Diablo III - It's official

Anyone in Act 2? I'm completely lost with Fuad's Cellar, the bastard has insane regen rate, and hits hard to my poor lvl 18 wizard :(
Any tips for killing it?
 
I've cleared the first two areas of act 2 now, and pretty soon after I entered A2, I died for the first time. Then I died again, shortly afterwards. First death I didn't realize the little mosquitos that the big mosquitos fire cannot be shot down with my spells so I just ended up eating them for bigass damage, plus there were loads of cats jumping around, and a pack of champion mobs too. It was pretty chaotic.

Then the 2nd death was during an event, and a boss pack of Fallen spawned plus a ton of small fallen, all in a rather tiny area and I got trapped and owned.

After that I started doing better though. The glyph for arcane barrage or whatsitscalled that you earn at level 18 really helped, it buffs damage considerably. I keep arcane missiles on one of the four separate skillslots, so when I run out of arcane power I can just keep spamming ranged attacks that hit for buffed damage on mobs that touched my arcane barrage strikes.

Act 2 is considerably harder. Bits of act 1 wasn't a cakewalk with random encounters and whatnot, but I never died (really close several times though), A2 buffs the challenge level quite a bit. Heedlessly running ahead as a wizard is not advisable, mobs are really fast and hit hard if you don't have twink gear like it is with the first playthrough.

I guess I could switch out the Glass Cannon passive ability lol...but it's so fun to shoot hard shots! Like they say, the best defense is a good offense. ...Unless you play hardcore. Heh.
 
Do yourselves a favor and stay away from the Metacritic user reviews page..... I made the mistake of reading a lot of people giving the game in general a bad review due to launch day issues, which is stupid. It even made me kind of mad..... I'm sure Blizzard apologizes for the millions of people swarming their servers, at the same time, causing instability. But really? To give the game a bad user review because you couldn't log on instantly? Skyrim was RIDDLED with GAME-BREAKING issues at launch, yet I don't remember people trolling the MC site about it. Then again, it probably did happen and the positive reviews started coming in once the bugs were ironed out. I'm doing myself a favor and staying away from spoilers or descriptions of gameplay, sadly I skimmed over a lot of this very thread. My copy is waiting for me at GameStop and I'll be online as soon as I return from the store. And even if I consider launch to be shaky, I'm not going to log onto MC and bitch about it...
 
If you cant play the game or keep getting disconnected how can you give it anything other than a bad review

If you were expecting a launch devoid of issues on a game as high in demand as Diablo 3, how can you actually rate the game itself when you're pissed off about your inability to log on? It's not a secret that the game demanded constant online activity. I think people need to relax and wait until the launch day chop smooths over before they start nerd-raging their frustrations and acting as an anchor on honest reviews.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
The high demand shouldn't give them a pass for online issues. They know that demand as well as anyone and should have been prepared for it. If they knew they would not be able to service their customer load they should have limited availability to a level they could service.
 
The high demand shouldn't give them a pass for online issues. They know that demand as well as anyone and should have been prepared for it. If they knew they would not be able to service their customer load they should have limited availability to a level they could service.

I understand. My complaint is people rushing out and doling out reviews without even having made it past the login screen. Yes. It's upsetting when a launch is turbulent. I want just as much as everyone else for the launch of a title as highly anticipated as D3 to go smoothly, without issue, for everyone. My point is, if I get home and aren't able to log on immediately, how does that justify my automatic review of the game itself? It boggles my mind that without even having played retail for even a minute, people are so quick to hop on review sites and trash it.
 
I think Dresden is arguing that a day 1 or 2 review's final score/decision shouldn't hinge too much upon server stability issues we all know will be resolved fairly soon. The game shouldn't be give a free pass on those issues by any means, but is the game itself a great ARPG, is it a worthy successor to the franchise. . .that's what I want to know.

And since review copies were likewise limited to the May 15th launch, anyone putting up a review today or tomorrow hasn't spent enough time with the game to give it a fair critique.
 
They really should have just made act 1 playable offline and people would hardly notice. Server is down, start a new character.
 
If all you can play is act 1 (normal, I'll assume) you'll quickly grow really effing bored, because you don't get much in the way of cool abilities, and even less in the way of cool gear. Both of which are really important in a game like the Diablo series.

It may sound good on paper, but in reality you're not going to like playing act 1 only, offline only, and not being able to take that character online to level and gear it up further.
 
Bloody hell, I can't even register my copy of the game. It keeps saying my code isn't valid or I get to the captcha finally and then it says my code isn't valid. Ugh...

Regards,
SB
 
Any strategy guides to beat the "Retrieving Hero List" boss? I got already past the Boss 37
 
If all you can play is act 1 (normal, I'll assume) you'll quickly grow really effing bored, because you don't get much in the way of cool abilities, and even less in the way of cool gear. Both of which are really important in a game like the Diablo series.

It may sound good on paper, but in reality you're not going to like playing act 1 only, offline only, and not being able to take that character online to level and gear it up further.

Do you expect the server issues to last forever? At least people could burn an hour or 2 doing something with the game for which they paid. It would certainly be more entertaining than staring at their server status page (assuming you can even do that).

And I was thinking you should be able to take that character online. There's not really a good reason to prevent it, its not like level 10 loot is going to break their economy.
 
Implementing offline play opens the door for third-party emulation of the full game, and thus, piracy, so no. They're never going to do that for that reason alone I'm sure.

Exporting offline characters to online opens the door for hacking and duping and possibly worse, realm crash exploits using carefully tailored bad data in the character file being uploaded for example. I'm sure implementing sufficiently watertight sanity checking of uploaded characters is a headache blizzard devs would rather be without...
 
So myself, the wife and 2 friends got together last night to start D3 and had a lot of fun! Was easy to realID each other with our battle tags and we managed to get a few hours play in without a hitch. I had created a teamspeak server for our communication since Blizzard decided not to implement their own.

Only problem I had was my DVD drive wouldn't read the discs correctly and ended up having to copy over the whole folder from my wife's PC to my own, which worked fine.

We had a blast and the monsters were definitely much tougher with the 4 of us, though of course that early in the campaign (just got to cathedral lvl 3) it's very easy.
 
Got my barb to 15 last night, stuffing my shared chest full of wizardly goods for my 2nd toon. B.net went down around 11:30 EST, which let me play for about 3.5 hours without any problems. Hopefully tonight is good too, though another post-11pm crash would be appreciated since it forces my aged butt to wander off to bed sooner than I would otherwise.
 
Do yourselves a favor and stay away from the Metacritic user reviews page..... I made the mistake of reading a lot of people giving the game in general a bad review due to launch day issues, which is stupid. It even made me kind of mad..... I'm sure Blizzard apologizes for the millions of people swarming their servers, at the same time, causing instability. But really? To give the game a bad user review because you couldn't log on instantly?

No.
This is completely incorrect, since it's essentially an attack to every gamer's freedom of speech.
Anyone who purchased the game and tried to play it for several hours (more than a day, even) with no success is, at the very least, entitled to make a review with a score of 0.

- If I purchase a printer and it decides to never work on the first day, and I find out that the printer model is having the same problems around the world then you can bet I'll be making a review and give it a 0.
- If I purchase a book and the pages come out blank and I find out every book is like that and it's not me who has a defective book, I'm going to rate it a 0.
- If I go to a buffet restaurant where I pay upfront and there's no food in the serving tables after 2 hours, I'm going to leave the place and rate it a 0.
- If I purchase a blu-ray that comes with a blank disc and I find out every other blu-ray disc coming from that movie is also blank, I'll return it. And rate it a 0.

I'm not going to patiently wait 5 hours for an employee to fill the tables, or wait for the book/blu-ray publisher for weeks until they send me a replacement. Likewise, I'm not going to wait days until the HP's/Epson's servers start working again in order to re-establish their draconian DRM control over my printer so it can print pages.

The product is either ready for market, or it isn't. A service is either prepared for its customers or it isn't. If there's not enough food output, the restaurant can't accept my reservation. If the books/disks are blank, they cannot be sent to the store. If the printer doesn't work, it can't go to the store either.


A very serious and very grave fault such as the game not working at all must not go unpunished or unspoken.
Customers owe nothing to publishers. There's absolutely no reason whatsoever why someone should wait in silence for days for a single-player game to be playable, after having to pay the full price up-front.

To rate a game that doesn't work by 0 is, by itself, a responsible action. After returning the game and asking the money back, it's the most relevant action any gamer could - and should - do. It's sending the proper message to other buyers: that the game isn't good enough to be bought. It isn't, it isn't even playable in many countries.

The gaming community must show Activision/Blizzard that they won't take faulty products and stand idle. Just because they're milking a popular franchise, it doesn't mean they can sell snake-oil. And that message must go through, as it went with many other games with much lesser problems (DNF, for example).


Look how I'm not even going into the draconian DRM thing, or the pay2win stores or the design change from realistic horror to childish cartoonesque.
That was widely known from day one, and to any person who would at least bother to look at the game's box.

I didn't write any review either because I didn't purchase the game, and I'm not interested in playing, honestly.
But to try to stop people from letting the world know they've been tricked? Based on what, brand loyalty? That's just wrong, IMO.


Skyrim was RIDDLED with GAME-BREAKING issues at launch, yet I don't remember people trolling the MC site about it. Then again, it probably did happen and the positive reviews started coming in once the bugs were ironed out.
Regardless of your opinion, Skyrim was playable and awesome at day one.
Some did go to the MC site to bitch about bugs and gave it a 1. Some considered the bugs too irritating and gave it a 5. Others (most, apparently) rated the game in the later months and gave it a 9/10. In the end, the average user score was 8.1.
The game's rate did suffer from bad reviews at the beginning because of the bugs, and the final score is reflecting that.
But that's the brilliance of statistics. There's this enormous amount of people who gave their opinion based on their experience and 8.1 is the score that you, or any other, will most probably give to that game.

Diablo III's current 3.5 score isn't any worse or better deserved than Skyrim's 8.1 score.

Don't worry. When the game works, people will start giving it better reviews. I don't think they'll be as good as you're hoping for, though.
 
Back
Top