Who all is in for Diablo III at launch?

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Originally Posted by monroeski

I mostly just left cooldown skills off of my barb, other than the one damage soaking one. As you say, they all just seemed unimpressive enough that I'd rather have another weaker skill that I can use 20 times than use the one powerful one every once in a while.

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I use the long cool downs all the time. In Nightmare, I use the ancestor call skill to bring down 3 other barbs when I run into blue and yellow mobs or when I'm overwhelmed. They not only soak up damage, but they add quite a bit of AOE damage that will clear out some of the lower level mobs.

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Originally Posted by monroeski

I mostly just left cooldown skills off of my barb, other than the one damage soaking one. As you say, they all just seemed unimpressive enough that I'd rather have another weaker skill that I can use 20 times than use the one powerful one every once in a while.

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Wait until higher difficulties.

Has anyone from here beaten the game on inferno? I made it to act 3, but can't kill the elite mobs consistently enough to try to progress. I don't want my strategy to be to kite the elite mobs out of the way so I can die and clear the path to the next objective.

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I mostly just left cooldown skills off of my barb, other than the one damage soaking one. As you say, they all just seemed unimpressive enough that I'd rather have another weaker skill that I can use 20 times than use the one powerful one every once in a while.

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I'm running call of the ancients, earth quake and berserk in A4 Hell A1 Inferno and it's handy. I can pretty much clear out an elite mob pretty quick using those kills.

After that I have leap (for it's armor effects) then Bash and then revenge.

Earthquake is great for doing a lot of AOE damage, Call of the Ancients provides that extra back up, and Berserk gives me life (I find I take a lot less damage) also increases my damage and then leap with the armor buff results in like 400% armor buff.

I also am doing like 700 LOH.

Example if I'm hurting in a fight and I see revenge is available I'll pop a leap (armor goes up 400%), use revenge and boom I'm good.If I need too I'll use a potion.

Right now I'm going slowly progress A1 Inferno/Farm Act Hell I need to get better gear. Found a sick Helm (50 Res, 30 Arance resist 135 Vit and 65 stregth) guy wants 1.5 mill however I'm bidding at 550k hope I snag it.

O yes and 22% GF

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Originally Posted by Snakespy

Wait until higher difficulties.

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Having to wait until after I go all the way through a game at least once to see the usefulness of over half of my skills (including a lot of other stuff in addition to the cooldown skills in that) is not good design, just like people saying you have to get 20 hours into Final Fantasy XIII before the game got good wasn't good design.

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Originally Posted by monroeski

Having to wait until after I go all the way through a game at least once to see the usefulness of over half of my skills (including a lot of other stuff in addition to the cooldown skills in that) is not good design, just like people saying you have to get 20 hours into Final Fantasy XIII before the game got good wasn't good design.

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Eh, I don't know. I didn't feel deprived of play styles during my first play through. I used earthquake a lot. The game was pretty easy on normal, but I constantly changed up my play style to try new things. If you are the type that gets set into a groove and doesn't change until you start dying a bunch then I could see it getting boring. The game doesn't actively force you to try new things until higher difficulties, but there's nothing stopping you from checking new stuff out.

Blizzard has said they wanted the first play through to be casual as to appeal to the widest audience. I think it was too casual, but most of us are far past normal now so it doesn't really matter.

My DH is still in Normal mode but I'm on late Act with 3 and half hrs in game. I'm sure within 4-5 hrs of game time I'll be in nightmare. I just don't want to progress faster then my level. I don't want to be lvl 28 doing tons of D runs to hit Lvl 30.

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Originally Posted by Timman_24

Eh, I don't know. I didn't feel deprived of play styles during my first play through. I used earthquake a lot. The game was pretty easy on normal, but I constantly changed up my play style to try new things. If you are the type that gets set into a groove and doesn't change until you start dying a bunch then I could see it getting boring. The game doesn't actively force you to try new things until higher difficulties, but there's nothing stopping you from checking new stuff out.

Blizzard has said they wanted the first play through to be casual as to appeal to the widest audience. I think it was too casual, but most of us are far past normal now so it doesn't really matter.

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I'm only past normal with one of my characters. I don't currently have any desire to dive back in with another.

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Originally Posted by monroeski

I'm only past normal with one of my characters. I don't currently have any desire to dive back in with another.

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:confused: I didn't mean change characters, but change your skill sets around. There are tons of combinations. My point was, sure you can roll through the game with basic skills, but theres nothing stopping you from changing it up. That's what I did several times just to try new things out. You could do leap/slam/cleave the entire game, but that's no fun. Its really what you make it.

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Originally Posted by Timman_24

:confused: I didn't mean change characters, but change your skill sets around. There are tons of combinations. My point was, sure you can roll through the game with basic skills, but theres nothing stopping you from changing it up. That's what I did several times just to try new things out. You could do leap/slam/cleave the entire game, but that's no fun. Its really what you make it.

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I know what you meant, and I mentioned earlier that I did swap in new skills to try to break up the monotony. It didn't really work. I was saying that I only have one character even close to any kind of point where I start being forced to use different skills so if I ever want to play another character I'll have to slog all the way through boring normal mode just to get to the difficulty where I can tell if I even like the character or not.

The cooldown skills in particular just made everything more boring IMO. Use the skill once and then you can't use it again for two or three more mobs and meanwhile you're down a skill slot. Particularly saw this issue against bosses because I would use the big skills once and before they recharged either I or the boss would be dead. I found myself equipping a bunch of different skills but then forgetting they were there because leap/stomp/cleave or frenzy killed everything so easily while waiting for recharges and all the other non-long cooldown skills just felt terribly inefficient.

I only had access to the game because I was a WoW Annual Pass holder. I let a payment lapse and all my accounts got shut off. From what I've read, my characters in D3 are gone, regardless if I re-instate my membership. Oh well. I hadn't played it for over a week anyway, and was already bored of it. I'm now playing Lineage 2 to tide me over until Guild Wars 2 comes out 8/25.

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Originally Posted by ImaNihilist

What is "off" about it is that it isn't Diablo 2. People said the same thing about StarCraft 2 when it came out. If you remember all the way back to the before time, people actually said the same thing about Diablo 2 because it was "too hard" and too much of a grind compared to Diablo.

I agree that there isn't really a hook to keep you playing past 60 with the same character. The game, as it shipped, was designed to give you an awesome experience with your friends from 1-60, then maybe try out a different class or two. And that's exactly what it does. That's why the Blacksmith, Jeweler and Stash carry over from character to character.

The motivation for the end game grind may come with the PvP patch. It may not. I tend to believe it will, because otherwise the RMAH is kind of silly. LA PvP system can easily make loot matter. The grind will seem worth it if there's a 1% chance you'll get an item that will let you dominate your opponent. People will grind for that, happily. We know that.

Personally, I'm not interested in an end game grind. That's what D2 was. That's what WoW is. If I want that experience, I'll go play WoW. I'd much rather have a NOX like experience that sits on top of Diablo 3 and lets me play with my own character. I'm probably in the minority here, but I freaking LOVED NOX and miss it so hard. A 4v4 CTF map for Diablo 3 would be awesome.

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Loved NOX as well. Loving Diablo 3 so far. NOX is one of two or three games I have ever played all the way through with every option available, with NOX that would be playing through the game with all three characters. The only other game that comes to mind for me is F-Zero GX on the Gamecube. I beat all the difficulty levels on that one.

I don't know if any of you have kept playing, but the 1.0.4 patch is awesome and worth checking out. Since that came out I've put a good 30 hours into my lvl 60 DH and still am not able to beat the game on inferno.

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Originally Posted by Snakespy

I don't know if any of you have kept playing, but the 1.0.4 patch is awesome and worth checking out. Since that came out I've put a good 30 hours into my lvl 60 DH and still am not able to beat the game on inferno.

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What did they change to make the game better?

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/7029...Live-8_21_2012

Paragon, more rares (LOTS more), legendary items are now actually legendary and a few other small little things they have changed. Of course, most of these little extras in the patch only count for level 60's. Like nephalem valor (think that was patch 1.0.3) But hey you can be power leveled real easy then play the crap of it on inferno. I do recommend doing a play through on normal at least once just to get the feel for it though otherwise you will feel rushed and not see the story since we just skip it.