So, I had one giggle-moment when restarting on Nightmare difficulty:
So, Leah says…
“They say my father was a soldier who died.”
Me: … Girl, I just met your father. He’s pissed.
DeepT
5182
The barbarian is really nice. The witch-doctor on the other hand, I do not get. I am playing this guy with a friend and he just seems gimpy. His dogs die like there is no tomorrow. They would only last slightly less time if the exploded as soon as I summoned them. Only the spiders seem like a decent attack, and the rest of the powers are kind of meh.
WoW adds abilities to bosses in harder difficulty modes, so that is wrong.
I feel the same way, I am at least going to give wizard a full play through , then figure out who I want to take up to max level in the harder difficulties. After that I’ll probably fade away onto the next new game catching my eye at the end of Summer.
You’re responding to a phantom post in which I claim that WoW doesn’t add abilities to their bosses. But hey, Blizzard must be streamlining their MMO design.
The WD is a versatile class. It’s true that the dogs aren’t very resilient, but they’re not suppose to be; they’re really just used as a distraction and exploding. A competent Witch Doctor should be able to keep his dogs alive through his other abilities though.
I personally prefer the exploding toads over the spiders. I just run up to mobs and let them loose.
Aside from that, the WD has a lot of crowd control abilities and dots, which I think will become a HUGE benefit on difficulties harder than normal.
Tim_N
5188
What level are you? I am 24 and having a blast with the witch doctor. Obviously I can’t make comparisons as I have only been playing the witch doctor, but he doesn’t seem gimped to me. The one thing though is that my performance is heavily dependent on the skills I pick (this may not be true for other classes). Certain combinations work extremely well, others are terrible.
First tip, always have soul harvest as part of your set, and always aim to harvest 5 souls everytime you run into a big group. This will increase your damage a thousand-fold (an exaggeration, but not as much as you’d expect).
I really like the exploding frogs, even though you need to be fairly close range. Acid cloud is another skill that does copious amounts of aoe damage (with soul harvest). The dogs are fairly weak, but if you have jungle fortitude and zombie handler as your passive skills, them + the gargantuan help quite a bit and don’t often die.
Make the final skill whatever you want. Do that and you should be able to plow through large groups with blues and yellows with ease. I have also had success with other combinations, so it isn’t only one build that works well, but he seems to be sensitive to bad combinations.
I am loving my Wizard. Playing through normal I’m basically just pumping my damage at the expense of nearly all else. ‘Kill stuff before it can hurt me’ is my preferred method of crowd control so far. I am loving Blizzard, it makes me wish for a non-channeled version in WoW, the slow plus AoE damage is great, toss in some Nether Tempest and an Arcane Hydra and you have an awesome killing field! I got a 40-something massacre before I logged last night.
I really like the Tempest rune that adds a 6 second 15% arcane vulnerability debuff. It synergises nicely with the arcane rune for the Hydra and the Magic Missile. I tend to prefer AoE or pseudo AoE signature spells for non-boss fights, chain lightning and the fire version of the first electricity spell are my favorites.
The sheer number of ways I can combine different skills already, just at level 29 is amazing. I get 3 or so new things each level, too. The only thing I’ve found I can’t live without, so far, is Diamond Skin. I kind of want to bind teleport as well, because just occasionally I find I really want to use it, but not that often. Also, I suspect it’s mostly when I have just made an error and want to bail out that I want it, so better to just not make the error in the first place.
Servers down again! I tell you, it’s like they know I personally want to play. Think they’ll be up at all between 9 pm PDT and midnight PDT tonight? I personally seriously doubt it at this point…
Tried to play last night, and no.
Tried to play multi with my brother tonight, and the server dies after 10 minutes.
WTF, Blizzard? This is flipping ridiculous.
Servers are up. They weren’t down for that long tonight, sucks about the lag/rollbacks some people are getting.
Not a good launch.
Tim_N
5193
Servers should be back up, although I am getting kicked from server a minute faster than I was earlier today so not sure what good the downtime did.
Just saw at least 7 Qt3 people on, so I know there are a lot of people logging in, here.
My impressions from Nightmare difficulty mode so far: I thought I was the shit, winning the game in Normal mode. The game is just laughing at me, now.
I’m level 35, and I’ve nearly died 5 times, and I just won past the quest that would have normally given you town portal for the first time. You know what sucks? Special mobs with 2 special abilities: Freeze and Mortar, or Jail and Mortar, or whatever and Mortar. Basically, get me to stop moving long enough to kick the living snot out of me, get me to mash and mash the heal key until I can use it again.
I find it funny people are saying the game is “hard” because they are dying 5-10 times. The average game I play has me dying countless times before beating it, probably in the 50-100 range.
RichVR
5196
Dear fucking god please stop this. This is not an MMO! There is no comparison. This is a game that was designed as a single player game. And then, LATER, the always on connection DRM was added. Yes you can play with friends. No it’s not a fucking MMO! Are you that clueless?
An MMO would be a Massively Multiplayer Online. Online what? You might mean a Massively Multiplayer Online Game. That would work. If that was what it was designed as. Or a MMORPG. Or a MMOFPS. OR anything that meant it needed others to play with you in a huge online shard.
The point is that it’s a fucking single player game that you are supposed to play all by your fucking self. And if playing with your friends was added people would be “Oh cool! I can play with my friends!”
But instead it’s, oh fuck, I can’t get in now because there are issues with the log in for my SINGLE PLAYER GAME.
Jesus fucking christ. It’s not supposed to be an MMO anything. And I don’t give a flying fuck at a rolling donut what Blizzard’s excuses are. I want to play my game when I want it . And anyone that thinks that’s being stupid can piss off.
Really enjoying this so far. Basically it’s like they got D2, tarted up the graphics, then took out all the stupid bullshit I didn’t like. It feels like a well worn in pair of sneakers.
No worries Rich, I was fucking around – the MMO thing was meant ironically.
It’s not like Blizzard were hiding the fact that online was going to be required. You knew that was the deal when you bought it, and you knew that sometimes internet servers fail because you don’t strike me as a stupid person. Pissing and moaning now seems kind of silly.
It’s neither an MMO nor a purely single player game with online always added for shits and giggles. The exact analogy is closed Bnet from D2, except that’s the only thing you can do.
It’s still bullshit because it hurts the experience of many customers.
Anyway, I finally beat Act 1. Last boss was pretty easy, easier than I expected, though still a fun fight with lots of abilities. They shouldn’t have put the healing wells in there, made it too simple, would have been much scarier without them. Story is getting a little less interesting, but still more into it than I was D2 despite being way older and more jaded.
