Hello Again Diablo, And Goodbye

Unable to do anything further in Hellgate: London until the 2.0 patch, I turned back to Diablo 2 today and got my HC necromancer through Act 4 and up to the first waypoint in Act 5, putting him in a good farming spot.

Diablo was a bit tougher than expected, as he instantly crushed all of my skeletons as soon as he appeared, and the golem and merc didn’t last much longer after that. After finding a skill shrine and resummoning a slightly tougher group of skellies, the second time went much better, partly due to getting Decrepify on him early on and partly because he stuck to melee attacks for a while, rather than the much more dangerous lightning. Now, the next dangerous bit is going to be the ancients on the Arreat summit…

A Little Slower Than Expected

Well, I didn’t hit level 49 tonight in Hellgate: London like I hoped I would. I did get some nifty new weapons, though. I’d found a unique sniper rifle yesterday, the Voodoo Rifle, but didn’t take a close look at it until today, and it turned out to be a lot better than I thought. It does three different types of damage, has high base ignite and stun ratings, and part of the damage is splashed over an area effect, including the stun if you add a physical damage mod.

I don’t usually like to use sniper rifles since they have a really slow rate of fire, so you have to make each shot count, and it’s annoying how the screen shakes when you fire it. After slapping in some mods to add fire damage and increase the ignite attack rating though, I think it’ll be my primary weapon from here on, as ignite and the stun kick in fairly often. Enemies that usually rush towards me are often held still and killed before even getting close now.

I also found a couple pistols with some skill buffs for summoning a better drone, for buff equipment. There’s only one or two points on each though, and I can certainly do better, but I’ll just have to cross my fingers and hope for good drops.

And finally, I used the skill retrainer I’d been holding on to to reset my allocated skills to zero. But I didn’t spend any, either. The 2.0 patch is due sometime soon and it’ll add new skills to the class, so I don’t want to spend any until I see what they are. But I had to use it now, because they’ll be giving out a new retrainer with the patch, but you can’t have more than one. This way, I get to respend my skill points and still hold on to the new retrainer, effectively getting a free one.

Another Day, Another Level

Using my list of optimal zones, I hit level 48 in Hellgate: London tonight. Though it slowed down a bit, I think I could still easily do a level a day until I hit 50. Now I just have to decide whether to do that grinding before or after the rest of the main quest…

I have to think about upgrading my equipment a bit, too. I only just realized recently that I could have a separate set of armour and weapons for buffing purposes, since the stats of the drone depend only on what skill and equipment modifiers (Minion Armour +x%, Minion Health +x%, etc.) were in effect at the time it was summoned, so I don’t have to keep them on after that. I’ve got some half-decent equipment modifiers at the moment, but I still need more skill point bonuses.

Another Trip To The City, What’s Left Of It

I was lured back into an old friend today. It’s not really a great game, but there’s still something addictive about the type of gameplay Hellgate: London has, as seen in the far-too-large number of hours I’ve put into Diablo 2, Titan Quest, etc.

I complained about slow leveling before, but since then I’ve discovered that the trick is to be hunting enemies three levels above you for the maximum amount of xp per kill. Following that guideline, and making a list of zones by the level of monsters found therein, I managed to gain two whole levels today. That’ll let me get a bit further on the main quest, and there’s only three more levels until I hit the cap at 50. I’m not really sure where I want to spend my last few skill points, so I’ll hold on to those for now…

So Much For Cross-Platform Cooperation

I played a bit more of HC Diablo 2 today, but not on the necro. Instead, I just killed a couple hours in order to make a mule character permanent, managing to get him to the outer cloister in the process. Mules will be particularly important in HC, since otherwise I’m going to lose a ton of other stuff stored in the stash should a character die.

I was going to install D2 on my Mac and use it to do the transfer, since I have a second set of CD keys for it, but I ran into a bit of a snag. Apparently the OS X 10.5.3 update broke a bunch of older games, including D2, and it just plain won’t run at all now. Oh well, I instead resorted to drop-muling the items I had, even though it’s a bit riskier.

But I Still Have A Negative Number Of Fans

I spent a bit of time over the last couple days rocking out, or at least an approximation thereof. First, I picked up the Pixies album recently released for Rock Band. A lot of the songs are really short (some are even less than 100 notes, on medium) and not too difficult, but there’s a decent amount of variety to them, at least.

I then finally got to try out co-op mode with a friend, and it worked fairly well, though it’s still disappointing that you can’t do the world tour mode online. Something to hope for in Rock Band 2, I guess.

And this afternoon I spent a while on my HC necromancer in Diablo 2, getting him through the rest of Act 2 and all of Act 3. No real difficulties so far, though I’m going to have to watch out for the Stygian Doll monsters in the nightmare and hell difficulties. Their suicide explosion will be powerful enough then that I’ll run a very real risk of instant death. I should probably start thinking about the bone armour skills before that point…

No Fire Yet

I played my elemental druid build in D2 a bit more today, and he’s managing to survive so far despite not being able to spend any more skill points for a while yet. I just need to make it 6 more levels before I can start pumping the Dire Wolf skill… Then I’ll have to rely on them for a while until I get the fire skills up in levels.

Longest Gaming Session Ever

I’ve also been “playing” another game recently, and at the office, even! For just over two months, I had ProgressQuest running in the background, and my goal was to see just how far my character could get in a single launch of the game. After 66 days, I was finally forced to reboot my workstation to apply the usual monthly security patches (the previous month’s patches hadn’t required a reboot, fortunately), and his glorious career came to an end, though he’d managed to get a decent ranking, at least (3674th out of over 27,000 as of this writing). His final stats (click to biggify):

April 12, 2008 – June 16, 2008, RIP

I’m sure I’ll have many cherished memories of ProgressQuest, like the time I clicked on a window edge but got the PQ window instead of the mail client, or the time I had to move it upwards a bit so I could see the output in a terminal window…

Is This A Race Or A Destruction Derby?

I finally got around to putting some time into GRID tonight, creating my own team and participating in a couple championships of the career mode. One of those actually was a destruction derby, but even the regular races felt a lot like it at times. I don’t know if I just suck at it or if it’s intentional, but it seems almost impossible for me to complete a race without a lot of bumping and crashing into other drivers, even in the open wheel races. The AI is aggressive enough that they’ll regularly bump into each other, not just me.

I also took a shot at a Le Mans event, where the entire 24 hour race is compressed down into a shorter time period of your choosing (24 minutes by default, I think), but still takes you through the whole day-night-day cycle. It made the rubberbanding of the AI really obvious though, as I could blow past some cars on the Mulsanne straight only to suddenly have them caught up and tailgating me shortly after, when I haven’t lost any time.

Sure is pretty, though…