So I randomly decided to play Season 17 of Diablo III for a few weeks. Gives me something to do while I watch podcasts and random Youtube nonsense. The culture war in America is amusing to witness in a horrific, can’t-look-away while it collapses kind of way. It is also interesting transitioning back to a ranged character after so many years focusing on melee. Not bad, just different. I actually died several times while leveling. That’s certainly different!
Anyways, the first thing I have noticed about playing a Demon Hunter in season is that their set multipliers are just better. Shadow Impale is an absolute monster and insanely strong for killing Rift Guardians. So high is their single target damage that you actually need to think about killing trash more effectively, which is just unnatural for me. After a bit of survival horror (i.e. lack of specific gear), I managed to find a level of tankiness and sustain that I am comfortable with. Currently I am as resilient as I ever was playing a Barb or Crusader, so performing optimally as Shadow Impale is quite easy. Translation: stand inside the monster’s asshole at point blank melee and let your numbers do the work. I was already good at that.
Secondly, the Demon Hunter community is surprisingly competitive. While the Barb and Crusader communities are certainly better at theory-crafting, more demon hunters push harder and faster on the leaderboards. I think the class attracts a slightly more bloodthirsty demographic, lone-wolves who really enjoy the hunt/push, but don’t have much to say. Their top 100 leaderboard competitors are all geared to the teeth with smart rolls and optimized builds. They seem like a veteran crew and I appreciated the challenge, especially when this thing dropped:
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| perfection... |
A few things I did work out as Shadow Impale is that you really have to maximise your positioning, even more so than say HoTA. Impaling trash is useless if you cannot get to the elites behind, and needing to vault too much causes your Travellers Pledge damage buff to become useless. You also need to rotate between using Vault and Shadow Power, not just to stand your ground as often as possible, but to allow diminishing returns on knockback (for Strongarms) to wear off. It’s a bit more to keep track of and creates an interesting branch of options every few seconds for optimal play.
I probably won’t push any further than this as I have new and more interesting games on the horizon. 2019 is shaping up to be a fun year for casual gaming. Doom Eternal inbound….
