2.0 mixed setup (Barbarian, 2xWizards, Monk) and thougths...

Can you show any video from your play?

Finally I found out how to record my game session and then publish the video on YouTYube. I feel smarter

Nothing impressive tho. Just as requested, for purpose of analysing the gameplay on a mixed setup.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxM9Hthj1DI

I leveled both this "mixed" team and the 4x Wizard team.

ATM I'm more comfortable with the mixed team... I'll have to try different setups however. My Crusaders aren't ready, I'll finish them later. I'll probably go for 3xCrusaders and 1xMonk.

But with my 1xBarb-2xWIzard-1xMonk, I'm running bounty mode in Torment I with no problem. XP and drops are nice. I might try Torment II, but I'm not so sure... In Torment I, I don't die anymore, even in case of double-elite pull (it happens when doing rifts) so I can benefit from yellow XP pools all the time, and i'm not sure that the extra time spend killing critters with a bigger life pool in Torment II is worth the benefit.

I understand you like to play safe, but that's quite slow T1 farming. It's easy to get wizards to hit 1m+ paper dps and 3m+ toughness without even good legendaries and having 2 in your party should be enough to kill white mobs a lot faster than that. Just basic yellows with elemental bonus on them. Ice is not the best element unless u go with Frozen Orb. Arcane is prolly most damaging element right now. Go with Disintegrate or Arcane Torrent and u will faceroll T1. As for Barbs, they are a must have for higher torment levels to boost your toughness, but for lower levels a WD is way better. 3m+ toughness is easy to get without a Barb and that's enough to do T1. Just be careful to get high toughness from All Resist and Armor, not Vitality which will get u killed in no time.

If u go with bounties, the key is speed and that clearly is not the case here. At least get your monk with Mantra of Conviction Annihilation to make your party move faster after killing mobs. And it's not about raw damage per character but character synergies, and Barbs are not good for boosting damage. My WD uses Piranhas Piranhado which sucks and disables a big bunch of mobs, adding 15% damage. Also Mass Confusion Paranoia which is 20% more damage on top of the usual 30%+ from BBV. Add Strongarm bracers to the WD or monk and thats 20%+ damage too. I'm doing T1 rifts very fast, facing 2-3 elite packs at the same time, without problems, not even from the Rift Guardians that die in a few seconds when I pop my whole combo on them. And obviously cause of BoA, everything was self found.

I want to add a Crusader to the mix, but need to learn more about them first. Also, I hate the fact they walk slower when they use a 2 hander weapon :/ Just doing a quick check, they don't seem to have many party friendly skills, but I could be wrong. I know of a very high damage build but relies on a few legendaries I haven't found yet, but once I do, I might try it.

A piece of advice. You might wanna do Act 2 bounties, instead of 3. These 2 items will increase your efficiency by a LOT:

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/item/gloves-of-worship-FA37P
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/item/illusory-boots-29WYI0

Those boots are amazing for multiboxing since its so damn easy to get stuck and out of sync in some situations.

Anyway, good luck

I am late in the boxing scene for Diablo and only started 1 week before ROS release.

I am running 4 wizard setup and I can breeze through torment 1 without any problem. When I first got my team to 70 it was abut difficult but as I started to gear up it's running very smooth.

I have been thinking about mixing it up but not sure what would be the ideal setup. I have a crusader that I can add to the mix and intend to power level 2 witch doctors to 70 also. I have 4 witch doctors sitting at level 70.

Based on the below which would be the better setup?

1. Crusader, 2 x wizard and witch doctor
2. 3 wizard and 1 witch doctor or
3. Crusader, witch doctor and 2 wizard setup

Sorry didn't mean to hijack this thread but didn't see a point for me to start a new thread since there is some type do discussion in here.

I'm experimenting with Cru Monk Wiz WD. I don't know if it will have long-term viability, but then I'm fairly inept at D3 in general.

In terms of mixing a Crusader in to a group, two things:

1. they do have a ranged generator (justice/burst is nice) and spender (shield or fist of the heavens + retribution, or also phalanx I guess) so not limited to short-range playstyles
2. valor/critical and judgement/resolved seem like they would have nice utility in most groups.

The latter is what made me throw a Cru into my madness above. Though they have a lot of interesting things as I play with mine... condemn/vacuum, shield glare/divine verdict

I'm probably going to experiment with bombardment/annihilate and phalanx tomorrow with the lord commander passive.

See caveat above about being rubbish at this game.

Also those act 2 legendaries are awesome. Now if I can just get them on everybody.

Actually I'm running Paragon II right now and that's ok. Maybe there is not as much difference between Paragon I and II at level 70, compared to Paragon I and II at level 60 ? Well it's ok like 99% of the time. The 1% remaining comes from rift bosses that are really annoying, not that they can decimate my team, but they are just a major annoyance. That "Butcher Replica" dude (whatever its name) hits like a truck, and there's that teleport and bump Wizard-like, too.

But there seems to be a HUGE difference in terms of item drops between Paragon I and II. Or maybe Blizzard hotfixed the game in the meantime, but I'll probably not go back to Paragon I.

I'm appreciating the Barbarian in my setup because of Avalanche, specially with the frozen affix. Also he's using Threatening Shout / Grim Harvest, and yes, I dropped a Legendary this way (well, just once). It never happened at level 60. More than this, he got that nice helm below. The way it works (so far, just dropped it yesterday) is that it always charm one critter in a pack, so in a pack of 3 blues, 2 of them will be fighting each other. So cool. But I need to work on the Barbarian, maybe build him a set with all "Reduced cooldown duration" stuff.

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/item/skull-of-resonance

I was already looking for the 2 bounty items decribed in that post before (boots and gloves), but that's will be a long time since I get 4 of them. Specially since I need 4 boots or none...

ATM Wizard seems to be a must-have in all setups. Black Hole is very nice for multi-boxing, not only it does a lot of damage, but it also drags opponents to a location so I can focus in the meantime. Obviously I chose the frozen affix for my build. And the Unweavering Will passive is just awesome, according to the way I play.

I completely agree with the fact that you can have tremendous gear just by picking yellows and reforging them. Well I have to admit that I have be a little lucky too, since I already dropped 2 nice Stones of Jordan. My team is in the 600k-800k dps (with 330k Vitality) which doesn't include the Stone of Jordan bonus and some +% Frost Damage...

My Crusader team is maxxed, still I'm not really convinced about them. As you stated the 15% movement penalty is a bother and that's a lot of Paragon point spend if you want to include him in a team and cancel that. I need to "make this team work", at least as well as my mixxed team. I still have to level my WD also, and include him, to check the benefit.

@Uraikai among your possible setups I'd go for the 1xWD and 3xWizards. I'll certainly put as much 'Reduced Cooldown' as possible on the WD. Actually I tried this setup @ level 60 and the 2 only things I didn't like were : cooldowns too long (obvioulsy this can be fixed now) and the amount of invoqued toons sometimes make me loose track of my own team

A monk is huge in any setup. Without it, u cut your efficiency by a LOT. Any high level party has always a good pull monk. Basically I try to mimic what I see in high level efficient parties and whatever works there, I tried to multibox it. Cyclone Strike makes everything so simple for your casters since u dont waste time targeting and chasing multiple enemies, just aim at the center. Besides the damage boost/reduction and CC u get from a monk has no match. My monk uses Mantra of Conviction Annihilation for the damage and mobility. Inner Sanctuary Forbidden Palace for the 30% damage debuff on mobs, slow and 55% damage reduced for allies. Exploding Palm The Flesh is Weak for 20% damage and 50% health explosion. Resolve for 20% damage reduction.

I mean, there's no scenario right now where I multibox without a monk, and less I'm farming low level crap with 4x chars of the same class to get a set or something I really need for that class, and even then, I might have 1 monk and 3x from the same class just to make it faster. It's just the best support char there is in the game right now.

I released 2 quick videos at Torment III.

Magda fight : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxvyS8Jtsqg
Bounty boss fight : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ES_JWWXCQ1A

In both fights I had to be careful of the "frozen" affix that I can sometimes fail to see since I'm a frost user myself. Also Magda's pets explode on death which can hurt a lot in Torment III. Looking at the video I noticed that Magda's fight is far form flawless. For a start my Monk is too far, so she wasn't hitting, and Magda is out of the Monk's AoE too.

Magda's pets are gathered by both the Monk (Cyclone Strike/Implosion) and the Barbarian (Ground Stomp/Wrencing Smash). They are incapacitated by Black Holes/Absolute Zero (and Meteor/Comet) from the Wizards, and Avalanche/Glacier from the Barbarian.

Still, my toons are mostly equiped with reforged yellow stuff (and a couple of Stones of Jordan), and Torment III is doable.

@Devile I still have trouble using Exploding Palm/The Flesh is Weak, it makes my Monk run out of spirit... I have to figure this out.

I could prolly do even T4 if I wanted, but is not efficient at all. Since T1 opens Torment legendaries, I rather do that very fast to get more drops per hour, than do it really slow on higher difficulties and risk dying every now and then. As for your monk issues, I see what's going on. Your monk is not hitting anything in many cases and that's because the skill you are using. This is my current monk build (hope the link shows up right):

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/m ... bUh!cYZacY

For all my characters, left click is a signature skill so I recover mana/arcane when I run out of it. Right click is the mana/arcane spender which does most of the damage. When I'm doing damage, I need the monk to have full spirit to cast his full combo (implosion X times, palm X times, inner sanctuary and mantra of conviction if needed) and for that to happen, he needs a good range skill with good spirit generation to make sure it's always hitting mobs. That's why I use Deadly Reach with Strike from Beyond rune, which has huge reach and I'm always hitting and generating spirit. Additionaly, the key to a good ZDPS monk is high attack speed (2-3 APS) and high crit chance (50%+). Good range, good spirit generator, % resource and spirit generation items, high attack speed/crit, etc. and u will never run out of spirit. Stack attack speed and crit in all your jewelry, helm and gloves. The same with Paragon points so u meet those requirements. % Resource and Spirit regen helps, but more important are attack speed and crit.

Also there's a legendary ring that helps with Spirit Regeneration:

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/item/band-of ... e-chambers

It's not mandatory, but if u get one, it helps too. Also, not mandatory but helps me a lot are VideoFX of the resources of all my chars on my main screen. The most important one being the monks. So right beside the Arcane pool of my main character, I have a VideoFX screen of the Spirit pool of my monk, so at all times I can see if I have spirit to cast Implosion, Palm, Inner Sanctuary, etc. It doesn't need to be the whole Spirit bubble. It can be just a vertical rectangle of the middle of the resource pool so u can see where u are at.

And finally, another reason why I don't pick higher Torment difficulties is because long fights are bad for multiboxing. With all the new affixes on elites, Nightmarish is VERY common and that get's me out of sync and sometimes killed. Running out of resources is very easy when your monk is hitting nothing but air, casting skills in a corner, far from your party. I rather kill fast to avoid having my party running all over the place. Elite fights should take less than 5 seconds to avoid out of sync issues that come when elites/minions start spamming skills. Nightmarish with Electric is very common now a days and that screws me faster than any other combo. Killing them instantly is a priority to my efficiency. Short fights = no spirit issues too.

I may move to T2 since T1 is already too easy. Whites are killed instantly and elites die in like 3 secs. I'll try T2 and see if that still works fast or if I need a little more DPS and eHP on my party to handle T2 as fast as T1. I also wanna test Blackhole on 1 of my wizards.The Event Horizon rune sucks all the shit Elites cast. I haven't used it yet, but read it sucks waller, frozen, etc. which makes it a great CC skill.

Hope my tips help with your spirit issues. Just by changing the skill u will notice a big difference. Follow the rest of suggestions and u will never run out of spirit. Also, u can consider using Strong Spirit rune for Exploding Palm. 1 explosion and u will have full spirit, but it's less DPS for your party.

I'll try that Monk setup next week (I'll be abroad till then), thanks for the tip. I'm pretty used to Breath of Heaven / Circle of Life, which is about 50% of health bar every 15 s (way more than what is mentionned on the builder). But if Exploding Palm reduces fight length I probably won't need it.

I tried Black Hole / Event Horizon a while ago and wasn't very impressed by it.

You should try Torment II, and you will find out that it's not really more difficult than Torment I. in Torment III however, area damage from elites hurts more, and I can die from multiple corpse explosions on death (which is the supidest feature in the game IMHO). ATM I'm doing bounties in Torment III and rifts in Torment II.

Also I'll try to gather a set of Inna for my Monk. Have you noticed that nice 4-set bonus ?

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/item/innas-vast-expanse