Thena's Serenity Set

Another low level set I found: Thena's Serenity

Far Left - Staff

Thena's Companion - Shillelah
DAMAGE: 9 to 15
CHARACTER LEVEL: 8
+3 Intelligence
+12 Health
+10% Nature Magic Damage
+10% Chance to Find Magic Items

Middle Left - Boots

Thena's Tranquil Path
ARMOUR: 8
CHARACTER: Nature Magic 4
+5% Mana Regeneration
+5 Armour

+10% Ice Resistance
+10% Fire Resistance

Middle Right - Gloves
Thena's Soothing Touch
ARMOUR: 6
CHARACTER: Nature Magic 12
+22 Mana
Restores 2 Mana Per Hit
+12% Death Resistance
+1 to Nurturing Gift, Enveloping Embrace, and Feral Wrath

Far Right - Hood
Thena's Calming Gaze
ARMOUR: 18
CHARACTER: Nature Magic 16
+6 Intelligence
6% Mana Steal
+80% Armour
+1 to Summon Fortitude, Summon Might, and Summon Bond

Set Bonus - 4 Items
+8 Intelligence
+40 Mana

+10% Magic Damage Resistance
+2 to Summon Fortitude, Summon Might, and Summon Bond
+2 to Nurturing Gift, Enveloping Embrace, and Feral Wrath
+5 Armor

Okay, Last Post about Diablo

For now...

I finished the game last night. I have to admit, in my frustration I was probably a little unfair to the game and the system, but my opinions still stand. My final thoughts on the story is that it is cheesy and clichéd, has epic cutscenes, has a neat little twist near the end and was way too short. When you calculate how long each act really took me, I'd say the game only takes about 6 hours to complete (if you don't backtrack, if you spend little time in town, if you don't die and if you don't wander around exploring). In fact, you could probably do it in less time. It's a little bit sad, but makes sense as in the real appeal to the game comes with the later, harder levels of Hell and Inferno. 

Co-op play is really the seller here, which I never expected. I hardly read anything about D3 before its release (probably should have since it may have eliminated some of my frustration...but maybe I wouldn't have bought it...who knows). I really enjoy it and I didn't think I would. I've been teaming up with a lot of my friends, which has made the game a lot more difficult (and chaotic). The story and details get a little lost, but it changes the game. It also makes all the encounters a lot more silly than when you're playing on your own.

In the end, I'll say it's a good game, it's worth a buy and has good aspects to it. Was it necessary to make? Probably 10 years ago when it was still fresh and welcome. Am I glad I have it? Yes. The story suffers, but the graphics, gameplay and co-op are way better. 

So no more complaining or analyzing it...back to my regularly scheduled blithering about Dungeon Siege.

Bored

So I'm going to take this opportunity to rant about Diablo 3, because I am pissed. I was going to wait until the end of the game to withhold my judgement, but I need to vent a little bit. I also seem to be the only person save maybe...one that seems to have negative opinions of the game so I apologize for my bitter old veteran speech.

Let me make this perfectly clear. The one aspect that REALLY gets my knickers in a knot is the ONLINE ALL THE TIME gameplay that Blizzard seems to think is necessary. This is bull shit. This means that if I want to play online, alone...as in single player without anyone else (if that wasn't already clear), I have to be signed in to my battle.net account and be logged in to a server 100% of the time. 1) The servers are always overloaded. 2) My internet connections sucks. 3) My laptop sucks. 4) Blizzard is a cash whore. OH DID I SAY THAT OUT LOUD? No you idiot this is text. God.

Seriously though, I can't play any session without the game lagging to the point where it is unplayable. The fact that I need a constant internet connection is not an asset. This means I can't play if I do not have access to the internet (to my knowledge). Maybe there's an offline mode, but I have not heard of one. If there was, I would have just set it to that in the first place. Not only that, once I add friends, they always know when I'm online, can see everything I do and there is no longer any anonymous activity. You have your full name up there 100% of the time. This is a problem for people with names like mine. I am the only one in the world with this name (again, to my knowledge) so I can't just add random strangers I know from YouTube and such without worrying about some creeper stalking me online. I see why this was done, there are good aspects to it, but this isn't going to stop trolls or people exploiting the system.

Now the actual game when I can manage to play for 10 mins without lagging out, getting disconnected, having the server go down or other stupid internet related problems, is horribly cheesy. I can't believe how cartoony it has gotten. Actually, scratch that. I knew it would get this way. Blizzard has a "style" now. We don't want dark. immersive, story-centred games. We want casual, silly games that makes Blizzard lots and lots of money! Yeah I get you're trying to appeal to a wider audience here Blizzard. I get that you want the game mechanics to be smoother and easier to understand (though I don't get why you had to hide away the option that allows you to take personal control over your skills and abilities). I get that you have the choice to take the story wherever the hell you want (no pun intended), but really, who did you honestly make this game for?

Think about it. After so many years, why make the game at all? For its fans. You didn't need this game for money. You have the World of Warcraft cash cow for that. So why make Diablo 3? I assume they wanted to appeal to that group of us that have a particular fondness for the game, but when the original developers of the game have long moved on...why bother? I'd almost prefer to be left with the masterpieces that they were. They are far out-stripped by a lot of games today. Games today have come a long way and...well they ARE much better. The games piss people like me off because I have a nostalgic love of the old games, and the new games do not meet the standards I have for the series. This is why I don't believe in remakes. I don't believe in continuing a series a decade after. It doesn't work for its fans. AND THAT IS WHY YOU MADE IT. Granted, there are new comers to the field. Well good for them. Make a new game. Keep the same universe if you want, but don't try to continue the story. Don't try pass it off as a continuation of the same series. TRY SOMETHING ELSE. This is why you were good in the past Blizzard.

Okay, so now that I've had my rant (and feel only marginally better), what's good about the game? Well, I'll admit that the social aspect is one of the only reasons I'm still playing after all my frustration. It has given me the opportunity to play with people that don't obsess over being the best or getting all the greatest items. It has given me the opportunity to spend quality time with people that I haven't seen in ages. Most of all, it's just fun to talk about all the crazy stuff in the game, the cartoony and cheesy story and how epic the cutscenes are. Yes, the cutscenes, as always, are fantastic. Cheese aside, Blizzard really gets you interested in the cutscenes. They are well done, high-scale and all round enjoyable. You forget that the plot is one of the lamest, cliched stories ever created by humanity. I watched Act II's cutscene last night (yes I'm only on Act II of normal...see the above rant) and man was it good. had my attention.

The voice acting is all over the place. Some of it is great and some of it is EXTREMELY bad. The queen at the end of the first act is pretty bad and Cain sounds like he's voiced by a young guy pretending to be an old guy (though I shouldn't be so critical after hearing how bad my voice acting its). the music is wonderful. Say what you want about Blizzard games, but no one can say they have terrible soundtracks. I love the music in these games and I'm glad to see it's just as good as it used to be.

Lastly...the cheesiness kind of works for it. Once I get over the fact that this game actually scared the shit out of me when I was younger and many of the bosses were actually intimidating, it's super hilarious. I love the physics and how bodies just cartwheel through the air at the slightest provocation. Dropping chandeliers on demon's heads and crushing others with logs. I'm playing a wizard right now and I have to admit I enjoy zapping dudes. That, and I have a GOD DAMNED LASER. Everything is better with lasers. That and I giggle constantly at how chill everyone is about demons and the forces of Hell cropping up everywhere. The Blacksmith ends up needing help killing his wife at the beginning and right after he's all "time to get back to work...now where's that darned apprentice..."

Overall, the game angers me, but it has redeeming attributes. I will continue to play it. I already have plans for a Barbarian after my wizard so that's cool. I just really needed to get that out, mostly because the hype that that game is getting from my friends and the general gaming community is just so blown out of proportion. Need a bit of a counter-balance every now and then. In return, I will try to relax a little and just enjoy it for what it is....grudgingly.

DS2 Enchanting

An interesting idea...if it hadn't already been used by Diablo 2. If I were to sit here and point out similarities with the Diablo series, we'd be here all night. Regardless, it's a fun aspect of the game and it allows you to make some interesting pieces of armour and weaponry. Yet, you always want to go for those legendary pieces for the maximum amount of slots available, which means that anything less is practically useless. I also tend to want to try and BREAK enchanting rather than create kick-ass items.

Started out innocent enough, trying to create pieces of armour and weapons useful for my characters. The two 35% physical damage reflectors got me wondering how far I could go with some of the enchantments. After all, this was 70% physical damage reflection...so what if I could achieve 100%? So far, I don't believe it is possible. I haven't finished the game on champion yet, so I technically could find an item that could work. The only problem is the reagents appear to be getting BIGGER. Since I only have a 16 square (4x4) space to work with, playing tetris with reagents becomes difficult. Yet...I manage to pull off stuff like this:

With 8 15% chances to find magic items (120%), I am more than guaranteed to find magic items. Excessive, but I felt it needed to be done. I also wonder if percentages over 100 mean you find more unique and rare items. I should look it up (or if someone knows please comment and tell me!) and see if I can break it more. Considering my human character has a base chance of 10% for finding magic items...that's 130%, not including what other characters have. I also wonder if the magic item drops are for the whole party or just the character that kills them. Considering I haven't seen a "normal" item in quite some time, that tells me it may just be party-based. That said, enchantable items technically count as "normal" items so... I also tried this:

I wondered what would happen if the combined reagents raised the minimum damage above the maximum damage on an item. Turns out the overall damage is increased. Down side is that no additional benefits can be added to the weapon (unless the damage range is fairly narrow to begin with, which would be another interesting experiment). I am sure there are tons of ways to exploit this feature in the game...more than my limited creative capacity can imagine. I'll see if I can come up with anything else. In the meantime, I'd love to hear about other combinations and exploits, so feel free to share here or on YouTube. Meanwhile...some other items I've created...including one that Vix is currently using:

Doing another recording session tomorrow.

Beginnings

As of now I have posted the videos for Act 1, Chapters 4 and 5. Chapter 6 will be posted by Monday (rendering at this very moment). Was looking back through all the screenshots I've taken and found this:



This is Wynter when I first created her soooo long ago. One aspect you didn't see at the beginning of my videos was the character creation process. Each race gives a bonus to the character (note the 10% chance to find magic items I totally forgot about...which means with that character alone I have a 100% chance of finding magic items with the amulet I made). Just thought it was interesting.

Also shows that I'm terrible with naming my characters since I remember just staring at this screen for a few minutes trying to decide.