lol - my lvl 1 hardcore (very veteran) cleric just successfully fought off a lvl 501 large creature (sphynx) for his FIRST KILL! (no skill, lvl 1 heirlooms, no stat upgrades) - bet you can't do that with a sorcerer. :)
lol - retirement requirement: lvl 9350, max vet item level: 72... Assuming NO difficulty, vet ranks or skill points, you'd max that item at level 7200... so basically, I can't retire without a maxed out vet item... <>
Lol - retired that character, and the first monster to spawn for my new character was a lvl 1 treasure chest.... this is going to take alot longer to kill than the last one I encountered... rofl!
Lol, so today I one-shotted a lvl 10,000 chest with my lvl 1741 cleric.... /flex... Really funny thing was, it gave me enough skill points to unlock the disintegrate skill for the first time ever (I usually retired long before getting that many skill points...) Disintegrate: "Each level gives a 1% chance to automatically destroy small, medium, large, and elite creatures"... Umm, I can already auto kill small, medium, large, elite, legendary and chests... 100% of the time.... But nifty, a new skill... (dumps points into damage percentage...)
To developer (about orange stagnation):
Real example of +5 not being enough: Both items are Ring 2... Lvl 380 Orange***: 235 Ht Regen, 78 En Regen, 246 Gold Find, 123 Mag Find. Lvl 1500 Purple (yeah 1120 levels higher): 152 Ht Regen, 152 En Regen, 307 Gold Find, 77 Mag Find... Would YOU swap out that orange for the purple? Stagnation, hoooo!
(In all fairness, I don't even look at the stats any more, I just use my vet set and stat upgrades to get me to fighting whatever level of monsters max my next vet piece, turn off auto sell - because I got tired of selling gems all the time - and collect a full set, then go to lvl 1, equip all the picked up gear and retire, next char, repeat....)
Oh, further not about sorcerer and full vet gear: The major money expenditure (enchanting and upgrading) doesn't apply to veteran gear, so the extra cash doesn't help that much -- though in fairness, you could take off one piece of vet gear to equip something like a +10k dmg enchanted ring or whatever, so I suppose it could be made useful.
@mnjiman: Yes, you can have a weapon with 1.101-1.104 speed - which is listed as 1.10 on the weapon (but, because of rounding half the 1.55 weapons won't go to 1.10 - as they're actually 1.545-1.549 and those will stop at 1.245-1.249 - or 1.25 as listed on the weapon itself)
@redbullet Your vet rank raises by 1 each time you retire a character. (Vet rank is per mode, so retired hardcore chars increase your hardcore vet rank, and normal chars increase normal vet rank)
Warrior: A fine class, but as a fully vet geared hardcore character, I find my block is quickly maxed... Meaning I block 1/2 the attacks, the warrior ability is only reflecting 1/4 attacks - for almost no meaningful damage, and the remaining 1/4 of the damage has to be dealt with via my health regen - but that only happens every 5 seconds, so even if I'm keeping my max hp at twice the legendary's damage, 1/16 times I'll get hit twice in a row and die before I can get a regen proc (unless I invent in survival, but them I'm doing diddly for damage, or I invest in life leach, but in my experience, damage lost investing points into life leach again reduces the damage too far, so I don't heal enough between legendary attacks to survive...)
Sorcerer: Money's not a problem in any way after a couple of vet items, and in hardcore, the only way to be safe with a sorcerer is to advance to the point where you're one-shotting everything, which works plenty well, don't get me wrong. However, in my experience with sorcerer vs cleric: my sorcerer's monster level was limited to whatever level I could one-shot a legendary at, whereas my cleric was limitted to whatever level legendaries couldn't one shot him at - which I find is a much higher level - doesn't matter to me if I hae to 10 shot the legendary, just as long as my max hitpoints are double what they're hitting me for (which when you include the 75% damage reduction from high block is INSANELY high)... And I can't spend money faster than it's coming in anyways, so bringing it in 50% faster doesn't really appeal to me any more.
Cleric: I find this class to be the best (again, for hardcore). By not having to put anything into survival or life drain, I can dump all my skill points into Damage% (I get soo much crit damage increase from my vet items raising my crit score that, when combined with the high block rate higher level mobs seem to have, my skills usually end up something like 7 base damage, 10 block pen, 33 damage % - that's a 165% damage increase, eat your heart out assassin... Oh, and I don't have too much trouble with treasure chests btw, they usually die within a minute or two - since they don't block and I get to crit with every hit - usually for 3 times that insane base damage, and all it takes - for me - is one chest to have soo much money I can't spend it fast enough anyways - so sorry sorcerer. And I find the cleric heal to be more reliable protection than warrior block and special, so cleric is my class of choice...
On classes (My experiences, others may differ of course. And please note, I moved to Hardcore long ago, so lemming options aren't allowed :)
Assassin: The damage is impressive of course, but I find it nearly impossible to keep health regen high enough to reliably protect my hardcore character from death by legendary unless I put tons of points in survival, instead of combat.
@Konilon Playing Hardcore, but yes, in normal mode that works just fine. What I've found works best (now that I have a full set of veteran items) is that I simply use my complete vet set until I get so high they don't level fast enough, then I replace pieces one at a time with found gear as needed to keep my level rising (usually with purples, since I get soo many purples it's crazy now, but it seems only possible to get oranges from legedaries, which you can't make spawn any faster, so they aren't reliable enough for my rapid level gains).
BTW: Barring the fact that enemy blocks prevent crit (even if you have block penetration, the damage won't figure in your crit damage) and if you're not getting much higher than 1000 crit score (soo 100% chance, but not alot of damage increases), the optimal way to spend skill points in the combat tree is to keep the points spent in damage % and crit damage about even, for reference.
On the other hand, if you are getting alot of blocking from enemies, and/or are in the 10k or 100k crit region, then all of it in damage % (none in crit damage skill) maximizes your dps - go excel :)
btw: For those who want to figure in their crit to DPS (or for dev reference if helpful), the formula is BaseDPS*(1+CritChance*CritMultiplier)
BaseDPS is the DPS listed in your stats now.
Crit Chance is the percentage chance of you critting (as listed) [remember, 10%=0.10 when multiplying)
Crit Multiplier is .50 to start, to this you add .10 per 1000 points of crit (from it's description), and 0.075 for each skill point in CritDamage (from the Combat skills)
To Dev (response to your response: "Upgrading oranges does improve the item level. It increases the item level by 5 each time.")
I realize they increase by 5 for each star, my apologies for not being clearer, what I meant (and was pointing out with my example) is that it needs to more. Compare a purple 5 levels higher to an orange with 1 star, and the one star orange is going to blow it away, meaning you won't want to do that replacement - in my experience, a purple 10 levels higher is still getting dwarfed, so now you've got an under-leveled item, and each such item prevents you from raising your level, as you eventually hit a point where your oranges can't take you higher, but the purples you're getting aren't as good as the oranges you now have, despite their higher levels. So now you have to wait for a very rare orange to replace your current orange (or pay too much for diamonds) and this, in my experience, causes me to stagnate, waiting for the orange that never comes
to kinretheor (continued):
The question I had was how does that limit stack with stoneskin (a combat skill that lowers damage you take). I highly doubt the stack additively as this could make you completely invulnerable, and I'm assuming it'd be all over these comments by now if that were possible :). The question then, is, is that 75% cap a combination of the reduction from block and stones skin, making stoneskin points worthless once you have 75k block, or do they play together to further reduce your damage when you don't block, making the points useful.
But thank you for your response.
to kinretheor:
"I think block % is the chance of blocking the attack, I could be wrong though. @messej."
Block percentage is the chance of blocking, but if you read the block info (the little (i) button next to the stat listed in your inventory screen), you'll see that for every 1000 (or 1k) you ALSO get a 1% reduction on damage you take (when not blocking). The dev said this is capped at 75% (meaning that at 75k block score, not block percentage, you get nothing more from points in block.
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