Diablo 3 May 15th!

The Game Room
503

It depends upon the gear you have access to. Dual wielding drops your firing rate for each crossbow by half, but gives you a 15% weapon speed buff. So if you have 2 1h crossbows with comparable damage and good stats, it’s like having the average of the two plus a 15% quiver. If one of them is significantly better than the other, though, it’s probably best to use just that one and a quiver, unless your second crossbow has amazing stats.

However, I’ve found it hard on my DH to find 1h crossbows with comparable dps to the 2h crossbows, so I’ve been using a 1k dps 2h crossbow with a 14% quiver. I’ve been using this build for Inferno Butcher runs to gear up for Act II.

504

What’s that?

505

Crowd Control. I.e., stuns, snares, confusion, roots, etc.

506

On the real money auction house, I’m not sure that all the good stuff will end up there. I mean, personally, I absolutely categorically refuse to buy or sell on it: Buying things for real money feels too much like paying someone else to play a game for me, and selling on it turns it from a game into a job. And I don’t imagine that I’m unique, here. So anything found by us folks will stay in the gold house. I suppose that someone could buy our items for gold and then turn around and sell them for dollars, but surely it’d be more efficient for them to just sell their gold directly?

One thing that I do expect to see move over largely to the real-money house is the reduced level requirement items, so get them while you can (I hope I can grab one, myself, today). My reasoning is that the best items the farmers find, they’re going to keep for themselves, to increase their farming efficiency. But the reduced level items can only be found by high-level chars, but aren’t actually of use to them directly, so they’ll have no objections to selling them.

On Demon Hunter building, mine’s only in A3 of Hell, so I don’t know how well my experience translates to Inferno. But half my skills are set up for slowing (Rapid Fire#Web Shot, Companion#Spider, and Caltrops), so even with duration reducers, everything is pretty much always slowed. The slowing amount doesn’t really seem to be enough against fast elites, in which case I try to arrange for my templar to tank them in the middle of a field of Caltrops.

Another way of slowing things considerably is to kill them. Most monsters stay very well crowd-controlled when dead. :slight_smile:

As an aside, achievements are fun, but they’re even more fun when you get them accidentally. I’ve been trying for weeks to get No Man Left Behind (keep all soldiers alive while raising the catapults), but always ended up losing someone somewhere. But the other day, I was going through a3 Hell solo with my DH, just trying to get through, and ended up getting it. And at about the same time, I realized that my wizard had gotten On The Wings of Angels (finish a4 in less than an hour) without even noticing it.

507

Wow. The people in the official forums are frothing at the mouth. Apparently they put in some sort of timer that only allows you to start a new game every X minutes or something. Someone said like 5 games in 5 minutes. I don’t know if it’s true or not.

Either way, people in those forums need to chill the F out. The internet is full of crazies but the Diablo forums are full of crying assholes. Never seen such an entitled bunch of pricks in all my life.

“I’ve submitted a ticket for a refund. I’ve played for 300 hours and now the server went down. This is a crap game and Blizzard sucks”

Yeah, you’ve played for 300 hours for $60. You got ripped off by this crappy game. :rolleyes:

508

Okay, so I decided to check out the goldhouse. I did in fact purchase an item that doubled my damage. Now I’m moving quite a bit faster… but it wasn’t as game-changing as I expected it to be. And that’s good, because I still don’t know how I feel about the gold house. There is something about item drops that feels a lot better.

I am trying to sell something cheap just to see what happens.

509

The way I look at it, in D2 I used to get sorceress drops while playing my paladin, and very little zeal/avenger pally gear. Now I can just put awesome but unneeded drops up on the AH, and use the funds from that to buy gear for my primary toon.

510

Yeah, it’s far better than joining countless “Sig4Trade!!” games only to find out a) the item’s been traded, b) you don’t have what they’re looking for, c) etc.

511

I heard that a 2h + quiver has better overall dps at or near the endgame…BUT…dual wielding is soooo much sexier with my female DH.

512

I’m at lvl 39 in Act II Nightmare, so I went back to look up this post.
I prefer Explosive Blast for my (4) skill (instead of Mirror Image). I wade into the enemies, cast diamond skin (except I use Mirror Skin to reflect damage back), then cast Explosive Blast to do massive damage. I didn’t like Sleet Storm with Ray of Frost because it doesn’t have any range, but it makes sense if you’re going to be wading into the middle of a pack( like I have been ever since I got the Diamond Skin and Explosive Blast combo). Lesser packs die after one blast. The problem is when they don’t die (ie. when their names are in blue) and your diamond skin wears off and you’re in the middle of a pack of them. I used to use Wave of Force as my (2) skill to help get out of that situation, but the venom hydra is too good to not use.

I guess by Ice Nova you mean Ice Armor? If so, which rune are you referring to?

513

I think by Ice Nova he means Ice Nova, under “Secondary skills”. It has a cooldown but no AP cost, and freezes all enemies near you.

514

:slight_smile: That’s the one.

I’m in Act II of Hell (getting very close to the end), and dying all the goddamn time. I read someone’s idea of eliminating signature spells entirely from your repertoire, so that’s where I am, with a frosty build:
-Primary mouse button is frost ray, with the black ice variant.
-Secondary mouse button is blizzard at reduced cost.
-Venom Hydra
-Diamond Skin (double protection)
-Magic Weapon (healing variant)
-Mirror Image (5-clone variant)

In many fights, I spam the non-mouse skills to get them all going, and then throw down a blizzard and frost ray the first enemy. You end up with three area attacks (the black ice, the venom pools, and the blizzard), and it takes care of enemies pretty well.

The worst thing I ever encountered was just recently: a fast molten horde of ghosts, whose AI tells them to swirl around me at high speed before settling in for the kill. I couldn’t do crap against them, and eventually led them to a far corner of the dungeon before dying so that I could sneak past them. They were awful.

The best thing I’ve found is a level 55 polearm that does like 520 damage, plus a bunch of other traits. It does more damage than any comparable weapon at the AH currently, so I’ve put it up for sale for 400K, just to see if I get any nibbles.

515

…aaaaand CHOMP! About quadruples the amount of money I’ve ever had in this game.

516

I sold a thing too! For 850 gold.

I am near the end of Act I Hell and I am getting my ass kicked. I die so many times (it’s the damned rams while I search for the khazra staff.) I upgraded my pants with something I bought in the gold house and it didn’t really even help, because at this point in the game, a 200 increase in armor is only a small percentage of total armor. What I really need right now is more HP.

Also I’m broke. This game is starting to piss me off. I think I’m going to start a new character soon.

517

Okay, maybe someone can help me with my build. I’m level 54 barbarian, I alternate between Frenzy, Bash, and Cleave as primary attack depending on my weapon. Right now I’m using Bash since Cleave wasn’t doing it for me. My secondary is Hammer of the Ancients with the focused, extra damage rune - this deals good damage. Damage is not really my problem. My 1 slot is Ground Stomp with double fury rune, my 2 slot is Revenge with 30% chance rune, my 3 slot is War Cry with regen rune (with passive Inspiring Presence to double effects) and my 4 slot is Earthquake w/added fire damage.

Passives are Inspiring Prescence, Nerves of Steel and that other one that increases armor by 25% I have alternated between that and superstition. I have also tried more offensive tactics like weapons master and the +25% damage when at full fury rune, but they leave me too vulnerable health-wise.

My biggest problem is I keep getting stuck in the middle of enemies and unable to escape, and revenge is not triggering often enough to save me. Used to be I could get the magic packs by using ground stomp to stun and then Earthquake, but this is no longer causing enough damage to kill them in one shot.

518

I also had a happy auction house transaction. I found a nice crossbow that would about double my damage, that I was willing to spend up to 100k on (that being the total I’ve made from sales). But it seems I was the only bidder, and I ended up getting it for a mere 1500. I’m still a level away from using it, but for that kind of bargain, I can wait.

519

I found a couple of similar buys: a level 59 pair of pants with basically all of the stats I want for 40k that was way under priced when compared with similar items. I’m only 2 levels away from using them, looking forward to it.

I also grabbed a -4 level 750 dps blue dagger that seemed moderately underpriced at 290k, actually had to bid on that one to get it. I don’t really know about spending that much on a blue, but it should be a reasonably good weapon into act 1 and maybe act 2, and it bumped me from ~12k dps to 20k+ dps and is making my life quite a bit easier at the moment. I find that when I can buy a weapon that massively increases my dps, I can fade some other slots from dps to surviveability without sacrificing much.

520

I just killed Belial in NM and got 4 blues. (Maybe this should be in the gripes thread.)

Anyway, I have a question. Just before you fight him you have to see how many refugees you can get to the sewers in a set amount of time. What is the reward for this? Maybe I missed it, but I didn’t notice getting a gold/exp reward. Maybe next time I’ll just let them fry.

521

Each refugee that reaches the sewers drops a pile of gold. So far as I know, that’s the only reward. Well, and if you manage to get 20, there’s an achievement.

The optional rewards that I wonder about are the “kill three wretched mothers” one early in A1, and the “rescue 8 prisoners in Alcarnus” one in A2. So far as I can tell, those don’t actually do anything at all, though I suppose they might change the amount of XP for the final award.

522

Dunno about the prisoners, but you get an exp and gold bonus when you kill the third wretched mother. It says it over the mobs head upon death.