I finally got this done last night, took me about 12 shots at Izual… keep going! It leads to prettiness!
Also, gripes, I just got home, servers are up, and I CAN’T GET IN!!! :mad:
Apparently a ton of people having the same problem right now.
Yeah, same problem. Why can’t they make the game playable without public severs?
ETA: The error says that Battlenet servers are down, does that mean people can’t play WoW either?
OK Auto, get a grip. It’s just a game. Get some work done and go to bed. You’ll be able to play a little in the morning.
Oh, wait… :mad::mad:
As someone who decided not to buy D3 because it was online-only, but who has a strange compulsion to follow news about the game, I must confess to a great deal of schadenfreude whenever the servers go down.
Yeah, if you’re a wizard you need to run away like a little thing-that-runs-away-a-lot all the time. I do that, and I still die a fair amount (partially because I got greedy and switched away from frost armor to storm armor, but anyway).
I love disintegrate. I extra love Archon.
Distance is the best armor. Except against Rakanoth. Then you’re @#!*ed.
Disintegrate is fine up though Hell mode. In inferno, however, it’s a liability as standing in place casting a spell is a surefire way to get yourself quickly killed by champion packs that can easily murder you in a second if they get close. Most wizards prefer arcane orbs as they let you shoot and run at the same time.
Gems are super awesome! I try to make sure I pick up every one. It’s a good thing they stand out so much or else that would be a real pain in the ass.
I’m really disappointed with Blizzard’s blatent grab for money. A level 60 cap, which I’m sure will increase in the future if you buy some expansion pack. I’m level 59 right now and I’m still getting basic drops worth nothing, not to mention they do no good for my character.
Everything I wear I’ve gotten from the auction house. Call me paranoid, but I think that was done on purpose by Blizzard. I’ve used the auction house WAY more than I ever planned to in order to get better weapons and armor to advance forward. I dread the day when real money becomes an option in AH (not that I will be using it, but I can only imagine the kids who will.)
Those are really my only two gripes, but to me they’re really huge and reflect Blizzard’s mindset when making the game. I was expecting something more along the lines of D2. 
Weapon switching! I miss weapon switching! if they want to make switching weapons reset your Nepharim, so be it - but bring me back my weapon switch!
One that I just realized the other day… There are seven different damage types, and there are all sorts of mechanics for changing your damage type, but I can’t think of any situation where it matters. So far as I can tell, damage is damage. Why the seven types? Why should I care that a particular rune changes my arrows to poison?
But everything in the auction house came from other people’s drops, right? So, it’s just an equitable way to efficiently distribute drops, which is a heck of a lot better than the way drops and trading worked in D2.
Now, if Blizz is ultimately unsuccessful in preventing bots, then you might have a valid gripe. BTW, any news on that front? Are there bots already, or are they even likely to ever be viable? Without maphack and dependable boss-drops, and with various security measures, could the scourge of bots really be vanquished in perpetuity?
I’ve only played the open-beta, and haven’t done a whole lot of reading about D3, except for occasionally popping into these threads to hear how things are developing.
You may have other skills that synergize with the type of damage (wizard has several), and it may be that down the road certain monsters are immune to certain types of damage. I haven’t encountered that yet, but maybe they’re setting it up for the future.
I haven’t been playing long enough to notice, but in D2, apart from different damage being useful against specific elementally-immune monsters, there was a rhyme to the reason. Any chance D3 followed the same pattern?
Lightning: High max, but always a 1 minimum damage. Allowed for huge spikes in damage, with a pretty average rate of damage.
Fire: The most consistently hgih source of elemental damage, no real benefits beyond that.
Cold: Lower damage than Fire, but also chilled or froze enemies.
Poison: Very high damage, but over a period of time. Also stopped health regen (later it was patched to just counteract regen).
Magic: Pretty rare source, usually just converted your physical to magical on certain skills (which were slower and/or single attack v. DPS).
I think the problem is that in D2 I could kill Nightmare Baal and then farm him for loot in order to progress to Hell. In D3 the feeling is you need Act 3/4 Inferno loot to progress through Act 2. As an example I’ve probably farmed 20 to 30 hours in Act 1 Inferno (Warden/Butcher runs) and still only found one item worth equipping. Everything else I bought from the auction house. In D2 one of the best places to farm is in The Pit in Act 1 Hell, there is no place like that in D3.
I soloed multiple characters to the end game in D2 without trading and found it immensely satisfying. I don’t think it will be possible to progress in Inferno past Act 1 without using the auction house.
At this point, I’m not really sure why I ever spent any money leveling up the blacksmith. I think that was a really cool idea, but I think the auction house pretty much renders it useless.
I suppose I could have him craft some crappy rares and try to sell them at a hair above what they cost to make, but I don’t know if I’d ever get all the investment in training him back.
And yet, still I train him…I can’t be sued for being an inefficient gamer, can I?
Also in D2, you could give a high-damage poison weapon to a cold-throwing Act III buddy and he would annihilate everything by converting it to cold and freezing people in place.
Fire often came with explosive/area-of-effect/persistent traits. (Fireball, Meteor, Firewall) And because it was the most consistent source of high elemental damage, it was balanced by the fact that resistances/absorption to it were more common for monsters, and easier to obtain for players.
That makes sense, and helps me to understand what you were getting at with your gripe. Thanks.
I think that it’s likely that balancing patches will address that to some extent, but since Inferno isn’t intended to be player-friendly and easily defeated, they’re still going to make you work at it and struggle to rise to the challenge. Without having played it, that seems like a good thing, to me.