And anyways, while "best offense is a good defense" is still ideal in D3, due to the way leveling up damage drops off as you go higher in level and difficulty, your health and damage negation abilities become more important as you go through Hell and Inferno. "Glass Cannon" builds of low health and high damage don't really work that well in higher difficulties since even with the best gear and equipment it's still difficult to kill enemies before they have a chance to hit you. My own Wizard now has 6k+ DPS and 32k health, and she still feels somewhat squishy in Hell.
Having just completed my Staff of Herding, I must say Whimsyshire is way too small. Yikes, I'm just starting Hell, with only 3.5k dps and 17k health...
The monk, with his passive ability to have dex increase armor in addition to dodge/damage makes me a god-like physical tank (magic effects do cause problems though). I've got about a 50% chance to dodge, and any damage I do take is reduced by about 50% by the armor. With a health pool around 10k allows me to soak up quite a bit, though my healing spells appear to be less and less effective as time goes on and my health pool gets ever larger.
In Inferno, the rule for wizard(post Energy armor nerf) is "Don't get hit." Illusionist, Teleport-Fracture, Diamond Armor, and slow spells. And I'm still rocking 34k hitpoints, 3200+ armor, 200 resists, and 13k DPS. My strategy stays "Kite like a cowardly bastard."
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/6018173/Game_Design_Update-5_28_2012#blog Comments about upcoming changes and about previous changes. Transcendence passive, Life on Hit, Life Regen, and Life per Spirit make for better healing at higher lvls.
Not geared for inferno, but hell isn't so bad. With exception of two mini bosses and Diablo, I could clear hell with my wiz in MF gear, with only 7k HP and 9.9k HP. Just takes a bit of dodging, diamond skinning or teleporting... I think you misunderstood; he means all four qualities on a single pack of elites...
I have the same dps and health as you do and I'm doing just fine. My item drops so far are shite, even on Hell (nearing the end of Act 2 actually) and the only weapons that break the base 200dps are two handed weapons which are lousy (I don't know why the game keeps giving me barbarian/witch doctor/demon hunter only items when I'm a fucking monk!). The only things that you will have problems with will be the mini-bosses. The key here is to play defensively, hit & run / kite as necessary, lure them into chokepoints where you can comfortably deal with the mini-boss + minions one at a time, use your own minions as diversions, etc. Tl;dr - Eh, you'll survive. I'm sure of it.
I am destined not to finish Act 1 of Hell. Between DCs and a random brownout, I cannot get past the area before the Manor. This is REALLY frustrating.
Nope. No misunderstanding there. I already found them on Hell with all the attributes mentioned in one package. As for the Mortar variant, replace Arcane with Mortar and experience mortar rain. At least the Desecrator is an activated ability and typically done while you're jailed. Molten is worse. Replace Desecrator with Molten and you get an HtH nightmare. Hence my liberal use of Mystic Ally.
It could be a natural attribute of the enemy because I distinctly remember getting Desecrated out of nowhere & with no other enemies in vicinity while fighting a pack with Invulnerable/Jailer/Molten, etc. and they keep doing it all the time during the fight. Either that or the game glitched big time which I think would be of distinctly low probability. Btw, by 'elites', you mean mini-boss + their minions, yes? If elites = blue names, then no.
Yellow names are technically Champions, while Blue names are technically something that slipped my mind, but I just call both elites, I guess. For a melee class like monks, I'd point you to the Inferno elite packs of Soul Lashers that do 10x damage compared to Hell and have 10x health, with Invulnerable Minions, Summon Horde, Life Leech, and Reflect Damage affixes. I'm just saying, anything you meet in Hell is nothing compared to Inferno... though it's not a matter of difficulty in this case, but a matter of grind. Inferno was designed with the idea that people need to farm up for gear in mind. It's not harder in some cases while in others it does force you to rethink strategies, but mainly I think it's the gear wall/check that often gets people down.
Funnily enough, just like in D2, Whimsyshire is a really good farming area. Drop rate/quality as good as Act IV of that difficulty, with a higher monster density, no hostile environment, and monsters who have no innate special abilities and no outstanding stats (hellooo Mallet Lords).
Okay, so I'm trying to get through nightmare and keep myself geared but WTF is up with the auction house? I constantly see items with 3,000 bid but 30,000 buyout. Do people actually pay 30k gold for items for level 40ish characters? That just seems dumb. Oh, and has anyone noticed that the blacksmith looks to have been patched? I only needed 5 pages to train him to the next level where it took 10 a day or so ago. Does anyone know if Blizzard made some of their changes early or am I just going crazy?
Nope, it was previously 10 Pages of Blacksmithing. Haven't logged on to D3 yet, but if it's 5 now, that means we just got a stealth change here.
It stands to be cheaper when patch 1.0.3 comes out. http://us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/6018173/Game_Design_Update-5_28_2012#blog
Are you sure you are not mixing it up with JC, which is 10 pages? I've used 5 pages/books for smith since release-ish (can't recall when I started training BS/JC) when I released what they were for. The first thing I stumbled upon was the fact that JC used double the pages at 10.
The AH needs to be retooled. As far as I can tell, I cannot sort my search results, which is annoying. So, I look at an item and the first three pages are people wanting 200 million for it. Go down 30 pages, people want 100k for it. The best part is, a lot of those high end ones had rolled worse stats than the cheaper ones. They think an orange name means everything. HA!
You can filter the searches pretty narrowly. Select up to three stats, enter a minimum value for each stat, or put in a maximum buyout amount...doing it that way can narrow results to a page or two of items. The sorting options they do have is less flexible/useful, so best to just have narrow searches. The UI is clumsy, but once you get the right filters for searches it does seem to work. Just needs to be streamlined.
No no no, I mean I want to sort the items by things like end time, bid, buyout, etc. Something that even WoWs AH did as I recall (which is why it baffles me that D3s doesn't do this).
Yeah that sucked a fat one. I've used it once just for the hell of it, and managed to screw someone for a weapon (Haha!), but it's really weird how you can't sort your results properly. Which is made weirder by how, on a seemingly random decision making basis, you can sort by a few of the fields but not all of them.
