Diablo III: Season 4

The next season of Diablo III starts in less than an hour, and it's looking pretty sweet. They put out a new patch this week to use in the new season and it has a ton of interesting changes! The biggest one is the addition of a new 'cube' with powerful new recipes. It lets you reroll legendary items to get better stats, or trade in an extra copy of a set item for a different piece of the set, or convert a rare item to a legendary. You can swap gem types, or crafting material types. You can remove the level requirement from an item to really power level an alt. But the best part is you can destroy legendary items and then equip 3 of their passive abilities onto your character! One of the constraints to builds in the past was which slots you could get passives from while maintaining overpowered set bonuses... Now those options have multiplied! So many more builds should become playable as a result!

On top of that they've added in higher difficulty levels (useful since the previous highest difficulty for the base game was massively eclipsed by the greater rifts)! New items! Quality of life changes to crafting and rifting!

On the downside they decided to put crowd control (CC) caps back in. This was part of the initial game and it sucked since you couldn't permanently CC hard enemies which meant everyone had to build to be invincible. Eventually they decided that was a bad idea and took the cap out. Now they put it back in and I'm not sure why. On the plus side it came with massive damage nerfs across the board to enemies so maybe they've decided everyone needs to be invincible again but actually made that feasible this time? I guess the setup where every group needed a CC bot that did no damage was pretty bad too. So if everyone can mostly survive just fine with the damage nerfs and you can use short bursts of CC to help against bursty monsters or something that could be good.

I tried out my old crusader on the highest difficulty just to see what it was like. He was built to infinitely CC things, and couldn't anymore, so that sucked. On the plus side I was able to kill all the monsters in torment X. I died to most of the blue packs. But my build was undoubtedly bad now, and I had none of the new cube bonuses, and I wasn't tip-top as it was, so the new difficulties are probably just fine.

All in all I'm pretty pumped to get playing Diablo III again. This version of the game is probably going to be the best one yet, and that's really sweet.

Diablo III: Reaper of Souls

Ike and I have been looking for a game we could stream together. I was watching Witwix a couple days ago and he was talking about how he had a 24 hour stream planned for Friday since that was the start of the new season for Diablo III. I haven't played any of the expansion at all yet, so 'new season' didn't mean all that much to me, but it felt like it might be a game Ike and I could play co-op. I suggested it to Ike, he tested to make sure his computer could handle streaming it, and it looks like we're good to go.

As I said, I don't have the expansion, and I wasn't really looking forward to paying Blizzard $40 for it. I did some searching around and found a bunch of different websites that sell keys for games. Initially this feels really sketchy. Have these sites cracked the key generation code and are just manufacturing keys? Did they buy a ton of keys from a country where the game is cheaper? Hack accounts in some way? Are they just scamming entirely?

Then there is the other option, which is that Blizzard is just engaging in variable pricing. Micro economics does say that the seller would ideally like to sell their product for the maximum amount of money to each individual buyer. But they can't well have on their website a button to buy a game for $40 and a button to buy the same game for $20. It's easy to make a more expensive button with a sound track or whatnot, but they'd likely lose more money from $40 people switching to $20 then they would gain from additional $20 sales. What they could do is sell keys to resellers for $20 and then let them mark them up a little bit and sell to the people unwilling to pay $40.

I then noticed that one of the key reseller sites sponsors the pro gaming team Cloud 9, which is my favourite NA LCS team. My favourite Hearthstone streamer, Hafu, is also on Cloud 9, and has an ad on her stream for the key reseller with a small discount code. So they're probably not straight up scammers, I would hope? There's certainly a spectrum of options for how they got their keys and some of them are pretty reasonable to support.

The bottom line is that if I was currently employed I'd just click the button on Blizzard's website and pay whatever they want to charge. But as things currently stand saving $20 is worth the risk of not knowing exactly how G2A gets their keys. So I snapped yesterday and finally picked up the D3 expansion.

I tried playing a bit, but everything is completely changed from the game I used to know. I have no idea what my old level 60 character's build should be, or if the gear she has is useful or not. But that's what a new season is for! Paragon points and stash and crafters and everything is completely wiped out for characters created in the new season.

So tonight Ike and I are going to try streaming from 10pm-midnight atlantic time. I'm going to try out the new class in the expansion, crusader, and I think Ike is going to shoot things from afar with a demon hunter. I don't know anything about what classes might be good or not except that Witwix said every 4 person group 'needs' a '0 DPS' witch doctor for some reason. I've never played any witch doctor at all... If I end up wanting to play without Ike then maybe I'll start one of those and try out public groups if those are a thing?

Diablo III: Reaper of Souls

Path of Exile isn't the only action RPG coming out with an expansion in March. Diablo III has a big expansion due out March 25th. It's going to work like a pretty standard Blizzard expansion. All the things are getting increased (a 6th class, a 5th act, and 10 more levels on the level cap) and pretty much all of the game systems are being reworked. They can't well mix the old systems and the new ones so they just patch everything into the new systems. That patch came out last week so a lot of the new changes can be tried out now. Some pretty major things have changed...

First off, the auction house is dead. They've decided people want to find their own loot, not buy their own loot. Personally I want to be able to progress with my own loot and that wasn't possible in the original game. That made me very sad. So I like this change. One might think this would just funnel all the loot sales into disreputable external websites to they've also made all the unique items bind on account and you can't trade gold anymore. So if you want a specific build defining item you'd better kill a lot of monsters!

Loot has also changed substantially. The days of enemies exploding in a shower of loot you need to sift through are gone. Now it's pretty rare that an enemy will drop anything at all, even white items! White items are actually in high demand because you can disenchant them into valuable crafting materials. They've narrowed the ranges for item stats so you can't get a truly terrible item anymore. If a max level item has int on it then it will have a pretty reasonable amount of int. Loot can be 'smart' which means it will spawn with stats your class wants and skip ones it doesn't want. So a wizard won't get drowned in items that buff witch doctor skills or have strength. You're still going to need to kill lots of monsters to find the specific stat mixes you care about, but it should be a lot more likely to find something you can use.

Paragon levels have changed. They used to give a flat amount of stats and magic find. Now they've added in a system of paragon powers similar to the end game leveling systems from games like Final Fantasy XI or Everquest. So my wizard gets to put 6 points into either int, vit, movement speed, or maximum arcane power. Then 6 more points into either attack speed, cooldown reduction, crit chance, or crit multiplier. Then 6 more between life, armour, resist all, or life regen. And then finally 6 more between splash damage, resource cost reduction, life on hit, or gold find. So we get lots of different options for how to spend extra levels. Oh, and all characters on your account share the same paragon levels. So my level 1 alt also got to spend 24 points getting more powerful! Unfortunately this does mean that the best way to power up any character is to play your best character... Well, unless you want loot to drop for the other character since the smart loot system will prevent it for dropping on your alt!

Difficulty levels have been drastically changed. There is no more normal/nightmare/hell/inferno anymore. Instead all the enemies scale based on your character level and you can use a slider to make them even harder for more rewards. I didn't mind playing the same stuff through 4 times but some people did and this change will be good for them I guess. I'll end up playing everything through multiple times anyway to grind paragon levels anyway! Leveling is also a lot quicker, especially with a friend. I started a new character on maximum monster difficulty and the enemies had 41k health and I would attack for 17! On the plus side I had a ring that would summon a fireball that hit for 2k so I could eventually kill them. But then Tom pointed out his max level character could do 41k damage and joined me... I hit level 58 in a couple hours!

Perhaps the biggest change, and certainly the most needed one, is the addition of guilds and chat channels. There were plenty of reasons why I got tired of playing Diablo III but the lack of a guild to easily rant with people was the biggest one. And they finally fixed it! I created a guild that's up to two whole members! If people are going to play Diablo III again they should join the guild too. I can't find a way to send an offline invite, but if you message me on any sort of system (Facebook, Gmail, Skype, ICQ...) and I'm awake I'll log in and hook you up. We can maybe run the infernal machine ring quests for a 35% xp ring!

Diablo III Auction House Removal

It won't happen until next March but Blizzard has announced they're going to be completely removing the auction house from Diablo III. They let me know via email, and by telling every single blog I follow that they should post about it. Well, I guess I'm following suit since I have my own take on the matter and getting it out there is what this place is for, isn't it?

I played a lot of Diablo III when it first came out, and have gone back periodically for more. I feel like the game launched in a very unfinished state, and even now is still missing features I consider core to an online game in this day and age like guilds and chat channels. They also failed badly in their first attempt to balance the end game difficulty and loot drops which really detracted from the fun of the game for someone who plays games as intensely as I do. The way items dropped combined with the tuning failure of monsters meant the only way to make meaningful progress was to grind up money and use the AH to get upgrades. Actually killing monsters for upgrades was not feasible since I couldn't realistically kill monsters that had anything resembling a decent chance of dropping an upgrade.

Different people came up with different solutions to this problem. Sky leveled up a character better at farming and used that character to gear up his main character. James decided the best way to get more powerful was to stop playing entirely and just wait for the prices of gear to deflate on the AH as more and more people became capable of fighting in the higher acts of inferno. I decided the best way was to become an auction house guru and make money flipping gear and finding great bargains from people who knew less about the economy. I then decided I had no interest in playing a badly designed economy simulator and stopped playing the game.

Eventually they smoothed out the difficulty at the top such that you didn't desperately need gear you couldn't obtain in order to play the game. (This was 'solved' at the start by Blizzard allowing the first wave of 60s to farm easy to reach treasure chests that they removed from the game after a few days which let the economy get bootstrapped.) I came back, and by that point James' plan worked for me and I was able to spend what little money I had on more than enough gear to get by even if the difficulty hadn't been smoothed out.

Was the AH itself to blame for the problems Diablo III had at launch? Yeah, I think it probably was. Either Blizzard put out an incredibly unpolished product or it put out what they thought was a pretty good game centered around the auction house without realizing that doing so was fundamentally changing the game and wasn't what the consumers wanted. Having a way to get gear outside the game allowed them to believe they could ramp up the difficulty because people could just buy their way out of the problems. But most people who play Diablo games don't want to throw money at the problem. They want to throw swords and spells at the problem, watch the enemies explode in a shower of experience and loot, and repeat the process.

I have been playing Diablo III every now and then, and I think they've gotten a lot closer to that game. I have fun logging in, killing monsters, and looking at what drops. But I realized that the last couple times I played the game I didn't even look at the auction house. When I'm really playing the game intensely I feel the need to use the auction house to get any edge I can find, but when I'm just logging in and blowing zombies up for a few hours I really don't need extra stats. So removing the auction house won't impact the way I'm currently playing the game at all. Even better, they're working on changing the way loot drops work to make things more interesting for people who go it alone, so that has to be good for the way I'm playing now. And good for an intense way of playing too, since then the way to get better actually will be just killing more dudes and looking at the shiny things that drop.

Blizzard certainly seems to be learning from their mistakes, and owning up to them, and I have to commend them for that. I just wish they were smart enough to not make such brutal mistakes with one of their flagship franchises in the first place!

Barter Kings

Often when I'm playing video games I'll have the TV on in the background. Stand-up comedy, preferably, because I can not pay attention for 10 minutes and I won't have any trouble picking it back up. Beyond that I'll keep an eye out for Mythbusters and then maybe a wacky police show like The Mentalist or Criminal Minds. A&E sometimes runs a Criminal Minds marathon, so it's in my rotation of channels to look at.

At one point on the weekend I'd left the tv on A&E while playing a game (probably League of Legends) and when I eventually looked up it was a show called Barter Kings. I watched a little bit, and got sucked in. They were running a marathon that weekend and I ended up just watching it for something like 8 hours. The show is about two guys who make trades for a living. In an episode they might do something like start out with some used scuba gear and end up with an airplane. Which they then sold for $20k. The internet seems pretty convinced that the show is mostly fake, but it's an interesting premise and the way they use jedi mind tricks on people to get trades down is awesome and makes me feel dirty.

It makes me think about the economies in Diablo II and Diablo III. The Barter Kings guys keep using a variation on convenience to convince people to lose hundreds or thousands of dollars in value. They'll tell a fat guy who's fiance left him that he doesn't have any use at all for her $5000 diamond engagement ring, so he might as well trade it to them for a $2000 elliptical machine. He can get in shape and find a new woman, see! And realistically, if he wanted to do it himself, he'd have to sell it to a jeweller for more like $3500 or spend a lot of time tracking down someone who'd pay closer to the $5000 for it. And then he'd have to find a place to buy a top end elliptical machine. He probably comes out up a thousand dollars or two, but it would take a lot of time and effort. And for the people trading a $300 thing for a $600 thing it makes even more sense. They're providing a service by going around and doing these things. They have the knowledge to find items that the random dudes they trade with don't have. So the other people are making time and getting things they want, the Barter Kings are spending time but making money.

In Diablo II, that's how everything worked. Some people knew what stuff was valuable and how to track it down. Other people would get legendary items to drop and not know what to do with them. What is my sorceress going to do with a twinky bow? It would be nice if I could make it turn into a good sorceress weapon magically, but I couldn't. Possibly I could go to Sky or Byung and have them do it for me, because they were like the Barter Kings of Diablo II. But I was more likely to leave it sitting on an alt or vendor it for gambling money than try to find a trade myself.

In Diablo III the auction house made every single item into an easily exchanged commodity. Turn anything into cash, then turn the cash into whatever you want! Seems like it would fix my problem of getting a twinky bow dropping for my wizard. But in order to actually use the auction house properly I'd need to spend a lot of time learning the markets. On the plus side instead of just hoarding it myself or vendoring it for gambling money I'd probably just sell it for a quarter it's actual value and then buy something for twice what it's worth. With Blizzard taking a cut both ways.

It's almost like it doesn't matter if you're trading or using currency. Someone who puts in time and effort is going to profit and that profit is going to come from people who don't.

At any rate, the show is pretty entertaining. One of the two Barter Kings has Tourette's syndrome and I've found it interesting when they take little sidebars to talk about how it makes him do some 'weird' things like repeat the word Suzuki or snap his fingers. They also end up with going through some unique items, like in the episode I saw today...

Conga drums became a popcorn machine, which became an engine lift, which became a purebreed bulldog pup, which became a vintage tractor, which became a speedboat, which became $10000, which became a new air conditioning system for their store and $3000 cash to help keep the store running.

They traded for a puppy! And then they traded the puppy away for a working 60 year old tractor! Crazy!

Diablo III: More Hardcore Action?

Ike asked me the other day if I was at all interested in forming a regular hardcore group in Diablo III. I'd been thinking of starting a hardcore character in order to get more achievements, so the answer was yes! The last hardcore group fell apart mostly I think because most of the people involved got bored of Diablo III in general and not because of an issue with playing hardcore. It didn't help that I kept dying, but I figure that was mostly a problem with choosing the squishy class and having never played it in normal. As such, I figure I'm going to play the only class I've really played before, wizard, and see what happens.

So, the question is, does anyone else want to come along? The plan is likely to play a couple hours on the same night each week. Maybe something like 9pm-12pm EST on Thursday? I'm certainly open to suggestions one way or the other. Let me know!

Diablo III: % Elemental Damage

Diablo III has a very poorly worded item mod: "adds X% to {element} damage". Any reasonable interpretation of that ability would indicate that it would amplify your {element} damage. Adding to your fire damage should increase the amount of fire damage you do! It turns out it doesn't do anything of the sort. What it actually does is amplify the physical damage of your equipped gear (including weapon) by tacking on some bonus {element} damage. It does not amplify any elemental damage on your weapon. It also doesn't actually do damage of the listed element if you use a skill with an innate element! So it's all kinds of counter-intuitive. Wizards have a passive that makes lightning damage stun people. It doesn't work with my storm crow hat if I'm casting blizzard, for example, because that added lightning damage is actually cold damage.

Ok, so the ability doesn't do anything resembling what it says it does. It does have a game effect, though, and the question then becomes how good it is. My current build doesn't make terribly efficient use of it (my weapon comes with a massive elemental boost on it, and it's pretty much the only option for me to use with my budget) but would another build with a pure physical damage weapon (apparently these are called 'black weapons' because they have a black background) make it an awesome ability or just an ok one? What about other sources of this mod? What are they, and could they be worth building around?

Assuming I had a black weapon then the 8% on my storm crow hat should be a straight 8% damage boost. For comparison I have 2177 int, so in order to get a similar 8% damage boost I would need to add on 182 int. That's a pretty good boost. Most items can only roll 100 int in a single mod, so adding on almost twice that is good. And if I already had, say, 30% elemental damage then adding 8% more from storm crow would only be a 6% damage boost and would be the equivalent of 140 int. Still good, but going downhill. For comparison adding on 50% crit damage would be worth 278 int in my gear according to d3up. So, a good mod, but not the best option by any stretch.

At any rate, what are the level 60 elemental damage options? I am going to skip weapons which aren't black.

Helm
Storm Crow (wizard only) - 7-8%

Gloves
Frostburn Gauntlets - 5-6%, also 15-30% more damage from cold skills (but no stats of any kind)

Belt
Inna's Favor - 7-8%

Boots
Zunimassa's Trail - 7-8%

Amulet
Tal Rasha's Allegiance - 5-6%

Ring
Stone of Jordon - 5-6%, also a massive 20-30% damage to elites

Offhand
Triumvirate (wizard only) - 15-18%


That's actually a fair number of slots covered by this mod. Triumvirate in particular looks potentially insane. 18% more damage? That's worth more than 400 int. That it also comes with 150-169 int, 8-8.5% crit chance, a ton of physical damage and a random mod makes it all the sweeter. Frostburn seems terrible except maybe if you're only using blizzard. Stone of Jordon can't have any stats at all which makes it seem pretty odd, but I guess 30% damage to elites could be sweet. The witch doctor and wizard set pieces with this mod both seem fantastic. (Boots/amulet.) Assuming you don't want arcane power on crit (say, you're running archon) then dropping storm crow for a better hat would be reasonable. Getting 32% extra damage from 3 slots on top of their built in stats could be pretty awesome. So I think I'm going to keep an eye out for Zunimassa's Trail, Tal Rasha's Allegiance, and Triumvirate to see what the prices are like...

I spent some time last night browsing the auction house between games of League of Legends and found some reasonably cheap items to go into this sort of build. The tricky thing with a lot of these legendary items that start with some good mods and can only roll 1 or 2 other things is the versions with relevant random rolls are actually really expensive. I wanted to get a set of Inna's pants for an extra 12% movement speed (apparently really important for an archon build) and it only has one random mod. Getting one with int was stupidly expensive. It is the pants with attack speed (and therefore awesome for the stunlock build too) so pretty much every high level wizard wants a set of them, despite it being the monk set. And with every wizard wanting them it isn't terribly surprising that pairs with int are expensive. I ended up buying a pretty cheap set that has armor instead. Similarly I bought a Tal Rasha amulet and a Triumvirate that had +gold find on them instead of useful stats. I figure gold find is better than something completely worthless like thorns or fire resistance and will eventually pay for itself! I also bought a fairly cheap socketed black weapon with crit damage on it. I made an 80% crit damage emerald and stuck it in the socket so my weapon alone is worth 124% crit damage. Yay pumping up my best stat!

My listed damage number has gone way up on the character sheet with the new items, but I know that's a bit of an illusion. Archon is pretty much a straight 3x multiplier from character sheet damage to actual DPS while the wicked wind spec was more like a 6x multiplier on a fight after ramping up. So I feel like this build is going to do less sustained damage, but is going to be significantly better at killing lots of things in a row. In other words, absolutely perfect for farming experience on a low monster power! I haven't tried it out yet, but it should be fun. I do feel like getting the Inna's pants will help with stun locking on the infernal machine bosses as well, though I may well need to spec for surviving instead of doing damage in order to use them.

I tweaked my spreadsheet a bit, because I want to see what stats are worth assuming a straight archon beam killing everything. Is crit damage still the best or do I have enough of it now? Generally because all the different damage stats stack multiplicatively you want a nice balance of them all. I went whole hog on crit damage (partly because my awesome crafted gloves and ring rolled it) and may need to double back and get some other stats now.

100 int = 21397
6% crit = 44215
50% crit damage = 33264
.1 base attack rate (switch from wand to dagger, though that has the issue that the dagger should have less base damage) = 31728
9% attack speed = 30286
4% damage to elites = 17084
8% damage as elemental = 27127
33 min damage = 7579

Ok, these numbers are all way bigger than they were for my other spec, even though it had such a high damage scaling factor. My current top stat is crit chance, which doesn't surprise me since I'm critting for +360% damage now. % damage as elemental still looks pretty good despite having 30% already.

My two worst damage items, according to d3up, are the two slots that have 12% movement speed on them. I guess that makes sense. Assuming I can play at a monster power where I murder everything then the ability to run to more things is going to be worth giving up damage and tankiness. I stuck two vitality gems in the pants so they're actually a fine tanky item compared to a lot of what I have. The Triumvirate looks to be as sick as I thought it might be. And that's one with gold find as the random mod!

I may still try to pick up a Zunimassa's Trail to replace my current boots. My boots are really good for tankiness with vit, armour, and resist all on them but maybe I'll be fine with doing more damage instead. It'll depend on how archon actually plays out.

Interestingly I plugged in what would happen if I replaced my worst ring with a Stone of Jordan and it was a 19% damage boost to elites and an 8% damage loss to everything else. So if I can find a sweet spot where I'm still killing trash trivially but could use some killing power on elites that might actually be a viable choice. It also chunks 8% off of my effective health. They were dirt cheap when I looked. I wonder if I'm missing something about them. Or maybe my second ring is just garbage and I should replace it with something better than both it and a SoJ?

Diablo III: Bonus Experience

On the weekend I picked up three rings with +35% bonus experience. I debated a bit about how much killing power I was willing to lose in order to get 70% more experience and was leaning towards all of it. 70% is a really big deal! It then turned out you can only wear one hellfire ring at a time (legendary items are unique equipped even though it doesn't say so in game) which made the debate a little moot. And now after reading some more I'm starting to wonder if the first one is even terribly good. You see, bonus experience stacks additively, not multiplicatively, and I already have an awful lot of bonus experience.

First, apparently at some point the Nephalem Valour buff got changed to include experience on top of gold find/magic find. (Looks like it was patch 1.0.4 when they added in paragon levels, which makes sense.) So with a 5 stack of the buff as my only source of bonus experience the ring would take me from 175% to 210% experience, or a gain of 20%.

Next up, the monster power boost. This last patch massively buffed the bonus experience gained for fighting on a harder difficulty level. I've been fighting on monster power 7 recently which gives 375% normal experience. Tack on the neph buff and I'm up to 450% experience. The hellfire ring on top of that brings me up to 485%, which is only a gain of 7.8%.

Now, apparently you can stick MF/GF/XP items on your follower and get 20% of the bonus as spillover from them. Sticking one of my three rings on my scoundrel friend has to be right. That's only a 7% additive bonus, which along with the MP7 buff and the neph buff is 457%. My own hellfire on top of that is 492%, or only 7.7%.

You can also get a socketed helmet for more bonus experience. My current hat doesn't have a socket, but what if it did? I could probably afford something like a 27% ruby, which brings my pre-ring number all the way up to 484%. Hellfire makes it 519%, which is only a 7.2% boost.

Now, don't get me wrong, 7.2% extra experience is still something. But it's not the massive 35% I thought I was looking at. I can totally imagine situations where a real ring would be better than a bad hellfire ring when fighting at MP7. Fortunately for me one of my three rings is actually insane. Randy pointed out an interesting stat website that breaks down your stats by item and it turns out it thinks my hellfire ring is my most damaging non-weapon slot item. It's more than twice as good as my other ring! And it has better defensive stats than my other ring. And it has an empty socket I haven't made use of! It doesn't have attack speed or crit chance which hurts my stun locking ability but I was able to play in MP7 with it so I can't be that big a deal.


Assume now that I want to efficiently farm for experience, not infernal machine keys. Getting more paragon levels to get more stats and more magic find is going to be pretty useful. Also assume I find a build with better initial damage so I can actually kill trash mobs. (The wicked wind spec can lock down and kill MP7 elite packs but it takes time to get going each fight. I know there are better initial damage specs like archon, meteor, blizzard, or maybe even disintegrate to play with.) What monster power level should I play on for optimal efficiency?

There are going to be two factors at play in this calculation. The first is the amount of time spent just walking around finding things to kill, or loading new games, or clearing out my inventory. The second is the ratio of monster health to experience earned. Raising the monster power level isn't really going to increase the downtime from doing a single run. (Well, you get a bigger magic find multiplier so I guess you'll spend a little more time dealing with items?) It is going to increase how long it takes to actually kill things. The formula for experience per time is then going to be X/(D+H*Y) where X is the experience multiplier, D is the downtime constant, H is the monster health multiplier, and Y is a constant based on how long it would take to kill things at MP0. I have no real idea how to estimate D and Y but the absolute size of them doesn't matter at all. What matters is the relative values of them. Estimating is even harder when I don't know what spec I'd be doing it in and have never played it! I feel like it should probably be well above half my time spent killing things? I'm going to pretend 30% downtime and see what shakes out?

Even with the hellfire ring this function maxes out at MP0. Ok, how much downtime do I need before a better MP level makes sense? Well, with D=.9 MP4 becomes the best. With D=.8 MP1 is the best. So, yeah... Unless all my time is spent running around looking for stuff to kill I should stick to the lowest level possible. Note that if your primary goal is finding keys then you actually are spending a lot of time just running around. And the key odds function increases much, much quicker than the experience function does. (Going from MP2 to MP4 will double your key odds but only gives me 24% more experience.)

The thing to point out here is that sometimes increasing monster health doesn't increase time to kill things. If I kill most everything on MP0 instantly then giving them all 50% more health probably doesn't slow me down much at all and the 10% experience bonus is going to be worth it. So realistically the 'optimal' choice is going to be finding a point where I can still trivially murder practically everything in my path. I feel like my gear is starting to get good, so I wouldn't be surprised if an archon or disintegrate build would be doing just that at something like MP2 or MP3. With my wicked wind spec giving all the monsters more health gave me enough time to ramp up my damage and get infinite resources back, which is another factor to keep in mind. I feel like with that spec I want to find the point where I can lock in a freeze, cast a bunch of spells for a bit, and watch everything explode. MP6 is probably right for that. But it's almost certainly going to be faster to use a different spec with no ramp-up time at a lower MP level. And my poor hand will love me for it!


The hellfire ring also gets relatively better at lower MP levels because it's adding in with a smaller MP bonus. Basically, it is going to add 35% of the base monster experience no matter how much health it actually has. So the more wimpy monsters you can plow through, the more experience the hellfire ring is going to add. So it feels like if you're playing on a low MP level then you really want to get a hellfire ring (and a ruby in your hat) but if you're playing on a high MP level then you probably just want whatever gives you the most stats. Or you want to get lucky and get a hellfire ring that happens to have a ton of good stats too.

Diablo III: The Infernal Machine Event

Back in patch 1.0.5 Blizzard added in a new end game event to Diablo III. They added four new purple elites to the game, one in each act, which each drop a different bind on account item. Collect the 3 keys from the first 3 acts and a crafting recipe from Act IV and you can build yourself an infernal machine item which is also bind on account. Then going forward you just need the three keys again to make another one (meaning you can skip farming Act IV). Each of these items drops at X*10% where X is your monster power level, and only drop if you already have 5 stacks of the Nephalim valour buff.

Once you get a bunch of these infernal machines the real fun starts. Using an infernal machine opens a portal to a new zone which contains a new boss fight. There are three different boss fights beyond the portals and each one drops a different bind on account crafting item, again with a X*10% chance of a drop in any given kill. Collect all three of these items, buy a recipe for 2 million gold, and you can craft up a bind on account ring. These rings are bind on account and have 170-200 of a stat (your choice when you make it), a chance to shoot a fireball, 35% bonus experience gained, and 4 random ring mods. Oh, and no level requirement... Hello, alts!

Yesterday Randy put a little group together to try out the boss fights. Sceadeau, Tom, and I went along, though Sceadeau and I haven't played enough to have a lot of machines to use so we mostly just leeched off the items. I mean, we did help win the fights, don't get me wrong. But we didn't pull our key grinding weight. We did the first set at monster power 6, found it was pretty easy, and went up to 7. The fights on 7 took longer and were sketchier (but with only 1 wipe in 13 tries it was still pretty easy). Maybe we should have gone up to 8 for the better drop chance? On the other hand if we couldn't win on 8 it would have been really bad since we'd lose 4 shots at 70% (2.8 items) while hoping to earn 4*3*.1 = 1.2 items. I would have tried, as I'm always willing to try crazy things, but it may not have made sense. And since they weren't my machines it really wouldn't have been my place to make that call.

At any rate, we used 15 machines, did 16 fights, and I got the pieces to make 3 rings. I couldn't afford the 2 million for the recipe right away, but I ended up selling some gems I had lying around to get there. (And then finally sold a set belt I'd found for 6.8M so I'm flush with cash now!) But I'm in a bit of a quandry. My current build relies almost exclusively on having high amounts of attack speed and crit chance to function properly. My rings give me 7% of my 35% crit chance and 13% of my 44% attack speed. Swapping those out for other rings, even ones that give me 70% more experience, are going to make me worse. Perhaps so much worse that I can't function properly in this spec? On the other hand, getting 170-200 int is going to give a decent boost to my damage so maybe it'll be ok if I lose some of my stunlock? And if I have to start soloing at a lower MP level but with 70% more experience gained I bet it will be ok. Maybe I should keep my better stunlocking rings for the next time I run infernal machine bosses? Or maybe I can just get lucky and roll up some +xp rings with attack speed and crit! Alternatively I could just find a new spec entirely. I do miss shooting laser beams at people...

Well, what did I get on my rings?

ring 1 - int/vit, life on hit, crit damage, socket
ring 2 - str, vit, dex/vit, socket
ring 3 - damage, dex, cold resist, armour

No attack speed, no crit chance at all. The first ring seems really good, though. Really, really good. It rolled pretty high on the int, life on hit, and crit damage rolls and the socket is a reasonable bonus. The second ring has too many wasted stats. I don't need strength or dexterity on my ring. I'll give it to my follower for sure, and it'll be awesome on an alt. The third ring also has two wasted stats but I do need more defenses so getting armour isn't terrible.

I may research some other builds that can use two rings, but for now I think I'm going to try replacing my worst ring with ring 1 and sticking the other two on my follower and see how that works out. I can try to make up for the lost attack speed by using some of my newfound cashola on a better amulet or maybe buy a witching hour belt.

EDIT: Turns out they're unique equipped, so I will definitely just use ring 1 no matter what I end up doing, and giving just one of them to my follower. That makes things easier!

Diablo III: More Numbers!

Both Snuggles and Sky have commented recently with mechanic based information for Diablo III that is pretty informative. My new build has been working out spectacularly and I want to know more about how things work so I know where the best places to invest money would be in order to get more powerful. Should I be saving up for a socketed weapon? A set source? Should I just be crafting more gloves/bracers/shoulders? I don't really know how things work so it's really hard to accurately answer those questions. I've read some guides and such so I know what other people think I should do, but I hate listening to just other people. I want to understand things myself so I can make decisions!

First off, proc rates on things. Snuggles found a post from a guy who did a lot of testing on the 'life on hit' mechanic. It turns out the amount of life you gain on hit isn't what is listed on your gear. Instead every skill in the game has a 'proc coefficient' number (listed in this spreadsheet) which determines what ratio of your 'life on hit' you actually get. So while my gear says hits add 893 life in actually wicked wind is only adding 112 life per hit because it has a .125 pc. It works similarly with the critical mass passive which makes crits knock a second off of all my cooldowns. Apparently some people on the forums have been doing some testing and think the chance is actually twice the pc here. I don't know why, and people are still testing. But for now I'm willing to assume that a quarter of my wicked wind crits will reduce my cooldowns by 1 second. The other spells I'm using are storm armor/shocking aspect which has a 0 pc, diamond skin/diamond shards which has a .167 pc, and explosive blast/chain reaction which has a .111 pc.

Ok, but what counts as a hit? Chain reaction is easy. It pulses for damage three times, and therefore is 3 hits for one spell cast. Each hit has a .111 pc, so every time I hit the chain reaction button I heal for 300 life per enemy near me and do 291% damage. (On a time delay, but you can stack up a bunch of them if the cooldown refreshes often enough.) Diamond shards is also easy. It has a similar delay (when the shield runs out or when you cast it again) and does damage to everyone around me once for 150 life and 210% damage. This is worse than chain reaction, except it also puts up an 11k shield and has no resource cost. I also think it's off the GCD? And I can cast it while frozen which is nice when I screw up. Wicked wind, on the other hand, is super complicated. You cast it and it spins around for 6 seconds. How many times it ticks over those 6 seconds depends on your attack speed according to the formula/chart in this thread. I currently have 2.187 attack speed, which means I get 28 ticks per cast. This means each cast of wicked wind heals me for 3126 per enemy hit. It also does 252% damage which means it does less damage than explosive blast. (And has a smaller area of effect.)

All those extra ticks also mean big things for my 'chance on crit' effects. I have a 31% crit chance and have 28 arcane power on crit on my gear. This also uses the same pc ratio as life on hit. This means chain reaction, in the long run, will return 3*.111*.31*28 = 2.89 arcane power per enemy it hits. It costs 20 arcane power, so I can't spam this. Diamond shards gives .167*.31*28 = 1.45 arcane power, on average, per enemy it hits. Diamond shards is completely free. Wicked wind gives 28*.125*.31*28 = 30 arcane power, on average, per enemy it hits. It costs 35 arcane power. So against a single target I'll run myself out of arcane power by spamming wicked wind, but if you add in a second enemy I'll have infinite arcane power in a very short amount of time. In practice I find I have infinite arcane power all of the time except when something goes wrong. If the enemies get out of stunlock for an instant and blink away, or if I'm in a party and they knock the enemies out of my winds it can set me back. Or if I just hit the wrong buttons because I'm bad or my hand cramps up or something. I'm wondering if I can afford to drop the 8 arcane power on crit from my source and buy a more powerful one. I may test it out at some point. I know if I get more attack speed and crit I shouldn't need all 3 pieces, but I'm still pretty low on both values. The guides have recommended getting up to 36 ticks per wind as a baseline and I only have 28.

As far as cooldowns go, dividing each of the above numbers by 14 should give me the number of cooldown seconds shaved off per cast. Which means chain reaction should take off .2 seconds per cast per enemy, diamond shards should take off .1 seconds per cast per enemy, and wicked wind should cut 2.1 seconds per cast per enemy. My spells have cooldowns of 10.2 seconds (frost nova), 12.75 seconds (diamond shards), and 5.1 seconds (chain reaction). With full diminishing returns a monster will break out of frost nova in 1.05 seconds, which means I need to shave off 9.2 seconds from the cooldown every second in order to maintain stun lock. With only 2.187 attack speed this means every second spell needs to be worth 9 seconds of cooldown. Well, except I think diamond shards is off the GCD so I can just spam it when the cooldown refreshes. And by looking at the guide closer it claims explosive blast is also off the GCD, so I can spam it too. (I just mash all the buttons constantly!) This isn't enough reduction to stun lock one monster, which is definitely something I've noticed. I can keep a single elite mostly locked down but if he has teleport he'll often get away which is a big pain. Three enemies is absolute gold since a single wicked wind is then worth 6.3 seconds of reduction. Note the initial frost nova is a full 3 second stun so I have a ton of time to get winds up and ticking! Also reality is discrete, not continuous, so I don't get .1 second of reduction per diamond shard. Mostly I get nothing but sometimes I get a full second off.

Ok, fine, so I can see that getting some more crit chance will up my cooldown reduction more, and will give me more arcane power. Upping my attack speed will let me both cast more spells and get way more life, arcane power, and cooldown reduction. Dropping some arcane power on crit is probably a fine thing to do, especially if I get more attack speed or crit chance. But given that I can mostly stun lock stuff as is, and I can survive most single hits, how can I do more damage?

Sky pointed out that the item mod 'adds X% to {elemental} damage' works in ways I didn't expect. I have a Storm Crow hat with 'adds 8% to lightning damage' and my thinking was that it would increase any lightning damage I did by 8%. Storm armor does lightning damage so this seems like a small boost. Not so! It turns out it adds 8% extra damage (from your physical damage) to every attack you do! It won't even be lightning damage if the spell has a different damage type. So my wicked wind (which does arcane damage) will be getting a damage buff from the hat. As best I can tell I have 443 physical damage on my gear and 408 magical damage on my gear. This means about 52% of my damage is eligible for this bonus, which makes this stat on my hat a 4.16% damage boost. That's pretty hot! The issue here is most of the damage on my weapon is +fire damage, and that's by design of the weapon. Theoretically I could get a different weapon to make this mod better, but that would drastically reduce my attack speed and that just seems wrong. Stunlock first, kill things later!

One of the things I like to do to work out how good stats are is build a spreadsheet and then vary the numbers a little to see what the incremental worth of a stat is going to be. You have to build assumptions as far as what you expect your rotation to be, and I think I'm going to assume 2 wicked winds for every frost nova with the other two damage spells being spammed on average based on expected crits. I'm also going to assume 100ms between casts even when stuff is cooled down. I'm really not good enough to keep that up but it should at least give a decent relative ranking of the stats. I am considering using my gaming keyboard to macro all of the spammy spells onto one button to save my poor left hand which would probably help bring things more in line with this mythical expected value.

Man, I must say, some of these numbers in my sheet get pretty absurd. A WW+WW+FN rotation with 1 target does 175k DPS, but the mob gets to run around some. A WW+FN rotation with 3 targets does 237k DPS per target and locks them all down forever. If somehow you got 20 mobs to stand around me I'd be looking at doing 18M DPS per target! (Ok, that's right insane, since the sheet now assumes I can cast chain reaction 191 times in a little over a second. This probably means the way I'm dealing with cooldown reduction from crits is wonky for big numbers.) Not like 20 mobs would live very long regardless.

Anyway, here's the DPS gain for the WW+WW+FN case on a single dude:

100 Int = 10626
6% crit = 20007
50% crit damage = 27236
3 base attacks per second (maxxed chantodo) = 2322
9% attack speed = 13462
4% damage to elites = 7806
8% damage as elemental = 8113
33 min damage = 4080

I tried to use what seemed like the max possible roll for a stat on a secondary item like a ring. It turns out the stuff I've been trying to keep an eye for is the best stuff. Int does have the advantage of also being damage reduction. The %damage as elemental stuff is interesting for sure, but it doesn't look like something I need to be targeting. The problem is definitely with my weapon, as the same 8% damage as elemental would be worth around 23k if my weapon did purely physical damage. Chantodo maxxes out at a base of 1.65 attacks per second and has to come with fire damage. The fastest other weapon is 1.5 from a rare dagger. Daggers can't roll arcane power on crit, so there are two big problems to deal with if I switched weapons: needing more attack speed to maintain the same number of wicked wind ticks, and needing to keep arcane power on crit stats on my hat and offhand. It's not inconceivable (Triumvirate is a ludicrous offhand for that plan since it can add 18% to elemental damage) but not really in my budget right now. I can't afford great pieces for one gear set; there's no reason to go branching out into a second one.

It's also important to point out that the DPS numbers here are only for once a fight gets rolling and I have enough wicked winds spinning to grant enough arcane power to keep casting all this stuff. It actually makes me pretty terrible at fighting regular easy guys. But wow, when I'm able to teleport onto a group of champions and go to town on them does it ever feel good.

As far as where I should go with my gear, I think short term goals are going to be:

• Get enough attack speed to reach the next wicked wind tick breakpoint. That's an extra 8% on top of what I already have, but my offhand currently has none on it.
• Try subbing out one of my sources of arcane power on crit. Like, say, my offhand. It only has 8 while my other two have 10 each. 
• Putting those two together, the Chantodo's Force offhand has a set bonus worth 130 int and 7% damage reduction from elites. It comes with damage, int, attack speed, max arcane power, crit chance, an irrelevant wizard spell modifier, and one random mod. I've been trying to buy one with the arcane power on crit random mod but they're all really expensive. It also rolls with a minimum of 8% attack speed, which seems just perfect for the first point. So I think looking for a cheap one with a garbage random mod instead of a perfect random mod could be fantastic.
• I don't have any bonus crit damage at all, and it looks like my best damage stat right now. So, investing in something that has it might make a lot of sense. Amulet/ring/gloves are the options for rare slots. Maybe I should try to make some of the crafted stamina gloves and see what comes out. All of my amulet/ring/gloves currently have attack speed and crit chance on them and two already have life on hit so I worry that finding one that keeps those stats while adding in crit damage will be very pricy. So maybe trying to get lucky on gloves really is right.
• I could still use some more defensive stats. I should look to see if I can trade int in some slots for defensive stats. 100 int is worth 10 resist all, which is good, but the max roll in a slot for resist all is 80. 80 is a lot more than 10 and it feels like int isn't as good an offensive stat as I'd been thinking it was so making some trades there may be both right and cost effective. If I craft gloves it'll definitely be vitality ones!

Diablo III: Item Mods Per Slot

One thing I quickly noticed when trying to build an item set for the wizard build I found was how few slots actually have attack speed or crit chance as options for rare items. Frustratingly, legendary/set items can sometimes break the rules that rare items have for mods/slot but the auction house interface won't let you search for them! For example, The Witching Hour is a legendary belt with attack speed and is the only way to get attack speed on a belt. But if you don't know about that item and you just want to find a belt with attack speed you simply can't use the AH to find it. It also means you can't filter all of the available The Witching Hours to get one with a max attack speed roll. My current belt is significantly worse than The Witching Hour could be, and until I went looking right now for an example item I didn't know it existed!

I want to know which slots can have which stats so I can go about properly upgrading my gear. I feel like I need more life on hit in particular, and more max health. But a couple hours of internet searching on the weekend did little to actually find information in an easy to use form. So, I've decided to go through all the possible rare mods and all the legendary items to build a nice list of the mods I care about and build a bit of a shopping list.

Diablo III: Crafting

Now, I like to make things in video games when given the chance. Last time I played Final Fantasy XI I hardly killed any mobs at all. I played a lot, but I spent my time almost exclusively crafting. Diablo III has a couple of different ways to craft but they were all incredibly stupid at launch. I don't know if it was a problem with the AH being new or what, but it didn't make any sense to make your own stuff. The question is, does it now?

First stop, gems. Does it make sense to level up to the top tier of gems on your own, or would you be better off selling the gems you find and buying the best stuff on the AH? Does it make sense to crush your gems and sell them on the AH yourself even accounting for the 15% cut. I ran the numbers in a spreadsheet and for the most part you don't want to do either thing. The 15% cut makes it so it's not worth selling anything beyond the first level of crushed items, and then only if you want to sell off your gems/tomes. I don't want rubies, so I'm doing that. If you do want a high level gem you're better off making your own, which is nice.

Next, salvaging. Do you want to vendor all the gear you pick up, or salvage it for parts? Do you want to pick up blues? Well, it would seem that the salvaged stuff has settled into a nice spot where it's right to salvage the cheap stuff and vendor the expensive stuff (and then buy salvaged mats on the AH if you want them). I tried to do this for a while, but it was adding too much time to my 'in town' time. So for now while I need money I'm just going to vendor everything. If I run out of my stash of materials then maybe I'll reconsider. I'm also not picking up blues, but I think if I was salvaging everything I would.

Finally, crafting. Most of the stuff back in the day was too low level to be worth making, and I think that's still true of the old stuff. But they've added some new patterns in the last patch which are totally worth making if you don't have a nutty item in that slot. I actually think the int+5 bracer pattern I found is possibly best in slot. I made a really good set with crit chance which makes me happy. These are bind on account, and are made with a bind on account material, so I will probably make more just to use up the stuff I find in case I get a truly awesome thing.

Diablo III: Critical Mass

I did some browsing yesterday for wizard builds and found lots of sites that list builds with no explanation at all for why people are using the skills they use. One site seemed to data mine the armoury thing to determine 'popular' builds and every softcore wizard build it listed was a variant on the same idea. They all used the critical mass passive which has a chance to reduce the cooldown on your spells when you crit. Apparently 71.2% of softcore characters at low paragon levels use it, and 86.46% at high paragon levels use it. I don't have a drop of crit chance on my gear and had never given critical mass a second glance as a result. My gear is all int/magic find/defensive stats and the idea of branching into crit chance never really hit my radar. But can 86.46% of people be wrong? Maybe it's time to figure out what's going on there and look into how expensive some crit gear would be.

It also looked like most of the builds were running the wicked wind rune of the energy twister spell. I'd always thought that spell was abysmally bad. I tried it once, hated it, and never looked back. Now, this was all 9 months ago and I didn't really do a very thorough job of trying it out back then. So, it was probably worth giving it another look. I tried it out at MP1 yesterday, found I couldn't kill anything, and switched back to my blizzard build. Ike joined my game and his pets tanked for me and I just killed things with blizzard and hydra. It was awesome! We didn't get a key but we both gained a paragon level and got a bunch of blacksmithing recipes. Good times!

Not really knowing what abilities do and how they may have been buffed/nerfed makes me want to run a challenge James came up with where you're only allowed to use the most recent spell/rune that you've learned as you level up. This would force me to use every ability and get a feel for all of them. The only downside would be not gaining paragon levels on my 'main', but it could still be pretty fun I would think.

Another option would be to search around and try to find people actually willing to explain a critical mass build. Google was no help at all so I did something I'd have thought I'd never do... I went to the official Blizzard forums looking for coherent posts. And I found them! Someone did a very good job of explaining the goal of the popular build and what it takes to get there. In particular it seems that the energy twister/wicked wind spell ticks incredibly frequently. With a typical end game amount of attack speed every cast of the spell will tick on everything inside it 36 times, for example. That's 36 chances to crit for every mob trapped in the twister. The build then stacks up the 'arcane power on crit' mod on gear which lets it spam out twisters like there's no tomorrow. If you have 30% crit, and a twister ticks 36 times, and you get 21 arcane power back when it crits you're looking at spending 35 arcane power to gain 227 arcane power. Per mob in the twister. Yeah, I think that's pretty sustainable. But how do you keep the monsters standing in the twister for the full 6 seconds? Simple! Hit them with a frost nova. Frost nova has a 12 second cooldown so you can't keep it up all the time... Or can you? Critical mass knocks a second off the cooldown with crits. One of the above twisters will crit 11 times in 6 seconds. Per monster it hits. Yeah, that'll let you keep spamming frost nova. You also get to spam diamond skin for a pretty much permanent 10k shield. And you might as well add on a ton of health gain on hit since your twisters are hitting 6 times a second per twister per mob. Yeah.

Now, the gear to get that much attack speed, crit, arcane power on crit, and life on hit is not cheap. So it takes time and money to become an indestructible perma-stunning death machine. But it seems feasible, and like it could be a lot of fun. Of course, my current gear plan is pretty much perpendicular to the gear needed for this plan. I have the slowest weapon I can find, this spec wants the fastest possible weapon. I focus on int and magic find, neither of which this build needs to start. In fact, of the 2 guides I read there wasn't a single mention of getting magic find at all. I wonder if this means paragon magic find is considered to be good enough, or if just killing more things is better. I do have two items with attack speed on them, and my hat has arcane power on crit, and most of my gear does have defensive stats. So it's entirely possible that I can try this build out with just buying a new weapon, offhand, and cheap attack speed/crit rings. I also recently switched out my only item with life on hit and really noticed the change, so I was thinking of buying some more life on hit pieces for my blizzard spec. They fit here too!

For anyone interested, the damage focused build of this spec is here. It doesn't use a signature spell which I guess makes sense when you have enough gear to turn wicked wind into an arcane power gain!

Diablo III: Monster Power Details

Last night I went to give Diablo III another shot around games of Blood Bowl (my TMNT themed Nurgle team won two games in a new mini-league!) without really knowing what to expect. I knew broad strokes about the new systems from reading the patch notes and talking a bit with Randy but I didn't really know details. What monster power level should I set? Not knowing what it would do beyond make things harder and drop more stuff I didn't really know what to expect. Randy was saying he plays on MP5 and his gear seemed considerably better than mine so probably something lower, right?

I decided to try MP4, but my first attempt didn't work at all. It turns out Blizzard buried the ability to even use monster power in one of the option menus and you need to go turn it on outside of a game before you can change the setting. You can also only change the slider outside of a game (so no farming up a full stack of the Neph buff on MP0 and then powering up to MP10 for awesome loot) which seems reasonable enough. My second try worked, but MP4 was rougher than I wanted. Even with being very rusty I couldn't really die (force armour and teleport refreshing on damage are still awesome) in Act 1, but the monsters had stupid amounts of health and my disintegrate just wasn't doing enough damage. I also didn't realize MP0 was an option at the time so I thought I was moving the dial up 3 levels (from a base of MP1) when really I was going up 4 levels. On the plus side I did get an upgrade from the first elite pack I found on MP4.

Next up, MP2. This seemed a lot more reasonable and felt a lot like how I remember the game from launch. It felt like I was killing monsters at around the same speed I used to (with both my disintegrate build and a blizzard/hydra build) but the monsters were doing less damage (to the point of sometimes not proccing my teleport refresh) and were definitely dropping more stuff. Having the Neph buff apply to loot from resplendent chests and add a new stack was also nice! I found I couldn't really kill a treasure goblin with my disintegrate build on MP2 but could barely do it with blizzard/hydra. This makes me think MP2 is probably the top of my range with my current gear and a blizzard spec, that my disintegrate spec is terrible, and that maybe I should research some actual builds and see if I can find something even better.

But now that I played around with it a little I want to see some real details. What exactly is changing when you turn up the monster power dial. I found a couple nice charts on the Blizzard site but they only show the initial 1.0.5 launch numbers and not the tweaks that have happened since. The first thing those charts showed me was that monster power does apply to pre-inferno difficulties (a question Ike asked me in game yesterday). It works a little differently and the scaling isn't nearly as brutal (MP10 on normal is 4x monster health. MP10 on inferno is 34x monster health!) but you can definitely turn up the dials and level faster if you can mow through tougher dudes.

On inferno the scaling is more extreme and it also does three additional things. The first is the MP level determines the drop rate of keys and organs for the infernal machine event. It sounds like MP0 is 5% and every other MP level is 10% per level, so on MP10 you have guaranteed drops. The second thing is normal monsters that drop an item (apparently 30% chance) have a chance of dropping a second item. It doesn't seem like a big deal but it does mean you'll get more stuff when clearing trash packs. The last thing is the monsters in Act I and Act II are leveled up to level 63 if you're running any MP level above MP0. This means every monster has the same ilvl loot ratio so you can actually fight anywhere you want and get the same value stuff. It also means the monsters in AI and AII get a bigger bump by going from MP0 to MP1 than other monsters do because they get both the +50% health boost from the MP1 and get more base stats by leveling up from 61 to 63.

I couldn't find an updated chart anywhere consolidating all the patch changes so I went through the patch notes and built my own. Enjoy!

One thing that really jumps out at me is that monster health drastically outpaces the rest of the rows. So if you aren't just murdering regular dudes then you don't need to bump up the monster power, with a couple exceptions. Getting into MP1 is really worth it if you're fighting in AI or AII by bumping up the drops to the top of the curve. And if you're trying to farm infernal machine pieces then it can be worth ramping it up. There's only one guy who drops each key, and you need to stack your Neph buff up before you can get a drop off of him. So it can really be worth increasing the time it takes to kill that guy to bump up the key odds. (Also, the XP, MF, and GF rows are an addition so the gains aren't as big as they seem. MP2 isn't twice as good as MP1, it's 20% better. (1.5/1.25)) MP5 is 5x the odds of a key drop and only ~4x the health of the monsters compared to MP1, for example.

For people who may be curious (I certainly was!) it sounds like the system was tuned such that the old difficulty is about the same as MP2/MP3. I couldn't find specific details but I would guess for AI and AII that MP2 is about the same with the two boosts and for AIII and AIV that MP3 is about the same. I remember AIII being pretty rough but doable with my gear so I should be able to smash things on something like MP0 or MP1 now.

I figure it's probably in my best interest to farm drops/xp for a while to power up my gear a little and then shift to a higher MP level and go after infernal machine keys. So I think I may give MP1 a try tonight and see if it's too easy. On the plus side I already got a paragon level last night. Woo!

Diablo III Patches

Last night I was hanging out on Vent watching Snuggles and Mike's Blood Bowl teams stand in a pile and punch each other. An unrelated conversation broke out at one point between Sceadeau and Randy about the current state of Diablo III and how after 9 months it may actually have iterated into a good game. Randy gave some examples that sounded pretty good so I figured I should go check out all the patch notes to see if my interest was sufficiently piqued to give Diablo III's tires another kick.

I'd last played the game in patch 1.0.3. I had actually posted about patch 1.0.4 (which brought in the 'new' endgame with paragon levels) but wasn't interested enough to actually play at that point. Patch 1.0.7 came out last week, so there's 3 major patches worth of notes to browse on top of the standard Blizzard hot fixes. What have we got?

Patch 1.0.5 brought:

• Monster power. This is basically a dial you can turn to tweak the difficulty of the game. Make the monsters harder and get rewarded with more items. The more items comes in the form of a magic find multiplier which can exceed the standard magic find cap, which seems pretty great. Diablo II let you make the game harder by telling it how many players were in the game and this sounds pretty similar. A difficulty dial is awesome, as is a small but tangible reward for moving up in difficulty. Maybe now hell won't be trivial while inferno is practically impossible!
• Infernal machine event. Kill a bunch of bosses to get low drop rate BoA reagents. Combine three of them to open a hard boss event. Collect stuff from the hard boss events to build awesome BoA items. This sounds like a nice time sink with a real reward that can't just be bought on the AH. This is again exactly what a Diablo endgame needs. Eventually they added similar things to Diablo II and I can remember having a lot of fun running around with Tom and Byung trying to get the unique charm thing.
• They completely redid the diminishing aspects of crowd control! I always hated that spells/mechanics just stopped working properly on harder difficulties and it sounds like they built a new system to keep CC from getting out of control without making it always useless. There's a great post on the topic here.
• Legendary and set items drop more often, which is nice. Even if I don't want to wear a set I still like collecting all the bits!
• Tons of bug fixes and skill balances.

Patch 1.0.6 brought:

• Nothing. It talked a little about Battle.net infrastructure changes. PLEASE LET THIS MEAN GUILDS ARE COMING! I fear it was more to upgrade Battle.net for the StarCraft II expansion, but I'm willing to be optimistic. I WANT GUILDS! Or at least a chat room. Can I have a chat room?

Patch 1.0.7 brought:

• PvP. I imagine this means way more to other people than to me, but I could see tooling around with this. Right now it's just a way to do little duels of up to 4 people.
• Quality of life/balance buffs to the end game systems. Monster power 10 is now worth 610% experience instead of 260% which is a pretty big deal and makes me suspect the monster power rewards weren't actually good enough in 1.0.5. The Neph buff now persists across acts, the base pick-up radius was increased, and you don't get an escalating rez timer if you die a bunch. All little, nice things.
• A new BoA reagent that drops from end game stuff and can be used to craft ilvl 63 BoA gear. Anything that makes farming for yourself a better way to power up than shopping at the AH is fantastic in my eyes since it encourages people to play the game instead of playing the economy. If I wanted to play the economy I'd play Eve. 
• New recipes to create awesome BoA gems.
• Legendary items put an icon on the map when they drop to make it harder to miss them. 
• More skill balances and bug fixes.

It sounds like they actually have a reasonable end game now. Rather than a single (brutally hard) difficulty with grinding gold being the only realistic way to power up for practically all players there's now a difficulty slider and a decent selection of non-AH paths to power. Paragon levels, the infernal machine, and the new BoA crafting materials all seem like fun things to chase that require you to actually run around, kill things, and take their stuff. It sounds like a reasonable guild system is still a pipe dream which makes me sad.

That said, I'm intrigued enough that if I don't have Blood Bowl matches to play tonight I think I'll patch it up and give it a spin. Most of the changes are focused at max level so it seems like I should probably play my wizard despite having like 8 months worth of skill changes to learn. Man, I hope laser beams are good! But even if they aren't, I can almost certainly still use them on a lower monster power level. I think I had reasonable enough gear when I quit so I'm really hoping that's true!

Ooh, there's an armoury for Diablo III now! Apparently I have 1274 int, 125% magic find, 500 vit, 1468 armour, and 223 resist all. Is that good?

Diablo III Patch 1.0.4

Last night I wanted to see if anyone was on Battle.net (I may have been looking for a scroll of resurrection) and I figured the best way to check would be to log into Diablo III. Imagine my surprise when I was greeted by patch notes for a patch being launched early this morning. I took a look through and some things really caught my eye...

Paragon levels - Essentially these are levels you can gain after you hit the level cap. It isn't clear just how brutal these will be to get but anything that encourages you to play the character you want to power up is good by me. Sounds a lot like merit points in FFXI (which I think started out as something in EverQuest?) There are 100 of them and each grant you small amounts of the core stats, gold find, and magic find. It sounds like if you manage to max out your paragon levels you'll be at the magic-find cap without any on gear which is an interesting idea.

Elective mode tutorial - As soon as you hit nightmare you'll get told about elective mode. It was idiotic that the average person would never find out about elective mode and it's nice to see them finally plug that hole.

Auction house fixes - You can now search for 6 stats instead of 3. They're fixing how you search for bonus damage. You can now cancel auctions without changing your system clock. How quaint.

Blacksmith can repair - Woo!

Weapon changes - They're making ilvl 61 and 62 weapons capable of being better. Not as good as 63s, but the gap should be closed enough to make it worth picking up a 62. They're making 2-handers and off-hands better.

Weapon racks - Will now always have weapons again but will drop lots of junk. This just seems more like Diablo.

Legendary item buffs - I remember finding multiple legendary weapons which were all absolute trash. They're reworking most/all legendaries to make them all potentially worth using which is nice. A legendary item should be cool, not garbage.

Monster power changes - They're nerfing monsters in multiplayer games to make it useful to group with people worse than you. They're buffing or nerfing normal and elite monsters all over the place to try to bring things in line. 

Champion pack nerfs - It seems like all the really brutal things are getting nerfed. No more invulnerable minions. No more enraging and healing after a long time. Want to kite/zerg them? Go nuts. Fire chains is nerfed. Jailer is nerfed. Shielding is nerfed. Nightmarish is nerfed. Pets take 10% damage from the AE stuff. Mortar is re-nerfed. Damage resistance based on mods is gone. 

YOU CAN'T PULL ABILITIES OFF YOUR BAR ACCIDENTALLY! YOU WON'T JUST THROW AWAY A FULL STACK OF YOUR NEPH BUFF BECAUSE YOU CLICK FRANTICALLY! HOLY COW! HOLY COW! IT'S ABOUT DARN TIME!

Class buffs - Looks like all the terrible damage spells are getting buffed up. You know some numbers were wrong when damages are getting quadrupled...

It really sounds like they're iterating towards a game really worth buying and playing. It's a shame I bought it more than three months ago and have since quit the game, eh? Even with all these changes they still haven't implemented the ability to chat with all your friends at once which is such an abominable gap. Realistically I should be able to have guilds/chat rooms via Battle.net across all games. There's no reason why I shouldn't be able to have a chat room with people from SC2, WoW, and D3 all together. That I can't even do with people in D3 alone is really stupid.

Diablo III: Hardcore Day 2

When last we left our hero BuffyIV was level 11 and needed to get up to level 20 by the next Wednesday. She had a wide selection of banked gear from following people around in Act II and was seemingly positioned well to make it to 20. BuffyIV even started off light by taking on the Skeleton King quest at level 11 and easily smashed all the way through Butcher and into Act II.

Once in Act II BuffyIV decided to get revenge on the achievement which killed off the original Buffy. Not by charging ahead blindly but by quickly and efficiently mowing everything down between the two cultist lairs. No problem! Achievement earned! BuffyIV was up to level 18 and sailing smoothly when disaster struck!

Wandering into an open area a large number of monsters crested the horizon. BuffyIV knew the situation was going to be dicey so she implemented the brave plan 'run away and shoot backwards'. Or at least, she tried to. Hit tumble, no movement. Shoot forward, no arrows. Hit invisible, stay visible. The monsters had stopped moving at this point and it was clear that some sort of time warp was going on. BuffyIV quickly tried to take the blue pill and leave the world behind but it takes 10 seconds to digest and alas it was too late. The monsters suddenly came to life, teleported beside BuffyIV, and obliterated her in an instant. *sad trombone*


Ok, whatever. That sucked, but it's only a minor setback. I still had three days to go. So BuffyV started off with no gear set aside and no initial free levels. I did have a stockpile of crafting materials and made liberal use of my blacksmith training to stay reasonably geared. I ended up getting to level 17 by yesterday which is within 5 levels of the rest of the team so I was fine as far as staying away from the xp penalty. I also found a good weapon so I was able to contribute positively to the fighting. Hurray!

We got to Belial and I screwed up yet again. I decided the right way to try to live through his meteors was to use tumble to dodge around them instead of trying to time my invisible ability to ignore the damage. I ended up tumbling through multiple meteors that were landing at once. (I just missed diving from the one landing on me and ended up just rolling into another one as it was landing. And maybe eating a third in the process.) Kaboom! BuffyV was dead. Everyone else survived and killed Belial. Rejoining now seemed like a waste of time, so I headed out with the plan of tagging back in once they got closer to level 40. Monks are tougher than demon hunters anyway, right?


I was annoyed with D3, so I decided to go play some League of Legends instead. I waited in a log-in queue for about 45 minutes (playing some Pilotwings while I waited) and when I finally got in decided to check if the Megaman Ezreal skin was live yet. Turns out no. And oddly enough it wouldn't let me buy the existing skins either as it had them labeled with a 'need to own champion' icon, which is weird because I've owned Ezreal for months now.

Ok, whatever. Time to play a solo queue ranked game. Nope, can't sign up. I don't own 16 champions so I can't participate in the draft. Juh? Check out my profile. All my champions are gone. All my masteries are gone. Grrr!

I played a quick normal Dominion game with one of the free champions (Fiora) and then Brent suggested logging out to see if that would make my champions appear. Instead it made the server disappear as I wasn't able to reconnect. Grr!


Ok, no LoL. Back to D3 I guess? It turned out Ike and Snuggles had just started hardcore characters so BuffyVI came to life to join them. I think I got up around level 8 before we broke for the night. I believe Tom, Robb, and Adam are around level 30... Can I catch back up I wonder...

Diablo III: Patch 1.0.3 Notes

The servers are currently down to patch up to the new version of Diablo. I found a list of patch notes on this site. Tons of details are available at the link but in some cases they're a little vague. Damage in Inferno Act II, III, and IV is being reduced, for example. To 99% of previous value? 75%? 50%? 10%? Who knows! It'll take some playing around to see. I've been playing around in Act III the last couple days and there have been mobs who can still one-shot me through force armor despite having 22k health and vastly improved resistances. Hopefully that'll change tonight!

Other interesting changes that I saw...

• Elemental affixes on monsters will no longer give resistances to those elements.
• Some brutal monster affixes got nerfed. Mortar has a bigger dead-zone. Invulnerable minions will have fewer health on the main guy.
• The Lyceum can spawn again! I should be able to close out several achievements now.
• The enchantress won't turn Robb into a chicken.
• ilvl will now be shown on all high level items. I'm glad for this since my contention has been that I simply couldn't feasibly find upgrades from hell/Act I. Now I'll be able to see for sure if that was true or not.

They also posted specific post-patch drop numbers. Previous Inferno Act I and Act II loot will drop as far back as Hell Act III. The best stuff will drop from the entirety of Inferno. In all cases you'll get better stuff if you fight in a harder zone.

Sky, Tom, and I were musing on the way back from Andrew's place this weekend about the best way to get loot post-patch. Elites at the start of Act I will die significantly faster than elites at the end of Act III but will only have a 2% chance of dropping the highest ilvl item compared to 8% from the Act III mob. For the second tier of items it goes from a 7.9% chance to a 16.1% chance. And for something that salvages into Inferno quality materials the difference is 17.7% compared to 24.1%. Then there's the added trouble of actually finding elite packs to kill, time spent sifting through everything that drops, and how long it takes to build up a 5-stack of the buff and the worry of dropping it. My gut feeling was that just plowing through Act I over and over was going to be the best but I'd like some way to quantify things.

I'm thinking the idea might be to plot out a few potential paths to run. Keep a count of how long it takes to do the entire path, including loot sorting, and a count of how many yellow+ items drop on the run. Keep in mind that bosses are only guaranteed to drop one rare with a full buff stack and every elite pack is also guaranteed to drop one rare. What paths should be tested?

An advantage to starting early in an Act is you get to fight all the story bosses and they tend to be pretty trivial compared to random dudes. The advantage to starting late in an Act is you have a bunch of waypoints to hit should you get stuck in an area. Personally I can't get stuck in Act I, I don't think, but Act III has been a real problem. The areas there are pretty linear so if I run into a pack I can't kill I have to abandon the area entirely (or try to teleport hop to the exit).

For Act I my path should probably start with the north-west gate story point. Doing Haedrig's dirty work for him doesn't feel like it drops enough stuff and this way I should get to kill the Skeleton King, Warden, and Butcher along with practically every elite that spawns in the whole act. It will take a fair amount of time to complete but most of that time will be spent with a full buff stack so it should be reasonably optimal.

For Act II I think I want to kill Maghda at least. The plot points before her aren't terribly useful I don't think and I have to clear out most of the world map to get my buff stack pre-Maghda anyway. As things stand I wasn't able to kill Belial but I think with the infinite teleport passive I might be able to pull it off now. And if I can't, no loss, as long as I can kill the elites before him.

What about Act III? I haven't actually done most of the act, getting the plot point at the end from a game with Tom and Sky. So I can either start at the beginning or I can start at the end and cherry-pick zones without bosses. I'll probably try one of each just to get the rest of the plot points actually done on Inferno. I suspect I'll end up getting stuck behind an unkillable pack at some point, but it's certainly worth trying to see.

My initial money is on Act I being the best, especially since I should be able to switch back to my disintegrate spec and just murder everything. Playing with blizzard and piercing orbhas let me kill things in Act III but it really hurts my hand with all the frantic clicking everywhere. Anyone else have any paths that could be good? Any bets on which will work out best?

Diablo III: Hardcore Day 1

We got 4 people on last night to start hardcore characters which is a perfect number since that's the maximum party size. We ended up with a barbarian, a demon hunter, a wizard, and a witch doctor. Robb, Tom, Adam, and I smashed a bunch of monsters and had some good fun. We got into Act 2 when insanity took over. In a misguided attempt to get a speed achievement I took off on a frantic search for the second cultist dungeon in the desert. One bad tumble got me stuck in a dead end with no discipline and completely surrounded by dudes. I did get out of that with a potion chug and finally pooling up enough for a tumble but I was one hit from dead with an army chasing me. I found the entrance to a dungeon which would save me from the masses chasing me down. I jumped in only to discover 5 monsters right at the entrance who killed me before I had a chance to hit a button.

Let's have a moment of silence for poor Buffy the demon hunter. We only knew her for 3 hours and 15 levels but she will be missed.

Losing a party member leaves me wondering what should be done in such a situation for a hardcore team. There are five options that I can see...

• Dead guy is kicked out of the party. Other three people keep playing without him until they eventually die off and then restart everyone from scratch.
• Dead guy is kicked out of the party and someone with an appropriate level hardcore character tags in permanently.
• Stop playing for the night. Dead guy has a week to level a replacement character when everyone will resume.
• Other three people keep playing for the rest of the night. Dead guy has a week to level up a replacement character to tag in next week.
• Dead guy makes a new character immediately and rejoins the party at level 1. 

I took the fifth option last night. I pretty much died immediately on respawning to terrain (the wall spit poison at me and killed me). I restarted again and died when a lacuni huntress thing jumped on me and one-shot me at level 3. BuffyIV played super carefully and actually managed to survive. Leveling up seemed slower than I expected and I ended up at level 11 with everyone else at 19 or 20. I'm going to (hopefully) get the last 7 levels on my own before next week.

One thing I noticed was I seemed to be getting a lot less experience than other people. I had Robb track his experience gain for a period of time and he'd gained 9k while I'd gained 3.3k. He had some +xp on his gear and I was naked so I thought he should be getting a little more than me but not that much more. I did some poking around and it seems that while you get an xp bonus for fighting higher level things you also get a massive penalty for having a high level friend helping you out. I found an interesting post detailing the level vs mob bonus/penalty. It turns out if you're 6 or more levels higher than the enemies your +xp from gear turns off which is certainly good to know, but it doesn't go into the grouping penalty. In fact there doesn't seem to be any concrete data for that penalty anywhere. Supposedly it kicks in with a 5 level difference and hits a -95% penalty at 10 level difference but I can't find anything verifying that. I certainly believe that something like that is going on since I was getting substantially less than Robb was. Note that quest reward experience isn't penalized and I didn't know about that last night so it's entirely possible most of that 3.3k came from quests.

Given that information I think the option I chose where a new level 1 dude tags in is very flawed. I can see it working if you're still in Act 1 normal but even where we were at the start of Act 2 normal it didn't seem to work terribly well. I was of no use to the rest of the party while causing the enemies to have an extra 75% of base health. The only plus side really is I'd get my share of drops which could then be split to the people who could use them. Catching up is pretty hard and that gap will only widen as the group gains levels. Not to mention that it will be harder and harder to stay alive as a low level hardcore character in higher zones. I believe eventually there's even a minimum level for zoning into higher difficulties so there's no way it would work once the group is in nightmare mode.

That said, what is the better alternative? I like the idea of subs but since there is no effective group communication in the game it actually seems really impractical. Thoughts?

Diablo III: Hardcore Night

Ok, Blizzard won't give us communication tools in order to actually communicate with people in game. So I'm just going to throw a plan out there and maybe it'll stick. Who knows...

Wednesday at 8pm eastern I'm going to get on Diablo III and create a level 1 hardcore demon hunter. My intention is to ignore the auction house with this character and just use gear I find/build with the blacksmith. If other people should happen to also create level 1 hardcore characters at the same time and join my game that would be just fine by me. Preferably a barb and a caster so we can use all the stats!