Lurker > HeroicGammaRay

star ocean

what if my current nation of residence later takes over the world

found ring with: 71 int, 25 vit, 55 dex, 7% attack speed, 20% crit damage, 12% mf

this seems like it should be worth a lot
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i don't think there's anything at all i would agree to do every sunday for the rest of my life for this little money

Belt that I got in Ponies that I didn't think was worth much (145 intel/200 armor/68 resist all/72 vit)

hate
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the last 'assassin' i used couldn't extra kill, just apply a strongman effect to the normal kill. a full-fledged assassin is incredibly strong and, yeah, shouldn't be seen much (can't comment on actual frequency since i haven't followed recent games).

on the flip side, town protective roles also shouldn't be guaranteed imho
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reject (would reject even if this only applied to regulars)

okay can someone briefly summarize important changes since, uh, the nautilus release
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digital games are great (but most pc games are 'digital' anyway if you just pirate); steam specifically is not. extra client no thanks.
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good news to me - smash has too many characters as is, and brawl's mechanics were awful. that said, i doubt the developers' ability to make the needed improvements (except possibly by accident)

not at all

feels like i'm risking my life every time though that's because i suck at it
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man an amulet with 40% mf and literally nothing else on it sold for 900k

man act 2 is easy now but it's sooo much less rewarding compared to act 1. the enemies have a lot more health and what's more a lot of them run away from you or become untargetable. took forever to do a 'run' and found nothing of value.

also: i got the gemstone on my first run through caverns of frost
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you know he always charges right after his fire beam in the same direction as the beam, right?

also: massive drop rate buffs. definitely noticeable, since i noticed something was off this past run and then went to check the forums for the news
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yeah there was lots and lots and lots of whining on the forums, and blizzard gave in. of course now they're whining that there's not much to do after clearing inferno...well, half of them are. the other half are complaining about repair costs.

i don't think the public will ever be satisfied, really.

aside: my early act 2 experience was like...engage 1-2 white mobs at a time, kite them across a couple screens and kill them. repeat. find elite pack, lure them back to town, get them stuck at the gate fighting the guards, kill. work through more whites, find another elite pack, repeat the lure trick. find a third elite pack, bring them to town again, realize that they have vampiric+plagued and the guards are standing in the plague so they're healing five times faster than you can damage them. whoops! leave them in town and use a waypoint to continue progressing. it was pretty hilarious.
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as far as 'what is there to do after inferno' my goals are mainly

1) do it with every class
2) hardcore

after those yeah i'll be done with the game if they don't add something. that seems like plenty of replayability to me, though (i have no experience with other diablo games so i don't know what's up with playing the same game for years)
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well i personally enjoyed going through inferno pre-nerf and am glad i got to see all of it before 1.0.3, but i can't speak to the experience of any of the non-wizard classes so yeah.

it might actually be harder to get through inferno heavily undergeared now, though. at the time i first beat a number of the bosses, i don't think i would have been able to kill them before they raged if they had rage timers, and now they do. even someone like kulle i'm sure took me at least 5 minutes to kill, probably more. don't have any firsthand experience with this so it might actually be possible to beat them even if they rage, but i kind of doubt it's a realistic prospect.

but inferno as a whole is definitely easier now if you have decent equipment. essentially it's been rebalanced so that anyone will be able to beat inferno without having to spend a completely ridiculous amount of time farming, even if they're not great at the game or have one of the less favored classes. personally i would have preferred if they just balanced out the classes and still demanded a ton out of you to get through, but eh. some of the more specific tuning was good - soul rippers/lashers for example were just way out of line with everything else. heralds could kill you near instantly from offscreen. oppressors could kill you literally instantly from offscreen (maybe they still can but the blanket nerf might have covered that). but most other enemies could be handled with sufficient care...from range, anyway.

really regardless of what the absolute level of difficulty is, it was and still is too swingy, but blizzard has said they're happy with the level of randomness so welp. i mean there's a huge difference between getting a reasonable map and getting a horrible elite pack right at the area entrance where there's no room to deal with them at all.
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so i just sold my boots to a vendor (was wearing my alternate boots for movespeed so they got mixed up with other items i was selling). and left the game before i realized what had happened.

i am so bad
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yeah got lucky and rolled a quiver with: 15% attack speed, 150 dex, 50 vit, 8% crit chance, 200 life regen. i now have 6 times as much money as i've ever had before. this auction house thing is pretty crazy.

it feels to me like blizzard's attempts to combat 'activities that can weaken everyone's play experience' have done more to weaken people's play experience than any malicious players out there. not just this, which isn't that big of a deal, but chest nerfs, jar nerfs, huge retroactive item changes, etc. they seem to be rebalancing the game around their LEAST desirable players, which is not very enjoyable for everyone else.

nifty calculator. 117438 (without dodge)

from my experience butcher and diablo do the same damage as before. dunno about the others.

speaking of which: solo inferno complete yessss. no auction house use, no grinding (okay i ran act 1 like 4 times the past couple days but that was only to get back to my pre-patch stats). diablo phase 3 actually went down on the first try but it took like...over 20 minutes because i was so nervous and wanted to be absolutely sure i didn't screw up. stayed the hell away from him.

final (unbuffed) stats: 19000 damage, 37000 hp, 2300 armor, 250 resist all. yeahhhh
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oh man got to the second shadow clone

diablo then reappeared near me in such a way that i was between him and the clone, so i died. but hey it's an improvement

yeah i've been getting two rares from that one

okay, drop rate buffs don't seem quite sufficient - i've been through over 150 yellows so far today and god knows how many blues and haven't found anything decent (and 10 of my 13 gear pieces are below item level 61 with a bunch below item level 55, even, so it's not like there's not much room for improvement). i'm just trying to get back to my pre-patch stats and haven't been able to so far.

also is it just me or does the game run significantly less smoothly post-patch? i'd just check the fps counter but it's bugged and displays a constant 0 fps

damnit just got a new mouse and 1.03 is live and all my attack speed items got nerfed to hell. might actually have to farm a little to kill diablo now. update: yeah, down to 15k dps lol.

also my manticore 1) does not seem to have an extra property 2) has like 70 lower dps now, presumably because of the attack speed thing.

Karl Moi Okoth, a 27 year-old vegetable and fruit seller, in front of his makeshift shop in Nairobi's Kibera slum in the Kenyan capital, on April 30, 2012. Okoth studied psychology and chemistry at Day Star University where he received a degree in psychology.

this one amused me - guess he wasn't good enough to get a chemistry degree, huh
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did you screw up somehow? or just a random spike

a, a, grad, mathematics, getting a phd

man i killed everything on every map and ended normal mode at 32

1) yes but only because it would be awesome to have that kind of reputation
2) no; wars and intolerance are good things

i think i've found five legendaries, the best of which was an 820 dps 2h crossbow. worst were two <20dps monk fists. no set pieces, though.

also i have seriously had it with diablo's fireball. he throws it at me, i teleport, it follows me and explodes under me. ???

and no, i'm not teleporting along the fireball's path or anything; i blink to the side and it inexplicably blinks with me. must be a bug or a lag issue. been trying to use wave of force or slow time to deal instead, but sometimes those are down or he's too close for slow time to be a good option.
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yeah it's definitely possible to get through with no ah/no grinding, at least in my class, but i do feel that drops could be a little better than they are. i'm at the diablo fight, and literally all of the equipment i'm currently using is from hell mode except my weapon (780 1h, dropped in act 3), off-hand (source, dropped in act 2), and amulet (purchased from a merchant in act 2). and i've had decent valor stacks for the most part - not a constant 5, but usually 3+.

my major trouble spots were belial (hundreds of tries lol i suck) and izual (probably like 80 tries). nothing else killed me repeatedly, but i did have to leave and resume games 2-3 times to get better maps in some places - getting camped at entrance by elite soul lashers is not fun. i can kill most elite packs with some effort and a lot of kiting, though many of them will give me the out of time debuff and i have to get out of range and then come back before their hp resets. the really awful packs i just teleport past or lead into a corner or try to abuse terrain somehow (eg heart of the damned map - i could lure the elites, including an invulnerable minions pack, to a level far below and shoot at them from above, and they just stood there and died).

diablo is also giving me trouble but that's in part because my mouse broke, and he's definitely doable if i play sufficiently well. i can even survive a hit from him unless he melees with his damage curse or poison on or lands the exploding fireball. the fight just takes forever and there's so much time to make a mistake.

anyway, it looks like they are in fact addressing the gear issue, so i doubt there'll be anything to complain about after the next patch.
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man i wasn't planning to use the rmah in any capacity but maybe i should get in on this. about how much gold is worth a dollar?

in other news, my mouse's left click started malfunctioning, so now i have to swap left/right click and put something i only use once every few minutes like energy armor on left click ('right click' according to the game). this means i have to completely retrain my muscle memory for diablo. oh well.
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oh, okay! i knew you could switch to there after clearing, but i wasn't sure if you could do so just upon reaching it, and not being able to would have been really bad. that'll be helpful.

okay, diablo phase 1 is trivial but it takes about two years, so i get barely any time to practice phase 2, which is not trivial. augh. the current issue is apparently being too close to the random cracks in the ground which makes him keep teleporting to me. haven't yet determined a wide enough loop i can go around that doesn't run into any of them. i would like to just practice this on hell, but that would make me lose my quest progress
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goddamnit had all the angels dead and he uses his unavoidable frost nova at the exact same time as he spawns freeze grenades, so i get chain frozen and die. would have been fine with just the nova.

got to the end of the corrupted angel phase a couple times but screwed up. out of repair gold at the moment so i'm calling it a night. hopefully won't take too much longer - would like to clear before 1.03

i seem to have the most luck when the oppressors actually decide to fight the angels for a bit on the other side of the pit i'm circling. but often izual himself is still chasing me and i can no longer circle around the pit because of unit collision, so i screw up. need to try teleporting away - hopefully this won't make the oppressors stop fighting the angels and charge me (like they usually do when i teleport)
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izual is killing me. i hate this fight because 1) i get about 17 fps so it's hard to react to things and 2) most of the oppressors at any given time are offscreen and it's impossible to tell what they're doing or how they're positioned, especially because they can also do their ohko charge attack from offscreen.

i got to the corrupted angels phase once so far so this -should- be doable with some luck, but ugh.

currently running force weapon (takes way too damn long otherwise), force armor, mirror image with extra clones to break freezes and distract the enemies, teleport with clones also to distract the enemies, and blizzard/hydra. am i missing anything that would make this easier?
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a wizard's guide to inferno rakanoth

1) take familiar - ancient guardian, teleport - wormhole, frost nova - cold snap, hydra - venom hydra
2) remove all sources of life regen
3) get to low life before the fight (take hits or break and then your equipment or whatever)
4) wait for the teleport attack, which the familiar will block, then freeze him, drop hydra, and wormhole to the other side. repeat.
5) don't have your weapon break when he's at 10% health like mine did the first time i tried this

so much cheese
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the only way this is a '10 year game' is if he played less than one turn a day, but yeah still pretty crazy. i've never really tinkered with civ postgames.

wow inferno azmodan is dumb - nothing is remotely threatening except for the pools which can easily kill you if he decides to be a jerk about their placement

on to act 4 oh god. if i even get to rakanoth i'm guessing he's going to be completely impossible.
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okay, the two packs of elite soul lashers did not spawn near the entrance this time, so i could actually abuse terrain and got through. in the process found my first significant gear upgrade since act 1 - my dps is now a whopping 18.5k

tower of the damned is an absolute nightmare. every time i get to heart of the damned there's an elite pack of soul lashers with some horrible combination right near the entrance, and i can't even reroll easily since that sends me back to the beginning of tower 2.

yay, siegebreaker down. not looking forward to the crater (soul rippers, phasebeasts, really constricted maps, inconvenient doors)

yeah i've been getting utterly ridiculous lag. first it makes me lose my 5 stacks on the bridge, then when i think it's over i go fight siegebreaker, kite him around for like 10 minutes, and then suddenly all my skills stop working and the next thing i know he hits me with a melee attack from 2 screens away and i'm dead

man ghom killed me a couple times on inferno because i had to retreat from the slimes (not enough dps to kill them quickly and they 2-shot me) and eventually ran out of space that wasn't poisoned. ended up permaslowing them with blizzard and running around the perimeter for 15 minutes until he died

-finally-

close to 500 attempts i think. worth it though. so glad i didn't buy or farm my way past him.
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