Diablo 3 tips

As I blaze through this game, here are some tips I’ve given to players that have really helped.

Keybinds

The default keybinds suck. The most comfortable way to play is change the ‘stand your ground to shoot’ key from shift to space bar. For the skill keys, instead of using qwer, try asdf. I then use v for the potion.

Diablo 3 also has emotes. The defaults are assigned to the numeric pad (sorry Mac keyboard lovers). Some aren’t assigned to any button at all. They might be useful in a multiplayer game where everyone is just charging, and you don’t have time to type.

Elective Mode

By default, the player can only choose a skill out of a group of four. In the gameplay options, if you check elective mode, you can fill that skill slot out of your entire universe of skills.

Social Options

Turn off allowing people to join your game. This makes you unable to pause it. When this is turned off and you bring up the menu screen, the game will pause.

DPS is not the end all

Everyone just focuses on the DPS and think the game is like WoW or something. For the final boss in the game, I had some issues because I was doing a high DPS build so I changed it. Then I one shot the final boss. Aside from moving skills around, I switched to dual wielding even though it was giving me lower DPS. Why? I was firing more shots. But what DPS doesn’t count is your skills. Firing more shots meant more chances to stun. I could keep the final boss in a constant stun.

The point is that DPS is not the end-all. In higher difficulty settings, better survivability is needed.

Farming is better with a friend

If you farm with a friend, he can give you any item that drops which is needed for your class as you can do the same for him. All loot in Diablo 3 is instanced to the player. So if you have two players going through the content, you are actually getting twice the drops but you can’t see half since it drops on the other player’s side. But that doesn’t stop him from giving you any cool loot you need from his stuff.

Don’t log out until you’ve completed the quest

One annoying thing with this game is that everytime you log in, the overworld or dungeon you were in gets reset from your last checkpoint. This is especially annoying on the overworld parts since sometimes you must trek from dungeon to dungeon across the same overworld in a single quest.

This isn’t Zelda, just go to the objective

If you want to spend 10 hours doing Act 1, play Diablo 3 like Zelda or other video games and search every corner and look under every rock. You’re wasting your time.

Diablo 3 is about killing the objective and doing it as fast as possible (so you can farm it). That’s the game.

Unlike other video games, much of Diablo 3 is randomly generated. There is no true reward to ‘search under every rock’ except if you are studying how the dungeon builds itself.