Friday (24 Jun) - Hell Hath Arrived

Friday (24 Jun) - Hell Hath Arrived

At level 45, Wild's barbarian, Barbedwire, had apparently met his match at the Nightmare level of Diablo 3. I was running from mobs more often than killing them, and once my health got low it took forever to restore it even if I got away. Frustrating, to say the least. Silver took a look at Barbed's ability choices and offered some suggested changes. The changes made quite a difference, and Barbed was soon crashing his way through Diablo once again.

I've only spent an hour or so a night playing since then, but progress has been steady. However, loot drops were worse than useless. Rare drops have been virtually non-existent, and the odd rare that did drop offered nothing better than what I already had. So I had to turn to the Auction House. Gold from kills and unusable gear helped fill the coffers, and I was even able to start selling some gear on the Auction House for even more gold. Each night I'd pick through the AH gear and buy upgrades. No, I didn't have anywhere near the gold needed for the higher end stuff - prices of a million or more gold are pretty common - so I settled for good stuff in the under 20,000 gold range. The AH search feature is laughably poor, so the best way to find bargains is to wade through page after page until coming across something worthwhile at a good price. It's time consuming, but it works.

That gear kept Barbed going right up to the final encounter with Diablo himself, which I arrived at on Friday night. Of course, I've killed Diablo once before on Normal level, and now I had a chance at Nightmare level. I gave the big baddy a shot, but came up a little short. I felt that I had enough DPS, as well has a pretty deep health pool, but with little crowd control other than my stomp, I took pretty constant damage and did not have the health regeneration needed to survive such a long battle.

I made another trip to the AH, looking for gear that had high health regeneration. Fortunately, there were many to choose from, and I was even able to upgrade other stats as well. My "life per second" stat improved from 60 to 171. With five new pieces of gear Barbed went at Diablo a second time, and this time Diablo died. Barbed made level 50 as well. Barbed previously completed Normal Difficulty, and has now completed Nightmare Difficulty. Hell level is next, followed by the last level, Inferno (assuming I keep at this).

It was still mildly disappointing that even the Diablo kill didn't get me a rare drop. It was just junk blue level stuff. You would think that a Diablo kill deserved more than that. I suspect that now that Blizz has their real money Auction House operating, they're hoping players will spend hard cash on gear instead of gold. That won't be me.

In a little WoW guild news, Wild spoke with guild leader Bd a few days ago. Wild was in game to do a little crafting and Bd was getting ready to logout. It wasn't a long conversation, but there wasn't much news. The three raids are still in place and still raiding at least part time. With a 25% reduction in difficulty now in place, normal Dragon Soul is pretty heavily nerfed. No word or expectation that the guild is going after the Heroic level of DS in any big way. I've thought about bringing Wild back out for some raiding, but ... Wild's gear level is i393, and even maxing his gear with normal DS the best he could achieve would be i397. Even JB seems satisfied with her i384 level gear. Those gear levels will be meaningless the second the new expansion hits the street, so continuing to gear up makes little sense.

Even as Cata winds down, new players keep popping up in the guild, so the guild is doing well with it's memberships. That has certainly helped with the raids. I even saw an old friend come back into the game, Bf. I think this is the third time he's quit the game for months at a time and then come back. I'm sure the rope is tightening around Wild even now, trying to pull him back in. Wild still /shrugs at that.