Wizard thoughts

[Skandranon]

Makes sense. I was using it with gear that had vitality on it, so against my 30k max health it was working just fine.

[MongoJerry]

Makes sense. I was using it with gear that had vitality on it, so against my 30k max health it was working just fine.

I wonder at what point one could consider not using it in Inferno mode. 50k health? 60k? 40k but a lot of damage mitigation? As I stated above, I think that gear should eventually be able to replace the need for Force Armor. But the question is whether such gear that is capable of doing so has been implemented in the game either as drops or crafting recipes.

[Skandranon]

The general consensus is that no such gear exists. Each act of Inferno is currently tuned like a new difficulty all on its own: act 2 inferno hits something like 50-100% harder than act 1, and the same for act 3 over act 2. Meanwhile, drops from those difficulties are confirmed to only scale up linearly or in some cases not at all.

[MongoJerry]

The general consensus is that no such gear exists. Each act of Inferno is currently tuned like a new difficulty all on its own: act 2 inferno hits something like 50-100% harder than act 1, and the same for act 3 over act 2. Meanwhile, drops from those difficulties are confirmed to only scale up linearly or in some cases not at all.

Ah hah. That makes sense with what the developers said pre-release -- that one would farm one act of Inferno to be able to progress well in the next act. They said something about effectively whole sets of gear that are specific to an act. Perhaps Blizzard has held off releasing the real Inferno gear drops until they see what people do without it. That is, they might want to see what exploits or unbalanced skills people find first before releasing the good gear.

I do have an observation, though. You keep saying that you have 30k health as if that were a lot, but I have 27.5k health right now as a level 53 at the start of Act IV nightmare. I only have one auction house item, and that's a level 42 item. (There is very little on the hardcore AH with level req's after 50, and most of those that are there are blue items). I suspect that by the time we slowly work our way through Hell that I'll be sporting at least 40k health. Frag is aiming for 50k with his barbarian.

[Skandranon]

I do have an observation, though. You keep saying that you have 30k health as if that were a lot, but I have 27.5k health right now as a level 53 at the start of Act IV nightmare. I only have one auction house item, and that's a level 42 item. (There is very little on the hardcore AH with level req's after 50, and most of those that are there are blue items). I suspect that by the time we slowly work our way through Hell that I'll be sporting at least 40k health. Frag is aiming for 50k with his barbarian.

Oh, I'm fully aware that it's not a lot of health. I could easily have 40 or 50k at this time if I sacrificed more offensive stats. It just wouldn't make a difference. So long as I'm using Force Armor, I die in three hits either way, and the more percentage of that a health potion replenishes, the more hits I can survive.

Currently the highest-end health pot restores 12500 health. I have about 30k, so with Force Armor the first hit takes away 10.5k, the next 10.5, and the third kills me. If I pot after the second hit, I go from 9k to 21500, and then I can take two more hits of 10.5 before I die. So my current health pool plus a pot is good for five hits on Inferno, and with Diamond Skin I can soak another two.

The advantage of getting more health, presumably, would be to not use Force Armor. Even with the nerf, Force Armor imposes an HP threshold - you want enough HP for Force Armor to do the most soaking so you still die in 3 hits, and not much more than that, since it makes it easier to heal back up. So there's no point in raising health without limit and also using Force Armor.

One more factor: since I'm almost always playing four player games, more of my incoming hits trigger Force Armor's threshold, and the exaggerated size of those hits makes it far harder to gear past. 40 or 50k health might make a difference in solo or duo games, and it might let me get away without Force Armor. I'd probably need 70 at least to survive in a 4 player game, and the dps checks are only tightly tuned on groups.

So far as I can tell, grouping to three and four actually makes the game harder in Inferno mode. This appears to be the designers' response to multiple people being able to resurrect each other during fights. I talked last time about how we wiped to the Butcher's berserk twice before beating him. The next day I tried the Butcher again in a different 4 player group, racking up another 4 wipes to his berserk. I left and another player left and the two remaining dispatched him easily, even earning the achievement for defeating the Butcher on Inferno in under two minutes. Later that day I went back in alone and got the achievement as well.

The berserk timers also make it very rough to sacrifice offensive stats past a certain point. Today in Act 2 (which we are making almost no progress in, because of how much the numbers have been tuned up) we managed to separate a boss from his minions in an isolated corner of the map. All three of us working together were not able to kill him before he berserked.

[MongoJerry]

So far as I can tell, grouping to three and four actually makes the game harder in Inferno mode. This appears to be the designers' response to multiple people being able to resurrect each other during fights.

Well, also because of the fact that groups can synergize both with skills and crowd control.

[Skandranon]

A little, yes, but the scaling is currently way off. At present no amount of synergy or anything counteracts the increased difficulty by bringing in somebody else.

[MongoJerry]

A little, yes, but the scaling is currently way off. At present no amount of synergy or anything counteracts the increased difficulty by bringing in somebody else.

Again, I'm leaning toward it being a gear issue. Either it doesn't exist, yet, or it exists but takes a long time to farm and a lot of bad crafts before you get the good stuff. Remember, the game has only been out just over a week. If people were blowing through Inferno like nothing, we'd be complaining that the game was too easy!