Sigh... it costs me 26k to repair my equipment, which is insufficient for inferno act 2 anyway. In other words, Inferno act I -> II went from impossible to stupid impossible

As a tanky barbarian (meaning I don't die very often), these new repair costs aren't really hitting me hard. I do have a couple of friends though who are pure glass cannon demon hunters that are pretty much screwed right now. They pretty much have to totally re-gear themselves to be tankier or just roll a different class.

Hahahaha! Wait... you're serious? Allow me to laugh even harder! Is that for one death? Jesus, that reminds me of the review I read about the new Armored Core game. You had to build up loads of attack points (or whatever) to attack someone's base in MP. If you lost, they all went poof and you had to spend an hour or so grinding more.

What really fucking pisses me off? I have no option to refuse updates. Blizzard could make the game into 3D pinball tomorrow and I could do fuck-all about it. I posted a ticket because I'm drunk and down to accomplish nothing constructive tonight:

Thanks to a friend, I've gotten better gear for my wizard and I'm now in act 1 hell. Blasting monsters into nothingness with disintegrate is no problem, but champion and boss packs still fuck me over.

Followers are fucking useless. I don't know what brainiac at blizzard decided to make them weak as piss, but there is very little reason to take any of the followers with you. They don't pull aggro, they don't do any amount of damage worth mentioning, and they're all annoying as well (except for Lyndon). In D2, the right follower was necessary to keep you goddamn alive. They performed a valuable function. In D3, they do not.

As I was playing last night I thought to myself that a lot of this game is straight up ripped off of D2. Act 1 in both takes place in Khanduras/Tristram. Act 2 is a different geographic location that is for all intents and purposes the same exact place i.e. desert for the most part, with a side order of 'powerful mage's secret hideout level'. Even the plot is roughly an echo (Both 'Great Jewel Cities of the East' - I mean literally, both Lut Gholein and Caldeum were referred to in the same way - are under insidious threat from demons. You have to go out to the desert first to find information and plot devices, before returning to the city to start the act's endgame. In both cases there is a super secret ancient mage's hideout you have to go to). Act 3 is different, except that both games feel like it drags at this point (Act 3 in D3 also rips off Act 5 D2 LoD - both were set in Keeps, both were under siege by demonic armies, both were set in the frozen north). Both game's Act 4 is quick. The problem is, they don't keep the cool quest rewards we got in D2. Stuff like getting extra skill points, getting an item, any item, socketed, busting mephisto's soulstone and getting gems and eventually, high-level runes. The quest rewards in D3 is just XP. Whoopdeefuckingdo. The drop rates for bosses are pathetic, and they're often located in awkward spots so farming them is pointless (actually all I know is that Izual is in a really awkward spot, but farming bosses in general is pointless because they don't drop anything good). It's like they copied D2 for arguably no good reason, but then didn't copy it for all the good ideas that worked.

That's not to say that D2 was perfect and that D3 is shitastic. D3 is fun, and both games had a frustrating hike in difficulty if you were underequipped and had a bad build (and having a bad build in D3 is no longer possible either, so that's a strong plus). D2 though, well, some builds lent itself well to not being gear dependent (a pally blessed hammer could conceivably win the game naked, so could i think blizz sorcs as well), so there was always that option. A lot of people used these sort of builds to make magic-find characters for their other characters. I can't see the same thing happening in D3. Having said all that, D3 is barely a month old, and D2 took a long time before it became really polished and sorted out. So I'm hoping that Blizzard sorts this shit out with expansions or DLC or something.

I haven't played Diablo 3, but Stofsk's complaint about the rewards being scaled back reminds me of what got me out of playing Team Fortress 2. In both games, the micropayment system seems to be at odds with enjoyable gameplay: in a normal game, you want your customers to like the game as much as possible so that they keep playing it, tell their friends to play it, give it good scores, etc; while in a micropayment-based game happy customers aren't paying you money to supplement an annoyingly low drop rate. And then you start adding anti-player measures like those mentioned in the other thread to stop gold farmers devaluing the currency...

Kite man! Kite like you've never kited before! A Terran SC2 player could dominate as ranged in D3 because anyone who can micro marines can micro a Wizard or DH. I avoided channeled Wizard abilities due to lack of mobility.

I salute your patience. Seriously. From keeping up with the patch notes, I'm noticing the same trends as I did in SWTOR (essentially, a focus on shit I hated that continued well after I quit): Blizzard is pushing the RMAH, constantly nerfing drop rates of gold and items (players don't discuss good farming areas for this specific reason), and turning Inferno into an endless grind to stall players so they don't have to create new content. In a few weeks/months, we'll see an expansion (likely another $60) that raises the level cap, making all that gear people paid cash money for (or grinded the gold for) useless and forcing them to spend more money on the new stuff..... just like WoW (or any MMO really).

On a related sidenote:
Looks like Bioware support as they just closed my ticket. Not that I really expected a response to my drunken ramblings.

Yeah I do kite, but unfortunately my gear is shit for one thing, I don't have any fast movement speed on my boots (for one thing). Some champion packs don't let you kite all that easily either, like vortex and jailer, and even mortars seem to fuck me over when I run from them. (I haven't figured out the best way to dodge mortar fire but sometimes in dungeons you don't have enough space to run and dodge either.)

As for being patient, well for the moment the game is still fun. Normal and nightmare are more or less fun. Hell is when things seem to get a little shit, but it's not stupidly challenging. I can easily see myself not liking inferno though. We'll see.

You're right that Blizzard has done quite a few things to make the game shit, but the main reason I'm willing to be patient is because it's something that can be reversed or fixed. It remains to be seen whether or not they do so.

You need two defensive skills plus energy armor to really survive hell as a wizard. You can go fracture teleport with duplicate mirror images, or with crystal shell diamond skin (despite the forum's hate for diamond skin it's still useful in hell, and with enough armor and resists people can make it work in inferno too). Also take along hydra, and combine arcane hydra with temporal flux for some snare or go with venom hydra for more damage. You'll want to stay away from any spell that forces you to stand in place.

Its all about the stutter step.

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Needs moar dakka

In recent news I've cleared inferno act 1 with witch doctor. Is it supposed to be this easy??

(My gear cost less than 150k gold total)

No... actually the WD is supposed to be so underpowered that the class begins to be useless in the higher difficulties... especially the Summons as they die fasterthan you can summon them.

Blizzard took some gamer request from their forum and doubled them to buff that class in the upcomming 1.04 patch...

Source: Bashioks Twitter

Whats your Equip and skill choice?

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"Bring your thousands, I have my axe."
"Bring your cannons, I have my armor."
"Bring your mighty... I am my own champion."
Cue Unit-01 ramming half the Lance of Longinus down Adam's head and a bemused Gendo, "Wrong end, son."

Basically I did a pet build with soul harvest, spirit walk and zombie bears, or sometimes horrify with armor rune. To make pets work in later hell and inferno you basically gear for +armor, +all resists, and very importantly life regen. I have about 887 hp per second regen which I share with my minions via fierce loyalty. My armor is about 5000, resists are all 450 minimum, and my damage is 13k. HP now is 21k.

I basically let my pets take the hits while I rush in, soul harvest, then spam zombie bears. Hardest elite group I faced so far was a invulnerable minions with arcane enchanted and molten plus something else I don't remember, and they were those fast leaping things. Took me three tries to down them, but most elite packs take me about under thirty seconds. If it's not a nasty combo of affixes I can beast elite packs in ten seconds.

I'm thinking of adding vision quest into my build and use my pet cooldowns plus spirit walk, soul harvest cooldowns to give me the mana regen to spam bears. I'm also going to try adding in big bad voodoo with health regen. Gonna see how that combo works against the really hard elite mobs.