Demon Hunter vs. Wizard Analysis

Well the lack of posts in this blog might give the hint that I have quit Diablo 3 or something similar to that, but the truth is I have not. I was just busy leveling my second character and alas, like my wizard, she has reached level60 as well. As the title of the post suggests, my second character is indeed a demon hunter.

Natalya my Demon Hunter

The screenshot above shows my demon hunter who just reached inferno. Haven't really bought anything much from the auction house for her and just relied on the drops of the game. At first glance (ignoring the barbarian character which was my friend's character when he used my account to give Diablo 3 a try), it seems that the demon hunter class has more damage compared to the wizard. True enough, my wizard never had 31k (31,000) DPS when I reached inferno (I think I only had 10k damage). This is primarily due to the passive abilities of the demon hunter which increase the critical rate of the demon hunters by a lot and we all know critical scales well over time and towards end game Diablo 3. Similar to the wizard, I believe the demon hunter class also uses kiting in order to defeat monsters and champion packs easily. Looking at my demon hunter's skills, I have hungering arrow (any rune is fine here but I think I use devouring arrow rune), elemental arrow (frost), preparation with (60% health heal), caltrops (torturous grounds), smokescreen (lingering fog) and vault (tumble). All of which have their special uses here and there depending on the enemies and champion packs that I face. For the hungering arrow and elemental arrow, these two are usually my spam skill in order to slow monsters and beat them to a pulp. I use my preparation mainly when I face reflect damage bosses or when I need a free heal (hooray for saving potions!). Caltrops are generally used for immobilizing boss packs which greatly makes kiting easy enough for me to be half asleep while still doing it right. Smokescreen is my lifesaver skill or last resort and only used when severely in trouble or trapped in walls or things like that. Finally vault is the multi-purpose dodge move (especially useful against frozen affix mobs) or movement skill I spam when I need to walk long corridors or fields without monsters.

As a demon hunter, killing normal monsters are fairly easy and stress-free and I believe this will continue given enough time invested in farming for gears. Most of the time, all regular monsters die before they even get close for me to be wary of their presence. Regular monsters also include those savage beasts or woodland trees in Act 1 inferno which gave my wizard back then a tough time bringing them down. Additionally, demon hunters have high dexterity stat so I generally dodge quite hits before taking damage compared to my wizard who usually gets hit all the time. However, unlike the wizard with a high intelligence stat, demon hunters take more damage when they are hit which generally could translate to getting instantly killed by an attack (note: intelligence boosts all resistances and damage for wizard).

Now we move to the interesting part which is dealing with monster affixes. Using my demon hunter, most non-threatening champions die with the basic elemental arrow and caltrops spam. I barely run out of discipline when doing this and I can kite in this state forever unless I run into other issues such as sneaky monsters. Compared to using my wizard (hydra and blizzard), caltrops and elemental arrow spamming are more controlled as I can target the monster that I would like to be trapped or damaged by my skills. In addition, the massive critical rate given by the passives simply destroy these champions faster than my wizard. On the other hand, when my demon hunter deals with threatening champions (usually includes a combination of the following affixes: vortex, teleportation, waller, mortar, extra fast, invulnerable minions, reflect damage, shielding, fire chains, molten) requires a lot of concentration, and perhaps perfect play. Unlike my wizard, I cannot afford sloppy mistakes for my demon hunter when facing these packs as it will result to certain death (as a wizard, most of my sloppy mistakes never lead to death so long as I have enough health and force armor on). Furthermore reflect damage champions are quite a pain to deal with when using my demon hunter simply because they reflect quite a big chunk of damage like nearly 1k damage whenever I get a critical hit on them (when I am using my wizard, I generally have little issues regarding reflect damage champions as most of the damage is negated once I use diamond skin with crystal shell rune). On the brighter side of things though, my demon hunter has better escape skills such as vault. Comparing vault to my wizard's teleport, vault is more spammable and less buggy than teleport. Vault has no cooldown and so it can be always used when I need it unlike teleport which requires my wizard to get hit for the illusionist passive to trigger and reset the cooldown of teleport. .However, as a downside to vault, I cannot use vault to escape the walls created by waller champions. The only way I generally get out of tight spots as a demon hunter is using the smokescreen skill which is very decent for escape and repositioning. As the biggest downside though, it costs a lot of discipline and I generally run out of it fast (even with the preparation skill) when I use smokescreen against waller champions and as a result, without any form of damage mitigating skills (like the force armor for wizards), I get killed. Despite having downsides, another good thing about smokescreen is that it allows the monsters to change their targets when I use the skill which usually results to my demon hunter getting my much needed distance away from the monsters. Much like my wizard, I don't really have problems with crowd control even against illusionist champions as elemental arrow, hungering arrow and caltrops generally do as much crowd control as blizzard and hydra. Finally, I would like to give a spotlight to the preparation skill of the demon hunter. This skill is generally one of the best skills I found in the demon hunter's arsenal and something that cannot be matched by another skill in the wizard. I generally use the discipline refill when I run out of discipline and only seldom use the heal part of the skill. Most of the time, the heal part of the skill is only useful on reflect damage mobs as almost every hit can kill my demon hunter (probably because I got low gears). There is nothing more annoying than running out of arcane power on the wizard and suddenly failing to use teleport which results to death. As a demon hunter with preparation skill, I generally avoid deaths that are caused by insufficient resource that happens on my wizard when teleporting too much evading the champion packs.

Summary (this is of course a summary in contrast to wizard):

Demon Hunter

Pros
-more DPS even without good gear, perhaps more DPS comparing wizard and demon hunter even with best gears.
-more spammable escape, dodge skill (vault)
-good repositioning skill (smoke screen)
-can stop monsters from overrunning your positioning which is sort of impossible for wizards as hydra and blizzard would just slow them down and not really block them from going to your position (caltrops skill with torturous grounds)
-free potion skill (this is if you use preparation skill with 60% health heal)
-instantly refills resource (preparation skill)

Cons
-requires perfect play and positioning when dealing with threatening monster affixes (I generally am 1 hit kill in act 1 inferno)
-lack of fail-safe skill (lag spikes and wrong clicks will kill you more than a wizard with force armor)
- dodge chance is still just a chance (if you don't dodge the attack you may die)
-no free resistances (given by intelligence gain)

Generally speaking, both classes have their pro and cons. Both classes also use the same tactic when dealing with champions/elite packs which is kiting. Most of their difference is in their ability to escape and their raw strength in terms of doing damage with or without gear. As such, I believe neither class is way superior than the other but it depends highly on the playstyle that one prefers.

Thanks everyone and again have fun playing Diablo 3.

Patch 1.0.3

Well patch 1.0.3 for Diablo 3 is up. There are a lot of changes here and there and I have a mixed feeling about this update. Basically this is a short summary of the patch and my personal thumbs up or thumbs down with regards to the changes.


+ crafting costs reduced (this actually made crafting weapons/armors slightly viable rather than just a forgotten aspect of the game)
+/- monster damage reduction (well I don't really have any problems here since I am able to survive inferno but for everyone out there having a hard time, this is just good for everyone but it also screws the challenge that inferno brings)
+monster damage would not scale when in a party (this would probably be helpful for melee classes, as ranged classes would not mind the damage if they cannot be attacked)
- attack speed nerf (though I don't really use attack speed items that much for my character, I think this would be bad for other classes)
- no more items from vases, destructible objects and such (this is probably to prevent all those vase and chest farmers and frankly I'm  quite disappointed in this. Even in Diablo 2, everyone with just a bit of a small luck can come across a legendary item dropped from an urn or vase and that was just the epic moment of joy)
- repair costs (seriously ridiculous especially if the player dies quite a lot which happens when they overextend in places where they are undergeared)

(edit, I realized that I have never  published this at the time of patch 1.0.3 release, lol)

Diablo 3 Wizard Inferno skill build

Since I rolled my first class as a Wizard, things have been great even in inferno mode. Some skills that were hotfixed here and there (force armor) kinda slowed my pace in inferno since I had to fix my gear and stats in order to cope with the changes. As such, I barely had the time to make wizard inferno skill build. But things have been stable as of late and now I can give it out for all wizards who are having a hard time in inferno. Perhaps the build I will post might be overused and overheard already but nonetheless here is the skill build that I use.

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/wizard#ZlXROQ!dWX!bbabYY

Basically as a wizard in inferno, without twinked gear from the AH, blizzard and venom hydra would be the way to go. As stated in numerous posts in forums, they are pretty much the best skill choices if the wizard does not have a very big amount of damage or health pool and high resistances. In the build that I use, I have two defensive skills which are generally all purpose so most if not all of the monsters in the game would have a little rougher time trying to get the wizard killed. Basically I have diamond skin with crystal shell rune as the lifesaver skill when the teleport skill is on cooldown or when the character actually gets stucked (yes that happens quite a lot with those waller + desecrator  monsters and damage over time does not trigger teleport to be instantly be on cooldown). Most of the time, if the wizard gets hit, the cooldown of teleport will be reset thanks to illusionist passive  and hopefully the player has enough arcane power to teleport away. As such the teleport skill with fracture rune will basically be the bread and butter escape skill. Some may have noticed that I took the fracture rune despite the decoys having little effect on the monster AI. True enough though, most monsters just ignore the decoy and still chase the player but these decoys provide a little collision area for the monsters to slow them down and the chance of them being attacked instead of the real player, that alone makes it quite okay to use. If fracture rune is not to your liking, it would be okay to replace it with other runes as it is the teleport that you really want and the rune is like icing on the cake. For another skill slot, I have energy armor with force armor rune (even after the nerf). Force armor is still a beast even after the nerf, the wizard just now needs to have a bit of health pool to make force armor work. Now for the primary left click skill, I took ray of frost as a personal preference. Most of the time, I just use blizzard and venom hydra to clear normal monsters, but some tough monsters like those mallet lords, fallen overseers and the like tend to survive, so an additional damage over time would bring them down before they get a chance to get close to me. Clearly some may prefer other skills such as magic missile with seeker rune and that would be really up to the player, but I suggest trying out ray of frost as it has worked out for me with no big issues on resource management. For the passive skills, I have illusionist which would help cope with the long cooldown of teleport (to reset it when needed, this has probably saved me millions of times), cold blooded over glass cannon for two reasons, one is that I have two cold spells in my arsenal (blizzard and ray of frost), two is that sometimes that extra 10% damage taken would be bad for a wizard without good gears but if you plan to change ray of frost for the primary left click skill, I would probably take glass cannon instead of cold blooded. For the last passive I have astral presence for resource regen and better management.

The general playstyle of this wizard build is kiting. It would be quite impossible if the wizard would not kite, unless you have about 100,000 DPS and 1000 all resist in which case the player need not read this as he would not have any troubles with playing inferno mode except maybe those soul lashers in act 3 or charging monsters in act 4.  If there are any questions regarding kiting, I have a previous article which covers it here on my blog.

That's all for the skill build, and hopefully it has helped you out in inferno mode and keep playing Diablo 3.

Diablo 3 Inferno Equipment Check

Playing in Diablo 3 inferno mode can be a quite a challenge and possibly frustrating. However, as a rule of a thumb, the difficulty and frustration levels increase drastically when the player progresses too far while being underequipped. It is important for players to stop and farm a bit more gold or items in order to equip themselves better to prepare them for the next act or arc of the act. Here are five essentials that players need to consider in their equipment especially when they are playing in inferno:

1) Weapon Damage / DPS

Without a decent and hefty damage, players would probably struggle here and there. Killing mobs or elites would be a pain if they take around thirty minutes to kill rather than just five. The longer the battle drags on, the more chances the player makes a mistake and eventually leads to his/her demise.  

2) Vitality

More vitality means more hitpoints. As the game suggests, lose all of it and the player is dead. In inferno, a vast majority of monsters deal very strong damage, without decent vitality (i.e. 20k~30k hitpoints for ranged or  40k~60k for melee) the player would get one-shotted by these monsters. Aside from vitality, the player should have some form of resistance in order to fully negate being one-shotted (discussed in #3).

3) All Resistance

The all resistance stat is pretty much one of the most important stats to have on armors in addition to vitality as they improve not only the player’s resistance to elements but also physical resistance. Having a tremendous amount of vitality without resistance would simply be a waste as the damage the monsters deal increase exponentially through acts.

4) Armor

This is one of the seriously underestimated stats in the game that actually helps quite a lot in inferno. Increasing the armor of the player would reduce damages coming from all sources. In reality, I personally believe it would be impossible to dodge all attacks even with a ranged class, hence increasing armor would be the next best thing to all resistance and vitality.

5) Critical Hit Chance

Increasing critical hit chances enable the player to deal burst damage to monsters which usually helps during elites, act bosses or that significantly annoying room with 99999 monsters. Though critical hits are chance based, increasing the chances would significantly boost damage output which makes killing monsters easier.

 There are other notable stats for equipment that can be valuable such as movespeed, resource regeneration, increased max resource, and the like which I did not really include as this is a general equipment check in inferno.

General Tips for harder difficulties part 2

If you are having a hard time in Diablo 3 past normal mode, here are some tips that you can follow:

1) Try playing in a party

Despite increasing the damage, and health of monsters, playing in a party has a lot of benefits. In a party, I find it easier to play through the levels and somehow manage to survive longer or not even die at all. This is probably because of the skills of each class working together bringing down tough elite packs instead of the usual kiting or running and dying when skills are all on cooldown. In addition, playing in a party allows players to resurrect each other hence giving another chance for all those mistakes, misclicks or just plain bad luck that could happen versus act bosses such as Belial in hell and inferno.

2) Repeat farming areas that are easy to do

If the player is having a hard time progressing especially in inferno, it is best to farm on the easier places to gear up and get more gold. For example, inferno act 2 is way more difficult than inferno act 1, so it might be a good idea to run a few skeleton kings rather than trying to progress to act 2 where all of the monsters simply hurt the player a lot and take a lot of time killing. This is a Diablo game, so much of the end game content revolves around farming for good items and perhaps PVP when it is implemented.

3) Skip monsters or elites that are very difficult to kill (in time the player will have his/her revenge)

People say that experience is the best teacher, and true enough I have had quite a lot of crazy elite fights that feel next to impossible to do. For instance, I have faced a bat boss with molten, plagued, vortex, invulnerable minions, horde. They were literally all over the place; it became next to impossible to target the main elite while trying to avoid lava trails and poison pools and getting sucked right next to them. I do like a challenge and so after more than 10 deaths, the boss finally died. However, I believe this is cost ineffective as the time it took me to kill the boss and the gold lost due to repairs compared to the mediocre loot that the boss dropped was totally not worth it. The only saving grace was the fact that I have beaten a crazy ass boss, and that is all. If the player has unlimited supply of gold, then by all means go ahead, but for everyone else, it would be best to skip them or try to run past them, if not just reset the game. I believe once the player has better or top of the line gear, then they could possibly beat all these near impossible combinations without much struggle.

4) Be wary of the surroundings

In Diablo 3, there are a lot of traps and nasty surprises that await the player at every corner. It is best for the player to slowly proceed through the map or move carefully rather than running at full speed and recklessly setting off traps or luring more unseen monsters like burrowing leapers or imps. Believe me, nothing is more annoying than dying to a nasty trap or environmental trap such as the slime spewer found in act 2 caves. I probably have died countless number of times to that in inferno where it usually 1-hit kills my wizard.

5) Save up on gold

Sometimes players tend to forget their gold is limited. They tend to splurge over items that are not really too important or buying a lot of crafting materials that they do not even need yet. Surely, it would not be a bad idea if the player has a lot of gold but more often than not, they do not. Always remember to have spare gold for repairs, crafting, removal of gems or that great deal that can be found at the auction house (I actually found quite a lot of great items at the auction house, but I could not afford it as their prices were around 200,000 and above but very cheap for their worth).

Thanks for spending time to read this post and have fun playing Diablo 3.

General Tips for harder difficulties

As Blizzard have said, the real game or Diablo 3 experience starts to begin on the higher difficulties after normal mode. In line with it, here are some general tips to follow:

1) Do not rush in the act (unless the player is already level 60 or have a plan like Azmodan farming*)

After completing normal mode, many players just tend to go berserk and rush into everything as they think their new goal is to reach inferno as fast as possible. As such, they all try to skip enemies, run through the act without really killing anything. Rushing through an act lets players lose a handful of experience, gold, possibly good items and achievements. I believe it would be in the players' best interest to hit level 60 faster for unlocking all skills and passives, have more gold and items rather than not.

2) Check each champion/elite monster group's abilities before engaging them

Players should be more cautious in higher difficulties when engaging champion and elite monster groups. They are now a significant threat rather than just another easy kill found in the dungeon or map. Often times I see players just rolling through the dungeon and not being cautious of the elite attributes and suddenly they die because they failed to check that the champion pack was vortex, waller, plagued, and frozen. Dying sets the players back with gold and time, and I can testify that everyone will spend a lot of their gold and time dying in inferno difficulty.

3) Increase the levels of the jeweler and blacksmith artisans

This is a good investment for higher difficulties as most of the gems and equipment that the player would have will come here. There is really no disadvantage of leveling these artisans other than losing gold and some pages, tomes (used for higher artisan levels) which are all easily obtainable again. As an additional note, I believe all characters of the same type (hardcore or softcore) made in an account share the same blacksmith and jeweler levels so it is kind of like a one time investment.

4) Use the auction house

This is probably one of the best tips I can give for players who are already at the higher difficulties. Using the auction house allows the players to get more items for themselves, find good bargains, and sell their unwanted items for more gold. All it takes is just to familiarize themselves with how the auction house works and spend a little time in the auction house.

5) Strike a balance between defensive and offensive skills

I cannot really give everyone the best skill build for each class as there are numerous viable builds in higher difficulties. Striking a balance between offensive an defensive skills would be the best way to go for higher difficulties as it allows the players to survive and do good damage output as well. It would be best for the players to find out what builds they like and how they plan to mix and match skills.

*azmodan farming is running azmodan and going to act 4 in nightmare difficulty and resetting that quest again and again as it provides a good amount of experience.

These are all the tips for now. I will continue these general tips in another post. Readers and viewers can submit their tips also at the comments below. Have fun playing Diablo 3.

Kiting 101

No matter how much hitpoints you have or high damage you do, I believe that kiting monsters especially champion packs become an invaluable skill to be learned by ranged classes. If you don’t have the slightest idea of what I’m talking about, then reading this post will give you the answer.

Kiting is basically a hit-and-run technique used by players who are more often than not ranged classes. One basically hits the monster once, maybe twice or as many times so long as the monster is still at a distance. When the monster starts closing the gap between it and the player, the player simply walks away again and repeats the process. The advantage of using this technique against champion mobs is that it allows the ranged character class to minimize the damage the champion mobs and minions to do them while still dealing damage and eventually killing the whole monster group without really taking lethal hits or deaths.

In Diablo 3, all monsters can be kited (yes even ranged monsters can be although it would be more challenging since you need to dodge projectiles while kiting). As such it is advantageous for ranged classes especially those who are in higher difficulties (nightmare, hell, inferno) to learn kiting as they naturally have lower survivability in terms of total hitpoints and armor.

In order to kite successfully, there are five things that you would probably want to consider or need in the battle against the hordes of monsters from the burning hells.

 1 – Movement impairing ability (i.e. traps for demon hunters)

Movement impairing abilities can help ranged classes kite easier because the slower the enemy moves; the easier it is to hit and run away from them. This is especially true for mobs that don’t have the fast affix. 

2 – Distance widening ability (i.e. teleport for wizards)

Distance widening abilities can make kiting more successful as they instantly widen the gap between the monsters and the ranged class, as such when something goes wrong (even internet connection issues), the player can still kite like a boss. Combining distance widening abilities and movement impairing abilities will make kiting definitely easy for newbies and veterans a like.

3 – Movement speed increase from equipment or skills (i.e. spirit walk for witch doctors)

If the player moves faster than the enemy, hit and running would be easier.

4 – Obstacles (i.e. rock formations)

If the player is kiting monsters especially those that move quite fast, finding obstacles would allow the ranged classes to temporarily slow the enemy for a second or so and this is all the time you need to run farther. Since monsters generally chase you in a straight line, having obstacles breaks this pathing hence making them a bit slow. Sometimes going around obstacles again and again would help against fast monsters. Take a little care and caution when using obstacles in kiting as they can potentially work against the player too.

5 – Awareness (i.e. kiting monsters to “safe” places)

Having awareness is important when kiting as the player does not want to go in bad places such as dead ends or areas that are not yet explored. Getting stuck in a corner or drawing more monster aggression to the player while kiting will more or less make matters worse for the player and could ultimately lead to their deaths. 

Note that the first four things can be optional to some, but for many if not all, it would be a requirement to kite easier, safer and more successfully. Do share other tips with regards to kiting in the comments below. Have fun and happy kiting.