f13.net

If you were running Torment before, plan on stepping down the difficulty until you're not dying a lot and slogging through mud to kill everything. It's not your imagination - the difficulty levels have changed. I had left my Barb in Act III and had to play through to Diablo to start Act V (wish I had known, I would have left her at Act IV). She was at Torment I, and I dropped back to Master, and then Expert so I could get through faster. Expert seems about right.

Old set items and new set items are different, and cannot be mixed/matched.

Question: What should I do with my old set items? I have one of every class at 60 except Crusader. Should I salvage them?

You shouldn't salvage the ones that have interesting effects.

I don't know the specifics, but some of the 60 legendaries don't have a 70 version - or they aren't dropping yet at least. I'm sure with some googling you can come up with something.

For sure there's a wizard amulet that does arcane damage and some other neat effect that people are still using at 70. (while being a l60 item.)

Fastest way to level a newb toon?   Playing around with a crusader, should i just throw the difficulty up to whatever i can handle and do adventure mode since i have that unlocked?  If i do adventure mode and play it linearly, would i still get crusader achieves for completing the Campaign, or do those ONLY occur in campain mode?

What I did for my last guy was find a competent L70 buddy and start a Torment VI rift on my low-level dude, then let the 70 run amok in it.  Two rifts gave me about 35 levels, and I finished off the rest of it doing bounties on Expert and Master by myself.  Slowing the pace a little at the end let me make sure that I wasn't completely undergeared when I hit 70 and was able to bump up to Torment 1 right away.

This is so awfully different than it was.

Someone told me that what people do after they hit 70 is run bounties on Act I on Expert until they get enough rift shards, and then run rifts at Torment I, in public games, to gear up.

Is this about right?

Most people it seems are running Wizards. Not nearly as many barbs and I still haven't seen a witch doctor, only 1 monk and 1 demon hunter.  More crusaders than barbs. Wizards seem to all be using disintegration beam or frozen orb.

Is it better to step down the level of the bounties to get through them faster?

Trying to figure out the best way to get loot to gear up plus level up my 60s.

they are now back in the game - I have a level 70 Moonlight Ward myself.

You've got the right of it.  Bounties for xp/ paragon levels/ shards, then run the hell out of Rifts.  Rifts have a better legendary drop rate so spend as much time in them as you can.

Wizards are broken and OP because they have actual skill synergies that work well. There's only a few good builds for the other classes, which makes them fairly boring. I've seen classes in this order: Wizard, Monk, WD/ DH, Crusader, Barbarian. I think I've seen maybe 2 or 3 barbarians that weren't F13 players. 

I think this is mostly because there's a lot of broken ground effects and anti-melee stuff that squishes Barbs. You're playing after the ground poison was nerfed, but before it was terrible and if a monster had Molten in addition it was a guaranteed death for anyone who had to stand in melee.  Monks just get a pass because they've got One With Everything which, along with the 30% reduction and dex-based means they have shittons of survivability.

I leveled up a new wizard from scratch, just because. I leveled from Act I through V on Normal diff, just so I could see the story, and by the time that was finished my newbie Wiz was somewhere in the 40s or 50s, iirc. Part of this took place during one of the bonus XP weekends.

Once I was done with the story, I kicked the difficulty level up to Expert to level the rest of the way to the cap in Adventure mode. I did try Master diff for a little while, and found out I was still a little soft for it.

Now that I have a few Paragon levels, and some level 70 gear, I've kicked it back up to Master again, and I'm killing things at a pace that I like. I still die to the occasional Jailer+Vortex+Electrified+Arcane+Frozen pack, but that's the way the cookie crumbles.

I started off by copying one of the wizard builds that I saw on the boards here, and then tuning it to my own preferences. That might have to change when I start into higher diff levels; we'll see. I love me some Disintegrate  :grin:

I refuse to say (in a serious manner) that Wizards are OP. This game is definitely a case of every class that isn't a Wizard needs to get massively buffed and have their skills redesigned. Any nerf to the wizard that isn't minor balance tweaks is simply a misunderstanding of the problem at hand.

Yeah the first half of my sentence was meant as tongue-in-cheek. Thus the "...because they have actual skill synergies that work well" after it.  If that's broken and OP then you're deliberately designing a bad game.

I do think there are a couple of things that probably need tweaking for wizards though - their passives are in a league of their own and they have far more % damage boosts than any other class (heck, any two classes combined). they also have a couple of "ierd" survival options that seem a bit wonky - defelction rune on magic weapon for example, which basically turns itself into an insane amount of health per second.

Overall though other classes do need the same sort of do-over wizards had - their passives and abilities simply don't have the same cross-over and synergy that wizards have. I always want more passive slots as a wizard, whereas on my monk and WD they just make me go "meh". Couple of really good, powerful abilities and the reset seem to be fairly insignificant.

Monks feel really bad outside of a group. In a group I kinda feel like I'm contributing a lot via my mantras. I switched over to the preferred #1 spec and it's a big improvement over my old one (you basically just end up running/dashing all over the screen at obscene speeds) but I literally can't kill treasure goblins in Torment1+.

My wizard I don't even really try. A champ pack shows up, or I spy a treasure goblin, I hit Archon then everything disappears.

What's this preferred monk spec?

Those gloves that make shrines last 10 minutes mean you can have 100% Epiphany uptime with an empowering shrine, I know that definitely leads to some pretty powerful shenanigans with the monk.

I've spend ~40 hours on my barb in RoS and have gotten to the point where I can farm T3 in groups okay. Melee classes aren't super popular in RoS for a few reasons

1) Lack of viable builds, like other people in the thread suggested
2) Having to wear a lot of gear with defensive stats to survive melee damage means you end up with less offensive stats. This means melee classes will almost always have lower DMG than ranged classes, even if all the classes were relatively balanced (they aren't). This also means melee classes will farm slower when solo.
3) Since melee classes do less damage than ranged and you only need one melee character to wrangle enemies it doesn't make sense to bring more than 1 melee character in a group
4) Many enemies are much more difficult/annoying to fight as melee. Teleporting/disappearing enemies or enemies with knock-backs are the worst offenders. The fire mages that do both in Act 4 make me want to uninstall the game.

Out of the 3 melee classes, Monks are the best at controlling enemies. Cyclone strike has no cooldown and can nicely clump enemies for the wizards in your group or for Exploding Palm. Exploding Palm also provides +20% damage for your group mates and, since the dmg is based on enemy HP, it will do full damage on an explosion even if your DPS is terrible because you're stacking defensive stats. Mantras also give you the flexibility of group-wide offensive or defensive buffs.

Compare this to a barb. The closest thing barbs have to Cyclone Strike is Ground Stomp with the Wrenching Smash rune, which is on a 12 second cooldown. Barbs are *much* worse are corralling enemies for the other people in your party. All of their damage scales off personal DPS which means they have nothing like Exploding Palm to make up for their low sheet DPS in groups. They only have one group-wide buff and it's 100% defensive. They are, simply put, terrible compared to monks in groups. If you aren't planning on grouping, you'd be better off playing a ranged class that kills shit faster.

Crusaders aren't great either, but they do have some pretty viable ranged builds and their group-damage buffs are even better than what Monks bring.

TL;DR: Melee classes are worse than ranged classes in RoS and barb is the worst of the melee classes. My DH felt more capable after 2 hours at 70 than my barb did after 40. They both feel completely useless compared to Wizards though.

Barbs needed a lot of help with the new changes. DH friends of mine were starting from scratch and passing me on damage with relative ease, plus they have survival skills to keep them at range.

It's a matter of time before they become good again. But probably a long time given the Blizzard cycle.

http://diablo.somepage.com/popular/monk#builds

Basically, you use a combination of Dashing Strike, Epiphany, and the Conviction Mantra rune that gives you a 30% speed boost on kill to have extreme mobility. Dashing Strike and Epiphany can in my experience get you out of goddamn near any scrape (provided you don't mind ditching your group if you're in a party, ha). The Deadly Reach rune hits pretty much anything around you indiscriminately and regularly knocks them into the air, and the kick is a fairly reliable stun. It sort of solves the squish problem I was having since the instant anything looks hairy you can be out.

There are probably quicker ways to level, but how I've been doing it is start a T6 game with your level 1 guy and have a level 70 friend join and kill everything.

Keep it on adventure mode - you'll get to level 60 in about an hour. Expect to start lowering the difficulty around level 56-58. It slows down substantially after 60.

When your friend gets bored, you then switch over to normal runs (in adventure mode, again) trying to get whichever item you want from whichever act. Do that act over and over again and you'll be at 70 in like 2-3 hours after hitting 60.

Another leveling question:   I know you get a guaranteed legendary drop when you kill an Act End Boss the first time on a toon in the Campaign.   If I roll a New toon, and play in adventure mode, and one of the bounties comes up as an Act End Boss, would killing that boss on Adventure mode use up that Guaranteed Legendary drop for that character?

How to play boils down to:
1. Farm bounties / caches (in act one preferably; it drops this (http://us.battle.net/d3/en/item/ring-of-royal-grandeur-3qRFop), and you want it) on whatever difficulty feels right.
2. Take the fragments you got and join some friends for rifts of whatever level you can manage (Torment 1 being the ideal).
3. Gamble with shards for whatever pieces you find lacking.
4. Go to 1.

As far as your old set items; case by case basis. But unless they are something really game breaking (like the zero discipline cost DH set) they are likely out classed by the gobs of STR/INT/DEX on new gear.

Something I can't ever seem to find information about:  Itemization per difficulty tier.

If I loot the same named legendary from Normal, T1 and T6, will they all have the same possible range of stats?  I understand T6 has a greater potential to actually drop a legendary, but is the quality going to be necessarily better, too?  If anyone finds any information about this, please link.  The wiki is somewhat limited.

I don't think the loot is better in the higher levels of Torment. You just get more of it. If you can do T1, you have a chance for the Torment-only sets and legendaries to drop, you'll just see less legendaries and set items drop overall.

For instance, I've found 3 of a particular kind of mask on my witch doctor, but none of the rolls have been that great. (Mask of Jeram +% damage to pets. I've found two 75%ers and a... 76%er.)

I definitely feel like the problem with monk is the things you can spend spirit on are incredibly bad compared to other classes spenders. There are five options not counting if you run a mantra, which lets you spam the mantra active with all the extra spirit you have sitting around. Most of them are bad. The ones that are less bad are still far from great.

I am going to assume that the Horadric Caches you get for bounties determine their drops when you get them?  Or would you be advised to farm bounties as a means of leveling up from the 60s and savin the caches to open once you ding 70 for a better chance at good stuff?

They set their level at what they were when you got them.

I remember reading a few days ago that each act had a few unique legendaries that drop in caches, but you can get any of them in Act IV.  Is that still true?

Yes. Here's a list:

http://www.diablohub.com/database/sorting/bounty-bags

Yep. Currently the ring from Act 1 that reduces the set requirements of any set by 1 is the absolute top item folks are after, because it unlocks so many different combinations of gear that otherwise aren't possible. One of the main ones being the Aughild's set, which with just 2 pieces gives you +15% to elites and -15% to elites, along with -7% damage from melee and raged which is a *ridiculous* bonus for just 2 items.

It is kind of lame that every single class has basically the same BiS items atm, Ring of royal grandeur + stone of jordan + 6 piece class set + aughilds is basically standard set up.

There are two communities that I have found useful to join.

First is Bounty Runz. The idea for this is that people advertise for groups to run bounties quickly in order to get the cache. They're advertised something like this "LFM Normal Split Act I bounty group" or "LFM Normal Split all acts bounty group."

Second is Rift It Forward. The idea here is that you start a private game on whatever level, open a rift and kill all the mobs or almost all the mobs to the Rift Boss. Then advertise for people to join you on the last boss, designating who will open the next rift (last person joining, first person joining, longest name, shortest name, whatever). Kill the boss, that person opens a new rift, and everybody leaves the game.Then you clear to the next boss and do it again. Alternately, you can join groups and open rifts.

With both of these, first you want to go into Options, Social, and uncheck Enable: Quick Join.

Why?

Apparently there is a bug that can occur where no one can join after the first person joins.

So you disable Quick Join and you approve whoever asks to join.

New Reaper of Souls question:

Does magic find improve your odds of getting legendary stuff from Kadala?  I just found out that i had a stash of about 170% magic find worth of old gear squirrled away on an alt.  Would it be worth it to swap into the set when burning through Blood Shards?

Nope.

If I find a legendary, say a bow, on my Crusader... does the character who identifies it change the Stat allocation, or is it already seeded by who found it? 

I got excited and identified a legendary Dagger and it came back Str/Vit... oops.

I haven't gotten to end-game, but the basic game is just a thousand times better than the original... it has that "just one more adventure" that pulls you along.  How did the original team not make this game... like falling out of the boat and not hitting water.  I guess the auction house *was* the original design spec.

When I found set items on my Wizard for my Demon Hunter, they were rolled for Dex.

It's already seeded for the character it dropped for. Edit: except the 15% non-smart loot, which is how you get set items for other classes as Schild points out :)

You can, however, farm Blood Shards on a well-geared 'main' and then buy things from Kadala with another character and the smart loot applies to the character doing the buying. That's the easiest way to gear up alts.

Stat allocation is set when the item drops, so you can't save it for another character and change the mainstat.

Might be a silly question:  I know increasing difficulty through Torment Ranks increases legendary drop rate.  Does anyone know if it also increases the chance for legendary crafting mats to drop?  Like, if I want to get mats for pieces of a Cains set, would it be better to kill Magda on the highest torment level i can easily clear, or just drop it down to normal and obliterate her as fast as possible multiple times?

I doubt it.  The farming guides (like that awesome one for Demon Skin) have a huge drop rate.  I can't imagine it getting any 'better' due to difficulty.

I farmed the shit out of Demon skin and difficulty didn't make any difference as far as I could see.

Yes, it absolutely makes a difference. Taken from here (http://www.diablofans.com/forums/diablo-iii-general-forums/diablo-iii-general-discussion/83094-guide-legendary-crafting-materials-drop-locations), which is a very useful post for legendary crafting mats, locations and farmable bounties:


Edit: Oops, pressed wrong button, I'll try and tidy that up :)

I'm lucky enough to be in a clan with a few people who are perfectly willing to help farm on T6, so the mats are mostly just a case of restarting the game until the bounties you want show up.

Goodness, they've changed radically.  If you look at the link from what they used to be....

Jings, I'm going to try and get my stake again....

Yeah, really takes the ballache out of farming for mats. I find the best way is to be looking for a few (3-4) at the same time, that way most games you start will have one or more bounties that you're after.

So is this thing fun/worth playing now?

What if you have no intention of replying it to death into Inferno +++?

Fuck, I don't know, I stopped playing ages ago, before the last big SuperPatch that was supposed to make everything awesome but which took so long to come out I lost interest and moved on to games that are actually interesting and fun instead of grinding the same shit over and over again for some items that let you do it faster.

I think it's fun enough, although I suspect it's also still a bunch of money for base game + expansion.  Plus, with the changes to the game, you don't need to re-complete the entire game in each difficulty, you only need to do that once, then you can play adventure mode, which allows you to do short runs towards completion of a goal - get currency to open portals.

I got the game for free on release in return for a year's WoW sub. I never completed the game in the first place, but the expack was almost half price at the moment for Aussies - so fuckit, I bought it.

I finally finished the expansion and tried adventure mode. (I'm also doing the Seasonal stuff at the same time). Fit the mood I was in this weekend,

So I tried adventure mode, and some rifts, and it's pretty fun.

I have a random question though: What followers do people use? I tend to just stick with the Templar, mostly because I'm too lazy to keep everyone else geared. And he's the first one I get.

For me, I use The Wife.

Alas, she boots off the other followers....

I use the enchantress on most toons, but the scoundrel with my Wizzerd. Though he's not at all needed now that I've got a full flame suit/Grand Vizier combo

I mght gear her up and try. I'm trying to get my Crusader to 70 (currently 59. It's sad my seasonal toon is my most advanced at 59), but I've been considering rolling a monk or demon hunter. (I've got a 48ish Witch Doctor and a low level Sorc and Barbarian).

I use a Crusader because I guess it's the default and the only thing he has equipped is the thing that gives him every ability. I'm not sure I've leveled him up all the way though.

Followers are stupid.

You need to say Templar or confusion will reign.

 :grin:

How are followers treated in your lands?

Best thing you can do with a follower is:

1) get the follower relic that makes them never die ever (actual effect: they take 0 damage)
2) get 2 Unity rings and give one to your follower

Congratulations, you now take half damage from everything forever (or until someone joins your game.) You take no damage when the follower is hit because their relic reduces the damage to 0 first.

I PAIR ONLY WITH KORMAC

Not that there's anything wrong with that  :drillf:

I'm pretty sure my gear sucks. :) I finally hit 60, so now all of sudden I'm getting all sorts of strange crafting materials.

lol

Level 61+ gear requires new crafting materials.  You'll notice a steep improvement in the quality of the gear as well.