So, uh, what am I doing wrong with Zolton Kulle?

General Discussion
49

If you read more of their posts you will see that they want to go through the game with each class in a classic style. “What people normally do in Seasons” is not relevant in this case for a couple of reasons:

  • The standard procedure in starting a season is to go straight to Adventure mode with all followers and grab a weapon upgrade and go straight to Kuhl at L1. That works fine even at, say, Master difficulty. It looks like the OP is working story mode on each character so the option to mine the followers for weapons and meet ZK at L1 is not on the board - not because they are “stupid”, but because that’s not what they are looking for from the game at this point in time.
  • It’s great you can fight ZK at any level whenever on season, but since they aren’t doing season, that doesn’t apply here. They were L67 when they got to ZK and that’s not a good level to be fighting a boss unless they have a weapon upgrade. They pointed out that they had plenty of legendaries from the other characters they’ve played before Barb, but they didn’t want to use them - i.e. they’re intentionally going through in a classic character-self-found-ish way that doesn’t match the pattern you are suggesting.
  • Not everyone plays the game the same way. I usually don’t follow suggested procedures either because they have a dry clinical approach to min/max effective stats and they optimize out most play mechanics for the prospect of getting to an End Game state that I don’t find compelling. But, I’ve been around long enough to understand the differences and know how to interpret the standard wisdom about “how players think we should be doing things” against my own goals. This player is just starting out, doing things their own way, and doesn’t know - or care - how most people do things. Suggestions for this case need to be tailored to what they are looking to get out of the game, otherwise it is just you pushing your expectations on someone - and that’s on you, not them.
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50

I’m not just starting out, I just don’t play D3 very often, but I never bother with min-maxing for the same reason I didn’t learn coding and write a trainer - it’s boring and takes all the fun out of it. All these guys saying “Ya but if you go directly to adventure mode on a new character you can jump immediately to Act 2 and kill the weaker bosses if you steal a weapon from a minion.” miss the entire point.

Getting past Kulle is as easy as opening up the menu, selecting “Easy”, and starting the game at the waypoint. That was never the objective.

What’s even worse is that most of the advice is “You can beat Kulle at level 1 at low difficultly why didn’t you do that?” like the meta is literally the only way to do it and anything else doesn’t make sense.

It’s like, my question is about getting good pizza in DC, and they all keep asking why I didn’t get Thai food in San Francisco 6 months ago.

Edit: Just dropping from Torment 1 to Master takes off 50m health off of him. I wonder how much -66 levels would remove?

51

I think there might be a bug with his slow time bubble. It use to just slow, but this season I noticed it actually literally freezes or stuns my character and I aren’t able to do anything for a second or two. Not sure about the bounty or act boss because I kill it so quickly, but definately noticed this during High Level GR and sometimes in rifts.

52

I have to say I didn’t know about this technique at all!
I might have to try it…

But I am curious… I find hard to believe that killing 1 boss, restarting the game, killing that 1 boss again a number of times yield a good number of XP per hour than, say, playing the game normally… :open_mouth:

53

If you’re dying in this game then your gear sucks or your build isn’t synergizing…

If you’re playing an old build from 2 years ago, chances are, that build is trash now… I’d go so far to say that any build over 6 months old is basically useless garbage at this point in the games life.

They just patched the game a few weeks ago and all the old top-end builds are now mid-tier builds and there’s a whole new meta for every class build…

Ether way your best bet is to just farm rifts until you can do a GR and start getting mad legendary drops from that… put together a build that works and just continue to power creep your way up through the torment levels…

Use the website Icy Veins to find a build… they have the 5 or 6 best builds for every class on there.

At T1 you could quickly jump to T4 after you acquire 2 of your set pieces and some decent legendaries to fill other slots.

After you find 4 of your set pieces, maybe improve some legendaries you should be able to conquer T6 or 7… after you obtain your full set you should be able to do T10 - T11 no problem.

Then it’s just a matter of farming T10 until you mop up the rest of your BiS gear or just get existing gear with better rolls to do T13+

T16 requires your build to have all BiS items with good rolls, once you can farm T16 you’re looking for the same gear only ancient versions or primal ancient versions if you’re lucky enough.

And that’s Diablo III… have fun.

54

@OP take a look here:

Specifically section 2 which is about 1-70 leveling. It is geared towards Seasonal play, but you will find it of use, your skill choices are what is holding you back.

55

You don’t need min maxing until you’re pushing your gr limit. And you sure as don’t need min maxing when fighting ZK as he’s more the easier boss (Malthael is the only boss that sticks out as his damage is still quite decent compare to other bosses, and some of his skills being harder to dodge). You just set the difficulty level way over your head, and you’re wondering why you’re having trouble? That’s like you setting the difficulty to Torment 6 and wondering what’s going on.

And yes, like it was implied in some of the post here (sorry, didn’t read all). Difficulty jumps at level 61, and your gear starts losing its power faster as you get closer to 70.

56

Jesus Christ, I had no idea enrage timers were still in the game. FFS, you can thank Jay Wilson for implementing that. Enrage timers do NOT belong in an ARPG.

Why hasn’t this completely unnecessary mechanic been taken out by now? There is no reason you shouldn’t be able to kill a boss on whatever difficulty you choose. If you are skilled enough to do so, you should have that option.

This is one of the things that I can say was in Diablo 2 without worry about being called nostalgic or whatever. If you were good enough to kite the boss and not die, you felt good knowing you could do that. Why is it necessary to force the player to lower the difficulty in order to progress? Shouldn’t you reward skill and hard work rather than GG ez mode?

Blizzard, PLEASE remove enrage timers. Literally WTF?

Edit: Made a new character just to see this. I made it to the Skeleton king, and have been letting him wail on me for 10 minutes now, still no enrage…Only certain bosses enrage?

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57

Or I’m intentionally playing a difficulty at the absolute maximum of what my character can handle.

I set it as high as I could handle. I wasn’t sure if it was the difficulty (since I could whittle at him and get him down to as low as 10 million health from 127) or something like an enrage timer.

Turns out, it was an enrage timer.

58

If you play a lot of HC you will quickly realise finding the correct difficulty level is trickier than it seems.
Sometimes everything seems fine and dandy for a while, you become over confident, and BAM, double elite with nasty affixes or attacks suddenly appear and you death proc twice in a row very quickly and meet a not so peaceful end…

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59

OP, You made a big deal about playing the story mode on Torment 1 but then sort of insinuated that a level 1 character using adventure mode to get better loot was somehow unbalancing.

Well guess what. Here’s what is going to happen. You are level 67 in the middle of Act 2. Once you hit 70, the level scaling will stop. You have already unbalanced the game.

You will be rewarded with level 70 loot for the rest of the game. The monsters will not get harder but the loot you can craft and get from drops will be far greater than what you’ve been finding currently. Plus you will find better combos and builds that work with end game gear. A lvl 70 Rare axe has 3000+ dps for example.
Once you hit Level 70 you will also be receiving a ton of paragon levels which will continue to advance the power of your character while the monsters stay the same. Paragon is assigning skill points to key stats like Str, Life, Crit chance etc.

By the time you reach Act V the game will feel so freaking pedestrian because you’ll be doing so much insane damage that you are mopping the floor with anything that gets in your way without even thinking about it.

Personally I think you put WAY to much emphasis on the tutorial mode of this game. You may or may not know this but the real game doesn’t actually start till level 70. NRifts and greater rifts and grinding out paragon are constantly challenging your build and gear and providing you with new gear and content for hundreds and hundreds of hours to come after reaching 70.

Trust me dude you haven’t even started playing the game. SO don’t worry about it get to 70, dominate everything in story mode, then come join the rest of the world in the real game.

*Also seasons are the same as regular play except that you are temporarily separated from the normal players. You also get rewards for achievements during the few months you play like the class set of the season and special bonus world events.

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60

Oh well then you’re just not playing Diablo III properly is all… that’s not how you do it… sorry. :slight_smile: Blizzard’s already dictated to us how they want us to play the game, you’re just causing yourself problems on purpose…

61

drop the difficulty if you can’t handle torment yet. You shouldn’t try torment 1 before you have BiS yellow gear tbh

This game’s difficulty isn’t balanced towards skill tbh. They just make the numbers bigger.

62

Why not to craft weapon at blascksmith - craft something with lvl70, then reroll the secondary mod on it for lvl reduction. Bam, you have lvl70 weapon with like 2-3 times dps.

63

I’m not going to say “OP is doing it wrong” because of the situation he is in, but I will agree that the game was rebalanced over the years to the point that L67 fighting ZK without a reduced level weapon hasn’t been on the designers radar for many years now. That doesn’t mean that wanting to face that challenge is “wrong”, it’s just going outside the current design focus/criteria of the developers.

And “different approaches” can be fun and their own challenge at the same time. In days gone by I’ve done the “Hardcore Glass Cannon challenge” and had a lot of fun doing it. Did the designers specifically add that as a mode when they designed the game? No. Was it easy? No. Did it make good use of the game mechanics? No. Was it fun? Heck, yeah!

When the game started, story mode progression from 1-60 was a bigger deal and required a lot more effort and was reasonably well balanced compared to 1-70 balancing in the current state of the game design. The game is pretty much designed to get that 1-70 out of the way these days and most of the changes happened prior to or with the advent of the extra 10 levels 61-70 (which is also probably the reason why those levels are the ugly stepchild of the current (non)standard progression).

It’s popular to want to get to end game these days, but that doesn’t mean it is the only way to play, or even the only “smart” way to play. If the OP gets bored with what they are doing, they can always adopt the common “here is how to get leveling out of the way” techniques later. If you want to explain how the game is designed and let them decide that’s great, but phrases like “the only way to” or “the designers want you to” or “you’re stupid if you” don’t belong in this conversation (or, really, any conversation).

But, none of that says that it is inappropriate to want to do story mode, or a self-found progression of a new character, or work on one leveling effort for each class before moving on to the end game activities that the developers have been giving more attention to. While I feel that I didn’t do a good job of characterizing what the OP was looking for in my previous message, it is pretty clear that “getting 1-70 out of the way to get to end game” isn’t really what they are focusing on right now.

Also, the game doesn’t completely flatten out after L70. There are no more skills to (l)earn, and you gain power in a different way (paragon), but monster power has a huge scale after that by playing with difficulty level and Greater Rift level pushing. The difficulty curve is just measured and managed differently after L70.

64

I start my characters on Torment 1 and drop only when necessary.

But I won’t sneer at people playing on easy all the time. :wink:

65

Then why are you complaining about that damage?

Under normal circumstances (master difficulty for example) those leaps shouldn’t take more than 35~40% of your health. That’s how the fight was designed to be tackled. You raised the numbers on purpose and overtuned the boss

66

Is a question, not a complaint.

67

Before I started playing Seasonal, Zoltan Kulle was most certainly the toughest Boss Fight for me (I played Witch Doctor). I thought I was pretty powerful at that point, handling most Elites fairly well, and so going into the fight with Kulle, I thought I would do equally well…

All did go well, at first. I was staying alive, his guardians were defeated, and his life was dwindling. Then out of nowhere he teleports on top of me and WHACK, he takes away 90% of my health in one hit. Before my Zombie Dogs had a chance to heal me, WHACK, Kulle hits me again, killing me, but with my Spirit Vessel keeping me alive. But not too long after that, though, WHACK again, and with that I was dead.

I tried a few more times, but realized, to my sorrow, I was not powerful enough to defeat him, yet. There was no way to avoid his attack, and it did too much damage.

I ended up having to go back a bit and build myself up more, finding better gear before trying him again. What worked for me (I never knew his big damage teleport/attack was on a timer), was getting my defense high enough and my life per hit high enough to where I could recover from his attack without dying, and then I could just wear him down. Not sure if that would work for the OP, but that is how I did it.

I think many of the people here have played Seasonal so much that they have forgotten what Campaign Mode is like (many may have never played it at all). Drop Rate is so so so much lower in Campaign Mode, compared to Bounties, Neph Rifts, and Greater Rifts. I played almost the first four Acts with only getting a 2-piece partial set, and not even getting 4 pieces of any set… So, to suggest to him that his setup is wrong, or his build is wrong, it isn’t! He only has the gear that has dropped for him, which is far less than what he would get with seasonal. He might be lucky to only have 3 or 4 legendaries, and not even 2 pieces of a single set!

So, whatever answers any of you might give, try to keep in mind the very limited selection of items he probably has.

Personally, I disagree with most of the replies I have read. I don’t think doing bigger damage is going to get you victory over Kulle. I think the answer is better defense and Life per Hit, so that you can survive and recover from KUlle’s Teleport Attack, and be able to keep wearing him down.

Maybe use Frenzy while wielding 2 weapons and see if you can get some items with a lot of Life per Hit in them to boost up your recovery. I am not sure whether Kulle has a visual animation right before he teleports, but if he does, how about trying to time your Ignore Pain right before he uses it? Keep a good purple gem in your socketed helm, and have good defensive Passive Skills turned on. And your selection of items may be limited, but you can still make sure to keep the ones you do have optimized with the Enchantress. But. if you have already done all of these things, then you may have to do what I did, which was to go back and replay areas you’ve already done in order to get better items. I certainly like these types of ideas better than dummying down the difficulty setting just so you can get past him…

Good luck and have fun!

68

You guys are over complicating this thing.

He plays Barbarian. The cheerleader class. This is the root of the problem.

-_-