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Diablo 3 n00b, some quick questions

Bramble

Member
So guys, I bought Diablo 3 (PS4) years back and this week I bought the Switch version. Up until now, I only really played the campaign and 1 or 2 rifts, but I'm trying to get really into it as my go-to-kill-some-time-looting game.

First of all, I started using the Necromancer on Switch and I have a question about this dude. I can equip a sword or any other melee weapon, but he has no ability where he actually uses this sword. His primary skills are all summon stuff. Does it even matter which weapon I equip? Does the level of this weapon scale with the damage I do with my primary attack?

Second, I'm trying to figure out the proper gameplay loop. Adventure mode on Switch let's you start with a fresh character. You can do the bounties and bosses in each act and on top of that you can create rifts in the town. What's the proper way to do this? Are the rifts in the later acts harder than in the first act? Should I first do all bounties and bosses in each act and than just do rifts in the final one, upping the difficulty?

Third, do you guys buy/forge actual weapons in the towns? Or is the loot that you get from rifts/bounties/bosses way better?
 

e0n

Member
1. Nothing major, just look for better primary stat and check passives. Certain weapon types have more class-specific modifiers like wands for wizards.
2. I usually like to do act 1, then alternate rifts/bounties. I don't think it matters what act you start the rift, only the level chosen.
3. I don't bother with buying items on shops. Only useful if you want a certain weapon type that you can later transform using the cube.
 
As e0n e0n said, run a bit of story to get some levels under your belt and get the Skeleton king's crown and then switch over to adventure mode.

Make sure to keep increasing the difficulty as you go so the drops get better.

Make sure you have a seasonal character so you can get the set armour for completing challenges.

Don't hold on to legendary weapons or armour for too long until you hit level 70, as a level 65 rare can easily outclass a level 60 legendary.

Weapons and armour have a main stat that you want to match to your character, STR - INT - DEX and so on, they don't change the type of attacks you can do.

Change the ability tree to advanced mode so you can use multiple skills from the same branch.

Have fun.
 

Inviusx

Member
So guys, I bought Diablo 3 (PS4) years back and this week I bought the Switch version. Up until now, I only really played the campaign and 1 or 2 rifts, but I'm trying to get really into it as my go-to-kill-some-time-looting game.

First of all, I started using the Necromancer on Switch and I have a question about this dude. I can equip a sword or any other melee weapon, but he has no ability where he actually uses this sword. His primary skills are all summon stuff. Does it even matter which weapon I equip? Does the level of this weapon scale with the damage I do with my primary attack?

Second, I'm trying to figure out the proper gameplay loop. Adventure mode on Switch let's you start with a fresh character. You can do the bounties and bosses in each act and on top of that you can create rifts in the town. What's the proper way to do this? Are the rifts in the later acts harder than in the first act? Should I first do all bounties and bosses in each act and than just do rifts in the final one, upping the difficulty?

Third, do you guys buy/forge actual weapons in the towns? Or is the loot that you get from rifts/bounties/bosses way better?

Hey, Diablo 3 is an awesome game on all platforms. One of the best ARPGs around, here's my answer to your questions:

1. Necro builds never rely on melee. They do wield a scythe which was a new unique weapon type added to the game when Necro was released but its not really used as a "click and attack" melee weapon. Their strengths lay in their spells, like raising skeletons to fight for you, corpse explosion and summoning skeletal makes to tear shit up. In the end game they are all about summoning shit to do the work for you. The play style will start to make more sense as you level up and unlock more skills. Also as you start to acquire set items for the Necro they will give you a bit of a starting guide on how to spec your character and what skills to use as the set gear tends to enhance particular skills and play styles.

2. If you're new to the game, i absolutely recommend playing through the story mode first, there are 5 chapters including the DLC expansion and you will see the entire game, all the bosses most of the environments and you get to see how the story unfolds. You should hit the level cap of 70 by the time your done with the story. Play on a minimum difficulty of Hard so that you get the XP boost and feel free to up the difficulty if you want more of a challenge. The higher difficulties will award more XP and better loot find percentages. Once you've seen the story that's when I recommend moving to adventure mode. You can visit any of the areas freely, complete chapter specific missions that are dynamic each time you play and then start focusing on the real end game, which leads on to your 3rd question.

3. Crafting gear is never necessary IMHO, what you will find just from drops alone will carry you through the entire 5 chapters. Once you hit 70 and you're done with the story, the end game starts and ends with Nephalim Rifts. These are repeatable randomly generated dungeons that will provide your primary source for gear farming. The rifts can be enhanced to become Greater Rifts which offers better rewards but come with a time limit. You can also increase the rift level to further stack your loot find percentage.

On top of that you will collect blood shards at the end of a rift that can cash in with Kadala who is an NPC in every town hub, you can roll gear with her to try and find a gear for a particular slot.

Once you hit 70 you will start to accumulate paragon points that are infinite in number and allow you to assign points against other stat bonuses in the paragon tree.

In all honesty there is a lot more to the stuff I've mentioned above, like obtaining gear power through Kanais Cube, class specific trial challenges, goblin farming, seasons etc etc.

IMHO, play through the regular campaign first and then tackle Adventure Mode, you will be comfortable with the games systems by that point so the your end game goals will be clearer.

Have fun and if you get bored with the Necro all the classes are viable so don't be afraid to reroll if things become tedious or if you're not having fun anymore.
 

sobaka770

Banned
I'll pitch in:

1. Weapons basically determine your base attack value and attack speed value. Make sure you maximise your DPS early on and when you get comfortable you can start looking at other stats and sockets.
2. If you never ran through a D3/RoS campaign - it's not a bad idea to do it in order to experience the story. Keep increasing difficulty to get xp and loot bonuses. D3 story is pretty rough, but there are cool things happening if you listen to dialogues and collect tomes. The biggest issues is that if you don't do that and just beeline the main storyline - it feels quite shitty. Reaper of Souls Act 5 is great. You can start doing Rifts and Bounties early but you get boss/location spoilers and if all you want is to slay and get loot - it's the way to go for fast level ups.
3. Bought items are pretty useless. Just gamble with Kadala and that's it.
 

Bitmap Frogs

Mr. Community
Your weapon is a stat stick. Skills and abilities are calculated as a % of damage per hit and the stats on the weapon are very useful - typically you can roll crit damage on weapons and slotting a ruby increases that even more. Crit damage is godly - it massively benefits your pets since their damage is calculated as a % of your damage per hit.

You should run through the campaign, specially as a new player. It’s fun and it’ll level your char to 70 if you run it at least on hard difficulty.

Vendor gear is mostly useless except to feed it into crafting recipes some of these are rather good but the good ones tend to be loot drops so I dunno if you have them available.

Once you hit 70 your priority is to get on the rift train - not only you get loot and xp but also you get blood shards. Statistically is relatively easy to get set armor from vala and sets are godly.
 

Graciaus

Member
Don't you have to beat the campaign at least once to unlock adventure mode? After I unlocked it I never played the campaign again. If you can skip the campaign completely since you played it on ps4. Just do bounties until you hit max level then start rifts.
 

Hari Seldon

Member
Save all of your legendaries with orange text. You can cube them later to suck their orange text power out. Didn’t realize this the first time I was playing. It is one of the primary ways to hugely jump in power level.
 

Bramble

Member
1. Nothing major, just look for better primary stat and check passives. Certain weapon types have more class-specific modifiers like wands for wizards.
2. I usually like to do act 1, then alternate rifts/bounties. I don't think it matters what act you start the rift, only the level chosen.
3. I don't bother with buying items on shops. Only useful if you want a certain weapon type that you can later transform using the cube.

So still not clear. Should I equip a melee weapon with the Necromancer, even though he doesn't actually swing it? Does it increase his attack damage?

Okay so no buying items, thanks.

As e0n e0n said, run a bit of story to get some levels under your belt and get the Skeleton king's crown and then switch over to adventure mode.

Make sure to keep increasing the difficulty as you go so the drops get better.

Make sure you have a seasonal character so you can get the set armour for completing challenges.

Don't hold on to legendary weapons or armour for too long until you hit level 70, as a level 65 rare can easily outclass a level 60 legendary.

Weapons and armour have a main stat that you want to match to your character, STR - INT - DEX and so on, they don't change the type of attacks you can do.

Change the ability tree to advanced mode so you can use multiple skills from the same branch.

Have fun.

Yeah I already finished the campaign and doing bounties in Adventure Mode also helps leveling and I get the feeling the loot is better. I got the crown, but I'm now getting to a point where it's stats are worse than some random drops. I guess I should get to level 70 and upgrade it at the Cube? I seem to be missing some ingredients. I guess I will find those inside the rifts?

Where can I change the ability tree? I feel like I'm overlooking this.

Hey, Diablo 3 is an awesome game on all platforms. One of the best ARPGs around, here's my answer to your questions:

1. Necro builds never rely on melee. They do wield a scythe which was a new unique weapon type added to the game when Necro was released but its not really used as a "click and attack" melee weapon. Their strengths lay in their spells, like raising skeletons to fight for you, corpse explosion and summoning skeletal makes to tear shit up. In the end game they are all about summoning shit to do the work for you. The play style will start to make more sense as you level up and unlock more skills. Also as you start to acquire set items for the Necro they will give you a bit of a starting guide on how to spec your character and what skills to use as the set gear tends to enhance particular skills and play styles.

2. If you're new to the game, i absolutely recommend playing through the story mode first, there are 5 chapters including the DLC expansion and you will see the entire game, all the bosses most of the environments and you get to see how the story unfolds. You should hit the level cap of 70 by the time your done with the story. Play on a minimum difficulty of Hard so that you get the XP boost and feel free to up the difficulty if you want more of a challenge. The higher difficulties will award more XP and better loot find percentages. Once you've seen the story that's when I recommend moving to adventure mode. You can visit any of the areas freely, complete chapter specific missions that are dynamic each time you play and then start focusing on the real end game, which leads on to your 3rd question.

3. Crafting gear is never necessary IMHO, what you will find just from drops alone will carry you through the entire 5 chapters. Once you hit 70 and you're done with the story, the end game starts and ends with Nephalim Rifts. These are repeatable randomly generated dungeons that will provide your primary source for gear farming. The rifts can be enhanced to become Greater Rifts which offers better rewards but come with a time limit. You can also increase the rift level to further stack your loot find percentage.

On top of that you will collect blood shards at the end of a rift that can cash in with Kadala who is an NPC in every town hub, you can roll gear with her to try and find a gear for a particular slot.

Once you hit 70 you will start to accumulate paragon points that are infinite in number and allow you to assign points against other stat bonuses in the paragon tree.

In all honesty there is a lot more to the stuff I've mentioned above, like obtaining gear power through Kanais Cube, class specific trial challenges, goblin farming, seasons etc etc.

IMHO, play through the regular campaign first and then tackle Adventure Mode, you will be comfortable with the games systems by that point so the your end game goals will be clearer.

Have fun and if you get bored with the Necro all the classes are viable so don't be afraid to reroll if things become tedious or if you're not having fun anymore.

Yeah like I said I already did the campaign on PS4. Not interested in doing it again on Switch. I just wanna drop in and do some stuff. I don't think I've seen Kadala yet. Or is she the Transmog NPC?

I'll pitch in:

1. Weapons basically determine your base attack value and attack speed value. Make sure you maximise your DPS early on and when you get comfortable you can start looking at other stats and sockets.
2. If you never ran through a D3/RoS campaign - it's not a bad idea to do it in order to experience the story. Keep increasing difficulty to get xp and loot bonuses. D3 story is pretty rough, but there are cool things happening if you listen to dialogues and collect tomes. The biggest issues is that if you don't do that and just beeline the main storyline - it feels quite shitty. Reaper of Souls Act 5 is great. You can start doing Rifts and Bounties early but you get boss/location spoilers and if all you want is to slay and get loot - it's the way to go for fast level ups.
3. Bought items are pretty useless. Just gamble with Kadala and that's it.

Thanks.

Your weapon is a stat stick. Skills and abilities are calculated as a % of damage per hit and the stats on the weapon are very useful - typically you can roll crit damage on weapons and slotting a ruby increases that even more. Crit damage is godly - it massively benefits your pets since their damage is calculated as a % of your damage per hit.

You should run through the campaign, specially as a new player. It’s fun and it’ll level your char to 70 if you run it at least on hard difficulty.

Vendor gear is mostly useless except to feed it into crafting recipes some of these are rather good but the good ones tend to be loot drops so I dunno if you have them available.

Once you hit 70 your priority is to get on the rift train - not only you get loot and xp but also you get blood shards. Statistically is relatively easy to get set armor from vala and sets are godly.

Also thanks for the tips. I'm on level 42 now by just doing Adventure Mode bounties and bosses. I will proceed to rifts when I hit 70.

All good advice so far, rift to grift and use the cube

Alright. :)

Don't you have to beat the campaign at least once to unlock adventure mode? After I unlocked it I never played the campaign again. If you can skip the campaign completely since you played it on ps4. Just do bounties until you hit max level then start rifts.

On PS4, yes, which I did. On Switch Adventure Mode is unlocked from the get go.

Save all of your legendaries with orange text. You can cube them later to suck their orange text power out. Didn’t realize this the first time I was playing. It is one of the primary ways to hugely jump in power level.

That's helpful. Does that also increase the weapon level?
 

Bitmap Frogs

Mr. Community
So still not clear. Should I equip a melee weapon with the Necromancer, even though he doesn't actually swing it? Does it increase his attack damage?

The character has a statistic which is called damage per hit. This is based on the damage of your equipped weapon and then it factors your primary statistic (str, dex, int depending on class) and other stats like attack speed, critical hit chance, critical hit damage and so on.

In Diablo 3 your spell damage, your minion damage is calculated as a % of that damage per hit.
 
So still not clear. Should I equip a melee weapon with the Necromancer, even though he doesn't actually swing it? Does it increase his attack damage?

Okay so no buying items, thanks.



Yeah I already finished the campaign and doing bounties in Adventure Mode also helps leveling and I get the feeling the loot is better. I got the crown, but I'm now getting to a point where it's stats are worse than some random drops. I guess I should get to level 70 and upgrade it at the Cube? I seem to be missing some ingredients. I guess I will find those inside the rifts?



That's helpful. Does that also increase the weapon level?
Weapons with intelligence as their primary stat will increase your damage output regardless of type of your a necromancer.

If you want a better crown just go and beat the Skeleton King again. The ingredients for the cube come from horadric caches which you get for completing all of the bounties for a given area. Upgrading rare gear is pretty much pointless. Until you get to level 70 everything is disposable and when you do get there you want to farm set items(green drops) anyway.

Extracting a power destroys the item but allows you to equip 3 extracted powers, 1 each for weapon, armour, and jewellery. This means you can keep an items power workout having to worry about whether the actual item will fit into your build.
 

Bramble

Member
Quick question about the bounties/bosses in Adventure Mode: do these periodically reset? I notice they reset when you increase the difficulty. Do they also reset within the same difficulty?
 

Bitmap Frogs

Mr. Community
Quick question about the bounties/bosses in Adventure Mode: do these periodically reset? I notice they reset when you increase the difficulty. Do they also reset within the same difficulty?

Just make a new game with the same settings.

Haven't played in a while, that's what we'd do to reset the bounties and bosses in adventure mode - if they implemented a reset switch ingame, I wouldn't know.
 

DavidGzz

Member
You upgrade one handed and two handed level 70 rare scythes into legendaries. You cube the two handed scythe and use a one hander on your character with a good offhand.

You can first craft said rare scythes at the blacksmith.
 
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Bramble

Member
Another quick question: does it matter in which area you start a rift? In other words: apart from being randomly generated, does Act I get different rift than Act V?
 

Bitmap Frogs

Mr. Community
Another quick question: does it matter in which area you start a rift? In other words: apart from being randomly generated, does Act I get different rift than Act V?

Nah.

Rifts are rifts. People prefer act 1 or 5 because the layout of the hub is more convenient than the other hubs.
 

Bramble

Member
What do you guys do with low level legendaries? I mean there isn't a way to upgrade them to match drops your getting above level 70, is there? Should I just extract their power? I also have Leoric's Crown, but that also has a very low level. Even with a gem in it. Should I just salvage it or extract it's power?
 

Ceadeus

Member
What do you guys do with low level legendaries? I mean there isn't a way to upgrade them to match drops your getting above level 70, is there? Should I just extract their power? I also have Leoric's Crown, but that also has a very low level. Even with a gem in it. Should I just salvage it or extract it's power?

Recycle those. You'll only want to keep max level stuff. You'll get to know what gear you want to keep. Diablo 3 is generous with legendary drops and they usually are for your class. Once you did the story you don't ever need to do it again. You can simply leveling in adventure mode then start doing rift and bountys
 
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Ceadeus

Member
Recycle = extract power at the Cube?

And when is something max level?
Oh oops, I meant salvage for material. I never used the Cube though! I can't help with this question. Max level is 70, same for items. Only the attributes are variable so you may find the same legendary but with different skills.

I would suggest to get to know the skills of your character, then try finding gear that boost these skills. I'm afraid I can't give better advice , I have not played for a while and my english suck right now.
 
What do you guys do with low level legendaries? I mean there isn't a way to upgrade them to match drops your getting above level 70, is there? Should I just extract their power? I also have Leoric's Crown, but that also has a very low level. Even with a gem in it. Should I just salvage it or extract it's power?
Salvage the crown. Are you running a seasonal character? If so keep an eye on your season journey and make sure you collect the rewards, you'll end up with a 6 piece armour set for your character and become a god of death. You can then work out what powers you want to extract using the cube.
 
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