First of all, rebind shift to space bar if your skills are still bound to 1-4.
I really can’t tell you why your wizard sucks, since I facemelted just about everything up through Inferno. What is your current build and gear? Knowing that, I can definitely make some suggestions if you like.
For what it’s worth, I think the AH is one of the best things that ever happened to D3. It is fun, profitable, and means that even the most unproductive mf run contributes towards the overall goal of perfecting your character. Do some of you just not remember how inaccessible Hell was in D2 or just how many thousands of Pindle or Meph runs it took to get good drops? There would be nothing to show from them whatsoever. Now, at least, a run without a good drop gives me cash. Nor is wasting time finding a game called 1 SHAKO 3 SOJs and trying to trade necessary. Ever think you are trading for an Annihilus and have someome stiff you with a Mephisto Soulstone instead? It sucked.
I was a very, very dedicated D2 player for years and believe that in many ways, this game is a real breath of fresh air.
I was obsessed with D2 for a very long time, single player only. If I spent 30 hours running Meph/Baal/Pits/Countess I would be overflowing with loot, easily enough to waltz through hell. In D3 I would be lucky to get a single usable item. Even after buying all my gear off the auction house I still get one-shotted regularly in Act 3 (yet I can practically tank half the elites/champs in Act 1 now). I farmed enough in D2 to take every class except the Druid/Assassin through Hell, including a Hardcore Sorc and Necro. Inferno is a lot harder than D2 Hell and it takes longer to farm.
I’m not sure where all the loot on the AH comes from to be honest. I know a couple of people that farmed the Alcarnas resplendent chest in Act 2 for days on end before it was removed and they got a ton of decent loot from that. Both were pre-nerf Wizards exploiting the mechanics. Before the nerfs it was a lot easier for Wizards and Demon Hunters to progress and farm in Inferno. I imagine there is a significant portion of players finding out the latest exploits (legal or not) and abusing the hell out of them until they’re fixed. I’m sure a lot of the loot comes from legitimate player too of course, after all I found a decent weapon only the other day, but I doubt that’s enough on it own.
Or maybe there isn’t as much loot on the AH as it seems. Perhaps not much is actually selling and everything just keeps getting relisted over and over again. I certainly notice that with the very high-end and expensive items.
FWIW I do think this game has a lot going for it. The combat feels a lot more fun than Diablo 2 it’s just the difficulty spikes, the loot system and some of the skills that make it a lesser game IMO. If this game was moddable then it would be the best ARPG ever.
The Big Catch here is that there were 3 or so skills that were ‘nerfed’ a week or two ago that let various classes survive much more easily in late Inferno than they currently can. By the time they adjusted the skills, the first wave of powergamers had already gotten to the point where they were farming the loot and/or able to drag other people into late Inferno with the benefit of that loot.
I will say the classes that can avoid being hit at all have a slightly lower gear bar than the ones that need to rely on mitigating those hits. It’s not a LOT lower - you still need a ton of DPS to make Inferno work - but it’s a little lower.
Isn’t D3 Inferno supposed to be harder than D2 Hell? D3 Hell is supposed to be as hard as D2 Hell, I thought.
A lot of the complaints about D3 inferno seem to boil down to, “this is ridiculously difficult.” And I find myself thinking, well, of course it is, it’s supposed to be ridiculously difficult. It’s put there so that folks who are crazy have-no-life-gamers will be able to continue playing the game while being challenged.
Complaints that, less than a month after the game’s come out, you’re not able to make it through inferno seem to me to be missing the point. The default expectation is that you’re not able to make it through this difficulty, so if you’re not able to, that’s okay. That’s on purpose. It’s supposed to be nearly impossible.
I dunno. If that’s the only place to get decent drops, I think a little criticism is expected. Personally, I think they should increase the drops for Hell, and do something different for Inferno - something like a different Annihilus charm for each act in Inferno. I’d try to organize a perfectly balanced team in order to get some Annys.
Where “decent” is defined as “worthy of being used in Inferno”? All of the gear I have, I got in Nightmare, and I’m still finding myself able to make progress through the start of Hell. Slowly and with difficulty, but progress. Doesn’t that put that stuff at least at the lower end of “decent”?
This seems extraordinary to me. It also suggests a big disconnect between the way people used to single player and battlenet enjoy the game. I was also obsessed with D2, but played online only. I had to build, level, and eventually abandon three or four characters before I could make any meaningful progress in hell whatsoever. I would accumulate mid-level loot and get just a little farther with each character until finally, I could more or less fumble my way through. It took enormous (400%+ mf) before I could get decent loot reliably, and I could only build a character with that much mf because I had a ton of banked gear from prior character build failures. Once I finally got some momentum, I was able to make real progress. By the end I had characters who soloed ubers. But it took an incredibly long time and doing, literally, thousands of Meph/Pindle runs. My friends and I could do a Pindle run in well less than a minute, and we would do hundreds of them at a time.
D3 is a much, much more forgiving game in every way. For people accustomed to single player who never had to trade, I can see that it must be a big adjustment. But to me and other battlenet people, the AH is wonderfully efficient and very attractive.
I’m working my way through A2 Inferno at the moment and yes, it’s a bitch and a half. But incremental gear changes really do work. I will get there, probably within a few days. I have a sense for which pieces need replacing, and now it is just a matter of saving up for them. With a lot of trial and error I discovered a build I really love and that seems to work. In D2, one small error with your build and it was all over.
I have found some pretty good stuff that I have managed to sell off in auction. Sadly I hit level 54 (Force Armor rune) the day it got nerfed, so I was not able to take advantage of that build. It was just a clever idea. The chest was definitely an exploit.
It is right in my practice, too. Perhaps you just need to drop your prices. I make sales all the time.
There were actually a few builds in D2 that could work just fine, even in Hell, with gear bought from merchants in Nightmare. And the first time I ever killed Über Diablo, I did so with nothing but equipment I had found myself in the process of leveling up, and no elite items. Though I’m not sure how long it took to find those builds: It may be that the same is true for D3, and folks just haven’t realized it yet.
I found my first legendary the other day. A lvl 33 Mighty Belt. Nothing too amazing. I went to look on the AH to see what it was going for and there were 46 pages just of this belt.
46 pages of a single legendary.
Made me feel alot less legendary.
I really think they are blowing it on the set items. I realize there are some here but they are mega rare. Even more so than legendaries I believe. I can’t imagine how anyone would ever be able to put a full set together in 100 years without using the AH. Putting together sets was one of my favorite pastimes on D2 and I loved teh quirky, class specific bonuses alot of them gave you.
A fundamental problem with sets and legendaries is that they are, generally, not really that great, even if they can be found. They are not awesome proportional to their rareness. People at the auction house seem to insist on absurdly high prices for them, even so.
I sell lots of stuff - maybe I am underpricing, I dunno. Generally, I find that I can sell my obsolete stuff as I level up, and those sales (plus selling what I find) funds my new stuff pretty well. I’m on level 56 now, so dunno what will happen when I get to level 60.
With my monk, I use that handy aura that makes my resistance to all forms of damage equal to my highest resistance. That means that if every bit of gear has resistance to (say) poision, I can build up a high resistance to everything. For such specific stats, the auction house is a necessity, because I’d never find such specific stats on my own.
That’s probably why. No one bothers to bid - it would suck to wait 24 hours for an auction to end on a level X item when by the time you get it you’re level X+5 and it’s no longer good for you. Set buyouts.
I think what they need to do to make legendaries appealing is to give them mods which simply don’t exist on random items. In D2, for instance, it was not possible to get Crushing Blow randomly, which meant that those uniques and runewords which had it were valued, even if they were otherwise unimpressive. Or if that’s not feasible, at least give them mods which don’t ordinarily show up in that item slot: An amulet that adds cold damage (hello, Eye of Etlich), say, or a weapon that gives faster run speed, or the like.
Unless you are selling lvl 60 gear starting at about 500k, you are wasting your time. I only just started actually bidding lately since items for me have become very expensive. Even then, I only look to bid on auctions expiring within two or three hours from the time I search. Always set a buyout for junk.