talk to a noob: it's funny

[haufbraus]

Hey everyone I've played D2 off and on for a few years now. Before recently I never played online and I never beat Diablo with my lvl 60ish necro on single player. So I'm the ultra-noob, but I'm willing to learn.

I don't understand about 75% of this forum, lol. all these longstanding acronyms and whatnot. I don't understand the difference between ladder and non-ladder. I remade another necro on NL and with a friends help I am at lvl 61 with some decent gear and semi-ish close to moving onto hell. close but not really im thinking. i just found out how to mule items with my toons without the help of someone else, yay!

i hate trying to figure out where my to put my stat points, skill points isn't that hard. i recently made a conc barb toon and wanted to impress my long-playing friends by leveling him up a bit. i got him to lvl 20 in less than 12 hours, which is short for me. then i realized that i made him ladder and all my friends play nl. so i re-made another barb, this time WW, and over a few days and with some help of my friends made it past lvl 40. I have WW now and started trying it out. So far I don't like it. I understand that it might be a gear dep skill and setup but the animation is horrible. it lasts 1-2 secs and as soon as you hit the skill its over. it doesn't really seem to hit at all anyways. i'm sure i'll learn how to use it over time.

i tried reading rik's guide on WW barbs but it was really really confusing. i only got so much info out of it. the thought i keep getting about this game is how badly it was designed in terms of item balance throughout all the levels. also they look really bad on your toon unless you have some crazy set or something.

i'm not sure how many points to put into str, dex, and vit. none in energy from what i hear, but 1-2 WWs and its gone for me. im partly to blame for that by trying to max out shout instead of battle orders first. I hate how you can't reset **** like you can in some games. It'd be nice to have that ability but I'm assuming that you can't really do it with this game since it doesn't really have an economy.

So throw me your thoughts and advice and maybe I can learn something from chatting with you all.

[noodleOrb]

never click on the enemy with whirlwind always click past them you get more hits in I think.

no dex enough strength for equip and rest vitality make an insight polearm for your merc very cheap runeword and restores mana superfast

[redrach]

The trick to using WW is to make sure that you never click on an enemy. Instead, you want to click on the ground behind him. (Pressing the Alt key helps, that way you can't select an enemy when you click WW).
Also, most of the 0 energy melee builds rely on mana leech for mana. With decent mana leech (from, say, a Manald Heal ring) a single WW through a group of enemies will fill your mana bulb instantly.

[karatedan]

To be honest, just try to play the game like a new person is supposed to. Put stats into whatever you feel comfortable with. Experiment not just ww, but all of the other skills as well. Use the character guides on this forum as guides, not instructions. Don't expect to get a hold of the game right away. But that's the beauty of it. You'll have more fun going at your own pace and discovering your character and all that online has to offer. Play with friends, but don't just rush and try to level as fast as you can. Maybe not all of the quests, but go through most of them. It's a whole different experience playing with others.

That's how I and I believe most people approached the game the first time they played online. It took me and 3 friends half an hour to kill Diablo in hell difficulty the first time we fought him. But geez was it sure fun.

But hey, that's just my advice. You can take whatever you want to heart.

[Omikron8]

my advice for you is don't play untwinked (no item muling/trading support) physical damage characters

there's a reason almost all players make a synergized caster build as their first character to mf gear before they make the characters they actually want

[Baranor]

Omikron8, you should know better than to advise that to a new player. Let him find out stuff on his own, he might actually enjoy it. Do you want him to turn into another member of cattlenet even before he starts?

karatedan is right. The only thing I'd like to add to that is that if you do find something with Crushing Blow, keep it. Its the one trick that will get you through the game, provided you have a melee build.

[Omikron8]

i don't want him to waste his time just to find out he hit an item requirement brickwall, and then conclude that physical damage characters suck, when it's actually blizzard's fault (not his) that they made the drop rates for decent gear as you level pathetically low

[haufbraus]

thanks for the tips and advice. yeah i've completed most of the quests in the game on my own. not through every difficulty of course, but I would say most of the ones in normal and a good amount in nightmare.

i'm totally down with going at your own pace and doing stuff to savor the game. however with this game it is a little different because of the age and style. As Omikron pointed out it is hard to play a physical class without some help in this game.

I'll work on WW skill usage and hopefully I'll get it down. For now I'm using mostly conc because of my lack of mana leech and WW weapons. I like the warcries and how a lot of it synergizes. Is there a way to keybind the skills, instead of pressing "s" and selecting the skill? Or any faster way, because I don't like to take my eyes off of the battle to select a skill and whatnot.

[AgentMarth]

You can set them to F1-whatever and use the mouse wheel to scroll through them

[karatedan]

Yes, all you need to do it open up that skills icon on the bottom right or left, the one where u pick which skill to use to which mouse click. Scroll over the skill and press one of the F keys, like F1 or F2. Whenever u press that F key, that skill which is binded to it will then be the active skill. Most players however dont use the F keys to bind skills. You can press Escape in a game and go to "Options", "Configure Controls", and scroll down to "Skill Tree". You can left click any of those Skills 1-16 and then press any key you want to have those be your binded keys. Alot of people assign a s d f z x to skills, just to name a few. They are much quicker than using the F keys.

[haufbraus]

okay figured out how to hotkey stuff and after a few mins got used to it. i've also tried clicking behind enemies for WW and worked on it a bit. i've seen a definite improvement in my WW usage. For some reason i gained mana when i used it and killed a couple baddies, but i don't think i have any mana leech.

[haufbraus]

good idea about the asdfzx, ill try that next time. i got skills bound to F1-F8 atm.

[Baranor]

Tell us your current stats and gear, and maybe we can give you some pointers. So stats, gear, and skills, and please,include the mods on the items :). Might take some time to type it all out, but it will definately help.

[haufbraus]

my stats at lvl 42 are:
str:70
dex:54(34)
vit:176
en:10

my def is over 634 with shield and ar is 598. i think my shield/mace setup is best for dmg at the moment.

for gear:
head: raven brow mask
ammy: sounding amulet
mace: civerb's cudgel grand scepter
armor: the spirit shroud ghost armor
shield: brimstone mark small shield
rings: platinum ring, nagelring ring
belt: goldwrap heavy belt
gloves: frostburn gauntlets
boots: cow king's hooves heavy boots
other weaps: armageddon fang two-handed sword, cruel gutter bastard sword
charms: jagged grand charm and iron large charm of balance, and fine small charm.

skills:
+1 to all skills
+1 to warcries

1 pt in all pre-reqs for WW
10 pts WW
1 pt Berserk
1 pt in each of the masteries excluding the weapon ones (i might go sword or axe not sure yet)
1 pt howl
1 pt taunt
1 pt battle cry
17 pts shout
5 pts bo
1 pt battle command

[Peresvet]

looks good :)

what I would do with this:

ditch the shield and equip one of your two swords in addition to the scepter (they do more damage than the scepter? or at least as much?)

do not raise WW more for now, focus on battle orders. Raise strength to at least 100.
Look out for a heavier armor to take advantage of high shout.

of course that's one way to go, and maxing ww first and going with light armor might be your way

[haufbraus]

thanks :)

yeah i wasn't planning on raising WW for a while. i'm not sure if i should put it to 20 or leave it at 10. I've seen some different ideas on this and so I'm still looking around. Yeah I'm putting everything I got into BO. I was throwing it all into Shout before I realized my mistake.

STR to 100 I wasn't planning on doing. I've heard that I should let it be guided by gear and so far there isn't really a demand for higher str. Hopefully I'll get some str gear that will raise it.

I like your idea with weapon switching. I'll see what it does. I'm not sure why I didn't think of that sooner. Even still though I don't have much mana leech, if any, so WW isn't really helping me too much. I do it on occaision practicing its use. I find it funny how much of a skill it is to use the skill instead of just clicking and watching the enemies drop. You have to see what shape a group of baddies are in and react according to how the battle goes. Which is all very fun. I'm glad I switched over to Barb.

[haufbraus]

also for head i'm using biggin's bonnet cap instead of that mask. i get more dmg/mana and sac a lil def.

i did the weap swap. i run with the mace and that cruel gutter sword. i want to switch that sword though b/c it has kb which no physical wants really.

i also just found a manald ring so i think im gonna work on WW more. its very tricky. but i think it'll rock with better gear.

[Peresvet]

Well in my opinion for skills like whirlwind and double swing, which attack very quickly but do not have huge enhanced damage of berserk/leap attack/frenzy or even conc, pumping strength is a good idea because it will increase your damage output by a larger margin.

For example with lvl1 mastery, lvl20 berserk and lvl20 shout a berserk attack adds +665% damage. If you have a 100 dmg weapon and 100 str, you will do 865 damage per hit. Raising strength to 250 (with points and equipment) will raise the damage to 1015, increasing your damage output by 17%.

With a skill like whirlwind, lets say you have lvl1 mastery, lvl20ww, and same lvl20 shout. Whirlwinding like that will give you +130% damage, so with 100 str and 100 dmg weapon you will do 330 dmg per hit. Raising strength to 250 will increase this to 480 per hit, increasing your damage output by 45%! Keeping in mind that whirlwind hits very quickly, this gives you much better killing speed.

Personally I like to keep whirlwind at lvl1 (with + skills it would get to about 4-6) and instead raise weapon mastery or another skill. Then strength plays an even bigger part. With lvl~1 ww, lvl~1 mastery, 100 dmg weapon and 100 str you will do about 200 dmg per hit. Raising str to 250 will increase your damage to 350, giving you 75% more damage. That is about 37% less than lvl20 whirlwind, but if you have some crushing blow/open wounds the difference is much smaller.

Level 1 whirlwind with strength and mastery is enough to kill plain mobs, and for quickly disposing of single targets I then use berserk and/or stun.

250 str is not the limit, there was recently a post with a similar idea where someone showed off a high lvl ww barb with around 460 str and top end weapon and gear. I dont know if you play hc or sc, but I would not take my str quite that high in hc at expence of vitality, but will always gladly wear items and charms with extra str.

Of course once you get to level 60 and higher you might as well strart putting points into ww for some extra damage unless you have more interesting and unconvetional ideas (find item, lvl20 grim ward, lvl20 leap, lvl20 battlecry? whatever).

[haufbraus]

hmm that's interesting. i'll ask around and see what else i need to do.