Diablo III

The Scoundrel gets the best lines. Shen is pretty good, too. Think he's voiced by David Hong, or someone trying very hard to sound like him. There's a couple moments where the Templar gets some good lines in, but those are few and far between.

I've found on bosses, I have to shift wizard over to fire and forget skills like hydra and blizzard. Hydra is superior because it's cheap and will actively target. I still use disintegrate, but have to dance around a lot. The big arcane orb spell might be better for mobility, but will take a *lot* longer to burn things down. Some bosses are conducive to Archon, but oftentimes I have to add another defensive skill into the mix to make it, unless it's stand and shoot like Azmodan.

Yeah, in the credits James Hong is listed as the voice of Covetous Shen/David Lo Pan. I love that guy. Anyway, beat Diablo on normal this afternoon... took about 40 hours of play time. Meanwhile, in the same 40 hours, my friend has completed both normal and nightmare.

Beginning to suspect the auction house kind of ruins the must-keep-playing aspect of this game, since once you rack up some gold, it's trivial to go to the auction house and buy exactly what you want to create a godlike character. I'll wait until I spend some time in inferno mode though.

I hear the game changes a lot in Hell and Inferno, and in ways that make me likely not to play much past Nightmare.

My suspicion is that Blizzard believes the surtaxes on real money exchanges at the auction house will be the cash-engine behind DIABLO 3, given that there isn't a monthly subscription fee (or other lucrative services such as transfers and faction switches and renames). I also believe that people won't be spending a lot of real-world money to trick out their characters for D3, for a variety of reasons. But what it really boils down to is that D3 isn't designed as an MMO and won't engender the same kind of attachment to player characters. I could be wrong, but I don't think that I am.

And big ups for hiring Mr. Hong (also the Eye Doctor in BLADE RUNNER) instead of a soundalike.

Apparently there's an internal Blizzard book open on how many months it will take for the first person to finish Inferno Act V.

― Andrew Farrell, Wednesday, April 18, 2012 6:11 PM (1 month ago)

The answer being .13 months, or 4 days.

can somebody send me a guest pass, or whatever they're calling a demo or starter version of the game?

I'm in, finally, and monking it up- up to Act 3 and level 25. I have a bunch of status effects stacked up so that basically everything I does heals me, and between that and the passive skill that converts Dexterity to bonus health have committed fully to the "shields are for pussies" route. I can never find fist weapons or staves with bonus Dex, though, so I'm stuck with daggers at the moment.

kingfish- check your email.

Oh man why did I install this

I can never find fist weapons or staves with bonus Dex, though, so I'm stuck with daggers at the moment.

craft your own! most of my best stuff is crafted, and salvaging extra loot and using your gold to level up the craftsman dude is way more fun than selling extra loot for 40 gold (or whatever) and buying mediocre equipment.

I plan to, but the very first craft able fist weapon requires level 29, which is kind of weird.

There's a lot of weird things in crafting, really.

And it's expensive.

Crafting is the reason why I'll never be able to buy a bank tab...

I've been throwing lots of gold into upgrading the crafting dude, but I've heard that the online auction house has enough stuff that you can basically decide exactly what you want and go check it out? Not sure, sounds good.

Oh. I haven't even checked out the online auction house!

/newb

witch doctor seems kind of boring so far. i may need to try another.

I haven't checked it either, Z S.

monk is awesome so far, btw

I am actually proud that I haven't been playing this much. Not that it's not great but that I've given priorities to work and women over diablo. This must be what puberty finally feels like.
I am sure I will regress shortly

if we weren't having guests this week I would be spending all my free time playing this

as it stands, I woke up this morning at 5:30, showered and dressed for work, then played until 8:00

oh yeah, for the first two days I stayed up til 430
i have since recovered as work has gotten crazy

lol

My Friday night was pretty much eaten by the game. I didn't even quit to order pizza, I just switched to windowed mode while in town and ordered food in a web browser

sponsorship opportunity for blizzard if you ask me; put online portals to pizza hut in town

If I'd wanted a larger chain's pizza, I probably would have ordered from my phone's web browser.

my psu crapped out as the client was downloading. back to d2 for me for a few weeks.

Russell Shirley 1979-2012

This is crack. Crack kills.

I'm not a doctor but if a 32 year old dies suddenly of heart failure it's probably only tangentially related to video games.

"He always had a good heart" apparently not bro

I feel like a dick for slagging on the guy whose friend died really young but the whole angle of Advancing Get Out of Your Damn Desk Chair Awareness seems absurd to me.

yooooo. any of you fine folx have one of those guest passes left that i can scrounge?

Stupidly, they don't give you any if you buy the digital edition, only in physical boxes. But the digital edition is the same cost. :(

I was just too lazy to go to the store. Sorry.

I have a couple, I'll look for em in the box when I get home.

weird, how hard could it be to drop a couple codes in a digi download?

mh if you are able to email one of them over at some point i would be super grateful. webmail or bobbyspirals at gmail dot com

I'm guessing they put them in physical copies to give retailers a little bonus so they'd stock it. My understanding is that in a month or so everyone will be able to play the Starter version and you won't need a guest pass.

The stupid thing about the guest pass is you can't play co-op, which is the most brilliant thing they've got going.

You can luckily upgrade the guest pass account to a full one, though. My friend was on his wife's guest pass and upgraded and now we can all play happily together.

I did the cheesy thing yesterday where you skip some quests and finish an act with someone who's already done so, powering through the end of the second-to-last one and ended up beating Diablo with another friend. So now I'm on the second time through and getting exp again!

I did the upgrade thing.

I'm also not sure about the skills selection yet. It makes sense but is kind of odd in that you choose skills, but never lose the ability to switch to others in the long-term. I mean, in other Diablo games you could eventually play so long that you could max out pretty much everything, but this model of unlocking skills by level and then being able to swap them around is something I'm still getting used to.

Has anyone found a good case where it's useful to use a skill but not the highest-unlocked rune of it?

Huh, I thought it was 99 points (at life-draining lvl 99) but it took 20 points to max out each skill? Which lead to either "oh no this skill that looked good at level 10 is in fact rubbish but I have 10 points in it" or just going to the internet and picking one of the 3-4 working builds.

Eh, probably, it's been a while since I've played the first couple Diablos and I doubt I ever hit level 99

The impression I get is that the main, normal campaign is something of a gleeful extended tutorial.

But, for what exactly? Playing the campaign again?

well, probably playing the campaign or co-op on a real difficulty level

I mean, I died by accident shortly after I hit level 10 because I'm still massively jet-lagged and was trying to make sure I wasn't going to be late for work and that was the only time I've even felt like I've been in danger, including the first boss fight.

I died like crazy in a few boss fights, but I would agree that the FEAR doesn't kick in as much with this game because you don't really lose all that much by dying. On the flip side, the frustration doesn't, either.

Man, Act II is a SLOG as a monk because of all those flying electromosquito things.

Those things are total bullshit no matter who you are.

Once I got the Monk ability to summon a spirit warrior it became easier to deal with the flying poison bugs. The spirit warrior can haul ass and seems to target those things pretty well.

a tutorial for harder level hardcore runs where killing you DOES matter.
blizzard is the only company i know who creates games made for a decade's worth of play. it's their business model and it works.
so i don't think anyone really understands the depth of play that's in diablo iii just yet. but i'm seeing glints and everything i read by the designers suggests this is very much going to be something they plan to support through 2020.

Anyone used the auction house yet? I threw a couple rare items on there for the hell of it, just to see if anyone actually bids. It'll be interesting to see how it works out when they open the cash version.

And by rare I mean "crap that popped out when I beat Diablo in Normal difficulty" so I'm not exactly fishing for huge gold prizes.

I've used the AH. I lowball. I really don't care, since it's not that much effort to get rares and the AH was completely, utterly stupid when I looked in on it the other day.

But have you played the secret level?

No, I can't get you there, but I might spend some time crafting the stuff that will.

I have to say that I LOATHE the new system of "Jump in to help a buddy and your progress gets boned." Came back to Act I NM after helping a friend and lost a half hour or more of progress. Not that it's a HUGE deal, I guess, but my game time is limited so taking steps backwards is unwelcome no matter how you slice it.

As for the normal being a tutorial, I've heard more than one person state "The game starts with Nightmare." Just like with WoW, the game really starts at max level (60, 70, 80, 85 depending on the version you were playing.)

And the Witchdoctor is giving me fits. He's really crippled for having only 4 skill slots at level 12 or whatever. Particularly when to make zombie dogs useful, you need a secondary skill and one of your passive skills set to boost them. It's like a more frustrating version of the Necromancer (my favorite D2 class by a mile.)

In Act I Nightmare now, and the unique packs are pretty much killing me instantly. Suspect my assumption that Normal mode provides no real idea of what the game is like is a correct one.

real diablo souls starts now