I had a couple spare keys left over from pre-RoS taking up space. The game wouldn’t let me drop them! I had to sell them for 1 gold each. Seemed such a waste…
Patch 2.0.6 is now live. They gave Monks the slightest of boosts and did away with specific crafting materials (such as the Shard of Enstig Plate that I was constantly remaking games looking for the bounties that dropped them. I guess I don’t need that spreadsheet that tells me who drops what anymore.) The now useless parts taking up space in your stash will vendor for 50,000 gold. I sold all of mine for about 1.5 mil, then quickly burned through that upgrading gems.
So, I guess now that I don’t need to look for them it’s just rifts and bounties.
Who here is Tapioca? And why have you been running in and out of Scouring of Caldeum games for the last month? It’s very odd! 
He’s not running Scouring of Caldeum; he’s running Zoltan Kulle. The only reason he’s ever on Scouring is that that’s the next quest, where he lands after finishing a Kulle run.
As to why he’s running Kulle, I don’t know. Maybe just because he’s a quick boss run, with no enemies between his WP and him?
Been doing some Hardcore characters on Normal level…got a crusader at 27…barb, WD and Wizard in the Mid 40s, my monk at 65, and my DH at 70. Shooting to get all 6 of them to level 70 and along with my softcore 6 characters at 70, will have all 12 at 70 eventually.
Let me know if you want to run some hardcore with me…you really have to TRY to get yourself killed at Normal level, so it’s not really stressful, done a few at Hard and I had to be careful only twice. Anyways, let me know.
Speaking of D3, the 2.1 patch should go live in a few weeks (though with the caveat that this is Blizzard and it might be longer). Not really interested in HC but once the patch hits I might check it out, there’s a ton of changes and the Greater Rifts and the new legendary gems could be fun.
Back in the D2 days, playing a non-ladder character seemed pointless. But I’m not sure if I want to scrap all of the gear that I’ve collected over the past few years and start over. When the new patch comes out, do y’all think y’all will switch to [del]ladder[/del] seasonal characters?
I won’t. The leveling experience is pretty boring, since it’s all the same stuff you’ll be doing at 70 except any legendaries you will find will be useless in an hour or two. And if I understood right, there’s like one new legendary per class and that’s about it.
Back in the D2 days, thanks to bots, you could get a new character to lvl 60 in a few hours, and into the 70’s range in a couple more. That meant that starting over wasn’t too painful if you knew what you were doing. It seems kinda ironic that eliminating cheating* could kill the ladder/season system.
- AFAIK, there aren’t bots in D3. But any foray into the MB brings up accusations of botting.
There almost certainly are bots. It’s extremely difficult to stop botting at the I/O level: That is to say, a program that monitors the screen, moves the mouse, and produces keyboard input. Effectively, this is doing the same thing that a real human player does. Now, it’s a lot harder to write a bot that does this than it is one that feeds directly into a lower layer, so the bots are probably a lot simpler than they were in D2, but there are still a few things they could do, and that’s enough if you’re running them 24/7.
I picked up Titan Quest during the steam summer sale, so have been playing a lot of it lately. But I’ll probably give the ladder season a try once the patch comes out. We’ll see how long it keeps my attention though.
I really liked TQ quite a bit. Good loot and the environment was fun. My only beef with that game was that it seemed a bit TOO long. Each stage took forever to clear if I recall.
I really liked the skill trees and customization options.
So the new television commercial for the console version really has me wanting to play D3 (probably on PC though). But i’m the kind of guy that would really want to play through D1 & D2 first (never played either). I know it’s not required but anyone have thoughts on whether it would be worth it/enjoyable to play through the first two games before jumping into D3?
IMHO TQ ( + expansion ) represents the best of the genre since the first Diablo. Most balanced and playable characters, decent loot system, good skills system, nice graphics, and a solid storyline. However I should emphasize that this is speaking of the single-player experience only as I don’t do multi-player in any game.
My biggest complaints with Diablo III since they cleaned up the broken ( again IMHO and in a SP context ) early loot system is A.) too bloody short, B.) crap story, and C.) such a huge, huge step down in atmosphere from the original. Diablo II failed in that respect as well, but not nearly as egregiously as III. Still a fun game though - I’ll have to try the expansion.
I don’t know what kind of games you have played, but chances are pretty good you’ve played one or two games in this mold, particularly the Diablo 2 build. They had a similar impact on the industry that World of Warcraft has had, genre-defining and oft-copied.
Diablo would be horribly dated by now, and having spent a good deal of time with D3, I’d have a hard time not feeling D2 was also badly out of date. But I do recall both fondly so there was definite value there.
There is a story arc and in-game mythology spanning the three games, but the third game does a fair job of delivering exposition to catch the player up. Or at least I think it did, but I already knew what was being referenced so maybe that helped. 
Personally, I’d say skip the earlier builds and go for D3 since it appeals to you.
The main thing you’ll miss out on by not having played the original is that you’re much less likely to soil yourself when you encounter a couple of specific bosses and realize that you’re going to have to fight those bastards again. Except this time, the floor’s on fire.
Fresh meat?
Not missing much unless you just want different hack and slash gameplay, in which case it’s probably better to try titan quest and path of exile before the old diablos. D3 is a much more tactical and less grindy experience than the old ones. The story is irrelevant in all three titles, so you’re not missing anything there.
Titan Quest was a good game with an amazing aesthetic. I had two major issues with it:
The game was perhaps a bit TOO balanced. Everything was more or less viable, which tended to mean nothing was extraordinary. Even though my friend and I had wildly different builds both times we played, we were both pretty much equally effective. One was even a summoner build, summoner builds are almost NEVER effective endgame.
This is an amazing feat and I praise the developers for doing that on a technical level, but you always felt like you were just where you needed to be power-wise. I never felt more useful than an interchangeable cog in the party, and never really felt a sense of power and progression.
The other issue, as Cubsfan mentions, was that it was too long and the areas get tedious later in the game. The first time my friend and I played it we made it to the end. Years later we played it again with the expansion and… we couldn’t even get to the end of the non-expansion content again. We got to the Chinese area and kind of got bored. We ended up cheating and giving ourselves uber levels and armor and just powering through it to see the shiny content (which was actually rather fun, but probably not the intended way to play the game :p).
Edit: As for Path of Exile. Meh. It seemed like a good game if you’re really hardcore into the hack and slash stuff, but it wasn’t for me. Call me a pleb if you must, but it was a ton of fiddly customization with not-particularly-spectacular visual presentation. I was used to D3 by that point which was pretty straightforward and really shiny and satisfying when you hit enemies. I felt like I needed an Excel spreadsheet and a build guide to play PoE correctly. Don’t get me wrong, I like technical games sometimes, but I didn’t feel like PoE was particularly “worth it”. But I’m also the kind of person who plays Hack and Slash games through once to see all the bosses and environments and then is done with them. I’m not the guy who runs back to back rifts to get the best gear in the game.
That’s a great way to describe PoE. It’s supremely sucky to be advancement-limited by what meager skill gems you can manage to find, with leveling otherwise being limited to boring passive skills. Coming from D3 where every level or two gets you something new and shiny and powerful to play with, PoE just felt like an exercise in… I don’t know, 3D spreadsheeting.
Well, getting back to Diablo 3…just as I was getting back into it, my computer decided that D3 was too hot for it. Literally. I have an old laptop and D3 is making it overheat, even with my best cooling devices. So, sigh.