Wednesday 13 November 2013

Why I'm not going to buy Reaper of Souls

So, as always, Blizzard is top notch when it comes to the art and animation of their games.  The crusader looks good, the moves look awesome and as always, the character model and moves are very well done.  I really enjoyed seeing their creative process when it came to polishing the character and the upcoming zones in Reaper of Souls.

When the panel switched to talking about "Loot 2.0" is where I started to really be disappointed.

Friday 27 September 2013

Thoughts on Changes/Adds to Diablo III - Reaper of Souls

Class Changes: http://www.diablofans.com/news/2021-diablo-iii-reaper-of-souls-datamined-class-changes-including-even-more-crusader-abilities/

Item Affixes: http://www.diablofans.com/news/2019-spoilers-ahead-diablo-iii-expansion-reaper-of-souls-datamining-post-bosses-game-modes-clans-ladders-and-more/

At first I thought I would go in depth, line-by-line of the posted info.  But considering that this is just internal testing and a lot, if not all of the information shown here will change as time goes on.  I figured I would just keep this post relatively short and simple.

The Diablo team at Blizzard seems to be going in the right direction, although I personally feel that this is not a complete fix of the real issue with the game.  But of course, to fix what I feel the real issue of Diablo 3 may require a complete rebuild of the game engine, and I guess they might not want to go down that road.

Sucked back into Dark Souls.....


So I've had this game since launch, played it a bunch at first but never got too far into it.  This was mostly because I was not too good at the parrying and riposte mechanic.  So I defaulted to the playstyle that got me through Demon's Souls, which was the poke strategy of a spear and shield.  During this time, I was still into Call of Duty, so it was easy for me to unhook myself from Dark Souls, and I figure it would be something I come back to at a later time.

Friday 13 September 2013

The Last of Us - PS3 - review & thoughts


Finally getting around to finishing this post.. a bit late, but better late than never.

Potential spoiler alerts may follow for those who have yet to complete this game (shame on you for not finishing it yet!).

Monday 26 August 2013

Thursday 8 August 2013

Ace Combat Assault Horizon - Broken game gets uninstalled




First problem with this game is that it requires a games for windows live login, which at first, does not seem so bad since I already have an Xbox Live account.  But for some odd reason, I had to physically go through the process of signing in via the "create an account" process in order for the service to recognize the account.  I could not just log in with my details, which was very odd, and wasted about 20 minutes of my time to figure out.  I originally kept getting the error message "LIVE could not sign you in because the Windows Live ID you entered does not exist or your password is incorrect", even though I was already logged into the Xbox Live site.  So here's the exact process;  Make sure you are logged out of your live account in your browser, and when prompted to either sign in with existing account (which causes the error) or create a new account, you select create account.  Windows live will direct you to a login screen where you can then use your xbox live account.  Hopefully this is only a one time deal since I never had any other game require windows live account.

Thursday 4 July 2013

Path of Exile - I am finally hooked by this game



So a while back, I downloaded Path of Exile to try out.  The game was still in closed beta at the time, and at the time, I only played it for a short period of time but never really got hooked onto the game.  I played in hardcore, but died fairly early in the game, so I kind of got a bit discouraged given how sudden and abrupt the death was.  So at the time, I still had lots to do in Diablo III, so I continued to play for several more months.  Path of Exile then turned to open beta, and I tried to get into it again, however, it still didn't hook me in.  I didn't follow any build or anything, and just winged it.  My ranger at the time, made it to the low 20's and I put the game aside again to continue my Diablo III.  It also probably helped that I was still streaming Diablo III and generally having a good time being part of that community.

Near the end of May, I heard news of a fresh ladder starting up with some extra things being thrown into the game which, to me, sounded very interesting.  Luckily as well, I had just reached my third paragon 100 character on D3, and was starting to feel burnt out on the game.  This time around though, I decided to follow the advise of others, and actually follow an established build.  Being that I personally like ranged play, I decided to stick with the ranger, and chose to go with a Lightning Arrow build.

This time around, there was a bigger group of  us playing the game, so it made farming for items that much quicker as we would end up sharing a lot of gear and items to help each other progress.  This, combined with following a proper build, I finally got hooked.

Wednesday 8 May 2013

Diablo 3 - 1 point oh oops! - Massive gold dupe scam

So as with much of the Diablo 3 community, I was looking forward to finally playing with the latest 1.08 patch.  Finally being able to farm with a group as an archon wizard.  As with any patch though, I anticipated a slight change in the auction house pricing as there is a rush of players coming back from not playing for weeks.  I get home, and hear about people making tonnes of gold selling overpriced gems.  I bought 15 or so to sell right away, but after I sold my lot of 15 gems, I noticed that the price on the auction house continue to skyrocket.

So we began to speculate on teamspeak, as it did not make any sense.  Both the gem prices on gold auction house and real money auction house began to go up and down, until someone found out that there was a massive gold dupe method found within the game.  So a lot of people were duping their gold, and then buying up all the gems, to cash out, or even worst, flip back through the real money auction house, for further duping.

Friday 26 April 2013

Wrath of the Berserker and Archon to be Changed - My response to Travis Day

In response to this following post in the forums.. http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/8568988912?page=1#16

The permanent up time is not the main problem with these skills, and I would like to point out that while in archon form, you are quite limited in skills.  You still need to drop out of archon to re-cast, and if you remove this feature of archon, you would completely kill the build, and reduce the already low amount of viable builds in the game for the wizard.  The other point is, a wizard can just swap over to a Chantodo's wand, and just proc the critical mass passive to refresh the cooldown anyways, so you end up just making it inconvenient.

Also, comparing Wrath of the Berseker and Archon in the same manner is pointless, given that you are very limited in what skills you can use while in archon, while the barbarian still has full use of their skill selection while in wrath.  If you want to make some meaningful change, maybe consider making WOTB more like Archon in the way the skills are different while in that form.

With that in mind, then the real problem is Wrath of the Berserker, but there are several elements that make this skill so overpowered, and by the looks of it, the community and the developers don't have a real grasp of the "actual" problem.  The main problem is not that you can keep it up indefinitely with Thrive on Chaos rune, nor is it the buff in DPS output and movement speed.  Those bonuses I have accepted, and while they could be toned down a bit, the real problem with the skill is not those two aspects of Wrath, but that you are permanently immune to any crowd controlling effects, and that is the real issue with wrath.  So the problem is the barbarian itself lacks any other hard CC break.  So if we are to fix the problem, we need to shift this completely broken ability mechanic and move it to another skill, either via Leap, Overpower or a War Cry of some sort.  Then you can drop CC immunity from WOTB completely, and maybe even keep it around as a way to break CC on initial cast, but while in Wrath, the player is no longer immune.  That alone I feel will bring a bit of balance back to the class.  Yes it is a nerf, but I think a lot of players would agree that this one is needed.

Friday 15 March 2013

Ways to fix D3



First, and most important thing is the need for more content, and more challenging content. This can be done by adding even hid difficulty, and even endless dungeons are very easy to implement in the current game engine. Its great that we have new items to craft to get more stats, but we need to have something to do with these new stats. We need things to draw the players back to the game, all the current issues with the economy and such are mostly because of the shrinking player base. Less people in the economy means less people making use of the gold sink mechanics that are already in the game.

Thursday 21 February 2013

Diablo 3 - Coming to Playstation

With the announcement of PS4 last night, we got some interesting news that Diablo 3 will be available for PS4, and also for PS3.  But what does it mean?

Initially, I didn't really think much of it, there are still a lot of details missing that I am more interested in.  Such as, would they have their own realm? or would they mix in with existing PC realms?  How or will there be an Auction House?  How would the control scheme even work?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFFNtE3yu20

Well, thanks to this gametrailers video, I at least get a bit of an answer to that last question.  So, there will be 4 player local co-op, and it will not be split screen, instead, the screen will be zoomed out, and you'd be playing it like old school gauntlet, and other action rpg games.  That's kinda cool actually, a different and new way to experience the game.  But how would loot be distributed? Are they going back to shared loot drops and its whoever can make it to the drop first?  Will it be colour coded and bound to each character until it is picked up?

Also, in the video, they touch on the control scheme, where the analog stick is in direct control of the character movement, so that leads me to guess that for skills that are ranged, there will be some sort of targeting system where you can quickly toggle between targets.  Either with the right analog stick, or some other button, like L1.  My guess right now is, the 4 buttons on the controller are to each skill bar, and left click would be on the R2 trigger, and right click would be moved to R1.

They also mention the inclusion of an evasion mechanic, which I assume would be tied to a button, which would be L2 (since its the only button available).  Which is kind of interesting, because, currently on the PC version, there is no such evasion mechanic.  So will it be added in a future patch? and if so, how would it tie in with the current mechanic?  My guess that with higher dexterity, the window to successfully activate this evasion proc is bigger?  Anyways, that's quite interesting development, especially for brawling, which has been confirmed that it will be included in the console version.

I am wondering however, that with the introduction of the new crafted BOA items, is that a hint that the console version will not have an Auction house, and the only way to get good gear is to farm it on your own?  but then again, a diablo game wouldn't be a diablo game if there weren't some way to trade gear between players.

So we will have to wait and see.......

Wednesday 6 February 2013

CDXLIV's Greatest hits (All the budget guides)

Compilation of all the Educational Monday posts of CDXLIV's livestream. (twitch.tv/cdxliv)

Barbarian
http://www.reddit.com/r/Diablo/comments/13y0xz/a_budget_barb_for_every_occasion_levelingfarming/

50m MP7 Archon Wiz
http://www.reddit.com/r/Diablo/comments/18g2l5/educational_monday_vods_results_50m_mp7_archon/

CM Wiz 2.0
http://www.reddit.com/r/Diablo/comments/149sfc/educational_monday_budget_wiz_20_results_and_vods/

Archon Wiz
http://www.reddit.com/r/Diablo/comments/152dq0/educational_monday_vods_and_results_1m_mp3_25m/

60m Transformer Wiz
http://www.reddit.com/r/Diablo/comments/17xot7/edumon_ultimate_transformer_wizard_vod_results/

Monk (original - fall 2012)
http://www.reddit.com/r/Diablo/comments/13jk6o/educational_monday_budget_monk_vod_and_results/

SW/Overawe Monk - 1.07 (winter 2013)
http://www.reddit.com/r/Diablo/comments/18tjb7/educational_monkday_results_vod_10m_50m_100m/ 

Demon Hunter (updated - winter 2013)
http://www.reddit.com/r/Diablo/comments/19bu9o/educational_monday_vod_10m_50m_100m_dh/

Witch Doctor - March 2013
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1u_-0lCoXNYon0lEU9DU_isccMZCcm1oJ2gi4SQxHd0U/edit?usp=sharing

Witch Doctor
http://www.reddit.com/r/Diablo/comments/12r7n4/educational_monday_budget_wd_vod_and_results/