Normal is incredibly easy, NM is easy unless you fall behind on gear, Hell seems like where the real challenge is.

My only mob I've had serious problems on was a vampiric desecrater pack of those guys that whirlwind. I actually had to fire my hireling because he kept putting them back to full life. I'm not in Hell yet though.

Vampiric is going to be the worst buff, I can sense it.

 

It'd be more of a joke because you can't use most of your useful abilities and your archery tree would be entirely unavailble to you, but yes I would rely on ally slows or switch to caltrops. Using caltrops with bait the trap would also let you have an extra 10% crit if you set it, tumble out, set a new one, repeat.

As for Hell, it seems like waller in conjunction with any of the high damage abilities (plague, desecrator, arcane, molten) will really fuck you over. It can already do that in nightmare if you play co-op because you get in the swing of melting through mobs and then find a rare pack and die before you realize they are rare.

 

Thank God they made the final boss a decent challenge - far harder than any of the others by far, at least in normal mode. Part of the challenge probably came from the fact that I was co-op with my brother and he managed to get himself killed halfway through the fight (how I still don't get, since he has a level 45 hardcore character).

That life bar is a monster.

Out of curiosity, do any of you remember what level you were at when you beat normal? I only ask because we rushed to quest objectives to make it a bit harder on ourselves. I'm wondering if it made a difference.

 

I believe I had just hit 31 when I beat the final boss on normal. Wizard.

 

Cool. We were both 30.

I mostly blame my brother for the trouble I had since it took him about 2 minutes of being dead to tell me that I could res in combat.

I'm pretty sure he was only playing carebear mode with me because he was drunk, though.

 

lost my 35 hc barb due to bluescren D:




edit, problem with diablo? i just stood there and took it. infinie rage. easy enough to heal through too

 

When I beat Diablo the first time, I was 35, lol. Explored and killed everything. Took quite a while indeed.

I just started Hell today, and it's already kinda pissing me off. Normal monsters, easy as heck. Bosses? Easy, since they're scripted and get no new abilities. But the packs of champions and rares and uniques? Those wreck me. I die half the time. Those are literally the only hard part of the game so far. A big, tough and strong monster with fast + vampiric + anything just rapes my wizard.

 

How the hell was Diablo hard at all in Normal? I melted his ass down with frost rays in about 1-2 minutes per part of the fight on Wizard at lvl 30.

Also, Monk + Quickening Rune = OP.

Stand in hoard spamming heals and skills all day every day at max spirit.

EDIT: Act rushing still exists, and you can skip entire difficulties at that. Just have a friend invite you into the boss quest of any act and bam, it's done. You can then make your own private games for them and open it to the public. I'm pretty much skipping anything from skeleton king until Belial because the walking parts of it are annoying as all hell.

Means I'm basically finishing Normal at lvl 23~ on all my characters now.

 

Okay, now that the stars are out of my eyes, I can give a decent opinion:

Spoiler

The storyline is utter shit. As well as not making sense, it -unfortunately- follows the same trend that they set with Warcraft and Starcraft (which, IMO, ruined both).

There are a ton of problems with monsters and drops, but I expect they'll sort/fix them in the first few patches. No need to rage there.

The art direction, though having amazing sights like on the battlements at Bastion's Keep, is shit. It's practically World of Diablo.

Diablo's design blows. I can understand that Diablo's host this time is female, hence his swaying hips and those strange shoulder mouths, but... he doesn't look menacing enough.

Compare:

Diablo 1 -

Diablo 2 -

Diablo 3 -

They should have stuck with the old design - updated, of course.

Ditch the odd 'shoulder mouths', and the strange breast pads on front, and just adapt the new features (head, spikes, tail) onto the classic look.

As well as looking a shit-ton better, and actually him look like the Lord of Terror and not some demonic transvestite, it would have made more sense - Leah's gone, and him having a look that's nothing in relation to the host would reinforce this in the player's mind, subconsciously.

All in all, it's worth the money and I'm glad I bought it - it's fucking great fun... but Blizzard has, once again, dropped the ball.

 

You did read the story right?

There is a reason the last Diablo only looks similar.

 

You have played the previous games, right?

Anyway - read it, played it. Again, Deus Ex Machina Black Soul Stone, flawed Adria, poor characterization, ruined atmosphere.

Also, Belial? Saw that 'twist' a mile away. Not good.

Point is, they could have made him look different by altering/updating his original design, to fit with the new. It's just a bad design decision to do what they did to him.

If you're a Command and Conquer fan, it'd be like giving Kane a goatee and an afro.

 

Your images for the Diablo's from I and II are swapped.

 

D3 diablo reminds me far more of Andariel.

 

I never really got the appeal of Diablo when I was younger but this thread has sparked my interest. Is 3 a good point to come in or am I doing myself a disservice by skipping 1 & 2?

 

If you want the story then play 1-2 too , if you want hack&slash without bugs then play 2. If you want to see why so many people are masturbating to demons, then play 3.

 

Spoiler

This isn't even the same Diablo. This is the "Prime Evil" a combination of them all. That on top of the fact for the first time it's a female vessel, I can't really blame them for giving Diablo a pretty big design change.

D2 and D1 story wasn't all that stellar either. Some people fail to realize that when D1 and D2 was out, you were a whole shit load younger, and since then, dozens of games came out with their focus on story. D1 and D2 are on a pedestal in a lot of peoples minds. I like the story for what it was trying to be, and I still think with everything put together, its going to be hard for any other game to become #1 under the hack n slash genre. I never understood why people thought D1 and D2 were story driven at all.

I liked the lore books more than the story to be had, but I wasn't expecting all that much from the story.

My biggest complaint with D3 so far is probably the gear system. Stats are just so important on gear that you rarely look for anything else. I think they could have come out with a lot of affix and suffix's to make equipment slightly more interesting, instead of just stacking your main stat and VIT.

 

D2 is probably the best game of the previous decade in my opinion. I've played it more than any other game, and whenever I finished whatever new game was out, I would always end up back at it. And, whenever the ladder was reset, I came back for a few months while the game was fresh again. It's a lot of fun when there's no dupes or rushes for the first few weeks.

I agree about the plot with d3 though. It's pretty uninspired. The lore books are definitly more interesting than the actual plot. And, I will say that while I've grown to like the Demon Hunter's skills and the game in general, D2 is still probably twice as good, and I'm not just seeing it through rose tinted goggles. D3 is sort in in between genres, and it really can;t decide what it wants to be, and it gets hurt from both sides because of that. Some people are treating it as an MMO, which it definitely isn't, and it's a bit simple compared to D2, which wasn't all that complex to begin with. Granted, the expansion did add a lot of what makes D2 awesome, so maybe there will be some cool stuff 20 years down the line when the expansion for d3 comes out.

Anyways, I'm stuck on Belial right now. I just hit 25, but I just can't find replacements for some of my gear. Belial 2 shots me in phase 2, and with the lag I just can't move out of his shit fast enough. Phase one is actually pretty fun when your trying to kill him and the adds at the same time. Also, I think everyone could see the plot twist with Belial coming, it's the most Transparent thing ever, as are the ones coming up.

Act 2 does stick to the tradition of having some of the worst zones in the game. Fuck the sewers. Fuck the aqueducts. My games was literary unplayable during those times. My fps was probably below 1, I think due to the reflections and the water splash animations. It's ridiculous. I can play perfectly fine in all the random cave levels, lost ruins, and the 18 hours long grind of collecting the shit to ressurect Krulle just to kill him right away. That was a huge chore and pretty boring.

Anyways, I started to try out a lot more of the demon hunter skills, and some of them are pretty fun. I've stuck with rapid fire though, as that seems the best killer. Im using electrical bola shot as my main attack since that can pretty much kill a pack of critters in about 5 seconds, along with stunning them in the process. I got summersault, which is never useful enough since it lags. I've got the smokescreen gtfo spell which is really useful to gtfo. I've got the fan of knives which is stolen from every other rpg out there, which can finish off a weakened pack. And I got strafe with the IAS, which is awesome when you have +life per hit gear. I got a gem that give +25 that in my weapon, so I got about +40 total along with normal life leech, so my livability went from shit to pretty damn good.

 

Give me your battle tag and I'll help you out.

 

Hand crossbows are much more fun than bows/crossbows. With a new crossbow, I'm killing any non rare mob pack with one pool of hatred worth of multishots. Smaller packs like fallen go down in one shot while the larger packs like the blood moon clan in act 3 take 2-3 shots. It only takes more than that when they are spread too far back and I have to move forward to hit them.

Hand crossbows were much more fun and it played more like an assassin compared to the mobile artillery I've become with the crossbow. It's definitely doing more damage, but man is it boring.

I just built myself a new computer because my old laptop was overheating with league of legends (and if LoL overheats it, pretty much everything will). With the new rig I can run everything on high but the first few days of playing on my laptop with several fans pointed at it, I had the same issues with the sewers/aqueducts. Constant video lag that made my character move like she was permanently slowed.
As for Belial, that was probably my favorite fight because it was a real surprise. I thought his p2 was going to be a repeat of him summoning a bunch of mobs from safety, then he completely changes the level and his form. Your best bet is to run it in co-op if you are lagging too hard to win it. Post your battle tag and I will help out if Evan is unavailable.

 

Tbh, I quite liked the storyline, even if it was all fairly predictable. At least it was nowhere near as cheesy as SC2, which I loved but well... its not Half-Life 2 which is my benchmark for how good stories should be in gameplay focused games.

I'm still a bit clueless about what stats really work for my Barbarian as the dps increase from IAS is pretty insane in comparison to everything, including Str :s

Still, just hit 51 this evening and started the first few quests on Hell. Found a Legendary Monk weapon in the last stages of Nightmare, Hopefully more cool items will be found in Hell! Also, those purple laser things are such a fucking pain!