Best characters for 4 player co-op

[droppin]

You guys focus on on monk mantras and monster debuffs, but so many other classes do that HERE'S THE KEY, without risking their life to do damage. I will say a well played monk is useful, but it's not critical.

1. Barb Tank with 3 shouts provides a constant +30% damage buff (unlimited resource), passive adds healing and glyph adds healing, armor, or resistance, and the third lowers the damage of monsters.

2. Witch doctor provides massive cc plus super buff cooldowns (big bad voodoo +30% damage +20% att speed), yes this is a long cooldown, but this is bonus to his massive cc and extra meat shields/dps.

3. Wizard provides massive cc, single target, aoe damage and nice buffs. Frost Nova: Shatter is huge cc and your tank barb will love it. Slow time can provide allies with attack speed or make mobs take 20% more damage.

Here's why I said that stuff b4.

4. Monk provides nice buffs, but is to risky to be used easily in a group fight in higher difficulties (unless they are ballers). The demon Hunter is nice, but I'm worried about the ability to fill multiple roles. (should the need arise)

[droppin]

You have no way of knowing that. I say that using a setup where one character can increase the entire party's defensive capacity by a large extent at only a somewhat small sacrifice to his personal DPS, will allow for a much faster first time through Inferno. But we'll find out!

^this guy has it right

Take wow as an example. (Yes I know they are 2 different games, but the idea is the same) You can bring 4 dps and 1 healer to a dungeon and go through it quickly, but you will have to focus on cc, kiting, and abunch of other things that takes huge amounts of time and resources. Or you can bring a good tank and and the dungeon will take 50% less time.

The one thing dps needs is time and focus to do their job of constant max dps. The best thing to allow that is to not make them run around dodging bad guys. That's where the control barb tank comes in, check him out http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculato...gkT!bXe!ccaacZ.

[Such Violent Storms]

I really don't know how you're making the connection of

monk = risky.

Monks, with two passives, can increase their armor by 1000+ and have a constant dodge chance of 45%+ without sacrificing any damage or any spirit for Mantras while debuffing enemies and dealing damage with Mangle-CW and spamming Lashing Tail Kick. They're indomitable powerhouses with some of the highest damage and strongest resilience of any class. Ignoring them altogether would be stupid, having at least one is strongly recommended.

[Apocalypse]

even if the monks damage slipped a little bit in favor of helping the group, him adding 50% damage to the group would more than make up for it

[droppin]

I really don't know how you're making the connection of

monk = risky.

Monks, with two passives, can increase their armor by 1000+ and have a constant dodge chance of 45%+ without sacrificing any damage or any spirit for Mantras while debuffing enemies and dealing damage with Mangle-CW and spamming Lashing Tail Kick. They're indomitable powerhouses with some of the highest damage and strongest resilience of any class. Ignoring them altogether would be stupid, having at least one is strongly recommended.

It's more of a bias from seeing it happen in wow and other rpg's all the time. Constantly other melee will randomly die on bossfights in wow and melee tend to have amuch harder time in rpg's. I'm not saying skip them entirely, but finding a good monk will be alot harder than just grabbing another ranged class.

I mean the barb will be tuned for tanking and the ranged for dps. Does the monk hybrid for both?

[mouseman]

Wow, I didn't know the game had already begun on so many levels.. It will be certainly funny to read these predictions in the coming months and years, I bet

But thanks for all the answers, I think we will add a monk to the group.

Is anyone else kind of relieved that we have freespecs the first time through?

[droppin]

We have skill swaps (freespecs is getting to memey/trendy/annoying) the whole game. It's not just for normal difficulty.

[marshmallow]

No one could agree on what the best four man group for D2 would be after playing for years and here people are trying to argue over vague tooltips for an unreleased game. GLHF.

[galzohar]

Melee having a harder time is why barbs and monks have inherent 30% damage reduction, and why Blizzard made sure ranged classes won't exactly be able to keep themselves out of harm's way (or at least that's what Blizzard claims to be the case).

Really any combination of 4 can have great synergies with good specs, though it would obviously be a bit harder to make a team with 2 of the same class. But even 2 of the same class can have some synergies if you put the effort into taking advantage of them (for example, 2 slow times can be used if you time them right, or you can just adjust specs so 1 barb doesn't take warcry, use 2 mantras, etc).

The only class that seems to have limited group help is the DH, but even he has some stuff that can be nice in a group situation, and can definitely benefit a lot from melee classes that make the monsters stand still (making them easier to hit with stuff like grenades).

[Dahmer]

Reading this thread I can already see what's going to happen in public games :
- random wizard joins public game that already has 2 other wizards and witch doctor
- random wizard complains there's no monk
- random wizard leaves