Diablo 3 is live!

[Worldie]

So wait, you telling me the 6% lifesteal i got is completely useless and i wasted my money? :S

[PsiVen]

OK, hear my words.
As a fellow tank and mathematician.
String of Ears sucks. Really, really sucks. Even 20% ones.

If you want to take less melee damage, nothing is going to do it better than String of Ears. It's equivalent to ~300 physical resist for most people, if you're taking punches in the face.

That said, post-1.03, it's not best in slot for A3/A4 Inferno. Most of the dangerous damage is not melee, and the prospect of stacking enough resist/armor to reduce Molten and various awful fireballs / succubus bolts to tankable levels is much more reasonable now. I will probably wind up switching when I find an awesome belt.

Stormshield, however, sucks pretty bad for its asking price.

So wait, you telling me the 6% lifesteal i got is completely useless and i wasted my money? :S

Not useless, but pretty lousy until you get good DPS gear. Given an attack that connects for 20k with 100% LoH coefficient, 6% lifesteal in Inferno is as effective as 240 LoH.

Most builds that take advantage of LoH to heal meaningfully use spells with high coefficients. For example, on my melee wizard I have about 11k listed DPS, perform roughly 70k DPS with an ideal rotation, and generate in excess of 400% LoH per second against a single target. My 1200 LoH would match 34% lifesteal.

[Passionario]

Lifesteal has a coefficient of 0.2 on damage in Inferno though. At 70k dps you would need 5k lifesteal to get 1000hps which is equivalent to 666LoH considering 1.5 attacks/sec

Yeah, but Lifesteal procs from all damage you do. Many attacks either don't proc LoH at all or do so at ridiculously low coefficients.
And Barbarians can get an additional 3% (0.6% on Inferno) LS due to their awesome belts.

[aureon]

Thing is, for using String of Ears, you lose out:
~50 all res
~50 specific res
~50 vit
and other random stats.
even if you're hellah high on resists (i'm at nearly 1400 now), it's hardly worth it, since at this point, it's not melee damage having a shot at killing you.
At lower resist values, that 20% is much less efficient.

[Epimer]

So after my woes from a few pages ago, I feel like I'm back on track with my WD.

I've followed this guy's advice with a few minor tweaks and it's let me do my quickest and easiest 5 NV stack Butcher farm yet. I have high hopes for it holding up in Act II as well.

Basically it's a Dire Bats/Vision Quest build. I hated VQ builds but because you'll use Spirit Walk/Siphon all the time, plus Unbreakable Grasp for the slow, you're already at 3 out of the 4 abilities you need on cooldown already. The fourth is either a CC ability (he uses Horrify, I use Hex) or a short term damage buff like Big Bad Voodoo with Slam Dance.

It's not a build I would have come up with myself through experimentation, not least because it uses Pierce the Veil with a high mana cost primary damage ability. But it works. I use Hex over Horrify because of the heal from Hedge Magic; I'm not sure what the LOH coefficient of Dire Bats is but it certainly feels very, very low. I'm not sure that Languish is the best rune for Soul Harvest but I guess it's additional safety for an ability I didn't think would be usable in Inferno.

The other big help is that gear has come down in price since I was having trouble. I can get 100+ Int items for comfortably less than 50k for each slot, with mana regen on weapon, helm and off-hand to support the above build and some crit. I spent maybe 200k on gear this morning and my stats are now:

- 26k damage (with 20% from Pierce the Veil already included)
- 14.5% crit chance
- +77% crit damage
- 833 max mana with 49 mana regen per second
- 20k health, 49% damage reduction (resists around 200)

With even a 3 stack of Soul Harvest, Act I Champion packs just melt. I think I'm now in a comfortable position to start work an Act II and get those stats up some more.

Also, I frickin' love Dire Bats and am very happy to have a build which uses them and works well. I've missed them.

[halabar]

Amused that now with my Monk at lvl 40, I have 2M gold mainly from flipping items in the AH..

At some point I'll spend all I have on one lvl63 max item, sell it on the RMAH, and call it a day.

[Gab]

This video helped me a lot for farming gear in Inferno. I can do a quick Act 1 run and get tons of more rares than just from a Butcher run.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0r2EzZDngQ

Not bad. Just got around to trying this out and am averaging about 1 rare/minute as a decently geared melee Wizard wearing a 219% MF set.

Not really sure, looking for some opinions, would it be better to be clearing Act III with virtually no MF at a much slower pace/higher mortality rate vs obliterating Act I with 219% MF. It really seems MF Act I is a better bet but I only recently cleared Act III so again not really sure.

[djlar]

Wow and I thoght my DH's crit damage @ 245% was a bit low.. hehe..

I'm seeing constant 120K crits now...

Did a full Act 1 run, got a couple of upgrades and a sellable item for 500K (that sold almost immediatly I should have placed it at 1M LOL)

[aureon]

Amused that now with my Monk at lvl 40, I have 2M gold mainly from flipping items in the AH..

At some point I'll spend all I have on one lvl63 max item, sell it on the RMAH, and call it a day.

Sorry, but at the current prices, 2M is about 3€.
Anything not made in inferno is peanuts, basically.

[halabar]

Amused that now with my Monk at lvl 40, I have 2M gold mainly from flipping items in the AH..

At some point I'll spend all I have on one lvl63 max item, sell it on the RMAH, and call it a day.

Sorry, but at the current prices, 2M is about 3€.
Anything not made in inferno is peanuts, basically.

Hmm.. then I made out really well with the $11 that I made selling low-level (20-40) stuff sofar.

On the other hand, the market is probably getting more saturated, and I haven't sold anything in a week or so.

[sahiel]

Amused that now with my Monk at lvl 40, I have 2M gold mainly from flipping items in the AH..

At some point I'll spend all I have on one lvl63 max item, sell it on the RMAH, and call it a day.

Sorry, but at the current prices, 2M is about 3€.
Anything not made in inferno is peanuts, basically.

Thank goodness for the US RMAH then! I've been selling numerous items that sit in the 250k-500k range for $5+ each, some under 1 mil have gone for over $15, not crazy money but enough to make the game free effectively.

[rodos]

Amused that now with my Monk at lvl 40, I have 2M gold mainly from flipping items in the AH..

At some point I'll spend all I have on one lvl63 max item, sell it on the RMAH, and call it a day.

Sorry, but at the current prices, 2M is about 3€.
Anything not made in inferno is peanuts, basically.

Thank goodness for the US RMAH then! I've been selling numerous items that sit in the 250k-500k range for $5+ each, some under 1 mil have gone for over $15, not crazy money but enough to make the game free effectively.

Do you find that there's a consistent "exchange rate" between the Gold and RM AH, or are there certain items that fetch more on the RMAH? As in, does a 1m item sell for about $10 regardless of what it is, or do people get excited to buy a weapon upgrade, and so spend $15 on a 1m crossbow, whereas a 1m chest piece would be lucky to sell for $2?

[aureon]

O_o i'm struggling to sell 4m items for 10€ atm.
I wanna play on your servers >_>

[lythac]

Flipped a weapon bought for 20k for 500k.

[sahiel]

Do you find that there's a consistent "exchange rate" between the Gold and RM AH, or are there certain items that fetch more on the RMAH? As in, does a 1m item sell for about $10 regardless of what it is, or do people get excited to buy a weapon upgrade, and so spend $15 on a 1m crossbow, whereas a 1m chest piece would be lucky to sell for $2?

There really seems little rhyme or reason to a lot of it, some obviously great items sell well, but so do some things I think are pretty crappy, other times an amazing item just won't sell... it's almost impossible to gauge and it seems to change every few days which ends up making it a lottery just to see if you priced your item at the right level for that day. =/