Just thought I'd post to share the build I am currently using to farm. I beat inferno a little over a week ago with the standard high IAS (3.25 attacks per second), movement speed (24% with unity and lacunis), 1H+source build with venom hydra, blizzard and piercing orb. Nothing wrong with that build, its very effective, but when they announced the upcoming IAS nerf I thought I would change it up for fun by getting rid of my IAS gear and building differently. Here's what I did and its working very well so I thought others might be interested.
This build may look weak because its sole defensive ability is teleport. However, it does work but its very gear dependent. I dropped all my IAS and stacked up on int, crit chance and crit damage and traded in my 1h+source for a 2h staff (with int and a socket). Now I have about 2140 int, 34% crit, and 205% crit damage.
This means that my obliteration runed arcane orb hits for just about 100k on a normal hit and around 300k on a crit. This is what allows the build to function with the minimal kiting ability that you get from just arcane orb+temporal flux, slow casting speed, and no +movement other than the boots. The reason it works is that a 300k crit will basically 1 shot almost any white mob in the game. A 100k regular hit will 1 shot many of them and 2 shot most. Combined with venom hydra, you basically don't kite white mob packs you just explode them. Trust me when I say this is a lot of fun.
What about champs? Obviously you aren't going to 1 shot those, so how do you deal with them? What I discovered when I tried this build is that being able to unload 300-900k in 3 arcane orbs on a champ mob is a much bigger deal than you might think. It allows you to quickly burst down a single champ, often right at the start of the encounter, which makes the entire fight much easier. Of course you have to kite after that, but you do have teleport and you do have a slow in arcane orb + temporal flux. In addition, I've been going back and forth on venom hydra + arcane hydra and both are very close in power for this build. Venom hydra does more damage obviously, but arcane hydra provides a consistent slow and you get so much damage from arcane orb that the dps loss is acceptable.
This build is 100% viable for endgame... I currently do most of my farming in whimyshire because I just find it the most enjoyable (both due to lack of ranged mobs and the pleasant color scheme, lol), but I've also used it successfully to farm siegebreaker/azmo. It works in act 4 also of course, but why would you go there to farm?
Anyways, point of the thread is not to brag but just to let people know that there is a viable and (to me) fun alternative to the fast attack speed venom hydra/blizzard kiting. Its a lot of fun to just stand there and explode things before they can even reach you rather than running away, and those huge yellow numbers make me smile.
33k HP and 170 res are defensive stats one way or another. They increase your EH. I mentioned the extreme of 0 defense and 0 vitality on gear. Youre saying "I am in inferno doing fine with my defensive stats therefore having them is wrong"..
Also, I don't think anybody is suggesting going 0 vit. In that case, yes, obviously not having force armor at all would be better. The point is to get the minimum amount of EHP such that force armor reduces most hits to 35% of your life, thereby allowing you to take 2 hits without dying. Thats what I mean by a "low defense build," as opposed to a build that attempts to stack armor/resists/HP and use prismatic armor to be able to take more hits than they can take with force armor.
I'll go back to the quote, regarding the extra bit of dps helps, why not replace force armor and get a familiar with spark flint for an extra 15% damage? Maybe the optimal build will be just that. Give up and force armor and nuke the hell out of everything before it even reaches you.
I think where we are disagreeing, if we are at all, is in the value of force armor allowing you to take 2 hits without dying. I think there is a very big difference between any hit being a 1 hit kill and being able to take 2 hits without dying. Likewise, I think there is a much smaller difference between being able to take 2 hits without dying and being able to take 6 hits without dying. Some hits are very difficult to avoid, particularly at the beginning of a pull when there might be multiple ranged mobs shooting things at you. Being able to not have to play 100% perfectly and eat 1 or 2 of those hits without dying really makes a difference.
Basically it is a whole lot harder to avoid getting hit with anything, ever, than it is to avoid getting hit more than 2 times in rapid succession. After the pull has started though, you are aware of the location of all of the mobs and probably have them slowed one way or another. At this point its much easier to avoid their attacks and you shouldn't keep taking additional hits, so the benefit of being able to take 6 hits for example is lower. Especially when you consider that with the additional dps you have from using a low defense force armor build, you are doing more damage to the mobs and therefore killing them more quickly, so there are less attacks to avoid.
But I thought I should also post it here because the wizard discussion here is good. Its very long, sorry, but there's a TLDR at the end.
Blizzard has made a number of announcements this week regarding proposed changes to Inferno which are intended, among other things, to encourage ranged classes to build more defensively. Overall, it seems the purpose is to reduce the gap between melee and ranged classes. I’ve been thinking about these changes a great deal and the effect that they will have on my wizard, and I do not think that they are likely to have the intended effect of encouraging defensive builds. For context, I play a wizard who has fully completed inferno and farms act 3.
The two primary changes which have been announced that are intended to encourage more defensive builds are 1) Reducing enemy health and damage in Acts II, III, and IV of Inferno, and 2) severely increasing repair costs. See http://us.battle.net...ic/5590647017#8
The developer in that post stated that “For the ranged classes, I'm hoping that the incoming damage reduction will make some survival stats more appealing to ranged classes.” With regard to repair costs, the developer stated “ I don't think the answer is to make death-zerging more attractive for melee; I'd rather make death-zerging a less profitable strategy for ranged.”
I’ll address these one at a time.
Reducing enemy health and damage in Acts II, III, and IV of Inferno
We start from the premise that the most popular current build for wizards is to equip a minimum of defensive stats sufficient to allow Force Armor to function to reduce most incoming hits to near 35% and then to devote the rest of their stats to DPS. This is confirmed by the developer post above which directly addresses this type of build, as well as watching any number of streams of wizards in act 3/4. The reason that this is the optimum build is addressed by the developer in the above linked post: “[I]t just feels like the minimum amount of survivability to avoid the 1-shot is so large it's unattainable. That's one of the things 1.0.3 seeks to address.” Why is this?
A large number of monsters in act 3/4 hit for at least 170k raw damage. This includes armaddons, phase beasts (acts 3&4), soul lashers, and tremor demons. This means that at approximately 126k EHP, force armor will reduce that hit to 35%, meaning you can survive 2 hits and will die on the third, not considering any source of healing. I outlined this in a previous post: http://www.reddit.co...ent_use_out_of/
However, without force armor, in order for the 170k raw damage of the act3 mob hit to do 35% of your life, you would need to have 485,714 EHP, or nearly 4 times as much! If you instead wanted to survive 6 hits without force armor, by building defensively and using prismatic armor, you would need 1,020,000 EHP, or over 8 times the EHP you need to utilize force armor. For context, to achieve this you would need (for example) 50k HP, 10k armor and 1200 resist all including buffs from prismatic armor and the enchantress, or said another way 1260 vit, 6000 armor and 925 resist all *unbuffed*!
Now, this is exactly what they’ve said is a problem and that they intend to address by reducing enemy damage in inferno. However, lets look at how enemy damage reduction will effect the use of force armor. Since we don’t know how much they will reduce the damage by, let’s look at it with a 10% reduction in damage and a 25% reduction in damage.
10% Reduction - Mobs now do 170,000 x .9 = 153,000 damage per hit. To survive 6 hits you would now need 918k EHP, but now you only need 113k EHP for force armor to reduce these hits to 35%. For 918K EHP you still need 50k HP, ~9k buffed armor and ~1200 buffed resists.
25% Reduction - Mobs now do 170k x .75 = 127,500 damage per hit. To survive 6 hits you would now need 765k EHP, which still requires ~50k HP, ~8k armor and ~1000+ resist all buffed. However, now for force armor to reduce these hits to 35% you only need 94.5k EHP. For context, 94.5k EHP can be had with roughly ~29k HP, 180 resist all, and 3400 armor buffed from energy/force armor. Basically, you can expect to get this amount of resist all / armor baseline from int gear, and then you only need about 725 vitality.
Essentially, even with a 25% reduction in damage (it seems unlikely that the reduction will be this drastic), you still need a very large amount of defensive stats to take a reasonable number of hits. Now, lets consider that they have also said that they are reducing the **health** of the monsters as well. Since the survivability of a glass cannon wizard basically revolves around burning down the monsters as quickly as possible (while avoiding their attacks), this actually increases the survivability of the low defense build.
Therefore, with even a 25% reduction in damage which is likely the best case scenario for a high defense build, you have a choice between needing to increase your HP by 2/3, your resists by 4-5 times, and more or less doubling your armor in order to survive 6 hits, or using all of that stat allocation for increased damage, which will kill mobs more quickly especially with their reduced health. This seems like a clear decision.
Increased repair costs
But what about increased repair costs? Won’t this discourage low defense builds? No, I don’t believe they will, and here’s why.
The goal for people who are farming in inferno is to farm whatever has the highest expected profitability - i.e. will result in the most gold to them over time. Now, obviously increased repair costs will decrease profitability IF a player dies a lot attempting to farm an area. The developers appear to think this will encourage people to build more defensive in an effort to farm acts 3/4 while dying less. However, the same patch is also introducing the drops of acts 2/3/4 drops to act 1 and 2, and reducing the health and damage of act 2 mobs which are already significantly easier than act 3/4 mobs. It is already trivially easy for a low defense wizard who is capable of farming act 3 to clear whatever parts of act I they wish, in incredibly quick fashion, without dying at all. If the health/damage of mobs in act 2 are reduced, I expect it will be equally easy to do this in most of act 2. Building defensively merely slows these clear times, and it slows them even more in act 3/4 were the mobs have more health.
Therefore, I expect that the actual effect of increased repair costs will be to encourage players to simply farm trivial content as quickly as possible, rather than to slowly farm more difficult content while building defensively. This is the change I am most worried about, because I am afraid it has the possibility of making the game boring to farm.
The second major problem with the increased repair costs as a disincentive to low defense builds is that there are two types of players farming inferno - new players who have hit 60 and are just beginning to farm, and established players who are already capable of farming inferno. The new 60 is likely relatively poor, while the established farmer likely has millions of gold which he has earned from farming inferno. The problem here is that the increased repair costs have a much greater effect as a barrier to entry for the new player than as a disincentive to the established farmer. If the repair costs are very low, as they are now, they can be essentially disregarded by both types of players. However, if they are raised significantly, they provide a difficult barrier for entry to a player who is barely geared enough to begin to farm inferno, while an established farmer can realistically disregard these repair bills because he has large gold reserves to absorb them and is farming content where he has a chance to obtain drops worth multiple millions. In a sense, they are “regressive,” in that they have the greatest effect on the least well off players and the least effect on the most well off players.
I apologize for the extreme length. I hope somebody found this worthwhile.
TLDR:
1) Decreased mob damage/health encourages, rather than discourages, low defense builds, because of the nature of force armor and because a low defense ranged player’s survivability increasing with increased dps and lower mob health - i.e. mobs die faster and they therefore have less chance to get hit.
2) Increased repair costs merely encourage players to farm trivial content, i.e. act 1 inferno, rather than to build defensively and attempt to slowly farm acts 3/4. Moreover, increased repair costs provide a barrier for entry to players entering inferno while having a much less pronounced effect on established farmers.
I still don't get what you mean by making it effective.
Lets say you did perfect it, now instead of 1 shot you can get 3 shotted tops?
Yeah, that is the entire point of force armor. It means that you can get just enough EHP to have force armor reduce most hits to 35% while focusing on maximizing DPS. Since the mobs in acts 3/4 hit so hard, this is much more efficient than trying to build defensively where you would need massive amounts of defensive stats to take more than 3 hits anyways without force armor and you would therefore severely limit your DPS.
Posted this on reddit also but I figured I'd also post here in case it helps anybody.
I play a wizard and am progressing through act 4 inferno, and I wanted to know exactly how much defense I needed to run with in order to efficiently use force armor while maximizing my dps, so I did some research. The basic premise is that force armor will have its full effect on a hit of 135% of your EHP, and that it will prevent a 1 shot kill on any hit of less than 200% of your EHP. So therefore it seems most efficient to get your EHP to X where X is the amount of damage from common monster hits divided by 1.35. So to find out what this efficient EHP value is, we need the data of raw monster hits. Luckily, the brady game guide lists much of this information and here's what it says:
Most things in Act 4 and many in act 3 hit for 113k raw damage. This includes terror demons, subjugators, oppressors, morlu legionnairres, and corrupted angels. Most of these attacks are physical damage. However, it does not list the damage on the oppressors or the angel's charge. The guide does vaguely indicate that the oppressors charge is fire damage instead of physical. If anybody knows how much damage these abilities do please post them.
Two notable mobs hit for 142k raw damage - the morlu incinerator and the blood clan sorceror (fat sorceror guys). The blood clan sorceror's fireball is actually physical damage even though it appears to be a fireball.
Then there are the heavy hitters of acts 3/4. These guys hit for 170k raw damage. This includes armaddons, phase beasts (acts 3&4), soul lashers, and tremor demons (the armored guys).
Lastly, a handful of mobs hit for major damage but are basically completely avoidable. The mallet lord in act 4 with the long windup attack hits for 227k, as do the colossal gorgors in act 3. The skeletons with the enormous axes and the windup attack in the basement of act 3 hit for 284k raw damage.
What does this mean? For acts 3/4, you will be taking hits of 170k raw damage from attacks that are very difficult to avoid - phase beasts and soul lashers especially. So if you want force armor to have its full effect on those attacks, you need ~126,000 EHP. This is pretty easily attainable. It comes out to about 35-40k hp with about 175-225 resists if you have a fairly typical amount of armor. Obviously this depends entirely on your specific gear, so play with the calculator here - http://rubensayshi.github.com/d3-ehp-calculator/#intro
For me I get there with about ~39k HP and 170 resists after the reduction from glass cannon (with ~3500 armor with energy armor). With 35k hp I need about 225 resists. Here's a trick though - all of the 170k hits are physical damage, so you could potentially get just your physical resist up to 225 with 35k hp and not have to buy so much expensive resist all gear. Watch out for the 142k morlu incinerator fireballs though.
TLDR: Get about 126k EHP for acts 3/4 if you're using force armor. Hope this helps other people starting acts 2/3.
OK so obviously EHP is what is relevant, not HP, but does anybody know how much EHP you actually need for act 4? I am just starting act 4 inferno, downed azmodan this afternoon, and I'd like to be able to calculate how much I need to not get 1 shot by oppressors. Does anybody know how much raw damage they do?
I am seeing people with 39k hp with 300 resist and they can get to act 4 with 50k dmg. I had myself at 380+ resist and 24k hp, 19k dmg buffed in order to get pass Act 1. So exactly how much resist do we need for Act 2,3,4?
I think its personal preference as to whether you would rather be much more tanky but take longer to kill things or whether you'd rather do more damage but die much easier.
Personally I run 30k hp, ~700 resists with force armor, ~6k armor, and 25k dps buffed. If I switch to an orb instead of a shield, I can get my dps to ~30k but drop a good bit of that defense. If I run glass cannon passive I can do that even more so. But personally I would rather slowly grind through the mobs without dying that die alot but kill things quicker. I think you can go either way.
Edit: This applies for progression through inferno. For stuff I have on farm (like act 1) I go higher dps for quicker clears.
I just cleared act 2 inferno with ~29k hp, ~25k dps (buffed with force weapon), ~700+ resist all (buffed with prismatic armor, which I use over force armor. Maybe 525ish without), and ~6k armor. I use 1h + shield.
First, stack resistances. A LOT of resistances. Lose HP & and DPS for it, they really don't matter much in comparison. Personally I even use a shield. I cleared all of act 2 this weekend, skipping only 3-4 packs (invulnerable minions).
You need a reliable slow. That means either arcane hydra + temporal flux (my favorite) or blizzard. You have to have one or the other. Either change hydra to arcane (w/ flux) or change arcane orb to blizzard (w/ 20 ap cost rune).
Blur passive is also a must in my opinion, so I'd drop evocation for blur. Drop wave of force for energy weapon and you'll be able to use a shield and/or lose dps stats on your gear for more resistances.
Got to him last night and beat him in about 10 attempts. Tried a few different builds on him but ended up with this: http://us.battle.net...XOYS!aYW!bbaYZZ
I used an enchantress and I have about 29k hp, 25k dps (w/ shield. ~30k with orb), ~500 resist all with force armor (~700 with prismatic). I typically use 1 hand + shield but on this fight I equipped 1h+orb for the first 2 phases then put on my shield in phase 3.
Basically phase 1 and 2 I handle exactly the same, drop a venom hydra, drop a trail of blizzards and kite them through it. Use diamond skin or frost nova when they get close so that you can run past them and kite them back the other way. Only difference in on phase 2 you have to be sort of conscious of keeping a blizzard on belial himself and keeping the hydra near him so that he takes enough damage and you can end the phase in a reasonable time.
P3 is just a dance, keep hydra/blizzard up and avoid as many hits as possible. Force armor should allow you to eat 1 hit but the 2nd may kill you, depends on your armor/resists/hp of course. Use diamond skin to eat hits you can't avoid, and try to stay in sort of the middle of the platform so if you do get hit you can get to a health globe quickly.
Hardest part of the fight for me was phase 2, and I tried it with teleport + illusionist and other builds but what finally got me through it was having frost nova on a 9 second cooldown.
I need to farm more. I dont really see myself making 300k in 2 hours though. That seems pretty quick
I am making approximately 250k an hour from a farming run in act 3 hell. The actual amount depends on how lucky you get with the drops obviously, but thats what I've gotten over about 6 hours of farming (1.5mil total).
What I do is start at the 2nd to last quest in act 3 hell, its the one BEFORE "Kill Azmodan". This puts you in level 1 of a spiral tower, which you clear along with level 2 killing 3-5 elite packs on the way. You then kill Cydaea or whatever her name is, the spider boss, you kill her with 3-5 valor stacks and then you are at the waypoint you would be on if you started the "Kill Azmodan" quest. So you have 1 fairly short hallway area where you will get another 2-3 champ packs, then you kill azmodan. I usually get at least 1 treasure goblin on the way.
So far I've been doing it in my regular gear, but today I am going to try to pick up a bunch of crappy +MF and +GF items from the AH because I am sure I can drop a ton of stats and still clear it quickly/easily, since it is a very easy run.
I do it solo with the templar follower, who I build with as much +vit as possible (he has 50k hp).
I know that I probably in the minority, but I am kind of glad the immortal build was nerfed as a mage. It was kind of play on game mechanics that was inventive for sure, but I would rather use skills vs. modified mechanics. Not saying that this did not require skill and planning, but it would be nice to utilize other builds and make them viable.
I agree with this. I've been playing it, but I really didn't like it. Certain things still just gibbed you, like any kind of dot. It made it feel very inconsistent, like you were nearly invulnerable to certain things and then died instantly to others. I like the more consistent feel from having a balanced build.
Nephalem valor claims to add 15% MF and stack to 5, i.e. a total of 7%5 MF at 5 stacks. However, with some experimentation you can clearly see that is has a greater effect, because with 5 stacks of valor most bosses will drop 2+ rares, while with 75% MF from gear and no stacks of valor you will generally only get blues.
Does anybody have any theory or explanation for this?
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The build is this: http://us.battle.net...jOQS!YUX!abaYZZ
This build may look weak because its sole defensive ability is teleport. However, it does work but its very gear dependent. I dropped all my IAS and stacked up on int, crit chance and crit damage and traded in my 1h+source for a 2h staff (with int and a socket). Now I have about 2140 int, 34% crit, and 205% crit damage.
This means that my obliteration runed arcane orb hits for just about 100k on a normal hit and around 300k on a crit. This is what allows the build to function with the minimal kiting ability that you get from just arcane orb+temporal flux, slow casting speed, and no +movement other than the boots. The reason it works is that a 300k crit will basically 1 shot almost any white mob in the game. A 100k regular hit will 1 shot many of them and 2 shot most. Combined with venom hydra, you basically don't kite white mob packs you just explode them. Trust me when I say this is a lot of fun.
What about champs? Obviously you aren't going to 1 shot those, so how do you deal with them? What I discovered when I tried this build is that being able to unload 300-900k in 3 arcane orbs on a champ mob is a much bigger deal than you might think. It allows you to quickly burst down a single champ, often right at the start of the encounter, which makes the entire fight much easier. Of course you have to kite after that, but you do have teleport and you do have a slow in arcane orb + temporal flux. In addition, I've been going back and forth on venom hydra + arcane hydra and both are very close in power for this build. Venom hydra does more damage obviously, but arcane hydra provides a consistent slow and you get so much damage from arcane orb that the dps loss is acceptable.
This build is 100% viable for endgame... I currently do most of my farming in whimyshire because I just find it the most enjoyable (both due to lack of ranged mobs and the pleasant color scheme, lol), but I've also used it successfully to farm siegebreaker/azmo. It works in act 4 also of course, but why would you go there to farm?
Anyways, point of the thread is not to brag but just to let people know that there is a viable and (to me) fun alternative to the fast attack speed venom hydra/blizzard kiting. Its a lot of fun to just stand there and explode things before they can even reach you rather than running away, and those huge yellow numbers make me smile.
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http://www.diablofans.com/topic/47483-gearing-for-the-most-efficient-use-of-force-armor-in-late-inferno/page__p__914092#entry914092
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Also, I don't think anybody is suggesting going 0 vit. In that case, yes, obviously not having force armor at all would be better. The point is to get the minimum amount of EHP such that force armor reduces most hits to 35% of your life, thereby allowing you to take 2 hits without dying. Thats what I mean by a "low defense build," as opposed to a build that attempts to stack armor/resists/HP and use prismatic armor to be able to take more hits than they can take with force armor.
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I think where we are disagreeing, if we are at all, is in the value of force armor allowing you to take 2 hits without dying. I think there is a very big difference between any hit being a 1 hit kill and being able to take 2 hits without dying. Likewise, I think there is a much smaller difference between being able to take 2 hits without dying and being able to take 6 hits without dying. Some hits are very difficult to avoid, particularly at the beginning of a pull when there might be multiple ranged mobs shooting things at you. Being able to not have to play 100% perfectly and eat 1 or 2 of those hits without dying really makes a difference.
Basically it is a whole lot harder to avoid getting hit with anything, ever, than it is to avoid getting hit more than 2 times in rapid succession. After the pull has started though, you are aware of the location of all of the mobs and probably have them slowed one way or another. At this point its much easier to avoid their attacks and you shouldn't keep taking additional hits, so the benefit of being able to take 6 hits for example is lower. Especially when you consider that with the additional dps you have from using a low defense force armor build, you are doing more damage to the mobs and therefore killing them more quickly, so there are less attacks to avoid.
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But I thought I should also post it here because the wizard discussion here is good. Its very long, sorry, but there's a TLDR at the end.
Blizzard has made a number of announcements this week regarding proposed changes to Inferno which are intended, among other things, to encourage ranged classes to build more defensively. Overall, it seems the purpose is to reduce the gap between melee and ranged classes. I’ve been thinking about these changes a great deal and the effect that they will have on my wizard, and I do not think that they are likely to have the intended effect of encouraging defensive builds. For context, I play a wizard who has fully completed inferno and farms act 3.
The two primary changes which have been announced that are intended to encourage more defensive builds are 1) Reducing enemy health and damage in Acts II, III, and IV of Inferno, and 2) severely increasing repair costs. See http://us.battle.net...ic/5590647017#8
The developer in that post stated that “For the ranged classes, I'm hoping that the incoming damage reduction will make some survival stats more appealing to ranged classes.” With regard to repair costs, the developer stated “ I don't think the answer is to make death-zerging more attractive for melee; I'd rather make death-zerging a less profitable strategy for ranged.”
I’ll address these one at a time.
Reducing enemy health and damage in Acts II, III, and IV of Inferno
We start from the premise that the most popular current build for wizards is to equip a minimum of defensive stats sufficient to allow Force Armor to function to reduce most incoming hits to near 35% and then to devote the rest of their stats to DPS. This is confirmed by the developer post above which directly addresses this type of build, as well as watching any number of streams of wizards in act 3/4. The reason that this is the optimum build is addressed by the developer in the above linked post: “[I]t just feels like the minimum amount of survivability to avoid the 1-shot is so large it's unattainable. That's one of the things 1.0.3 seeks to address.” Why is this?
A large number of monsters in act 3/4 hit for at least 170k raw damage. This includes armaddons, phase beasts (acts 3&4), soul lashers, and tremor demons. This means that at approximately 126k EHP, force armor will reduce that hit to 35%, meaning you can survive 2 hits and will die on the third, not considering any source of healing. I outlined this in a previous post: http://www.reddit.co...ent_use_out_of/
However, without force armor, in order for the 170k raw damage of the act3 mob hit to do 35% of your life, you would need to have 485,714 EHP, or nearly 4 times as much! If you instead wanted to survive 6 hits without force armor, by building defensively and using prismatic armor, you would need 1,020,000 EHP, or over 8 times the EHP you need to utilize force armor. For context, to achieve this you would need (for example) 50k HP, 10k armor and 1200 resist all including buffs from prismatic armor and the enchantress, or said another way 1260 vit, 6000 armor and 925 resist all *unbuffed*!
Now, this is exactly what they’ve said is a problem and that they intend to address by reducing enemy damage in inferno. However, lets look at how enemy damage reduction will effect the use of force armor. Since we don’t know how much they will reduce the damage by, let’s look at it with a 10% reduction in damage and a 25% reduction in damage.
10% Reduction - Mobs now do 170,000 x .9 = 153,000 damage per hit. To survive 6 hits you would now need 918k EHP, but now you only need 113k EHP for force armor to reduce these hits to 35%. For 918K EHP you still need 50k HP, ~9k buffed armor and ~1200 buffed resists.
25% Reduction - Mobs now do 170k x .75 = 127,500 damage per hit. To survive 6 hits you would now need 765k EHP, which still requires ~50k HP, ~8k armor and ~1000+ resist all buffed. However, now for force armor to reduce these hits to 35% you only need 94.5k EHP. For context, 94.5k EHP can be had with roughly ~29k HP, 180 resist all, and 3400 armor buffed from energy/force armor. Basically, you can expect to get this amount of resist all / armor baseline from int gear, and then you only need about 725 vitality.
Essentially, even with a 25% reduction in damage (it seems unlikely that the reduction will be this drastic), you still need a very large amount of defensive stats to take a reasonable number of hits. Now, lets consider that they have also said that they are reducing the **health** of the monsters as well. Since the survivability of a glass cannon wizard basically revolves around burning down the monsters as quickly as possible (while avoiding their attacks), this actually increases the survivability of the low defense build.
Therefore, with even a 25% reduction in damage which is likely the best case scenario for a high defense build, you have a choice between needing to increase your HP by 2/3, your resists by 4-5 times, and more or less doubling your armor in order to survive 6 hits, or using all of that stat allocation for increased damage, which will kill mobs more quickly especially with their reduced health. This seems like a clear decision.
Increased repair costs
But what about increased repair costs? Won’t this discourage low defense builds? No, I don’t believe they will, and here’s why.
The goal for people who are farming in inferno is to farm whatever has the highest expected profitability - i.e. will result in the most gold to them over time. Now, obviously increased repair costs will decrease profitability IF a player dies a lot attempting to farm an area. The developers appear to think this will encourage people to build more defensive in an effort to farm acts 3/4 while dying less. However, the same patch is also introducing the drops of acts 2/3/4 drops to act 1 and 2, and reducing the health and damage of act 2 mobs which are already significantly easier than act 3/4 mobs. It is already trivially easy for a low defense wizard who is capable of farming act 3 to clear whatever parts of act I they wish, in incredibly quick fashion, without dying at all. If the health/damage of mobs in act 2 are reduced, I expect it will be equally easy to do this in most of act 2. Building defensively merely slows these clear times, and it slows them even more in act 3/4 were the mobs have more health.
Therefore, I expect that the actual effect of increased repair costs will be to encourage players to simply farm trivial content as quickly as possible, rather than to slowly farm more difficult content while building defensively. This is the change I am most worried about, because I am afraid it has the possibility of making the game boring to farm.
The second major problem with the increased repair costs as a disincentive to low defense builds is that there are two types of players farming inferno - new players who have hit 60 and are just beginning to farm, and established players who are already capable of farming inferno. The new 60 is likely relatively poor, while the established farmer likely has millions of gold which he has earned from farming inferno. The problem here is that the increased repair costs have a much greater effect as a barrier to entry for the new player than as a disincentive to the established farmer. If the repair costs are very low, as they are now, they can be essentially disregarded by both types of players. However, if they are raised significantly, they provide a difficult barrier for entry to a player who is barely geared enough to begin to farm inferno, while an established farmer can realistically disregard these repair bills because he has large gold reserves to absorb them and is farming content where he has a chance to obtain drops worth multiple millions. In a sense, they are “regressive,” in that they have the greatest effect on the least well off players and the least effect on the most well off players.
I apologize for the extreme length. I hope somebody found this worthwhile.
TLDR:
1) Decreased mob damage/health encourages, rather than discourages, low defense builds, because of the nature of force armor and because a low defense ranged player’s survivability increasing with increased dps and lower mob health - i.e. mobs die faster and they therefore have less chance to get hit.
2) Increased repair costs merely encourage players to farm trivial content, i.e. act 1 inferno, rather than to build defensively and attempt to slowly farm acts 3/4. Moreover, increased repair costs provide a barrier for entry to players entering inferno while having a much less pronounced effect on established farmers.
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Yeah, that is the entire point of force armor. It means that you can get just enough EHP to have force armor reduce most hits to 35% while focusing on maximizing DPS. Since the mobs in acts 3/4 hit so hard, this is much more efficient than trying to build defensively where you would need massive amounts of defensive stats to take more than 3 hits anyways without force armor and you would therefore severely limit your DPS.
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I play a wizard and am progressing through act 4 inferno, and I wanted to know exactly how much defense I needed to run with in order to efficiently use force armor while maximizing my dps, so I did some research. The basic premise is that force armor will have its full effect on a hit of 135% of your EHP, and that it will prevent a 1 shot kill on any hit of less than 200% of your EHP. So therefore it seems most efficient to get your EHP to X where X is the amount of damage from common monster hits divided by 1.35. So to find out what this efficient EHP value is, we need the data of raw monster hits. Luckily, the brady game guide lists much of this information and here's what it says:
Most things in Act 4 and many in act 3 hit for 113k raw damage. This includes terror demons, subjugators, oppressors, morlu legionnairres, and corrupted angels. Most of these attacks are physical damage. However, it does not list the damage on the oppressors or the angel's charge. The guide does vaguely indicate that the oppressors charge is fire damage instead of physical. If anybody knows how much damage these abilities do please post them.
Two notable mobs hit for 142k raw damage - the morlu incinerator and the blood clan sorceror (fat sorceror guys). The blood clan sorceror's fireball is actually physical damage even though it appears to be a fireball.
Then there are the heavy hitters of acts 3/4. These guys hit for 170k raw damage. This includes armaddons, phase beasts (acts 3&4), soul lashers, and tremor demons (the armored guys).
Lastly, a handful of mobs hit for major damage but are basically completely avoidable. The mallet lord in act 4 with the long windup attack hits for 227k, as do the colossal gorgors in act 3. The skeletons with the enormous axes and the windup attack in the basement of act 3 hit for 284k raw damage.
What does this mean? For acts 3/4, you will be taking hits of 170k raw damage from attacks that are very difficult to avoid - phase beasts and soul lashers especially. So if you want force armor to have its full effect on those attacks, you need ~126,000 EHP. This is pretty easily attainable. It comes out to about 35-40k hp with about 175-225 resists if you have a fairly typical amount of armor. Obviously this depends entirely on your specific gear, so play with the calculator here - http://rubensayshi.github.com/d3-ehp-calculator/#intro
For me I get there with about ~39k HP and 170 resists after the reduction from glass cannon (with ~3500 armor with energy armor). With 35k hp I need about 225 resists. Here's a trick though - all of the 170k hits are physical damage, so you could potentially get just your physical resist up to 225 with 35k hp and not have to buy so much expensive resist all gear. Watch out for the 142k morlu incinerator fireballs though.
TLDR: Get about 126k EHP for acts 3/4 if you're using force armor. Hope this helps other people starting acts 2/3.
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I think its personal preference as to whether you would rather be much more tanky but take longer to kill things or whether you'd rather do more damage but die much easier.
Personally I run 30k hp, ~700 resists with force armor, ~6k armor, and 25k dps buffed. If I switch to an orb instead of a shield, I can get my dps to ~30k but drop a good bit of that defense. If I run glass cannon passive I can do that even more so. But personally I would rather slowly grind through the mobs without dying that die alot but kill things quicker. I think you can go either way.
Edit: This applies for progression through inferno. For stuff I have on farm (like act 1) I go higher dps for quicker clears.
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You need a reliable slow. That means either arcane hydra + temporal flux (my favorite) or blizzard. You have to have one or the other. Either change hydra to arcane (w/ flux) or change arcane orb to blizzard (w/ 20 ap cost rune).
Blur passive is also a must in my opinion, so I'd drop evocation for blur. Drop wave of force for energy weapon and you'll be able to use a shield and/or lose dps stats on your gear for more resistances.
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I used an enchantress and I have about 29k hp, 25k dps (w/ shield. ~30k with orb), ~500 resist all with force armor (~700 with prismatic). I typically use 1 hand + shield but on this fight I equipped 1h+orb for the first 2 phases then put on my shield in phase 3.
Basically phase 1 and 2 I handle exactly the same, drop a venom hydra, drop a trail of blizzards and kite them through it. Use diamond skin or frost nova when they get close so that you can run past them and kite them back the other way. Only difference in on phase 2 you have to be sort of conscious of keeping a blizzard on belial himself and keeping the hydra near him so that he takes enough damage and you can end the phase in a reasonable time.
P3 is just a dance, keep hydra/blizzard up and avoid as many hits as possible. Force armor should allow you to eat 1 hit but the 2nd may kill you, depends on your armor/resists/hp of course. Use diamond skin to eat hits you can't avoid, and try to stay in sort of the middle of the platform so if you do get hit you can get to a health globe quickly.
Hardest part of the fight for me was phase 2, and I tried it with teleport + illusionist and other builds but what finally got me through it was having frost nova on a 9 second cooldown.
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I am making approximately 250k an hour from a farming run in act 3 hell. The actual amount depends on how lucky you get with the drops obviously, but thats what I've gotten over about 6 hours of farming (1.5mil total).
What I do is start at the 2nd to last quest in act 3 hell, its the one BEFORE "Kill Azmodan". This puts you in level 1 of a spiral tower, which you clear along with level 2 killing 3-5 elite packs on the way. You then kill Cydaea or whatever her name is, the spider boss, you kill her with 3-5 valor stacks and then you are at the waypoint you would be on if you started the "Kill Azmodan" quest. So you have 1 fairly short hallway area where you will get another 2-3 champ packs, then you kill azmodan. I usually get at least 1 treasure goblin on the way.
I'm using this build specially for this run (I don't use this in inferno): http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/wizard#RcXlSO!YXU!bcabZY
So far I've been doing it in my regular gear, but today I am going to try to pick up a bunch of crappy +MF and +GF items from the AH because I am sure I can drop a ton of stats and still clear it quickly/easily, since it is a very easy run.
I do it solo with the templar follower, who I build with as much +vit as possible (he has 50k hp).
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I agree with this. I've been playing it, but I really didn't like it. Certain things still just gibbed you, like any kind of dot. It made it feel very inconsistent, like you were nearly invulnerable to certain things and then died instantly to others. I like the more consistent feel from having a balanced build.
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Does anybody have any theory or explanation for this?