The Full Guide to Obtaining the Infernal Machine, Important Information on Monster Powers, Blizzard Talks WW Barbs, Blizzard on

Obtaining the Machine by Scyberdragon
The first thing a player must do to fight the Uber Bosses is to create the Infernal Machine. In order to create the machine you need 3 keys and the plan to craft it.

  • Key 1 - Found on Goat Mutant Key Warden in the Fields of Misery (Act 1)
  • Key 2 - Found on Dune Dervish Key Warden in Dahlgur Oasis (Act 2)
  • Key 3 - Found on Morlu Spellcaster Key Warden in Stonefort (Act 3)
  • Infernal Machine Plan - Found on Terror Demon Key Warden in Silver Spire Lvl 1 (Act 4)
  • The Key Wardens will always spawn in each Inferno game.
  • Monster Level does not matter.
  • You must have a 5 stack of Nephalem Valor for the drops to even have a chance of dropping.
  • If you do it on monster level 10 with your 5 stacks, you are guaranteed the drop.



Using the Infernal Machine
After creating the machine, the player has to activate the portal to enter the three realms with the Uber Bosses.
  • The machine needs to be activated in the Heretic's Abode found in New Tristram.
  • The portal will open up one of the three locations randomly.
  • The Realm of Discord - King Leoric and Mahgda.
  • The Realm of Turmoil - Siege Breaker and Zoltun Kulle.
  • The Realm of Chaos - Ghom and Raknoth.
  • The machine only works to open a portal one time.
  • A new machine will need to be crafted each time to open another portal.
  • The portal remains open until the bosses are defeated or you leave game.
  • The Vengeful Eye, Devil's Fang, and Writhing Spine, needed to craft the Hellfire Rings, are not guaranteed drops.



Screenshots
Special thanks to Buleh and Moldran on Twitch. All images come from them streaming their games while getting the Infernal Machine and fighting the Uber Bosses.






Important Information on Monster Powers
Blizzard confirms some key information on Monster Powers, a new system now active on the 1.0.5 PTR.

Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

The current difficulty in 1.0.4 is roughly equivalent to Monster Power 2 or Monster Power 3 in 1.0.5. (Monster Power 0 is just the setting the game will default to when you first log in.)

Is Monster Power 0 = "No Monster Power" in the choose quest options?
Correct!

And if so, are the monster levels 61/62/63 for A1/2/3? Or even on 0 are they 63/63/63? Thanks.
Monster Power is considered "on" once you bump it up to Monster Power 1, at which point all monsters in Inferno become level 63. "No Monster Power" means that the system is technically "off," so monster levels will remain the same and you won't get any of the scaling XP/GF/MF boosts.

Must be bugged then, because MP1 the bosses tear through my char where normally it was only the rarest of the rare that could do that with my MF set.
Are you a) playing on your witch doctor and B) using a very similar build to what's in your profile? This is just for context so I can pass on the information (though you might also want to report this in the PTR Bug Report forum)

I haven't logged on yet to see but does the increase to monster power increase chances for higher end ilvl's drops in Act 1 or 2?.
So, the moment you go into Inferno with any kind of Monster Power (e.g. Monster Power 1 and above), all monsters become level 63, and they can now all drop iLevel 63 items the same way that Act III and Act IV Inferno currently do. However, bumping up Monster Power beyond 1 will not further increase your chance of getting iLevel 63 items.




Blizzard Talks WW Barbs
WW Barbs have been hitting the forums day and night talking about what will happen to their build. Blizzard hit the forums to talk about these changes.

Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Run the Like Wind makes WW/double tornado barb a very strong build by combining multiple benefits into one neat little package: life regeneration, Fury gain, damage, in-combat mobility, and run speed. It's all there. Ask just about anyone (or take a look at the posts in these forums) and they'll tell you WW barbs are incredibly powerful, and it's also one of the first builds people point to when the word "nerf" is mentioned.

I think most players -- whether they'd admit it publicly or not -- probably agree that the tornadoes left by sprinting (a skill that provides utility, huge mobility, and proc effects including Life On Hit and Into The Fray) shouldn't be so powerful in comparison to other skills that have restrictions on them. Like Hammer of the Ancients, which requires you to stand still, swing, and who's sole purpose is to deal damage. We'd like to bring the skill more in-line with other build options, and we think that from a pure design standpoint the problem is tornadoes triggering procs, most specifically Life on Hit.

The survivability you get from WW with LoH is definitely an outlier compared to other available builds. This wasn't a huge issue previously, but once we introduced Monster Power it became clear that we needed to make some adjustments. Basically, when we were doing our initial testing for 1.0.5, anything that didn't kill WW barbs in the first second of combat failed to be any sort of real threat, and that applied even after scaling Monster Power up to its higher settings. The amount of damage enemies do at higher Monster Power levels is pretty insane, and while the WW barb was still doing fine, it felt punishingly unfair to every other class and barbarian build.

This introduced another problem: if a WW barb could heal from empty to full health in half a second, then for any monster to pose a threat it would need to take you from full to dead in less than half a second. We could certainly make damage more spikey, but most players don't enjoy being insta-gibbed, and we tend to agree that going from full health to DEAD without ever seeing your health hit those intermediate values can make combat feel a little shallow. Having times when you want to play more conservatively vs. more aggressively can add depth to combat and make it more interesting, so (in general) we try to avoid creating situations where spikey damage is the norm.

So, even though we really liked the build, in the end all the data was telling us that WW needed to be changed.

They like nerfing fun builds.
Just to give you some history, when we started to troubleshoot how we could better balance Run Like Wind, we didn't want to remove the ability for tornadoes to trigger procs completely. Rather than break the build, we wanted to find ways to reduce the sheer efficiency of it without removing the fundamental mechanics that make it work. We also discussed options outside of adjusting its proc coefficient, too:
  • We looked at just nerfing Sprint's tornado damage, which would allow us to keep the core mechanics without the build being greatly more effective than every other build in the game, but the life regen still made the game too bursty at the higher Monster Power levels.
  • We also looked at reducing the run speed. But, the running speed boost is baked into Sprint, so it felt wrong to consider changing that aspect of the skill. The fact you have in-combat mobility is a fundamental property of leaving tornadoes behind as you sprint, so if we removed that aspect it'd be the same as deleting the skill from the game, and we're not interested in doing that.
  • The last alternative was Fury cost. You gain Fury with WW, but it comes from Battle Rage – Into the Fray. Into The Fray seems to interact just fine with other skills, which really underscores that the real issue is the tornadoes’ ability to proc effects.
After a lot of internal testing and heated debates, we ultimately decided to address the core of the issue and reduce Run Like Wind's proc coefficient, and we brought it down by a significant amount (from 0.2 to 0.08). We want to make sure whirlwinding is still viable, though, so to compensate, we also dropped down Whirlwind's Fury cost from 16 to 9. This should make it possible for players to still whirlwind continuously, but it lessens the need to have Sprint in order to use Whirlwind at all.

Of course, we're really looking forward to players jumping on the PTR, testing out the changes first-hand, and sharing their feedback. We're still working out a few kinks with the PTR client, but hopefully we can start getting that feedback pretty soon now. :)




Blizzard on Energy Twister

Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

In 1.0.4, we reduced Energy Twister's proc coefficients from 0.25 to 0.125, and applied that change to four of the five runes. Problem is, we intended that change to apply to all five runes including Storm Chaser, so we're correcting that mistake in 1.0.5 (it's going from 0.5 to 0.125 to match the others). It could probably be considered a bug fix at this point, but for the sake of clarity we're listing it as a normal change in the PTR patch notes. We might change that plan for the live notes, but it really depends on your feedback. :)

As for why we changed Energy Twister's proc coefficient at all, Wyatt summed that up nicely in his original class preview blog for 1.0.4: http://us.battle.net...n/blog/6939564/

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