Non seasonal progression thread

[Cluck Kent]

Fantastic Bob! Well done.

Bob and I played last night and we were revving up to do some 2 player GR 90s when a couple other chaps joined and we cranked it up immediately to 95. I had never attempted a 95 with my new, shiny Impale DH but with a Monk and a Barb mitigating damage, I was eager to try. Bob firebatted things up with his powerful WD and 95 went down like nothing. So did 96. I urgent the group to stay on 96 since we could run it pretty well and it gives great XP, gem upgrades, legs, but the concensus was 97.

What is important to understand here is that my Impale DH has 3 powerful damage mitigation skills. I won't go into the specifics here, but suffice it to say, when solo, these skills provide the build with 550,000,000 toughness. In 4 player group, toughness was over 2,500,000,000. I was standing in overlapping arcane beams while molten explosions were going off and my health bulb was only burping a bit. And this, while I was not in the Monk's Inner Sanctuary. 

So it was damage reduction overkill and I knew if we were going to continue to try higher GR levels I was going to need more damage so to start the 97, I shed one of the three defensive skills in order to bump damage and gave it a go.

We didn't get a great rift but we handled it. My DH held up well and the increase to damage was noticeable.

Then some joker - not me, I swear - loads a GR 100. Ridiculous. But I empowered anyway just because it was the right thing to do. I also shed the second of my three damage mitigation skills for another significant power boost and, Bang! We ploughed through with 2 minutes to spare. And it seemed we found a good rhythm and difficulty level because we stayed and did a few more.

But time grew short and I indicated to the group that I only had time for one more. Someone thought it would be funny to end on a 102, which was even more ridiculous than the 100 but by golly we did that 102 with about 2 minutes to spare.

All in all, it was an amazing 2 hours of D3. The 4 of us were on headsets and cracking wise most of the time which only made it that much more fun, and the XP and loot were only exceeded by the gems upgrades.   

[mn4nu]

Great story Cluck.  Where does a 4 player GR102 rank on the leaderboards?

[Orbert]

Holy crap!

[Cluck Kent]

You need a 106 in 13:00 to get on the 4 player leaderboard.

Seems incredibly high but it's kind of deceptive. Before I 'gave in' to the MP metta, zDPS and DPS together, GR 90 and above seemed unreachable. GR100 and above was only for the 3500+ massive paragoners. But I got tired of struggling with DPS only characters and so I turned to the dark side and built and learned how to use a zDPS Heal Monk. Almost immediately,  Bob and I started to complete 2 players grifts 10-15 levels higher than with DPS characters only. 4 player takes that to another level. 2 zDPS chars and 2 DPS chars co-ordinated are more than the sum of their parts which means even greater differential in GR achievement MP vs solo. And of course the loot, Paragon and especially the gem upgrades earned in MP directly benefit my solo characters.

The Canadian in me wants to apologize for always promoting MP so I will. I'm sorry. However, as it has been fun and rewarding, I am likely to continue to do so. So, I'm sorry in advance. I'll still play solo and HC because I enjoy them. And I will continue to tinker with new builds because that's fun too. But I'm glad I finally relented to zDPS because that made a big impact on all the SC things I like to do and it's another fun play style.

I understand many of the folks around here know this already but it was eye opening to me how large the zDPS gap was until just a couple of months ago and I wanted to share what I'd learned with anyone else out there that might not have known either.

[Supermatt]

Congratulations guys and great story Cluck!!

[hurtlocker]

I witnessed the 100+ Grifts fall and was amazed. My impale DH doesn't seem so impervious Cluck, what are the
3 skills that give such defense?

[Cluck Kent]

In town I have 56 mil toughness. Shadowpower buffs this to 86 mil and with the elusive ring in the cube the 86 mil becomes 216 mil. Fan of knives Bladed Armour takes it to 278 mil, and Vengeance Dark heart bumps that to 555 mil.

[Lego]

I am such a n00b compared to you guys. I got my main character, a barb, through the battlefields of Arreat and into what looks like the bowels of hell itself. Lvl 32. So far it's easy mode, but compared to the disaster that was trying a DH as my first character, I'll take it. Don't have any interesting loot, but somehow my items occasionally dupe. I have 2 Squirt's pendants and 2 Leoric's crowns and I have no idea how. Well, I mean I do, but I don't know why, I think. I think if I give an item to my follower, it stays in my stash as well. So I've just been destroying the dupe for materials.

[Timinator]

Gg lego, the first time is memorable. There is plenty of time to go nuts afterwards

[TheMikrobe]

Keep going Lego, I was there about 9 months ago. Barbarian is always the best choice for a first character (and the best choice for all subsequent characters, but maybe that's just me...), since as I liked to say way back in Diablo I "nothing is immune to a big fucking sword". You can figure out more complex character builds once you know more about the game.

Great work by Cluck and Bob! I really enjoy doing bounties in MP but other than that I'm a committed single player, a good team for greater rifts does sound fun though. I'm working a whirlwind build hard in non-season trying to get to 70 to open up primal ancient items, made 67 today at paragon 778 or 779. I have some doubts about my build and/or how I'm playing it but can't see how to make major improvements, I did some experimenting today after the GR67 and think I made some progress.

I've used the armoury to make up a leap-quake build but I'm not very good at that yet, will try to learn it once I've reached GR 70.

[sam_manzanza]

Fired up D3 for the first time in a long time yesterday and played around a little. Was really good fun. Not sure how long it will hold my attention for but I am going to play again tonight for sure. Was good to talk to you guys again as well, even if I was hungover as hell and not overly chatty...

Was playing lightning Archon Wiz, as I have read that's really strong and I have some passable gear, so there wasn't too much coming up to speed. Still missing a Manald Heal, which is the item the build is built around, so that'll make a difference. Even without that I was doing GR45's in 3-4 minutes, which seems crazy to me because before I quit I was doing GR40 and that was enough to get on the bottom of the leaderboard! How times have changed. Fun to play Archon again though - reminded me of pre RoS when perma-Archon was easy.

Tonight will be low GRs till I get a Manald Heal and then pump it up a bit and try to farm some good gear.

[Cluck Kent]

I always knew that GRs gave better XP than Torment rifts, but was never sure just how much. These days in SP I am running a combo of T13 and GR82s. I get great drops on T13 and pools and once I have a pool or two, I start a GR82 for XP and drops. I am doing GR 82s because my current char can run them very quickly and I rarely die so I don't waste any of the XP pool.

So today I decided to do some math on the XP gain from each and here is what I discovered:

1. T13 Rift: 2.36 billion XP;
2. GR 82:   36.9 billion XP

That's 15.6 times more XP in the 82 GR. I run both in about 5-6 min and these numbers included a pool.

I guess I was surprised that the difference was so great.

[Supermatt]

I always knew that GRs gave better XP than Torment rifts, but was never sure just how much. These days in SP I am running a combo of T13 and GR82s. I get great drops on T13 and pools and once I have a pool or two, I start a GR82 for XP and drops. I am doing GR 82s because my current char can run them very quickly and I rarely die so I don't waste any of the XP pool.

So today I decided to do some math on the XP gain from each and here is what I discovered:

1. T13 Rift: 2.36 billion XP;
2. GR 82:   36.9 billion XP

That's 15.6 times more XP in the 82 GR. I run both in about 5-6 min and these numbers included a pool.

I guess I was surprised that the difference was so great.

I think that T13 is probably only meant to be comparable with GR60. GR82 is probably ~T25 or something!

[Timinator]

Yeah I'd noticed grs much better than rifts. Apart from things like dbs and keys of course I like grs more

[Cluck Kent]

Hey Matt,

I know that T13 is supposedly equal to about GR 60 - although personally I find T13 more difficult than a 60, perhaps more like a 65. It's just that the difference I calculated between T13 and GR 82 was so huge I wanted to share it.

But, you inspired me to run a GR60 to compare what Blizz says is equal to, a T13. Again, these numbers are while on a pool:

1. T13 Rift: 2.36 billion XP
2. GR 60:    9.95 billion XP

That's 4 times more XP in a GR 60 than a T13. Still significant but not the 'holy crap' factor of the GR 82. I wish we got more XP in Torment because I love running for crafting mats and gobs and bandit shrines,etc, but having said that, I guess the XP variance probably makes sense because if you could have it all running Torment rifts, there wouldn't be as much reason to run GRs.