Diablo III - Reaper of Souls - Initial thoughts...

So much to my surprise, Blizzard announced the new expansion for Diablo III last week at Gamescom.  Its called Reaper of Souls.  

The Next Gen of Consoles - Xbox One & PS4 - Thoughts

Which one will I be getting?

the answer is simple; Xbox One.

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.

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.

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.

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.