Mastering your class

Yesterday I talked about how the builds you make in the skill calculator are only part of mastering your Diablo 3 class.

Today I'd like to expand on this and talk about tailoring your build on the fly to adapt to different tactical situations.

It starts with class knowledge. To master your class you really need to understand every skill and every runed variation of your skills. You also need an understanding of what is possible with gear and later on this site will be reviewing gear in depth. Finally you need to understand how to work with other people and to be willing to cooperate with other people. I'll explain why I think grouping will be so important in a few days time.

So skills then.

Many people will design a build and stick with it without varying. Just by being willing to adapt you improve your potential significantly. In an area that's full of impassable rivers or chasms you could switch in Teleport or Leap Attack. If the group is taking too much damage you could adjust to form a Trinity style group with tank and healer.If the area is trivial you could drop your defensive abilities and go all out damage or ramp up the magic find.
 
Now I'll talk specifically about playing a Barbarian in the early days of Inferno. Inferno is going to be hard. How hard? This hard.

The best gear drops from rare and champion mobs. These are probably going to be completely randomly placed. In Diablo 2 randomised bosses appeared both completely randomly and at specific places. For instance in the first zone the Blood Moor, you might find several random bosses in Hell but you'd never know where or what they would be. However there would always be a Zombie boss called Corpsefire at the end of the Den of Evil and one of his three properties would always be Spectral Hit.

Corpsefire - a not so random boss

In D3 Inferno hunting down such bosses will involve first identifying an area you think would be a good place to hunt. To start with the early part of the game might be best because monsters may have a thinner density (because the zone is designed for beginners). Even though you're doing it on a harder difficulty it's still a newbie zone.

Here's a look at farming the Forsaken Cemetery courtesy of D3AuctionGuide. Notice the Imp with the purple name and the words Frozen underneath it early on? That's a random boss level mob, the type we should be farming. In Inferno it will have 4 mods so Frozen + 3 others. Since Frozen snares you - here's a close look at it - that could be very nasty if two of the other mods are, say, Fast and Strong. So it snares you, quickly catches you and batters you.

The geography of the area allows us to dive out the entrance if the boss inside is too dangerous, this is part of the way the area is designed for newbie-friendliness.

So our starting point is to identify bosses with mods we feel happy tackling.

One of the Barb's roles then might be to run fast through the area spotting bosses and reporting their mods. This lets the group choose what to tackle. A high level Barb can move very fast by using faster run gear and a build like this Sprinter Barb build. The build is based around the Sprint skill - you just Sprint everywhere perhaps occasionally stopping to Frenzy down a lone normal mob that should be an easy kill. There's no cooldown on Sprint, you can Sprint whenever you have the Fury to cast it. All you're doing with this build is running around the Cemetery identifying the boss mods and reporting them to your team so you can cherry-pick the easiest fights.

Once you've identified your target then your role as a Barb might be to tank it/ In this Cautious Physical Tank build I've skipped treasure options to really maximise defence - it's important to win a few fights in Inferno before you relax and start milking the bosses for drops with this Boss Milking Tank build.

Alternatively your group might be more comfortable taking on a boss with elemental damage mods. Perhaps an Electrified Frozen Arcane Enchanted Knockback boss. To tank this you would need to adapt your build again, perhaps something like this Elemental Tank. This build uses stuns and knockbacks to disrupt enemies and includes improved resists and damage reduction. If that doesn't work another method might be to get everyone in the group to respec to health globe based skills and try to out-heal the damage with health globe spam. You might dual wield your fastest weapons and use something like this Health Globe Generator.

Now after the run is over you will most likely have a horrible repair bill. As one of the developers said in the You Will Die video the drop he wanted most was gold. So go back to an easy area of Hell, put your gold find gear on and run through mobs with a build like this: Easy mode farming build.

I hope you now agree that picking a 6 skill build and sticking to it forever is not the best way to play Diablo 3!