Appreciate all of the different perspectives from everyone.
Yeah, my stigmata was primarily from the early days with Diablo 3 when the game didn’t know what it wanted to be, so I figured I’d probe around here to figure out a thing or two.
Diablo 3 was very poorly designed at the beginning, big in part to mr Jay Wilson taking the helm.
I am starting to get a feel for the way the game wants to be played with my current playthrough in just the last 5 hours, so I’ll give the Diablo 3 endgame a whirl, see how it feels for me now.
Oh trust me, I cannot wait for Diablo 4. I am quite excited, truth be told.
Yes. I think GR’s are boring af. Most seasons I do far more bounties than GR’s. It is possible to get all you need to farm up to T16.
It is still feasible. It will just take you probably 5 to 10 times longer than if you did rifts/GR’s too. I can go from fresh season start to having all 13 of my gear pieces by 5-10 hours rngesus depending. You should be able to do it with no rifts in 25 to 50 hours of game play.
That all depends on how you value your fun. If fun for you is mindlessly killing monsters and only getting a loot pinata at the end, do GR’s. If fun for you is finding loot as you mindlessly kill monsters, then don’t do GR’s.
I know you said you do not want to do any rifts, but regular rifts have a lot of loot along the way, so before you brush those off, give them a small try. They can be actually fun, especially if you hit a goblin pack.
T16 is very, very farmable with less than 400 paragon, no legendary gems, an non-ancient gear if the OP is OK with playing an established set build, and grinding T16 is how high the OP will go without doing rifts/GRs. Grinding paragon is really only necessary if you want to push GR’s which the OP has zero interest in doing atm.
I was just messing around doing the story line. Every goblin I killed it drop a gift. I was working on Zoltun Kulle in act 2 and pickup about 20 drops.
If you are not going to run GR’s, there is no point in accruing paragon. I can speed run T16 with 400 paragon as fast as I can with 10,000 paragon. You can kill an ant with your boot, or drop a building on it, the result is the same.
As the OP has no interest in running or pushing GR’s, gaining xp is not going to be important to what his goals are, so again, grinding paragon is not something he needs to do.
No, you can’t, if that was the case I wonder why on your seasonal DH at Paragon 700+ clearly geared for non GR content have exactly zero speed skills or speed increasing legendaries equipped?
Technically you can get items through cubing so it is possible to get a build going, probably (and if you manage to get t16 viable, you’ll be swimming in mats)
However, exp gains are next to nothing compared to the exponential curve of paragon levels, so you won’t get very far in that regard.
Since you’re not running rifts though, it’s questionable whether you would even need paragon, but yeah, you ain’t getting past the first few hundreds probably.
Edit: you will also be missing legendary gems which are pretty important. Idk if you can do t16 without them.
Also, no augments either since no gems and no echoing nightmares.
This conversation has been incredibly helpful as someone else who is returning to the game after many years, and deciding if and how to invest some time in building out a geared-up necromancer while enjoying the winter break in b-school classes. Downtime is rare, efficiency is a must, so rifting it is!
I do, my point was there zero reason to not run speed passives if it’s as you said just as easy to speed run at paragon 400 as there is at paragon 10000, why intentionally gimp yourself?
You’re running Boon of the Hoarder, that’s at minimum a 20% loss there if you don’t bother changing between grifts and other, ignoring that the speed increase between your generic build and an actual speed build is quite a bit more than 2%.
That’s right, I was running a basic gold find build when I stopped playing this season in like week 2. I did log on to run my puzzles when they started the holiday gifts. Again, I am not worried about max efficiency, otherwise I would not be running UE in the first place as there are faster speed builds.
Most people play games for fun and are not worried about max efficiency. OP is obviously not worried about efficiency, which is why grinding paragon will net him little to no benefit for what he wants to accomplish. Believe it or not, you can easily get 800 to 1000 paragon in a season without doing one single rift/GR. Will it take longer to get there, yes, but I would rather take longer doing something I enjoy than do something I do not enjoy for the sake of efficiency.
Bounties, as I understand it, are similarly treated as campaign mode so there is a decreased drop rate making them not worthy of doing except for materials, overall, considering the XP is low and the items are as well, compared to a GR over 90+.
Open world difficulty is limited to t16, which is ultra-easy once you have a basic set gear. And even with reduced drop rates you’ll get the gear pretty quick. This game is meant to be played mostly in greater rifts.
No one is saying you shouldn’t play the way you want. But there’s a difference in freedom of gaming style vs advising a relative new player to play against the designed purpose of the game. Main stream model of D3 post game is GR since its introduction in 2015. OP can decide what he wants AFTER he experiences the mode, not based on past experiences from other games or description from other players. That is the adventure he is entitled to find out for himself.
I don’t think anyone mentioned, you must do some leveling in Rifts and GRifts and level some legendary gems to specific levels in order to finish the Seasons journey, if that is part of your goals, if you are just into Non Seasons it really doesn’t matter, it will just take longer to get there. Good luck!
