Soylent Brown

Developer livestream starting in a few minutes, where they should be announcing the plans for season 1 and hopefully some other stuff too.

I hadn't been using charge or leap, but I had movement speed and movement speed after killing an elite on my boots, ghostwalker aspect on the boots too, for the movement speed during and after unstoppable. Along with the shouts, you can get from A to B pretty quickly just running. Max CDR on hat and amulet, and Marshall in a glyph slot, for as much uptime as possible.

I think my barb has around 430% crit dmg, 23% crit (rising closer to around 90% after a couple of seconds channelling ww, and with enemies slowed + vulnerable), and about 340% vuln dmg. Stuff like close / stunned / bleeding / slowed are all in the same damage bucket, so while they're not bad, they're not quite as good as the main three. Anyway, up to level 20 on my baby necro. The butcher spied an opportunity for revenge while I was running a dungeon and splatted me good, but overall I'm still winning that particular duel.

They're probably all long gone now, but if you have one to spare, I'd love to jump ship!

Stat ranges don't seem to change after 725, but weapon dps does. You'll want your main weapon to have as high a level as possible, for maximum dps. Any stat sticks will be fine at ~725 though.

I did it at 60 too. If you have solid gear with the right aspects on it, it isn't too bad.

Got to 100 on my barb, and didn't fancy having to grind for mats and gold to sort new gear out to try HOTA, so decided to level a necro instead. Fun at the moment - bone spear absolutely murders everything. It's a shame the game isn't keen on people trying different things with the same class though.

They were both disabled for roughly a week to fix an issue, but have been working as intended for a while now, so no problem using them.

They probably need to get rid of respec costs before they add loadouts. There are enough goldsinks in the game already that we'll still be struggling to pay for things even if we can change builds for free.

Yeah, I didn't pay the extra to start early, so a few days behind. I won't ding 100 tonight, but probably tomorrow. I might just go sorc for season 1, as that's probably the only class that's safe from nerfs!

It's not so much balance that bothers me, but the reactionary nerfs. You see some nice video of a class crushing dungeons, so you look forward to getting there and trying it out... Only by the time you do, the build has been stripped for parts and is up on bricks with its wheels missing. Instead of doing a big explosion when you stop whirlwinding, you do a mildly unpleasant raspy fart which annoys the monsters more than injures them. I'm reluctant to start thinking about what I might do in season 1 because if I set my heart on a class, I fully expect that it will be nerfed to the ground and I'll go into the season disappointed. Another issue with the game - they've changed it so that Nightmare Dungeons are the most efficient way of levelling, but how that's worked for me is that I'm 99 and a bit, and I'm thoroughly sick of Nightmare Dungeons. I'll probably push through to 100, but I've lost all motivation to play.

It takes HOTA barbs 10 minutes to kill Uber Lilith, and it takes the other classes 2 minutes. HOTA barb is only OP in PVP, but PVP is a joke anyway. Barbs need big buffs everywhere. I'm not sure there's a magic solution to the stats issue. There will always be a best option, and people will stack that. If you want every stat to basically be of the same value, you may as well just delete all of the stats entirely at that point and bake everyone's power into their character.

Basically, because they decided that difficulties 3 and 4 would have a resistance penalty, and because armour already accounts for like 50% of your resistance totals anyway, resistances are worthless stats as it stands. Blizzard have said that they're going to try to fix things, but that's probably not something they can rush. Try not to have any resistances on any gear as it's a wasted stat. (Rings and amulets come with them automatically, of course.) For now, armour is king. Skulls all the way!

Barbs are incredibly weak compared to druids and necros. Sorcs do have it tough though. With resists basically being worthless because of how they designed the game, and things like hydra getting nerfed into the ground because of level 25 twink bullshit, Blizzard really shit the bed there.

I expect they'll be adding more end game stuff as they move into the seasons. Leaderboards for Nightmare Dungeons perhaps, but other new content too. It's mostly in a good place, but there's plenty of room for improvement.

Well their surnames are certainly comparible.

Just dinged 95, so not too long now. Should be done before next weekend. Most of my items are about where they need to be and I have my remaining paragon points planned and ready to deploy, so it's just a matter of time. I'll probably have a look at some higher Nightmare Dungeons and get murdered by Uber Lilith a bit, and then take a break from the game until Season 1 starts.

Yeah, I've been disappointed with the gems so far. No upgrades for them, so pointless to collect. I stopped picking them up about 20 levels ago. I think there are a couple more gem types that have been datamined, so perhaps we'll have something extra in season 1.

Even the little fucker down at the front who refused to wear the kit!?

Joyce and Ornstein reporting that we're trying to get Szoboszlai from Leipzig. I can't say I know that much about him, but it sounds like he knows where the goal is. It's been far too long since Liverpool had someone dangerous in the middle.

I liked it in the 90s, and I like the new version too.

Well if we're doing disturbing things with Italian food (sound on)-

Yeah, once you're in torment it's better to stay there as the XP buff is really good. When I first made it to Torment, I did a few helltide zones until I got a couple of upgrades, then did regular dungeons until I was nearer 70, before starting Nightmare dungeons. One thing I found quite good was just running regular Blind Burrows over and over (complete it > leave dungeon > log out > go back in and run again > repeat.) It's one of the better dungeons for XP per hour. Nothing major on the class front, but some nice XP changes- https://news.blizzard.com/en-gb/diablo4/23964909/diablo-iv-patch-notes

Big buffs to Nightmare Dungeons in the patch that just went live. You can now teleport directly to the dungeon entrance, and the XP seems to have been roughly doubled. Levelling from 87 to 100 should be a lot quicker for me now.

Most of my fun is had while I find gear and build a character, and that tapers off as you max everything out, so seasons give you a chance to start fresh with everyone in the same boat. It can still be fun even if you're not a try hard. I quite like to switch classes with the seasons too, to freshen things up even further.