Combined Farm Route that allows you to obtain the most legendaries, demonic essences and experience per hour. In addition, the document has data(exp/hour, group exp/hour, mobs killed per hour, SS of starting points) that will allow you to make your own farm routes.

TLDR: VoA -> Desolate Sands -> Dahlgur Oasis -> Eastern Channel -> Western Channel

Result: 25+ Demonics/Hour, 6+ Legendaries(got 21 hour;RNG), 160m+ Exp Hour

Data: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eDYucvOpSUUsf_O0NsYgOo6zGZmFJZkyzdiBSYyae8c/edit


Video: 


Happy Hunting

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Blizzard Donates Money Made from Dupe to a Good Cause

After the Diablo 3 gold dupe that broke out after the 1.08 patch went live, Blizzard responded by locking down the Auction House and banning players who had executed the exploit to dupe. Now, however, after Blizzard has identified who duped the gold and banned them, they were stuck with the players’ auctions that had previously been posted, and needed something to do with all of the money they now had sitting around.

Blizzards plan of action, however, is clever; rather than cause an outrage by many in keeping the money made, Blizzard has said “We'll be donating all proceeds from auctions conducted by the suspended or banned players—including all of THEIR sale proceeds that we intercepted as well as our transaction fee—to Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals."

While the economy in Diablo 3 may still take a big hit due to all of the gold that was duped, even players who were banned for using the exploit can console themselves in knowing that at the very least the money they would have made is being donated to a good cause. While the exact amount of money made has not been announced yet, it could be a sizeable amount.

Let us know, were you banned due to this dupe? If so, how do you feel about what Blizzard is planning to use the money you may have earned, and finally, do you think they handled the situation properly or could they have dealt with it differently? ...

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One thing I've always wanted. Purely for aesthetics/badassery

It's always bugged me that the lobby only shows your currently chosen character so my idea is similar to what it looks like when you group up with friends in the lobby. I think your menu should include all your characters standing there looking like a team of badasses.

As you choose a different hero, that hero moves to the front of the pack.

Yeah, probably not on Blizz's radar, but I think it adds to the grind if you can see all your characters in their glory. Maybe not all ten, but maybe your 5-6 most recently played characters?

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Suggested Stats (DPS, EHP) for MPlvls

Since public games are incredibly popular and beneficial to go to now, I thought it'd be handy to have a general idea of what people should be gearing towards for each monster power. Especially since people will join MP10 with too low DPS (including myself!) without knowing that they're a huge hindrance to the group.

You can already see multiple posts with people complaining about teammates slowing the group down because of deaths or low DPS.


All

• kill MOST elite packs under 30 seconds (disputed: see comments)
• kill trash under 3-5 seconds
• deaths average 0.25 or less per elite pack

Barbarian

• MP10: 650k EHP (55k HP for act 1 HoA), 200k DPS (170k solo)

Wizard

Critical Mass Build
Wiki Guide
MP5: 2.307 aps, 40% crit chance, 50k dps 400+ life on hit, 20+ APoC 3500 armor, 500 all resist, 35k hp
MP7: 2.501 aps, 45% crit chance, 75k dps 800+ life on hit, 20+ APoC 4000 armor, 550 all resist, 35k hp
MP8+ with 2.501 aps and highest DPS: 2.501 aps, 55% crit chance (Frost Nova: Deep Freeze will also be a big help), 150k+ dps 800+ life on hit, 20+ APoC 5000 armor, 700 all resist, 45k+ hp
MP8+ with 2.73 aps and decent DPS: 2.73 aps, 50-55% crit chance, 125k+ dps 800+ life on hit, 20 APoC 5000 armor, 700 all resist, 40k+ hp
MP8+ with 3.01 aps and lower DPS: 3.01 aps, 50%+ crit chance, 75k+ dps 800+ life on hit, 20 APoC 4500 armor, 650 all resist, 35k+ hp
MP10 ubers with decent dps and a solid freeze: 2.73 or 3.01 aps, 55%+ crit chance, 100k+ dps 800+ life on hit, 20 APoC 5500+ armor, 700+ all resist, 40k+ hp
SNS Build

Build Guide

MP10 138k DPS, EHP 340k

Monk

Backlash Build
D3Up Guide

• MP10: 500k EHP, 200k DPS (150k for soloing)

Demon Hunter
Grenades Build
Wiki Guide
MP 8 SOLO, MP 10 GROUP: 225k EHP, 200k DPS (full stats)

Bola/Spike Build
MP10: ~320k EHP, 340k unbuffed DPS (full stats)
Witch Doctor
MP10: 370k EHP, 160k DPS

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Dupe takes the Diablo 3 Auction House offline

Ever since the Diablo 3 launch people have been searching for (and finding) dupes. The Diablo 3 1.0.8 patch released yesterday brought us another dupe exploit allowing many users, as stated on a Battle.net forum post, to make billions, and for certain users, trillions of gold. We're not entirely sure how much gold was duped, but we do know the exploit was real and that the real money auction house was/is down as a result.

"After the release of Patch 1.0.8 this morning, we found that some players were exploiting a bug that enabled them to duplicate gold through the Auction House," Diablo 3 Community Manager Lylirra explained. "We're working on fixing the bug right now, and bringing the Auction Houses offline helps us troubleshoot in a more stable environment while preventing further exploiting."

A fix has been found for the issue and Blizzard is currently testing that fix. They've announced that despite recieving a lot of requests for a rollback, they won't actually do one. "We've been able to successfully identify players who duplicated gold by using this specific bug, and are focusing on these accounts to make corrections. While this is a time-consuming and very detailed process, we believe it's the most appropriate choice given the circumstances," she wrote. "We know that some of you may disagree, but we feel that performing a full roll back would impact the community in an even greater way, as it would require significant downtime as well as revert the progress legitimate players have made since patch 1.0.8 was released this morning."

When we asked our sources at Blizzard what would happen to the exploiters, they were unable to tell us. We assume a lot of people are going to be banned, but they might have already made their money from the dupe. The only thing we've been able to learn is that they're in the process of "reviewing the accounts involved and taking appropriate actions, including temporary locks, suspensions, and/or bans."

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Legendary item uniqueness and its link to build diversity

Yesterday during Diablo discussions we brought up a few topics related to item and build diversity that I wanted to expand upon using an example. The concepts that we were speaking of were:

• Legendaries that have specific affixes not available on rares
• Legendary procs/properties that scale with various stats
• Legendary procs/properties that synergize with specific skills
• Legendaries that are designed to encourage certain play styles and builds
• Legendaries leading to gear polarization/different prioritization of stats

In an ideal world I think that if someone was playing a build that you never saw before and you took a look at their armory, your first thought should be “What is this guy/girl smoking?”; however, after looking through their gear choices, the synergy and scaling between their gear, skills and procs and after doing some runs with them this person that they actually have a badass build that is on par with the cookie cutter build you’ve been playing all along. Achieving this is obviously not a simple task and requires a lot of balancing.

Sample build: This example is purely an illustrative one that is obviously not completely balanced, but demonstrates the concepts and their importance.

Bloodbeam WD (After finishing writing this I realize the damage output is probably a bit too high…)

First glance on stats from gear when unbuffed:

2500 int, 1000 str, 1000 dex, 45% ias, no crit stats, 400 all res (including base int), 3000 armor, 50k HP, 500 DPS 11% IAS 3% lifesteal dagger socketed with... A TOPAZ to hit 20k thorns (going to introduce thorns legendary so that this number isn’t as ridiculous as it sounds with current standards).

First glance at their skill setup:

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/witch-doctor#aZUYXd!gTY!ZaabYb

At this point if you never saw this before you should be thinking “Um……”

However, the WD has a few unique legendaries on him that have some interesting text associated with them:

Legendary WD Helm: +2000 thorns and “Blood spilled returns to haunt your foes” (or something less lame sounding)

Legendary offhand: +3000 thorns damage and “Offense is the best defense” (again not the coolest sounding thing…)

Legendary belt: “Chance to unleash the Angel’s wrath to punish the weak” (I’m a scientist alright! Get off my back about flavor text!)

Legendary glove: +25% damage to holy skills

So let’s look at the first unique item ability:

“Blood spilled returns to haunt your foes”
Creates an AoE damage circle (similar to SW on monks) around you and your pets that can proc whenever you are hit, this can stack up to 3 times and will last 5 seconds, damage dealt is holy damage. The animation would be similar to SW but with droplets of blood spinning around you.

The base proc rate is 5%, but scales up to 80% based on the total amount of strength you have and hitting 99% max of 80% asymptotically at 2000 str. At 1000 str the proc rate would be ~55%.

The base radius of the circle is 8 yards, but scales up to 20 yards based on the total amount of dexterity you have hitting 99% max of 20 yards asymptotically at 2000 dex. At 1000 dex the radius would be ~16 yards.

The base damage normally scales off of thorns damage doing 33, 66 and 100% depending on stacks; however, for every 500 int the scaling in increased 1 fold. So unbuffed 2500 int would be 5 more; 5 + 1 (base) = 6x scaling coefficient on 20k thorns = 120k DPS, but fully buffed (4430 int) we now have a 9.86x scaling coefficient meaning 197k DPS.

Then throw on the fact that because we went with Fierce loyalty, your pets also have thorns damage and will also do 120-197k DPS in their swirly majiggers. And on top of that we’ll be doing an extra 25% damage from these sources because of the legendary glove we got, so you and your 3 zombie dogs will be doing: 150/246k DPS in a 16 yard radius around you when you’re at full stacks. This will allow you to just plow through trash while having all 4 of you converge on a pack of elites to get overlap of these circles leads to almost 1M DPS.

“Offense is the best defense”
Simple ability here: For every 1000 points of thorns damage you receive 20 all res and 200 armor.

So now that 20k thorns gives us a bonus of 400 all res and 4000 armor, so our total mitigation is 400 + 400 + 1930*0.1 = 993 all res fully buffed, and 3000 + 4000 = 7000 armor OR when using haunt, 10000 armor. Take into account the fact that you could use jungle fortitude and get your dogs to tank 10% for you, all of sudden you’re able to get away with just 3% LS.

“Chance to unleash Angel’s wrath to punish the weak”
This proc is a chain lightning like ability that is checked every time you attack, but the animation is a white/yellow beam type thing that deals holy damage.

The base proc rate is 5%. This value is also increased by up to 80% depending on the amount of dex you have topping out at 2000 similar to before. With 1000 dex we’d get 55% proc rate.

The number of targets that it jumps to (cannot jump to the same target consecutively) is determined by user’s strength. Base rate is 2, but increases up to a maximum of 10 depending on strength using diminishing returns. Let’s say that with 1000 str we hit 7 targets with a 50% chance to jump to an 8th.

Finally the damage of the proc is determined by the base value and has a 2 multipliers based on the degree of slow on the mob and the user’s Int. The first multiplier can be increased by up to a bonus 500% depending on the amount of slow on the mob. With 80% slow you would get a 4x multiplier, with 92% slow (poison darts and one of the other slows) you would get a 4.6x multiplier. The int multiplier would be similar to before where every 500 int adds 100% damage. So if the base was 5000 dmg, we would have: 5000 * (1+4.6) * (1+2500 or 4430/500) = 168k or 276k damage PER target. Finally let’s not forget that we get an extra 25% bonus damage since its holy so we do a total of 210k or 345k damage each time.

Now you see why this WD stacked 45% IAS on a 1.67 APS weapon to get 2.42 attacks/s. At the 55% proc rate you’d be launching 1.33 of these beams/sec on average which would decimate elites whenever you encountered them. Poison dart is also one of the best choices here since its fast, long range, costs little mana and provides a 100% chance of slowing (although slow spiders could still be viable).

Now that we’ve gone over what a potential build would be like let’s analyze how it fulfills the concepts mentioned earlier:

Legendaries that have specific affixes not available on rares
3 of the legendaries here have very unique procs/abilities on them that you could make an entire build around alone. The last +25% bonus to holy is like the WKL where despite the sheet DPS loss, depending on your skills used you can get a large DPS gain.

Legendary procs/properties that scale with various stats
We made the proc rates and utility of the spell here scale off of non-primary stats and thorns. Normally a WD would really only consider getting Str for the purpose of Armor, otherwise they’d ignore non-primary stats. Thorns in this build increases both the offensive power and defensive power of it.

Legendary procs/properties that synergize with specific skills
Here we have the swirly AoE DPS that works wonderfully with pets once they have the fierce loyalty passive. Furthermore, we have synergy between the multitude of slows that the WD possesses and holy chain lightning proc.

Legendaries that are designed to encourage certain play styles and builds
This kind of setup makes pets extremely strong since they actually do damage with stats that you can control! Furthermore, it rewards playing a bit more ranged since slowing the enemies now provides increased damage output as well as utility.

Legendaries leading to gear polarization/different prioritization of stats
The stats sought after by this build are completely different than the normal bears build that focuses on Crit stats and Int and only overlaps with 0CD ZDs really in the department of IAS. We’re going for as much thorns when gearing for this build while picking up a lot of non-primary attributes in addition to getting Int.

One last point about these items that I wanted to make is that in order to balance it out and get the items out faster, I believe that Blizz needs to use the PTR and players more. When these items are designed and you feel confident with them, make an announcement and put them on the PTR. Let the players try it out and see if they can break the game with the item. Depending on how over/underwhelming the builds that emerge from it, adjust the procs and damage accordingly. The main point is that you don’t have to wait till you finished ALL of the items and test them all the PTR all at once. I think it would be much better is players could be more focused on certain elements rather than getting a smorgasbord of changes thrown at them.

I want to end by saying this is in reality only half of the equation. The larger paradigm for determining what builds succeed and fail is dependent on both the player side as well as the environment side and I’ll make a post about the latter variable on a later date.

So for those who managed to make it this far down the wall of text I’m wondering what you guys think of these concepts as the fundamental building blocks for how legendaries should be designed in the future and/or even examples of how these could be applied.

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Itemization and item customization, how will they change Diablo 3? Your thoughts!

So it appears the next big changes coming to Diablo 3 will be both itemization and the ability to customize items. I think both of these ideas are going to really improve peoples desire to play this game, and I think it will bring back a lot of players. Actually being able to find gear for your player while playing the game, rather than spending time in the AH trying to find an upgrade, is what we have all been waiting for. This all sounds great, but what will it change?

First off, if item drops are going to be better and more geared towards the character you are playing, isn't that going to be enough for to get people moving in the right direction? Anyone who has spent hundreds of hours playing this game knows that actually getting an upgrade from a drop is very rare. More often, we are hoping to get an upgrade for someone else that will sell for a significant amount of gold. We then head to the AH with our new found riches and hope someone else has found an upgrade for us. That doesn't seem right, so should be thankful for the AH? No. The AH is the reason top tier items are only available to the top 5% of the Diablo 3 population, and most of them are bought out by bots then placed on the RMAH.

So now legendary items will roll stats based on the monster it dropped from. This is another great idea. This opens up the possibility for more items being useable, and gets away from the cookie cutter item builds that have developed. Hopefully it will also allow more skills to come into play. My concern here is that they will reduce the drop rate of the legendary items to not flood the market.

Item customization might be the biggest game changer of them all. The general feeling is that any customization to an item will automatically bind it to your account. This is going to make those items one step away from being OP, to being completely OP. For example, let's say you have an Echoing Fury that is 1250+ DPS, 150+ main stat, .24+ AS, 2.7%+ LS and 90+ CD, how much more valuable does that item become with a socket? This is just one example. And since these customizations become account bound, how valuable do these items become prior to customizing? I have a feeling more items will be sold via third party sites (d2jsp) to exceed the 2B cap placed on the AH. This brings up the question: what will it cost/take to customize an item? Obviously gold, Demonic Essence, gems and possibly brimstones will all be required. Does it scale with item level, or maybe some sort of item score (think diablo progress)?

And with all that being said, how does the game get rebalanced after all these changes? Everything mentioned above is going to make gearing up your character go from several months to a couple of weeks, once the AH has been restocked. Will it be possible to gear up a character that one shots everything in MP10? Does an endless dungeon that gets more difficult the further you go down become the new end game? If so, that essentially creates a ladder system for Diablo 3, something that a lot of players want to see.

These are just some of my thoughts and ideas based on the information I have read in blue posts and what not. Let me know what you think!

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[Monk][Video]If any of you high end guys are bored of the same old grind, give this a try. Run MP7/MP8 using a LpSS build.

If you are tired of the same old grind and looking for something to keep you on your toes, try running a LpSS build. Ive never used LpSS so I figured, "eh -why not". Turns out, its actually pretty fun.

It is by no means efficient but I was able to farm pretty successfully on MP7 and took out Ghom on MP8 (see video). Sadly, my EHP for this build is in the toilet at 397K - LpSS Monk so that limits its usefulness but I kind of like the play style and the need to think about what Im doing - especially against RD packs!

I am always looking for ways to improve my current game-play so if you guys have any suggestions on what could improve this build, Id love to hear them :)

Video: 

In case you are wondering, the LpSS gear cost a combined total of 20M

Just swapped to a new Inna's and equipped one of the rings from my standard build. That bumped my AR up by ~80 and my DPS by about 30K. Just facetanked MP9 Ghom!! d3up link has been updated!

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Two ideas that would make me excited as hell to keep playing Diablo 3

I must admit I play more SWTOR these days, but here are some input on what would make me want to play more Diablo 3:

Once your jeweler learns the cut, he will be able to use an "Insatiable Gem" to socket an "Insatiable Void" into an item.

"Insatiable Gems" drop randomly in the world. As you feed materials into the gem, it slowly grows in power. The materials that you feed into the gem determine how it will grow. For example, placing green gems will grow it in dexterity, yellow gems will grow it in intellect. Placing gold into the insatiable gem will increase it's gold find, grey items will increase armor. White items will increase it's pickup radius. Blue and yellow items will increase its magic find, and feeding in legendary items has unknown effects. Unfortunately, it is not possible to tell how much an insatiable gem has grown in power before it is attached to an item.

You can continue to feed items into an unsocketed Insatiable Gem indefinitely. At any time you may seek out your jeweler and have him attach an insatiable gem onto an item, and it will imbue that item with increased stats based on the types and quantities of items that have been fed into the gem. Once attached, the gem creates an "insatiable void" on the item - and you can continue to feed items into the void to add stats to the gear (at a slightly lower rate of return than before it was attached.) HOWEVER, attaching the gem to an item prevents you from selling or trading that item to another player. The gem can never be removed.

Chaos Orbs

We all get into ruts sometimes, and need a reason to mix things up. Chaos Orbs are meant to break you out of your rut by giving you a reason to try a different playstyle, without requiring you to buy an entirely different set of gear or play a different class.

Chaos Orbs drop randomly from mobs, and alter the behavior of your spells or provide a new passive ability. Chaos Orbs cannot be traded or sold, and are ethereal - meaning they will dissappear over time. Orbs will drop with a random duration between 2 and 4 hours of playtime. There are 2 types of orbs: Universal, and Class-specific. You can only equip 1 of each type at a time, and in addition to your equipped orbs you may only carry 1 of each type. (Example: You have 2 orbs equipped and 2 in inventory, no new orbs will drop for you.) Class-specific orbs will only drop for the class you are currently playing.

Some examples of Chaos Orbs:

Universal:

• 10% chance to cast a duplicate spell that uses a random rune variant
• Your crit chance is increased by 10% of your critical hit damage
• Killing an enemy increases your run speed by 1% for 5 seconds (Can exceed cap) but damage you take is increased by your run speed.
• Access to abilities from other classes
• Magic find reduced to 0, gold find increased by double your magic find.
• All attacks do AoE damage equal to double your pickup radius.
• Gain 50% of thorns damage as healing

Wizard:

• Meteor strikes land instantly
• Each cast of Magic Missile also casts Arcane Torrent: Death Blossom
• Ray of Frost now penetrates all targets

Barbarian:

• Frenzy now hits all targets within 10 yards
• Weapon throw no longer costs fury, instead generates 2 fury
• Call of the Ancients: Summoned Ancients now last until killed (they inherit your baseline armor, resist, and HP)

Monk:

• Attack speed of Crippling Wave increased by 100%
• While Sweeping Wind is active, each enemy you kill adds 1 second to the duration of Sweeping Wind
• Lashing Tail Kick: Hand of Ytar & Spinning Flame Kick no longer have a spirit cost

Demon Hunter:

• Your Rapid Fire can now be channelled while moving
• Entangling Shot has a 10% chance to activate Fan of Knives: Crippling Razors at the impact site
• Bola shot now detonates instantly upon impact
• All hatred generating attacks have damage increased by 250%, but now cost half the hatred they would normally generate

Witch Doctor:

• Toads generated by Plague of Toads persist for 10 seconds, up 50 active
• Travel speed and damage of Spirit Barrage increased by 100%
• While Angry Chicken is active, each enemy you kill adds 1 second to the duration of Angry Chicken

When a chaos orb expires, you receive the buff "Lawful", increasing damage, armor, and resistances by 10%. Lasts until you equip a new chaos orb.

In order to equip a Chaos Orb, you will need to complete a quest by obtaining a chaotic organ from each Act end-boss: The Butcher, Belial, Azmodan, and Diablo. These are a 100% drop chance at MP1 and above. This will inscribe you with a band of chaos, adding two new inventory slots where you can place Chaos Orbs.

• Each time you die while a Chaos Orb is equipped, you lose 20 minutes from its remaining duration.
• Chance for Chaos Orbs to drop fluctuates based on what you have out of 4, at increments of 25%. (If you have 4 of 4, 0% chance to drop. If you have 2 equipped but none in inventory, +50% chance. If you have none equipped or in inventory, +100% chance.
• As you feed your insatiable gem, you CAN see the quality as it grows from grey, white, blue, yellow...legendary? in color.

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Itemizing a monk from the ground up

I've been away from the game for such a long time (almost pre 1.04)

and I've recently decided to get back to the game again, I feel that I've gotten myself stuck into a corner when itemizing my monk previously (basically whenever I found a better dps upgrade, it ruined my EHP horribly, or vice versa)

I also need to re-think my itemization choices regarding resists (is there any particular resist that comes cheaper than others overall?

is it better to get both ALL RESIST + single resist on each slot, or is it possible to achieve better results using only single resists combined with OWE and aiming for high values, in order to free some of the item budget for better stats ?

I don't want to gradually go through phases of itemization and gear progressions or "tiers", I would prefer to know what's the preferred ideal combination of stats / and the values I should be looking for per each slot, and aim to target these high/maximum values for each slot on a per slot basis instead of upgrading each slot just a little bit.

sorry for rambling on, but what I'm trying to say is a little bit unformulated in my mind.

Here is a profile, to get an idea about what I was building before.

I have no clue what the maximum values for each roll on each slot is, and what is the most optimal combination of special stats that would be beneficial if you are min/maxing (I saw that there's a SOJ legendary now that adds % dmg to elites?)

TL/DR what is the best in slot item build for monks (not in item name wise, but stat value wise per slot, within the maximum rolls and combination of rolls allowed by the game)

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