I'd say good riddance, but I wouldn't be surprised if our marauding friends show back up in an expansion pack...
I just spent an hour farming the shinbone in the manor. I hit lvl 38 right when I started, and I have 2 ticks left to go on the bar before I hit lvl 39. Thanks to the AH, I now have enough cash to buy the cowbell. Now I just need to find me some liquid rainbow in Act 2. Then I can slaughter cuteness given form at will! BWA-HAHAHAHAHA!!!!! On an unrelated note, I do find it funny that the various launchers all seem to use the same ad, even when it makes no sense. "Buy Diablo 3" in the WoW launcher makes sense. Having it in the D3 Launcher.... not so much.
Oh god yes. My Wizard has barely started Act 1 on Nightmare (that's the next difficulty after Normal, right?) and boss fights with her are either me dying right away because I didn't realize there was a boss there in time, or me having my wizard run around in large circles around my Hydra because I certainly don't have time to stop and shoot! In fact, that's pretty much how I beat Normal Diablo.
Yes, but some services are terrible in terms of reliability or speeds. And sometimes, they are your only option for broadband aside from satellite (which is ridiculously expensive, terribly slow and poor reliability again). Where I am, I can get Comcast (a large cable TV company) which are pretty standard in a lot of places. No DSL. No fiber. No other cable companies. It's Comcast or nothing. Comcast has such a bad reputation that a few years ago they rebranded themselves Xfinity, moving the Comcast name to bills and fine print rather than being their advertised name.
I think Blizzard would really push their fanbase to the brink if they made an all Kurast expansion pack
I'd wince but then again, I'm not a US citizen so I don't know exactly how bad this Comcast's services are. Btw, that sounds like a monopoly unless when you said "It's Comcast or nothing" meaning that there's practically no other service providers in your area other than Comcast. If that's the case, then that really sucks. As for me, got myself a 20mbps synchronous up/down DSL. Bundled internet/tv/telephone. Not as fast as those in the US I'm sure but I'm pretty happy with it.
Well, because satellite and, god forbid, dial up are still options, it isn't a monopoly. Verizon is one that is available in some areas. Worst part is, their site won't let me get their FIOS service...but I have a pedestal 15 ft off my back porch that says, "Verizon Broadband Fiber Ready" on it. I really need to bug them more often. And as for how bad it is, I will lose connections at least twice a week. Usually for no more than about 10-15 minutes at like 2am, but it happens so frequently. And given that I'm basically a nightowl, it sucks hard.
This is actually incorrect. The only characters who can currently solo Inferno difficulty (that we know of) are shield-using tanky barbarians who stack resistance and use Revenge (with Provocation to double proc rate), Furious Charge (Dreadnought to lifesteal) and Ignore Pain. Dhunter used to be able to do it by stacking DPS and using smokescreen but smokescreen's duration got halved.
I'm fairly certain you can't even GET those speeds on DSL in the US. That's cable-speeds there. As to a monopoly, it has to do with the way the US telecom regulations are set up, and it does suck for the consumer. Big time. Hillariously, I'm also on Comcast as the only broadband provider, and it's a 20 meg connection that's quite good and mostly reliable (baring having feet & feet of snow dropped within a month, totally abnormal for here).
US Telecoms basically have regional monopolies handed to them by the government. It's a system that's entirely bad for competition and for consumers, it's why the US has absolutely pathetic broadband internet infrastructure and availability, but that's the end result when corporate lobbying results in the lobbyists owning the people that make the rules. Nah, there are plenty of DSL companies that offer high speeds. But generally they're asynchronous connections. CenturyLink (formerly Qwest) offers advertised speeds of 25 and 40 mbps in some areas. But testing generally shows they achieve nowhere near the advertised speeds. In regards to connection speed and D3 gameplay, I have 17 Mbps-rated DSL. Bandwidth tests show I can get 9-10 Mbps depending on the server I connect to. Diablo 3 only lets me get ~200-300 ms latency with this connection while playing solo, and the way the game handles latency issues is by making the gameplay stutter. It's the single most annoying aspect (for me) of the 'always-online' requirement. The game plays like my hardware is struggling to run it (it's not - doesn't even push my CPU/GPU above 50% loads). I get much better latency in WoW, so I hope they can streamline D3's latency issues. If/when they can get the latency issues resolved, I will be a very happy camper.
Where I live, Comcast is practically the God of Generosity, Sunlight, Butterflies, and Fast, Reliable Broadband compared to the eldritch horror that is AT&T DSL.
If you were on AT&T DSL, it would drop once and refuse to come back on for half an hour. You mentioned you lose connections twice a week on average? On AT&T, I lost it two to three times a day on average, just from regular usage. That figure could easily rise into the 10-20 range if I was torrenting, or even downloading a large file normally. Trust me, you don't get into a game of bad Internet service oneupsmanship with me. Granted, though, it might depend on area. And probably on number of local competitors, too.
Comcast is hit or miss when it comes to Blizzard. I have a feeling that ultimately Comcast is going to have to do the behind the scenes special fixes for D3, that they did for WoW and SC2.
Really? Where I live it's the exact opposite. Edit: I had the same experience of losing my connection 10-20 times a day when I was torrenting or downloading stuff, but, that was because of the router they sent me, not the service. I got a real router and the problem went away.
On a random note, I just rescued Adria. I am disappointed that her voice is so different to Diablo. Whatever happened to that crazy, booming, "I sense a soul in search of answers" voice?
Here reliability is a BIG deal, I remember a few years ago when one of the 5-6 large ISPs COMHEM, had its net down for a few hours it was big national news, and great improvements and change and improvement was quickly promised with investigatory commissions and all (turned out someone had pulled out a plug that shouldn't have been pulled). I have COMHEM and get disconnected I would say under 10 times per year, and then for short times of a few minutes.
In my case, whenever the connection suddenly becomes unstable, which is quite rare nowadays someone either messed up with the switchboards or there's a major upgrade going on somewhere. Maybe after complaints from users, the ISP here now sends sms warnings a week in advance if there are major upgrades or maintenance works. But I do wish there are more ISPs here instead of the national carrier. There are other ISPs of course but these cater for mobile and WiFi connection. For gaming, surfing, torrenting, etc., I still prefer land line. Back to the game, I thought of continuing with my wizard on Normal, maybe level her up a bit but went ahead with my monk to see what Hell difficulty looks like. Not much difference from Nightmare. Ok, maybe the mooks require a bit more hits to take down but that's normal. Only the blue-name elites pose more challenges but it appears that the trick lies in actually using obstacles to prevent them from ganging up on you. Did that, took them down one at a time. That and being able to inflict up to 2.3k per normal hit, up to 3.6k on crit & combine that with the monk's Way of 100 Fists, that combo tends to empty a field or a room full of monsters really fast. Heck, I just managed to clock a 68 kills frenzy...in Hell mode. YEAH! Eh? You're only up to Act 2? Still on Normal? I thought members would've progressed to Nightmare at least. Anyway, I kinda like her new voice better. The original one sounded too gypsy-ish for my liking.
I know people who raced through and finished it the day (or the day after) it came out. I've never finished Diablo II (well, the expansion) and I've sunk hours into it. I don't see the rush. Playing the game is the fun part, and discovering more stuff. BYE
So my Wizard encountered the Crumbling Vault for the first time ever... while in Hell difficulty. Not only did I fail to get to the vault room in time (kept dying along the way even with Diamond Skin + Teleport + Force Armor), but I also managed to engage the checkpoint at the exit marker, and then kept dying there to Champion Mobs with Arcane + Frozen + Shielded (WTF). The first and only time in this game I had to leave game just to get out ;_;
Here is a man who gets it. I saw people who were going "I beat the game already, WTH Bliz!?" and wanted to smash my face into a wall. Diablo games have always been a "journey, no the destination" kinda thing. I'm still plugging along through Nightmare right now, and have been perfectly satisfied.
Having a blast of a time throughout the game. What I like about Hell difficulty is that the game no longer pretends that it is not an absolutely cheating bastard and will do everything it can to murder you in the most brutal way possible. Goddamn it, the mini-bosses hit me hard enough not only to kill me in 1 blow, I can actually see my body fly across the screen and in one case, it actually flew towards the screen and I went "Whoah!".
