LadyCrimson

Oh yea...what kind of shield do you prefer? I was using the healing ones but I found a 550ish high fire resistance one and w/the hunters heal-after-a-kill skill it's been great. Between that and the revolver changed my gameplay tactics a bit...it's great fun to charge up close, fire in a bandits face and watch them dissolve.

Sniper rifle is always 1st choice when I can do distance. I don't find a faster RoF to be bad, since I'm not the best aimer anyway. More important is how fast it reloads, which isn't always obvious until you actually try it. The weapons stats on descriptions seem lackluster...sometimes you can't tell how fast/good one will be until you actually use it. Shotguns w/low to middling accuracy & revolvers, for most fast things that like to rush you. Often 1-shot kill anything up close even w/out criticals, as well as seemingly whittle boss lifebars down tons faster than most, so I think of them as 'panic weapons.' I used smg's/auto rifles/repeater pistols a lot at first and carry them for back up, but since up close it's hard to miss anyway, I'd rather use the extreme 1-2 shot kill dmg. than lots of little burst dmg. Further I go the less I prefer just 1 weapon & use what's best for situation so I don't run out of any 1 type of bullets too fast. High elemental chance seems awesome for mid-range to close up, been getting into that a lot now. Here's my current four and the SMG I use if I plain run out of the other bullets, heh.

J.E., were you playing on Very Hard? But still, sounds like Torchlight has the late-game unbalance issues the original Diablo1 had. Er...at least that the overpowered Diablo1 sorcerer had. Loot based games often have that problem tho...maybe Torchlight needs something like a Zod rune that hardly ever drops, a reason to keep searching, heh. The enchanting feature is too overpowered, if you use it, making dungeon-found items even more extraneous. I'm really surprised they left that aspect in there. I remember in Fate I had all these items with so many enchantments you couldn't see them all on the item list anymore. They should've made it so you could only enchant any single item a few times. I still think it's worth the $20 tho.

--I guess instead of boss runs, one finds the best-chance chests and does chest-runs? --I love the humorous achievements titles.I want to become the Skagpocalypse, only 1200 or so to go. --Got my 3rd orange item last night. The 1st two weren't great, but the 3rd is awesome for my level. A 200+ dmg caustic-x4 revolver that messily 1-shots a lot of critters. It's now my close-combat weapon. --my playthrough w/hunter seems disproportionately obsessed with revolvers, and I noticed there doesn't seem to be a revolver skill stat like for other weapons. Interesting?

Found some of them already I think. Do you know what the level 'cap' is for items in chests & area? That is, y'know how Diablo areas could only drop certain ilvls of items and that's it, that sort of thing? Or can almost any big chest randomly pop out something really high, based on what chr lvl you are when you open it? Edit:Based on my tiny experience, it doesn't seem entirely random, in that chests in certain areas seem to have better odds of spawning a good item, but I wonder if chr lvl affects anything. One of the ones near Skagzilla popped out my first orange item. :D

Heheh....had a few things like that happen early on too. Fun stuff. Skagzilla for me was the easiest mini-boss for me to do. No cheap/sniper oriented methods there...didn't take much ammo, but I had a beefy shotgun. The next boss was harder/had my usual troubles but I'm now in the trash-town of New Haven. Pew, smelly.

In that case...unless you're a serious graphics 'ho, my answer remains the same...about a few years. And if you don't care whether you can run at max-everything settings, or aren't playing games much or are broke, even longer. But yes, 10 years would be pushing it. Maybe 4-5 at most. heheh

LMAO...corny silliness, at least when taken out of context. *chortle* ...but other than that, this game looks like it has potential & I haven't played a 'deeper' RPG in a long time, maybe I'd like them again. Thanks for all the thoughts on the game so far....I may pick it up when done w/Borderlands. It's nice to have a PC that can play new games again.

I've felt the same way for a long time now. I don't buy many games per year anymore. When I do, I try to give them at least several hours of my time to see if I'll get sucked in...but usually not so much. Lots of games on my shelf practically untouched. Torchlight is fun & simple, but I can see how it's not mentally obsessive, if that makes sense. I found Fate the same way. Enjoyable monster hacking fluff for a while, but not something to be replayed repeatedly. Too many years, too many of the same types of games. The first few hours of Borderlands I was ho-hum up in the air about it...but it grabbed me at some point. It'll probably get dull before I get thru the entire game w/all 4 chrs...but good enough.

Well like entrerix said, you can play Borderlands how you want so it works for most player skill levels. If you want to tackle all the hard guys when the quests are orange, you're free to do so. Or not. I've been starting all the main quests a level or so higher than the quest stated level, when they're still 'green,' then often killing the actual boss+quest reward puts it over the top. So the timing for me has worked out well. Getting there is still a moderate challenge and I always try the boss the regular way first. It's hard to learn FPS boss fights in 10 second frantic encounters and I don't consider dying 50 times a very fun way to learn - which I've done before in other pure FPS I've done. Meh...

Personally I like getting better at a game than the character outgrowing the challenge. Unless we're talking I want to be the guy hard. Borderlands lets people like me become more skilled/better, tho, w/out having to become so frustrated we toss the game in the garbage first before we reach that point.

I have no clue. In the old days I've had vid cards that worked forever. Heck I have an old VooDoo card that still functions, if I had a PC I cared to put it in. lol But these high performance/high heat cards...who knows. Assuming no defects, I'd guess 3 years, longer if you don't stress it all that much. Maybe someone else has a better idea...

Yup, that's a big reason I can love it, despite the fact combat is FPS feeling etc. Altho, I'm beginning to think the programmers allowed for not-so-skilled solo players. I did the guy at the end of the Sledge/Arid chain (in the small room) and after two failed tries (I did get semi-close the 2nd time but...) I found another very cheap method to succeed, where no one could touch me. I'm having a hard time believing all these cheap ways are accidental oversights.

Haha, you're stuck in the car and I'm not! ROFL!

Procrastination is an art form, but alas I have to stop being artful and go sit in traffic a while for a meeting. Then the ballgame. I'm pretty sure there's a ballgame today.

Been trying the other chrs, doing enough to reach lvl 12 or so for each. Much faster a 2nd time. Brick's beserker is funny...and if you put him in 3rd person at the default FOV his huge back blocks your view, lol Beyond Brick tho, every chr. I make ends up using sniper rifles quite extensively. I'm too attached to them I guess. Certain shotguns & others are great for close up, but TK gave my Lilith a purple sniper for one of his quests and it has a zoom on it that's so long I can sometimes plunk baddies from a distance where they'll grunt, curse, and swivel around in place but not chase me down. It's bad AI hilarious. Now why couldn't my Hunter have found a sniper like that...

@Aristes --yea, I have that feeling too. I guess I keep thinking if I didn't play games, I might like Mac's more at this point, but my desire to take the time to learn a whole new OS/terminology isn't very high. ...getting ready to watch some of the World Series game. Hoping Phillies can manage another win and take it all the way to the 7th game. :D Edit: wait, wait...there's no game tonight. I should know that. I'm an airhead, kthx. In that case...computer game time.

Hm I kind of like those graphics, cute and weird at the same time. Might have to look it up. ...and I'm playing Borderlands. I keep saying I'm going to play more Torchlight too, but so far Borderlands has me by the nose and won't let go..

It's a bit of an odd place for them, imo...

My case has the two fans both on the side and the top (plus the one in the back), and the air coming from them feels coolish. But the front intake fan (it's a big one) is semi-blocked by the unremovable multiple hard drive mount casing so I'm not sure how great the airflow from it gets pushed through the entire case. :/ The Asus AI Suite says the CPU/System temps are a little high, too, I think..low 40's. So you didn't have any trouble installing non-stock stuff on the card? Taking apart stock things to put new stuff on isn't something I've ever done before...maybe hubby can do it.

So is 48-52C at idle "normal" for the GTX 200 series of cards? This in 75F temp room w/the GPU stock fan going at 60%? The reading I've done makes me think so, but this makes me worry about summer days when it often reaches 85-90F in this room. Late night, when the room is closer to 62-65F, the idle GPU temp drops to maybe 41-43C. The back fan vent on the card shoots out super-warm air, so at least I know it's doing it's job. When I play Borderlands, it shoots up to 70-75C. I know they're rated for max temps higher (especially if not OC'd) but the last card I bought flaked out due to too much time w/high heat, so I'm now paranoid. If I buy something like this Artic Cooling VGA triple fan cooler, is someone like me going to be able to safely install it? The instructions in one review sounded like I might risk breaking something....

Shrink - I picked this up, knowing nothing about it, because Kevin Spacey was in it. A rather odd little film about a shrink-to-the-famous who's having a break down. The plot goes rapidly and not always smoothly between him and about 4 other character arc/plots that to one degree or another eventually merge together. Very strange. Watchable and oft snidely amusing but not a great movie. Maybe 3 stars out of 5...slightly more if you're into making-fun-of-Hollywood satire & Kevin Spacey's type of sarcasm/acting,

NVM...hubby came home and reset it, all works now. The Mac UI interface is weird when you're not used to it. I'm not sure I like it. Not a reflection on Mac vs PC...just...not used to it, hence don't like it. haha

1-I'm not a huge melee in-your-face type of combat fan so didn't consider Brick as my first. The lady (Phase?) seems kind of blah...I was going to try the soldier next, but looking at his skills, yea, a little too generic. I do like his regen ammo thing and his turret skill. But w/all the gunplay, since it feels like Brick has the most radically different playstyle option, I may end up trying him sooner than I thought. 2-One's ability to FPS dodge/strafe/aim under intense time/action pressure (figure it out in 5 seconds/be able to get aimed criticals while moving or you're dead) is probably a huge part of boss difficulty. I've seen tons of posts from people who are like me and it's not easy for us no matter what, heh. Roid killed me in 2-3 hits or bomb tosses (w/a 238 healing shield) and even a sniper critical barely dented him (I was lvl 17). Non-boss combat situations my targeting/critical ratio isn't too bad & I very very rarely die, but boss fights leave little room for error imo, so...that's all I can say on that.

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