I have been playing 5 v AI games. Initially with Garen, playing until I felt I knew what I was doing: where his buttons were and what to use when. But over the last week I’ve been playing Sona. There’s something about how annoying she can be that I’ve really liked. Plus I think I would prefer (long term) to be a good support. I’ll probably buy Janna next, and maybe Lux, so I have some useful options… and then try to get good at these four.

I’m already tempted to buy Arcade Sona, because… OMG ARCADE SONA. *cough*

I’ve been playing the beginner five player versus bot games for about three weeks, and I’m almost level 12 now. I stepped into an intermediate level bot game and it was a schooling. I think we surrendered at 5/60 or something. It was horrid. It’s scared me off playing real 5 v 5 games for a long time. I’m not even sure if I should wait till I’m level 30 or …? I’m assuming not, but I know I’ve a way to go yet.

Anyone else out there play LoL? Any advice about when to step it up?

And if you see a quiet, determined Glowbie in a bot game, say hi

I’ve been pondering the importance of mastery. No, not that WoW class-specific stat, the one that you stack this week and reforge off the next. I’m talking about actual mastery: being skilled and knowledgeable. It’s a bit late, but I suddenly realised that mastery of something is incredibly important to me. And on a selfish level, maybe a vain level: being publicly masterful. Or at least publicly striving to master something.

Since I’ve dumped WoW I’ve played lots of other games, but all of them pretty much ‘by myself’. Even D3 I only ever played with friends. When they stopped playing, I played alone. I’ve puttered around, but I haven’t put the time into anything to get ‘good at it’.

I’ve also been crafting: knitting, crochet, embroidery, a little beadwork, even some sewing. I’ve been pushing myself more than I have in the past: reading/watching/learning new skills and techniques… making myself learn continental-style knitting, to knit left handed (never purl again!) trying tough patterns (even ones in german!) new stitches… and sticking at projects until they are complete. I feel that I’ve turned my ‘striving for mastery’ need towards crafts rather than games. I don’t think that’s a bad thing per se, but I miss a bit of the community side of things. And I know I have a long way to go before I feel like I’m ‘good at it’.

I guess what this is all leading to is a self admission that I miss part of what WoW offered.  Please understand that I don’t want to play WoW, there’s way too much I don’t miss. But I am missing the community, the guild, the research, the farming (yes, I know) and all the little things that come together to make something bigger than myself. I miss the challenge. I miss ‘putting myself out there’ both in-game and on my blog.

Perhaps I need to seriously consider craft blogging, as bloated as that area is already. A friend is pregnant and I’ve been knitting some little baby bits and pieces for her. Another friend asked me if I’ve been keeping work-in-progress pictures. I haven’t. But maybe I should. Perhaps begin a new blog. It would also help  keep track of the ideas and inspiration that are swirling around my busy mind.

Maybe I could use it to document my new striving for mastery. Just for me.

It’s been a while since I blogged here; it’s been a while since I played WoW. The qualifiers here are meaningful. I have been blogging lots elsewhere, and I have been playing lots of other games.

“There is too much, I will sum up.”

Since I stopped raiding back in March, I spent a bit of time logging into alts and mucking around. That lasted a couple of months but it gradually petered out. I haven’t logged in for a looong time. Needless to say I did not purchase MoP.

I played Rift for a while: I enjoyed the levelling and questing, but friends drifted off and D3 was on the horizon, so Is topped playing. I played Diablo for a while, I enjoyed that too, but it wasn’t as lasting as I’d hoped. And although my friends drifted away from D3 once GW2 was on the horizon, I’m not going to blame their movement on my cessation of play.

Truth be told, I played D2 for years even with friends coming and going. The game was the thing that held me in its thrall. I loved the boss fights, I loved finding the shinies, I loved the race anew every ladder reset. Collecting goodies for my alts and the sneaky stashing and relogging if no trustworthy friends were around to hold games for you. It was fun. Diablo 3 is not the same, it’s all built to drive the player to the AH, and it makes me sad. I enjoy the gameplay, the classes are engaging: but I miss the eternal levelling, but the world/story is lacking, the item drops are a failure.

Soooo… I’ve been living a great deal ‘outside of the computer’. I’ve been engaging my creative side and making things. Real things that you can touch. I’ve also been playing lots of little games. World of Goo, Tiny Towers, Torchlight 2, PvZ (again/always!), Revenge of the Titans, Contre Jour…

I’ve been having lots of fun, but I have missed the community/grouping side of things. Soooo. I checked my Rift account over the weekend, and I still have lots of time left on my year subscription. And it looks like they have an expansion due out soonish. The expansion looks fun and interesting. I love the world and the storylines – so I had some fun over the weekend picking up a lowby warrior and playing guardian for the first time. I even ran a random dungeon as dps. Yep.

I may blog a little about it. I apologise in advance for the lack of Pandas.

I’ve been pottering away at D3 though, playing my wee barbarian. I finally finished act 2 on him, Belial inferno + Aussie pings is pretty brutal… that and it took me a while to realise I really needed a more dps build/gearing config to down him. Onto act 3 and being brutalised by every fireball. Back to playing with a more tanky build/gear for a bit and inching my way through. It’s fun, but most of my friends have drifted away from the game, so I’m soloing everything at the mo, so it really needs all of my concentration as well. P’raps now I’m finally beating this flu I’ll have some more time and brain space to document my adventures with Wybie.

I’ve also been dipping back into WoW. Just playing alts, staying in touch with friends and hanging onto a bit of the social dynamic I’ve missed while soloing. It’s funny how quickly you fall back into it. Okay so there may have been some left clicking on the mailbox, and clicking on the ground to walk… but stepping into dungeons and healing was like sliding on an old glove. It was a comfortable glove… but it did feel old. Playing Rift and watching The Secret World and the beautiful worlds they create made WoW look very tired and dated. And I’m not enthused at all by what MoP promises, so I doubt I will buy it.

But what next? What will be the next big thing for Glow? I’m not sure. I’m having fun with my current blend of casual gaming (of many sorts) with craft projects on the go, new gadgets to play with and spontaneous nights out for dinner/drinks with RL friends. At the same time, I miss my WoW guild and friends, and the challenge of defeating encounters as a team. So we’ll see. There has to be a balance somewhere, just need to find the perfect game.

That is all.

We had a small run around in Inferno: finished the first few quests/areas there and it didn’t look terrifying. We only fought one champ pack and the ability combo wasn’t insane, so we killed them quickly and painlessly. I’m assuming the pain levels will ramp up heavily though as we press onwards.

We thankfully didn’t come up against one of these:

The difficulty of Hell difficulty

We actually didn’t find Hell toooo bad. Elite packs with annoying combinations sometimes took a few corpse runs to defeat. There were definitely some tense moments where we thought we might not be able to defeat an encounter – but in general it was just a matter of kiting and peeling regardless of the composition of the pack.

There was one pack of champs we gave up on. It was in one of the Act 3 Sin dungeons so it was at a linear point where we couldn’t easily ‘skip’ them. However, we wanted to press on: we had our Nephalem buff and didn’t want to lose it. So Shigeko aggroed them and ran away while I vaulted like mad through them… and the rest of the level… and dove through the portal at the end. Shig rezzed and hopped through my banner and we went on from there.

So champ/boss packs in general were difficult, but not impossible.

The consistent pinchpoint through every difficulty so far has been Izual. Certainly on Nightmare and Hell, it was after a few deaths on Izual that we re-thought our gearing level and headed off to the AH to look at upgrading some gear pieces.

We killed Izual the night before last, but it took quite a few attempts, including one where he decided to spawn twice. Fighting two Izuals was less than enjoyable, although unsurprisingly brief. We decided afterwards that we both needed some mitigation upgrades and did a spot of shopping.

Fighting two Izuals. This didn't go so well.

Last night we started Act 4 again and cleared right through to Diablo. We wanted to stack our Nephalem buff; most of the large rooms/trash with elite potential is early in the act. This time we killed Izual on the first attempt – although it was still messy.

How we handled Izual

Shigeko’s monk tanked Izual while I pewpewed at range. I moved to avoid frost bombs, Shig did not. There are two waves of adds (based on his health I guess, maybe 70%/30%?) melee/fire breath demons first wave, fallen angel casters next. When the adds spawned I would take them down one by one (with a little kiting for the melee ones). Any that ended up on Shig I took down last with AOE or single target, depending on how things were going.

Often one of us would die. It is possible to get a rez off if a) you have movement abilities as Izual is fairly slow or b) during a window where Iz stops to use his frost bombs or decides to attack an angel or Tyrael. But it’s touch and go, sometimes he just chases you endlessly. If he’s low on health and your adds are dead then we found it was often better just to solo him down and rez after. But rezzes are possible when duoing, if difficult.

We were frustrated initially by Shigeko being one-shot inexplicably at times – especially during crunch times like while moving into a space during frozen bombs, but we have a plausible theory for what was causing this.

The theory: Izual crushes your puny frame if he gets to hit you while you are facing away.

It seems that mostly we were oneshot while running from him. Actually, Shig was oneshot once while just turning to begin to move away, hence the theory. And hence why we switched to Shigeko tanking the freezes. His mitigation is such that the bombs themselves don’t hurt much, and it doesn’t seem that Izual does significantly more damage when you’re frozen. Well, not compared to the smash-in-the-back-oh-you’re-dead attacks.

And then there’s Diablo – but he/she deserves another post.

And I leave you with these poignant words from the family in Bastions’ Keep:

I just hit 60, and haven’t even looked at my lvl 60 runes yet. As soon as I hit 60 we killed some champs and I didn’t want to lose my nephalem buff!

In any case, here is the build I’ve been running with my demon hunter. It’s a fairly offensive/mobile build, as I’m playing with a very tanky Monk, but I’ll explain my playstyle below.

The build

Link to the battle net calculator with the build I’m running:

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/demon-hunter#acVdYQ!YeT!YYbbbY

I’ll run through these choices in more detail below, as I explain the play style.

The set up

I play with a Naga, and have 1-4 bound to thumb buttons, so the only time I’m using the keyboard is for potions and to lock my position. I play with my left hand hovering over shift and everything else is mouse driven. This allows me a lot of flexibility for stop-go style fighting, which I use a great deal with Hungering arrow.

The play style

I’ll run through these skill choices in detail here, outlining how/why I use each, along with the rune choices I’ve made.  I like to use positioning and angles to my advantage, and hence prefer piercing, mobility and strategic snaring and this specific playstyle heavily biases my preferred skills.

Primary skills

Left mouse button: Hungering Arrow, runed with Devouring Arrow

Hungering arrow gives me a great ‘homing’ primary attack, with piercing for extra damage, especially when the mobs are bunched up on a tank target or being forced through narrow corridors/doors. It’s a solid single target damage dealer wit the occasional extra target from piercing.

Dodging around ground effects while throwing Hungering arrows

But why I really prize Hungering arrow is as a kiting tool. As I mentioned above, I play a very staccato style demon hunter: I’m constantly stopping for an instant and firing a shot behind me as I kite, or dodge mortars et al. Hungering arrow is a shoot-and-hope skill: as long as I fire roughly ahead of the mob’s pathing, it will eat an arrow. In Hell, I can kite a high powered mob effectively indefinitely while throwing Hungering arrows, and it’s almost solely for this reason that it’s become my primary skill.

Right mouse button: Rapid Fire, runed with High Velocity

I’m a huge fan of Rapid fire, but it struggles a bit with the stop-go style I outlined above. Sometimes I force myself to stand still and dps hard – and Rapid fire is a satisfying way to do just that.

I love it because it’s a very powerful single target damage dealer, it’s great for focus fire on bosses/champs/treasure goblins and, as long as I am able to stand and unload for the whole duration, it’s a very efficient use of hatred.

I hate it because it’s very inefficient if I have to move. Knowing when it’s safe to stand still can be tricky, so it pays to know the damage patterns of the creatures you’re fighting – or you can end up attempting to start a couple of Rapid fires and end up with an empty hatred globe and nothing to show for it.

I rune this with High velocity as I am partial to piercing shots. It turns Rapid fire into a pretty reasonable multi-target ability on tightly clustered mobs. It can be also really useful for things like shooting through a mob pack to kill the pesky rezzer at the back.

Piercing through a cluster with Raipd fire + High velocity

And you can stand in one spot and slowly rotate Rambo-style, spraying bolts across the screen. Oh, yeah.

Action Bar Skills

1: Preparation runed with Battle Scars
This isn’t really about Preparation, it’s about Battle scars. I just find it impossible to say no to a 60% heal. The ability to top up my discipline, especially while kiting, is a bonus… but that’s not why I take this. A big heal on a reasonably short cooldown, thank you kindly.

2: Vault runed with Tumble
My second hunting skill, but one I find I can’t play without. This is when my thumb sits on my mouse, I vault…. a lot.

Vaulting. Before: bad room, very bad room

I’m not really a huge fan of any of the runes for this, Action shot doesn’t do enough damage to feel anything other than gimmicky, and the runes that effect the path are wasted, as I use it to tumble away from things, not through them. And adding a cooldown to tumble would leave me crippled, hobbled, lame!

Vaulting: after! Nice empty room, space to stand and shoot.

I use vault to:

• move out of ground effects,
• to deliberately move through ground effects,
• to move to the clustered mobs to drop a caltrop and then quickly out again,
• to kite,
• to catch up to the combat after I’ve died,
• to get a good angle for piercing,
• to make myself look cool like Jason Nesmith.

Okay, maybe not the last one.

I use vault often, I use it reflexively, it’s a big part of why I enjoy the demon hunter.

3: Caltrops runed with Jagged Spikes
I’ve only recently forced myself to go back to using caltrops, so I’m still learning the ropes, but I’m already finding it hard to imagine playing without them. This kind of goes back to my choice of primary shot. Now that I’m using Hungering arrow rather than Entangling shot, I’m adding back a snare via the placement of caltrops.

Caltrops actually allow me to be more strategic about snaring that Entangling shot did: they can be pre-placed in bottle necks or planned kite paths. They can be dropped on the run. Tumble in and place them and then tumble back out. Very versatile!

Making a nice line of caltrops to edge the mobs back over.

I’m still playing around with the runes, I like most of the options: especially the extra snare, but I find having a place-able AOE is extremely useful. Especially in cases where I can’t get line of sight (hello wallers!) being able to drop a caltrop on the edge of terrain and still do decent damage is great!

Dropping a caltrop under the edge of a waller wall.

The damage from Jagged spikes isn’t trivial, I’ve even killed myself a few times kiting damage reflectors back and forth through spikes. Ow.

4: Multishot runed with Full Broadside
Ah multishot. Now I feel like a D2 bowazon. Well, a little.

I’ve bounced a bit between this and Rain of vengeance as my AOE skill, but have settled on this as I just find it easier to target. This isn’t to say that I don’t occasionally waste a big chunk of hatred by multishooting off in the wrong direction… sigh. But RoV just feels clunky. I hate the demon-bombing versions as they are static and we fight so much on the move. Dark cloud is the only runed version I used consistently, as it moves with you – but even then it’s hard to get all the mobs you want by the time the duration is over. I admit to feeling shackled by the cooldown.

Multishot. So delicious.

Multishot has it’s own ‘cooldown’ in that it’s very expensive runed this way, but I can manage that myself. It’s extremely powerful and flexible to be able to choose when to unload three multishots and emptying all your hatred, or whether just to throw in one to finish off a few low level mobs and then go back to generating hatred.

I have had a play with a few runed versions, I particularly like Arsenal and Fire at will, and have switched between these three quite a bit, but am favouring the raw damage output of FB at the moment.

Passive Skills

Steady Aim
A flat 20% extra damage when there’s no enemies within 10 yards. This is pretty much all of the time for me. Delicious free damage!

If you want to check what the 10 yards looks like, you can play for a bit with your character sheet open and watch your dps dynamically update as you move in and out of range. I wish this was displayed more ‘transparently’ with a buff, but it doesn’t take long to get a feel for your minimum distance.

Note that it doesn’t pay to let this dictate your positioning too much. There are times when being point-blank range is good, for example when fighting a mortaring mob, it can’t mortar you in melee range. The loss of dps being face-first would probably out weigh the running around you’d be doing at range.

Archery
More free dps! I’m using a crossbow at the moment, so that equates to extra crit damage. I haven’t looked at any maths for this, so not sure if it’s wonderful, but it ties in well with my last passive.

Sharpshooter
I have a love-hate relationship with this passive. It makes me think I have UBER DPS when I’m standing around in town and my crit chance has stacked to 100%. And as I’m doing extra crit damage, my character sheet is all OVER9000dps! Well actually much more than 900 dps is what it tells me, but I know it’s all lies.

Sharpshooter and the deceptive dps numbers

Well it’s is only partly lies. I do relish wandering around a quiet dungeon only to be suddenly jumped by one million scorpions. HAHA scorpions! Eat my 100% crit chance multishot with extra lasers and sharks! PEW PEW! Oh, they all died. Muahaha.

But despite the glorious funtimes, it does mean that my ‘in town’ character sheet isn’t telling the truth about sustained combat (which is where your damage really matters). Again, you can get a better feel for how your dps changes during sustained combat by opneing up your character sheet during combat; it sawtooths up and down as the crit buff builds up and drops. Again, another passive that I wish was an obvious buff on your toon.

Summary

So that’s my demon hunter for the moment. This is the build I’m running in Hell, so I might need to switch up to a whole lot more defensive group of skills/passives once I hit Inferno, but I don’t think I’ll be dropping my 1-3 action bar skills in a hurry.

I think My maths degree has inflated my score

I’m more than just my maths degree! Only today I did engaged in an email argument with an old friend who suggested that ‘debunk’ classified as a ‘word that only exists in prefixed form’. Like these. A nice little trail of searches later, I discovered that ‘debunk’ means ‘to remove the bunk’ from something, and ‘bunk’ in this sense comes from ‘bunkum’ which now means ‘nonsense’. ‘Bunkum’ itself used to have a more specific meaning about flowery but meaningless political statements, based on one given to the member for Buncombe in 1847.

So bunkum does exist in an unprefixed form, and I win the Internet.

Maybe it’s not just my Maths degree the nerd test picked up.

Blizzard may tout the BattleTAG features as allowing you to chat with your friends across games – but it doesn’t allow you to socialise within the game beyond a simple one-to-one chat. Only after playing Diablo for a week or so, and after a couple of comments made by friends does it become clear the huge magnitude of the failure of the BattleTAG system – in failing to allow us to communicate as a group.

Sure, as a group we all swapped BattleTAGs on our WoW guild forums, and looked forward to playing together in D3. But now that we’re in D3, there is absolutely no way to chat together as a ‘guild’. There’s no guild functionality, fine, so no g chat. But you can’t even create a custom channel to chat in (as you could in the old d2 menu), so there’s no way we can coordinate together when we’ll be online that week, or how we’re enjoying the game, or what items we find that might be useful to share… or any of the other host of things a group of like-minded players want to do IN GAME.

What the hell is BattleTAG even for other than a simple presence/join-my-game indicator? I can’t even use a ‘to all my friends’ chat command like I could in D2. I’m just dumbfounded that I can’t chat with my group of D3 friends without leaving it to a separate tool like Vent/MSN…

How can I be simultaneously appalled by the lack of privacy AND by the lack of communication inherent in this tool?

More ability combinations

As we cleared through, I tried to collect as many screenies of boss/champ ability combinations as I could, just to record which mob modifiers we saw. I’ve compiled these below with a rough indication of damage, and how avoidable these attacks are by themselves. Once these abilities appear in combination with others, some can become very difficult to avoid, I haven’t noted that here. Also, some of these are much harder to avoid when you are melee, and I’m playing as ranged.

Note that a champ pack will share all of the same abilities. A boss will have one or more abilities and its minions will have a subset as well. On Nightmare it often seemed that the minions would have one or two of the two boss abilities, so it varied how painful they were.

Damage based:

• Electrified – aoe lightning around mob. Moderate damage, semi-avoidable
• Mortar – throw bombs at range. High damage, mostly avoidable
• Desecrated – small circular patches of fire on the ground. high damage, moistly avoidable
• Molten – trails fire. Moderate damage, mostly avoidable
• Frozen – frost bombs randomly over a large area that explode after. Moderate damage plus stun, mostly avoidable
• Fire chains – linked by chains to their brethren. Moderate damage, mostly avoidable.
• Arcane enchanted – rotating arcane blades. High damage, mostly avoidable
• Plagued – drop poison circles at their feet. Moderate damage, mostly avoidable (as these circles are largeish, it is difficult for melee to attack without moving the mob)

Movement based mob abilities:

• Waller – randomly throws walls up around the players. Block movement and line of sight
• Jailer – small red circle around the player that roots. Blocks movement, but not line of sight
• Fast – these guys are… fast
• Vortex – teleports the player to the mob
• Teleporter – teleport to the player
• Knockback – knocks the player away from the mob

Other abilities:

• Extra health – the mob has higher health than a normal champ/boss
• Horde – the boss has more minions than a normal boss (assuming champs can’t have this?)
• Shielding – occasionally self casts an invulnerability shield
• Vampiric – damage done to the player heals the mob
• Illusionist – occasionally splits into multiple ‘mirror images’ that attack but have much less health
• Reflects damage – a (smallish?) percentage of the player’s damage is reflected back to the player
• Nightmarish – mob attacks can cause the player to run in fear

I think that’s everything we’ve seen so far.

The combination we had the most trouble with was this one:

Oh vampiric plagued fallen angel champs, how we hated you.

These fallen angel champs were the sort to fly around randomly EXCEPT when we wanted to move them out of their plague spots. Also, we had Tyrael ‘helping’ us at this stage, and he LOVED to stand in the plague. And, as we eventually discovered, damage done by the plague also heals them. So we spent a good 20 minutes trying to kite these guys around, with Tyrael helpfully holding them in their plagues so Shigeko couldn’t get in there, also while pulling extra mobs the whole time (I think we cleared the whole room before we finished these guys off… all the time with them healing themselves back to full.

This became another peeling/kiting exercise, in which we picked one of them to dps hard, disengaging and trying to pull them out every time they dropped a plague, untill one by one we killed them all. So we didn’t die that often (maybe once or twice each) but it took forever getting the positioning and focus fire we needed. And yes, Tyrael. Thanks mate.

Then it was onto Diablo, who was easier on Nightmare than on Normal for us. Maybe just because we knew the fight this time.

Sparklies!

And onto Hell. FWIW we were level 51 when we finished Nightmare, with about 15-20k health (I’m a glass cannon) and 1300-1800 dps according to our character sheets.