procs on crits and higher attack speed should lead to more procs from WW, so with 50% crit, I'd expect the damage to increase by about 16%, or I'd expect the total dps gain to be about 90%, for a relative dps of 1.9. With a crit % of 52% I would expect Shocking Aspect to double your dps over prismatic armor, roughly speaking, with the same APS of 1.965 or so.
For reference, my stats at the time of the data collection were 104k dps buffed (110k with pinpoint), 1.965 attacks per second, 20 APoC, 1298 LoH, 1.5% Life Steal, 641 resist all and 4588 armor unbuffed, with 40.5k hp and 43% crit with Scoundrel. I also had about 400 life per second regen, just to complete the stats.
2
Generally speaking, you have separate stages:
In step 1+2, WD is absolute king - by far. However, that means you'll only get the full Haedrig 1-2 hours earlier than the other classes because in the end it's not what takes the most time.
Step 3 takes by far the most time, simply because of the amount of farming you need to do. Here you can switch to a different set. If you get lucky and get a UE set pretty fast, DH beats everything here (and I'm saying this as someone who really doesn't like DH).
Step 4 comes down to a mix of personal preference, experience, and skill. And this is where the lines become blurry because of the time spent in steps 3+4 combined, and it also depends on what we need to do for the season journey. Do you only want the stash tab? Then GR60 solo is the most you need to do; *every* class can easily do that without much difficulty. Do you want Guardian? Then the GR70 solo will be the most difficult thing, and some classes have it easier here (Invoker Crusader is a joke up to GR70 since you can stack toughness instead of CHD/CHC) but are at a disadvantage in other steps (Crusader is very slow in farming rifts in comparison).
1
Interestingly, even Arachyr has cleared GR93 (Yoda on NA) - which is #4 on his region and #20 world wide. So even that is a potential answer to OPs question. Note: He didn't ask for "what's the flavor of the month build that everyone and their dog is running". He asked for which builds are "strong at end game". Given the evidence from leaderboard, HT+Jade and to some extent even Arachyr have to be named here to give a true, objective, and unbiased answer to this question. I have no idea about Zuni and LoN builds, would be interesting if someone has cleared 90+ or 95+ with those (I know it's not showing but someone with a 91+ HT clear could've cleared 90+ with Zuni just a tier lower).
Saying it's 90% HT just reflects that 90% of the leaderboard is just following a popular build, but it says nothing about true powerlevels. We've had this every season. My prime example is always Season 3, 4 player, where everyone was assuming that DH was top DPS when in fact wizard was clear #1, but even top groups didn't switch in time, which resulted in a leaderboard that didn't show the "best" build composition, just the "most popular".
1
Blizzard has been doing this (soft reset) for 16 years in Diablo 2, so are you telling me Diablo 2 is not in "maintenance mode"? ;-)
The game was constantly patched for 2 years after it's release, then after 2 more years (2005) Pandaemonium was added, and another 5 years later (2010) was another sort of "bigger" patch with 1.13c. D3 might be at a similar state, where we might not see a "bigger" patch like 2.5 for another 1-2 years. Of course I hope I'm wrong and we get some awesome features at Blizzcon. We'll see, it's not too long of a wait anymore
1
A new season, but no new patch.
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/20275888/season-7-ending-soon-9-30-2016
I wouldn't be surprised if we see patch 2.5 with something interesting at Blizzcon and then a PTR one week after Blizzcon, for a 2 month testing period (Season 8-9 transition end of January). But of course could also be completely unrelated, and more likely this is just another sign that Diablo 3 is going into "long-term maintenance" mode and although small features might still come every now and then, development of the Diablo franchise is moving on to something else.
4
I love Diablo, and for me Diablo is a "game". When you say you like to make money out of the game, I feel like I'm not hearing correctly. What you're looking for is Wall Street, please don't mistake our beloved game for your personal income source - it was never meant to be that way and will never (and I'm quite confident to say that) never never again turn into that.
If you had asked about trading I'm personally against it but I'm sure many people would like it. But real money has no place in Diablo. So I'm pressing that "no" button as hard as I can.
1
Yep :-) Or both of us!
1
Same for mobile. I have no idea why people are so persistent on this, maybe it's because of Rhykker's video. I've tried to tell him in various comments including on his video post - he completely misinterpreted the post which he used as his "main evidence" for D3 mobile. In that very post they stated that the job required Direct X development experience, which is a Windows (desktop) only feature. It's like looking at a Baseball bat and saying "oh, you're going Swimming, cool!". Direct X in that job posting was the 100% evidence that whatever the unannounced project may be: it's not mobile. So basically: Mobile D3 is highly unlikely, and if so there's something else, because the job postings were all pointing in the opposite direction.
D2HD may be likely, but only because of the SC HD leak. But people need to understand that scaling up a sprite-based game such as Diablo 2 is essentially the same as developing an entirely new game. They can re-use the numbers and names from the items, but everything you see on screen - all graphics - need to be "remade" almost from scratch. Still: D2HD is more likely than D3X2 and D3mobile. But here as well - D2HD is also not the "unannounced Diablo project". Why? Because they hired concept artists and very basic positions which you need for a game in its very first stage, not something which is basically just a "game engine port". There's no need to have a concept artist pitch out concepts of the D2 story or the D2 monsters, because in a remake you want to stay as close as possible to the original. Takeaway: D2HD is possible and the most likely out of the D3, but not the unannounced project either.
MissCheetah's post sounds to me like something bigger. My assumption is that the "new Diablo project" is a slight deviation from the initial ARPG genre; much like World of Warcraft took the franchise to a new level. And that could mean any part of the Diablo universe. It's highly unlikely that the story is just continuing after D3 - I also remember somewhere in an interview some developer saying that Diablo was more or less a trilogy and it's finished. To be fair, with Cain dead I probably wouldn't care for another sequel. I could imagine an "origins" story which dives deeper into the magic of the Horadrim or that kind of stuff (I don't know too much about the lore but I think there could be interesting stuff there). Or it could be a world of constant battlefield in which Evil has won, providing a never-ending stream of enemies. It would be boring lore-wise to have no achievable "goal" (i.e., you'll never cleanse everything) but to be fair, 99% of successful games on the market these days have zero story either. In terms of gameplay/genre it could be anything; something they've got already (RTS, FPS, MMO, MOBA, ...) or something they don't have yet (a pure adventure or a sandbox game would make me super super excited but probably not be too popular) or even make a crossover and "invent" something new. The older ones among us might remember Blizzard for being the company that could take a small genre to a new level (which is what Diablo did, some even say they invented a new genre with Diablo).
We'll see. But putting your money on D3X2 or D3mobile... makes me wonder if it's just what people want, or if people have stopped following the news altogether. Just do some research and you'll see it's very unlikely.
1
Not saying the team is Wyatt only, but I think it's safe to say that not "a lot of people" are working on D3. There might be people working on something Diablo-related, though. I'm really surprised that so many people voted for the 2nd expansion in this poll - of all things it's the most unlikely option based on everything we know.
3
The group who did this is called "PoodleCorp". They asked for a ransom of 2k retweets to bring servers back up. Why are they doing this? I think no one knows... attention, obviously, if they ask for retweets. There is an article asking for the reasons after their popular entry to public (hacking Pokemon Go this summer):
https://mic.com/articles/149174/meet-poodlecorp-the-pok-mon-go-hackers-with-a-plan-to-make-society-crumble#.qvQWRwgOu
Pretty dumb if you ask me:
"Overall, the motive is to simply piss people off"
"We do it because we can, nobody can stop us and we just like to cause chaos" - the first part is ridiculous, because there's nothing difficult about a DDoS attack, it can even happen by accident.
"We are just having fun lol"
The problem is that hacking isn't difficult from a technical point of view, but it's a combination of having the problem-solving ability (which requires some cognitive capabilities) with a complete lack of responsibility and sanity (which requires a childish mind). In a nutshell: hackers are tech-savvy infants. And just like real infants, they don't need a reason for anything, they're just doing things before they think about it. When I was a kid and got into programming I thought as well how cool hacking is... and then I grew up and realized that the power that comes with such skills shouldn't be abused for stuff like this.
Basically, they're some guys standing next to an ice cream stand and every time a kid buys an ice cream, they beat the kid's hand so that the ice cream falls to the ground. It's the exact same action. In real-life absolutely no one (except Gru from Despicable Me) would find that funny, especially not after the 100th kid. It would also not go unpunished. But since on the Internet anonymity protects you from punishment for your wrongdoings, it's a different story. And of course many keyboard warriors say "lol" online to a kid complaining about their game breaking down. I wonder how many of them would also IRL "lol" to a kid whose ice cream is on the ground, especially when the ice cream store owner and the parent of the kid are next to the scenery.
4
Yes, this is probably fake. But I'm not sure what everyone is trying to show with the domain whois? GoDaddy is a popular registrar in the US, and DomainsByProxy is a service provided by GoDaddy to "hide" your registrar information. It's simply a placeholder for privacy reasons that anyone can order. If Blizzard were to buy a domain and they don't want to disclose it yet, they might use this service. And once the game is officially confirmed they could update the registrar data (or simply cancel the proxy contract which has to be renewed every year anyways). But citing the GoDaddy entry 3 times doesn't prove anything, just look at the official Diablo3.com entry which looks the same (except for no proxy data as there's no reason to hide anything).
A giveaway for fake though is the source code of the website. Super minimal HTML code, inline CSS, and doesn't look like any HTML code I've ever seen on a Blizzard website. The only instance I can remember seeing such sloppy/minimal website source code from Blizzard is when they hid hints to future release in the source code (as they did for the hidden lost numbers in the splash screen code that led to a hint at the D3 announcement). It also doesn't make sense to hide anything (domain owner, image, or some HTML code puzzle) if the very domain name already reveals everything...
So yeah, probably fake, but not because of the whois, but rather because of the website and its code.