Quick update just to put you all up-to-speed on what’s going on Kemwer-land. Work is being kinda crazy, so I’ll try to write more dur­ing the week­end unless there’s some­thing spe­cially inter­est­ing I need to get out of my chest. For now, this is the state of the games I’m cur­rently involved in any way with:

Dia­blo III

I’ve played with two classes that I could call my “main” char­ac­ter. First is the Monk, which I’m using for coop play with Mrs. K and another friend. We’re half way into Act 2, but since my friend almost can’t play dur­ing the week, I haven’t really got into this char­ac­ter for some days.

To avoid out-leveling out coop char­ac­ters we all cre­ated sec­ondary ones for play­ing solo, and funny enough we all cre­ated Wiz­ards. The Monk is a blast at lower lev­els, and it’s prob­a­bly the most pow­er­ful class dur­ing Act 1. But once you get into Act 2 and beyond… man, the Wiz­ard is an unstop­pable killing machine. It has so many high-damage area-of effect skills that makes it almost too easy. Almost.

My build is as of this level Shock Pulse for short-range, fast-fire high dam­age; Dis­in­te­grate as my go-to long-range skill. When deal­ing with large groups of mobs I use a com­bi­na­tion of Frost Nova and Wave of Force to quickly kill every­thing in a blast radius. Bosses some­times need a lit­tle more punch, and for those sit­u­a­tions Meteor is the answer. Addi­tion­ally, I use Hydra to help me clear rooms of envi­ron­men­tal mobs, and to pro­vide a con­stant stream of dam­age even when I need to run away of incom­ing fire. This com­bi­na­tion of skills has proven itself very deadly. On my last level up I also got the Bliz­zard skill that I’ll try instead of Meteor on stronger mobs.

I have used the Auc­tion House a lot with these char­ac­ters, so my dam­age out­put is prob­a­bly a lit­tle over-the-top. The Monk is not that absurd actu­ally: at level 23 I’m doing around 215 DPS, which is good but noth­ing to write home about. The Wiz­ard, how­ever, is look­ing quite impres­sive thank you very much. Due to some of my lat­est acqui­si­tions, like a ring of +58 intel­li­gence (among other bonuses) with a sock­eted Square qual­ity gem for extra +30 intel­li­gence, and spe­cially a wand of 29.4 nom­i­nal DPS with bonus of +99 intel­li­gence, +19 vital­ity, and a sock­eted Per­fect Square qual­ity gem for +14–28 Dam­age bonus, this char­ac­ter has the (for his level) absurd 481.75 DPS. I think Tobold was right after all: once you go black (mar­ket), you don’t go back.

Torch­light II Beta

I swear I meant play this… but Dia­blo hap­pened. My char­ac­ter is still on the same place it was the last time I wrote about it, so there isn’t much of an update to make. Don’t get me wrong, the game is a blast, and unless some­thing ter­ri­ble hap­pen (ahem… Guild Wars 2), it’s a cer­tain buy for more fun coop action. The prob­lem is: Torch­light 2 is in beta, Dia­blo 3 was already released. What I do on Dia­blo is kept for good, but all my progress on Torch­light will be going down the sewer once the game is out of the door. So it isn’t really a hard pick of what to play, given the options.

Guild Wars 2

Arrrgh… release at once!!! You already have my money!!

Are­naNet announced yes­ter­day that no Beta Week­end Event will be tak­ing place this week­end, so you know what that means right? It means that when they said “BWEs will hap­pen around once a month” they meant 1 or less times a month, not 1 or more.

I’m start­ing to get into a self-imposed media black­out on Guild Wars 2. I won’t stop read­ing blogs about it, but I’m no longer stalk­ing the forums for infor­ma­tion about the game. There is just so much spec­u­la­tion one can han­dle, and nei­ther the crazy opti­mistic or the doom­say­ers do me any good. So unless there some new facts to dis­cuss, I’ll prob­a­bly just wait and see.

Final thoughts

I need to recon­sider the mean­ing of the expres­sion “quick update”.

Also, I don’t really feel very com­fort­able pro­vid­ing per­sonal infor­ma­tion on the web­site, so if you want to add me to your friend list on Dia­blo, let me know on Twit­ter, Face­book or on my Con­tact page, and I’ll let you know in private. ;)

Elder Scrolls to me means total free­dom. Means walk­ing for a whole hour in a straight line and be sure that the only limit to what I can explore is my skill. It means hav­ing lev­els as a way to mea­sure the state of your char­ac­ter devel­op­ment, not where in the world you’re allowed to go. It means cre­at­ing a blank slate char­ac­ter, and lev­el­ing by “doing it”, not by choos­ing a class at the begin­ning and the choos­ing skills on a window.

Recre­at­ing the free­dom Elder Scrolls play­ers expect within the World of Warcraft-style mechan­ics Zen­i­max Online is using for this MMO would be impos­si­ble with­out chang­ing the way that play­ers inter­act with the world. (…) The Elder Scrolls Online aims to allow play­ers to enjoy what­ever piques their inter­est, so long as you are appro­pri­ately lev­eled. (…) Zen­i­max declined to share details on indi­vid­ual classes, though the stu­dio con­firmed that the game is class-based instead of using the free-form char­ac­ter pro­gres­sion of Skyrim.

Source: Imgur

That, I believe, is not what Elders Scrolls means. Read more →

Yes­ter­day the comic above was posted by the guys on Penny Arcade. It rep­re­sents an old dilemma for gamers: there are so many fea­tures we enjoy on games, but hardly ever we get to see them all rep­re­sented on a sin­gle title. I don’t really agree with the exact points raised by the comic itself — I didn’t really find TERA Online that fun to play — but I do agree with its gen­eral con­cept: there are many fea­tures on these three games that would be amaz­ing to find on a sin­gle cohe­sive environment.

While talk­ing about this comic with Keen on Twit­ter, I sug­gested of some of the fea­tures I would like to see on a “per­fect MMO”. I thought I could expand this dis­cus­sion here and bet­ter explain­ing what fea­tures I would want of a sin­gle MMORPG. Read more →

Cross-posting with the offi­cial forums, here are some thoughts on the beta event. It’s a long list, so check right after the break: Read more →