LadyCrimson

On another topic: I guess I was wrong about the RMAH vs. the goldAH. I think decent lvl60 items have all but disappeared from the gAH in the past days. I thought there would be enough players who didn't care about RMAH to keep the goldAH viable, but either the lvl60 gear you want is millions or billions (I mean really, has anyone made 4billion in gold in this game in a month?) or it's just not there. This is the gear I currently use most of the time on my Monk - tho I have all star gems now, no squares. The amulet and the better ring, in particular, haven't seen anything like it on the gAH since. And can't find any weapons better than mine, even for a million gold. Now that I don't have the "digital copies must wait 3 days" bug, I can see the RMAH listings, and that's where they all are. Btw, only 3 items I'm wearing I found myself. By Inferno, it was all about the AH. I guess with the patch, that could change somewhat, but it's still aggravating to have a clvl50 Rare drop in Act2 Inferno. clvl50? Really? Crafting costs for some Inferno blacksmith items have gone down (but only for 4-5 attribute ones), but the mat. costs haven't, and those Inferno mats aren't exactly super-fast to accrue. Apologies for my long winded ranty posts. I don't think I've ever had a game where I've had this degree of a conflicting love and hate relationship and it drives me crazy...even when I'm not playing much anymore. (edit: the attack speed items are lesser, now, of course. Andariel's helm dropped to 5% instead of 12, I think, etc)

The Barb (and the Monk) are both engines of death (assuming good gear, likely AH'd, and effective skill setup) until Inferno. And again, once you have good gear, can be pretty good death engines in Act1 Inferno. Try running WhimsyShire Inferno with one tho....keep in mind it's not that you can't kill everything, it's that you can't stand still and do it, unless you like death-zerging. The concept of old-school "tanking" just isn't there. Now, it's possible if you can somehow get over 100K health + 1200 life on hit + 1200 life regen + 800+Resists and other uber gear/stats, that you can do it with mobs and some less difficult Elites. Everything/everywhere? Most likely not. And not many average players are going to be able to get gear like that to begin with. My Monk can stand in Arcane sentries in Act1 Inferno to a degree. Depends how many there are tho. 2-3 ok, a huge cluster of them, not as much. In Act2, can take it for 3-5 seconds. But after that, especially if they have more than just the Arcane (like Arcane+Desecration or Molten etc), I have to run. Plague, oddly, is less damaging than most of the other DoT stuff. I can often stand in that for a very long time. Also, humor: http://us.battle.net...89888966?page=1

I saw an ad for that and I was like, "wtf?" The idea is just crazy enough it might work.

Iron Man2 was watchable, but yeah, had none of the depth (for a superhero flick) that Iron Man1 did. My thoughts on Iron Man3? .... don't care, really. Like many movie series these days, if the first one was awesome, the rest will be....not so awesome. There are exceptions (SpiderMan2 comes to mind) but typically, I expect nothing from sequels. However, I'll probably still see IM3 when it comes to my cable TV. I figure it'll at least be mindlessly watchable like the 2nd one. As to will it make money.....yes, yes it will, since you have to include worldwide profit these days. Unless of course they spend 500million making it or something, maybe. But if 3 is terrible/only breaks even, a 4th movie becomes unlikely, imo. And I like Bale as Batman. I do not like him as Bruce Wayne, however. There's a difference there. Oddly, I think Michael Keaton made the best Bruce Wayne (in film) even if he doesn't look the part to my mind, but his Batman was a bit weak.

Hehehe yeah....i've seen groups like that. The person actually playing, and then this whole squad of other people farming. There is no such thing as true tanking in Diablo3. If you can do it, you're either overleveled or over-geared for an area, and from what I've seen/heard (and judging from my previous and still current Act2 experiences), you can't be over-geared for Act3/Act4 inferno Elites. The patch has made it easier, but ... yeah, no. I know another Barb who had hoped that the patch would mean he could tank Act2 Inferno because of his very frequent 150K crits build, but nope, he just died and died still.

Starship Troopers is one of my "guilty pleasures." The original one at least. I tried watching one of those horrible sequels once. Never again. Kind of like how in Walking Dead season2, they hardly fight any zombies. It's a little slow (the human interest stuff, like I mentioned). And yes it's silly. I must admit that half of my like for the show probably stems from the Pope character. I always like those types of characters. And in terms of the day/night thing....that was the first thing that came to my mind watching the very first episode ... "these aliens must be day-sleepers or something, because the confrontations are always at night." I liked the premiere the other day tho....I wonder what they'll do with the Ben/son chr....

Dear Diary: today I cleaned up cat hairballs off the area rug. Also, I ate some spicy mango meatballs, which was yummy. The two things are completely unrelated, btw. Just saying.

917. I "could read War and Peace in 10 hours and 40 minutes." Faster than I expected, not a good test, like already mentioned. Sounds about right for "in the zone" fiction reading however....not that I would actually remember even half of the book afterwards, mind you. Actual retention of specific things is not a part of my casual/fiction reading speed (I'll just remember the basics of the story, main chrs, emotions it brought out in me etc). If I was reading a textbook or something, trying to learn, it slows waaaaaaay down. Couldn't figure out how to make their html code post a pic in the forum so I screenshotted it instead.

@entreix - the bnet forums are good for a laugh, and the occasional bug/glitch info. That's about it. Repairs....yeah...if you don't die, the repair fees are still reasonable. More than they were, but I haven't found them to be that much. But die 3-5 times trying to kill some Elite mob with horrid attribute rolls and you're suddenly looking at 20K repair bills. But....thing is, once you're lvl60 and can farm Act4/Hell and/or Act1/Inferno in relative safety, the money just rolls in. I was down to 250K gold yesterday morning (bought something on the AH ), spent a few hours testing the patch, and I'm back at 600K gold. However, it does still suck because that hour or three you spent Valor-farming an area for gold and items to vendor/sell could have been spent doing something else. Re: difficulty changes - yup, it's quite nerfed now. Keep in mind I spent almost a week farming and "shopping" for gear for my Monk, to try to make Act2/Inferno manageable, and largely failed. So my gear, while not even close to the best of the best, is not exactly shabby either. eg, I'm sure people first entering each Act will find it very hard still. But with my setup, the patch made Act2 more than twice as easy as before. Oasis/Desert Sands/Kulle's Archives were basically impossible for me, Elite-wise. Dead in 4-8 seconds. Now those same areas, I can faceroll half the Elites I encountered, kite most of the others, and one or two per "area" would kill me 3-5 times before I got them all. Before, I couldn't even whittle them down at all, so it was useless. I'd just run. So anyway....yea...it's a lot easier now, relatively speaking. For my Monk at least. I'm sure by late Act3 or Act4 it'd be horrible again, with the never ending hunt for more uber gear. But compared to what it was...drastic change. For Act1, it means I can now wear a whole lot of MF gear and still faceroll everything there. Crazy. P.S. but even with the increased/better item droppage, think I'll delay going further into Inferno. Still burnt out on the game from pre-patch Act2 frustration. heh

"We'll just get some of those cheap hotdogs, buns, canned mandarin oranges at CostCo." ...later.... Meatballs, two kinds of sandwich meat, a huge platter of breakfast pastry thingies, beef jerky, frozen chicken, bread, etc. At least I don't have to go to the grocery store now.

Checked....they're now lvl59. Which is better than lvl13, but they still lost a level. Took a while to get them to 60, too. Oh well, better than before. Side note: never go to CostCo when hungry.

It's worse. You don't gain XP anymore either. Neither followers or player chrs. My lvl60 monk is still lvl60, but my lvl 30 alt's xp bar now looks like this, with the important part being that "0" for xp needed to level: Killed a few things, the xp bar didn't budge/numbers didn't change. However my mule chr. who's only lvl 6 does gain experience and has a "xp for next level" number instead of a 0. So the issue seems to be that the patch reverts people (some? all? don't know?) to "starter accounts" (eg, like the beta), hence no xp. gain if you're higher lvl than than 13 already. Current player-workaround found is to reset/change your bnet account password. Why this would fix it, I don't know. Not to mention, I shouldn't have to do something like that in the first place, to fix a game bug. I'll wait and see if they hotfix it later themselves.

So I have the patch. Checked out Act1. Things seems to hurt less, even w/my MF gear on. Crafting prices as advertised. Higher ilvl blue items (most rares I found didn't fall into that category yet, however). However....after noticing my Enchantress was constantly dying, I opened her stats windows. She's now lvl13 (instead of 60). I went back to town. All the companions were lvl13, with all gear "padlocked"/unusable. wtf bug? Anyone hear of this? Tried resetting quest, reloading game, etc. They're still lvl13. Now, not a huge big deal, it's only the companions right, but that's still a huge bug, imo.

Logan has the most adorable blond curls for hair. I remember that bridge when my teen boyfriend (not my husband) and I drove across it on the way back from WA after his relatives up there gave him a car (flew up, drove down). Love the pics, looks like a lot of fun, brings back memories too. Hubs would like that Til. cheese place tho, I bet. He loves cheese, and I buy that brand a lot.

Gave up trying to kill most stuff and would lure them to far corners, let them kill me, and skirt/mad dash past them etc. So in that way I made it to the next "Start Quest" point in Act2 (where you do the 3 dungeon levels then confront Kulle boy). Now I can go back to Act1 and farm. Or wait for the patch. Or play alts. Or watch TV. Anything but more Act2. Probably spent 600K gold in the past few days trying to gear up slightly better and it didn't help a lick. Couldn't find a skill-set up that worked any better, either. It's just partly luck (the elite modifiers) of the draw and partly ... something else I haven't figured out yet. Diablo2's expansion came out after about a year or year and a half. Don't remember exactly. I wouldn't expect D3's expansion to come out any sooner than that either. I'm sure it's half done already tho. And yeah, the AH prices have gone skyhigh kablam....also, the selection (at least for Monk stat items) for lvl59-60 stuff has dropped quite a bit I think, probably because of the RMAH. It's enough to tempt me to sell that Anariel's unique for 40million gold or something. Is the Hardcore stuff really separate from the softcore stuff? I made a HC chr. once (then deleted it), and it did not seem to be separate from the softcore chrs. That is, the HC chr. could still look in/grab stuff in the Stash that the softcore chrs. had put there. So I'm not sure they're different....they just make your chr. inaccessible when you die in HC. But I could be wrong. I probably did that experiment at 3am or something.

Been catching up on the TNT series "Falling Skies" this afternoon. I somehow missed it before. Season 2 premiere tonight. It's not a bad little sci-fi post-alien invasion/human rebellion/resistance show. Not great, with a lot of sudden quick (eg, anticlimactic) problem solutions, longer-than should be plotlines and some bad dialogue here and there, but not like the pickings for sci-fi TV is huge right now. A little more human-interest drama than I tend to prefer (Spielberg...), but the effects aren't too shabby for TV and it's enough to keep me watching. Anyone else catch this one?

Gorgeous weather this weekend, as long as you don't have to do any vigorous physical activity (90F+). Put cushions on the old rickety wood patio loungers, a small table with a drink, a book, a cat by the feet, some shade trees....loverly.

Managed to get to the "get the blood" in Act2 checkpoint after Oasis, had to avoid a few Elites. Thought I'd try farming very early Act2 to see how that went now that I have 800 life on hit and 18K-19K dps. *start game* //haha normal mobs are easy ... ohno-a-jailer-arcane-mortar-avenger mob// ++die++ *startgame* //haha normal mobs are easy ... ohno-a-waller-arcane-desecrator-fast mob// ++die++ ...repeat 10 times...not in the mood to farm for yet more gold/crap items and refresh the AH over and over for hours again. *turn off game, go outside* ...those jailers and waller mobs are stupidly unfair.

Ah, Yreka. We've been through there several times. One of hubby's brothers used to live in Weed, a bit South from there, too. We used to either go up by 1/101 or 5, then at some point randomly try some road that would take us East to the other side of OR to hit 84. Adventurous roads, some of those. Then I think we used 93 or 95, or both (different trips) to get to 80/Reno. I look forward to more photos, and hearing about the grand time you all are having.

Since I'm a Monk, I prefer the Dex. I looked on the gold AH and jeez, what I could sell the thing for. People are crazy. I guess ones with Dex are often extra-pricey because a lot of DH's want one so you'll see them on the AH less often. It doesn't seem that special to me, but I guess the attack speed.... And yeah...they should at least let you "vanish" the uniques if you don't like it, even if they won't let you change the color. From unique to chr's head. How hard can allowing at least that be? There are people who may be willing to spend $15-100 so they don't have to farm for items/gold themselves, but supply will be much bigger than demand overall, initially, from all the yahoos who think they can turn D3 into their paying job. And yes, the RMAH is silly. Even as a method to discourage/jump the gun/control pricing on people who would do it outside the game anyway. I'd still be curious about to look at it, mostly out of morbid curiosity, but I still dislike PayPal and so I won't be. That and I don't feel like spending 10 hours a day farming gold and items for other people. For me a game is supposed to be fun, not work.

Went back to Act1. Someone dropped this: Which is enough of an improvement to at least wear while farming. Spirit regen can mostly live without, but I lose a lot of resist, maybe I can make it up somewhere else. The other issue is that it looks dorky: ....and I can't dye it or "vanish" it. But at least (with skills/buffs) it makes my average dps about 18K. Which made me feel like a badass in Act1, so I went back to Act2/Oasis. First Elite I see....poof, I'm dead pretty quick. Not unexpected, mind you. Time to watch some TV.

If I quit to the point I'm going to delete characters, sure. But I'll probably hang on to them long enough wait and see what at least the 1st expansion may entail. I'm just so tired of the cheap elite mobs like this one: I tried to get close enough to see what attributes they had, they saw me, Vortexed me in, hit me 2-3 times and I was dead before I could readjust my mouse cursor or hit a skill hotkey. Life on hit/life steal etc. works great....when you have a chance to hit something. ... sigh. Even some of the tougher "normal" mobs can give me headaches now and then, at this point. I've tried all kinds of things, from 800dps Fist w/life steal (giving up dex and a ton of life etc)...but 3000 more dps or 10K more life just is no defense against cheap stuff like that.

Well, I'm in the Oasis/inferno and just about every single yellow Elite can kill me at least 5-6 times before I can get them all. A couple I couldn't kill at all, frankly, like Vortex/Desecration/Fast. Health is gone too fast compared to skills being greyed out vs. timers. I can keep farming the AH for more life on hit (a few hundred more might make some difference) but that's a stat that's pretty hard to get a lot of without spending millions. I'd have to farm the AH for days nonstop hitting the refresh button and that's boring. I can also just keep running and get past stuff, but that's also....kinda boring. I can farm earlier in Act2 but...sigh. What a drudgery. I also found a blacksmith plan for a Fist, but it turns out to be like this: Even if the patch lowered costs by 75%, that's a silly amount of gold, not to mention the materials, considering the randomness....plus it's unlikely it'd result in a Fist with high enough dps to be worthwhile? I think I'm about done with this game. If I was to rate this game on a scale of 1-10, I'd give it maybe....a four. Largely because of the cheap/lazy difficulty, item stats and drop rates (boring items), the silly Artisans that don't make up for those drop rates, etc. For a game where the fun/replay is primarily supposed to be, imo, in the hunt for ever better loot, D3 fails miserably. I used to spend hours, even days, hunting for that good ring of Zodiac in Diablo1, because it felt worth the time to do so. There's nothing like that in D3, as far as I'm concerned. Still, I like the Monk class a lot. I'm sure most have a class they really like to play. It's just the game that surrounds them isn't very good. It can still be a very addictive game, for a while...but eventually the irritation starts to take over.

Yeah, I personally haven't seen anything over 570dps for 100K, either. At least, not in Rares or Legendaries. I see blues a lot, but I need/want life on hit on my weapon and .... that's hard to get. I got lucky with my current Fist and it's close to 100dex, 200+VIT, and 403 life on hit at around 540 (green gem in it) for 60K. Seen nothing even close to it since, with enough higher dps to be worth giving that up. Even when I don't set a buyout, all those 10million weapons don't seem a lot better for what I want.

If you can farm Act3 Inferno, this might be true. Act1 Inferno drops nothing but crud for your level. I see a whole lot of lvl 55 items, for example. Ok, I did find that Tal Rasha belt. But I mean..they suck 99% of the time. Just more efficient to farm gold as fast as possible and wait for someone to sell something on the AH you want. Sad but true. Altho, the patch may change this, with ilvl drops changing. I'll definitely be checking it out when that happens. At the moment Highlands to the Butcher in Act1 Inferno, about an hour, 80K-120K gold. But Act4 NM or Act2 Hell, I can make 300K in that hour because I can do multiple entire "runs" in that hour. Right now I just want to stock up on gold so I can stop thinking about stupid gold for a long while and just play. Plus, in anticipation of potential higher repair costs and dying a lot in Inferno Act3 or 4. After playing a DH and Barb into late Act3 NM, I can say....it's a Monk thing. They seem designed to be a lower dps but high survivability skills class, making up for the seemingly lower dps. It may say 13000dps on the stat sheet, but I dunno...sometimes I think the actual result may be quite a bit higher than the stat indicates. You could make a high dps Monk of course, and I'm sure some do, but they don't need to be, relatively speaking. My Dodge is only 31%, btw. Of course there's the bob and weave thing, too.