Diablo 3

[Psyren]

As opposed to D3 where you vomit your build prescribed color onto the screen and clear it all.

If you're playing at difficulties where "vomit" is sufficient then of course you're not going to experience any of the depth. No cooldown management, no resource management, no density-building, no elite-hunting or kiting... that's like stopping at Nightmare in D2 and claiming all you need is color too. (Not that D2 has much of that either.)

In any event, hopefully JordanM's question got answered since I doubt either of us is going to convince the other of anything. You go your way, I'll go mine, ne'er the twain shall meet etc.

[noob]

Some rare monsters are absolutely cruel in D3 like the ones that combines "invulnerable sbires" with "create walls" and a bunch of other horrible things.(I do not know if those modifiers were kept in latter versions)

[hamishspence]

Invulnerable Minions is thankfully gone, but yes, there can be some very nasty combos. Arcane Enchanted plus anything that limits the player's movement (Jailer, Frozen, Waller, etc).

[Traab]

Invulnerable Minions is thankfully gone, but yes, there can be some very nasty combos. Arcane Enchanted plus anything that limits the player's movement (Jailer, Frozen, Waller, etc).

Yeah you need either very specific gear for that sort of thing, or play a class with the right skills. Like i think there are a couple of class skills that let you basically phase through waller.

[hamishspence]

And the Bottomless Potion of Kulle-Aid.

[Psyren]

Arcane Enchanted plus anything that limits the player's movement (Jailer, Frozen, Waller, etc).

This is a nice example because there are a wide variety of solutions even on high difficulty. Evade the beams if you have a teleport ability, escape jail with a break-cc ability, use a class defensive or immunity, stack arcane resist if your build is weak to this combination, wear/cube a Cameo, use a cheat-death, cc/assassinate the jailer with a cooldown before they can trap you, bait the jail and the beams away from each other, and even some class-specific counters like Wizards being able to reposition the beams with Black Hole, DH being able to outrange one or both affixes + turn invisible to mess up their targeting, WD or Necro being able to bait the jail onto a pet etc. And whichever you choose, you have to do in a split-second.

[hamishspence]

And some things will simply not be available in Greater Rifts - you can't swap in a Cameo if you're not wearing one and haven't got it in your Cube Amulet/Ring slot either.

[Psyren]

And some things will simply not be available in Greater Rifts - you can't swap in a Cameo if you're not wearing one and haven't got it in your Cube Amulet/Ring slot either.

Yeah it's a build consideration before you start the rift, if yours has that as a particular achilles heel. There's a tradeoff associated obviously but some builds have more flexibility in the amulet slot or cube jewelry slot than others.

[JeenLeen]

Question to see if there's a viable Diablo 3 playstyle for me: when I played Diablo 2, I didn't really like the live-action combat, but I was enjoying the story and exploring dungeons. So I played Druid and basically had my pets kill everything for me, while I explored around and turned into a bear if I started to take too much damage.
I killed the boss of Act I without even realizing I was fighting it, as my pets finished her off at the edge of the screen while I was picking up loot.

Is there a similar build/class for Diablo 3?
I don't care about it being viable on the more difficult settings, but hoping it'd at least work for the default difficulty.

Also, I played... some Exiled or Exiles of Something for a bit. Once I hit Act II, it became necessary to have an AoE effect to handle mobs. (In Act I, I could stab them one at a time and it worked well enough, if a bit tedious.) That made it a lot less fun for me. I reckon an army of pets is basically a AoE, but is there something like that in Diablo 3, like a point where tactics that would have worked earlier no longer work as of a certain point.

[hamishspence]

Question to see if there's a viable Diablo 3 playstyle for me: when I played Diablo 2, I didn't really like the live-action combat, but I was enjoying the story and exploring dungeons. So I played Druid and basically had my pets kill everything for me, while I explored around and turned into a bear if I started to take too much damage.
I killed the boss of Act I without even realizing I was fighting it, as my pets finished her off at the edge of the screen while I was picking up loot.

Is there a similar build/class for Diablo 3?.

Both Necromancers and Witch Doctors are capable of being very pet-centric. With the right Legendary Items and class sets, Monks and Demon Hunters can be too.

The Barbarian, Sorcerers and Crusader are all somewhat less so.

[Lord Torath]

Plus, if you stick at Normal Difficulty, you will have no problem getting through the storyline.

The Wizard can use Storm Armor and Hydra to kill things far from you, and hit anything that gets close with Disintegrate or Lightning. Or any number of other offensive powers.

[Psyren]

WD and Necro are best at it, but almost every class has some flavor of pet build. Wizard and DH get turrets, while Barb and Monk have mini-followers that aren't much good for tanking but can divert some hits from you. The one that gets basically no pet support is Crusader.

[hamishspence]

Using Phalanx, with the Bodyguard rune, and having the Eternal Union ring (either on you or cubed) allows Avatar of the Order pets that last 30 seconds.

Not great, but it's a pet build of sorts.

[Rynjin]

Using Phalanx, with the Bodyguard rune, and having the Eternal Union ring (either on you or cubed) allows Avatar of the Order pets that last 30 seconds.

Not great, but it's a pet build of sorts.

Phalanxsader is my pet project I work on off and on whenever I play Crusader. It's...difficult to get to work. As mentioned up thread, it requires a LOT of gearing, preferably via farming on another character or with a different build, and there's really only two options: hardcore into Legacy of Dreams, or Akkhan's.

The hard part with Legacy is getting Akkarat's Champion to 100% uptime. The problem with Akkhan's is that it's boring and you may as well do a different build with the set, and it's difficult to impossible to fit the nice little Phalanx boosts that do exist like the Warhlem of Kassar into it. I have yet to be able to crack T12 with it.

[Psyren]

Using Phalanx, with the Bodyguard rune, and having the Eternal Union ring (either on you or cubed) allows Avatar of the Order pets that last 30 seconds.

Not great, but it's a pet build of sorts.

I discounted it as it's a meme build at best. At the levels where you can make Phalax work, you can make just about anything work.

[tyckspoon]

The hard part with Legacy is getting Akkarat's Champion to 100% uptime...

Hmm. Well, there's not really a Phalanx weapon (or at least not enough weapon-slot Phalanx related items to have significant competition as to what to choose between equipping and cubing and not using at all), so Messerschmidt's Reaver? Especially if you have no or few other skills that regularly are on cooldown. Possibly combine with Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac, presumably you have a Wrath-dumping skill selected as well if you're using one of the extended summon variations of Phalanx, and the Legacy gem gives you a lot of flexibility in jewelry slots (obviously much less if you're using the original ring set instead.) I don't think there's a lot of competition for generic armor slots and you badly want Cooldown Reduction for that, so a Leoric's Crown might fit? With that, paragon points, and slanting gear property choices to CDR you can probably get 40-50% CDR; take the low end and you're looking at a 54 second cooldown on Akkarat's. 20 second duration gives 34 seconds of cooldown that needs to be negated, so 34 monsters kills within 20 seconds with the Reaver. Should be pretty consistently doable in any content with good enemy density, and in zones without you have safe down time to just let the cooldown reset naturally.

[Man_Over_Game]

So my wife and I have started playing together - she's new and I'm not - and I'm noticing how friggin difficult it is playing my monk compared to her necromancer.

We just started Chapter 2 on our first run, Master difficulty.

Is the power discrepancy temporary, should I suck it up for a while, or do I just suck?

[tyckspoon]

So my wife and I have started playing together - she's new and I'm not - and I'm noticing how friggin difficult it is playing my monk compared to her necromancer.

We just started Chapter 2 on our first run, Master difficulty.

Is the power discrepancy temporary, should I suck it up for a while, or do I just suck?

Monk takes a pretty good while to get its better skills/runes, IIRC, while Necromancer gets some of their key stuff from like.. level 5. It should be temporary. (If she's using Corpse Lance, you're probably also noticing the results of two traits of Corpse Lance: A, it does *tons of damage*, and B: it uses bodies instead of actual character resource, so as long as there's something dead nearby you can chain-Lance through entire packs of enemies. This means the Necromancer during leveling is doing damage that most classes need to find a good helper legendary to achieve, and they rarely have to stop to use normal attacks to recharge their meter because they're not actually using meter resource.)

[Man_Over_Game]

Monk takes a pretty good while to get its better skills/runes, IIRC, while Necromancer gets some of their key stuff from like.. level 5. It should be temporary. (If she's using Corpse Lance, you're probably also noticing the results of two traits of Corpse Lance: A, it does *tons of damage*, and B: it uses bodies instead of actual character resource, so as long as there's something dead nearby you can chain-Lance through entire packs of enemies. This means the Necromancer during leveling is doing damage that most classes need to find a good helper legendary to achieve, and they rarely have to stop to use normal attacks to recharge their meter because they're not actually using meter resource.)

That's one thing I'm worried about.

For my monk gameplay, I'm doing a pretty solid rotation of Bleeding Palm + Cyclone Strike (so that I kill a bunch of enemies when that one guy dies), combining that Critical-damage-aura with the Tempest secondary (which hits a ton to stack the crits needed to max my aura quickly), and then punching my Bleeding Palm target.

It's a good setup from what I can tell, and very similar to the one I used when I played years ago on later playthroughs.

So my question is, does the Necromancer have some sort of powerful, early game scaling, is the necromancer generally stronger, or am I making some kind of mistake with the abilities I'm set up for?

[Psyren]

It's pretty difficult to diagnose play I can't see, so I can't tell you if you're doing anything wrong. I'm also not clear if you're using a generator or not.

Personally I would do either Cyclone Strike or Tempest Rush while leveling, not both - they are both spammable spenders, as opposed to the more discrete spending of Exploding Palm that makes it easier to fit into a damage rotation. I would also make sure you're using Dashing Strike so that you can dive priority targets and get out again easily.

As another suggestion - if you find you're dying a lot, having to kite/run a lot, or taking a long while to kill the monsters, lower the difficulty to Expert or even Hard - the higher bonus XP you get from racking up big killstreaks and not spending time dead will outweigh the increased base XP from the higher difficulty.

Last but not least, make sure you're visiting and upgrading Griswold frequently, and get the highest base-damage weapon(s) you can afford and equip from him.

[Rynjin]

It IS also true that necromancer is just a stronger class, baseline, than Monk. Monk requires a lot of item support to do much, and has been setup as the designated "support class" of the game.

Necromancer is just...kinda juiced, comparatively, at least until you hit endgame where everyone is pretty much the same strength depending on build.

Monk does have the advantage of having better baseline generators though. Way of the Hundred Fists and Crippling Wave are still both used endgame (for comparison, most builds for other classes don't use Generators AT ALL endgame), and Fists of Thunder is lowkey all you need early on.

It might be easier to focus on punching things more and dumping Spirit into the big smashy smash abilities instead. That's what I typically do when leveling Monk (which is my most played class). You burn through enemies a lot quicker generating max Spirit and then dumping it all on Lashing Tail Kick or Wave of Light and repeating than trying to go for an early game, ghetto Uliana's type build.

[Traab]

Sounds like necro suffers from expansion explosion. If you want to lure people back to buy your new expansion and play the class its gotta be an AWESOME class. Kinda like when death knights got added to world of warcraft they were absurd beasts for quite some time, blood spec were capable of soloing group quests that should require 3-5 players. That said, I love my necro, but since I dont play with others it wasnt as obvious to me. Though I have noticed some classes have a harder time getting started. And yeah, difficulty, its best to pick one where you can easily slaughter groups of mobs rather than one where you struggle to kill because of those kill streak bonuses and just plain regular kill speed. If everything dies twice as fast its like having a 100% exp bonus anyways. Save the "can barely survive/kill" difficulty setting for gear farming where you need to squeeze out every torment level you can to have better loot drops.

[Rydiro]

Save the "can barely survive/kill" difficulty setting for gear farming where you need to squeeze out every torment level you can to have better loot drops.

Quality of loot doesn't increase with torment level, only quantity.* And you don't even want the torment-exclusive legendaries.

Its far more efficient going at max killspeed and only increasing torment level when your current one is far too easy, and you could go about the same speed in a higher difficulty.

*Ancient quantity increases slightly more than overall legendary/set quantity. Still quantity though.

[Psyren]

Pushing difficulty (i.e. GRs) is for upgrading your legendary gems, and just challenging yourself in general. The loot you get from the Rift Guardian, while nice, should not be your primary source of gear.

T13-T16 are for speed clears - your goal is the highest possible quantity of legendaries so you maximize your chances of that BiS primal ancient for your build dropping, as well as maximum mats (Death's Breaths in particular.) Everything else you grab is for completing your build, or rerolling specific pieces (again, with the goal of targeting that BiS primal.)

[Rynjin]

Quality of loot doesn't increase with torment level, only quantity.* And you don't even want the torment-exclusive legendaries.

Its far more efficient going at max killspeed and only increasing torment level when your current one is far too easy, and you could go about the same speed in a higher difficulty.

*Ancient quantity increases slightly more than overall legendary/set quantity. Still quantity though.

Because of the way the system works, quantity equals quality. 10% of all rares are Legendary, so more drops means more meaningful loot.

[Traab]

Ah ok then, I dont do gear farming much anyways so I just thought I remembered hearing that certain tiers of torment tend to drop higher quality gear so pushing to the brink of what you can handle might mean the difference between seeing your current gear dropping and seeing better statted versions of it dropping. But if its still all about speed the point stands, drop difficulty till you are flying through the area with minimal delays.

[Man_Over_Game]

You know, one really interesting thing that is actually really big right now, and kinda started around the same time that folks threw a huge BF between the transition of D2 to D3 is the recent push away from specialized gameplay.

It's actually a big deal, but D2 is kinda outdated with its progression system, and would actually end up being pretty...bad, if it was compared to a lot of the stuff that comes out today.

See, with a lot of games, you start out being pretty bad at a lot of things universally, and so you slowly start making progress towards an end-goal, investing in minor things along the way, and using them until they are no longer worthwhile. Eventually, you start investing in the things you are planning on doing all of the time, and you end up doing more and more of that thing and less of anything else.

So you've hit a point where you're now only playing the game one way, all of the time. Essentially, what happens is that you end up having less "game" to play the more you play, by balancing around the fact that the player has to specialize.

Now, taking D3 into consideration, its lack of specializing your stats, your skills, etc. means that you can be completely valid while changing your entire playstyle on a whim. I recently picked up a legendary that made me shoot fireballs when I do my sweeping monk kick, guess now I'm rebuilding a new way to play by fitting that into my rotation.

It kinda makes me laugh when I think about how much grief D3 got when it came out for how people hated how "arcady" it was, when really it was setting the bar. Hardly any notable games nowadays use the classic D2 progression system, and most that do end up trying to add ways to mitigate the problem, usually by having a max number of points you can put into one thing (like Borderlands), or by making sure nothing you invest into can be wasted (Children of Morta does this, all of your investments are passives or are actives that can all be used at once).

Diablo-esc games act as this really vivid window into how game design goals have changed over time. With the 90s, it was all about that grind, getting better, hitting that next bar. But over time, enemies became more telegraphed, gameplay started to act closer to what you'd expect in an Arcade, where reaction time and planning are becoming more important. You can even see the trend continuing with D4, as character movements become more responsive, chaining moves becomes more important, and enemy attacks can often be avoided with well-timed stuns or movements.

Without those lessons, games like Hades or Children of Morta probably wouldn't be half as good as they are.

I'm kind of a game design nerd, sorry. It's just been pretty cool to witness over the last 20 years. For some reason, Diablo keeps setting the bar for the generation to follow, and I guess I'm looking forward to see what happens after this.

[Psyren]

Ah ok then, I dont do gear farming much anyways so I just thought I remembered hearing that certain tiers of torment tend to drop higher quality gear so pushing to the brink of what you can handle might mean the difference between seeing your current gear dropping and seeing better statted versions of it dropping. But if its still all about speed the point stands, drop difficulty till you are flying through the area with minimal delays.

At very high GRs, almost every drop from the rift guardian will be legendary. The problem is that you're looking at 6-8 drops total in an amount of time where you could have done three speedrift T16s back to back and gotten upwards of 6x that many. And that's not counting random procs like Cow rifts, Whimsydale, Greed portals etc etc.

It kinda makes me laugh when I think about how much grief D3 got when it came out for how people hated how "arcady" it was, when really it was setting the bar. Hardly any notable games nowadays use the classic D2 progression system, and most that do end up trying to add ways to mitigate the problem, usually by having a max number of points you can put into one thing (like Borderlands), or by making sure nothing you invest into can be wasted (Children of Morta does this, all of your investments are passives or are actives that can all be used at once).

I agree with all your points, just wanted to also note that D3 deserved the hate it got when it came out. Drop rates were far, far stingier then than they are now, with the goal of pushing people towards the RMAH as a primary gearing mechanism. And on top of that, the "Hell" difficulty the game launched with was basically impossible to play unless you spent real money on those drops, or farmed your fingers to the bone in unchallenging content until you got lucky.

[Rynjin]

Yeah, D3 was an absolute trash game on Launch. I never mad eit through Act II, it got so boring.

It wasn't until Reaper of Souls came out that I got back into the game and started loving it. A lot of people, understandably, never gave it that second chance.

[Rydiro]

At very high GRs, almost every drop from the rift guardian will be legendary. The problem is that you're looking at 6-8 drops total in an amount of time where you could have done three speedrift T16s back to back and gotten upwards of 6x that many. And that's not counting random procs like Cow rifts, Whimsydale, Greed portals etc etc.

Thats an unfair comparison. Speedfarming GRs (like 2-3 min per rift) gives you more legendaries per time than the torments do. And they all drop conveniently in one place.

And yeah, Diablo 3 endgame was literally a stock market simulator at launch.
Edit to explain: The way to play it was neither real money nor grinding. But instead buying undervalued items in the auction house and reselling them for profit. Using arbitrage to profit off naive sellers. Then you could afford gear to advace a little more. We never got past inferno ghom.