MF can't increase the number of ilvl 63s that drop and MF doesn't affect the stat rolls on items besides the higher chance to get a full + split stat combo. This is why MF isn't as good as some might think.
Those are the two most important things in D3. You need ilvl 63s because it has a much better chance of rolling higher stats, and then you need to get lucky and get a good stat roll.
Maybe this makes sense for HC, but the issue is that most people think that it's best to farm the end of A1 because they're more likely to drop higher ilvl compared to earlier parts. In my experience, the drops from packs in the cathedral etc, tend to be weaker than what you get from Cursed Hold forward.
This was confusing, you say most people think as in they are mistaken, then you say you have noticed it yourself that the drops are better at the end of act 1 ^^?
As far as I know, all packs in act 1 have the same chance to drop good stuff.
In act 2 I hear that they mobs go from 61-62 halfway through the act, so there could be a difference there. But as far as I know all mobs in A1 are lvl 61.
The mainly reason I don't farm a lot of the "last" zones in Act 1 is cause they are nastier packs compared to the Weeping Woods so I just skip them for a faster run so I can get back to the Starting zones again ^^
Huh? I meant what I said.
Most people farm the end of A1 because they believe that the further you go, the better the drops are. I really don't know if this is true or not. But from my subjective experience, it seems like it is.
The elite at Warrior's Rest clearly has a worse chance to drop good items, I think people would agree with that.
I have found at least 8 items in Act I that I can think of off the top of my head that sold for over 15mil. If you really farmed that much and never found anything then you either 1) have lottery winningly low bad luck; 2) don't know how to price the drops you are getting; 3) didn't really spend that much time farming and it just feels to you like you did.
Before they buffed act III drops and I was focusing on act I, I was making 5-8mil a day, and usually only about 3-4 hours of farming.
If you really farmed that much then you should have around 10 million just from gold pickups, and a lot more from salvaging... You can even put together a decent a3 capable set for under 1 million so the only thing that held you back was really yourself.
Yeah you must have bad luck, not sure. Don't get me wrong, I've made millions of gold farming A1. You can get 5 million a day certainly.
It's just that the way it goes down is really lame. Also, it's getting harder to do with every week that goes by. A few weeks ago it was super easy to make gold compared to now. Just look at the situation with weapons on the AH. You basically can't sell 2Hs that are like under 1200 DPS or 1Hs under 850. Sometimes with a high LoH roll you can, but generally it's difficult.
It bothers me trying to sell items most people shouldn't want.
Essentially, the way you make gold farming A1 is by selling tons of smaller items and by selling a super rare item for millions. Every so often you'll get something that sells for 5-15 million. But most of the time you end up trying to sell trash items. As time goes by this is a less and less reliable way to make gold.
So yeah... the farming situation in A1 will only get worse and worse. Pretty soon the only gold you'll make is from those super rare items.
I average about 1 page (plus a few more) in the stash filled with rares. I pick up all blues and rares. I don't even look at the blues just DE them all for mats, and check every rare after my run, keeping what should sell for anything 50k+, my highest sold item so far has been for 800k, so I haven't gotten those super juicy drops yet (at least not for selling) ^^
The run takes me between 30-50min I would say.
The only slightly dangerous part of this run is if there is a Beast pack in the Northen Highlands while I'm rushing to find Watch Tower, or if the affix combo is nasty for my build (wallers + shields are my bane).
I play on HC EU.
Maybe this makes sense for HC, but the issue is that most people think that it's best to farm the end of A1 because they're more likely to drop higher ilvl compared to earlier parts. In my experience, the drops from packs in the cathedral etc, tend to be weaker than what you get from Cursed Hold forward.
You're forgetting Highlands Crossing --> The Watchtower. Always a few elites and a yellow chest in there. Easy skeleton-mobs for fast farming. My record-find was 7 elite-packs in that tower
wow i didnt know that ! ty O.O
This is true. I don't usually check for it for some reason... should probably start doing that. Also, Cathedral lvl 3 there's sometimes a summoner at the WP.
So I'd probably do like Crypts / Graveyard (3 packs) > Cathedral lvl 3 (check for summoner) > Festering Woods (kill 3 packs) > Northern Highlands (kill 1 pack) > Watchtower > Leoric's Mansion (1 or 2 packs) > Halls to Butcher.
Extra affixes don't hurt you at all. They don't decrease the max roll on a given affix, so it doesn't matter. Besides, it is still unclear as to whether or not MF adds affixes at all or simply increases the chance at higher quality items.
The addition to the game guide seems to say that it does affect the affix count, but it's a bit vague, and it goes against what was said previously. The guy around here who has that awesome MF thread is looking into it.
You're right. But it can feel like those garbage affixes are taking away from the desired stats when every item you get has at least 1 split stat lol... it gets so annoying seeing 4 primary stats on items.
They did originally say it doesn't affect the affixes, but I'm guessing they were talking about the stat rolls themselves. The # of affixes does seem to be affected though.
It increases your chance to get 6 affixes. Playing the game with 340% MF, it feels like every item I get is 6 affixes (of course it's usually life regen, pickup radius, etc). It's really noticeable with this much MF.
I personally find act III with 5stack nv and no base MF to be far more productive than act 1 360mf. You still get legendaries and set pieces without MF, in fact it feels to me that the base chance (off of which MF works) of these items dropping is much higher in act III than it is in act I. I farm act III on my WW barb, act 1 in MF on my DH, both move very fast thru the acts. Barb is much more productive.
a3+ have such incredibly higher chances to drop ilvl63 and other higher ilvls. I'm not sure if anyone has tested the exact drop rates now but it was 4x higher than a1 when they first introduced the new tiers but that turned out to be a nerf to a3+ rates so they buffed a3 back to the original rate supposedly, they never said the original 1s+ rates or what it currently is though, just that for a few weeks it was 8% to get ilvl63 in a3 vs 4% in a2 vs 2% in a1.
Yeah that's the impression I get. Of course getting 350% MF to steamroll Act 1 is less expensive. But I also think it'd be more fun to play A3 because it gets really frustrating IDing level 61 trash items all the time. I'd almost rather get no rares than bad ones.
If you think any 3-4 affix gear is good then you are either low geared or don't totally understand affixes. It takes 4 affixes just to get max main stat/vit and resist all.
1 - main stat
2 - vit
3 - combo roll main stat+vit
4 - resist all
The other 2 rolls need to be things like crit, crit damage, damage range, loh, attack speed, sockets, % life, MF... Even 6 affixes is not enough to get all of the good affixes on a single item.
Obviously the best items in the game are 6 affixes...
I was saying that if 4 affix items are more common, you'd have a much easier time selling them on the AH if they're only 4 affix. You'd rather have many high quality 4 affix items than an extremely rare 6 affix item, for a variety of reasons. But I was mainly thinking of it like 6 affix lower rolls being as rare as 4 affix higher rolls. Which isn't the way it works, so disregard that idea.
In conclusion to the OP: Magic Find is indeed a powerful stat, especially when stacked high, BUT it is not worth it if you would gimp your offensive and defensive stats too much (for example, running Act 3 with 400% MF is nice and all, but with 8k DPS, you will be killing elite pack for hours). How much DPS for a certain amount of MF you can sacrifice in a set act is very hard to say, so invest a lot of gold to balance stats or do the MF switching before kill, which I hate.
MF is a good stat, but it's not as good as most people think. I definitely used to believe it was a lot better. The key seems to be accessing ilvl 63 gear, which means farming A3 even with 0% base MF.
The problem is that MF doesn't give you higher stat rolls outside of rolling split stats with full stats. It's really lame how they've made it so ilvl 63 gear is the only way to get stats of a certain level in D3.
There's ilvl 63 gear that can roll split stats higher than 2 full stat rolls on ilvl 60. Getting 6 affixes on everything is pointless when the base stat values are so low.
I don't know what the chances are for various stat rolls based on ilvl, and I'm not sure anyone but Blizzard would know that. But it definitely seems like the highest rolls are very rare while the 2nd, 3rd, etc ranges aren't nearly as hard to get. This makes ilvl 63 so much better compared to 62 and certainly 61.
More affixes is not usually helpful believe it or not.
All the items I get have tons of affixes. The problem is that 50% of the affixes in this game are meaningless. Truthfully, you want like 3-4 affixes with high rolls on each one. That's what makes good gear. Not having 6 affixes with terrible values.
I don't know exactly how it works, but sometimes it makes you think that MF is hurting you because the game is adding on extra affixes like pickup radius, thorns, life regen, etc when you'd rather just have higher values of fewer affixes.
If you farm A3 with only 5x NV you'll still get a lot of 63s, no doubt. I don't farm A2, so I don't know how many 63s you can get, but you should figure out how much you average.
I can say for sure that farming A1 with 340% MF you average 1-2 ilvl 63 armors / weapons per run. Each run takes like 30 minutes or less. Another problem is that it's difficult to check white mobs because I just blow by them. It's almost guaranteed you're going to leave good items behind unfortunately.
The point is that 75% NV is way better than 75% MF. Because there's a cap on MF basically (most people don't get too far over 375%) it makes more sense to start by farming the highest level content with 0% MF, and then moving towards adding more.
I would advise people to try to get to the point where they can steamroll A3 (even with only 75% NV) because the chance to see ilvl 63s is much higher. Even if you're only getting 1-2 rares per pack, they're much more likely to be ilvl 63.
I get rares all day with 340% MF in A1, and it's all garbage that I vendor. Of course if you farm A3 with no MF you'll see a lot of white Archon gear, which will be frustrating. But I really think getting to the point where you can steamroll A3 as soon as possible is the best way to get gear. And then just add MF after that (if you're not doing the gear swap junk).
I run with 265% MF unbuffed, and it's very common to get no rares from the first 1-2 packs I kill.
Farming A1 with 0% MF is going to be terrible. But farming A3 with 0% MF is probably significantly better than A1 with 350% honestly. I wouldn't have said that previously, but having farmed A1 for a while with 340% MF, you realize that the number of 63 armor drops you get is extremely low. Sure I can steamroll A1, but the time spent running from pack to pack seems like enough to make it not worth the time.
Of course you need much better gear for A3. I just wouldn't plan on farming A1 with 350-400% MF over the long term, you just don't get enough 63 armor.
MF gear is supposed to increase the QUALITY and QUANTITY of items. Basically a white item turns yellow with higher MF.
However, I don't believe that MF increases the number of ilvl drops you get. Meaning that A1 will always be problematic for farming. It increases the chance for the ilvl 63s to be rare, sure. But it won't give you more of those items. You'd much rather have more ilvl 63s drop period than have a higher chance for them to be rare when they do drop.
I mean I get 3-4 rares consistently from packs and guess what? 80% of the time they're level 61 items that are garbage.
Everything is too fast in A2 basically. If you're trying to kite it gets really annoying.
There's too many open areas. I agree that the dungeons are good (lots of skeletons) but the open areas are terrible. The open areas in A3 are much better because it seems like the mobs are closer together. Their models are generally bigger too, so they get all crammed in. The first part of A3 isn't great, but it's still better than the open areas in A2. Also, it's easier to get to the dungeons in A3. In A2 they don't have as many waypoints.
As for A1... best route is probably to get 2-3 stacks from Defiled Crypts / Graveyard, 3 stacks from Festering Woods, then kill 1 pack in Northern Highlands, kill 1-2 packs in Leoric's Mansion, then do a typical Butcher run from there. That's what I do anyway. The other waypoints aren't nearly as good. The lower level champions will drop worse loot as well I believe. Which is why you want to do the early parts of the act first.
WS isn't bad either (I'd say a bit worse than A3) as long as you have the right gear and you aren't melee.
Being nv5 guarantee to find 1 rare while having 75% mf from gear doesn't .. I don't know how the nv works but imo just relying on mf is not a viable option. I'd rather suggest to Kill as much elites as possible as fast as possible while being nv5.
Seems like not everyone realizes this...
I can farm parts of A1 with 280% MF and not get any rare drops. But if you farm with 5x NV and no MF you'll get rares. It's really dumb for someone who stacks MF. This is why a lot of people prefer to not use MF and just farm A3 with 5x NV.
act 1 butcher run with 5 stack of nv : cemetary of the forsaken , the festering wood ( blue outside + 2 yellow in cave ) . leoric manor + courtyard ( blue / yellow ) . hall of agony / warden / butcher = around 30mins .
This is correct. Takes about 30 minutes to do a full A1 run.
Sometimes I think it's better to farm A3 than A1. Even with 350% MF I average less than 1 archon per run. It seems that anything below 63 is becoming less and less valuable. All the weapons I get are garbage (so many 2Hs).
I've almost found more legendarys / set items than I have 63 armor... not joking.
Champ packs will usually drop around 3 rares, but the chance for them to be 63 just seems so terrible.
I'd probably work towards farming A3 effectively with no MF vs steamrolling A1 with 350+.
Anyone who disagrees with the premise probably hasn't made it to Inferno yet.
The equation is pretty simple...
1) The strength disparity between champs and white mobs is massive.
2) If you have the gear to kill champions effectively, it's almost meaningless what you do vs white mobs.
3) Any build that's based around killing white mobs more effectively (AoE mainly) is pretty much unusable.
Of course Blizzard has already made it so that creating builds isn't really a part of D3. There's not much of a theorycrafting element. But these mechanics make it even more cookie cutter.
It's not even like a build "might" be good with certain gear. There are clearly defined builds for every class because some skills / passives are obviously better against champs.
Now your dps is nice, but your build would fail in farming and you know that Your mana is over after several bears, it's just enough time to kill bosses in that time lol.
Funny. I run the same build, less resistances, less damage, less mana yet have no issues farming in any part of Inferno with Bears. Plenty of folks can say the same. Just because YOU can't do it doesn't mean it isn't possible.
I think what he meant is that your farming speed is reduced. You won't "fail" at farming, but it's inefficient for your gear level.
A lot of people have geared to the point where bears 1 shot all white mobs (most would use SW of course to immune) but you can't farm as fast killing most white mobs because you WILL run out of mana.
It's not as efficient as other builds really. Though it is pretty OP against champ packs of course, assuming you have enough damage to not need regen or much defense.
By the way, as for how you get super high intellect... it's through Gruesome Feast.
Provoke the Pack is legitimately better than most people probably think.
Sacrifice might actually be alright if you can gear to the point where ~1800% weapon damage is enough to kill an entire champ pack (and you can actually hit all of them with each dog).
You sure that Paranoia works on bosses? I remember trying it and it didn't seem to work, but maybe I missed or something lol.
But yeah, when it comes to killing bosses, WDs are indeed OP. This wouldn't work so great for farming obviously. You need pretty good gear as well. I've used this build on bosses before and if you can't kill them with the initial bears you'll go OOM and probably die.
It's whatever I guess... the cooldowns in this game are too basic anyway. A lot of them do the same kinds of things.
Once you have 1) A main attack 2) Grasp 3) Spirit Walk 4) An AoE if you use Darts, the remaining 2-3 abilities can be any of the cooldown abilities and you'll do fine. I'm sure a lot of people use BBV and FA with Bats and VQ even if it's not quite as good as other shorter CC abilities.
My point was just that it shouldn't be like that. There should be certain skills that fit together and increase your efficiently.
D3 isn't like that though. Which is why it's kind of pointless to talk about what's the best build beyond a certain point. Because once you have the core 3-4 skills, with the core passives, the remaining ones don't even really matter. And truthfully, once you have really high end gear, your spec almost doesn't even matter as long as you can spam an ability.
I dunno, it just seems to me that you should have all of your cooldowns for every champ fight, and be forced to use your cooldowns intelligently in order to avoid dying and kill the champs quickly. And that BBV and FA take away from that once you start farming faster.
But yeah, the way the game is now, most players (who have average gear) need Grasp, Spirit Walk and a Main Attack to kill most packs, not more than that. The other 3 slots are for 1) An AoE ability if spamming Darts is annoying for white mobs or 2) 3 abilities to have on cooldown in addition to Grasp to trigger VQ.
The 2-3 other abilities people get are just to allow them to play sloppier by overlapping cooldowns and having to kite less. So in that sense, BBV and FA are great because they trigger VQ and replace shorter cooldowns that aren't very necessary.
I think that's why you see a lot of people with dumb builds in Inferno because once you have your core skills (good gear?) the rest of the spec doesn't matter. I still don't understand why more people don't use LS though.
a start would be fixing the pets. a playable build like in d2 with summoner necro is just needed to increase the diversity for wd's at least.
In order for pets to be viable they have to be made WAYYYY stronger (defensively) because they're only meaningful when they can tank champs without stacking defensive stats. Pets will never do damage in D3 because Blizzard specifically doesn't want people playing D3 like they played necros in D2.
No one will use pets unless they can hold champs in place.
Cooldowns are absolutely fine and are in line with other classes' cd's. CD's also an essential part of VQ builds which adds good diversity. I do think VQ should only require 3 abilities on CD though because 4 is too limiting, or perhaps make it so that each ability on CD adds another 100% regen which would make regen smoother and allows much more variety (allowing to either either gear more regen with less cd's or gear less regen with more cd's).
Cooldowns aren't exactly fine. Long cooldowns that is.
Here's why:
When you get to the point that you're encountering champs more than once every 2 minutes (or 90 sec for Devoted Following) they become really useless. You'll use BBV/FA on one pack, and then 1 min later fight another pack and be unable to use those cds.
You can swap between each cooldown using 1 per champ pack, but BBV is pretty awful without having a way to tank the champs.
Of course that's a tradeoff the player decides on. But the point is that the abilities are fairly useless if you don't stack MF gear (lowering your farming speed) and can kill champs faster than once every 2 min.
Also, the idea that long cds are good for VQ is wrong. Long cds are terrible for VQ really. They become placeholders.
White mobs don't matter in this game, all that matters is champs. If you spec into FA and it comes up 30 sec before you encounter a champ pack, you use it to clear a few white mobs, you've essentially just wasted a cooldown. Now you fight a champ pack without a really powerful ability. The alternative is to just run out of mana clearing the way to champ packs, depending on your damage. Or you spam 4 short cooldowns (Grasp / SW / Horrify / SH) just to fire off a few more Bats. Most people will go with at least 1 long cooldown even though it's useless a lot of the time, just to avoid having to spam 4 abilities in a row to get regen for 10 sec. The best for this is Devoted Following.
Pretty obvious that this style of gameplay is bad.
I mean I guess it's alright to have cooldowns that are good for lower gear levels (BBV / FA) and have ones that are more useful for higher gear levels (Horrify / ZW). But the problem is how it interacts with VQ. Once you get really good gear it makes sense to switch to VQ builds and drop the long cooldowns. But the long cooldowns make using VQ a lot easier, so people take something like Devoted Following, and just spam it everytime it's up just to use up a cooldown slot.
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Those are the two most important things in D3. You need ilvl 63s because it has a much better chance of rolling higher stats, and then you need to get lucky and get a good stat roll.
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Huh? I meant what I said.
Most people farm the end of A1 because they believe that the further you go, the better the drops are. I really don't know if this is true or not. But from my subjective experience, it seems like it is.
The elite at Warrior's Rest clearly has a worse chance to drop good items, I think people would agree with that.
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Yeah you must have bad luck, not sure. Don't get me wrong, I've made millions of gold farming A1. You can get 5 million a day certainly.
It's just that the way it goes down is really lame. Also, it's getting harder to do with every week that goes by. A few weeks ago it was super easy to make gold compared to now. Just look at the situation with weapons on the AH. You basically can't sell 2Hs that are like under 1200 DPS or 1Hs under 850. Sometimes with a high LoH roll you can, but generally it's difficult.
It bothers me trying to sell items most people shouldn't want.
Essentially, the way you make gold farming A1 is by selling tons of smaller items and by selling a super rare item for millions. Every so often you'll get something that sells for 5-15 million. But most of the time you end up trying to sell trash items. As time goes by this is a less and less reliable way to make gold.
So yeah... the farming situation in A1 will only get worse and worse. Pretty soon the only gold you'll make is from those super rare items.
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Maybe this makes sense for HC, but the issue is that most people think that it's best to farm the end of A1 because they're more likely to drop higher ilvl compared to earlier parts. In my experience, the drops from packs in the cathedral etc, tend to be weaker than what you get from Cursed Hold forward.
This is true. I don't usually check for it for some reason... should probably start doing that. Also, Cathedral lvl 3 there's sometimes a summoner at the WP.
So I'd probably do like Crypts / Graveyard (3 packs) > Cathedral lvl 3 (check for summoner) > Festering Woods (kill 3 packs) > Northern Highlands (kill 1 pack) > Watchtower > Leoric's Mansion (1 or 2 packs) > Halls to Butcher.
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You're right. But it can feel like those garbage affixes are taking away from the desired stats when every item you get has at least 1 split stat lol... it gets so annoying seeing 4 primary stats on items.
It's not really so unclear what MF does... (linked again) http://us.battle.net...ment#magic-find
They did originally say it doesn't affect the affixes, but I'm guessing they were talking about the stat rolls themselves. The # of affixes does seem to be affected though.
It increases your chance to get 6 affixes. Playing the game with 340% MF, it feels like every item I get is 6 affixes (of course it's usually life regen, pickup radius, etc). It's really noticeable with this much MF.
Yeah that's the impression I get. Of course getting 350% MF to steamroll Act 1 is less expensive. But I also think it'd be more fun to play A3 because it gets really frustrating IDing level 61 trash items all the time. I'd almost rather get no rares than bad ones.
Obviously the best items in the game are 6 affixes...
I was saying that if 4 affix items are more common, you'd have a much easier time selling them on the AH if they're only 4 affix. You'd rather have many high quality 4 affix items than an extremely rare 6 affix item, for a variety of reasons. But I was mainly thinking of it like 6 affix lower rolls being as rare as 4 affix higher rolls. Which isn't the way it works, so disregard that idea.
MF is a good stat, but it's not as good as most people think. I definitely used to believe it was a lot better. The key seems to be accessing ilvl 63 gear, which means farming A3 even with 0% base MF.
The problem is that MF doesn't give you higher stat rolls outside of rolling split stats with full stats. It's really lame how they've made it so ilvl 63 gear is the only way to get stats of a certain level in D3.
There's ilvl 63 gear that can roll split stats higher than 2 full stat rolls on ilvl 60. Getting 6 affixes on everything is pointless when the base stat values are so low.
I don't know what the chances are for various stat rolls based on ilvl, and I'm not sure anyone but Blizzard would know that. But it definitely seems like the highest rolls are very rare while the 2nd, 3rd, etc ranges aren't nearly as hard to get. This makes ilvl 63 so much better compared to 62 and certainly 61.
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More affixes is not usually helpful believe it or not.
All the items I get have tons of affixes. The problem is that 50% of the affixes in this game are meaningless. Truthfully, you want like 3-4 affixes with high rolls on each one. That's what makes good gear. Not having 6 affixes with terrible values.
I don't know exactly how it works, but sometimes it makes you think that MF is hurting you because the game is adding on extra affixes like pickup radius, thorns, life regen, etc when you'd rather just have higher values of fewer affixes.
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I can say for sure that farming A1 with 340% MF you average 1-2 ilvl 63 armors / weapons per run. Each run takes like 30 minutes or less. Another problem is that it's difficult to check white mobs because I just blow by them. It's almost guaranteed you're going to leave good items behind unfortunately.
The point is that 75% NV is way better than 75% MF. Because there's a cap on MF basically (most people don't get too far over 375%) it makes more sense to start by farming the highest level content with 0% MF, and then moving towards adding more.
I would advise people to try to get to the point where they can steamroll A3 (even with only 75% NV) because the chance to see ilvl 63s is much higher. Even if you're only getting 1-2 rares per pack, they're much more likely to be ilvl 63.
I get rares all day with 340% MF in A1, and it's all garbage that I vendor. Of course if you farm A3 with no MF you'll see a lot of white Archon gear, which will be frustrating. But I really think getting to the point where you can steamroll A3 as soon as possible is the best way to get gear. And then just add MF after that (if you're not doing the gear swap junk).
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I run with 265% MF unbuffed, and it's very common to get no rares from the first 1-2 packs I kill.
Farming A1 with 0% MF is going to be terrible. But farming A3 with 0% MF is probably significantly better than A1 with 350% honestly. I wouldn't have said that previously, but having farmed A1 for a while with 340% MF, you realize that the number of 63 armor drops you get is extremely low. Sure I can steamroll A1, but the time spent running from pack to pack seems like enough to make it not worth the time.
Of course you need much better gear for A3. I just wouldn't plan on farming A1 with 350-400% MF over the long term, you just don't get enough 63 armor.
MF gear is supposed to increase the QUALITY and QUANTITY of items. Basically a white item turns yellow with higher MF.
However, I don't believe that MF increases the number of ilvl drops you get. Meaning that A1 will always be problematic for farming. It increases the chance for the ilvl 63s to be rare, sure. But it won't give you more of those items. You'd much rather have more ilvl 63s drop period than have a higher chance for them to be rare when they do drop.
I mean I get 3-4 rares consistently from packs and guess what? 80% of the time they're level 61 items that are garbage.
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There's too many open areas. I agree that the dungeons are good (lots of skeletons) but the open areas are terrible. The open areas in A3 are much better because it seems like the mobs are closer together. Their models are generally bigger too, so they get all crammed in. The first part of A3 isn't great, but it's still better than the open areas in A2. Also, it's easier to get to the dungeons in A3. In A2 they don't have as many waypoints.
As for A1... best route is probably to get 2-3 stacks from Defiled Crypts / Graveyard, 3 stacks from Festering Woods, then kill 1 pack in Northern Highlands, kill 1-2 packs in Leoric's Mansion, then do a typical Butcher run from there. That's what I do anyway. The other waypoints aren't nearly as good. The lower level champions will drop worse loot as well I believe. Which is why you want to do the early parts of the act first.
WS isn't bad either (I'd say a bit worse than A3) as long as you have the right gear and you aren't melee.
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Seems like not everyone realizes this...
I can farm parts of A1 with 280% MF and not get any rare drops. But if you farm with 5x NV and no MF you'll get rares. It's really dumb for someone who stacks MF. This is why a lot of people prefer to not use MF and just farm A3 with 5x NV.
This is correct. Takes about 30 minutes to do a full A1 run.
Sometimes I think it's better to farm A3 than A1. Even with 350% MF I average less than 1 archon per run. It seems that anything below 63 is becoming less and less valuable. All the weapons I get are garbage (so many 2Hs).
I've almost found more legendarys / set items than I have 63 armor... not joking.
Champ packs will usually drop around 3 rares, but the chance for them to be 63 just seems so terrible.
I'd probably work towards farming A3 effectively with no MF vs steamrolling A1 with 350+.
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The equation is pretty simple...
1) The strength disparity between champs and white mobs is massive.
2) If you have the gear to kill champions effectively, it's almost meaningless what you do vs white mobs.
3) Any build that's based around killing white mobs more effectively (AoE mainly) is pretty much unusable.
Of course Blizzard has already made it so that creating builds isn't really a part of D3. There's not much of a theorycrafting element. But these mechanics make it even more cookie cutter.
It's not even like a build "might" be good with certain gear. There are clearly defined builds for every class because some skills / passives are obviously better against champs.
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I think what he meant is that your farming speed is reduced. You won't "fail" at farming, but it's inefficient for your gear level.
A lot of people have geared to the point where bears 1 shot all white mobs (most would use SW of course to immune) but you can't farm as fast killing most white mobs because you WILL run out of mana.
It's not as efficient as other builds really. Though it is pretty OP against champ packs of course, assuming you have enough damage to not need regen or much defense.
By the way, as for how you get super high intellect... it's through Gruesome Feast.
Provoke the Pack is legitimately better than most people probably think.
Sacrifice might actually be alright if you can gear to the point where ~1800% weapon damage is enough to kill an entire champ pack (and you can actually hit all of them with each dog).
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But yeah, when it comes to killing bosses, WDs are indeed OP. This wouldn't work so great for farming obviously. You need pretty good gear as well. I've used this build on bosses before and if you can't kill them with the initial bears you'll go OOM and probably die.
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Once you have 1) A main attack 2) Grasp 3) Spirit Walk 4) An AoE if you use Darts, the remaining 2-3 abilities can be any of the cooldown abilities and you'll do fine. I'm sure a lot of people use BBV and FA with Bats and VQ even if it's not quite as good as other shorter CC abilities.
My point was just that it shouldn't be like that. There should be certain skills that fit together and increase your efficiently.
D3 isn't like that though. Which is why it's kind of pointless to talk about what's the best build beyond a certain point. Because once you have the core 3-4 skills, with the core passives, the remaining ones don't even really matter. And truthfully, once you have really high end gear, your spec almost doesn't even matter as long as you can spam an ability.
I dunno, it just seems to me that you should have all of your cooldowns for every champ fight, and be forced to use your cooldowns intelligently in order to avoid dying and kill the champs quickly. And that BBV and FA take away from that once you start farming faster.
But yeah, the way the game is now, most players (who have average gear) need Grasp, Spirit Walk and a Main Attack to kill most packs, not more than that. The other 3 slots are for 1) An AoE ability if spamming Darts is annoying for white mobs or 2) 3 abilities to have on cooldown in addition to Grasp to trigger VQ.
The 2-3 other abilities people get are just to allow them to play sloppier by overlapping cooldowns and having to kite less. So in that sense, BBV and FA are great because they trigger VQ and replace shorter cooldowns that aren't very necessary.
I think that's why you see a lot of people with dumb builds in Inferno because once you have your core skills (good gear?) the rest of the spec doesn't matter. I still don't understand why more people don't use LS though.
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The class definitely isn't "fine" but compared other classes it's not as bad as some people claim.
The main issue is mana right now.
In order for pets to be viable they have to be made WAYYYY stronger (defensively) because they're only meaningful when they can tank champs without stacking defensive stats. Pets will never do damage in D3 because Blizzard specifically doesn't want people playing D3 like they played necros in D2.
No one will use pets unless they can hold champs in place.
Cooldowns aren't exactly fine. Long cooldowns that is.
Here's why:
When you get to the point that you're encountering champs more than once every 2 minutes (or 90 sec for Devoted Following) they become really useless. You'll use BBV/FA on one pack, and then 1 min later fight another pack and be unable to use those cds.
You can swap between each cooldown using 1 per champ pack, but BBV is pretty awful without having a way to tank the champs.
Of course that's a tradeoff the player decides on. But the point is that the abilities are fairly useless if you don't stack MF gear (lowering your farming speed) and can kill champs faster than once every 2 min.
Also, the idea that long cds are good for VQ is wrong. Long cds are terrible for VQ really. They become placeholders.
White mobs don't matter in this game, all that matters is champs. If you spec into FA and it comes up 30 sec before you encounter a champ pack, you use it to clear a few white mobs, you've essentially just wasted a cooldown. Now you fight a champ pack without a really powerful ability. The alternative is to just run out of mana clearing the way to champ packs, depending on your damage. Or you spam 4 short cooldowns (Grasp / SW / Horrify / SH) just to fire off a few more Bats. Most people will go with at least 1 long cooldown even though it's useless a lot of the time, just to avoid having to spam 4 abilities in a row to get regen for 10 sec. The best for this is Devoted Following.
Pretty obvious that this style of gameplay is bad.
I mean I guess it's alright to have cooldowns that are good for lower gear levels (BBV / FA) and have ones that are more useful for higher gear levels (Horrify / ZW). But the problem is how it interacts with VQ. Once you get really good gear it makes sense to switch to VQ builds and drop the long cooldowns. But the long cooldowns make using VQ a lot easier, so people take something like Devoted Following, and just spam it everytime it's up just to use up a cooldown slot.