Mummelmann said: lestatdark said: Mummelmann said: Act I was piss easy with Demon Hunter and is really, really hard with a Barbarian. The Barbarian is barely able to defeat any Elites or Boss groups in the Halls of Agony while I simply surf through them with the DH. The difference in gear is not great, the Barbarian has about 14k more hit points and 50% better armor but still gets his ass kicked. Even some normal mobs can damage me quite a bit. I ran through the entire Act I areas with my DH, farming for loot and money and didn't die even once, managed to beat every single group of Elite and Bosses but my Barbarian is getting nowhere, fast. I can't imagine how hard it'll be to melee on Act II and forwards... It seems like the Barbarian is terribly gear dependent compared to the Demon Hunter, Monks seem to be doing better due to the ridiculous self-heal skills and aura's. Isn't your armor something like 4.5K? (last I checked it). That seems really, really low for an Inferno barb since I'm sitting at 3.2K on Act II Nightmare (I've got a 1000 armor shield waiting for me at level 60, heck, I'm looking at a huge boost for armor when I hit 60, putting me in the vicinity of 8K).  That armor would make Act I Inferno a real hell (no pun intended ). Also, Barbs have a much efficient self-heal if played correctly: Revenge, with the level 51 rune (30% activation). I've seen some vids of Inferno barbs literally sitting on pools of plague or molten and constantly getting Revenge triggered and healing them constantly.  Changed my passives and gained armor and now have about 7500 armor, sacrificed some damage. Added Vengeance and still use Ignore Pain as well as Ground Stomp for stunning. Bosses and Elites still kill me almost every time... This is hopeless since 1-handed weapons deal so much less damage. I lose 10k DPS by going 1-hand, even more with different passive skills so it takes forever to kill the bosses. Wrath of the Berserker makes you near unstopable but has a really long cooldown which kind of defeats the purpose if you need it more than once per fight (and I do...). I honestly don't know how to survive with the Barbarian, I have managed to beat one single group of Elites in the Halls of Agony since I started, including some retries. Bosses with Nightmarish or Jailer kind of renders my healing useless since I won't be able to hit for healing and Molten, Desecrator and Plagued still wipes me out in no time, even Mortars are deadly. Oh, and also; the game crashed again! After ten minutes of playing, if that! This is getting really annoying! Elites and Bosses still destroy me, no matter how many times I activate Revenge. The healing is just not good enough and I have the health globe passive activated as well, to no avail... This is really frustrating, its silly that I'll have to spend hundreds and hundreds of thousand on the auction house to clear Act I with a melee character. If it wasn't for the Demon Hunter I have to farm decent gear, the Barbarian would be even weaker.

Have you tried switching to Warcry with the 40% Armor boost? That should easily put you over 10K armor. With Ignore pain, that should also give you a hefty total DR. 

How are your resists as well? You need to have at least 300 resist for Act I with a melee char, 500 for Act II and almost 900 for Act III. My level 60 gear will put me around 400 resists un-buffed.

I managed to beat Act I, the Elites and Boss groups were horrible but the the Butcher was easy. I died once but that was from standing in the fire too long...
I use Warcry now, armor reached around 8200 with all boosts and I have almost 60k HP as well, and that sure helps!
My resists are piss poor though, probably around 60-70 on average, if that, so Act II is impossible for me at the moment.
Good news for me though, the prices of good 1-hand weapons are going down quickly! A week ago it was damn near impossible to find a good 1-hander above 600 DPS for under 500k but now I can find decent ones for 50-150k!
I want to find one myself though, I've found both my 1-handers with the Demon Hunter on Act I and II.
Off to farm the Butcher for a while then!

I really want the 1.03 patch though, better gear would be a (literal) lifesaver right about now, especially with the repair cost of high-tier items going up about four times pretty soon.

Mummelmann said: I managed to beat Act I, the Elites and Boss groups were horrible but the the Butcher was easy. I died once but that was from standing in the fire too long... I use Warcry now, armor reached around 8200 with all boosts and I have almost 60k HP as well, and that sure helps! My resists are piss poor though, probably around 60-70 on average, if that, so Act II is impossible for me at the moment. Good news for me though, the prices of good 1-hand weapons are going down quickly! A week ago it was damn near impossible to find a good 1-hander above 600 DPS for under 500k but now I can find decent ones for 50-150k! I want to find one myself though, I've found both my 1-handers with the Demon Hunter on Act I and II. Off to farm the Butcher for a while then! I really want the 1.03 patch though, better gear would be a (literal) lifesaver right about now, especially with the repair cost of high-tier items going up about four times pretty soon.

60 - 70 it's pretty low, I've got that on Nightmare almost exclusively out of Intelligence (most of my pieces have hefty intel boosts as well). I've got a sweet 1H spear that has 690 DPS and 170 str and 120 Vit boost that dropped from Maghda with my DH XD, probably going to put my DPS into near 20K vicinity. 

I'm glad their upping the cost of repairs for ilvl 60s and above gear. The amount of corpse jumping people were doing to finish the game was pretty ridiculous because it was profitable. Now, a red broken gear icon will mean costs in the 30k gold vicinity.

Yeah, I don't mind the repair cost, dying has no consequence now, no one cares. In Diablo II dying on Hell was a really, really, big deal.

Oh, by the way, life regen is seriously underrated! My DH has over 900 life per second now and it works wonders in boss and elite encounters, I vault and kite and regen really fast, takes well under a minute to gain full health from near zero! Its perfect for ranged classes since they don't have healing abilities that are anywhere near as good as Barbarian and Monk (which kinda makes sense).

What are you using for such a really high regen on your DH?. My WD has a similar health regen (800), but the big problem with the WD is lack of damage output in Inferno (or at least I haven't found a viable build that doesn't require corpse kiting enemies).

I've managed to snag and find quite a few decent items with relatively good Dex and Vit as well as Life Regen. Some luck and a bit of cash, between the slight healing from Nether Tentacles to vaulting over several health globes to the terrific regen I hardly ever die any more! I beat two boss groups at once simply by moving, slowing and regenerating.

Have to replay with my DH again. I'm thinking of switching up my strategy, adding Preparation and SS to the mix as well. I don't have much life regen on her though, only about 200 life per second.

Farming the Butcher is a cakewalk now, takes about fifteen minutes per run. I go out into Festering Woods and kill Elites and Boss groups in the two tombs and the forest itself, they're almost always really simple to kill, sometimes I can fill my 5 stack of NV in that area alone!
Then I just run through the Halls of Agony and kill the Butcher. Haven't gotten anything really good yet but in three runs I've scraped together about 150-200k including the things I find to sell on the AH and it took about 40-50 minutes tops.

Edit; beat Zoltan Kull, he was real easy as expected. Spellcasting bosses are really shit in Diablo III. I basically only have Belial left but I dread the very thought of even trying right now... I don't expect to have much of a chance at all against him since he removes my main advantage over other mobs; mobility. Anyone else going to try him soon so we can team up? He's gonna one-shot us anyway so might as well be more of us for ressing and killing the damn serpents...

Belial isn't the problem, the problem is the guards in the very limited space and the fact that they can spawn anywhere, including on top of you....

For the Belial fight the difficulty is :

Phase 2 > Phase 1 > Phase 3 

Granted I don't get one shot in Phase 3 , if you do it might be harder for you...

Best way to kill him is actually with a tank and a WD for CC but there are not many tanks out there that can actually tank the snakes (most die as soon as a snake magus does his  blue circle thingy).

Tried Belial, only once though. Phase 1 was fairly simple, hang around in one corner, caltrops all over to slow the serpents and blast them to oblivion with Nether Tentacles. Phase 2 was a lot worse, got Belial down to 50% health easily enough but then the serpents started coming, I can survive one hit from one of them but all my effort went into dispatching them and Belial takes little to no damage.
I was swarmed in a corner with no Discipline to vault or place caltrops and was killed, Belial was down to approx 40% HP by then.
I know I can take him if I try long enough but I think I might wait till someone wants to help me, even with the HP they gain in coop, it'll surely be easier with more than one person keeping the serpents at bay and damaging Belial the whole time.