Who is doing Season 4? What builds are you going for?

[NetQvist]

I don't like the idea of 2 pure support chars in the current meta. Sounds like overkill toughness and not needed at all. At least for 60s speedruns and to push 70s, I dont see how just 2 DPS will make it, specially since the second support doesn't add much DPS to the party. At most, a Barb as a support will add 30% (falter) + 10% (rend?) additive damage debuff which is really low. It will mostly add buffs which can be added anyway with just 3 DPS barbs.

I still need to work on my monk and hellfire amulets, but my plan is to do low 60s for exp speedruns (5mins max per run) and push 70s to upgrade gems. 3 HotA barbs, diamonds and isoteric alteration for additional toughness, with perma Ignore Pain (round robin on just 2 with some CDR is enough) and 1 with WarCry. With perma Inner Sanctuary, Mantras and the insane monk healing, that should be more than enough surviability. At least that's what I see from current GR70+ 4p parties. It's always 2 HotA barbs + 1 WW barb which is not support, it's DPS that just pulls stuff closer, but still does a ton of DPS.

If Blizzard fixes the lag, it would be amazing to have a Bears WD with cubed SMK for perma BBV and a bunch of debuffs. Wish Crusaders were viable, but they suck right now.

As soon as I have my monk ready, I'll record some videos.

PS: I'll try to hit 60s with just 4x HotA barbs and see how hard it is. I'm sure the lack of healing will be a problem.
PS2: I see ppl doing high 70s and 80s with 2 DPS and 2 support, but 1 DPS is a Carnevil WD and the support barb spams health globes.

Okay not sure how I missed your post up there but here's the problems I currently have with 3 dps and the healing monk which you just have to have, it's impossible without that LPS when you are constantly eating affixes at 60.

1. Movement, the only way you can do proper movement as 3 dps barb + monk is to use charge and dash, I'm not really sure how well that works since I haven't tried it. I guess you could also sacrifice the third barb's element ring for grandeur and run chilanik's belt on him. Getting permanent chilanik just isn't happening on a single HotA barb without dropping the ruby though.

2. When you say 2x barbs as IP round robin I guess you mean to drop the elements ring for a grandeur and use a 6 second cassius belt so you can still use leorics as cube. This means you'll need 10% paragon, 8% shoulders, 8+8% from rings/gloves, for 52% uptime which is cutting it a bit short due to lag but it should work. You could of course drop the ruby and crown to keep elements but that would drop your xp to 0% with a diamond, so that's more for progression.

3. If you do manage to keep the three rubies and leoric's with charge + dash as well as 227% on the monk you're looking at 118,25% xp per char versus 154,5 xp with 2x 227% support. The difference between those two should be 3,47 GR levels in terms of xp, so you'll need to do at least 4 levels higher in GRs to get the same XP as a 2 man support team. The mob health increase for that should be like 1,9 times the health of the level that the 2 man team is running, that means your third barb has to do almost as much damage as your other two barbs combined. This is why xp scaling in the game is friggin retarded! Health scale is 1,173 and xp is 1,08 per GR level. Health scales at more than twice the value of xp.

4. Concerning surviveability I'm not running esoteric or diamonds on my current hota barb and he is the first to die with the 100% ip + healing monk at 60s+, Now tbh I don't like the idea of using esoteric on a hota barb. You really need stricken, pain enchancer and trapped to get that damage through the roof!

PS: The WW barb you're seeing in those speed rifters at 65-70s is actually a support barb usually with BK weapons just spinning using the ancient spear to pull mobs in. Of course I could be incorrect but from what I've seen that is the case, sadly it's kind of hard to do that as a multiboxer =(. Looking at the group composition I think the best are HotA+HotA/SunWuko+SupBarb+SupMonk, I'm sadly also aware of the fact that both the SupBarb and SunWuko are very hard to play as a multiboxer since they are generally doing their own thing. The Carnevil could actually do some amazing things due to BBV for the HotA barb, aspeed makes HotA pretty nuts.

And now go prove me wrong so I could actually do the 3 HotA + Monk as well =)

PS2: The Xp calculations are a bit incorrect since I'm actually dropping the cubed leoric on my support barb in favor of having both chilanik and cassius. I really need to see how well charge and dash works together, it's probably a fucking mess for me currently since I'm proccing F+R on the U6 monk with a generator and then the barb would have to use FC to proc it.....

[Magicme]

Okay not sure how I missed your post up there but here's the problems I currently have with 3 dps and the healing monk which you just have to have, it's impossible without that LPS when you are constantly eating affixes at 60.

1. Movement, the only way you can do proper movement as 3 dps barb + monk is to use charge and dash, I'm not really sure how well that works since I haven't tried it. I guess you could also sacrifice the third barb's element ring for grandeur and run chilanik's belt on him. Getting permanent chilanik just isn't happening on a single HotA barb without dropping the ruby though.

2. When you say 2x barbs as IP round robin I guess you mean to drop the elements ring for a grandeur and use a 6 second cassius belt so you can still use leorics as cube. This means you'll need 10% paragon, 8% shoulders, 8+8% from rings/gloves, for 52% uptime which is cutting it a bit short due to lag but it should work. You could of course drop the ruby and crown to keep elements but that would drop your xp to 0% with a diamond, so that's more for progression.

3. If you do manage to keep the three rubies and leoric's with charge + dash as well as 227% on the monk you're looking at 118,25% xp per char versus 154,5 xp with 2x 227% support. The difference between those two should be 3,47 GR levels in terms of xp, so you'll need to do at least 4 levels higher in GRs to get the same XP as a 2 man support team. The mob health increase for that should be like 1,9 times the health of the level that the 2 man team is running, that means your third barb has to do almost as much damage as your other two barbs combined. This is why xp scaling in the game is friggin retarded! Health scale is 1,173 and xp is 1,08 per GR level. Health scales at more than twice the value of xp.

4. Concerning surviveability I'm not running esoteric or diamonds on my current hota barb and he is the first to die with the 100% ip + healing monk at 60s+, Now tbh I don't like the idea of using esoteric on a hota barb. You really need stricken, pain enchancer and trapped to get that damage through the roof!

PS: The WW barb you're seeing in those speed rifters at 65-70s is actually a support barb usually with BK weapons just spinning using the ancient spear to pull mobs in. Of course I could be incorrect but from what I've seen that is the case, sadly it's kind of hard to do that as a multiboxer =(. Looking at the group composition I think the best are HotA+HotA/SunWuko+SupBarb+SupMonk, I'm sadly also aware of the fact that both the SupBarb and SunWuko are very hard to play as a multiboxer since they are generally doing their own thing. The Carnevil could actually do some amazing things due to BBV for the HotA barb, aspeed makes HotA pretty nuts.

And now go prove me wrong so I could actually do the 3 HotA + Monk as well =)

PS2: The Xp calculations are a bit incorrect since I'm actually dropping the cubed leoric on my support barb in favor of having both chilanik and cassius. I really need to see how well charge and dash works together, it's probably a fucking mess for me currently since I'm proccing F+R on the U6 monk with a generator and then the barb would have to use FC to proc it.....

I also started running 3 hota 1 heal monk after I felt like I was hitting a 'wall' with WW. Charge/dash actually works pretty well. Occasionally the Monk gets a bit desynced, because charge tends to lock on a target. What is really annoying, is when one of the barbs ends up charging somewhere else and isn't hitting what you want. You either lose a bunch of dps because he's not hitting, or lose a bunch of dps repositioning Bit of a learn to play issue I think but it happens regularly enough for me that I'm considering swapping 1 barb to a support crusader.

Weird I know, crusaders are completely off meta at the moment but perma 50% move speed+ability to walk through mobs was amazing when I boxed crusaders and I think it would work really well with the Hota+heal monk. Walk through everything at a decent speed, aggro a few rooms, move to a corner or w/e and nuke everything. They don't bring much damage increase (shield glare + the usual strongarms/toxin, judgement is pretty useless for hota) but I'm going to try it anyway before I try support barb. The other option is illusory boots ofc but I don't really want to drop 41% xp or convention for those. Theoretically everything stays nicely synced up, and you can drop charge/dash for other skills.

After deciding that I figured I should try get some use out of the 20% crit from judgement, so I'm also swapping one barb to a Wuko monk. No ancient furnace but an almost perfect non ancient, so that will do for now. I feel like that comp (HotA/Wuko/SupMonk/SupCrus) is very similar to the current meta for speed farming, but much more suited to multiboxing. You're right that it's pretty much impossible to effectively box a pull support barb, and I agree with the 2 support/2 dps thing. 2 fully exp geared toons is pretty huge for farming those paragons.

As I said, haven't tried it yet. Was getting a bit frustrated with 3xhota for speed farming 55-60 though, so I'll try this and see how it goes.

You mentioned having some issues with your 'rotation' to keep both F&R procs up. I just have my isboxer set up to send my combat rotation to each toon, every time I press one button (5). IE I sit there spamming 5 and it'll spam my generator on uliana monk and SSS on cd, spam cyclone strike/inner sanc/blinding flash on heal monk, and for the barb it'll hit a generator, spam hota for 4.5s, generator, etc. Automates a lot of it I guess, but makes it a hell of a lot easier. If I'm running charge/dash for the 3 hota group then yeah I just hit the charge/dash keybind every now and again.

Anyway, this got much longer than I expected. I'll try the Wuko/SuppCrus and see how they go.

[NetQvist]

I also started running 3 hota 1 heal monk after I felt like I was hitting a 'wall' with WW. Charge/dash actually works pretty well. Occasionally the Monk gets a bit desynced, because charge tends to lock on a target. What is really annoying, is when one of the barbs ends up charging somewhere else and isn't hitting what you want. You either lose a bunch of dps because he's not hitting, or lose a bunch of dps repositioning Bit of a learn to play issue I think but it happens regularly enough for me that I'm considering swapping 1 barb to a support crusader.

Weird I know, crusaders are completely off meta at the moment but perma 50% move speed+ability to walk through mobs was amazing when I boxed crusaders and I think it would work really well with the Hota+heal monk. Walk through everything at a decent speed, aggro a few rooms, move to a corner or w/e and nuke everything. They don't bring much damage increase (shield glare + the usual strongarms/toxin, judgement is pretty useless for hota) but I'm going to try it anyway before I try support barb. The other option is illusory boots ofc but I don't really want to drop 41% xp or convention for those. Theoretically everything stays nicely synced up, and you can drop charge/dash for other skills.

After deciding that I figured I should try get some use out of the 20% crit from judgement, so I'm also swapping one barb to a Wuko monk. No ancient furnace but an almost perfect non ancient, so that will do for now. I feel like that comp (HotA/Wuko/SupMonk/SupCrus) is very similar to the current meta for speed farming, but much more suited to multiboxing. You're right that it's pretty much impossible to effectively box a pull support barb, and I agree with the 2 support/2 dps thing. 2 fully exp geared toons is pretty huge for farming those paragons.

As I said, haven't tried it yet. Was getting a bit frustrated with 3xhota for speed farming 55-60 though, so I'll try this and see how it goes.

You mentioned having some issues with your 'rotation' to keep both F&R procs up. I just have my isboxer set up to send my combat rotation to each toon, every time I press one button (5). IE I sit there spamming 5 and it'll spam my generator on uliana monk and SSS on cd, spam cyclone strike/inner sanc/blinding flash on heal monk, and for the barb it'll hit a generator, spam hota for 4.5s, generator, etc. Automates a lot of it I guess, but makes it a hell of a lot easier. If I'm running charge/dash for the 3 hota group then yeah I just hit the charge/dash keybind every now and again.

Anyway, this got much longer than I expected. I'll try the Wuko/SuppCrus and see how they go.

Have you tried using hold position when using charge and dash? That removes the lock on thing for solo at least.

And you pretty much hit the nail straight on the head there with the walk through mobs, I've also thought about the illusory boots but not the crusader, think I'll start gearing that on my barb support account actually now and see how that goes. And hopefully I'll get my sunwuko geared as well, got all pieces but the amulet and furnace are dog shit so U6 will do for now. If you're only doing like 55s U6 seems to be perfect but it starts losing effect at 60.

Any chance you could share the config for the rotation, I spent like 2 hours trying to get the same damned thing to work but something was really strange. I've got cleave on left and hota on the right mouse button for my barb. When I tried to make a button I could spam it worked as long as I was NOT controlling the barb, if controlled then the right click from the hotkey action for 4,5 seconds made him MOVE even when I was holding down hold position. It was really strange.

Currently uploading 2x 60s that took like 9min, I just can't seem to get it together sadly and get a good rift for another 6min so I'll put them here once they are done.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcmd_ooEZ6I
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AV51H9Wri1I

[Perrigrin]

@NetQvist - Can you share your builds for those videos? Or is it still relevant for the links you posted above?

[NetQvist]

@NetQvist - Can you share your builds for those videos? Or is it still relevant for the links you posted above?

http://www.d3planner.com/588287848

I hope this works it should be public. The links up there are pretty relevant of course but I do change build on my main account quite a bit for solo running normal rifts or bounties while my toons just wait in town.

The characters in the videos on the planner are: U6, HotA, SupBarbXP, SupMonkXP

For progression which I haven't tried yet I'm basically just planning on switching the cube item to illusionary boots for all the characters I'm running so I can get bigger pulls by myself. I'd also like to get rid of the U6 monk with the SWMonk build which I haven't tried yet. The Carnevil build works pretty decently as well which I was running instead of the HotA for a bit, probably smarter to replace the U6 (Bad scaling it seems) tho but due to being stupid and cubing everything I find I don't have enough mats to reroll into ancient weapons on my main so I'm stuck with my U6!!!!

The HotA could use some passive changes to get more fury, I've been having some issues with it on larger pulls. And the reason I'm using Blinding Flash and Breath of Heaven with spirit runes on the monks is pretty much due to not being able to run ephiphany without fucking up the sync. Gotta get more spirit somehow, I think the Breath of Heaven could be changed to something else though. Getting in dash and furious charge would be lovely but I think I'd still need the generators because it's pretty hard to dps and still keep sync with F+R otherwise.

Lets talk keymaps a bit then. With the layouts I currently have this is how I played it.

Start of the rift you'll need to hit 4 once to get the ancients up on the barbs as well as 3 to get battle cry on.

Whenever I move around I use force move and spam 1 to get war cry speed and blinds off, You also really want to hit right clicks on the barb at the same time to keep Ignore Pain up so make a keymap for that.

When fighting I just do hold position and then hold left mouse button and use right click to hit with SSS and HotA (I really recommend some kind of proper cycling for the HotA barb, it's kind of hard otherwise). While fighting you can also spam 1 and 2 (I'm not really sure if the active on the mystic ally for the SupMonk affects anything so I haven't done any keymaps here).

The specific mappings you'll need tho are.
-Support Monk Cyclone Strike needs to be mapped to a key, shouldn't be spamming this.
-Barb Ancient Spear can be mapped to the same key as your attack, cyclone strike as well as it's own key. Hasn't really ever fucked up for me even if it's constantly being thrown around.
-The mantras on the both monks is quite useful to map to a key as well.

That should be it!

[Perrigrin]

great, thanks - one more question: I am running 2 accounts where I have 2 geared wizards (can do 45-48 or so) and 2 not so geared monks - Any special advice on gearing the 2 new accounts? Just boosting them through 40s with the wizards?

[NetQvist]

great, thanks - one more question: I am running 2 accounts where I have 2 geared wizards (can do 45-48 or so) and 2 not so geared monks - Any special advice on gearing the 2 new accounts? Just boosting them through 40s with the wizards?

Pretty much what I do, I generally use my main account to clear as high as possible rifts in a fast time and then 3x accounts of the class I'm gearing.