Out of boredom, I decided to just power straight through on normal mode Inferno with my barbarian. The other day I finished Act 1 on my Barbarian for the first time so after easily screaming through Act 2, I ended up just zooming through the rest of the game. I figured that with the 5 stacks of Nephlam Valor carrying through each act, it made sense just to retain them between acts in the hope of getting a good drop here and there sooner rather than later.
For the most part, everything was dead easy. Only Act 4 gave me a slight issue where the unique that has the plans for crafting machines would nuke me a few times. Beyond that, my barbarian held remarkably well in normal mode Inferno to the point where I felt like he was overpowered even. I made a few changes to my barbarian based on Moldran’s barbarian. While I do not have the same gear as he does, I ended up switching some talents and passives around because I found myself rage starved too often. I still have some issues with rage, but not to the degree as before.
Right now, I’m focused on doing a whirlwind barbarian build. I use the Bul-Kathos legendaries for some added fury (not much), one having life on hit. I believe my life on hit at the moment is 1.2k and he has lifesteal from his belt. When I tackle reflect damage mobs, I have no issues whatsoever. It’s really cool since my survivability is just awesome. When I modified my barbarian, I sacrificed once passive (the one for armor) for the rage generation passive. I thought that his survivability would drop. Quite the contrary. Probably, I’m doing far better now than before.
My next challenge would be to try higher monster powers to see where a sweet spot is for farming. Initially, I want to focus on gaining paragon levels since most of the drops are crap as of now. Usually, I’ve been picking up gems, rares and tomes on top of legendaries to build my barbarian’s personal stash up. Some people don’t feel it’s efficient but again the goal is more long term since I eventually want to make enough money and have the mats to craft better gems and the Archon recipes.
Besides playing my barbarian, I also have been playing my Demon Hunter. My Demon Hunter is in a weird state since he’s pretty much my best character with decent gear/DPS and sits at paragon level 42. However, he’s probably nowhere near efficient as a monk or barbarian. I ended up getting the vault talent once again just to move around faster but I don’t feel that my farming has improved much. Sadly though, all the good stuff comes from his runs.
Despite all that, my Demon Hunter is slowing down considerably when it comes to Paragon Leveling. I’m back at Monster Power 2 without any change of gear just to try and grab better drops and experience. Right now, it doesn’t feel all that challenging so I’m tempted to pump it up one more level.
Down the road, I would like to return to my other characters. I would’ve put more effort into my monk if it wasn’t for his squishiness as a Tempest Rush build. However, I would love to some day give the Archon Wizard build a try. I did use a lower level Archon style build at one point and I found it loads of fun. But in moving to Inferno, I needed something with a little better survivability and for cheap. Hence, the Critical Mass build choice. The problem with my Wizard as a Critical Mass build is that her gear is pretty bad. She drastically needs better gear and I want to devote either gold to obtaining that gear or finding it on my own.
Then lastly there’s my witch doctor. I’ve seen the Zombie Dogs and Zombie Bears builds but I don’t quite have the gear for either. Instead, I use a pretty generic build that allows him to do decently. But his DPS isn’t great and I think he’ll have problems at higher monster powers. I would love to eventually get him better gear, but it’ll take a while and probably quite a bit of money before I can do that.
If I have time, I would eventually like to have the opposite gender for each of these classes. But some things I would do differently are getting a Hellfire Ring as well as the other legendary ring that provides the XP bonus. Also, I want to have them dedicated for other builds. For those other builds, I want to find all the gear on my own rather than depend on the Auction House. That possibly will take quite a while and require me to eventually focus on one main farming class (probably barbarian or my demon hunter). But I think it’ll be a nice long term challenge.
Once again you might be asking, “What happened to Path of Exile?” I recently learned that one of my friends acquired a new PC. I’m hoping to convince her to try out the game. When she does, I’ll probably re-roll my ranger. I found out that I probably messed up her build already so it’ll probably be better for me just to re-roll her. In the meantime, I wanted to focus more on gear acquisition and paragon leveling in Diablo 3.