Would also have to echo Years of War. Mained a wizard, geared a DH - I levelled 3x lvl 60 gems for use on the DH (which means a minimum of 45 rifts, but probably closer to 50-60) and by the end of it, I had full UE set with 3x ancients, proper belt (had a witching hour laying around), decent bracers, a deadman's legacy etc... Then it was just a case of rolling a few bows to a yangs and I had a DH that could farm T10 to finish the other set(s) to get another 1-2 55's done. I probably spent about 17-20K blood shards in total by the time I had finished both marauder and UE sets, which aren't a ton when I get up to 5K per hour.
Just keep using your main to farm shards and roll gear untill it can comfortably start T10 - there's no point trying to gear a second char up through the tiers, will take you WAY longer. I ended up doing Years of war with firebirds, tal rasha, Delsere's MO on wizard, and Shadow's, Marauder and UE on my DH (shadows kinda sucked though, would not recommend :s).
Do remember that some affixes are weighted aswell - I don't recall the exact numbers, but in general, Vitality and Mainstat are 4 times as likely to roll on an item, than a vast majority of other items.
So 4 times as likely to roll vit as any skill-affix. That means that if you lay all the affixes out together, it has:
Dex
Dex
Dex
Dex
Vit
Vit
Vit
Vit
Life%
Regen
Bola
Entangling
Hungering
Evasive
Grenade
In Mikhail's case. It also explains why you see things like elite dmg / reduc roll so rarely on weapons/offhands/chests etc, it's at a 100 point-score with "normal" affixes at 1000, and Vit/mainstat at 4000. 40 times more likely to see a vit roll than an elite damage reduction on chest :P.
I don't get the disparity with Kadala? Does anyone or has anyone ever used her to get yellows deliberately? is that an early game thing?
Why can't they adjust her output to be relatively 50-50 minimally? Wouldn't be a complete fix but it would ease it tremendously.
Before the blood shard change (5 shard per item), Kadala was a giant source of materials. They buffed the drop amount of veileds to compensate for that from rift guardians.
Stuff below is rough first draft with some issues, disregard, just keeping it for posterity.
Assume 5 targets (optimal for Cluster arrow): My base hatred regen is 5.00/sec, and my generator gives me 6 hatred/sec when casting it (2 APS with krider).
I have 20% RSCR, meaning my CA costs 32 hatred. This means over a minute I can, with an initial 125 hatred:
Shoot 120 shots.
Gain 300 hatred from passive.
95 shots are EA generating 285 hatred.
25 cluster arrows (assuming prep+pet used to regen hatred for 3).
EA is 330% wep dmg per shot + 4x hits of 330% on secondary targets = 156750% total weapon dmg.
CA is 550% wep dmg per shot + 4x rockets for 900% wep dmg on secondary targets = 103750% total weapon dmg.
Likewise, using EA, you get spitfire turrets as EA takes care of the chill for CTW. Let's just assume 3x turrets, with 1 rocket per shot (so 360 rockets)
SFT is 240% wep dmg per shot = 86400% wep dmg.
This is not even accounting for the (on average) 3 extra elemental arrows you'd be shooting with turrets, which is obviously 156K*3.
Meanwhile, with Evasive fire+CA and a crossbow you get:
90 Shots (1.5 speed vs 2).
300 Hatred from passive.
60 Evasive fire = 420 hatred.
30 Cluster arrow (assuming prep+pet used to regen hatred for 3.5).
Only new number is EF, which does 400% wep dmg in an ideal scenario per shot.
EF is 200% wep dmg per shot + 2x hits of 100% on secondary targets = 24000% weapon dmg.
CA is 550% wep dmg per shot + 4x rockets for 900% wep dmg on secondary targets = 124500% wep dmg.
No spitfire as you need polar station.
Let's be very generous here, and turn this around. Say you're a mega-good player and get all the lifeglobes etc; you manage to cast 60 clusters and 30 EF's instead of the opposite. This means 249K% weapon damage over 90 seconds.
So we have 261K% from EF, and 347K% from EA.
Let's compare a perfectly rolled Arcane barb:
1560-1940 + 787-961 = 5248 * 1.10 / 2 = 2886.4
2886.4 * 261K = 753M damage.
And OP's krider (which is fairly mediocre):
1819+2928 / 2 = 2373.5
2373.5 * 347K = 823M damage.
Compare it to a perfect NORMAL kridershot:
1190-1490 + 145-819 = 3744 * 1.10 / 2 = 2059.2
2059.2 * 347K = 714M damage.
Essentially, a perfect arcane barb with EVERY advantage given to it (far more cluster arrows than you should expect) is 10% lower than an average Kridershot; BEFORE counting the extra elemental arrows from turrets. A perfect NORMAL kridershot is about 5% behind a perfect ancient barb, BEFORE accounting for the EA's aswell.
Essentially, what I'm getting at is, on paper, any ancient kridershot will beat the crap out of Barb on overall damage. It will not have as high bursts (as it splits the damage pretty "evenly" into 40% EA / 35% cluster / 25% spitfire) as EF(which goes 95% cluster/5% EF), but the sustained damage will be far better.
The definite answer is that Sentries *do* update dynamically (EG, you could drop a turret at 4.12 attack speed, have gogok get a few stacks, and update to 4.15 and then shoot faster). The downside to this is that it *ONLY HAPPENS* when the sentry fires off a normal bolt.
This means that if you have either Elemental arrow or Chakram on your bars, they will NEVER update dynamically, as they will NEVER shoot a normal bolt. This means that for all intents and purposes, if you use gogok to hit the 4.15 breakpoint for a ball lightning build, your sentries WILL "snapshot" attack speed.
Except it's still RNG - there's just a lower chance to luck out and get something than there are others because they have weighted drop chances. I got two calamity's from random rifts in less than an hour earlier tonight (Calamity is the furnace of demon hunters, just FYI). That's all random. It's a good thing that the most powerfull of all items are rare, because it gives us something to work towards, and when they finally drop, it gives us a sense of accomplishment. If I got five furnaces every week just by playing, then I wouldn't really care about the fact that I found the BiS weapon. Same way you don't really give a shit that you're wearing "insert-set-piece-X" here, despite the set being build defining and BiS.
Riffsphere, just to be pedantic, but you could theoretically put 49 points in paragon instead of 50, and end up with XX.8% :P. Not that it matters a lot, but, y'know, just because you can't get fractal points from gear doesn't mean you can't *at all* :D.
span>But let's hear it: What is your proposition to solve these issues? Rather than rant on about how shit it is, be constructive. Give us some examples of how you could better maintain integrity. I'd love to hear it.
His proposition is probably something along the lines with: Solo-keystones and Group-keystones which is retarded.
That's only half of his complaint though, he also seems genuinely peeved that some people can get 3-4 levels more on their gems than him because of playing in optimised 4 man groups that can reach higher levels. I mean, jesus fuck, 1% more damage on his zei's, 4 seconds more on his bane buff and 200% wep dmg more over 10 seconds - absolute fucking killer.
Oh wait, never mind, I found a skeleton rift and a conduit near the boss, it's all good bois, fuck your gems.
I agree that something needs to be improved to tie character progression together. My thought is that the trial rift really should be a one time thing until a character completes a grift. Then the level that they can't complete should be where they always start when they spawn a new grift. However, you should be able to entry the trial again if you want to "reset" your beginning grift level. Overall, I don't think this a major problem, as it only takes 10 minutes to get back to your Grift level anyways.
Much easier solution: Clear trial rift. Trial rift deems you at level 32 rift. Make spectral guy of rifts have a vendoring option with keys from level 1-32 unlocked that you can exchange for trial keys. If you want to unlock higher than 32, put the unused rift key into the obelisk and try again. If you fail and only reach 30, no worries, still managed to get 32 so can buy new ones at that. Reach 34, and you unlock 33 and 34 to be bought in bulk from him. It takes away the god awful 2-3 minutes per trial key spent fighting waves of monsters and somewhat the RNG of getting easy waves (lol zombies, lol berserkers etc) or "I'm gonna fucking rape your ass"-waves (fucking phantasms that turns into lightning and just PEWPEWPEWPEW's you down from ranged). Sure, you could still encounter them, but you only have to get lucky once to permanently unlock say, lvl 35 rifts, rather than get one lvl 35 rift every 10 attempts cos of wave RNG.
You spent ages writing this entire post, but spent zero time in game testing all your assumptions before you actually went ahead and posted? That's... Bold, I guess.
But to set a few things straight:
The toxic and pain enhancer gems do not "stack" - they can only have one effect at a time. It will, however, refresh the duration if they are triggered again. For me on my seasonal wizard, it means my Toxin gem at lvl 25 is doing 1.5m ticks every second. Nothing to scoff at as I can leave mobs on a little less than half health and have them die as they try to follow me due to the DoT, but not nearly as gamebreaking as you suggest.
Likewise, you seem to think adding 200% weapon damage to an attack is significant. It's not. I'm currently running a wand of woh explosive blast wizard in seasons. I have my EB on a 2.55 second cooldown. It triggers 9x attacks doing 520% weapon damage each. Let's be generous and say that's 3x attacks every second (so 3 sec CD) - you're now looking at 1560% weapon damage per second from my main attack. Sure, 200% wep dmg per second is a decent chunk, but after removing the affixes you lose out on due to needing sockets in jewellery, and accounting for the fact that no fucking build uses physical (pain enhancer) or poison (toxin) +dmg bonus, and you'll be using say, +fire dmg with my build, you're looking at maybe 10% damage added per second for a gem.
Now compare them to the "useless" percentage gems - the ones who increase your damage by a flat amount. I use gem of the trapped because of the way my build works, which means that I am adding a 22.5% damage debuff to every mob I am hitting. 1560*1.225=1911 - or 351% weapon damage, not accounting for the bonuses to fire dmg increase. It's far more potent on it's own (although the lvl 25 bonuses lets the toxin and enhancer gems catch up due to their secondary effects being damage increases, and trappeds being CC).
So essentially, yea, you're wrong. You're *extremely* wrong.
As an honorable mention:
Do you not think the developers are aware of how damage normalisation works, and the fact that the pure damage based gems works better with slower weapons (eg Toxin, Enhancer)? Of course they are. That's why they offer alternatives to builds that relies on fast attacks - it's called "proc based" gems, and Mirinae and Wreath are the given choises. If you do 1.2 attacks per second with a slow 2H, then yes, you'll gain far more from hitting stuff with the Enhancer gem or the Toxin gem. On the other hand, it'll take you an average of five to six seconds to get a single proc of wreath or mirinae. But the monks rolling with Flying Dragon that are doing more than 6 attacks per second? Those guys are getting procs of wreath and mirinae left and fucking right, averaging a proc every second (essentially? They have 100% conduit uptime).
So no - there's absolutely no need to enforce WoW's normalisation in Diablo. It'd make for extremely boring build choises. Just learn how the game works instead please.
1
Would also have to echo Years of War. Mained a wizard, geared a DH - I levelled 3x lvl 60 gems for use on the DH (which means a minimum of 45 rifts, but probably closer to 50-60) and by the end of it, I had full UE set with 3x ancients, proper belt (had a witching hour laying around), decent bracers, a deadman's legacy etc... Then it was just a case of rolling a few bows to a yangs and I had a DH that could farm T10 to finish the other set(s) to get another 1-2 55's done. I probably spent about 17-20K blood shards in total by the time I had finished both marauder and UE sets, which aren't a ton when I get up to 5K per hour.
Just keep using your main to farm shards and roll gear untill it can comfortably start T10 - there's no point trying to gear a second char up through the tiers, will take you WAY longer. I ended up doing Years of war with firebirds, tal rasha, Delsere's MO on wizard, and Shadow's, Marauder and UE on my DH (shadows kinda sucked though, would not recommend :s).
1
Do remember that some affixes are weighted aswell - I don't recall the exact numbers, but in general, Vitality and Mainstat are 4 times as likely to roll on an item, than a vast majority of other items.
NVM, google fu is strong, here's the page:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Diablo/comments/288xch/datamined_rarity_of_all_affixes_calculating_your/
So 4 times as likely to roll vit as any skill-affix. That means that if you lay all the affixes out together, it has:
Dex
Dex
Dex
Dex
Vit
Vit
Vit
Vit
Life%
Regen
Bola
Entangling
Hungering
Evasive
Grenade
In Mikhail's case. It also explains why you see things like elite dmg / reduc roll so rarely on weapons/offhands/chests etc, it's at a 100 point-score with "normal" affixes at 1000, and Vit/mainstat at 4000. 40 times more likely to see a vit roll than an elite damage reduction on chest :P.
1
Before the blood shard change (5 shard per item), Kadala was a giant source of materials. They buffed the drop amount of veileds to compensate for that from rift guardians.
2
Stuff below is rough first draft with some issues, disregard, just keeping it for posterity.
Assume 5 targets (optimal for Cluster arrow): My base hatred regen is 5.00/sec, and my generator gives me 6 hatred/sec when casting it (2 APS with krider).
I have 20% RSCR, meaning my CA costs 32 hatred. This means over a minute I can, with an initial 125 hatred:
Shoot 120 shots.
Gain 300 hatred from passive.
95 shots are EA generating 285 hatred.
25 cluster arrows (assuming prep+pet used to regen hatred for 3).
EA is 330% wep dmg per shot + 4x hits of 330% on secondary targets = 156750% total weapon dmg.
CA is 550% wep dmg per shot + 4x rockets for 900% wep dmg on secondary targets = 103750% total weapon dmg.
Likewise, using EA, you get spitfire turrets as EA takes care of the chill for CTW. Let's just assume 3x turrets, with 1 rocket per shot (so 360 rockets)
SFT is 240% wep dmg per shot = 86400% wep dmg.
This is not even accounting for the (on average) 3 extra elemental arrows you'd be shooting with turrets, which is obviously 156K*3.
Meanwhile, with Evasive fire+CA and a crossbow you get:
90 Shots (1.5 speed vs 2).
300 Hatred from passive.
60 Evasive fire = 420 hatred.
30 Cluster arrow (assuming prep+pet used to regen hatred for 3.5).
Only new number is EF, which does 400% wep dmg in an ideal scenario per shot.
EF is 200% wep dmg per shot + 2x hits of 100% on secondary targets = 24000% weapon dmg.
CA is 550% wep dmg per shot + 4x rockets for 900% wep dmg on secondary targets = 124500% wep dmg.
No spitfire as you need polar station.
Let's be very generous here, and turn this around. Say you're a mega-good player and get all the lifeglobes etc; you manage to cast 60 clusters and 30 EF's instead of the opposite. This means 249K% weapon damage over 90 seconds.
So we have 261K% from EF, and 347K% from EA.
Let's compare a perfectly rolled Arcane barb:
1560-1940 + 787-961 = 5248 * 1.10 / 2 = 2886.4
2886.4 * 261K = 753M damage.
And OP's krider (which is fairly mediocre):
1819+2928 / 2 = 2373.5
2373.5 * 347K = 823M damage.
Compare it to a perfect NORMAL kridershot:
1190-1490 + 145-819 = 3744 * 1.10 / 2 = 2059.2
2059.2 * 347K = 714M damage.
Essentially, a perfect arcane barb with EVERY advantage given to it (far more cluster arrows than you should expect) is 10% lower than an average Kridershot; BEFORE counting the extra elemental arrows from turrets. A perfect NORMAL kridershot is about 5% behind a perfect ancient barb, BEFORE accounting for the EA's aswell.
Essentially, what I'm getting at is, on paper, any ancient kridershot will beat the crap out of Barb on overall damage. It will not have as high bursts (as it splits the damage pretty "evenly" into 40% EA / 35% cluster / 25% spitfire) as EF(which goes 95% cluster/5% EF), but the sustained damage will be far better.
1
This means that if you have either Elemental arrow or Chakram on your bars, they will NEVER update dynamically, as they will NEVER shoot a normal bolt. This means that for all intents and purposes, if you use gogok to hit the 4.15 breakpoint for a ball lightning build, your sentries WILL "snapshot" attack speed.
1
1
1
Oh wait, never mind, I found a skeleton rift and a conduit near the boss, it's all good bois, fuck your gems.
Much easier solution: Clear trial rift. Trial rift deems you at level 32 rift. Make spectral guy of rifts have a vendoring option with keys from level 1-32 unlocked that you can exchange for trial keys. If you want to unlock higher than 32, put the unused rift key into the obelisk and try again. If you fail and only reach 30, no worries, still managed to get 32 so can buy new ones at that. Reach 34, and you unlock 33 and 34 to be bought in bulk from him. It takes away the god awful 2-3 minutes per trial key spent fighting waves of monsters and somewhat the RNG of getting easy waves (lol zombies, lol berserkers etc) or "I'm gonna fucking rape your ass"-waves (fucking phantasms that turns into lightning and just PEWPEWPEWPEW's you down from ranged). Sure, you could still encounter them, but you only have to get lucky once to permanently unlock say, lvl 35 rifts, rather than get one lvl 35 rift every 10 attempts cos of wave RNG.
1
But to set a few things straight:
The toxic and pain enhancer gems do not "stack" - they can only have one effect at a time. It will, however, refresh the duration if they are triggered again. For me on my seasonal wizard, it means my Toxin gem at lvl 25 is doing 1.5m ticks every second. Nothing to scoff at as I can leave mobs on a little less than half health and have them die as they try to follow me due to the DoT, but not nearly as gamebreaking as you suggest.
Likewise, you seem to think adding 200% weapon damage to an attack is significant. It's not. I'm currently running a wand of woh explosive blast wizard in seasons. I have my EB on a 2.55 second cooldown. It triggers 9x attacks doing 520% weapon damage each. Let's be generous and say that's 3x attacks every second (so 3 sec CD) - you're now looking at 1560% weapon damage per second from my main attack. Sure, 200% wep dmg per second is a decent chunk, but after removing the affixes you lose out on due to needing sockets in jewellery, and accounting for the fact that no fucking build uses physical (pain enhancer) or poison (toxin) +dmg bonus, and you'll be using say, +fire dmg with my build, you're looking at maybe 10% damage added per second for a gem.
Now compare them to the "useless" percentage gems - the ones who increase your damage by a flat amount. I use gem of the trapped because of the way my build works, which means that I am adding a 22.5% damage debuff to every mob I am hitting. 1560*1.225=1911 - or 351% weapon damage, not accounting for the bonuses to fire dmg increase. It's far more potent on it's own (although the lvl 25 bonuses lets the toxin and enhancer gems catch up due to their secondary effects being damage increases, and trappeds being CC).
So essentially, yea, you're wrong. You're *extremely* wrong.
As an honorable mention:
Do you not think the developers are aware of how damage normalisation works, and the fact that the pure damage based gems works better with slower weapons (eg Toxin, Enhancer)? Of course they are. That's why they offer alternatives to builds that relies on fast attacks - it's called "proc based" gems, and Mirinae and Wreath are the given choises. If you do 1.2 attacks per second with a slow 2H, then yes, you'll gain far more from hitting stuff with the Enhancer gem or the Toxin gem. On the other hand, it'll take you an average of five to six seconds to get a single proc of wreath or mirinae. But the monks rolling with Flying Dragon that are doing more than 6 attacks per second? Those guys are getting procs of wreath and mirinae left and fucking right, averaging a proc every second (essentially? They have 100% conduit uptime).
So no - there's absolutely no need to enforce WoW's normalisation in Diablo. It'd make for extremely boring build choises. Just learn how the game works instead please.
1