Monday, May 14, 2012

Early post... guess why!

Diablo 3 comes out tonight at 3 AM my time.  Lately I have been often late with posts but this week I am going to be early to maximize my D3 time tomorrow.  I won't be going whole hog for D3 though; no getting up at 3 AM to start playing at first possible opportunity for me.  I did that sort of thing for every WOW expansion, standing at the store for an hour with friends and then rushing home to play all night so I could get raiding asap. Unfortunately this time I have a sick child in my house and I might actually have to be functional tomorrow to take care of her so having no sleep isn't a sound plan.  I also remember having a tremendous amount of fun with midnight WOW releases the first two times but it really fell flat with Cataclysm.  That was pretty much due to me failing to win the race to level 85 on my paladin since after much preparation and rushing it was a big disappointment to fail.  I rushed through all the content and did it while feeling gross and exhausted and ended up with nothing for my efforts.  This time I am just going to take my time and do whatever seems fun rather than go for broke; this is probably a good idea because I had a real chance at winning the server first race to 85 in WOW but I have zero chance of winning D3 first to level 60.  The servers are huge, the number of people trying is massive and I have obligations... I can't just play for 5 days straight with no sleep and I know at least a few accounts are going to do exactly that.

I revised my build for my first Witch Doctor.  Obviously this is tentative on the abilities actually doing what they say they do on the calculator and also seeing how they work in the game.  The Zombie Charger in particular looks absolutely insane if it does what I think it does but it might have a very tiny range or something that isn't noted there.  The main things I looked for in a build was as much passive defence as possible in terms of minions and walls, a way to abuse both Soul Harvest (insane damage) and Vision Quest (infinite mana) which seem like they *have* to be broken, and a powerful spammable AOE attack spell.  It is a build arranged for Inferno, of course, because I am quite confident on any lower difficulty it will be a matter of clicking quickly and having a build that isn't idiotic and I feel confident I can meet that standard.

I am pinning a lot of hope on D3.  After being bitterly disappointed by the end to Mass Effect 3 I am looking for a story that won't turn out to be a sad mess and I can't help but think that Blizzard will do a better job here than Bioware did.  First off the Diablo series doesn't have crazy physics / metaphysics to deal with and isn't angling for a Deux Ex Machina to allow the player to beat an unbeatable foe; the Diablo universe has well and thoroughly established that the way to deal with a gigantic demonic enemy is to find some hero to go kick its ass in single combat.  A lot of people are going to die along the way and a lot of bad things will happen but my Witch Doctor is eventually going to blow up every badass demon until there aren't any left.  End of Story.

Or not, as the real End of Story is likely going to revolve around killing that super powerful demon over and over again to get MOAR SHINIES to increase my ever growing mound of treasure.  Which, thankfully, is likely to be a hell of a lot of fun.

9 hours, 45 minutes, 30 seconds to release.  Hell, it's about time.

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