Diablo3 - Go hardcore or go home!

The Game Room
1

Greetings, Cecil’s Minions,
In light of the recent glut of Diablo3 threads, perhaps this is not worthy of its own thread, but I’ll leave that for the mods to decide.

Anyway, I have seen a few threads of people posting gamertags and forming groups, but I have only seen a paltry 1 or 2 posts in support of hardcore mode. I am feeling up for a challenge, and I found myself agreeing strongly with the points raised in this article by Gamespot (linked to by a doper whose name I forget). So, I have decided to play hardcore mode before even beating the game normally. Crazy, huh?

Well then I’m crazy! Who is with me? Who is up for the ultimate challenge? [del]Whose cuisine reigns supreme?[/del]

My gamertag is Autolycus#1971. I currently play on the Americas server, but as I live in East Asia, I might switch to that server if this thread drops like a soulstone. With that said…
Happy Diabloing!
Auto

2

How dare you forget my name!

My name is very memorable. :frowning:

Kin - because I am a kindred spirit

Tha - because I’m all tha’

Lis - because I have a lisp.
I’ll want to finish up a round of normal non-hardcore before jumping in to it though so hopefully I’ll catch you guys next time.

3

So, with no offline play mode available, what happens to a hardcore character if the blizzard servers go offline, or you lose your network connection. If you are in battle, will you be permanently killed?

4

Even if I do eventually go hardcore, it won’t be until after I’ve beat the game (the whole game, at all difficulty levels) on softcore, so I can learn what’s needed and how to survive. I don’t want to put in 40 hours leveling and gearing up a character only to suddenly realize I don’t have what it takes for a particular battle, and lose it all and have to put in another 40 hours to get back to that point.

5

If the servers go offline, then your savegame is back at the last checkpoint.

If you lose your network connection, your character will stand still for 10 seconds, then despawn if he survives. If he dies in those 10 seconds, he’s dead.

6

Ouch… thanks for the info.

I think that seals it for me.

7

Same here, I still get random disconnects from time to time (But luckily less now than the first couple of days.) so until the servers are rock solid it’s not for me.

8

If Blizzard’s servers aren’t rock-solid, it’s no harm no foul, since you’ll then start up at the last checkpoint (generally either the start of an area, or right before some major fight). They did their duty on that one. The problem comes if your ISP has a problem: Blizzard has no control over that. If that happens, then you have the ten second countdown.

I think that the reason for the countdown is that they wanted to take away the panic-quit option, to make it “more hardcore”. But given that internet connections can and do fail, I think it’s probably a little too far.

9

Instead of the full 10 second countdown or no countdown at all, perhaps we could have a 3/5ths compromise of only 6 seconds :smiley:

10

I’m playing hardcore as well. I haven’t died yet, but am only in Act 3 Normal. My brother plays HC with me, as does a friend, so there are three others that will play HC with anyone who is interested. I’m on most nights, anywhere between 7 and 12 EST.

I added you Autolycus. I’m Selene on Bnet.

Good luck everyone.

And may your deaths be glorious.

11

That article is BS. The whole point of gaming is to do hings too dangerous for real life. Having to worry abut dying takes that freedom away. I might as well stick to RL.

12

I’m more worried about shoddy networking code, like the infamous Demon Hunter shield disconnect.

13

Funny how a glitch in a three-day-old game can be “infamous”. But I’m confident that by the time I would have any interest in hardcore, Blizzard will have found and fixed most of those. Things like some idiot with a backhoe severing an Internet line, though, Blizzard can’t fix.

14

I loved playing hardcore in D2 but doubt I’ll ever give it a try in D3 due to the possibility of a simple connection loss leading to the death of the character. Perhaps if I get bored but even then I’m probably more likely to just return to D2.

15

the hardcore mode in D2 is offline? what’s the point? why not just play normal mode and quit if you die? this way you can continue playing later if you change your mind.

16

Uh…it’s always been that way. Disconnect deaths have been a part of hardcore lore for a decade in D2.

You can make hardcore characters online or offline.

17

OK, report from the trenches. Things are going great now. I don’t have too too much time to play, so I’ve been taking it slow and steady so as not to risk unnecessary death. So far I’ve only died once (knock on wood), and that was due mostly to joining an instance solo in a 4 man group due to a lot of confusion.

Right now I’m in A4 Normal as a 31 wizard with 7K HP and 380DPS. My skill setup is Electrocute (more splits rune), and Disintegrate (wide beam), on left and right click, with 1234 as Archon, Diamond Dust (absorption boost), Force Wave (extra dmg and stun), and Blizzard.

Right now I’m basically steamrolling through everything, solo or group, and it feels great! The only change I’m thinking of making is replacing Archon with Venom Hydra, because while Archon is a ton of fun, the cooldown is a bitch, and I’m hearing really good things about V-hydra’s damage output.

Oh, and before I forget, passives: Blur, 4arcane per sig spell, and arcane power/regen boost.

Sooo, yeah, it’s been a blast. I had 6K at Belial and he was a joke, so last night with a group we plowed through all of act3. Only two hairy moments. One was during the Azmodan fight, and I was super-glad I had that high HP. I swear I dodged the massive fireball of doom, but a wizard directly next to me got hit by it, and apparently I got hit too for full damage! Grrrr… that hit me for like 3.5Kish, so that plus a bit of other dmg had me running like a chicken while the barbs did their thing. ::embarrassed::

The other was in Act4, because, well, did you know there is no lobby there? I didn’t, and when we went into this instance we didn’t know it would be a mini-boss fight. Cue panic… Came out on top though, and I am pretty sure I’ll be fine all the way to Act2 NM.

In summation, hardcore all the way whooooo ^^

18

In D2 you could play hardcore single player without danger of a disconnect death. But not in D3.

19

I don’t understand–why couldn’t you just play online in normal mode and quit if you die as well?

20

I doubted I was ever going to be brave enough to do this, but last weekend my husband and I got drunk and decided to do it. So now I have a level 10 DH and he has a level 10 Barb. We played with a buddy and it was a lot of fun. Definitely adds to the excitement. I’ll go back to HC eventually but right now I’m kind of obsessed with my Level 53 barbarian.