Diablo – How to determine correct difficulty to play at max level

diablo-3

How do I determine which difficulty my max level Diablo 3 character should play?

The easy answer would be try a few difficulties and see how hard they are and how I feel about playing character X at difficulty Y. But that is subjective. I am looking for something as objective as possible: I know this question is not strictly objective but I am sure the community has some sort of guideline.

Perhaps a chart or table that says "to get the most out of Master, your character should be in this stat range. Below this you will struggle, above this you are wasting your time."

For example, I have a 70 (32) wizard with 232k damage, 4.4m toughness and 15k healing (this question is NOT about my wizard, just using it as an example). If I walk into a Normal game I would expect people to tell me it is a waste of my time, just as I would expect players in Torment VI to say this character is not ready yet and needs more time on lower difficulties to gear up. What I have found is Expert seems to be the right place, but I cannot explain why using objective means.

Part of the reason for asking is this: if I enter a game that my character's gear says I should breeze through but I do not, perhaps the problem is between the chair and the keyboard and I need to evaluate skills and strategy.

My goal is to be able to play in the highest Torment difficulty possible for the better loot and the prestige of being able to handle the highest difficulties. Along the way I want to gear up from drops and gambling (so Expert would help with bonus blood shards) as well as gain paragon levels (although that is more a side effect of grinding for gear than anything). I just want to have some objective idea of where I should be along the way.

Best Answer

This depends on what you are trying to accomplish.

If you want to farm for gear, then you should play on either Normal or Torment 1. If you want Torment-specific items, then play on Torment 1, otherwise play on Normal. The farm speed on Normal is so fast compared to other difficulties that you're going to get so many more rolls of the dice that the minor differences in drop rate are easily overcome. You want to play on the easiest difficulty that can still drop the items you want.

If you want to farm for experience, then you should play on the hardest difficulty where you aren't challenged. This will increase over time as your gear and player skill go up, so there's no rule for how to approach this. You will just have to try all the difficulties and see which is the highest one that you can plow through without stopping.

You can't judge anything based on your Damage, Toughness, and Healing, because these equate to entirely different amounts of DPS and survivability depending on class and skill build. There is no rule like what you're asking for except to just try and see what happens.