IndiraLightfoot

Alright, I just did a marathon run with my monk. She had accidentally reset the quests just before the expansion hit, so I thought I needed to put that to good use and put her up to speed again. Patiently (not), I ran through all content like only a monk can do. I started at level 60 with crappy gear, and nothing to twink hear with. I didn't even give her gems. Amazingly, though, she did find a few decent items along the way, and even three legendary weapons. First she had a legendary 2H, and then later two legendary 1H-wpns. And most conveniently, after Act V (which I did thoroughly. as I wanted to savour it), she hit lvl 70 just before Malthael. This is Harmony right before Malthael. This looks quite a bit like a mix of scenes in MotB at the end, as well as the Outsider world in Dishonored. And here she is just after having slain that beast Malthael. She found a nice legendary chest armor, btw. Also, notice that weird message: "I just blued myself". Well, I said I was going to put this act1-5 run to good use, didn't I? It's a weird achievement, where you have to keep your hero all painted in Mariner's Blue when you kill like 15 bosses. She looked like this when she killed Diablo, and speaking of Diablo...

Here, let me show you a few of them Muscovy ducks (very friendly birds, btw: The black-n-white one outside one of our outbuildings is the drake. The much smaller grey-n-white one is one of his ducks.

@kgambit: What a lovely photo! And btw. I got auto-corrected. I wasn't gendering or sexing any ducks. I was gandering them, hehe. @Woldan: Yes! The colours were insane. The sky was on fire, and that formation was almost whirling. Still everything was calm.

Here's a lovely sunset with a weird cloud formation I saw a couple of days ago, when I was gandering a few reluctant muscovy ducks on the western edge of my property.

Finally! My crusader took down Malthael on her second try, but I lowered the difficulty to Expert for the occasion, though. The crusader is a lovely class, with a nice mix of heavy damage and lots of protection and toughness. I'll definitely play it more now in adventure mode. A third of my success was my Templar, though. That follower sucked in D3 vanilla, but now it's much better, and to top it off, in lvl 61 I found a fantastic legendary templar relic that makes that stuffy guy a beast. Also, it unlocks all his skills, so he becomes a healing and stun machine beyond measure. From now on, Cormak is my faithful companion. Myself, well I look like a female version of Captain America, and that legendary 2H sword makes me look a bit like the teaper death angel Malthael himself. It seems to be the theme in D3. In vanilla D3, most items made you look like a stupid cow, just like Diablo herself.

Ffordesoon: I hereby award you Post of the Day! I laughed out loud and your great points came through loud and clear.

Heh! Nice thread! And why kill every kind of enemy each and every time? Imagine a super-skilled Trapmaster! Loads of humanoids and weird animals could be caught in cleverly rigged traps, and then be subdued or released in order to solve quest objectives. The aim is almost a non-kill playthrough. Add to this, and expert Drugist or Apothecary, and you can make sleep darts, the possibilities are endless.

Heh, certain teleporting hulks can be brutal at the end of Act 3, if they are Elites, that is. And in Act IV, there's a number of monstrosities that can hurt you pretty bad. Good luck with your further endeavours into D3.

Ffordesoon: That video on difficulty was sheer brilliance and very informative. Thank you for posting it! And, Ghosts & Goblins, I had almost forgotten about that one. That was pretty fun back in the day.

Yes, and even worse. In that darn app, there's a setting's tab/menu, where it defaults to using up just a fraction of your bandwidth. I had to coreect that early on, and then boom, it went ten times faster!

Yup! Battlenet App is just a portal for all your Blizzard games. In my case, there's still just D3. However, it shows info about which people are in-game in your clan and such, so I now use instead of the D3 shortcut.

I just flipped though my old D&D books, and also browsed Dave Trampier's images online, and I realize what kind of legacy he's left us. I love thousands of his pictures, I just do. It's part of what made me interested in RPGs in the first place. In honour of his art and his accomplishments, I have solemnly changed my avatar to one lovely and wise Rakshasa of his. I bid thee farewell, mr Trampier!

This is sad news! And what a sad story too. His pictures are like yesterday to me. I literally watched them for hours in total as a teenager, dreaming away. I really liked his Magic Mouth-depiction in that stairwell, and that evil (?) wand-shooting wizard riding roughshod through a city street. Thank you for those dreams, mr Trampier!

Posted by Studio Fawn ♥ Like Heya everyone, Dani here Time (finally) for an update on how things have been going with Bloom! I just got this one from Dani over at Studio Fawn. Enjoy!

As per my example for PE's Ironman mode, a D3 RoS Hardcore style, I reckon that not everything needs lore trails and whatnot. If the encounters are designed well enough, you should be able to survive them by observing what's going on during battle. It's a bit like Darksouls as well, I guess.

For the Ironman mode, I'd actually like to see Diablo 3 Reaper of Souls Hardcore style. It's a bit like what Prime Junta described under Roguelike style, but some of it is even worse. Under unfortunate circumstances, you can get stunlocked by a combo of Elite spells and just perish. A few days ago, Hiro the Protagonist wrote about his pretty incredible feat. He did this new expansion solo, and not with very good gear at that. He had never experienced the content and somehow managed to stay alive and beat the content all the way down to the final big bad boss. Much of this must have been skill. Something similar, I'd love to see for PE's Ironman Mode: It should be possible, but darn hard.

As much creative freedom as possible when making ourselves a party, please! If I want to have six monks in my party, it should be a viable option. In a perfect CRPG, there shouldn't be such a thing as a well-balanced party, if you get my drift. Here are some heresy for y'all to chew on: What if you take a dialogue- and text-heavy CRPG with deep soul-searching storylines and story branching, and then you mix in the smoothness of the combat seen in D3 or some popular MMOs, and then you improve on the diversity of those combat systems and make them RTwP. Wouldn't this be a possible success? And then this distinction between old and new won't matter much anymore. And by "diversity", I mean, instead of six different classes with fixed attributes and just a few skill tree options here and there, make at least double the amount of classes and have attributes mean a lot. Then add a choice of character race that's just as meaningful. Give us the option to pick interesting background traits and select talent pools. Also, for most new levels you reach, there should be plenty of branching and new skills to choose from, including spells and everything. And since it's a party-based game, the amount of character creation-development creativity should go through the roof and then some. Just make sure that levels just don't fly by, like they do in ARPGs, and don't have us drowning in loot. Make the characters you build more important than the loot combos you dress them up with. Hmm, in a weird way, I think Josh is already doing most of what I've just trying to describe here.

Josh saying this: “The biggest thing that modern RPGs do that I don’t like is to write dialogue for people who don’t like dialogue. Which I think is dumb and a load of ****,” he says, laughing. “My assumption is that if you want to have dialogue in and you want to make it a big part of the game, you assume that the player wants to read it and it’s your job to make it good.” Makes me go

Keyrock: Good luck, indeed! Also, I have to commend you on the brilliant names of your party members. Beefstick, Slippy... I love it!! ManifestedISO: It does. I've been playing M&M X a lot, and it reeks of that kind of TSR art nostalgia. You didn't ask for it, but here are more pics of my intrepid goat: Here my goat's surfing in the USA, on the roof of a car, in traffic. Once my goat stuck real bad, in a serving table in a roadhouse. I managed to get its head and ass through the tabletop. It took a full minute of rock-n-rolling to get undone. My goat likes killing people. It got so bad, now she's a daylight vampire! Hmm, a crane. I must get up there! Oh, the thing keeps going up. Upwards, me and my army of lice! Let's run out on the crane arm! Look! There are those gas pumps that didn't like my kind of bumper stickers! I got to the top of the world, standing on the railing, balancing with my hard hooves with human blood all over them.

I pre-ordered Goat Simulator, and I just fired it up! It's so much fun! This goat doesn't give an ass about anything and anyone. destroy the world and eat it! I managed to roll a boulder on a garden party and everyone died. How sad!

PCGamer just announced a stand-alone expansion for COH2 - the Western Fronts. This will be very exciting, indeed! :D Tom Senior at 17:42 on 28 March 2014 Company of Heroes 2 is returning to the setting of Company of Heroes 1 with The Western Front Armies, a standalone expansion that's coming out in June for $20. It includes two armies: the US forces and the German Oberkommando and eight new multiplayer maps set in the green, unfrozen lands of the Western Front. There are no single player missions or Theater of war Scenarios mentioned, so it looks like an expansion designed to feed the multiplayer scene, which has been quietly warring away since launch last year. Though Western Front Armies is standalone, it'll share a multiplayer pool with Company of Heroes 2, which means whatever combination of the two you own, you can be automatched onto any of the 31 maps alongside any army. Buying the original game or the expansion will make their included armies playable, and let you create custom games with the included maps. Sega also note that the armies will be available separately for $12.99 each. There's also mention of a "new progression system" that will let you unlock "unique content" that'll let players "dive deeper into the tactical and strategic aspects of the game". I don't know what that means, but it might have something to do with the tiny unit upgrades and skins you can unlock with the current experience system. Here are a few shots from the Xpack. Shermans! Paratroopers! I'm having happy flashbacks to the first game.

My crusader is now passed lvl 50 and has just entered Act V. Yay! She's doing it on Torment I difficulty as well, and that with relative ease. How, you may wonder? My answer is twinking and more twinking, mostly in the form of a high-level ruby-xp-turbo in her helm socket, but also through the use of other gems in other sockets, mostly weapons, of course. However, there is an even bigger twink-factor, courtesy of my Wizard's first minutes in adventure mode at level 70. She found a yellow 2H-sword. It doesn't have any socket, and not even STR on it. However, it was level 70, and had a huge amount of dps on the ticket (2100 DPS) and like 750 vitality, and life on hit 1 700. Better still. It had a level reduction of 24 levels! Guess why my Crusade started flying at level 45 in Act III? Never overlook yellows, folks. They can be very handy!

Indeed. That horsey is often the perfect escape. In Act 2, I used it many times in combination with the Fallen Sword jumps for speed-runs through content that felt less than satisfying atm. Giddy up!

I'm in Act 3 right now and over lvl 40 with my Crusader, and I have to agree with Gfted1's assessments so far. It's like a clunky armored monk with equestrian dreams. Since I really like the Monk, this is a class to be reckoned with in my book. And I'm relieved that I finally can put Act 2 behind me in softcore. Hiro: I still can't fathom that you managed to survive that. And your Scoundrel looks mean. It must have helped too.

Hiro: You should be quite proud. Surviving that on HC at all is a feat all in itself. You are probably among the first few thousands in the world that achieved that so early.