Saturday, May 26, 2012

Diablo III: Twinking Out

My wizard has picked up some new gear and spec and can now handle pretty much everything in act 1 inferno. Act 2 inferno is a completely different story. The difference in difficulty between the two is really extreme! If I want to stick with the wizard I guess my only really option right now is to keep grinding act 1 over and over for cash so I can buy upgrades on the AH. The other option is to try another class and see if they can do any better! With gear/gems transfering over between characters to trivially in the game this isn't as rough as it would be in World of Warcraft, say. Really all I need to do is level up to max level and I'm most of the way there. Probably need to switch some gear out if I have a different primary stat, of course, but I can recycle a lot of stuff.

One thing that really caught my eye while looking through the mechanics guide is the fact that monks and barbarians get 30% damage reduction for free. I believe this was added in the beta because they're melee and therefore had a harder time surviving the stuff in early act 1 and I can believe that to be true. But I think when you get to inferno everyone is having a hard time surviving everything! Especially in act 2 where enemies have a habit of jumping off the ceiling directly on top of me! Taking 30% less damage from stuff like mortar also sounds pretty sweet. So I want to try one of those two classes. I already have a 35 monk on hardcore and don't really want to start a second one lest I get confused and ended up dying in hardcore so I'm going with a barbarian. I already had a level 11 barbarian kicking around so off I went.

I found myself dying a fair bit to random large melee dudes and it took several swings to kill most anything. So I figured I should probably take a swing by the AH and see if I couldn't find some upgrades. I decided since my goal was to hit 60 as fast as I could that I concentrate on finding gear with +experience on it if I could. It turns out I was able to buy cheap rares with experience and strength for every slot and it made a stupid amount of difference. I'm one shotting everything in my path! I'm also set up with +115 experience per kill and 23% bonus experience on top of that which has made leveling really really fast. One thing I noticed while shopping for rares is most slots could get +10 experience but a couple could only get +8. That has me curious about how stat mods work and when they're going to jump in size so I could go back to the AH for upgrades...

Unfortunately a half hour of searching couldn't turn up any such list. I know lists of affixes with level ranges used to exist in Diablo II but I guess the game hasn't been out long enough for a list to get compiled or get high up on the Google search ranks. Oh well!

1 comment:

Sthenno said...

I don't think standing next to the enemies is going to make surviving easier!

I actually think the only thing to do is to farm money and buy gear (and maybe find a few pieces of gear yourself). I tried my hand in act 2 of inferno last night and found that I could survive okay but I couldn't kill a unique because it just had too much health (1.6M and it's minions had 600k each). The thing is that a handful of people managed to bootstrap their way to higher gear using tricks that are rapidly being nerfed out of the game. So they are finding 1200 dps and 1100 dps weapons. Since 11000 dps is no longer the best the price of those weapons is rapidly falling.

Anyway, barbarians are probably the loudest complainers about inferno being too hard. Of course everyone complaining about that should really be complaining that nightmare and hell were too damn easy.