Diablo 3 new patch

[Monte Carlo]

I've been gambling blood shards for items. All of them suck, I've done about sixty and got one item that was half-decent.

 

I'm nowhere near kitted out with uber-gear, either.

[IndiraLightfoot]

Hi all! Here's a lengthy report from Sanctuary!

 

I begin with a little Easter Egg, which can be seen sometimes in the cemetery of Westmarch. There's a cluster of neon-pink mushrooms that says "Bad data ;)"

 

And, finally, Dreamteam!!

 

I’m most proud so far of this achievement, mostly because it took quite some time to get it – and it was really fun in the process. Getting all the classes to level 70 in softcore mode and also having them beat Malthael black and blue is very satisfying.

 

I’ve also confined myself in my playing. How so? Well, I have refrained myself from playing adventure mode (except for my very first char that made it through – she did three nephalem rifts and found no upgrade, except one Kadala swap of a pair of pants). None of my characters have twinked one another since I started RoS. No gifts via the shared stash. The only gems they’ve slotted are marquis gems that I have dozens of for each type. I haven’t crafted any items for them or enhanced items.

So, in essence,  the items they are wearing are what they’ve found while playing Act V, or in some cases, as they rushed through Act I-IV in order to get there. Here are the statistics for each and every character. Mind you, they include boosts from passives and follower skills, but I figure, it’s more honest to show the stats for the characters with the skills I’m using for them. If anything, it’s interesting to see how random the drops are in D3 RoS. Moreover, now you get to compare your stuff with an average player like me, and also, you get a sense of the RNG-workings behind it all. I list my lvl 70 softcore characters in order of their DPS, and after a fourth passive has been picked. All values are from before patch 2.04, and they include Paragon level boosts.

 

Wizard:

D: 354K

T: 2.9M

H: 9,471

Life: 306K

Res: 946-1,111

Lvl 61+ item upgrades found playing lvl 60-70: y weapon lvl 70, set pants lvl 70, y gloves lvl 61, y bracers lvl 61, legend amulet lvl 70, y shoulders lvl 70

***

Wiz follower – Scoundrel (interestingly, unchanges since D3 vanilla – an extreme CC:er):

D: 2.8K

T: 306K

Life: 203K

Res: 84

 ----------

DH:

D: 225K

T: 3.8M

H: 8,161

Life: 350K

Res: 618-862

Lvl 61+ item upgrades playing lvl 60-70: legend helm lvl 67, y chest lvl 66, y amulet lvl 66, legend shoulder lvl 67, y bracers lvl 61, y gauntlets lvl 61, legend belt lvl 65, legend ring lvl 70, y ring lvl 61, y pants lvl 66, set item weapon lvl 67, legend boots lvl 65

***

DH follower – Templar:

D: 49K

T: 1.2M

Life: 295K

Res: 215-260

Lvl 61+ item upgrades playing lvl 60-70: y focus lvl 70, y weapon lvl 66

-----

 

WD:

D: 153K

T: 3.7M

H: 5,580

Life: 391K

Res: 1,142-1,258

Lvl 61+ item upgrades found playing lvl 60-70: y belt lvl 69, legend ring lvl 61, y wpn lvl 70, y pants lvl 66, y bracers lvl 70

***

WD follower – Enchantress:

D: 153K (She’s stronger than her mistress!)

T: 1M

Life: 300K

Res: 732-818

Lvl 61+ item upgrades playing lvl 60-70: 2 legend rings lvl 61 & lvl 66, 1 legend weapon (a great Skorn) lvl 69, 1 y focus lvl 61

-----

 

Crusader:

D: 144K

T: 3.5M

H: 12,400

Life: 281K

Res: 692-961

Lvl 61+ item upgrades playing lvl 60-70: legend weapon lvl 65, y shield lvl 67, y boots lvl 61, y pants lvl 61, set item belt lvl 66, y bracers lvl 61, y gloves lvl 66, y shoulders lvl 61, y helm lvl 66

***

Crusader follower – Templar:

D: 94K

T: 1.9M

Life: 440K

Res: 148-283

Lvl 61+ item upgrades playing lvl 60-70: legendary focus lvl 61, legendary mace lvl 67, y amulet lvl 61, y ring lvl 61

-----

 

Barbarian:

D: 141K

T: 4.4M

H: 29,500

Life: 399K

Res: 484-733

Lvl 61+ item upgrades playing lvl 60-70: y wpn lvl 68, legend shield lvl 69, y pants lvl 61, legend belt lvl 66, y ring lvl 61, y gloves lvl 61, y bracers lvl 61, y chest lvl 66, y shoulders lvl 61

***

Barbarian follower – Enchantress (yet again, a follower matches her mistress):

D: 137K

T: 653K

Life: 215K

Res: 678-714

Lvl 61+ item upgrades playing lvl 60-70: legend weapon lvl 68, legend amulet lvl 70

-----

 

Monk:

D: 140K

T: 3.6M

H: 16,000

Life: 283K

Res: 706-794

Lvl 61+ item upgrades playing lvl 60-70:  legend weapon lvl 69, legend weapon lvl 69, y pants lvl 61, y ring lvl 66, y ring lvl 61, y belt lvll 61, legend chest lvl 70, y gloves lvl 61, y bracers lvl 66, y shoulders lvl 61, y spirit stone lvl 70

***

Monk follower – Enchantress:

D: 60K

T: 330K

Life: 177K

Res: 217-323

Lvl 61+ item upgrades playing lvl 60-70: y weapon lvl 68

-----

 

 

Some thoughts and more info: My top two characters before RoS dropped were my Wizard, followed my WD. They were in a league of their own. My WD has kept an entire Zuni-set, and it has worked pretty well all the way up to lvl 70 on hard/expert Difficulty. However, my wizard has got quite a few new items, and she had no real sets to speak of, and now she can handle RoS T1, and even T2, but slowly. I still think she has been my luckiest character here. Furthermore, notice how consistent the dps of the other characters is? A ballpark number of 140K-155K. It seems the engine that dishes out items has a pretty stricked drop policy for weapons lvl 61-70.

 

I’ve also had the honour of playing all the classes now, and I’ve been surprised at how fun they all are. In D3 vanilla, I almost detested DH. It felt like playing a tumbling superhero-acrobat with an Uzi. I usually used Hungering Arrow with Rapid Fire. However, now I happened to get a legendary belt at lvl 65 – Sash of Knives, with 30% increased damage for Fan of Knives. I picked the version where you get rid of the cooldown. Then, I picked a passive that made Fan of Knives even stronger. But that passive also increased grenades, so I picked a hatred-generating grenade rune, along with another passive, which made my DH into a grenadier. 10 minutes later I found som legendary chakram-boosting boots, so I picked a 2 minute-swirling chakram around my body, and before I knew it, I had created a weird build that loves to stand in the midst of battle and just blast, shred and dice the opponents. And it’s very easy to play. It has a nice flow to it, all items you pass break neatly, and the new VO for it is mature and brilliant. So, atm, DH is my 2nd favourite class. Who would have thought that a month ago?

Here she is in all her glory!

And here is my skill-setup, which makes for one very entertaining DH-build!

 

Finally, here’s my current favourite class list:

1. Wizard
2. DH
3. Monk
4. Crusader (they’ve nerfed my build now, though)
5. WD
6. Barbarian (Still, a very nice class – better than expected in RoS)

[Malcador]

Well ok they pasted well for Indira. Crusader feels a lot more potent after the patch, at least.

[IndiraLightfoot]

Alrightie then! Ready for another Sanctuary-report?

 

I've started adv mode with my DH (as she's my new-found love), and did a couple of rifts. I reckoned the drops were pretty bad. However, at the end of rifts there were some tough guardians to make up for it, and some of them didn't give up their loot even after death!!

This was some Ghom-like rift guardian, and his toxic vapours lingered forever. No, I'm not kidding! I don't think it's intended, since all the loot was underneath, so getting each piece was putting your life on the line.

 

The allure of Torment 1 difficulty became too strong for me, so I began trying it out with my DH (see specs for it in my lengthy post above). Monte Carlo even joined me in my new endeavour, but like he put it, we "couldn't even dent them".  Well, after he left, I 've kept at it, and also I began crafting and using Kadala and the Mystic. Well, two days later, having played my DH exclusively. She has found or Kadala-swapped items so that all but two items on her body is not legendary items that I've then adjusted at Myriam's stand. Kadala is a cruel mistress. It took me 33 quivers to get a legendary one. And I think I had 12 gloves going before I got some nice legendary pair. My equipment now include shoulders that heal me to full health if I'm about to die, boots that make me faster, the lower health I have, and a cloak that casts Caltrops for me (I started using that skill to slow people already and gain that nice 10 % crit chance bonus when standing on one).

 

I've also crafted a few slots onto legendary items, since gems are more powerful than I first realized. I saved and saved to get some royal ruby to put in my legendary 2H crossbow that freezes critters for like every 10th shot. Since I had played all characters through, I already had almost all gem plans in place over at Shen's, so now it's just a matter of cost and patience. I've also changed my Vault to a rune that stuns opponents when I roll over them. Very useful vs bosses. In essence, I've made a fleeting tank-DH. I always run into the fray and stand on an automagically placed caltrop circle and just give them Fan of knives hell, and pump up hated with grenades. Some day, I'll transmog my crossbow into a proper weapon, a dagger or a sword of some sort. She's easy to play, and if anything goes bad, I have legendary bracers (crafter through recipe) that lowered primary resource cost with like 30 %, so Discipline vaults and caltrops are basically free. I just roll away. I've also plenty of healing when bombarding them with hatred-generating grenades and 57 % crowd control reduction makes her Jailer, Frozen, etc, almost laughable. It's a pure joy now. And her she is, ready for torment 2, with almost 450K in DPS:

 

[Monte Carlo]

Indira I'm going to need your help kitting out my Barb and Crusader.

[Azure79]

I've been playing for short bursts. A Rift here and there before bedtime. 

 

I am quite enjoying the experience, dare I say, almost as much as my D2 days. I still find the account bound legendary system quite restrictive as I want to give some items I've found to friends. Surely Blizzard can find some kind of compromise such as if someone is on your friends list for 30 days or so, you can trade freely with them.  

[Monte Carlo]

Strange, my Level 66 Barbarian feels more durable than my level 70 Crusader. I've got 27 or 28 Paragon levels.

[IndiraLightfoot]

Strange, my Level 66 Barbarian feels more durable than my level 70 Crusader. I've got 27 or 28 Paragon levels.

 

Consider this loadscreen tip:  "Barbarians and Monks have 30% damage reduction unlike other classes like Crusaders (sic!), Demon Hunters, Witch Doctors and Wizards". Although, somewhat surprising, since it is a tanky holy paladin, it actually is, at its core, just as squishy as my DH atm. Weird, but true!

And yes, I also felt that my Barbarian was more of a fortress than my Crusader.

 

[marelooke]

Thanks to Indira's extensive report a bit earlier in the thread I realized my Wizard was kind of ready for T1 (~500k damage, 2.2m toughness, ~380 resist all) so I started off easy (*wink* *wink*) by trying to kill Urzael. Ouch. But I managed it after a whole bunch of deaths (that fight has made me seriously wish I could zoom out further)

 

So far I managed to kill Urzael (hard), The Skeleton King (easy), The Siegebreaker Assault Beast (easy) and Belial (hard) on T1, not sure if there's an enrage timer, but if so I was probably skirting it on Belial as he started one shotting me with his swirly pool spam move, took me quite a bit of swearing to get him to eat dust.

 

I must say the difficulty on T1 is seriously spiky. Usually I mow through packs quite easily, but then I run into some really annoying combinations that just rip me to shreds as if I were made of paper. One of the most annoying combinations I had yesterday was Thunderstorm + Jailer + Frozen + Teleporter. Blink and Wormhole weren't enough to be able to dodge enough of their stuns (had a similar pack but with that arcane AOE orb instead of Teleporter which was even better fun, especially in confined space ).

 

As for Crusaders, they now have a 15% reduction to all damage taken since the last patch, my (low level) crusader certainly started feeling a lot more sturdy all of a sudden.

[IndiraLightfoot]

 

As for Crusaders, they now have a 15% reduction to all damage taken since the last patch, my (low level) crusader certainly started feeling a lot more sturdy all of a sudden.

 Oh, I missed that important bit of info! I think I missed the entire patch. Thanks for letting us know. Another piece of info that many miss because it was hotfixed last month is that the elemental skill damage bonus no longer applies to physical damage skills, so you need to pick elemental skills now to have that sweet extra eDPS from items with +% elemental skill damage. It should be called iDPS, because its invivisible in the stats shown. Weird, but true!

[IndiraLightfoot]

This is also very interesting. It was hotfixed a couple of days ago, it seems:

"Hey all,

A series of hotfixes will be deployed today making more adjustments to overall reward structures within the game.

I wanted to take a minute to explain the reasons for the changes that we are making. A driving goal of our design has been to make killing monsters feel rewarding, we want you all to find tons of cool items that you are excited about but more importantly we want you to have fun while doing it.

Rifts have always been intended to be the most efficient play method in the game, currently they aren’t for a number of reasons. Part of this has to do with the high level of efficiency in farming that players find doing things like farming Manglemaw, Razorclaw and any other number of unique monsters. Another contributing element is that farming chests without having to actually fight monsters is far more effective than actually fighting the monsters. It is very important to us that chests are exciting to find and feel rewarding but presently they are far too common and reliable to farm in certain areas of the game.

Finally Kadala, she has always been intended to give players some degree of control over their item upgrades. While we don’t want players to simply pick and choose from a list of items at an excessively high cost, we do want you to have an answer to the question “How do I upgrade my boots?” Kadala is meant to be that answer, she is meant to give you some direct control over the types of items you find. Since we are increasing the overall reward structure of the game she is also going to be increasing but by a larger amount than the rest of the changes since she didn't feel rewarding enough to us.

Without further delay here is a list of the changes that will be coming in the hotfix.

The Bad!
Unique monsters now drop less items.
*Uniques were dropping far more loot than their difficulty would warrant.

Chest spawns have been thinned out across all acts of the game.
*Ideally chests become less common and something that players can’t flip games to farm. It is our goal to make them feel exciting and rewarding when you find them.

The Good!
The bonus legendary drop rate for rifts is being increased from 25% to 100%!
*This means that while in a rift your chance to find a legendary item from monsters, chests, elites, and everything else is double what it is outside of rifts. No this does not mean opening bounty bags in rifts is the new hotness. ;P

Kadala’s legendary drop rate has been significantly increased.
*Blood Shards are meant to be a compelling element of rift rewards and something players are excited to get."

 

This means that Rifts, Kadala and Bloodshards are your best bets right now. I was playing with Bendu in our clan today, and out of the blue dropped a really nice pair of Firewalkers, and know I think I know why. Bendu is a lucky charm and read the hotfix above.
 

[Bendu]

Bow down to Octavian!

 

[IndiraLightfoot]

That shield is humongous, Bendu! I love it!! It's like a sarcophagus lid. It's so bizarre!

[Malcador]

The game seems more sinister in German.

[Monte Carlo]

Everything seems more sinister in German.

 

'Nipple,' for example, translates into 'breast wart.'

[IndiraLightfoot]

Ich singe aus angst vor dem dunkeln ein lied
und hoffe, dass nichts geschieht.

ein bisschen frieden, ein bisschen sonne
auf dieser erde, auf der wir wohnen.
ein bisschen frieden, ein bisschen freude,
ein bisschen wärme, das wünsch ich mir.
ein bisschen frieden, ein bisschen träumen
und dass die menschen nicht so oft weinen.
ein bisschen frieden, ein bisschen liebe,
dass ich die hoffnung nie mehr verlier.

 

Here are some sweet words that I assure you are anything but sinister, regardless of their extreme clustering of consonants.  
 

Edited April 15, 2014 by IndiraLightfoot

[Malcador]

Giving this game a break as I'm seeing the treadmill a bit more clearly and it's not that fun to hear that legendary ping and then find out it's some POS even for my newly 70 monk.  Amazed at my paragon 200 friends though.

[Bendu]

Meet Dea Roma. Level 66. Tomorrow I will start some Torment I runs. Let's see what nice loot we will get for her...

 

[Monte Carlo]

OK, I've got my characters (Monk / Bbn / Crusader) to 70/56 or thereabouts. With my barb I'm able to Torment 1 most rifts and bounties.

 

Who's up for some Torment 2+ so I can see how I get on?

[IndiraLightfoot]

Although I've put RoS on hold for awhile, I have two characters that I think could join you (barely) at T2 and higher: my DH and my wizard.

[Hiro Protagonist II]

Got an invite to the cow level. Totally hilarious. The health globes are beef steaks.  There were so many shrines and pylons. And something like 5 Conduit pylons as well. We tore through everything.

 

And we came across the Lord of Bells on the 6th level. In my excitement in taking the screen shot, I died but luckily it wasn't HC.

 

 

The Rift then went on and on and eventually ended on level 10. Definitely the best rift in the game.

 

 

But I did get the achievement which was great.

 

Edited May 3, 2014 by Hiro Protagonist II

[Monte Carlo]

Ha ha ha look at dem Paragon Levels. I think I'm nails and I'm 59.

[MrBrown]

Finally hit Paragon 200 on hardcore. I have two characters that can do Torment I and 3 that aren't yet geared for it. Not planning to go past T1, rather just focus on doing rifts on T1 more efficiently.

 

Still haven't hit the cow level.

[Malcador]

Nice, played a bit after the patch and got a cindercoat.  Sadly all my gear is elemental arrow (+33% dmg) and the fire elemental arrow kinda sucks. 

[IndiraLightfoot]

Interesting patch! Although I haven't tried it out - it seems nearly all changes are buffing our characters, instead of nerfing them. Blizzard seems intent on making D3 RoS a fun experience for all.