Personally, my plan for Inferno Belial is to get out of the way and/or dodge for as long as I can, pump out as much damage as I can, and then let party members who can actually survive finish him off. When you can’t walk, you crawl, and when you can’t even do that, you get someone to carry you.
Is Resist All really relevant, anyway? I would have thought that his fist was pure physical, and his green meteors and breath were both pure poison. Does he have any other elements mixed in?
Resist all affects all damage types, including physical, holy, arcane, etc. And armor affects elemental damage. Confusing if you’ve come from an extensive D2 background.
So far as I know, both resist all and armor work on all damage types.
People say it’s very important to stack both–as they work multiplicatively together. If RA reduces damage to 1/3 and armor reduces it to 1/3, then the actual damage you receive is just 1/9.
Right, I understand that. I’m just saying, if you’re worried about Belial specifically, you don’t need resist all, you just need physical resist and poison resist. Which you could get from resist all equipment, or you could get from equipment that just has those without the other elements along for the ride.
Ok…Here’s a battle.net thread that pretty much confirms Frylock’s and Punoqllads statements…it just takes a few pages to bleed out the confusion of diminishing returns.
So, 10 armor = 1 resist all, if you are generally sticking in the range of 13:1 to 7:1 allocation for optimum damage mitigation.
And STR adds to armor, INT adds to Resist All, and DEX adds to Dodge.
Important note: INT adds to Resist All, but only by a factor of 1/10.
Before I realized that, I was thinking INT was like the absolute most important stat aside from any character’s damage stat.
Does anyone know how dodge chance is actually calculated from dex? And how added dodge % is actually thrown in with current dodge %? (It’s not simple addition that’s for sure.)
I’m pretty sure it’s the same formula as for armor or resists: Base dodge chance is Dex/(Dex + 50*monster level). If it weren’t, then you’d end up with an imbalance between Dex and the other two stats, which Blizzard was clearly trying to avoid, given the perfect symmetry between Int and Str.
Now, added dodge % (say, from Mantra of Evasion) does seem to just add directly to that, so far as I can tell, which can lead to some absurdly powerful results: If you managed to stack your +dodge, you could theoretically hit 100% chance to dodge, which is of course overpowered. In practice, though, I think (though I don’t remember where I heard this, so take with a grain of salt) that all three mitigations (armor, resist, and dodge) are hard-capped at 75%, so you don’t quite hit invulnerability.
OK, I just tested, and I stand corrected. First, the simple part: Mantra of Evasion effectively gives you one (or two) additional opportunities to dodge: So, if you ordinarily have a 25% dodge chance, and you’ve just activate the mantra (so you’re getting double benefit), it checks a 25% chance, then a 15% chance, and then another 15% chance, and if any of those succeed, you dodge (though they just show the total effective dodge chance on the details screen).
And now, the complicated part: How you get the base dodge chance from dexterity. This, I’m not sure about, but it is definitely not the same formula as armor or resists.
Addendum: A bit of Googling finds this table:
Which seems to agree with the numbers I tested, but it still seems funny that they’d use a lookup table for this, and especially funny that it wouldn’t go to an asymptote, and doesn’t depend on monster level. Though I guess it’s not possible to actually hit 8000 dex, so maybe they didn’t worry about the formula’s behavior out there.
I linked it in the other thread, but this is still very good reading on the subject.
Yeah, I read through that thread, but it’s mostly about armor and resists, not dodge chance (which, with a Demon Hunter and a Monk, is what I’m most interested in).
Yes, you are quite right. I was more respnonding to the discussion about armor/resists slightly upthread.
The table is very helpful. I use an expected value calculation that includes dodge when I make some big gear choices, but this closes the Dex to dodge loop.
Ok I’m officially going on hiatus from this game for a while. At least until the next substantive patch. The drops are just too sparse and then when you do get an i63 item the rolls are garbage 99.99% of the time. Not only that they aren’t upgrades for me but they arent useful to anyone and I can’t sell them. Mighty weapons with 200int and no str or vit. Wands with 130str and +health globes. Piles and piles of i63 weapons that are unusable due to ridiculously low dps regardless of the modifiers. 150dps 1h weapons. 500dps 2h weapons. Unusable in Inferno so why are they rolling off the highest item levels in the game???
I will say I’ve definitely gotten my monies worth as I’ve put in at least 120hrs on this game. Hopefully they can fix it though before i permanently don’t want to return.
Im done with it because I have zero interest in the AH or paying real money to fix up issues in the game, dont seem to get equipment to fit my ability to progress, and find lag noticeable enough to be annoying and a cause of death.
My gear is red from dying again, and I just dont care enough to get gold to repair it again. When I play at the level I can reliably make money at I never see gear better than I have, when I go up in level I need to stock up on gold in order to pay for it - and I still dont see gear better than what I already have dropping.
I want to play a single player game like Diablo 2, and instead I got most of the annoying aspects of an MMO without many of the interesting aspects. Reading this thread simply confirms its just not the game I felt nostalgic about.
In conclusion, wahhhhhhhhh.
Otara
I’m still enjoying running around early Act I Inferno - there’s a nice balance between blasting the crap out of most things and moments of sheer terror when I hit an elite with a tricky combo of attributes. I figure if I never get to Act III, that’s okay.
That’s kinda what I’m doing with my DH, though I just made it to Act II last week. I have to say that finding a treasure goblin and actually killing him in Inferno gives me quite a bit more pleasure than absolutely anything in D2 ever did.
I’m still playing and enjoying it quite a bit. I like that I still actually have to pay attention in A1 because some champ packs can be quite tricky. Good but not perfect gear is getting cheaper on the AH by the day, making it even easier to try out new endgame combinations with low investment.
Ghom is still a pain in my ass, but I am one or two pieces of gear away from ending his miserable life.
So apparently the top geared barbs can clear act 3 inferno in about 45 minutes. Awesome! Their gear is worth 500m. Not awesome.
I finally got by Inferno Belial with my DH with the help of my son’s barbarian…he kept spamming me with “SS!” after each wipe because I died constantly because of my bad timing of using the Smoke Screen, especially the breath attack. Learned to stay in the bottom corner for most of the time, and pay attention to the arm attack warning, and not hold down the right click button for the elemental arrow (+nether tentacles)…just tap it as needed. Traded in Caltrops for Marked for Death and kept that up so we could beat the enrage timer…I had 43k dps for the fight.
And then we started Act 3…nothing beats that awesome feeling of getting pinned down at the first set of stairs by arcane wallers w/reflect damage!
Well yeah, but then you get a silly combo which sort of makes up for it. Such as a mob with teleport and no ranged attacks. OK, so you just ported away, and? Come back to momma, I have a Sword of Spanking with your name.
My favorite combo to hate so far: evil floor (poison or fire) plus bombardment plus arcane. If you’re close you eat the floor, if you’re too far you get bombarded, whomever invented arcane should get a custom job title along the lines of Evil Mastermind.