02-20-2013, 07:12 PM
Found a decent Manajuma's carving knife for my witch doctor. I had the other set piece in my stash, but I went out and spent a couple million on a better offhand. My DPS dropped slightly, but I gained life steal. So basically at higher MP's I get more DPS than with the Last Breath/Amethyst combo. Since 1.07 launched I've been doing solo runs on MP1 with the Spirit Barrage build-although I changed Blood Ritual to Rush of Essence.
A guildmate has moved to playing mostly public games and she told me she runs MP1 games. The higher-DPS characters apparently carry her through quickly and she gets lots of XP. I tried a couple of those and they're OK, but the games end with Azmodan being killed, so you miss out on Keep Depths and Fields of Slaughter with 5 stacks. I consider that sub-optimal. The gaming itself was fine-people pretty much stayed together while adventuring. I also tried an MP3 game with my pet build and that also went OK, but was slow. In neither case did I feel like I was gaining a ton of extra XP over solo MP1-but the sample size is pretty small. I'm going to try MP2 with the pet build next.
I also found my first Stone of Jordan ever-including all of my D2 play. It was a decent roll for a WD with an 8% bonus to Plague of Toads damage. I'm using it for the public game runs and will switch over to it full-time once I hit paragon 65. I also did some crafting and rolled a nice set of shoulders for my demon hunter. Less armor than the Vile Ward, but about 4k more damage and life. All-in-all, the new crafting recipes seem pretty good, although a bit more customization would be nice.
A guildmate has moved to playing mostly public games and she told me she runs MP1 games. The higher-DPS characters apparently carry her through quickly and she gets lots of XP. I tried a couple of those and they're OK, but the games end with Azmodan being killed, so you miss out on Keep Depths and Fields of Slaughter with 5 stacks. I consider that sub-optimal. The gaming itself was fine-people pretty much stayed together while adventuring. I also tried an MP3 game with my pet build and that also went OK, but was slow. In neither case did I feel like I was gaining a ton of extra XP over solo MP1-but the sample size is pretty small. I'm going to try MP2 with the pet build next.
I also found my first Stone of Jordan ever-including all of my D2 play. It was a decent roll for a WD with an 8% bonus to Plague of Toads damage. I'm using it for the public game runs and will switch over to it full-time once I hit paragon 65. I also did some crafting and rolled a nice set of shoulders for my demon hunter. Less armor than the Vile Ward, but about 4k more damage and life. All-in-all, the new crafting recipes seem pretty good, although a bit more customization would be nice.