Diablo 3 Gameplay/Performance Impressions (NO SPOILERS ALLOWED)

In normal, Monks are ridiculously OP. In Nightmare, slightly OP. You really have to pay attention to specs when fighting bosses and kite from time to time. You realize as you hit the latter stages, as Naticus said, that the Monk is the group healer. It feels like Blizzard took the WoW/MMO approach to D3 where:

Normal is WoW 1-60 (Solo fest, hey let's figure this stuff out and have FUN!)

Nightmare is WoW 61-80 (Hmmm, instances/grouping are worth exploring, but solo still fun)

Hell is WoW 81-85 (instancing is worthwhile and some questing is better in groups)

Inferno is end game raiding/heroics (Yeah, definitely need a group for this. I want top tier loots!)

You start off face rolling, it gets harder, you explore your specs. You play more. You realize specs count. You play more; you realize in classic Blizzard style there is a myriad of options but a few cookie cutter specs emerge. You realize Hell and beyond really needs a group.

It's great because if all you want to do is see the content and enjoy the game, normal makes it very easy solo. It is almost impossible to die, but like D2, the real magik is in group play.



Having a blast, though.

 

I don't know, my wizard at 32 aoe spec is ridiculous. I am a walking glass cannon.

 

What kind of items are you focusing on to not die as a wizard? Hard mobs can basically kill me in an instant even with a lot of vitality gear on.

 

Try buying upgraded weapons on auction if you find yourself getting killed all the time in higher levels

 

I basically use gears that have high vitality AND int. And you have to move around and aoe. If it is a boss/hard mob, kite them around.

 

Yeah i have a a lot of rare items with vit and int but kiting is your best friend. I have wave of force, frost nova and explosive blast hotkeyed and end up still using pots and abusing those red health things. Disintegrate is awesome for long range aoe into groups or into tight passages.

Frost nova and wave of force save my life every few minutes. Also i have gear that is plus health when i hit stuff or stuff dies. Disintegrate into a big group is like a life steal attack combined with that.

My passive skills are -20% melee....+15% dmg/-10% resist and armor.....-15% on cooldowns. My frost nova is 8 sec cooldown.

 

During normal, I concentrated on DPS on my wiz and I only had about 800-900 HP until I finished normal. I can count on one hand the number of times I died and its only on boss fights. I normally kite but I can kill fast. I used a 2H weapon for bigger max damage. DPS between 1H and 2H will be the same but on short fights, I preferred that time bigger top damage as primary and secondary skill damage is equal to % multiplier x weapon damage.

When I entered Nightmare, its a different story. I always die on random blue named mobs in just 1 hit I played with one wizard using a shield as offhand and wondering how he can survive face to face with mobs. I died maybe 50 times while with him, he always just res me.

Next day I get a good shield and gems and a 1H weapon. Now I can go solo nightmare again. I just killed a few bosses alone recently.

Edit:

Guys, what is your DPS at your current level? I dont usually go for anything aside from Intellect for my Wiz. I just want to get an idea on how others are doing.

I guess we have to study and may need to change our playstyle and specs depending on the needs of the difficulty level.

I plan to play with groups now that I'm done with the story but its always better if I can play solo anytime I want. Sometimes I cant stay playing continuously and has to get plenty of short breaks so it may not work with a group.

 

Doh, didn't know weapon damage affected spell damage. I guess I need to find somewhere that explains what all of the stats actually do because it is not clear at all to me.

 

The sudden network disconnects have gotten better, but one just struck at quite possibly the single most inopportune time so far. I just killed the spider queen, and she dropped TWO rare/yellow items, one being a powerful bo staff specific to monks. And I am a monk. Hooray! ...Bam, disconnected. Completely out of nowhere. Had been just fine for hours up until that point. Logged back in, spider queen was still dead, but all the loot from her gone. I had actually picked it all up, it was simply wiped from my inventory. ...

Game: Here, coolest item you've seen yet!
Me: All right, thanks!
Game: Haha, nope! **** you, player!
Me: FFFUUUUUU-!

True story.

And this...in the SINGLE-PLAYER part of the game... Yes, how the industry has evolved.

 

Just repeat the quest to get that item you want..

 

I just finished the game on normal as a wizard. My toon's dps is 190, which I suspect is a bit low, and my hp is 4414 (level 32).

 

How did you do the first fight in act 4? I just got my butt handed to me 4 or 5 times in a row.

 

what class are you?

 

Wizard. I think i need to backtrack and work on gear.

And man, with meteor, hydra, and diamond form, azmodan was a piece of cake to solo.

 

I'm on the opposite stats when I finished normal. I have 900 HP and 700 DPS lol!
I always run and try not to get hit. I guess that's why I always die in 1 shot in nightmare.

 

Hit act 3 in NM and the difficulty is starting to catch up with me. Playing 48 Witch Doctor, 1.5k DPS and 10khp. Poison is extremely strong in this game

 

Some buddies of mine and I playing. Good luck finding this level

 

I can't, that's what I'm saying. The server saved the death of the queen and the completion of the quest but not the loot I got from her. Even if I could, I'm sure it was a random drop. But, oh well, I've already gotten over it. I mean, I'm level 13 or 14, how great could the items I'm getting at this level be? :]

 

At that level you can hit the auction house and get decent items for 1000g easy. Wouldn't hurt giving that a look.

 

Just now starting nightmare at 36 on wizard. DPS is 388. 3735 health. I retooled my gear while going through act 4. I gained almost 2k hp and nearly doubled my dps. My Wizard is even more overpowered when it comes to AOE.

I hate the multiplayer leveling system. At 36, the only games available to me are Diablo runs. I can't get into the first quest of nightmare because i'm too high a level. I'm really going by what they allowed in each quest. I got screwed over because I had the last part of act 3 to do, and I was too high a level to get into any multiplayer groups.

So, I just went in single player, got my templar merc, tricked him out with new gear as we cleared stuff and it was easy as pie.

At least lower levels can invite higher levels into their games so you can help friends. That's not too bad.

 

Had to give up a lot of dps on my witch doctor for nightmare and pick up hp and give up a lot of dps spells for CC.

Now I am soloing pretty well with CC and in a few more levels I unlock some runes & passives that will make it work even better.

Got DCed after running a map for 2 hours finally found where to go and it lost my map progress

In a group, my friends will love me as we had a lot of dps already but we died vs elite mobs, now with my CC it will be cake.

 

I just ran through the first quest of nightmare act 1 and it was easy as hell. Maybe since I'm 36. I'm at the highest level of even the second quest in the public game. According to Blizzard, I'm way overleveled for nightmare. I can understand they don't want people joining lower level stuff, but this is ridiculous that because I chose to do things with friends, and grind out gold and gear, getting more levels in the process, I'm being punished for it. They should at least loosen the requirements by a few levels.

Also, the jewelcrafting plans started dropping for me in nightmare act 1, too.

 

I was 30's when I got to nightmare and I didnt even grind. I just hit 39 now part way into Act 2.

 

I'm 30 and just getting ready to fight the Act 3 boss on normal I'm a little OCD because I like to explore the whole map and kill everything before moving on

What kinda stuff are people running on their Witch Doctors?

 

I just moved from a mass AOE build to Mass CC w/ light AOE for Nightmare.

The CC is needed to not get face rolled by elite mob packs and when I get into a group later my friends did enough dps without my AOE so I will stick with the mass CC to keep them (and me alive) but change my light AOE to some single target spells to help take down stronger mobs & bosses.

I also evolved from this.

single hand + mojo --> single hand + shield --> 2 hand high dps

And they have worked best in that order. Depends on your build though that 1H may still be best, but for me the higher damage scaling of 2H works best and since my CC is so good the loss of armor from the shield is not important but the dmg from my 2 dmg spells is, plus it lets me save mana.

 

I might do that just out of curiosity, but the game's been so easy even with the most meager of equipment so far, that I think I'd rather be stingy than to spend any gold at all on items. The only thing I have bought so far is an upgraded blacksmith. I do keep my eye open for "keen...of the hawk" or "illuminating...of the hawk" stuff from merchants, so maybe I'll check for those.

 

I tried looking at the auction house and the stuff is way overpriced. I'll look at it again in a few weeks when the prices have stabilized and people have gotten a sense of what amounts of gold each level is supposed to have.

On another note, the official forums are friggin depressing. I am having a lot of fun but all people do is complain about Inferno being too hard, lack of variation between class builds, certain classes being overpowered and itemization being horrible. I can attest to the class builds and itemization already.

It seems vitality and your class' stat is the main focus while everything else is thrown out the window and near pointless. Also, with the builds being limited, cookie cutter builds are definitely emerging. I go back and forth on my wizard between an aoe/cc build for mobs and a survival/DOT build for bosses. Everything else pales in comparison.

Also, these people that played Diablo 2 talking about only specific builds used, I don't know what game or even class they were playing. I played a Sorceress and Amazon in Diablo 2. The Amazon, I saw either Multi Shot Bowazons, Strafe Bowazons, Lightning Javazons. However, for the Sorceress, people could use *all* kinds of builds. I'll admit, though that I found myself using Thunder Storm/Frozen Orb but it just plain worked and it made Hell seem like a children's playground. However, there were people with Wall of Fire builds, Blizzard builds, and many others. Maybe other classes were limited, but the two I played made Hell difficulty seem like a joke.

 

can i play d3 on an a10 4600m at 1920x1080 on 22' monitor?

 

Performance wise here is what I am running D3 on so far:

Desktop: AMD Athlon II X4 620/AMD 4670. 1920x1080 Everything max settings w/anti aliasing. Averaging around 30-35fps

Laptop: Intel Core i7 2720/Nvidia Quadro 1000. 1920x1080 Everything max settings w/anti aliasing. Averaging around 30fps.

Laptop: Intel Core i5 520/Nvidia 330m. 1600x900. Everything max except low quality shadows. No anti aliasing. Averaging around 28-30fps.

Failed to run:
Desktop: AMD Athlon II 260/AMD integrated 4200 graphics. Tried what I could but just would not play smoothly.

 

Hey guys, how do you think my laptop will do in terms of performace (fps) and which quality I should be at; once I get the comp of course
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Lvl 31 Monk. I really like how you can do many different combinations of your abilities/passives to find out what work well for you, as well as for bosses. Finished normal difficulty and for some reason I had difficulty on the last boss fight, felt like I wasn't DPSing fast enough. Changed it up and went through it like a breeze.

I have a really good buddy who gave me a D3 key (long story short: he bought the CE thinking he could keep it mint and sell it in the future for a come-up. He bought a digital key and ended up deciding to against keeping the CE mint, so he used the CE key and gave me his digital key). Anyways, I was never keen on repeating a game over again, but I can see D3 being a different story. I wanna get the rest of my abilities/passives and play around with finding the best build for me.

Off the top of my head this is the build I'm running with my monk -
Ability 1 - Crippling Wave
Ability 2 - Wave of Light
1 - Breath of Heaven
2 - Sweeping Wind
3 - Mystic Ally
4 - Mantra of Evasion
Passive - Chant of Resonance
Passive - The Guardian's Path
Passive - Sixth Sense

I like the combination of the passives CoR/TGP (the 2h buff) for the pure Spirit regen. I try to keep spending all my spirit on the mindset that if i'm running at full spirit, i'm not DPSing hard enough. So with CoR/TGP, my spirit regens faster, meaning I can keep spending it, meaning my DPS is higher.

 

Most of the items are way overpriced but if you specify the limit price for the item you want, youll most likely find it in decent price.

 

Level 56 Wizard. Act 3 Hell. Melee build. 30,000 health, but only 6,500 DPS. Still looting for better items. Im really having fun playing this game in coop. Runs great maxed out with AA and VSYNC ON but sometimes it drops from 60fps to 30fps, i dont know why. Someone told me the CPU is the problem (plays better with only 2 cores activated). I have the latest 296.10.

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk 2

 

I'm L49 now just entered nightmare Act 4. I played Act 3 just maybe 30% of the time in groups. The last 50%, I respec and played solo.

Here is my setup:
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/wizard#ilUROX!fXW!bbYabY

Right Mouse Button -Disintegrate - Volatility Rune
Left Mouse Button - Blizzard - Snowbound Rune

1 - Electrocute - Surge of Power Rune
2 - Hydra - Arcane Rune
3 - Energy Armor - Energy Tap
4 - Diamond Skin - Enduring Skin

HP - 5680 (I know its low )
DPS - 1838 (1H weapon. Unbuffed because I dont use the Familiar Buff)
Armor - 2003 (I use a shield. The chance to block and the amount it can block has been helping me in many tight spots.

This is what I use normally, AoE kiting. I has been working perfectly for me on bosses in nightmare. Arcane Hydra is very helpful when I just go around spamming blizzard lol

I also skipped using Mastery Skill as I preferred to use 2 Force Skills with Blizzard and Hydra.

I'm sure I have to change again when I finish nightmare.

 

If anyone didn't know, if you don't want to be forced int certain categories of skills for hotkeys, you can go into the gameplay options and check "Elective" mode. It'll allow any skill to be put anywhere in your hotkeys.

I use it sometimes for boss fights to get more survival and dot skills, but it's not too useful for me. Some skills you can only use one at a time, like the Wizard conjuring skills.

 

I always use it for my wizard because it's the only way to get Familiar (Sparkflint rune) and Magic Weapon at the same time, which are both huge damage increases.

I'm on act II of Nightmare, and it's pretty easy. I die occasionally. I find random named mobs with certain characteristic combos to be much more irritating than the actual boss fights.

Magic Missile with the split rune and Arcane Orb with Obliteration are my bread and butter, with Disintegration used in tight corridors to wipe out big groups (you can channel disintegration for a good long while if you use diamond skin with the prism rune).

 

See, this is what I'm hoping for and people in the official forums say other wise but we're not at Hell or Inferno yet. I'm hoping these different builds for different playstyles work in the long-term. Because, like, I have a build that works for me and I love it, and you and a few other guys have builds that work for you. We just have to wait and see.

I'm just still shocked we have a 60 level cap. That's so annoying. I thought at 36 I was barely 1/3 of the way to the max level. I thought it was 99 like Diablo 2.

 

I have no doubt that I'll be changing my build up when I get to hell and inferno.

I actually have a question. When people are citing their DPS, is that just the number from the character sheet? Because one dude said his was like 500 at level 36 or so earlier in the thread, and at level 38 (40 now) mine was around 1800.

 

http://www.notebookcheck.net/typo3temp/pics/98b80857af.jpg

at max np at 74 fps

 

Level 51 Monk, I can solo up to a point. When going against elites I just get smashed. Playing in groups is much more fun, been playing with my friend who's the same lvl but a wizard. I can definitely say that wizard is OP if built right. He has 7k dps and crits for 15k imagine at level 60 what that dps output would be, all at a range....

 

My gear must suck at 36, if I'm at 400 dps.

 

Level 57 Monk now. I'm slightly frustrated when trying to fight elites. Especially the ones that heal. Luckily I play with my brother who is a level 60 wizard which can, apparently, obliterate everything in about a second.

 

Are you wearing current level gear that has your primary stat for your class?

 

Lol! The build I posted above helped me survive in nightmare in most cases but now I died maybe 4 times already trying to kill Diablo

I am experimenting now, and changing some of my gears to Vit gears. I increased my DPS to 3100 when I reached level 50 but my HP just isn't enough.

Luckily I sold the rare ring I looted for 60k for some gear upgrades with Vit. But my DPS will surely go down to about 2500.

I got to kill him!!!

 

Oh wow that's great news! Thanks!

 

Haha finally finished Nightmare. I partied with a 49 Wiz and kited him. I had to res him twice though. Now let's see hell

 

Here's my character:



The thing is, I'm not seeing any issue, even in nightmare. My AOE is tearing things apart.

I'm confused on why my DPS isn't soaring like others.

 

I use a a 2 handed axe for my wizard with +100 i think int for maximum DPS of 6.5k. You can use any weapon as long as you can wear it unlike in D2.

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk 2

 

How are your items? I always upgrade items when its more than 5 levels lower than me.

My DPS when I was 25 is 300, 700 when I was 32 when I finished normal. I know my stats are high on Int than Vit but at 37, 300+ dps is very low.

You wont have a problem yet with trash mobs but any glowing mobs will take time to kill.

Not sure what the balance is right now. But I have to reduce my DPS to 2700+ buffed from 4000 buffed at 52 so I can increase me HP. Got my HP up from 9k to 19k now.

Hell is as hard as hell lol! There are glowing mobs every corner of the map and dungeons

I think I will try making my Int and Vit equal in numbers. Right now I have both at 700+.

Also try to get a 2H weapon than using an off-hand. A +## damage stats is normally always better than just Int. although I prefer using 1H and a shield still for survivability.

Also take a look at some % increase attack speed as it increases the DPS more than Int.

 

You guys are making me drool. I'm so stoked to get my laptop and install D3. Its chillen on my desk staring at me in the mean time :|