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Creating your Build on D3Up.com

General Guide

By jesta on August 31, 2012
Last Updated: August 31, 2012

Contents of this Guide

What is a Build?

A build is a snapshot of a character from Diablo 3, including all the following information:
  • Your Class, Level and Paragon Level.
  • All the Gear your character is wearing.
  • The abilities you use while playing.
  • The passive skills you've selected.
This information is then used to calculate your Stats, DPS and EHP and provide tools for you to improve your character.

Creating a Build

Creating a build is simple! Under the "Builds" menu on the top of the page, you'll notice the first option is to Create a Build. Clicking this link brings you to a page that will get you started. 

The first page collects some basic information about the build you are creating:
  • Name: What do you want to call this build? It could be your characters name (Jesta), the name of your gear set (Magic Find Build) or even what kind of build it is (WW Barbarian). 
  • Description: A short description of what this build is all about
  • Character Level: What level is this build for?
  • Paragon Level: What paragon level is this build?
  • Private: Yes/No - This prevents the build from showing up for other users browsing all the builds in the database.
  • Class: Which class this build is.
Fill this information out and hit "Save", and you will be redirected to your new build page!

Step #1 - Adding Gear

The first thing you want to do with a new build is add all of your gear to it. 

Currently there are two methods to equip your build with gear:
  1. Manually Creating the Items and adding them via the "Create New Item" or "New" buttons for each piece.
  2. Automatically Import your entire character from the Diablo 3 Armory.

Automatically Importing your Character from the Diablo 3 Armory

For more information about automatically importing your character from the Diablo 3 Armory, check out the Character Import guide.

Manually Adding Items to your Build



One of the first things you see is similar to the image above, it's the "Gear" panel that lets you control everything about your build's gear. There are a few buttons across the top of it, here's what they all do:
  • Create New Item - Brings you to the item creator to create a new item.
  • View My Items - Brings you to your "My Items" page, a page that lists every item you own in the database.
  • Save Stats to DB - This will save your DPS and EHP into your build so it's visible on the "Builds" pages and will show up in searches.
Below that, you'll see every equipment slot for your build, as well as some buttons next to each one of them. 
  • Change - The "Change" button will prompt you with a menu that lets you equip any item that you've previously created. This is great for playing around with builds and swapping items up with things that you've used in the past.
  • New - The "New" button will bring you to the Item Creator and pre-pick the "Type" of item if possible. When you've created the item with this button, it will automatically equip the item on this build and bring you back to the build's page.

Step #2 - Picking Skills

After your gear is all setup, you're all set to use the calculator. However, if you want to factor in your skills in the calculations, we need to setup which skills you are using. Just as with gear, there's currently 2 different ways to add your skills to your build:
  1. Manually enter them on the "Skills" tab via the "Change My Skills" button.
  2. Automatically Import your entire character from the Diablo 3 Armory.

Automatically Importing your Character from the Diablo 3 Armory

For more information about automatically importing your character from the Diablo 3 Armory, check out the Character Import guide.

Manually Adding Skills to your Build

If you click on the Skills tab, then click on the "Change My Skills" button, a screen will appear that looks like this:



Each one of the Skill and Passive choices listed here will allow you to change the skills on your build manually. Every skill for the class you picked in the initial creation of the build will be available to add to your build. 

After you've picked your (6) Active Skills and (3) Passive Skills, make sure to hit the "Save Skills" button at the bottom to save them!

Creation done, now time to use it!

As you can see from the two steps above, it's pretty simple to get your character into the D3Up.com Build Calculator!

So, you have a build... now what? Well, the rest of this guide covers all the things you can do with it now!

Explanation of the Statistics Panel (Right)

The statistics panel is located to the right of your build, it's used to show you all the useful information about your build that you can find in game and more!

The statistics panel is made up of 4 individual tabs, 
  1. Stats - Your character statistics, they should line up close to your stats in game!
  2. DPS - A breakdown of how much DPS (Damage per Second) each piece of gear you wear provides.
  3. EHP - Your characters EHP (Effective Health Pool) based on your gear and skills. 
  4. Gains - DPS and EHP values you could gain by adding +1 of specific stats.
Each panel's stats are automatically updated everytime you change a piece of gear, change a skill or "activate" a skill. 

Enabling Skills in your Skills Tab

Your Skills tab not only lets you change skills, but also gives you an area to enable some skills. 

Some skills have situational buffs, changes to your character that only occur under certain conditions. Instead of just factoring these skills into your stats automatically, these skills have an "Activate" checkbox in the upper right of their description. Checking this box will activate whatever situation buff they provide throughout your build. 

For example, take Frost Nova - Deep Freeze. 



The ability itself doesn't provide any passive bonuses, but it does provide a bonus if you hit atleast 5 targets. This is a situational buff and needs to be treated differently than a passive buff. 

On this skill, if you were to click the "Activate" in the upper right of the skill, it would provide your build temporarily with +15% critical hit chance. 

You can stack as many situational buffs as your character allows, combine them and see what all of them do at once!

NOTE - Activating Situational Skills does NOT save with your build. This is by design, your character in-game doesn't always have this active, so neither does your build. User's that are browsing your build can also activate / deactivate these skills to see the effects on your DPS/Stats/EHP.

Changing the VS Level of Monsters

At the top of the Statistics panel, you'll notice a small select menu that lets you change the "VS Level of Monsters". 

The purpose of this is to calculate your Damage Reduction, Dodge and other Defensive Stats versus certain levels of monsters. 
  • Act 1 & 2 Inferno Monsters = Level 61
  • Act 3 Inferno Monsters = Level 62
  • Act 4 Interno Monsters = Level 63
This is primarily used in your EHP calculations and will update them based on the level you select, which defaults to level 60. 

Individual Skill-based DPS

One of the newer features on D3Up.com is the ability to see how much DPS and Damage your individual skills do based on your build! Throughout this example, I'll be using my wizard build as the build.

Direct Damage Abilities

The first kind of ability and probably the most common is the Direct Damage skill, it's a skill that you shoot, and it does damage. 



Arcane Torrent - Cascade on my Wizard comes out to be 39k DPS, with the average hit being ~25k. These damage numbers are calculated based on the Weapon Percentage damage listed in the tooltip, then factoring in all of your gear and other skills (including ones you can activate). The damage ranges are designed to show you the minimum possible hit as well as the highest possible critical hit. 

If I activated Frost Nova - Deep Freeze on my build, the display for Arcane Torrent - Cascade would update showing new damage numbers factoring in the +15% extra crit provided from the Frost Nova. 

(DOT) Damage over Time Abilities

The second kind of ability you'll notice is DOT abilities, abilities that do X damage over Y time. These have slightly different statistics displayed than a direct damage spell since they act quiet differently. 



The DPS number still exists for DOTs, but a few new extra stats are provided:
  • Total Damage per Cast - This shows how much total damage this ability will do over it's lifetime. In this example, it's 25k over 6 seconds. 
  • Per Tick range - This is how much damage the ability does every second, or tick, and should be close to the numbers that pop up in game as the DOT is "ticking"
  • Per Tick Crit Damage range - If the "tick" crits, this is how much it will end up hitting for.
Just like direct damage abilities, these numbers are automatically updated as you change gear, passives and activate other skill buffs.

Item Comparision

The "Item Compare" tab is designed to compare two different items of the same type and simulate what would happen to your character should you swap items. The Item Compare may eventually be phased out to some extend, as the Item Simulation is a bit more useful, but here's how you use it.

First off, hit the "Compare" tab on your build, you will be brought to a screen that looks like this:



I tried to put some basic instructions on the screen and hopefully it's easy to use, but here's the basics:
  1. Select the Slot of the Item you are comparing. This will take whatever item you currently have equipped into that slot and load up the next select box with all other items that could fit into that slot.
  2. Click the "My Items" select and pick an item to compare it to.


After you select which item to compare it to, you'll notice that below the options it loads in a small table showing you what will happen to your character's stats if you were to equip this item.


The "Old Item" part shows the item you're currently wearing, and the "New Item" part shows the item that you were comparing it to. Both of them can be hovered over for a tooltip incase you don't know what they were off the top of your head.

The table itself I tried to make as easy to read as possible. 
  1. Column #1 - The stat that changed, which also includes theoretical stats like EHP and DPS. 
  2. Column #2 - The "Difference" of putting on the new item, +53 Cold Resistance (Gain) and -20 Magic Find (Loss). 
  3. Column #3 - This is the total of the specific stat you will have if you wear the old item.
  4. Column #4 - This is the total of the specific stat you will have if you wear the new item.
Each number is also color coated either green (for gains in that stat) or red (for losses in that stat).

Simulate Item changes in real-time

(Coming Soon)

HELP! My DPS Calculation is off by 0.5%

Well, they all are, that's the simple answer.

There's some sort of rounding magic that Blizzard is doing in-game that none of us calculator / theorycrafter's have nailed down 100%. Many builds on D3Up.com are indeed perfect, down to the DPS number, but those using lots of damage modifiers (like +Minumum Damage, +Maximum Damage or +% Elemental Damage) will have their DPS off by <1%.

Here's a list of common "gotcha's" that I get a lot of email about:
  • Sharpshooter - No, sharpshooter isn't factored into the calculator yet. Just because you have 120k DPS in town doesn't mean your character has 120k DPS, especially when it drops to 30k after you take your first shot.
  • +% Elemental Damage - This isn't implemented yet either, but will be very very soon.
  • Follower Damage Buffs - Make sure you aren't running around with a companion that gives you a buff, it might be off because of that. I'll be adding these soon.
  • DPS doesn't match what's on the Armory - It probably won't either... Blizzard just logs whatever your DPS is when you logged out of the game, buffs and all. On D3Up, you have to activate those buffs for the numbers to change. 
Those are just a few things we'll just have to deal with now. If your DPS is off by a lot and none of the above situations are happening,  please let me know and I'll be more than happy to look into it!

HELP! My build page looks all messed up

Please send me a link to your D3Up.com build, feel free to email me at aaron.cox@greymass.com.

Most likely, there's an error with a combination of your specific gear and skills. With the millions of possible skill combinations, I haven't been able to test them all! Just let me know and I'll get it working for you ASAP.

HELP! My set bonuses aren't showing up

Sometimes the Character Importer doesn't automatically add your items to the proper set. 

Try editing the item, and under "Set", assign the proper item set. Make sure all the items are part of the SAME set! 

It's kind of confusing since 1.0.4 now that there are 2x Immortal Kings, 2x Tal Rasha's and a bunch more duplicate sets.

HELP! None of the help above really helped...

Either check the guides section for a guide on the topic or email me at aaron.cox@greymass.com!

I don't bite and I'll help you figure out whatever it is :)
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