DiabloFans

With all the DB and bounty builds appearing these days, and a lack of cosmic strands in said builds, i figured I'd post this.

One of Cosmic Strand's main benefits is really the increased movement speed. The free teleport from wormhole isn't on the standard GCD. So even with aetherwalker the Wizard with wormhole run will travel faster than the Wizard without it.

I know most people would be satisfied with 500-600 or whatever DBs/hour, but for some easy maximizing of travel speed, cosmic strand isn't very hard to put into most builds.

Not going to put a video of it, but you can easily test it yourself by selecting the wormhole rune if you don't want to craft a cosmic strand.

Quote from AlanDrs»

Try hardcore. It brings much more sense into your gameplay, makes skill matter more, and also makes achievements more valuable. Also quite easy to get into leaderboards, I just closed gr60 with my monk a couple of days ago which brought me into top400. Felt pretty cool. And my wiz is still somewhere in top1000 with as low as 48.

Oh and btw I see like everyone wants to get to the top of leaderboards and stuff.. But guys:

1. It is meant to be competitive so the number of places on "the top" is limited. Whenever you get there - someone else gets kicked out. So the fact that it requires to farm exp 8hrs a day to get to the top seems pretty ok to me. At least it feels more fair than someone getting to the top because of some super rare drops like 0,0001%.

2. You dont actually have to push the leaderboards to enjoy the game. After all D3 is not meant to be highly competitive. Try HC as I said above.

HC problems also extend more than ever now that most classes can create server lag in higher GRifts.

Quote from fritzlsepp»

1. join communities and join some runs

2. add players you had fun with to fl, do the first step, dont wait to get added

3. try to group up with atleast 1 from fl to get easily 2 players from community

4. see 2.

5. see 3.

these people are usually online when youre online and a good friendlist is more worth than any clan. dont hesitate to use friend broadcast when looking for something or just ask people without grp / idling in menus.

i filled my list like this last season and now its like i got to apologize all the time for joining another grp as soon as i come online.

I know its offtopic here, but if youre a very active player who is enjoying the game, just missing the mates, i had to give you some advice to fix that

Quote from st0rmie»

Quote from cying»

Quote from st0rmie»

Of course opinions are not unanimous. But I definitely think RMAH/AH distorted the game more, and was harder to ignore, for people who hated it. Hate seasons? Don't play season. End of story. Your non-seasonal game is completely untouched.
There was no "non-AH" mode you could play if you hated the way it distorted the game.

you literally had to press a button to get to ah or rmah. if you didnt want to, you didnt have to click that button. people felt compelled to ah to be competitive.

Exactly. You could not play a multiplayer game without it being distorted by the AH. If you only ever want to play solo, then you could ignore the AH if you wanted to. Then you only collided with the fact that the difficulty and loot drops had been tuned around the assumption of AH usage.

Quote from Polrayne»

Quote from TryHardEnmity»

I'm top 50 on the leaderboards, I was 20 at the highest a week ago, haven't been able to log on since. Saying that I'm Paragon level 650, everybody surrounding me is about 800-900+. I only play 2-3 hours a day, I haven't been able to play AT ALL for a week straight.

You can get onto the leaderboards without playing 8 hours a day, as any class

It's more towards the end of the seasons you will be punished by the Paragon levels for not playing all day every day. I agree fully that it takes the fun out of the game, the fact that time played is actually a bigger decider than any amount of skill that goes into the game, the ultimate combo of the players in the top 5 ranks are they have both.

I really feel they should just add a Paragon level cap to seasons, it sounds harsh, people shouldn't be punished more for playing more. But overall it will make the leaderboards MORE competitive, boiling it down to more skill than time played. I know the game has a huge luck factor with loot / GR composition but it feels like it's way too aimed at whoever plays the most wins at the moment.

Like I said before, I hit 20 being severely under-played to my fellow Demon Hunters, so there is a factor of skill involved. But overall, time wins the race

Thanks TryHard for the response - I feel like you understand the heart of why I made the thread.

Folks - I never said I wanted to be Rank 1. Like all things in life, you do have to put in the time if you want to earn the best. I know that I can not dedicate the time to be at the top, so therefore I had no aspiration to try and be at the top. I do not begrudge Quin69, or streamers like him, that play this game as their job and dedicate massive amounts of time playing. This thread was not a complaint of "Blizzard sucks/I want something for nothing/streamers blow" rather this thread is talking about "what do you do, when your character is pretty good and all you need is two ancient weapons?"

Nobody has answered that. Most of the threads fall in two categories: "don't base your gameplay on others, do what you want to have fun" or "stop whining."

I'm currently putting together one last piece of gear so I can do the support healing Monk build and start farming experience like everyone else. If I'm graced in my experience gaining travels with an ancient versions of my current weapons for the SSS build, then I'll start grinding out the GRs. When I reach a new limit I can't beat, I'll go back to farming experience.

THIS is how people progress. In one aspect of the game - the leaderboards.

Let me be clear - I WANT to progress on the leaderboards. I do not want to be at Rank 1 because I do not want to play 12 hours a day, seven days a week. However (before TryHard's response) I felt as though even if I played three to four hours, five nights a week, I would never come near being, even, in the top 200, because most folks are fantastically high in Paragon levels. I'll give it a shot and see how far I can go.

I do not want to play another class. I'll idly work on achievements. So LET ME ASK AGAIN - what else is left for me to do. I want to play my Monk. I want to progress in the GRs. If I know that most likely will never hit a cool level in the Leaderboards (200 or better) because of lack of Paragon, then the game is sorta over before it started - because I can't dedicate 10 hours a day farming experience.

That was my question. And then I went on to speculate on what a game could be like, if there were not gimmicks and Paragon issues. So players had to rely upon slightly better gear (the point of Diablo, imo) and skill. I mentioned the AH/RMAH because for me, it was always something there to do with my hours of farming and the gear that I found. You never knew when you would find something that would bring in the gold and subsequently real money if you chose to go that route.

I'm not saying "BLIZZARD SUCKS - DIABLO 3 IS DEAD!" I'm saying, let's cap Paragon, remove gimmicks (as Quin has suggested) and let good old RNG and game play skill be the guiding force for achievement.

Thoughts?

(TryHard, if you made it this far in the wall of text - love your guides!)

D3 hasn't been about skill for a long time, long before GRs entered the picture. The fact remains that the rifts and the gear/stats do more than players are able to overcome. The only exception to when skill *might* have been the main factor in D3 is probably during launch week, before the first set of nerfs came in. Even then, choice of class was probably more relevant than skill.

The way the game is structured isn't meant to be competitive from a skill standpoint. It's built around item hunting and paragon farming. I could reliably keep top 1% rankings in games like WoW and StarCraft. However for ranking systems such as D3 I generally only keep high leaderboard standings (I have no idea where 1% rankings would be, maybe top 100 or so?) for the start of the season, or if some class happens to be significantly underplayed.

Until the method of ranking is changed, the game is going to be about gear and rift RNG. I had 4 characters in the top 1000 solo boards earlier in the season, and they all relied on specific rifts, mostly going through like 10-30 rifts just to get a spot on the boards. I don't think any of them even took a top 100 spot aside from my Wizard yesterday.

Just yesterday I tried playing a Vrys Wizard which I really don't know how to play too well (I only played Vrys like 6 hours this season, probably a third of that sitting in town trying to figure out the skills). I happened to have decent Vrys gear in the stash from playing my DB farming Wizard, so I stuck it on a new Wizard and fished through like 20 rifts. Came out ranked 75 on the leaderboard. Of the 20 or so rifts, only like 3-4 of them were even able to clear to the RG before the timer. The rest of the rifts were just garbage. bad mobs, bad layout, bad RG, etc. Had a run on the same difficulty (GR63) take 22 minutes (and even had one I couldn't kill the RG at all), while my clear was 13 minutes. Just all rift RNG.

Quote from BlacKcuD»

Quote from TianZi»

You can fix the bugs with certain plans/items/gems not dropping by reinstalling the game. Don't know which specific game files effect it, so not sure if there's any easier ways.

That was probablly just a coincidence with more runs, reconnecting to the servers and waiting and doing yet another run. Nothing of the drops is tied to your local files ever. That would be paradise for cheaters.

It's really such an easy fix if they meant for D3 to be a competitive game in the first place. All the need is to rank based on average time of X number of Grifts in a row. Fail one, and it's doesn't count.

This way RNGing high rifts is out of the picture since you have to be able to consistently clear whatever you are attempting. So players will have to compete based on time, while playing on a difficulty they can actually clear vs a variety of mobs. At the same time it would naturally be less annoying to try for rank since at least you're playing rift difficulties you can complete.

This is the reason why PvP tournaments in most games use a "Best Of" format, so RNG doesn't become the main factor. D3 using a best of 1 rift format makes it impossible to be competitive with skill as the main factor.

You can fix the bugs with certain plans/items/gems not dropping by reinstalling the game. Don't know which specific game files effect it, so not sure if there's any easier ways.

I think one of the biggest things with Wizard archon damage is you need to stay alive. I only played my Wizard about 6 hours this season (4th class i'm playing), but i noticed that after dieing the chance of dieing again in a big pack seems really high. I cleared up to 57 so far, and I had 6 or 7 deaths (mostly on the RG), and as a result it took like 6 minutes just to kill the RG even with striken gem. In the parts of the rift when I wasn't dieing the clear speed was going significantly faster than the timer.

I tried playing WD today (leveled my WD yesterday), and it definitely still causes lag with the Acid could variant of Helltooth. I was already able to cause a slight amount of noticeable lag in a solo lv60 rift. Meanwhile I've run plenty of 60-65 4man rifts on my Uli monk with double barb+healer and they're pretty much lag free (for all HotA, WW, and SS barbs), even on the very fast ~4 minutes tier60 runs we did.

This is on US server, and it is definitely not fixed.

I dislike a lot of the things you like in D3, but I'll still be around for a long time for the game engine. Game engine is by far the biggest thing they did right, which way too many companies fail at.

Unfortunately with the direction of the game, I probably won't see most of my early days D3 fans on again. However the overall direction does appear to appeal to most of my RoS friends, so there's still people online when I do log in to play.

Quote from ruksak»

Quote from Jamoose»

One of their main guidelins that they talked about even back at the first blizzcon after D3 was announced which was in 08 i think, was the idea that they don't want this to be a D2 with better graphics. Why would they add the horadric cube in D3? It doesn't make sense not in terms of lore and not in terms of gameplay. This cube does totally different things from what we've seen so far and has nothing to do with transmuting items and combining them to create other items or artifacts. I think you guys are just complaining for the sake of complaining.

Good morning, Moose.

Jay Wilson's comments were "We don't want this to be D2.5".

Josh told us at the 2014 Blizzcon that they want to bring more of what we love about d2 into d3.

...and the crowd cheered. A mixed message? Or a paradigm shift?

Color me confused........

they don't want this to be a D2 with better graphics.

Well....they certainly don't have to worry about that. It isn't.

The devs could say anything and there will be people cheering. The player base of D3 since launch was split up of people from so many games that they could literally point the game in any direction and there would be a group of people cheering.

If I were to take a guess, I'd guess more people that picked up D3 at launch came from WoW than players returning from D2.

A lot of players never really cared about D2 but wanted D3 for what they advertised. The original direction of D3 that Jay Wilson tried to create was meant to be a challenge rather than a hack&slash.

The last time i played a non-blizzard game it was a free game. And the last time i paid for a non-Blizzard game, it was a $5 game. So considering I'm playing the Blizzard games, I have high expectations for them. If my expectations for Blizzard games were as low as other games, then I'd probably be playing other games.

I spent $5 in HotS and $10 in hearthstone, and I still like to write in all my complaints about those games. Someones got to complain or nothing gets better ~_~

It doesn't matter that RMAH already covered the expense of all my Blizzard games and computers to play them for the rest of my life. If I'm playing a game, I'm going to complain when there are things that I think need improving. Other games get plenty of complaints too, it's just harder to notice because most games have a much smaller playerbase.

I've played some DH, Barb, and Wizard this season, and I thought delrasha wizard seemed the easiest by quite a bit.

The thing is barb feels pretty RNG in terms of good rift/bad rift, and having special weapons feels pretty much required (either the 1h set or the boulder breaker). The you get to the RG and certain ones are pretty difficult to kill as melee, especially if your gear sucks. I have like 40 hours played on the barb and wasn't even able to clear 50. I never got an ancient bould breaker, I'm sure a good one would have made 50 easy.

For DH I had like 80 hours played before I even beat 50. I did have more than 5 minutes left over, but the run still felt dangerous most of the way though. If i had more act 5 mobs I easily could have lost that 5 extra minutes. Somehow I never managed to get a good ancient nats, balefire, or calamity 1h so I didn't try the nats setup.

For Wizard I had an okay rift, then spent 7 minutes killing Bloodmaw. But the main difference is that there were hardly any times where I felt like I was at too much risk of dieing. The thing with Wizard is you can use pretty much any ancient 1h weapon, or just go craft a devastator or something if you don't want to find a weapon. I only had like 30 hours played on the Wizard when I cleared 50, and that was only with 3-4 ancient items.