Diablo 3 ROS

BLM WHM SMN SCH THF RNG BRD MNK WAR DRK PLD > 99

Diablo 3 is turning out to be much more than your average game.  I have invested TONS of hours now in making those heroes tougher and tougher in gear.  

The way the game works is that the character level maxes out at 70.  After that you must invest time in abilities of which you start out with 3 major abilities per piece and then get up to a max of 4 and rarely 5.  Once you are there, it's time to start to invest in WHICH abilities you want to have most in common because you will be able to, after some gear drops with a set of abilities, to change ONE of those abilities to something that can then be a common among y0ur other items.  The total of your gear is 8 pieces.  Those being helmet, chest, shoulder, gloves, bracers, belt, pants, and boots.  You probably don't want to mess too much with changing abilities until you are a full 70.  The confusing part however is that you will get legendary gear much SOONER than 70 which you then are forced to forgo grudgingly as you level past the items level.  

Now once you reach level 70, it's time to talk to Kamala.  She will give you gear for blood shards and really, to save yourself time and a BUNCH of self-doubt, it's time to DUMP all your gear that is not level 70.  Just do it, because you are GOING to end up doing it anyways.  Dump all your legendaries too because it is WAY too expensive to change legendary gear to suit your needs at this point. 

Next thing is to figure out which rare gear goes with what.  You will notice that some gear allows you to have your critical chance go up and other gear doesn't.  Likewise some gear allows a big boost in armor and other gear doesn't.  Some allows slots to put gems in there and if you picture yourself in the best gear it's best to just stop keeping ANY gear that doesn't have full slots, namely 3 for the chest piece and 2 for the pants, 1 for the weapon and 1 for the offhand item if you don't choose a 2-handed weapon.  These are a must so just throw it away if you can't get those right off the bat.  Now if you get a perfect roll with the other 3 stats then you can roll to get your slot so thankfully Diablo 3 is nice in this respect because you get PLENTY of play room to get the skills you want.  

And I am telling you that THIS is the fun part of the game.  It's diabolical but the actual playing is not that much fun at all, the SHOPPING is.  You get to roll roll roll and soon you are out of money and you gotta go hunt things again.  Eons later you will figure out what is the right combo that let's you play on the harder levels.  

The first level you should try at 70 is Torment 1.  It goes all the way up to Torment 6.  If you go online, you find all of these characters that have modded their characters.  They have weapons with 3 slots, rings with 3 slots, even amulets with 3 slots.  Oh I forgot to mention that at level 70 is about the time you should start to worry about amulets and rings.  They are nice but and are very necessary at 70 but before then it's really just up to you if you dabble because you can't craft rings and amulets until 70.  

Ok but I have finally made it to Torment 6 and I am here to tell you it IS doable with just regular equipment even though it seems like impossible to play there(that's what it seemed like to me at first).  

Now, imo(in my opinion) you first need to get all of your gear with your main stat.  There are 6 characters each with their own main stat that gives them more DPS(damage per second) the more their main stat is raised.  For Crusaders and Barbarians it is Strength, and for all characters Strength gives you more armor.  You have to take this into account when you decide what stats to add because if you play the Crusader or Barbarian you will need more Resist All(magic resistance) because they already have a high armor due to their main stat serving both as a damage boost and as armor.  

For Wizards and Witch Doctors their main stat is Intelligence.  This means their DPS goes up the more this goes up and the bonus is that all characters get more Resist All if their intelligence is high so for these characters you will want to add more Armor and not worry at all about Resist All.  You WILL need to take into account Armor though, because getting one-shotted... really happens... alot... and also...  really annoying... so this is why.  

For Demon Hunter and Monks their main stat is Dexterity.  I haven't got my Monk up to 70 yet so no info on him too much but for Demon Hunter their DPS tends to be the highest because they move around the fastest.  People tend to invest more on DPS with these but because of that these tend to be the weakest soloists with the most damage.  It's almost like playing Tetris with the Demon Hunter because you are just tamping down stacks with your long range hits while at the same time trying to stay away from magic and fast mobs which of course is all relative to your difficulty.  You'll have a tough time with Demon Hunter because you won't want to invest in armor OR resist all but you are really going to need to for a while until you figure out the pattern you want to use and what your favorite abilities are.  Once that's done, then you can take stuff away you don't need and then use smoke or vault to leap away and use your slots for damage.  Again this is fun job to play but also rather trying because you are such a lightweight when it comes to damage you can take.  Once you are good you will have insane damage and will be able to post sentries that whittle stuff down in front of you so that you can finish them off so in this regard it's quite a fun time preparing and again, SHOPPING for the gear and such to improve your game.  

That's why I didn't like the game so much at first, was because it really was like Torchstone it seemed but boy now that I see that Torment 6 is possible and that I made it there, I am eager to figure how the other jobs will get there.  

Now I got Demon Hunter at a really nice DPS and it's really fun to play but I can't play much past Torment 4.  You really have to be awesome to go Torment 5 or higher and of course you could MOD(modify your stats by saving your character on a disc and then modifying those stats manually) your game but that's a lot like shouting at darts.  Yeah there's a skill to it, and it's also a bit like slapping ppl.  They do what you want at first but then "whoa where'd everyone go and who are all these new people... they don't seem very friendly... SLAP."  

"...only what you take with you" - Yoda  

My demon hunter needs to figure out how to use sentries and there is a set of gear, Marauder's gear, that if you get all 6 of the pieces, lets you lay down sentries that fire your high damage ammo for no cost which is probably how you survive T6(Torment 6).  

Today I am going to tell you how I got the Witch Doctor to Torment 6.  I had already got my Crusader to T6 but he was doing NO damage hardly and even though I was able to keep mobs(monsters) off the other players I played with online, I sensed that they had figured out a way to do high DPS without being maxed in armor and resist all like my Crusader was, so he needs more work.  

The witch doctor is one that casts all sorts of weird spells like locusts and spiders and bats.  I could explain it more but you will have to try the game out to understand it and learn it all and much of fun of the game is to switch out one skill for another and giving it another go.  Now I can say I have truly spent a bunch of time on witch doctor.  At first I used the azurewrath with the lidless wall which is a cold sword with skull shield.  It looked SO awesome!  It's junk.  Later I went back and tried to up my DPS .  Now this is confusing because while you are upping your DPS you are figuring out which skills are better or more comfortable and trust me on this you should just STOP moving around your skills and get all of your rare gear in order like I am going to tell you. 

Now first thing is give all of your items Intelligence.  That leaves 2 or 3 other slots to worry about which is ok since Intelligence usually rolls on the item anyways automatically, but sometimes not.  Now your main DPS, after your intelligence boost, is going to come from Critical Chance and then Critical Damage and then Attack Speed(atk%).  Focus on Critical Chance(crit%) or Critical Damage(critD) only at first because getting Intelligence with one or the other means you can focus on getting the third with no problem.  So if I get a  glove with 4 stats and one of them is intelligence and the other is Critical chance and the other 2 are crap then you still have a chance to re-roll one of those others and get your 3 stats that you want.  If you get intelligence without any of those others, it's time to salvage(throw away) the item.  

The funny thing is some items allow some stats while others allow others.  I will have to address them individually otherwise this will get confusing which is what the game wants is for you to spend a HUGE amount of time figuring this stuff out.  

Gloves get Crit% and CritD and Atk%.  Bracers get only Crit%.  Helmets get Crit%. Weapons CAN have atk% or critD or a tinybit of Crit% but you mostly want those to have a slot so that you can put a gem in there that gives a HUGE amt of critD(yellow gem).  Just do it.  You can add a red gem which will boost the damage a good bit but if you look at your DPS you will see that you should always go for the yellow gem period (EDIT: it turns out that your followers have a max critD so if you recycle your rare rings to your followers,  all maxed out with crit% and critD, you will need to use a red gem on their weapons). This was probably done on purpose so that you would do a red to yellow step and therefore play the game a long while with a red gem in your weapon.  Perhaps you can tell who the new people are online because they have a red gem in their weapon?  Now the offhand weapon is more of a perhaps.  I have noticed that you can add Crit% which is a must have but you can also roll for a slot that allows you BONUS primary stat(depends on your job like before either STR DEX or INT) but it's a difficult call because you get a higher Intelligence and Vitality for it and since you must have Crit% then you either have to settle for whatever else drops or take it and skip vitality, which is your hit points, which are yet another thing you have to figure whether or not you have enough of it.  

I am still working on this so all I am going to do is tell you what I have worked out so far.  I have helltooth gauntlets which together with ONE other item would give me a bonus 500 INT but honestly I have found something else that makes it even worth GIVING UP those 500 INT.  On it I have Crit% CritD and INT. For shoulders and bracers I have Aughild gear which give me nice stats but because I have a Ring of Royal Grandeur, those two get treated like 3 and that is REALLY why I have them because it gives +15% dmg vs Elites while at the same time -15% damage from Elites.  For the belt and chest I have Blackthorn.  After a great many times of coming close and getting the 4 slots needed to avoid those nasty ground effects of plague molten and desecrator, I opted to settle with 2 plus the ring which makes it 3 which give me +10% dmg vs Elites and -10% dmg from Elites, which gives me a total of 25% dmg resistance from Elites which is a nice complement.  This leaves me my pants which are Pox Faulds.  I had Helltooth but once I got these which put out a bunch of AOE(area of effect) damage when 3 or more monsters are around, I kept them and gave up the other.  For my feet I got the illusory boots which allow you walk through those walls the elites like to put up and plus they allow you to walk through those monsters and put up horrify which stuns them all for 2 seconds which again is a nice complement.  Now this item is really hard to get because it, like the Ring of Royal Grandeur, only drops as a result of a Horadrim Cache which you only get after clearing an ACT of all 5 bounties.  And it only sometimes drops a legendary, which might not be this, so it's really rare.  

I have a bunch of stuff that I have salvaged because I have too many characters so a good piece of advice is to start with 3 or 4 characters and have those be complements like a wizard then a witch doctor or a crusader then a barbarian.  This way you can keep good items that you spent a lot of time tweeking and just give it to your up and coming character that uses the same primary stat(statistic).  Part of the fun of the game is figuring out HOW to put rare abilities to good use.  The butchers sickle for instance pulls an enemy up to you 1/5 of the time so I'm wondering why this is so cool and then when I fight the butcher he pulls me in and then SLAMS me with his heavy weapon... good idea yeah?   That's the game.  

Now something I have not mentioned is the rings and amulet.  You must get these to have crit% and critD along with main stat. ONce you have these 3 then go for the fourth stat to be either atk% or slot.  Slot is not so great since gems don't give too much stat and atk speed 5% is much better than 200 primary stat which is what one of best gems can give but again go for these only after you have the other 3 and you start tossing masses of stuff away.  

Now much later, you are going to want special rings and amulets.  These have higher stats for INT and VIT but like before you are going to want crit% and critD in there at the very least.  The precious part of this is that you need to PAY a high-value gem to change stats on these.  This gem is worth 900k so it's a very costly roll and one you need to make sure you don't waste because if you roll the wrong stat, can't switch and say you want to change another one.  This is REALLY frustrating right?  But it's also part of the fun because right over here huge decision making going on and over here you are tossing away tons of crap you simply won't settle for that was really useful not long ago.  

So that's my guy. The legendary rings have special abilities ON TOP OF the stats btw, so I have an amulet that makes you immune to poison and a ring of royal grandeur(with crap stats btw but its too hard to get a second one) and regular rare ring that is crap because it has no abilities but is much better than all the legendary rings with crap roles on them.  It has slot and crit% and critD so it's pretty maxed but ideally I would want crit% critD atk% and primary stat, which never happens except maybe on magefist which I have on this one character.  

Now after you have all of that in order, it's time to figure out what to put in your weapon and offhand.  The weapon must have a slot, for the yellow gem that gives a huge critD, so first thing is to decide which stat you are going to give up to roll up a slot.  Usually you want to have INT and VIT because VIT on a weapon is max 700 whereas on other items it maxes at 500 meaning it's more valuable to put it here, yet if you want to deal more dmg you can roll 10% dmg or 7% atk speed which are again a choice but high on the list of choices.  Usually there is an option to roll a resource/second option which is like a regeneration of your ammo.  This depends if you use ammo or if you use abilites with a cooldown.  Abilities with a cooldown have no ammo but you have to wait a while before they recharge and, if they are strong, then you have to wait a LONG while, making them not so attractive to use.  For me I started using the Barber knife.  It has atk% and slot and +10% damage so it has a very high amount of damage which made my DPS number really high and made me happy but I wasn't running at T6 yet, I was only at T4.  Later I found the Royal Grandeur ring all messed up life/second and a life/hit stat that I didn't want on my ring but that I had to settle for.  At that point I tried using the dogs tweek that instead of giving me possible health globes when I blew them up, to give me +10% armor full time.  That seemed to help a lot and then I tried using the dogs with life/hit ability.  Since each dog gave my life/hit stat to me instead of just my one attack giving me life/hit, I got 5 times my normal life/hit which coupled with life/second was now giving me 6 times my normal healing rate.  This was a great idea.  Now with my boots equipped I could run around and horrify, which upped my armor 100% because I chose that tweek of it, and then firebats into a crowd while upped in armor and getting healed by my dogs.  

Things were getting better.  After doing this for a while I decided to change out my offhand item from a shield to more offensive gear since I wasnt actually blocking anything before they died off and sure enough I got immense stats from switching that out.  I was using a rare gear item but then realized I could go in and craft the legendary item I wanted and put it in there instead though it would be more expensive.  So I crafted me a nice item called Spite and it served me for a long time, then the game dropped another mojo item named Manurja or something that coupled with a Manurja dagger(that I didn't have yet) gave me bonus stats similar to armor sets so since it turned out to have good stats that were just as good as Spite and that with one tweek could be better than Spite, I equipped it and hoped the other dagger that made the set would drop so that I could have the 250 INT bonus.  After a while a nice dagger called the Barber dropped(did I say that?)  Before, I was using the one you could create on your own, the Umbral Oath, which was not bad but it didn't have the nice atk% stat available so switching to the Barber was a nice upgrade.  Then one day I got another dagger of reaching or something.  This totally threw me off.

Since it had an ability that gave "grasp of the dead now has raining corpses" on it, it was of course a MUCH better weapon because now I would be able to use grasp of the dead with TWO abilities.  The only drawback was that I wasn't using grasp of the dead and, to use this, I would have to LEARN to use it.  

In the game, you get 6 active abilities(you push a button to use them).  Luckily you can put them on any key you like but there are a BUNCH of them total and each ability has 6 MORE tweeks you can use to tweek each ability which makes it interesting to try things combo'd with something else, PLUS you get 4 passive abilities you can choose from like 20.  These abilities tweek you or your active abilities FULL TIME assuming they are relative. 

My routine goes like this:  I order up some dogs with summon zombie dogs.  Now, I used to use poison dogs with the "poison dmg reduces dmg 20%" ability but now I don't do that although it is a safe way to go on higher levels.  

I use corpse spiders.  These things are nice since they attack from long range and since it takes a while for the little spiders to find their prey and attack 3 times before they disappear, they are good for keeping chains going from one group to the next.  I use the cold ones that slow so that they serve as sort of a tank when I am exploding my zombie dogs.  Yes, I use sacrifice.  It's evil to sacrifice others but it's very satisfying too.  I used to use the option that gave a chance to leave health globes since that helps everyone in the group but now I use the one that gives 5% bonus damage per dog which with 4 dogs gives a long 30 seconds of +20% damage.  That's a lot.  Once I explode the dogs I send in the Piranha wave that also gives bonus damage to enemies getting bitten by Piranha, aka +15% more damage.  At this point, I can either toss more spiders or use firebats.  Firebats do a lot of damage since they use up mana(high damage ammo).  Corpse spiders don't use mana.  But the bats are short range so I have to get in close so to do that I have to prep with Horrify.  This stuns nearby mobs for 3 seconds but also gives me 100% armor for 8 seconds since that is the tweek I chose.  Now this doesn't give me too much time to use Firebats but usually I am using it behind my dogs so it's rather safe unless there are too many monsters, which happens a lot nvm if there are elites running around using their ground effects to make me run around like crazy.  

So that's it. The passives I chose are the one that gives 20% more damage but cost 30% more mana.  This is a non-issue since I use the tweek for firebats that has higher initial mana cost but no fueling cost.  This means I can use it and then just hold it down and mana will continue to refuel while I continue to use firebats.  I can't start and stop it of course because I will run right out of mana but if I am careful I have all the mana I need and I get the 20% more damage tweek for all of my use. The next passive is either the 15%  less damage to me and the dogs or the poison one that gives 20% less damage for 3 seconds after I hit them with poison damage.  This is nice when I use poison option firebats but those run me right out of mana so it's iffy.  This works great with locusts since the whole time they are doing DOT(damage over time) they are keeping that elite at -20% damage(20 seconds=huge) but I can't afford to use a locusts button when I have the summon zombie dogs button(qvv). The next two passives(there are only 4) each give me one extra zombie dog, one gives a dog plus 50% damage to their dmg and the other gives a dog plus 30% movement speed to you when the dogs are out and you are not in combat.  This last option plus the illusory boots are what makes this job so incredibly useful even at high levels because I am literally flying around the screen when the dogs aren't fighting.   This makes it useful also for running away sometimes especially when you run into the SECOND set of elites which really is just ridiculous and yet you ask yourself HOW? 

How does someone survive this?    

And like Ramirez would say "with Faith Heart and Skill... in the end... there can be only one".  So it's important to remember that this too, this ridiculousness is indeed something that serves if not you then the one that conquers you or the one that conquers him ... or her ... or IT.  

So then I upgrade my dagger, yeah?  Way back there I got this dagger that now allowed me to use Grasp of the Dead with an extra tweek.  So here I am trying to get by without my extra 15% damage from the Piranha wave by switching that out to grasp of the dead which will now have two tweeks on it.  I have to say it was nice for a while.  I began to use the slow effect of grasp of the dead and at the same time that the guys in the area were slowed, corpses would rain down on them along with their attack speed being slower or something.  Bunches of effects yeah?  But sadly,  I was used to pushing things back with my piranha wave which was my goto button when things got close.  This was not like that at all.  I was now much more inclined to run around but instead of having a bunch of foes pushed back all in front of me, now some of them here or there would surround me and attack me from behind which was frustrating.  What was also frustrating was that I saw my DPS drop.  Instead of a nice 1 million damage or 1.2 or so I was down in the 900k's.  And I could really tell that I was taking longer to kill monsters though I was surviving them much more now.  I was now able to go into Torment 6 and survive there somewhat, especially since I was using the zombie dog option that gave life/hit for each of their hits but I was still getting one shotted often because those pesky monsters at that max level... they tend to hit hard, lol.  Horrify works nice but use it to stun them for 2 seconds and then 20 seconds later that cooldown timer reset can't come around soon enough and here they come.  It was a tenable excuse for saying I could survive T6, but I couldn't really survive T6.  

I switched to T5 and after getting my ass kicked all day, I realized how it had trained me well.  I was able to float across the screen oh wait, I forgot to mention that I next got dropped the Anessazzi Blade.  Yeah, it's a nice blade.  It stuns things when you summon your zombie dogs and since I was used to waiting for the counter to be up and then exploding and then summoning a new set of dogs to tank and everything would stun for a moment while I attacked them and moved on, I was much better at T5 with the new blade that basically just told me to FORGET THAT grasp of the dead mess I was trying and get back to explode(+20dmg) > summon dogs(stun) > piranha/move them back(+15dmg) > firebats (high dmg ammo) > horrify(stun) about halfway before summon dogs is about to finish its cooldown. It was a real nice improvement from what I was doing before which was probably mostly being done on T4 but I can't remember.  

Now, another mojo dropped which was Zunimassa string of skulls which was nothing special unless you had the set of which this was the first piece so I didn't even consider putting it on but, after a while of fighting, the Homonculous dropped.  

This was a game changer.  

This item's ability was to summon a zombie dog every 4 seconds.  What a stroke of luck that I was using summon zombie dogs already right?  Unlike grasp of the dead that I had to learn to use I already had this skill well in hand.  But wait, what's this?  I now didn't NEED to summon zombie dogs!  That's right!  Spare button! What to use, what to use, what to use, I was all afternoon trying out things to use on that button.  Oh sure I couldn't use the tweek of life/hit from the dogs since they turned out to just be vanilla dogs but it turns out that they still did tanking(taking damage from monsters so that they wouldn't attack me directly) just fine.  I tried out Spirit Barrage and really enjoyed using it.  When it came to elites, especially when there were 3 of them, I would target the weakest one and finish him off.  Often from way across the screen when I didn't want to get close enough to use firebats, I would corpse spiders until they were about half health and then spirit barrage them the rest of the way.  In fact it was a really goto spell on things that liked to run around the screen like flying animals and burrowing frogs and such.  

But since I have that +20% dmg passive, that ups your mana usage 30%, I was still using up a lot of mana and basically running out.  So I tried to use Soul Harvest which basically gives you a 10% intelligence boost.  It was NICE... then it was meh.  Really nothing to write home about, I got used to it for while but I couldn't really see a difference.  I even used that Totem Pole thingy but it takes WAY too long to cooldown and gives +30% dmg for about 20 seconds then wait another 120 seconds on cooldown(= not worth it).  

Then I tried Locust Swarm.  What a godsend.  It was perfect.  It gave a huge amount of damage over time at a huge mana cost but who cares once I realized how great it was on elites.  I basically go around doing my pattern like I said before but now instead of sometimes summoning dogs then exploding them once a minute or so, I could explode dogs every 20 seconds or 15 if I was in a hurry for only 15% dmg boost and then I piranha and horrify etc, but now I look for elites or large mobs and STING with Locust Swarm and wait and run around and the whole battle is over in like half the time.  It was quite ridiculous.  I am now on T6 doing my combo and just patiently waiting for spiders and locusts and dogs to do their job and soon enough... battle done.  

You get it now BATTLE DONE?  Glad I could help... 

PS: I finally figured out how to use grasp of the dead, I replaced the firebats button with it and changed out my nice high damage dagger The Barber to the Grasp of the Dead one and now I basically just infect stuff and slow them down and wait for locusts and spiders and dogs to finish them off slowly.  It's very hands off but somehow the battle is done faster and with less risk to me.