Gear is looking pretty good. I’d still reroll those shoulders- 3m+ per roll seems like a lot, but if you’re running Hoarder when you farm keys, that’s usually about 50-75m per run, and maybe 4 minutes per run counting town time. Which will buy you quite a few rerolls, even at that price.
And even if you can only get 13 or 14% EQ on there, that’s still 7-8% more damage. But, I mean, if you’re loving the high CDR, then that can certainly work out just fine for you too.
Also- I apologize for this- I think you may want to go back to your Ancient Ancient Parthans… they were definitely less good defensively than your current equipped normal pair, since these have max 12% affix, Vit, and ranged reduction. But, if I remember right, the ancients had 20% fire vs 18% for these normals, and having a max roll there is fairly important since you don’t have fire% on your ammy. Between that higher fire roll and the extra Str from being ancient and the aug, it’s about 6% extra damage. So, might be worth swapping back, since it sounds like just a bit of extra damage might get you over the 15:00 hump.
As for the gloves, I wouldn’t touch them. For now, you’ve got enough CDR, and the nearly 1k Str is pretty valuable. Someday, those will be a very nice pair of quad gloves in non-season (after rolling that Str to CDR).
Ever so barely made it last night. 14:58.316 on what was really not a great rift. Drew Saxtris though, with a little under 3 minutes to go. Had to kite for the first 2 minutes to get him down enough for the adds to pop and sweated it the rest of the way.
I stuck with the non-ancient bracers and after 40 rolls got 15% EQ on the shoulders.
Time to chill for a few days, farm keys, maybe look for some upgrades. But definitely no more fishing for a bit.
Thanks for the help Rage, it made a huge difference that I can feel when playing.
So, since I screwed up on that 130 that was meant to be “for demonstration purposes only”, thus removing my sub 1k paragon clear from the board, I figured I’d just see how far I could get, sub 2k paragon, and no augments, with an expenditure of 100 keys.
Bagged 135 on the ~90th key. About 1900 paragon, 12k Str.
Little chance of me matching that since my skill is poor and I don’t have the patience for that kind of fishing. But I do have the goal of getting to paragon 3000 so I’ll see what I can do with that and I suppose I’ll get enough gems leveled up to augment the build with 135s to 140s.
I’ve never really understood this perspective. I mean, one of the main things to do in this game is to just see how high you can get with a certain build. For me, that is really the only thing, and everything else- getting keys, doing bounties, leveling gems- is just a means to that end. Other people are different, of course, and enjoy doing different stuff, like Chris logging his speed GR progression, or TinneOnnMuin, who does a bit of everything- pushing, speedrunning, theorycrafting, achievement hunting.
If “I hate fishing” were an “I have limited time” thing, I would understand… but the fact of the matter is that it takes a hell of a lot less time to fish 100 keys than to aug every piece with 135s!
We gain keys really fast these days- I can generally farm about 60-75 keys an hour. So dumping 100 keys into a clear only represents about 1.5 hours of work on the “intake” side. And on the “output” side, it doesn’t take much time at all to open a rift, see a bad map or bad mob type, and then close it again. Out of those 100 keys, I probably played some part of about 30 rifts. And many of those ended just a few minutes in, when I reached a level exit and then found myself behind the timer and staring at a Corvus or Cave map, at which point I remade the game.
Fishing is really just a way of using your time efficiently to maximize your clear potential. In terms of “GR levels gained” vs “time spent”, it is definitely more effective than grinding either huge amounts of paragon or high-level augs.
Fishing is okay when my goal is to get a clear.
My perspective is that my time could be going to something more constructive. Hitting a big milestone, finding an amazing new item for your build, sure fishing is great.
For me, personally, I get kind of edgy and pissed off after about 50 keys.
PS - Rage, stop showing off and aug your gear. I can’t speak for anyone else but you are making me feel like a gimp. lol.
Lol, yeah, that’s kind of what I love about it! I start with a big heap of keys, and with every key that doesn’t produce a clear, the tension gets a little higher… I start watching the pile dwindle, and start to think, “am I gonna make it!?”… when it finally goes down, it’s such a sweet feeling!
That’s probably the main thing that’s kept me playing this game for so long.
Spent all my augs on my Frenzy gear, which I think was a better investment… it got me a (short-lived) rank 1… and Frenzy scales up a lot more directly with extra damage from mainstat than MOTE does.
I’d say the last few seasons are ones in where I started to actually fish. And this one most surely the most. (including trial and error on PTR) I could understand frustration from it, but I too side with Rage. Like, that’s the whole point of me fine-tuning and hunting for gear for this purpose. xD Otherwise, I’d stop at FnR rings with STR/crit/Crit.
Sidenote: My 139 progress gained a little traction, not sure how many keys I’ve fished for a good map and mob type, nothing insane, but if i had to guess maybe another 60-80 on top of the 40 some-odd I had previously. I’ve been so close on so many, but knowing I don’t quite have the lead I need for a boss. I love almost everything about this build, but the glaring weakness in Single target is almost excruciating. xD It was rough to see my friend fight a 135 boss without stricken and kill it successfully without a stricken (GodDH) and knowing my 139 boss is gonna take roughly 5 minutes with a stricken. mindblown
I haven’t been keeping up the grind as much as I had in the first two weeks. MTG and Genshin/IRL has stepped in for some good company and moderation for D3. But I should still be able to hit my 3200 paragon goal this season, and with that my goal of smashing a 140 with MOTE should be mildly easy.
EDIT: I hope in the future, they give us a little boost for the build. I amused myself last night by thinking about each tick of EQ stacking stricken. xDD Pure chaos.
Watching your MOTE clears without augs has been hilarious. XD Meanwhile I think back to your concerns about catching up to gons and power. You make me chuckle, good sir. xD
Yeah, Leapquake really is pretty terrible vs single target. I still think that the best solution would be some sort of effect caused by Leap, via Lut Socks, since a) this item is already required for the build, and b) it would be really easy to avoid breaking the game, since Leap can only be cast at a certain rate, no matter your attack speed + CDR.
I look forward to seeing the big 1-4-0 up on the board!
I really find a lot of excitement for the possibilities of this. Because I do still enjoy working for the push, I don’t feel like a super massive multiplier is needed. But, I do feel like something that helps shave the time off elite kills and RG kills is necessary. Boots now feel like the only thing left to add some flavor to. (Though I do think that Band of Might could come with a nice 20-30% damage bonus on it or something since a lot of our builds use it.)
Wouldn’t do anything. You’d still do the exact same amount of damage because the number of EQs you can generate is capped by your Leap speed, which is constant. It doesn’t really matter if they do their damage in 8 seconds, or 0.8 seconds: it’s still the same damage.
For me it’s an evolution of my Diablo 3 career that may end up there.
2014 or 2015 played through the campaign once, beat Diablo, figured that’s it folks, but the game down.
2018 dusted it off, played through the campaign, was capped out at level 60, figured out that I needed to buy RoS to get to level 70, don’t even remember why I cared but I guess I was having fun so I bought it.
Enter the “what the hell is a rift?” phase. I remember having no idea what the progression globes were and why they were sometimes yellow, other times purple.
Played only solo except for bounties and some public key farming until December 2020 when the advice in these forums finally prompted me to learn zbarb.
All this time I was learning more and more about Rend Barb and everything else in the game.
But I just played every rift I entered and figured “that’s it” if I lost. I didn’t have much of an understanding of how much the rift variations impacted your clear time.
A this point it’s not that I hate fishing. It’s really two things:
I think (or have thought) my time is better spent in the long run improving my hero.
I don’t know the maps and mob types that well and I’m not disciplined enough to quickly decide NG.
Yes but it’s more satisfying to watch gems and paragon go up and know you’re making progress then to bail on a bunch of maps in a row.
Having said that, it could be an example of “common sense” not leading to the right conclusion. Another example is bounties - I used to run them a lot so that I could use my forgotten souls to reforge legendaries. Otherwise the souls go to waste, right? What else do I have them for? Then one day Chris said bounties are the biggest waste of time in the game, only do them when they have double bounties. I also started to learn that Primal doesn’t matter, and even Ancient is secondary to getting all the right stats, and the power gain you can get from improving a good ancient piece is negligible compared to the effort you put in to re-roll. So now I only spend a minimal amount of time doing bounties.
Point being that I see your point and I may get to the place where I feel that’s the way I should spend my time.
Thanks for the personal history, always interesting to hear about that kind of thing.
Mind you, I’m not saying you need to play the game this way or that way… what I am saying is just to be mindful of what you’re doing, and why. If your goal is to improve your play, then more of that is learning the ins and outs of a build than finding perfect primals or grinding augs.
But, many people just like grinding, or collecting amazing gear for its own sake, and that’s cool too.
