LadyCrimson

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.

I was aware of that by the time I watched the movie, so that isn't my complaint. At least, not any more so than I would have watching "Mission Impossible" and going "yup it's a spy/suspense movie." eg, everything feels somewhat derivative to me these days so I try not to hold that against a film specifically anymore. I just found it kind of dull. The romance/chemistry between the leads didn't work for me, even on the shallow basis these types of film tend to use... and frankly, Carter's extreme leaping ability (even if it is on Mars) made me giggle. It started off reasonably enough, for fantasy, with Carter having trouble walking and such, then rapidly went to totally absurd. I know the material was written when people still thought there were "canals" that mean there might be life on Mars, and of course it's a fantasy, not reality. But still hard to suspend disbelief when the rest of the movie didn't capture my emotions/attention enough to forgive it and the only explanation they have is "Mars has different gravity than Earth" (Superman has alien DNA, Green Lantern has a magical ring, Luke has "The Force" etc). As filmed, perhaps if it had taken a more satirical approach I would have enjoyed it more. Not an over the top satirical...just the occasional knowing wink type.

Real Money AH is now available, according to what the login screen says. It shall be interesting to see how much this affects the gold AH. Mostly, I wonder if this will make the goldAH nowhere near as easy to "farm" as it has been, if that makes sense. We shall see. Either people will want more gold for good stuff because they figure some are just buying to turn around to sell on RMAH and they don't want that to be easy, or there will just be less and less "good" items on the goldAH. Or nothing will change. Heheh. Also...I have killed Izual 20-30 times now and he still has not dropped that staff. On the plus side, I discovered that you can farm quite a bit gold using Valor, even on late NM difficulty. eg, it's a ton easier than trying to farm the gold in Inferno. Sure you don't get as much per stack dropping, but with the speed you can kill everything (at lvl60)+the fact you can give up stats for gold find, it's way faster to accumulate 300K gold than farming Act1 Inferno.

I'm stubborn. (small pic) The big yellow hammer-carrying beast, before you get to her, one-hit me three times. Also...behold the awesome vendor sales and item drops of Inferno!

I saw one report that a quick fix made it so less gold will be dropped from vases in Act1 and the urns in Act4. I don't know how much less, but ... that could make the easy gold farming spots people were using less profitable. I mostly want items...either for me, or to sell on the AH. I sold my Dawn legendary for 125K. TeeHee. Still keeping my Tal Rasha belt tho. I could probably sell it for 1.5 million but...not right now.

After several reloads, finally managed to get a game without 2 champs in that spot. Moved verrrrrrry slowly around map edges and managed to clear enough to get to the first quest bits. Killed one Champ (purple) flying bug mob (barely, died once, Enrage activated but my life regen was enough to just survive that). Crossed bridge, skirted the map edges again, got to Alcarnus and managed to get the "City of Blood" checkpoint. So...going to stop there. Good checkpoint to restart at when I want to go back. Wish I could put on more MF gear to stack with Valor. 87% isn't enough.

Yesterday largely took a break from D3 and spent time in the yard reading under the shade, playing with the outdoor kitty...sunny and warm so it was nice. Then watched TV. Relaxed. Today it's supposed to be a bit warmer so I'll likely stay indoors (AC...) after I run some errands. I swear my tombstone will say "She sure did run a lot of errands."

KungFu Panda 2. It was "free." Watchable with some cute moments but the 1st was better. And of course, every time the duck-father Ping was on-screen, I kept thinking about Diablo3 (I'm Covetus Shen!)... Haven't seen the film, but I'd agree with this. Not that Kristen isn't cute or anything, but .... yeah.

Act2 Inferno - lawlz. My friends were right. It's a wall (without uber-gear). I can't even get past the first outer area outside of town yet (not the very first w/the poison fliers, but a bit after that). Champion mobs are doing 5000-10000 dmg and that doesn't include their special non-melee attacks. So in 3-5 seconds you can be dead. Even while kiting. Stupid Enchantress' attracted a 2nd Champ mob to me when they moved around. Hah. May be time to not use a Companion at all...when the game lets me. My stats. Dps is still "low" but that's really not the main problem at the moment. Hitting twice as hard still wouldn't kill them in that 3-5 seconds. That difficulty spike is insane. Anyway...Act2 Inferno, melee, I'd recommend: 700-800Resist All 1200+ Life Regen (I think this is the best melee stat after Resists, lets you tank Desecrator longer and such) 30-50K health (doesn't matter a whole lot, really) 8000+ armor 15-20k dps - Dunno about Barbs, but for Monks at least, you can get away with relatively low dps, but you do need to at least "keep up" somewhat. Just my opinion/playstyle tho. Farm Butcher w/stacked Valor, wait for patch.

I'm probably one of the few who doesn't mind the home-video cam or shaky cam in movies that much. Only time it bothers me is if it bobs and spins so much that it looks like a 5 year old on a merry go round is holding the camera for 90 minutes. Yeah, it doesn't always make story-sense that someone is holding a camera the whole time of the film, but then again, it's not sensical that we should be able to see the events going on in a film, anyway (that godly narrative perspective) so I guess I don't care. heh Anyway, last night we watched John Carter. I'm glad I didn't pay to see it in the theater. It wasn't terrible or anything, and I'm sure the effects looked cooler on the big screen, but it was pretty silly and overwrought. The best thing in the film was the "dog." I loved that "dog." I want one. The actors, btw, were not the problem. They seemed mostly fine for what the movie called for, even the guy playing John Carter.

I don't know what it is, but in Diablo games I've always sucked with bow characters. I've died several more times to Elites in Act3 NM with her than I ever did with the Monk, or the Barb, or the Wizard. Something about having to hit the shift, aim, fire, run, repeat. Micro lag (which I don't notice in melee, oddly) often has her firing behind her when I'm supposed to be running to the next retreat point, instead. And the Wiz doesn't really have to aim. I know the DH has the chakram and I use it, but then I feel like I may as well play the mage. Anyway....I'm hitting a play-entertainment wall. Keep trying to level up my alts but fall asleep after half an hour and do something else. MF'ing Inferno Act1 has been largely unproductive with my Monk so far (lots of Rares but nothing very good). Think I'll see what Act2 Inferno is like...assume I won't get very far....then I'll probably stop until they patch the game. I'll be interested when Torchlight2 comes out, how that compares to this game in terms of replayability.

The jeweler is way useful on the journey to lvl60, imo. Sure what he can craft will just get dropped later in the game, but if you're having trouble even getting to that later part of the game, it's well worth crafting those gems up...to a point. My gear has all kinds of gems in it. It's one of the better options for taking lesser gear and still being able to use it to get through the game. In my mid40's, I used a blue armor that had +104VIT and three sockets (green, green, purple)for a long time, and it was a while before I saw anything on the AH for my clvl that would beat it stat-wise (well, in the 10-20K price range anyway). And of course, Rares with sockets are very fun. However, I'm not convinced gems past the Flawless Square or Perfect Square (looks like a diamond shape) are worthwhile, except for lvl60 perfectionists. Or after an expansion, maybe. Not to mention, upgrading them becomes way expensive. I think that the Blacksmith, given plans, could be useful. His rares will start to have a lot more attributes (5, 6). But still the problem of random and cost. It seems designed largely to give endgame lvl60's something to do with all their gold and useless magic items. That developer discussion I mentioned earlier, they were mulling over the possibility of being able to use gems with the blacksmith to force a stat on a crafted item. Which could make him better, but I bet it'd be mega expensive in gold and gems required.