I guess my logic was that with that combination, I’m usually at max fury, and if I do decide to spend my fury, it takes a very short time to get to max again. I usually only use whirlwind when I’m trying to get out of a tangle of enemies or trying to transcend a wall of enemies to get to those damned necromancers. So far I seem to be doing okay with this, but one thing I noticed is that what works for one character’s level/circumstances will change over time.
I know that everybody says that Normal is ridiculously easy, but the Butcher keeps kicking my ass. After my first ass-kicking I leveled up to 17 and then was able to use a wand that some generous doper left for me days ago. I had him slivered when the fire from below killed me (I’m a glass cannon wizard.)
This butcher is not the same one that you could kill by opening the door, casting firewall, closing the door, and then giggling while he burned up trying to open the door.
The butcher requires either 1) an overwhelming gear advantage or 2) really fast twitchy reflexes. The most damage I receive from the fight is due to the fire from below, so I prioritize avoiding that. Avoiding the butcher’s attacks is secondary. Seems to work ok for me!
You can out-range his ranged attacks. Stay far away, and you can see how far out they reach.
Don’t go glass cannon; sometimes you can’t avoid the fire.
When people say Act 1 is easy, they mean all the things before the Butcher. There’s no shame in having to get help for any of the act boss fights.
It’s easy, but I did run like a pansy from my first Champion pack in ActI NM. Playing solo, HC, went into a damp cellar with my templar buddy, only to find instead of the quill beast treasure hoarder, a vampiric jailer zombie dude. With no room to kite, and seeing as the one zombie in the lead that basically spawned on top of me took off 1/3 of my life in a few hits, I diamond-skinned and high-tailed it outta there.
I wasn’t too close to dying, as I had force wave on cooldown, but, I hear that vampiric life leech can make things impossible to kill, and I wasn’t gonna risk death to find out! Gave me that good old-fashioned adrenaline rush it did.
Wait for the next patch?
It’s what I’m doing.
I may have to join you in waiting. 
I just cannot get past blood and sand.
Currently getting my ass handed to me in Act III Nightmare. Man this game can turn the tables on you quick.
I really hate those purple laser beams.
Outside of Act I and maybe a little of Act II, Inferno is pure bullshit. I’ve farmed Act I extensively and also Whimseyshire.
I’m simply not willing to farm any further just for gold to buy gear. Buying gear on the AH isn’t fun. Gear drops are fun. But since the odds of good gear drops required for progression are virtually nil, I’m done with the game. Challenging mobs are fun. Being cock-blocked isn’t fun.
I tried a hardcore character, but the game froze and quit on me in the middle of a fight with a champion pack and when I restarted … you can guess the rest.
Until I was reading a bit, I assumed that gear was hard to get to drop but you could in fact get upgrades. I found out that really isn’t true, as a barbarian you need the Act 3/4 gear to complete Act 2 
Unless I am unlucky as can be I do believe those rumors to be mostly true. I simply cannot win against certain affixes, they enrage before I can win.
Folks trying inferno, have you tried in full parties? From what I’ve read, Blizzard has tried to make Inferno be super-hard, so either AHing it up or going in parties seems reasonable.
Parties make it worse, if anything. The champions and elites have correspondingly more health, and also hit harder. Controlling the kiting path is more difficult, the likelihood of adds is worse, and it’s even more likely to be fatal if you make a mistake, get stuck, or face a difficult combination. Certainly, it’s not easier. The best you can hope for is that an over-geared character can help out a character with less gear and carry more of the weight (e.g. I could run almost anyone through Hell difficulty or Act I Inferno with ease at this point).
Yep.
Parties make things harder for sure, unless you want to just try to run through an area and hit the next waypoint (outrunning the bear… etc etc). Or for Act bosses, particularly Belial; I envy the hell out of classes that can take one hit from anything in that fight on Inferno and not die. 
I am in Act 3 now and it’s still going, but really slow. I definitely feel like I’d be more comfortable with 20-30k more HP and 10-20k more DPS, but yeah, I’d need the Act 4 / 4 million gold bows to do that…
That said I went back to do a quick farm run in Act 1 when I only had a few minutes this morning and I definitely felt how much easier it was, so there is progress. It’s just really slow and grindy unless you get super lucky with a drop.
They don’t even scale 1:1 with more players - it’s not a simple “2 players, 2x more health, 3 players, 3x more health” sort of thing. The increase is actually 110% health and 15% damage for each player - so in a 4 person game, monsters will have 430% life and do 145% damage. I think Blizzard did this because properly-specced parties could raise their ability multiplicatively (stacking mantras, buffs, etc.) but that means you’re kinda forced to pick those skills now. And of course, it doesn’t solve the problem that the melee characters tend to draw aggro and will now be taking far more damage than they were before, even if the amount of damage your party deals is roughly comparable.
I think the main problem is that the gear you need simply doesn’t drop - it’s not like D2X where you could still find end-game worthy items dropping from Nightmare or Hell Mephisto. Sure, there were items that could only drop from certain areas, but those items weren’t required to finish the game. With the relative weakness of legendaries/sets in this game, high-level rares are the only end-game equipment and you need to be able to farm the later areas to get the best ones.
Bottom line, you can’t farm the gear you need to progress on Inferno difficulty. You can only farm gold and buy gear off the auction house, which is why end-game gear there carries an absurd premium. You might find a good item once in awhile that is Inferno quality, but the likelihood of finding sufficient such pieces to, say, survive normal mob hits in Act III Inferno is so remote that farming for it is not realistic unless you have no life. You won’t be able to craft it, either, for the same reason: the randomness range is much, much too extreme.
I admit that I used for a bit an exploit that would allow me to farm in Act IV on Inferno difficulty. I almost never found anything that would have a whelk’s chance in a supernova of selling on the AH, much less be an upgrade for me that would allow me to get through Act II content. The only Legendary-quality items I have found were total rubbish.
Something is very, very wrong with that.
Buying gear off the AH isn’t fun. Having it drop for you is fun. But in Diablo III, it won’t drop for you, at least not reliably enough and in sufficient quantities to enable progression through Inferno by itself.
I did finally get a decent drop on my way to kill the Siegebreaker for the 1 billionth time yesterday. A 950 DPS 1-hander with IAS and 150 Strength. It’s still not as good as my current weapon, which I bought for 2.25 million, but it should sell for around 3-4 million. The cycle continues.
I actually got my first ever legendary item yesterday. A hour later I got another. Both were terrible and I would be lucky to get 30k for them.
I have around 150 MF when doing my runs, not counting Nephilim stacks.
I’ve not bothered progressing past the Siegebreaker in Act 3. Is there a better place to farm in Act 4? The loot is the same in Act 3 and 4 right?
I’m not there yet in Inferno, but I feel like the end of Act 3 would be a really good farm spot, since Cydaea and Azmodan only have one zone/area between them (and are two of the easiest major bosses in the game IMO). Should be able to load up on Valor stacks and kill them fairly quickly, I’d think.
Are the bosses even worth farming? I haven’t had a yellow drop from my last 3 or 4 boss kills. And those were first kills too, for that difficulty, which I’d think would have a bonus.
Speaking of which, is the loot bonus only for the very first boss kill (ie on normal difficulty) and not once for each level of difficulty? Because that’d be stupid…
You’d be surprised how much some people are willing to pay for legendaries just because they have a different color. I sold a crappy 500dps Wizardspike for 400k, and you can buy a 800dps rare for the same price.