No mercy for the wicked...

More Diablo. Yep. Sif not.

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:

perfection...

Speaking of which, I still managed to push into their top 25 with my inexperienced Demon Hunter. I really shouldn’t say this as I have played Diablo for a long time now and understand the ins and outs of the game, even on a different class. There is an optimal way to play and an even more optimal way to build which seemingly translates to multiple classes in subtle ways.



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….

Too easy!

I have not made a blog post in quite a while. Again, a combination of playing fewer games lately or playing games that do not really necessitate any kind of discussion. Additionally I find myself doing other things in my spare time, including a general desire to stay in better shape. Doing weights will do wonders for your mental and physical well-being. Highly recommended.

So, Diablo, again. After the incredibly disappointing announcement of Diablo Immortal at 2018’s Blizzcon, I must admit that my skepticism for Blizzard’s handling of the franchise has peaked. I certainly feel for the many Diablo fans who attended last year’s event, hyped up for the “major Diablo news” only to be hung drawn and quartered by the announcement of a mobile game. Why they did not have even a small amount of content for Diablo III, even a new patch announcement, is completely beyond me. It is sad to see a developer so out of touch with their own community.
Anyways, Season 16 of Diablo III has rolled around. Nothing really new, just buffed sets and native Ring of Royal Grandeur (translation: ~20% more damage). Having accrued a library of podcasts and material that can be listen-watched, I decided it was a good time to jump in and remind myself of how things are. I initially started as a Crusader, but another Clan member also had the same idea, including running Roland’s Sweep, so I jumped ship to a Barbarian as soon as it was sensible. Most folk who were non-committal had stopped at this point too.

Interestingly, for the first time in the longest time, I actually experienced playing Diablo with another individual who has a very similar build and play-style focus as me. As a HOTA Barb, grouping with a Sweep Crusader is just magic. Without the need to communicate, it is very obvious where we should go, where we should stand and when we should move on during difficult rifts. Indeed, pushing above GR100 has been a pleasant and smooth experience, with two builds that are functionally similar and derived from near identical play-style philosophies. It’s intense, but the casualties are incredibly low and group pushing is a joy. Additionally, the group buffs (Warcry & Laws of Valor) and clustering mechanics (Bloodshed, Provoke/Condemn & Sweep Dot) are absolutely game changing. If we somehow had a monk, any monk, I think the team would be completely devastating. Dream Team right there.

Additionally I undertook further investigation and experimentation regarding sustain. Life on Hit no longer uses proc coefficients, and as long as you hit something per ability, you will get the full life return back. This scales with attack speed, but not the number of targets hit. This ... is surprisingly good. Not great, but definitely worth considering, as the amount you can roll on Ancients is huge, and the attack speed you can obtain is utterly ridiculous! For the longest time I was undecided whether to go with Life on Hit this time, or run with the tried and true Life on Resource spent. Eventually I came to the following conclusion…

The results are absurd. Even in my non-optimized gear, I can restore around 200k HP per second. That is 25% of my health, on average. At over a billion toughness when rolling, that is a LOT of EHP. I won’t beat this dead horse any more than I have in the past, but if you are still building without any consideration for sustain in Diablo III as melee, you are doing it wrong, plain and simple. I will rarely dip below half health, and even if I did, I would become near invincible with Esoteric Alteration. There is a reason I completely ignore most damage in the game: math.

Anyways, I did not push as hard as I usually would this season, mostly because the Immortal King set was not buffed as much as others and it is unlikely I will get much higher. The build still works for what it is and its nice being the 2nd highest HOTA Barbarian on US seasonal servers. Observe: