LL D3 Tourney

[Kylearan]

I didn't have much time to play because of business trips and other RL issues, but finally I'd like to report on my progress - better late than never, I guess. General background: Compared to most (all?) of you, I'm a total D3 noob. I've only beaten Normal once with a Barbarian, and have a hardcore Witch Doctor just before Normal Diablo - and that's it. So while I have played D1 and D2 excessively, a lot of D3 still feels very new to me.

Because of that, I don't expect to win this tournament and decided to play my Wizard first without looking at the skills of the other two characters, simply because I haven't played a Wizard yet. For reference, here is his skill set; what follows are my thoughts about the skills.

• Magic Missile/Split: Sounds a bit like Poison Dart/Splinters, not much to say here. (Of course it turned out I was wrong...)
  
  
• Disintegrate/Chaos Nexus: Looks like a standard beam skill, probably good against single targets. Chaos Nexus doesn't sound so good however, as I don't intend to be near enemies...but on the other hand, I seem to lack an escape skill, so this might become unavoidable.
  
  
• Diamon Skin/Prism: I've read a lot of Wizards use this, and it reads like it'll be a great protection skill. Good! I have no idea how useful Prism will be.
  
  
• Energy Twister/Storm Chaser: I've read no Wizards use this :p, so I've probably entered massive variant land here. From the description I suspect aiming/reliability will be hard. Storm Chaser sounds like a free extra Twister with less damage but bigger area. It's unlocked at level 52 however, which I doubt I'll reach.
  
  
• Ice Armor/Chilling Aura: A protective skill against melee. It only triggers when being attacked, which in principle I'd like to avoid, but since it's cheap and lasts a long time, I won't complain. Chilling Aura actually sounds useful for avoiding being hit in the first place.
  
  
• Archon/Slow Time: From what I've heard, Archon is very powerful so I'm looking forward to this. Reaching level 30 sounds doable, level 52 for Slow Time however...not so much.
  

All in all, I think what this build really lacks is a crowd control skill and a way to escape from emergancies. In addition, I suspect that I lack a good area of effect spell as well, although Energy Twister might work. All this means I'll probably have to kite a lot in Normal already, and I doubt I'll get far in Nightmare. But I'll have fun on the way, of that I'm sure!

For most players, Normal probably isn't exciting anymore. Still, I plan to report on my progress in a little bit more detail anyway - less about strategy or individual fights, but more about random thoughts I had during my sessions. I guess the main reason is so that when my Wizard dies, I won't forget about his adventures so easily, and that the journey will mean more to me. I hope you won't get annoyed by me cluttering up this thread. Feel free to skip my reports.


So welcome Simpleton, my Wizard with limited abilities. The beginning was easy enough, of course. I used Magic Missile most of the time and Ray of Frost against bigger monsters. In the cathedral, I found this:



Nice! This went into my stash for later use for one of my other hardcore characters.

Also, whenever I saw a bookcase in the cathedral, I got kind of sad.



Especially now with my Wizard, every bookcase reminded me of the spell books in Diablo 1, which I miss terribly. I loved that extra dimension of randomization the spell books provided! I know I know, D3 is a different game, but still - the bookcases make me nostalgic.

The tournament rules require us to make a full clear, which suits my playstyle very well. I also tried to pop most barrels, urns etc, but didn't go overboard in that regard. What I planned to do though was to read more journals. My Witch Doctor had accidently found out that Leah adds more entries to her diary while the game progressed, so in true celebrity stalker fashion I routinely returned to her room to take a look.



But damn, I somehow missed entry number two! Annoying. Anyway, I got to entry number eight during the first five hours, which also provided me some modest XP.

When I entered the Fields of Misery, at first I thought the game was broken. I cautiously advanced into the area along the border, trying not to wake up too many monsters at once...only I didn't see any, at all! I walked, and walked, and...no monsters.



It took some more time before I finally had my first encounter, but this was really odd.

Another thing about the Fields of Misery I don't understand:



Has anyone actually ever been hit by one of these traps? Neither your follower nor monsters trigger them, only you. And the hit area is so small that I have no idea how you can get damaged by this, even if you don't pay attention...

Act I contains one of my absolute highlights of this game:



The battle with the spider queen! I love that part. Not because of the difficulty, the AI or any special tactics (you don't need), but because of the music. Only in this encounter the music changes to a fast-paced, low-level drum tune which in me induces a feeling of absolute threat and urgency. It creates a perfect atmosphere for such a mini-boss encounter inside a closed arena, and I really wonder why no other boss fight has a similar piece of music. In fact, I cannot really say what music other boss fights have - it must be something unobtrusive. But the spider queen fight absolutely stands out to an acoustically-oriented person like me. Love it!

The game drastically changed for me when I hit level 13. That was the time I got locked both into the Split rune for Magic Missile and into Energy Twister, which meant my DPS went down the drain. More about Energy Twister in my next report, but first let's talk about Split. I found out it's not like Splinters at all, where you rapidly fire three darts in the same direction, but one missile gets split into three and fired into different directions.



What happens is that when I fight a single, small monster, often only the middle missile would hit while the two outer missiles miss the target. That means my damage in this case went down from 110% (normal Magic Missile) to 50% (only one missile hits). WTF?!? Argh, that really hurts. Even against mobs where all three missiles hit, they often hit different enemies. I'd rather concentrate my fire against one monster at a time to take it out quickly. I feel this is essential without a crowd control skill - so with Split I made the first step into Variant Land, and it took some time for me to adapt. At least against big monsters, Split does more damage than a vanilla Magic Missile...

My first five hours ended exactly at the gates to Leoric's Manor, at level 14.



By the time of this writing, I'm almost at the Butcher. I hope to find enough time to get to ten hours until tomorrow, but we'll see. I'm also looking forward to reports on how you others are doing!

(Argh, we're only allowed 10 images per post? Damn. Have to remove some smileys...)