Diablo 3 - Greater Rift 82 Rank 1 Wizard [S4] by Avoid

http://twitch.tv/Avoidlol
http://twitter.com/Avoidlol

Diablo 3 Video - 4man GR87 (Asia) \1 SC monk + 3 zdps sup(barb, crusader, healing monk) [Achieve Zzz]

(Asia) Diablo III Season4 GR87 4Man
[Crusader]

Diablo 3 Video - Quin69: GR69 + Hammerdin Crusader Guide (Solo | 2.3 | Season 4)

Diablofans written guide: http://www.diablofans.com/builds/6658...
watch live @twitch.tv/quin69
twitter me @quinrex

Diablo 3 Guide - An in-depth guide on how Vyr's Amazing Arcana wizards work [by Raz9r]

Foreword

This is a guide for greater rift gameplay for Archon wizards using the reworked Vyr's Amazing Arcana set. I consider this guide to be for advanced players.

If you have not read my in-depth guide on Bane of the Stricken yet, I highly suggest doing so before reading this guide.

This guide will explain the Archon wizard and its mechanics in detail and will hopefully clear up some of the partially false rumors I have seen spreading on the forums.

Archon wizards have little gear choice, so here is what you need.

Itemization

The mandatory items

• Vyr's Amazing Arcana (6 pieces)
  
  • Stack gain rate is limited to 3 stacks per cast and only works with the Archon Strike and Disintegration Wave abilities
  • You still gain 1 stack per kill, which is not limited at all
• Chantodo's Resolve (2 pieces)
  • Your main damage dealer of up to 7,000% weapon damage per second
  • Stack gain is limited to 1 stack per attack, so even with capped attack speed at 5 attacks per second you still need at least 4 seconds to get to 20 stacks
• Ancient Parthan Defenders
  • Freezes count as stuns, so this offers isane survivability with Halo of Arlyse
• Fazula's Improbable Chain
• Halo of Arlyse
• Jewelry Slot in Kanai's Cube: Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac
• Armor Slot in Kanai's Cube: The Swami
  • Stacks can overlap into Archon form and are additive with normal Archon stacks
• Weapon Slot in Kanai's Cube: Aether Walker
  • Also works in Archon form, where Teleport then does have no cooldown or Arcane Power cost at all

The optional items

• Either Unity for a more defensive setup or Convention of Elements for more damage
• Eye of Etlich is preferred as an amulet, but immunity amulets like Mara's Kaleidoscope or The Star of Azkaranth also work

Legendary Gems

• Bane of the Stricken
  • Helps you against the boss and works very well with high sheet attack speed, especially when snapshotting the internal cooldown to a lower value using a potion
• Bane of the Trapped
  • Best damage gem in the game, since it is in its own damage buff category
  • Enemies get slowed by the Archon Slow Time ability when inside of Archon and by the slowing aura of the gem when outside of Archon
• Pain Enhancer
  • Highest damage proc off all legendary gems, considering most wizard skills have bad proc coefficients
  • The additional attack speed helps with Archon stack gain before you are capped at 5.0 attacks per second

Stat priority
To see the stat priority on the items, check out the build on d3planner.com.

I prefer Attack Speed over Cooldown Reduction or Damage Increase on weapons because attack speed on weapons is multiplicative with attack speed on gear and thus allows you to get more value out of Archon stacks and Pain Enhancer, but you are goig to reach the cap of 5.0 attacks per second faster with this.
Paragon priority

• Core: Intelligence
• Offense: Cooldown Reduction > Critical Hit Damage > Critical Hit Chance > Attack Speed
• Defense: Life > Armor > Resistance to All Elements > Life per Second
• Utility: Life Per Hit > Area Damage > Ressource Cost Reduction > Gold Find

Yes, you actually do not need any movement speed. Because why walk when you have teleport without cooldown?

Skills

• Active Skills
  • Arcane Torrent - Static Discharge
    • Spender for Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac with an internal attack speed scalar of 3.0 for faster reset of Archon cooldown
    • Has the best proc coefficient of all usable channeling spells, so 4 Arcane Power on Critical Hit is enough
    • The delay on the bullet allows you to gain 1-2 more Chantodo's Resolve stacks after you enter Archon
  • Spectral Blade - Flame Blades
    • Insane temporary fire elemental damage increase
    • Scales well with your attacks per second
  • Archon
    • You gain all runes from the Vyr's Amazing Arcana set
    • Obviously used in an Archon based build
  • Frost Nova - Deep Freeze
    • Halo of Arlyse uses the Frost Nova rune on your bar, so this is permanent 10% Critical Hit Chance
    • Do not ever use this skill yourself, since doing so will lower the amount of Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac procs going towards the Archon cooldown
  • Teleport - Safe Passage
    • Provides 25% damage reduction when outside of Archon
    • Insane mobility without cooldown because of Aether Walker (also works when in Archon)
  • Ice Armor - Crystallize
    • Ice Armor is needed for Halo of Arlyse
    • Crystallize rune provides 60% armor, which is a needed defensive boost
• Passive Skills
  • Blur
    • Extra damage reduction, needed so you do not die
  • Evocation
    • 20% free cooldown reduction which are definitely needed in a cooldown-based build
  • Unstable Anomaly
    • Dying sets you back quite a bit, so this cheat death helps you not to
  • Audacity
    • Audacity is one of the strongest damage buffs in the game, because it is in its own buff category and thus multiplicative with every other buff

Gameplay and Mechanics

The rest of this guide is done in my usual Q&A style, which should hopefully make this guide easier to follow.
What does the set even do?
I suggest you to read the item descriptions.
What does the gameplay look like?
If you want to see high-level wizard gameplay, I highly suggest checking out Quin69's GR70 clear.
Archon gameplay consists of six phases. After phase 6, go back to phase 3. If you die (which is basically game over), go back to phase 1.

1. Build up 20 Chantodo's Resolve stacks
2. Enter Archon form and try to get as many stacks as possible
3. Reset Archon cooldown using Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac
4. Build up the remainder of the 20 Chantodo's Resolve stacks using Flame Blades
5. Enter Archon form with still overlapping stacks from The Swami, this is where your damage is the highest (since you have overlapping stacks and for part of this phase also the Flame Blades stacks)
6. Remaining time in Archon without overlapping stacks from The Swami is spent trying to group up mobs while still trying to damage them, may also be spent for going to the next group of mobs

What exactly does one Archon stack give me?
Every Archon stack is equal to 1% to all resistances, 1% to armor, 1% to attack speed and 6% damage in the DIBS category (Damage Increase By Skill).
What is the DIBS category?
Damage buffs in Diablo III are sorted into categories. Buffs in the same category are additive with each other, while the sums of all categories get multiplied with each other.

Archon being in DIBS is bad, because most damage buffs are in the DIBS category. This makes Archon wizards benefit less from group buffs or certain skills, since they diminish in value. It also makes power pylons have almost no effect for Archon wizards.
When do I use either Arcane Strike or Disintegration Wave in Archon
Arcane Strike freezes enemies, which makes enemies resistant to crowd control even faster. There is no value in using Ancient Parthan Defenders if all enemies around you are resistant to crowd control, so you should use Disintegration Wave when enemies are not yet crowd control resistant.

If you intend to ramp up Bane of the Stricken stacks, you should use Arcane Strike, since it hits more often (and also does slightly more damage most of the time, depending on the attack speed breakpoint you hit).

When using the Disintegration Wave ability, make sure to describe a cone with the beam that as many monsters as possible within one attack cycle. Since Disintegration Wave is a channeling ability, you can animation cancel it with a non-channeling ability like Teleport to move around without wasting any attack cycles you could have gained archon stacks in. This is not possible when using Arcane Strike, since it is not considered a channeling spell.
What about the other Archon abilities?
You enable Slow Time once you enter Archon form and you use Arcane Blast as often as possible. I highly suggest numlocking the latter.

Teleport is used for mobility, survivability and gathering mobs. It can also be used to skip bad maps completely when used in conjunction with Aether Walker, which makes you need less Greater Rift keys when fishing for the perfect rift.
Why do you suggest using Aether Walker over The Furnace or other items?

• Fishing for the perfect rift: More mobility means you need less rift keys
• Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac procs are not being wasted on Teleport when outside of Archon
• Being able to constantly teleport around allows you to control what mobs get resistant to your freezes and reposition yourself better and more frequently to adjust to their crowd control resistance

Crowd control resistances? What is that?
As explained by Wyatt Cheng in this post:

When monsters are CC'ed, they get 10% CC resist for every second they are CC'ed. If you CC them for 2.5 seconds, they gain 25% CC resist.
Prior to 2.3.0, this capped out at 65%, so if a monster had been CC'ed for 8 seconds, it would still only apply 65% of it's CC resist. As for 2.3.0, this now caps at 95%. In other words, monsters can reduce the effectiveness of your CC abilities to 5% of their full duration IF they had already been CC'ed for 9.5 seconds or more prior to that.
This CC resist naturally decays at a rate of 5% per second while the monster is NOT CC'ed and free to act.
Note 1: soft" CC's such as movement speed slows are not affected by, nor do they effect, this CC resist in any way.
Note 2: When CC resist was initially implemented it decayed by 10%. This was changed to 5% in Reaper of Souls Note 3: We experimented with a 20% minimum during PTR but did not like it, so that change did NOT go live.

This means that your survivability is based on your constant repositioning and that you will have to gather new mobs all the time using teleport, because you will at all times want mobs around you that are not resistant to crowd control yet.
What is animation cancelling channeling abilities?
Wizards channeling abilities can be cancelled by some spells, so you can effectively cast two spells in the same attack speed cycle.

This can be abused so you can gain Archon stacks while teleporting and using Disintegration Wave at the same time.

In an alternate version of this build where you swap Frost Nova for Blizzard - Snowbound, you can spam Blizzard while channeling Arcane Torrent to animation cancel it so you get two Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac procs in only one attack cycle.
What do I do with each pylon?

• Channeling
  • Allows you to recover from death more easily by resetting Archons cooldown
  • Allows you to get more Flame Blades stacks
• Conduit
  • Gather density, take conduit, kill stuff
• Power
  • More damage, but value diminishes the more Archon stacks you have
  • Best to take in phase 6, because you will then have the most uptime on it when you have no overlap
• Shield
  • Very good in phase 1-5, when you are the squishiest
  • Good to kill mobs that are fully resistant to crowd control
• Speed
  • Movement speed effect is basically useless, because you ever only move using the teleport skill
  • Knockup effect counts as crowd control, and thus makes mobs become resistant to crowd control faster
  • Only take when fighting bosses, because the knockup hits count as hits for Bane of the Stricken 
  Got any more questions? 

SOURCE

Diablo 3 - Bountiful Bounties \ Double Caches, This Weekend Only

Kanai’s Cube has changed the face of Diablo III forever, and it’s a hungry Horadric artifact! We hope you’ve been enjoying this versatile addition to the game, and to help you take even greater advantage of its powerful transmutation abilities, for this weekend only each bounty you complete will reward double Caches! This applies to both Horadric and Bonus Caches, so be sure to hit up those bonus acts for extra rewards. 

This bonus period begins in the Americas region this Friday, September 25, at 12:01 a.m. PDT and ends on Sunday, September 27 at 11:59 p.m. PDT.

SOURCE

Diablo 3 - How to Archon \ Season 4 (Patch 2.3) Wizard Guide [Fevir]

Looking at the Archon build in season 4 of Diablo 3. Probably the strongest wizard build available this season.

HEY! QUICK NOTES:
This is my first time doing a Diablo 3 guide type video. I assumed since the game has been out so long I didn't have to hand hold and read tooltips out loud. I would love input from people who are in the Diablo 3 community and have looked at other guides for potential advice on future guides. Thanks!

It's a very item dependent build- to the point where it's not even worth using the build until you've collected it all.

Archon Wizard build details:

Archon Skills:
Blizzard - Snowbound
Ice Armor - Crystallize
Archon - Pure Power
Magic Weapon - Deflection
Teleport - Wormhole
Frost Nova - Deep Freeze

Evocation
Unstable Anomaly
Blur
Audacity

Archon Gems:
Bane of the Trapped
Bane of the Stricken
Pain Enhancer

Helm: Diamond
Armor: Topaz
Weapon: Emerald

Archon Equipment:
Vyr's Helm (Socket - Crit)
Vyr's Shoulders (Cooldown Reduction)
Vys's Chest (Socket / Elite Damage Reduction)
Vyr's Hands (Cooldown Reduction - Crit & Dam)
Vyr's Legs (Socket & Armor)
Vyr's Feet (Armor)

Chantado's Will & Force MH & OH

Fazula's Improbable Chain (Life)
Ancient Parthan Defenders (Crit)

Halo of Arlyse (Socket & Dam & Crit)
-Unity and Convection

Amulet (Socket & Dam)
-Hellfire, Mara's, Moonlight Ward, Etlich

Archon cube effects:
Furnace
The Swami
Obsidian Ring of the Zodiac

Archon paragon points:
1. Movement Speed, 20 into Arcane Power, Intellect
2. Cooldown Reduction, Dam, Attack Speed, Crit
3. Armor, Resist, Life, Life/sec
4. Area Damage, Life on Hit, Resource Cost Reduction, Gold Find

Notes about gearing:
50% cooldown reduction
30-35k life on hit
Elemental damage on bracer/amulet (your choice of which)
Armor, armor, armor
Critical hit damage over critical hit chance

Notes:
Can't stop, won't stop.
Herd monsters in archon
Speed Chantodo stacks and archon refresh in non-archon
Kill, kill, kill in overlap archon


FevirGaming:
Facebook ► www.facebook.com/FevirGaming
Twitter ► www.twitter.com/FevirGaming

Diablo 3 Video - Why Rush Past the Best Part? \ Enjoying the Loot Hunt in Season 4 [ZiggyD Gaming]

I wanted to make this video to provoke some of you into thinking about how you might be rushing past the best parts of Diablo 3 Season 4- the Loot Hunt! There's not really any drawback to taking an extra couple of days or even weeks to enjoy the loot hunt a little more - especially if you were never aiming to be a top of the leaderboards contender in the first place!

Here's Moldran's Video of his uber 20 hour barb: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3ITz...

As always, do what you find most fun whether that's rushing or not - but if you've found yourself rushing and getting bored more quickly as a result then maybe it's time to approach D3 RoS a little differently!

CONNECT WITH ZIGGYD:
Web → http://ziggyd.tv/
Twitter → http://twitter.com/ziggydstarcraft
Facebook → http://www.facebook.com/ZiggyDTV
Support Me → http://ziggyd.tv/support
Livestream → http://twitch.tv/ziggydlive

Diablo III is a loot-based action-RPG from Blizzard Entertainment on the PC, PS3 & Xbox 360. Reaper of Souls is it's first expansions pack. You can purchase & find more info on the game here: us.battle.net/d3

Diablo 3 - Patch 2.3.0 Now Live

PATCH FEATURES

New Feature: The Ruins of Sescheron

The frozen wasteland that is the Ruins of Sescheron are now open for exploration! Filled with new enemies, traps, and environmental hazards, you'll be able to explore the region and learn more about what befell the barbarians of Mount Arreat. Explore the Immortal Throne and obtain the ultimate treasure: Kanai's Cube.

New Feature: Kanai's Cube

Kanai's Cube is a new artisan that offers a slew of new recipes to fully customize your items and catalogue your Legendary powers. Several recipes are available to players immediately upon acquiring Kanai's Cube:

    Extract Legendary Power: Destroy an item to add its Legendary power to your catalogue of collected powers. Once a power has been extracted, it can be equipped to your character without the need to equip the item. Players may have one Weapon, one Armor, and one Jewelry power equipped at a time. Players may only equip powers from items that their characters can normally equip and use.
    Reforge a Legendary Item: Completely re-rolls a Legendary item as though it had dropped for the first time. This includes any powers that may have been previously enchanted on the item. Note that reforged items may re-roll as either Ancient or non-Ancient, so reforge at your own discretion!
    Upgrade Rare Item: Upgrades the quality of a level 70 Rare item to Legendary. This item will roll as a randomized Legendary that shares that item's equipment type.
    Convert Set Item: Converts a Set item to a randomized piece of gear from the same Set. For example, if you convert a pair of Asheara's Finders, you could get Asheara's Custodian, Asheara's Pace, or Asheara's Ward in return.
    Remove Level Requirement: Removes the level requirement from an item, allowing it to be equipped by a character of any level.
    Convert Gems: Converts 9 of any color gem to 9 of any other color.
    Convert Crafting Materials: Converts 100 normal, magic, or rare Crafting Materials to 100 of another type of non-legendary Crafting Material

To aquire Kanai's Cube, visit Zoltun Kulle in New Tristram, Hidden Camp, Bastion's Keep Stronghold, or The Survivor's Enclave in Adventure Mode. He'll be quite pleased to guide you on your way.

New Feature: Season Journey

Each player approaches a new Season a little differently and we wanted to celebrate individual player successes. Beginning in Season 4, you'll be able to track your personal progress through the Season Journey interface.

A player's Season Journey is divided into chapters, each with their own descriptive goals and achievements. The further you advance in your Season Journey, the more difficult the milestones become and you'll find there are challenges for every level of player. Completing the highest level Tiers will unlock new portrait frame rewards to celebrate your accomplishments.

COMPLETE PATCH NOTES

Diablo 3 - Countdown Clock for S4 Start @ NA & EU

NA

EU

Diablo 3 Guide - Fastest 1-70, Gearing and Paragon farming strategies by Garfm

How to start a new season (season 4)

In this guide I will discuss every topic you could imagine for getting started and getting started FAST most importantly in a new season. I will be covering how to prepare for the season start, different strategies for leveling from 1-70 plus my own strategy for leveling, level 70 gearing strategies, and paragon farming.

TLDR/TLDW : Prepare by writing down skills for 1-70, Level by Cursed Chest bounties, Halls of Agony Level 3 and Rifts, collect Kanai’s cube mats while gearing to gear faster, gear pool to gear even faster(read the post if you wanna know what that means), 2-3 xp/leech builds most efficient for farming paragon levels.

Video Guide: https://youtu.be/HZuJ6OftFbU
Bounty Map: http://imgur.com/j08EaYG
DH notes/cheatsheet: http://imgur.com/Zgjsv61

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Foreword
Preparing for the Season
1-70 Leveling Strategies
Level 70 Gearing Strategies
Paragon Leveling Strategy

Foreword
I realize many of you may have heard some of these tips before and while I will be combining ideas and information that has been spread out into one place. I will also be providing my own insight on existing ideas and providing to my knowledge "original" tips, tricks, and strategies or at least ones that have been kept somewhat secret. For those interested in reading something (I hope) you have read no where else before skip to Hybrid leveling strategy and gear pooling.

Preparing
Preparing for the season is mostly about cutting out the time you would normally spend in game wondering what to do next, you might think it is not important but that time will start to add up if you don’t prepare. So to prepare for the new season I suggest doing a few things. First of all knowing when the season will start. Season 4 starts Friday August 28th at 5:00 p.m. PDT for North America. Europe and Asia start times can be find here: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/19842943/season-3-ending-soon-8-7-2015 . Next you will want to figure out what class you will be playing and who you will be grouping with whether it be friends, clanmates, or random players. I highly advise forming a 4 man group for fastest leveling (sorry solo players), because of the group xp buff. Knowing what class and who you will be partying with ahead of time will allow you to get started on your journey from 1 to 70 the second the season goes live, instead of fiddling around with that once it has already begun. Additionally you may want to form a party or pick your characters based around group synergy as well. Having a person dedicated to bunching up mobs will be nice, could be a monk, crusader, or witch doctor (however wd pull comes very late into leveling). Probably the most important thing you can do to prepare though is to write out a detailed list of what skills and keys tasks you will be doing and at the levels you need to assign those skills or do those tasks. This will help cut down a lot of time wasted checking your “new” skills every 5 levels and wasting time deciding what skills to change. You can check my DH notes/cheatsheet http://imgur.com/Zgjsv61. I list out every skill and rune I will take, what level I will take them at, and which key they will go on. I also have other key tasks in that list which I will discuss later. Two finals things to do for the season is to know what difficulty you should be playing on and what leveling strategy you want to do, doesn’t matter too much which strategy as long you know what you are going to do once you enter the game. As for the difficulty you should be on a difficulty where you 2-3 shot most white mobs and also note that expert is the least efficient difficulty so its advised to either bump it up one above or drop one below.

1 to 70 leveling strategies
There are 3 fairly well known strategies to level from 1-70 at the beginning of a season. I will explain all of the strategies and my own hybrid strategy that involves using all 3 of the strategies. I will also include the “Key tasks” that are on my list that I mentioned early when I explain my hybrid strategy.

Cursed Chests
Pros: High Density, Completion Reward(chest, handin xp & gold)
Cons: Inconsistent (don’t always spawn)
This method involves doing cursed chest bounties over and over until you reach level 70. The reasoning for this strategy is that the cursed chests you will be looking for provide a lot of easy to kill mobs and are generally harmless and you get the resplendent chest, and bounty xp and gold. The cursed chests you will be looking for include: Cursed Chapel act IV, Cursed Bellows act I, Cursed Cellar act I, Cursed Court act I, Cursed Grove act I, Cursed Hatchery act I, and one that most people don’t mention but I really like it Cursed Peat act V - Paths of the Drowned. All the waypoint locations can be seen in the Bounty Map http://imgur.com/j08EaYG. So you look for the corresponding bounty(ies) in each act (only one should spawn per act as a bounty). If they spawned go complete the bounty if not remake the game and look again. Repeat until level 70.

Halls of Agony
Pros: Consistent, High Density, Low threat.
Cons: Boring, No guaranteed bonus rewards.
This strategy is to go to Halls of Agony level 3 in act I and clear out the entire floor leave the game and repeat. This is claimed by many to be the fastest although I think it is very debatable I think all 3 strategies are nearly equal each having its pros and cons. Pros to this strategy is its consistency since it is always there and the high density low threat mobs that Halls of Agony level 3 provides. Its packed with mostly slow moving skeletons.The con to this strategy is that it becomes boring as hell when done repeatedly for hours. So once again you just clear the entire floor back out and remake. Some people choose to do Halls of Agony levels 1 and 2 as well but they tend to have lower density.

Rifts
Pros: Increased Legendary droprate, Bloodshards, Hand in Bonus.
Cons: Random Density, Random Mobs.
This strategy explains itself fairly well you just do rifts until you hit level 70. Since you no longer needs keys to enter rifts you can now just do rifts back to back until 70. Reason behind doing rifts is for the increased legendary drop rate in rifts so you can upgrade your gear faster than you normally would, which can make a big difference. If you have ever gone for a couple levels without finding any major upgrades you know that feeling of the monsters becoming increasingly difficult to kill. Doing rifts should help prevent that from happening. However the drawback to rifts is the random mob types and random density which can slow things down.

Hybrid Strategy
Pros: Somewhat Consistent, Bloodshards, Hand in Bonuses.
Cons: A lot of teleporting around.
Ok so I am going give a brief overview of the rotation and reasoning behind the strategy then go into detail of the exact plan and key points I’m going to hit while leveling from 1-70. So the rotation will be go into a Rift and start clearing as normal. Once 1 or 2 people find big upgrade getting a big power spike we will then teleport back to town. I’m sure someone will ask for me to define a “big upgrade/power spike” while it all depends on how you and your group feels so adjust the following example to something that feels right. Here is an example: If your progression is <25% look for 75% dmg increase combined among members (ie 3 people each find weapons increasing damage by 25%), progression <50% 50% dmg inc, <75% 30-40% dmg inc, <100% 20%dmg inc, if you find no dmg increase proceed to the next step after finishing the rift. From there we will look for the cursed bounties I listed in the cursed bounty strategy and clear any of them if any spawned, once we do that we will also go clear halls of agony level 3. Then we will head back into the rift finish it hand it in and reset the game. Philosophy behind this strategy is that you gain the benefits of getting increased drop rates and once you hit a power spike you can take advantage of the guaranteed easy xp of Halls of Agony and easy xp and loot of potential cursed chest bounties. Only downsides are the extra time spent teleporting around and again the uncertainty of rift mobs and density. Here are the exact steps I will be doing while trying this strategy.
LVL 1: Steal Follower Weapons & Find Cursed Chest Bounty or Easy Boss Bounty.
Why?: The chests rewarded at the end will provide initial blues/yellows to get you started.
LVL 1-12: Do cursed chest bounties and halls of agony.
Why?: Guaranteed easy mobs to get through the first few levels.
LVL 6-7: Check Fence Merchants in Act I and Act II for rings.
LVL 10-12: Check Fence Merchants in Act I and Act II for amulets.
LVL 10 -14: Switch to Campaign go through until you can kill Skeleton king.
LVL 18: Kill Skeleton King.
Why?: First time killing SK guarantees a Leoric's Crown being lvl 18 ensures socket. Put ruby in the socket.
LVL 18-70: Run Hybrid Strategy rotation.
LVL 45: Craft lvl 60 Weapon roll reduced lvl req on it.
LVL 60: Craft lvl 70 Weapon roll reduced lvl req on it.

General Tips for All Strategies
Keep an eye out for the following items.
Leoric’s Signet: %xp roll.
Puzzle Ring: save for lvl 70 put into cube for greed’s realm.
Bovine Bardiche: save for lvl 70 cow level.
Nagel Ring: Provide huge burst dmg while lvling.
Craft lvl 60 Weapon roll reduced lvl req on it.
Craft lvl 70 Weapon roll reduced lvl req on it.
Craft and wear Cains if you find the recipe for %xp.

Level 70 Gearing Strategies
Bounties First Strategy
So this first strategy for gearing up is definitely up for debate since I have not tested it. So once you have hit 70 spend your blood shards and go get Kanai’s cube. Use up your puzzle rings and Bovine Bardiches if you found any. The reason you may want to start bounties first depends on what items you found while leveling up 1-70. If you found something worth extracting right away you can start doing bounties otherwise doing rifts and greater rifts first will be the best to gear up. So do bounties until you have the item or items you want extracted early in the cube then switch over to rifts asap because they will give much more reward until you are ready to farm mats again at t6+.(Thank you to mhgd3 for replying and correcting me here).

Rifts First Strategy
Alternatively you could start doing rifts right away and start looking for a weapon and set pieces that way since there is the increased chance of finding legendaries in rifts and you get more blood shards. After obtaining sets and once you can do about t6 or higher you can start farming bounties for the mats to reroll legendaries and extract them.

Gear Pooling
This is a strategy that I almost never hear people talk about which surprises me because it is so strong. Maybe I am out of the loop or maybe people are just too greedy and that is why it has not caught on yet but here it is. Note that this strategy will work with either of the ones previously mentioned. So what you will do is get in a party with 2 or more players of the same class as you that you trust(clanmates or friends, usually best). Determine who is going to carry (I recommend whichever person will be playing the most) then everyone will pool all of their important set pieces to the carry. For example if it were DH’s the three people being carried would give the person who is carrying EVERY piece of Marauders, Natalya’s, and Unhallowed Essence. Pool set pieces into the carry until he has finished one then bump up the difficulty as high as you can, which will most likely be t6 to start and then ease your way up. The carry then carries (hence the name) the other 3 through t6 until they finish their sets. The carry should also be handing set pieces out to the group that he finds since he obviously already has a set. To restate the person carrying should be the one who plays the most incase people leave before they finish their sets the carry will hopefully be online when you regroup. This is a super effective method for gearing up fast if you have trustworthy people to do it with because even if just one person has a set finished it will be enough to crank up the difficulty and the entire party will find gear faster and level up faster.

Paragon Leveling Strategy
So as many of you may know %xp has changed from Season 3 to Season 4. The xp is now shared with the entire party instead of just the one person wearing xp gear. They also changed Greater Rift keys so you can no longer recycle keys. This means the paragon farming meta is going to shift. Now when you are running greater rifts you will want 2-3 people wearing “leech” setup even though now it would be more appropriate to call it xp build or something since they are no longer leeching but helping the entire party gain more xp. So the builds for an xp build will essentially be the same as they were last season give or take a few skills due to the cc changes. I have a feeling running 2 people with full xp gear and 2 dps (maybe with a few pieces of xp gear on them) will be the most efficient way to farm xp but it is still up in the air as things will shift once the season pans out. Also since keys were changed there will also need to be some experimenting with exactly which greater rift level will be the most efficient for most groups. Now that it takes longer to get greater rift keys, since you can’t recycle anymore, you have to find the sweet spot between doing grifts fast but also doing one of high enough level so you get the full value out of your greater rift keystone. I imagine having times between 7-10 minutes will end up being the sweet spot but it needs to be tested further.

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Diablo 3 Guide - Season 4 Build List for the lazy people [by Inglorious]

If youre not playing on PTR and want to copy paste some pretty decent builds for 2.3 Season-4 patch, there you go!

Keep in mind i didnt entirely min max the builds gear-wise BUT its really close to the best there is! The builds are only tested in solo or 2 player GR60-65! If you have any Questions My BattleTag on EU and PTR : Inglorious#2258

IMPORTANT for those who dont know, if you click on the Skills/Effects Tab on the D3Planner Build Website you can scroll down in order to see the Cubed Legendary Items!

• High CDR Whirlwind Barb The build is pretty simple you keep up your warcry/ignore pain/battle rage/wrath of the berserker and threatening shout big mobpacks/elites/champs/bosses as often you can while constantly using whirlwind, you just dont stop, ever. In GRifts you need a very high white mob density in order to complete 60+ without 5 damage or 5 conduit pylons.
• 2 Player GRift zDPS Barb The idea of this build is you just run around with almost 700 million toughness and grab mobs together with your ancient spear while buffing your partymember with 20%armor increase and 30% increased dodge chance AND your Ignore Pain for another 50% damage reduce on top of that. Obviously debuff the mobs with your threatening shout and rend to increase the damage of your partymember. The build plays best with a high dps glasscannon like Demonhunter. Exploding palm Monk is also a really good choice.
• Immortal Kings Rend Barb Tricky to play but ridiculous damage output. Main goal is to generate as much fury as possible with your furious charge and spend it quickly to reduce your cooldowns of your wrath of the berserker. You can also swap out mara's kaleidoscope for a hellfire amulet.
• Blessed Hammer Crusader aka Hammerdin Well not much to say you use your cooldowns when you need them and spam blessed hammer like sonic on acid. Protip: rebind your Force Stand from shift to another button (preference) you just hold down left mouse button and spam the force stand since youve cubed Hexing Pants of Mr. Yan and need to move constantly.
• Acid Cloud Witchdoc My favourite build so far fun-wise. The build is all about positioning and keeping up your buffs while doing a really good amount of damage and party support. Without the perfect gear a pretty squishy dps build but fun to play. Pretty important for gearing is that you need the armor roll instead of all resist and stack the single resists on secondary stats plus the gold and health pickup radius to increase the radius of your passives Grave Injustice & Swampland Attunement!
• Seven-Sided-Strike Exploding Palm Monk This Build stacks tons of Crit-Damage and uses Broken Promises in the Kanai Cube to get 100% critchance for a few seconds to burst down everything. If it doesnt get nerfed it will be the strongest build overall in the upcoming patch for sure. Protip: Do not spend any Paragon points in Crit-Chance it will nerf your damage. Also you dont want any critchance on your gear at all. You can swap out Way of the hundred fists for Crippling Wave with the Tsunami rune for more defense but id recommend rolling with WotHF in Softcore. Also i am not 100% sure how Seven Sided Strike and Exploding Palm works with Dual wielding and how the damage gets calculated because i am done testing Monk atm. Lets just pretend the skillsdmg gets calculated off from the mainhand and the offhand is just there for bonus stats but dont be upset if i am wrong on that one. If i am wrong just swap out the VIT on the offhand for 10% damage roll. You could also swap out Madstone from the Cube for Spirit Guards if u really need that extra 40% damage Reduction. For the Passives you could swap out Guardians Path for Sixth Sense if u feel like you need more NON-Physical Damage Reduction but overall i like 35% dodge more than 25% elemental damage negation.
• Did not test Wizard&DH but just roll archon set for wiz and multishot/nat set for DH and youll be fine

Last but not least i wanted to say sorry for my bad england my native language is not english and my grammar is terrible dont get mad at me.

And yes this is a build list/walloftextlol and not an in-depth how to play diablo3 every button explained guide so i just wrote down what i think its important to point out.

cheers!

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Updated 2.3 & Season 4 fastest leveling guide. Full of top tips, video guides and post 70 gear farming tips [by HerpDerpenberg]

TL:DR: Still level up on hard, cherry picking efficient quests, high dense zones, and select cursed chests. At level 42 crafting level 60 1h weapon with up to 18 reduced levels on it, bump the difficulty into the torments and taper off back to expert/hard as you approach 60. At level 70 craft a 2h Mace/XBow for a big DPS boost. At level 70, immediately farm standard rifts and open greater rifts whenever you get a key since they drop on any difficulty now. Slowly work on acquiring gems and upgrading them as you complete rifts. You should be able to do T2 once you get your legendary gems and T3/4+ in a few hours after you get 2 or 4 pieces of your sets. Most classes can be doing T6 and beyond on day one if you like pooping in a sock! Good luck!

• quick guide in one picture for you
• Video guide for leveling

Foreword

Patch 2.3 is around the corner. With a new patch, we have a new season and the age old question, “What is the best way to level up to 70 and gear up?” Well, I'm here to help you out.
The patch itself brings many changes to the leveling process and early gear acquisition once you do reach level 70. In this guide, I’ll go into detail about the best methods to level up a fresh seasonal character using adventure mode: * Patch 2.3 changes that affect the leveling process we’ve grown accustomed to. * What difficulty to level on. * What gear choices to make, when to craft, and what levels to upgrade artisans. * What new gem tiers to expect leveling up.

Leveling up, Patch 2.3 changes and crafting gear

There are many changes in 2.3 that will streamline the leveling process for everybody.

• Gems tiers while leveling have been simplified and you should get better gems than you normally would. The new tiers are standard up to level 30, flawless up to 40, square up to 50 and flawless square up to 60 with marquise dropping at 61. This will be a big boost when socketing a ruby into your weapon and helm.
• Crafting materials have also been simplified: There is only one tier of materials now, so salvage everything and save it as you level. You also get salvage all from the get go. Rare weapon and armor tiers upgrade every 5 levels and level 60 rares come with 6 properties so you'll craft better items each time. With the new goblins and even bandit shrines, you shouldn't have any problems with gold or materials while you're leveling up.
• Crafting low level legendary sets requires the same materials as rares, just slightly more. So if you find a Cain’s or Born’s set, you can craft them sooner to help boost XP while leveling.
• You can still craft a level 60 weapon with reduced levels. Unfortunately, they have removed 2-Handed weapons from the pool of level 60 crafted weapons. This time around you’ll need to craft 1-handeded weapons this time around and a second if you dual wield or a mojo/source/quiver if you’re a Wizard/Witch Doctor/Demon Hunter. Bad news with quivers is that they are level 59, but not the end of the world, the main damage comes from your weapon. You’ll want to craft a 1-H mace and Demon Hunters craft Bows. The slow attack speed on a mace make your abilities hit the hardest they can, and you're just stuck with bows because nothing else is level 60 for a DH. Off-hand weapons will likely be your second best craft, so always hang onto them if you dual wield.
• Rifts (standard and greater) and legendary gem upgrades have been changed. I’ll go into more detail on my “post 70” section, but the “slow roll” grifting is gone and gems are simpler to level up now.
• New adventure mode cache rewards are more aimed at level 70+, but adding in a boss chest reward and better full act clear cache rewards makes doing full act clears more beneficial to a leveling player. Act caches now contain bonus gold as well as legendary patterns which can help you leveling. You can also gain act crafting materials for cube recipes later.
• The patch added Kanai’s cube, which is very powerful tool post 70. There’s not much benefit using it when you are leveling, but if there is a bounty in the Ruins of Sescheron, you should probably take a slight detour to do the bounty and then grab the cube after you finish it so you have it when you do hit 70.

For leveling basics... First and foremost, you’ll want to make sure you create a seasonal character and then level up in adventure mode. There is no longer a requirement to unlock adventure mode, so anyone can start with it. The biggest thing to remember while killing is to KEEP MOVING. Learn to kill on the move and have skills that benefit killing groups and killing them with 1-2 hits. You should aim to be go 1-70 in 5-6 hours but you can go under 5 easily. I wouldn’t be so heart struck on getting 70 as quick as possible, because ultimately saving an hour when you’re likely going to spend hundreds of hours on a character isn’t really saving much time in the long run. But do what you want and I list all the best ways at your disposal below.
Some quick tips while leveling:

• Immediately steal the weapons off your follower at the start of the game. The Enchantress and Templar have 1h weapons, the Scoundrel has a Bow. If you're running solo, the templar. Even without a weapon his support is the best for spot heals and defensive boosts.
• At level 6 start making stops to the fences to look for rings with min/max damage on them. At level 10 amulets will start popping up as well. These are huge bonuses to your damage in the early game and really help out. You don't need to remake games to find them, you'll eventually find a vendor that sells some in a few levels time. Around your 30's, pure stat rings begin to phase out these rings, so don't go out of your way to look for them at that point.
• Only upgrade your blacksmith, jeweler, mystic when you need it. It helps preserve the gold you have while leveling for crafting and enchanting that level 60 weapon.
• Upgrade your rubies, put your best one in your weapon and next best in your helm.
• Unless you're playing hardcore, prioritize damage over survivability with gear stats. You can make up for a lack of survivability by using diamonds in your socketed armor pieces, except for the ruby in your helm.
• Salvage all your materials and never pay to de-gem an item. Salvaging it removes the gems for free.
• When you're 42, upgrade your Blacksmith to rank 10, so you can craft level 60 weapons. Look for a weapon with freeze/stun/fear or other crowd control and roll off the OTHER secondary stat as this reduces possible affixes by a great amount. You might even have better luck straight crafting one with up to 18 reduced levels on it.
• When you're level 61, craft a level 70 2 handed Mace or Xbow the same as a level 60 weapon for a good DPS boost on your way to 70.

Difficulty Selection

If you want the details, check out my old leveling guide where I go into detail on it. Basically, you want to go on HARD difficulty up to level 42-45. When you equip your level 60 weapon with reduced levels, bump the difficulty up to the torments until you're 1-2 shotting things and slowly start knocking it back down to hard or expert once you get close to 60. I find that the power creep of level 61 items let’s you run expert pretty good and you can carry it to 70, but don’t be afraid to drop down to hard if you need to.

You should never run normal difficulty unless you find yourself getting killed constantly and unable to do things like kill elite packs or goblins.

Three Leveling Strategies

There are three methods of leveling that I’m going to go over.

• The fastest is going to be Cursed Bounties and Halls of Agony farming
• The next fastest is doing select bounties or completing all act 1 bounties or chain completing the bonus acts
• Finally, still quick by any means is running pure rifts.

While I order these, there is still a level of RNG involved. You can run cursed chests and halls of agony and never run into a cursed chest. On the other hand, rifts might be all being zombies and skeletons. Rifts might have a slight shift late leveling as you gain more skills and have better AoE clearing, but early on the randomness of rifts and the varied monsters and density hurt consistency and make them more difficult to tackle.

The whole point is to be aware of these three methods and pick what works and has you spending more time killing instead of running empty space or loading menus. Full completing acts or doing rifts are your fall back when you have a game that throws nothing good at you for the best bounties.

Halls of Agony and Cursed Chest farming method.

This method has proven for the past seasons to be the fastest leveling method, although very monotonous to do it for several hours. The density is always stunning on Halls of Agony 3 (you can go to levels 1 and 2 as well) and has a chance to spawn the swarm type cursed chest which awards the best XP of the cursed chest types. Monsters are mostly melee, skeletons and cultists. Before you run Halls of Agony 3, check around act 1 for the cursed bounties on the map and do those first, you’ll always end your run with Halls 3 and then start over when you dead end or reach the Butcher. Never re-create games fishing for bounties, you're just wasting your time in menus. I would avoid doing the Butcher all together, even if you get the quest, 2.3 added a bonus chest to give you some good loot for the bounty. If you are struggling for crafting mats or just have bad items, you could do a boss run. But I warn you, you’re giving up a lot of experience per hour to get the kill and should probably bump the difficulty down a notch just to clear it faster. Make sure you re-create your game to bump back up the difficulty to hard.

• Cursed Chest bounties to look for: The Cursed Chest events to look for are the ones that require 100 kills for the bonus chest. These reward more XP on completion and more XP per monster kill than the wave type. You're only looking for acts 1 and 4 for these. A1: Cursed Bellows (Halls of Agony), Cursed Cellar (Old Ruins), The Cursed Court (Cathedral Level 2), The Cursed Grove (Fields of Misery) and The Cursed Hatchery (Spider Cave). A4 you are looking for The Cursed Chapel (The Silver Spire Level 2). There are others, but these are the easiest to get to and have easy mobs to kill.

Personally, I like to add looking for “Clear the Hell Rift” in act 4, the entire Festering woods (static perimeter, dense zone) has very easy bounties to snag. I also like killing in Weeping Hollow and doing any quests, but I ignore clearing the Den of the Fallen quest.
I’ve even made a fancy map you can open up on a second monitor to remind you of the areas I like the most here.

Select bounties and other high density zones with the full act option if you want a chance at Cain’s set pattern method.

In this method, stick with the Cursed Bounties and Halls of Agony farming, but look bounties that have decent density and good time vs. reward investment. This method adds variety to keep you from going insane grinding all those cultists in the Halls.

• Zone clear bounties: these bounties give the most XP than any other and are simply finding a dungeon and killing all monsters on a given floor. The easiest ones are those that have easy to find entrances: A1 - Khazra Den, Scavenger's Den, Den of the Fallen, Cave of the Moon Clan. A3: Icefall Caves. A4: Hell Rift. there are other zone clears but these are the easiest to find in their respective zones and have easy layouts to navigate.
• Heavily dense zones: These are zones with easy monsters (i.e. heavily melee based) and relatively simple/linear map layouts to minimize backtracking. You will want to complete any bounty in these zones but SKIP boss kills as they take too long for the XP rewards. A1: Halls of Agony Level 3, Weeping Hollow, Cathedral Level 2. Fields of Misery is an honorable mention. If you're on higher difficulties, the ranged guys can really rip into you. But playing on Hard shouldn't be that difficult. A3: Keep Depths Level 2 a bit dangerous for HC, so I suggest only going here for SC.

If you notice you have a few more bounties to do a full act, you can choose to do so. Patch 2.3 brought bonus cache in the bonus act. These result in better cache rewards while leveling and you can get some legendary patterns out of them. You might even get a Cain’s set, which will significantly boost your leveling experience. If you plan to clear the bonus acts, start at the bonus act and then rotate to the new one.
I'd skip over act 5 if possible... fuck that act and fuck those mobs.

Rifting

The last method is pure rifting. Rift fragments are no longer required to created rifts in 2.3, so you can start running them right at level 1. There’s not much to the method here except running rifts over and over. You’ll get some blood shards, but save them until you get 70 or cannot carry any more. In rifts, you'll get the benefit of double legendary drop rates. However, I would still suggest getting your first 15-20 or so levels in the methods I listed above. The earlier levels will go quicker due to easier mobs. Once you get your movement and AoE abilities, you can move to rifts.

What to do once I reach level 70?

Now that you’ve hit level 70, the real game starts. Here, some time saving methods on gear acquisition can trickle down to saving you hours on progression. The sooner you can get a good baseline of gear, the sooner you can acquire set items which boost your efficiency farming your end game set of gear. Your top priority for gear farming once you hit 70 will be as follows:

• If you haven't unlocked your Kanai's Cube, do the quest right now. Without the act specific crafting items, you can still; turn rares to legendaries, convert set items, swap crafting materials and gems and open a portal to the Vault with a puzzle ring. If you do run the vault, make sure you do it on Torment 1 and above for a chance to get your class set items. Don't worry about bounties. You'll only need the act crafting materials to make level 70 legendary items and extract legendary affixes to the cube. The recipes that benefit a fresh 70 (rare to legendary conversion, gem/material conversion, set item swaps) do not require these cache materials.
• Immediately start rifting on a difficulty you feel most comfortable on to get double legendary drop rates. Remember, in softcore you can always start high and drop the difficulty down. In hardcore, start on hard and use greater rifts to gauge your difficulty. Greater rift keys drop at any difficulty now, up to 100% on T6 and then a chance for an increasing double drop on Torment 7 through Torment 10.
• Use greater rift keys as soon as you acquire them and complete them as fast as possible. With patch 2.3 you can pick what +1 on your highest completed greater rift level. The menu is also a gauge for when you can start doing T2 bounties. Gone are the days of “slow roll” rifts, because one greater rift token opens only one rift, so do them on the highest level you are comfortable at completing.
• Since slow rolls are gone, legendary gem acquisition is slowed down a bit but at the benefit of more efficient upgrading of your gems. Take note to do the highest rift you can complete so you can upgrade your gem at the end. Try your best to +12 the rift relative to the gem so you can 100% each upgrade. Remember, failing a rift means no gem upgrade chance.
• Start doing bounties once you can clear level 13+ rifts and are hunting for a 4 or 6 piece set bonus. You'll want to start them on Torment 2 and beyond as cache rewards are a 50% drop rate of items, up to 100% on Torment 6.

And that's about it. The rest is grinding rifts to get gear and bounties for act crafting materials that you need. I hope this guide has helped you improve both your leveling and early game gearing. I'll see you in Sanctuary!

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Diablo 3 - Season 3 End & Season 4 Start Dates

Season 3 End & Season 4 Start Dates:

There will be a short period of time between when a Season ends and the next begins. During this time, you’ll be able to sort through your rollover rewards and review your progress on the Leaderboards. It’s a great time to reflect on the accomplishments you’ve made and enjoy the culmination of your pre and post-Season loot hunts!

Season 3 will be ending at the following dates and times for each region:

    North America: Sunday, August 23 @ 5:00 p.m. PDT
    Europe: Sunday, August 23 @ 5:00 p.m. CEST
    Asia: Sunday, August 23 @ 5:00 p.m. KST

Season 4 will be starting shortly after at the following dates and times for each region:

    North America: Friday, August 28 @ 5:00 p.m. PDT
    Europe: Friday, August 28 @ 5:00 p.m. CEST
    Asia: Friday, August 28 @ 5:00 p.m. KST

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Diablo 3 - Main builds for each class in Season 4

Main Builds

By agryxoxo

Barb:

• WotW: Spin2win, spin some more, fill the screen with tornados.
• IK: Hammer of the Ancients or Seismic Slam. You and the three stooges smash stuff with big hammers.

Demon Hunter:

• Natalya: Spin2win, call flying stuff to wreak havoc.
• UE: Multishot or lots of blue balls to clutter the screen.

Witch Doctor

• Zuni/Carnevil: Little guys, spit snakes & darts, now with less lag. Hooray.
• Helltooth: Walls of zombies, walls of death, walls, bears, giants, dogs.
• Arachyr: Spiders (big and small), toads, bats.

Monk

• Uliana (now): Use Seven Sided Strike, enjoy the animation, everything explodes. Repeat.
• Uliana (soon): use Seven Sided Strike, enjoy the animation, hopefully everything explodes or run for your life until the cooldown is over.
• Raiment: Dash dash dash, punch punch punch.
• Generator: Punch punch punch, punch punch punch. Sometimes Cyclone Strike to gather guys in order to punch them.

Wizard:

• Vyr: Transform into Archon, watch your weapons (Chantodo) do the work, after Archon channel stuff to get back into Archon.
• DelRasha: Meteors, bubbles, lots of colors, is pretty cool. I like it.

Crusader:

• Light: ~15 second cinematic for Falling Sword, land, cast hammers (Yes, you're the hammerdin). Ok no, most people don't use the FS skill.
• Roland: Don't know. Sweep stuff or smash with shield, never played it.
  

Estimated GR lvl for each one

By Drak_Gaming

-After the upcoming patch-

Barb:

• WotW: 70 | IK: 70

Demon Hunter:

• Natalya: 67 | UE: 60+

Witch Doctor:

• Zuni/Carnevil:65+ | Helltooth: 65+ | Arachyr: 60

Monk:

• Uliana:65+ | Raiment: 70 |Generator: 65+

Wizard:

• Vyr: 70 | DelRasha:65+

Crusader:

• Seeker: 65+ | Roland: 60+

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