Tensei

To be fair, I think that anyone who doesn't play Dota or stuff like roguelikes (actual ones, not that casual binding of isaac bullshit), EVE online, Space Station 13 or Dwarf Fortress is pretty much a casual gamer.

When was this? If anything, people nowadays are more likely to think for themselves, or at least have a broader perspective on videogames because of the internet and message boards. Previously you only really had the opinions of your friends and videogame magazines to go on. But hey, don't let me ruin your fake nostalgia.

This line of thinking can be applied to a lot of skills though: If a champion deals bonus damage on every third hit as a passive, why not just up their stats accordingly and replace it with something more interesting? Really though, the worst thing are passives that pretend they're actually actives like Gangplanks friggin' Raise Morale.

tbh the washed out ground textures bother me more than the anti-aliasing (or lack thereof).

Yeah this seems a bit too contrived and pandering towards a specific demographic, but hey, as long as it brings in money.

Just as a heads up, the Eastern qualifier for the second International is happening today, but the twist is that it's entirely viewable ingame through Dota TV, and it even has the audio channel feature implemented so you can pick a caster to listen to while controlling the camera yourself.

There's also a Wizard build focused around Living Lightning that makes use of the amount of times it hits combined with high crit ratio and the Critical Mass passive that reduces your cooldowns each time you crit, which in turn increases the uptime you have on the likes of Diamond Skin and other survivability spells. E: I actually just rolled a Wizard cause I wanted to try this build out, and I'm kinda burnt out on Inferno difficulty at the moment with my 3 level 60s

Passive damage or armor boost, Active on-hit skill, gap closer/movement speed boost, random nuke with maybe some light CC, Ult cribbed from Dota but nerfed to fit the game. Contact me for my resume, Riot. E: The LoL forums are a perpetual source of hilarity: "W-well, I don't even WANT every champion unlocked from the start ;_;"

Armor and Resistances are all seperate instances of damage reduction. Armor reduces all damage, while Physical resistance will only affect physical attacks. Aside from that, certain spells or passives will give an additional % reduction (like WDs Jungle Fortitude), and there are also items that give bonuses like reducing melee damage or damage from elites by a certain percentage. That said, Resistances are generally the cheapest way to boost your survivability quickly. Attack Speed also boosts your cast rate for every spell, which means it works well to up the DPS on cheap spammy attacks like poison darts, but it doesn't really affect any damage over time spells, and it will cause you to run out of mana quicker if you use a lot of mana-hungry spells compared to other ways of boosting your damage (cause you're casting the spell more often for smaller amounts of damage versus casting it slower for larger amounts of damage) Intelligence, just as any other primary stat for a class, will boost your damage by 1% per point. 100 Intelligence means a 100% increase to your damage. This is why minor damage boosts, like a ring that adds maybe 12-24 damage, can suddenly make a huge difference when you're getting like 1200% extra damage from your stats. WD has a lot of ways of dealing with Elites. Probably the least thing you want to do is to start using Spirit Walk because it lets you get out of a lot of messy situations unharmed. I like it with the Spirit Vessel passive because it lowers cooldown and gives you another safety net in case you die. Snares and CC in general get diminished as you go up in difficulties, but Wall of Zombies always remains crazy strong for blocking powerful enemies. Hex is another great spell that affects every elite and even certain sub-bosses. Fetish Army is a good oh shit button because it does significant damage even later on, and draws away a lot of aggro. Offensively, stuff like Haunt or Swarm of Locusts is probably the most efficient if youre kiting a lot because of the damage over time component, so you can spend more time running.

There's already some really amazing stuff in the workshop.

Oh come on, that's some conspiracy theory-level stuff right there. It's not like they want to keep milking this cow for all it's worth, they genuinely care about the game and want to keep introducing new and interesting champion concepts. If the balance of a new champ occasionally feels off, it's probably more because of the new and untested mechanics they're introducing with each release, not because they're that desperate to sell their new champs.

Pretty sure Whimsyshire would be the equivalent of Act 4 drops unless it's somehow different from previous difficulties. It's also nice that none of the monsters have any ranged attack or special abilities, but farming up 1 mil for the staff can be a pain. Also, I feel like I'd have to team up to be able to do Inferno Belial at all due to the way the first phase of the fight is set up, which is murder for a DH (or any Ranged, really). Dying on Inferno isn't really an issue, even if your gear is up to par, it's more of a problem when you simply can't get past a certain group of elites.

I use a 2-hander because of the 50% bonus crit damage from the Archery passive, combined with Sharpshooter. I find that I stagger my attacks a lot anyway with all the kiting, so attack speed isn't all that important for me compared to having slower attacks with high crits. Keep in mind that quivers can be equipped with any kind of bow, not just 1-handed crossbows.

Here's why dual wielding isn't the best idea: It takes the average DPS from your two weapons and adds 15% attack speed. That's it. If you have a 900 DPS bow and a 700 DPS bow, your DPS will actually INCREASE if you remove the second bow. It's stupid, but that's how it works unfortunately. A quiver costs a a fraction of a second crossbow, so you're essentially paying twice the cost for a single upgrade. Shields + Melee weapons are a similar story, you trade 1k+ armor, as well as any potential resistance stats for slightly faster attack speed, and each weapon upgrade will cost you twice as much. Monk might be able get away with dualwielding because of the passive 15% dodge bonus. I'll admit that it looks cooler, but I don't think you can really complain about the game taking a dump on you if you're making it intentionally harder on yourself.

So get a decent shield to farm Act 2 until the rest of your gear is good enough to let you tank with a 2-hander or whatever. Also accept that certain elites just can't be done by certain classes if you're not overgeared for the act. That aside, the best way to up your Demon Hunter DPS is to just go out and buy the best ranged weapon+ quiver you can find. I had no trouble getting 800+ DPS Crossbows for less than 200k. At this point extra stats like Dex, Vit and sockets are just very expensive luxuries that won't really boost your effectiveness by much. DH survivability ultimately comes from the fact that you blow everything up before you get hit.

You're right, I skipped to 10 minutes and missed the part where they mentioned that they were talking about Inferno. What happened with Inferno balance is that they upped the difficulty to the point where their internal testers couldn't beat it, so they'll most likely be rebalancing it based on community feedback. The thing is though, the fact that you're currently grinding for gear to progress to the next act is more or less how Blizzard intended Inferno to work. They also mentioned recently that many players went into Inferno undergeared. This leads me to believe that it's totally possible to play an unconventional build in Inferno, you just need more gear to make up for it.

I don't think that vid does any false advertising with regards to viable character builds. I've stopped using pets on my WD since I started Nightmare (aside from the occasional Gargantuan to tank bosses), and it has probably been my easiest and fastest solo Hell run so far. Also, they're talking about Hell difficulty, not Inferno. You can do loads of different builds on Hell, while still enjoying a decent challenge, which is a drastic contrast with D2 Hell. Inferno is the equivalent of Uber Tristram, i.e. endgame content for completely players that want a challenge for their twinked out characters.

So I managed to squeeze out 184% increased magic find with gear+ 5 valor stacks and a fortune shrine before killing the Warden. The ensuing loot shower was definitely worth it.

Dualwield is viable afaik, mostly due to the 15% dodge passive. If you combine that with the Mantra and the temporary boosts you get from other skills its relatively easy to keep yourself around 50% dodge rate (it's hard to get a lot more than that due to diminishing returns though). Stacking Dodge and Resists while skimping on Vitality seems to be the way to go mostly because the heals don't really scale that well with levels (Breath of Heaven heals only for like 7k). Also, Monk will probably have the hardest time with ranged elites that have molten/vampiric/fast. It doesn't matter if you can tank them when you can't actually outdamage their heal or even get close enough to punch them.

http://www.dota2.com/spoilsofwar/ The cosmetic store is in, and I guess it's now finally 100% confirmed to be free to play with all heroes unlocked from the start.

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/demon-hunter#aRXYSV!eTY!YcZZab This is how I roll for Inferno Act 2 solo. Devouring Arrow is great for nailing offscreen targets and hit-and-run kiting, also has a 120k damage crit potential due to the pierce mechanics. Elemental Arrow with Nether Tentacles destroys large groups of weaker enemies and bosses. Smoke Screen is mandatory as a panic button to walk through hazards and dodge attacks, caltrops is what I spam when I'm kiting groups of enemies. Like half the stuff you encounter in act 2 is faster than you, so caltrops helps even the odds. Preparation is a requirement for Discipline regen, and the 60% heal is quite decent too. Scatter Spike Trap is specifically to be used against those fucking invisible snake guys that appear out of nowhere and oneshot you. It also does like 300k damage if you manage to stack together multiples in a single small area and you get a few lucky crits. I made a vid of me farming the first area of Inferno Act 2 with it, I got up to 4 Valor stacks. E: Well, now I'm up to Inferno Belial and it's completely kicking my ass, so I haven't even made it up to his second form. His minions are very hard to kite in that small area and absolutely everything oneshots me. This is probably the point where I get rid of all my vit and resistances in favor of full-on damage and pray that I can somehow dodge or avoid literally every single thing in that fight. Also, sir_nuts, since we were talking about how bad legendaries are yesterday, take a gander at like the best belt possible for a Barb:

Butcher is actually cake to farm provided you have enough DPS to kill him before the enrage timer goes off. All of his attacks have huge windups and are easy to dodge, with the exception of the AoE multiple hook attack. If you can live through that, you're golden.

For all you know he wasn´t experimenting but actually using uncommon builds effectively, but I digress, he probably didn´t get reported for no reason. The issue I have is that it´s all metagame-related. The 'rules' for building a champ aren't something that's hardcoded into the game but something that emerged from the community itself. If they're really going to make it bannable to use builds that aren't commonly accepted, they might as well disable the items they deem inappropriate in ranked.

I think Inferno is more or less working as intended. After you've finished Hell, your character is maxed out, and the game is basically done. Inferno is like the Diablo equivalent of a crazy challenge mode that stacks you up against impossible odds, and Blizzard has explicitly stated that they only expect a small portion of the playerbase to play it, let alone beat it.

How dare you break our precious metagame, we worked very hard on that.