Diablo III --Impressions start on page 36 --

[leo8877]

What's the point of WD pets in Nightmare+?  They die almost instantly.

Which pets? Not Gargantuan I hope. Zombie dogs die damn near instantly in Normal act 2, so that's certainly not shocking.

Yeah the poor zombie dogs.  It's like I need to cast them on every pull.  Garg seems to be doing ok.

[jersoc]

What's the point of WD pets in Nightmare+?  They die almost instantly.

see, this is my point! i rolled a WD to use pets and you can't. you'll see my inferno build has zero pets and with good reason.

[Harkonis]

Pets require high resists (both straight and int) and high armor to be viable.

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/5271500086

[Orgull]

My Wizard just finished Nightmare at Level 51 and I've had my first taste of Hell. It's pee-inducing so far. My first pack of elites was Vampiric, Electrified, Arcane Enchanted. I nearly had heart failure taking them down. Much running and swearing was involved.

Seriously as much of a Fanboi as I am of the Diablo series, Normal is actually fairly boring. Please don't give up on the game till you've tried Nightmare. That's when it gets really fun and you feel really powerful yet appropriately challenged. And the loot is sweet.

Not sure about Hell yet. It's too early to tell.

[Gratch]

Seriously as much of a Fanboi as I am of the Diablo series, Normal is actually fairly boring. Please don't give up on the game till you've tried Nightmare. That's when it gets really fun and you feel really powerful yet appropriately challenged. And the loot is sweet.

I just finished Normal, thoroughly enjoyed it, and thought the difficulty was just about right.  Then again, I've never been one who thinks uber-difficult = better.  Might give Nightmare a try, but I don't get super excited about restarting right away.

[Harkonis]

Seriously as much of a Fanboi as I am of the Diablo series, Normal is actually fairly boring. Please don't give up on the game till you've tried Nightmare. That's when it gets really fun and you feel really powerful yet appropriately challenged. And the loot is sweet.

I just finished Normal, thoroughly enjoyed it, and thought the difficulty was just about right.  Then again, I've never been one who thinks uber-difficult = better.  Might give Nightmare a try, but I don't get super excited about restarting right away.

it's not really about it being more difficult, it's about actually having to think instead of just mashing through everything.  On normal you can face tank just about anything and just stand there and click.  Nightmare is where the champions and elite mobs start having combinations of abilities that make you actually have to use tactics to beat them instead of just pure force.  If Nightmare just was the same as Normal but with more hp and damage, it would be boring as hell...  (pun intended)

[Hotfreak]

Have any Inferno-level WD's been able to come up with a decent pet build?  I noticed Jersoc wasn't using dogs or Garg for Inf Act 1 boss.

[Gratch]

Seriously as much of a Fanboi as I am of the Diablo series, Normal is actually fairly boring. Please don't give up on the game till you've tried Nightmare. That's when it gets really fun and you feel really powerful yet appropriately challenged. And the loot is sweet.

I just finished Normal, thoroughly enjoyed it, and thought the difficulty was just about right.  Then again, I've never been one who thinks uber-difficult = better.  Might give Nightmare a try, but I don't get super excited about restarting right away.

it's not really about it being more difficult, it's about actually having to think instead of just mashing through everything.  On normal you can face tank just about anything and just stand there and click.  Nightmare is where the champions and elite mobs start having combinations of abilities that make you actually have to use tactics to beat them instead of just pure force.  If Nightmare just was the same as Normal but with more hp and damage, it would be boring as hell...  (pun intended)

To each their own, but the main reason I enjoy the Diablo games is because I'm a mindless, whirling machine of pure death.  I actually enjoy simply racking up a massive body count, grabbing more loot, and becoming more powerful without dinking around with a lot of tactical nonsense.  That's part of the charm, and probably why I've never gotten very far past Normal mode before.  

EDIT:  Just played through the "secret level".  OMG, that was hilarious.

[Harpua3]

What is this "secret" level you speak of?

[Gratch]

What is this "secret" level you speak of?

Google "Whimsyshire".  No idea how to access it...I jumped into a friend's game to get there.

[Nonnahob]

You have to craft a staff to access it. It's kind of a jarring experience from the rest of the game.... And that staff is not cheap. A buddy of mine spent a few hours farming for the crafting mats needed. Didn't seem to be worth it, imo.

[Misguided]

To each their own, but the main reason I enjoy the Diablo games is because I'm a mindless, whirling machine of pure death.  I actually enjoy simply racking up a massive body count, grabbing more loot, and becoming more powerful without dinking around with a lot of tactical nonsense.  That's part of the charm, and probably why I've never gotten very far past Normal mode before.  

Ditto, but I'm also having fun playing HC normal.

[wonderpug]

Have any Inferno-level WD's been able to come up with a decent pet build?  I noticed Jersoc wasn't using dogs or Garg for Inf Act 1 boss.

If I remember right, they benefit from your armor and resistances, but not your vitality. Pumping those stats and of course taking the pet friendly passives is the way to go, from what I've read.

[Arclight]

The drops have dried up for me. I've put about 5 levels worth of time into Nightmare with my Monk. I'm finding the play totally do-able, but the drops stink. Any yellow's that drop are usually for another class or at best a side-ways exchange for me.
We all know the excitment of the game, primarily, is the drops. Without out that high expectation of something, new and fresh dropping for your character the game quickly becomes a boring click-fest. At least it does for me after the first run through.

And some of the armor designs for the Monk........ ..........I'm wearing a helm(if you can call it that)that you would expect to see on a court jester at Medival Times Dinner and Theatre show.
Anyone else having the same luck?

[Nonnahob]

Yes, I'm 100% with you on the drops. I actually resorted to buying from the ah earlier because my gloves were so awful for my level.

I've seen two epics or legendaries or whatever, but have not gotten one myself. My wizard is at 43 and my barbarian is at 38. Im lucky in that I've had a good group of friends to play with and we have had more success finding loot for each other probably then finding it for ourselves.

I really have noticed an uptick in the amount of rare loot in nightmare but certainly not an uptick in quality of that loot. Just keep trucking along I guess.

[Harpua3]

What is this "secret" level you speak of?

Google "Whimsyshire".  No idea how to access it...I jumped into a friend's game to get there.

Awesome. I will. Now.

[leo8877]

Have any Inferno-level WD's been able to come up with a decent pet build?  I noticed Jersoc wasn't using dogs or Garg for Inf Act 1 boss.

If I remember right, they benefit from your armor and resistances, but not your vitality. Pumping those stats and of course taking the pet friendly passives is the way to go, from what I've read.

This is Int and Str, correct?

[Blackjack]

Nightmare-wise, what's ticking me off is the matchmaking system basically won't ever put you in a public game unless there's only one person in it. So it's like the moment someone leaves my 2-player game THEN it drops someone in. Then that person quits cause they don't want to be in "only" a 2 player game. Then someone else is dropped in. Then they quit for the same reason. Lather, rinse, repeat.   It's stupid, frustrating design.

After about 15 deaths on an early boss in Act 4 NM, the fun factor is about dead. If I could ever get more than 2 players in, I'm sure it's doable, but the stupid system -- which Blizz has said mostly just ends up with a bunch of 2 player games to try to spread the server load -- makes it all but impossible to do via public games.

I'd think ideally they could set it to give you an option: "don't put me in a co-op game until at least 3 players can be put together." I wouldn't even mind waiting in a que for that to take place. To me that would be more fun than the current system which seems to end up in say, 200 1-player public games and maybe a dozen 2-player public games and, depending on the hour of day apparently, virtually never more than that.

Really, Blizz, if yer gonna tout your game being built for co-op from the ground up and then basically say your server system is designed pretty much to have as few full groups as possible because it can't handle a lot of full groups, that's a crock. imho...

Now I'll try to vent my frustration by beating on demons with my low level Barbarian...  

[Purge]

My level 14(at the time) WD found this:

Split Tusk.

My first legendary.

[CeeKay]

And some of the armor designs for the Monk........ ..........I'm wearing a helm(if you can call it that)that you would expect to see on a court jester at Medival Times Dinner and Theatre show.
Anyone else having the same luck?

haven't found any armor, but I do find it humorous to run around with a mace and shield as a monk.

[Teggy]

Into hell now, still no legendaries...

I had a little trouble with one of the minibosses in Act IV nightmare so I went to a public game - having an actual tank instead of the templar for DH makes things so much easier. We breezed through for the most part as a group of 2, especially once the game added two more people to our party.

I entered hell at level 50. It was kind of interesting, because the vendor was selling a ton of great upgrades, but they were all level 54 or higher. Made me wonder if they expect you to spend a little longer in nightmare. When I came back after the first few quests, though, they were selling mid-40s stuff.

Act 1 hell has been pretty easy at 50 so far, but my exposure to elites has been minimal. I did get a frozen waller extra health yellow in a tiny cellar - was a bit difficult with so little room to maneuver and I died a couple of times.

[Mikagami]

Hi ho. hi ho, into Hell we go, .. . . . . . with not a single legendary drop to date on 75hours of combined class playtime.

It's rough when a basic zombie smacks you for 1/4th of your health.. with nearly 50% damage reduction in total.......

About 50k of AH upgrades later, I'm back to toe to toe with molten elites.
From what my friend tells me, at the lv50 and up range, item upgrades are needed almost every level as the difference in stats is massive.

[Arkon]

My level 19 Monk just got a legendary...it was a level 7 fist weapon.  What is the point of drops that far below my level...very frustrating as my very first legendary and it is utterly useless to me.

[Teggy]

RUN AWAY!!!!

[gellar]

RUN AWAY!!!!

Ahahahahahahhaha.

[Purge]

My level 19 Monk just got a legendary...it was a level 7 fist weapon.  What is the point of drops that far below my level...very frustrating as my very first legendary and it is utterly useless to me.

SELL IT.

Dude. Srsly.

[Arkon]

My level 19 Monk just got a legendary...it was a level 7 fist weapon.  What is the point of drops that far below my level...very frustrating as my very first legendary and it is utterly useless to me.

SELL IT.

Dude. Srsly.

I did a search on the AH and found the item with a buyout as low as 5,000 gold...isn't even worth much sadly.

[CeeKay]

My level 19 Monk just got a legendary...it was a level 7 fist weapon.  What is the point of drops that far below my level...very frustrating as my very first legendary and it is utterly useless to me.

yeah, some of the yellows I have gotten have been 'that's it?' weak.

[Sparhawk]

been farming inferno the last few days. I think the biggest thing blizzard can do right now is make all items drop be at level 58-60. i found so many rares that were lvl 50, what?

why am i finding nightmare shit in an end game difficulty?

also, give witch doctors a mana regen. wizards are lol.

witch doctors do have abilities that Regen mana and quickly I might add. Soul walk has a time but my favorite is using spiders with the widow maker rune.

Sent from my SGH-T989 using Tapatalk 2

you can not use VQ in inferno, if that's what you mean. if you keep 4 skills on CD for no reason other to regen mana you are dead. you also can't spam bears anymore. I'm 60, i've played my WD for over 80 some hours. I know about all the VQ builds.


a range of emotions...

I'm not talking about VQ. There are runes for poison dart, spiders, and soul walk that rebuild your mana. Though, the build I use I'm never mana starved.

[leo8877]

Has this been posted yet?  Diablo 3 Nightmare strategy:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEyk63UaBI4

[rshetts2]

and this is why Blizzard sucks.  Had some time to play my single player game and the game is inaccessible because they are doing maintenance.  For like 10 hours.  This isnt WoW, wtf Blizz.  Once again honest people pay the price for pirating.  Those of you out there who pirate games.....   

[Orgull]

I've been playing for hours, despite the maintenance. Simply start the game, and BEFORE you log in, change your account settings to Europe or Asia, then you can play all you want while the North American servers are down. Keep in ming you can't transfer loot between regions so these out-of-region alts are on their own. But you can still play.

Then when the NA servers are back up, again BEFORE you log in, change your account settings back to North America and you'll be all set!

Enjoy.

[wonderpug]

There's no way to manage your auctions outside of the game, right?  No web based access on Blizzard's website or something?

[Clanwolfer]

It's actually pretty interesting to watch what's going on as they work on the Diablo 3 infrastructure - I mean, I run a much, much smaller application at my job, and I've seen some of the same kinds of things - for example, when the AH auctions were all unsorted. Our application tends to get a little weird with SQL queries when the DB is in bad shape, and sorting seems to be the first thing to go out the window - so seeing today's patchnotes where they talk about sorting of past auctions being fixed, then the AH still being down for 'database checks', makes me think "Hey! I bet they're scrambling around to defrag indexes, update statistics, and/or optimize queries 'til everything works!".

Not that it's such a stretch to imagine that the AH is wonky because the databases are slow, but it makes me feel better that Blizz deals with the same stuff I've seen, and the same patterns (sorting goes odd, then transactions get slow, then you have to start taking stuff that's not working offline)!

Wonder if they're fixing up the queries in-house, or if they've got some database consultants in to optimize the hell out of any calls against their AH database. Maybe they pulled queries from the WoW AH that scaled well to one side of one realm but couldn't scale up to all of D3.

[CeeKay]

Has this been posted yet?  Diablo 3 Nightmare strategy:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEyk63UaBI4

 

MUWUHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!

[ericb]

and this is why Blizzard sucks.  Had some time to play my single player game and the game is inaccessible because they are doing maintenance.  For like 10 hours.  This isnt WoW, wtf Blizz.  Once again honest people pay the price for pirating.  Those of you out there who pirate games.....   

Actually we're paying the price for hacking and cheating...I don't believe pirating the game was ever a big concern.  Item and gold duplication would kill the real money market though (that Blizzard just happens to receive a substantial chunk of cash from).

Personally I understand the reasoning but the lack of LAN and single player non-connected games still blows.  Especially with 10 hour maintenance windows

[skystride]

it's not really about it being more difficult, it's about actually having to think instead of just mashing through everything.  On normal you can face tank just about anything and just stand there and click.  Nightmare is where the champions and elite mobs start having combinations of abilities that make you actually have to use tactics to beat them instead of just pure force.  If Nightmare just was the same as Normal but with more hp and damage, it would be boring as hell...  (pun intended)

The funny thing is that I find some of the bosses in Nightmare are actually much easier than Normal.  My build right now has enough lifesteal than I just stand there and whack the boss.  I realize champs/elites are a different story but it's interesting that story mobs actually got easier for many cases.

[Hrothgar]

and this is why Blizzard sucks.  Had some time to play my single player game and the game is inaccessible because they are doing maintenance.  For like 10 hours.  This isnt WoW, wtf Blizz.  Once again honest people pay the price for pirating.  Those of you out there who pirate games.....   

Actually we're paying the price for hacking and cheating...I don't believe pirating the game was ever a big concern.  Item and gold duplication would kill the real money market though (that Blizzard just happens to receive a substantial chunk of cash from).

Personally I understand the reasoning but the lack of LAN and single player non-connected games still blows.  Especially with 10 hour maintenance windows

Do they really take down all the North American WoW servers at once for 10 hours at a time?

[leo8877]

and this is why Blizzard sucks.  Had some time to play my single player game and the game is inaccessible because they are doing maintenance.  For like 10 hours.  This isnt WoW, wtf Blizz.  Once again honest people pay the price for pirating.  Those of you out there who pirate games.....   

Actually we're paying the price for hacking and cheating...I don't believe pirating the game was ever a big concern.  Item and gold duplication would kill the real money market though (that Blizzard just happens to receive a substantial chunk of cash from).

Personally I understand the reasoning but the lack of LAN and single player non-connected games still blows.  Especially with 10 hour maintenance windows

Do they really take down all the North American WoW servers at once for 10 hours at a time?

Yes, they applied a patch today.  It's been back up for awhile now.

[Qantaga]

Yes, they applied a patch today.  It's been back up for awhile now.

 
   
I was able to get in and play for awhile after the patch, but now I can't get back in. It gets to "Retrieving Hero List..." and just hangs.