Anyone want to get back into Diablo 3? New season/fresh start on 4/10

The Game Room
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Diablo 3 introduced a season system a while back. They run about 3 months, and if you choose to create a seasonal character, it’s basically a fresh start. You only play with other seasonal characters who are also starting from scratch. You can’t get twinked out gear from your other characters or have someone easily power level you the way up to 70. Not at the start of the season, anyway. So if you want to try playing with other people, but not be ridiculously far behind them because they’ve played the game a whole lot more than you, seasons give people a way to get a fresh start, work your way through the challenges, and level up with other people in a similar boat.

There are various other aspects to seasons - special seasonal legendaries, leaderboards for various accomplishments, etc. At the end of the season any characters or gear you’ve made from the seasonal run become normal characters in your roster, and a new season starts.

Anyway, I’m new to RoS and really haven’t played the game since it came out, but it’s a lot better now. I thought perhaps some other people were in the same boat and had given up on it but might want to try it out again.

If we do play together, I’d like to use our mumble server for voice chat, since you might as well make it a social game and it’s too fast paced to stop and type. Mumble download. Server info is: hostname silverbolt.blue//fangsolutions.com port 22622. Remove the two slashes from that address, I’m just protecting it from random webcrawler bots. If you need help setting it up, add me on steam (same name) or send me a PM. Even if you don’t have a mic you can still listen in so we can still coordinate via voice chat, but when you’re running the wizard to set it up, set a push to talk key even though you don’t have a mic. There’s a weird glitch when you first log on where you won’t hear anyone until you’ve at least tapped your own talk key.

We do have a guild - search for SDMB and it should be the only one listed.

My name on battle.net is SenorBeef#1394. If you’re interested in playing together, post here and add your battle.net ID.

I don’t think we’ll be coordinating specific sessions, and we may end up drifting apart on levels as the hardcore players pass up the more casual ones, but we probably won’t be so far apart that lower level players can’t contribute at all, so let’s just get on each other’s friends list and play together when we can.

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Oh, if you haven’t played much or in a long time, be sure to complete the campaign, since you need to do that to run adventure mode, which is how most of the playing is done now.

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I’ll be playing at least a bit, but I dislike seasons so I won’t be participating in S3. Anybody playing non-season character is welcome to join me if I’m online though, as long as I’m not in a Greater Rift at the time.

ETA - I’m Ainue #1698 in D3.

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I’ll be there!

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Some of the new stuff is ridiculously powerful - I got together the basic gear I need for Tal Rasha meteor set and I’m already critting for 1.9 billion with my free fire meteors. The game needs higher difficulties than T6, I don’t even get to start my damage rotation properly against elites before they explode into little giblets.

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The game has higher difficulties than T6-- They’re the higher-numbered greater rifts.

And if you’ve already assembled your gear for that, you must be playing the play test realm: Keep in mind that that might not be exactly the same as what’s in the official game.

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I know about the greater rifts but you still need to do normal rifts to get keys for those. And the patch was on Tuesday, I had several pieces of the Tal Rasha set already stashed and was lucky enough to get the few remaining items quite fast. Never been on the test realm, I’d be annoyed at all the great loot that drops that I can’t keep.

One word of warning for anybody playing HC characters - D3 seems to crash sometimes now after the patch which probably leads to death if it happens while fighting.

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Oh, I was assuming that there was a new version of the items, and that those new versions would only drop during the season, in which case the only way to have them so early would be to be playing the playtest. If you got them in the regular game, they’re highly unlikely to be nerfed. At least not directly: If they’re overpowered, then they’ll compensate by buffing up all other items to match and increasing monster numbers, yet again, like they always do.

Sigh… I remember when, the first time I figured out how to get 100k DPS from a glass cannon, that was a big deal. Now, that’d be considered typical for a ZDPS tank build.

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New season starts in about an hour and a half. I’m going to be able to play for an hour or two and then I’ve got to go somewhere. As per Rucksinator’s suggestion, I guess we should get together and run the campaign up until the skeleton king, and then switch to bounties.

It’d be good if people set up voice chat, it’ll make playing together a lot more fun.

I also think I’m going to play a DH. Either that or wizard. I’ve never tried either so I’ll be learning on the go.

What difficulty do you start out a brand new character on?

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Well turns out I played for 5 hours straight. Got up to level 45.

The game difficulty levels are a lot easier than I thought. This is my first time really playing through from scratch and we were able to beat torment 2 rifts without too much difficulty by the end of the night. It seems like if I’m already beating torment 2 - does the game get much more difficult? Or do you just end up playing torment 6 with no challenge, blasting away everything without worrying about dying?

Are rifts the best way to … well, do everything? We played 3 acts worth of bounties and then we started doing rifts, and the rifts seemed to give more xp, gold, and gear.

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Torment 6 at max level used to be fairly hard, but nowadays it’s a joke if you have good gear. You can still die if you are careless or get a really unlucky by something like Vortex + Molten explosions or Waller + Arcane sentries but it isn’t common. The real difficulty these days is in the Greater Rifts that scale to infinity and beyond - Torment 6 equals to GR25 or so if I remember right and some people are are doing GR50+ where the damage is over 20x higher than what it is in T6.

Generally, yes. You do some bounties to get rift keys and to get Ring of Royal Grandeur from Act I caches but other than that it’s rifts and Greater Rifts. They give you blood shards, have +100% legendary item drop rate and GRs give you legendary gems and gem upgrades.

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How much should one value magic find on gear? On one hand, you’re sacrificing DPS to keep an inferior ring with magic find, but on the other hand, ultimately aren’t you just killing stuff to search for gear? It it increases the gear per kill by a greater amount than the time to kill, it seems like it’d be beneficial.

I found the nagelring (43% magic find) last night, it was level 29ish I think and I’m wondering when I should replace it.

I also found a puzzle ring and another nice legendary ring I ended up giving to my friend.

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I also found a naglering.

I’m not sure how much the MF helps (there’s stuff online about it being nurfed hard in the background). But the Fallen Lunatics do crazy, crazy damage in the 30s. I’ve seen crits over 100k! I have no idea how many stats you’d need to do more damage than the spawned mobs but it seems like it would take a whole lot.

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Magic Find is a trap. It used to do what it says on the can but these days it has been nerfed heavily so it basically does nothing, despite still existing on some pieces of equipment. It is a red herring for people who don’t know D3 mechanics inside out.

Only Magic Find that does something is the one you get from having more people in the group.

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Well I hit 70. How are you guys doing?

I saved 500 blood shards for when I hit 70 (seems wasteful to use them before then) and got a surprisingly high proportion of legendaries and set items - I think 6 or 7 in total. Is it normal to have the blood shard merchant give legendaries out like candy? If you manage to find a treasure goblin in a rift you get quite a lot of shards.

I finished up on torment while fairly undergeared and using a non-optimal build, but the upgrade from the blood shards might catapult me to torment 2 or 3. The game is too easy, and after you can blow through torment 6 without a challenge it’s hard to see a reason to keep playing.

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Kadala gives out legendaries around 10% of the time, so getting 6-7 out of 500 shards is quite lucky. And the challenge is in the Greater Rifts these days - if you don’t like those then yes, you’ll hit the ceiling fairly fast. At highest level Greater Rifts it’s a whole different game altogether, with well-defined roles for different players. I’m not really interested doing those but even at GR35-45 the game can be quite exciting and any mistake means instant death.

The power curve used to be totally different and even Torment 1 was hard to crack. You needed to farm special materials to craft legendary gear and the legendary drop rate was a fraction of the current loot rain. Maybe you would have liked D3 better during those days, hard to say.

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Well, my DH got an Izzuccub from my first gamble with Kadala, at level 55, which was a doubling dps boost from the previous rare 1h.

At lvl59 currently, and the hockey playoffs might interfere with me getting to 70. But I will try to get in with the rest of you Season 3’rs.

BTW…I have this annoying thing my computer does while playing D3…about every 4 minutes, my Frame Rate goes down to about 2-4fps for about 30 seconds and then it catches back up, and in the middle of a fight with champions/uniques means instant death. Is there any setting I should consider tweeking? Believe it or not, I’m still on windows XP.

YeticusRex#1389
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/profile/Yeticusrex-1389/hero/52054006

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http://us.battle.net/d3/en/profile/Yeticusrex-1389/hero/60326343 - Current Seasonal - ApologyGirl

Also, the Nagelring is really cool since it now summons a Fallen Lunatic (up to 4) every 10-12 seconds and each one is currently doing about 2500% weapon damage atm…excellent for running into big packs!

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/item/nagelring

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I don’t see a more current Diablo 3 Thread, so I’m bumping this one… Just saying Hi, and If anyone else wants to get back into Diablo 3, there are a few of us that play regularly right now.

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Patch 2.3.0 PTR preview.

Looks like I’ll be back once this hits the live servers.