Betas

I've been playing the Diablo 3 and Mists of Pandaria Betas, so I figured I'd talk about those some.

D3 is fun, no doubt. I really dig the classes and while you often feel like there is no way you'll ever get killed, it's easy to get overconfident and realize how insanely wrong you are about that. I haven't died much, once you figure out how to pull and fall back when you get enough mobs on you, it's very manageable. I need to try Barbarian though, so far Wizard and Demon Hunter have gotten most of my play time, and both are primarily ranged classes with some point blank escape abilities. I imagine a pure melee class is a bit more hectic in the fray.

My biggest gripe is that you're very limited about what abilities you can hot-key. They only give you a few keys to begin with, and on top of it you can only bind certain abilities to certain keys. The beta only lets you go up to level 13 or so (haven't capped it out yet) but very early on I started seeing issues. They put utility spells on the same key are main nuke abilities, forcing you to choose between a reliable high damage ability, or something like a snare, or a target-less random AoE spell. None of that would be so bad, except there is no quick way to swap those abilities out, and even if you do swap them manually, the new spell is on Cooldown for a few seconds. Maybe as you level up and get more spells this is less of an issue, but it's a little peculiar to me. Right now I'm largely ignoring the new spells they're giving me and just using the main spells I get near the start.

The sound and ambiance is spot on though, it feels like a real dungeon crawl all game through, and love the sounds the creatures make. Know what else is pretty cool? Booby traps in the dungeons. It's definitely fun, and since I got it free from the WoW annual pass, I'll be playing it, but I can't say I would have bought it if I got into the Beta before buying it.

In a lot of ways it plays just like Torchlight, which makes sense since Torchlight is a Diablo clone, but you'd think the long awaited D3 would have some more tricks up it's sleeve. I suppose expected more.

On a related note, Torchlight 2 will be released sometime later this year, intentionally later than Diablo 3 so they don't go head to head with Blizz. The Mac port will come some time after that, but no relative date on that yet.

I'll be doing another, longer post later about Mists of Pandaria when I get a chance. I'm not home right now, so I don't have access to my screen shots, which I'd like to share. In short, Mists is fun. Despite the complaining of quite a few people regarding the new Talent system I found myself putting more time into my 5 choices than I have put into the 30+ choices the old system gave us since I first started playing. I also feel that the reworked Glyph system plays a bigger role in customizing your character than it did before. They give you some hard choices that will help you customize your game play to your liking. Oh, and the minor glyphs now are just plain fun. Glyph of Polymorph makes it so your Poly lasts 24 hours on critters, so I spent half an hour turning all the squirrels in Stormwind and all the frogs in Darnassus into turtles, pigs, sheep and rabbits.

Frost Mage in PvE is very fun, no small part of which is due to the interaction between frost orb and the new Cleave mechanic Ice Lance has been given. Holy Paladin healing isn't bad, but there seems to be an issue with mouse over macros (possibly all macros) on the Mac which makes healing reliably a real pain when you're as addicted to mouse overs as I am. I failed 2 groups twice trying to work it out, it was shameful. I'd like to report on the state of Druid tanking, seeing that it's a hot topic, but since the character copy gave me 2 copies of my Paladin and none of my Druid, and I'm out of copies, I can't. Hopefully they'll get premades working soon, and I can give my bear a shot.

There is definitely a longer MoP posting coming soon enough.

I applaud Blizzard and Runic Games for doing a real Mac Port of their games, as opposed to cheating like some other developers are doing these days. But I'll go on about my feelings regarding Cider in a future post.

Upcoming Posts:
Mists of Pandaria
Cider is Bullshit (did I ruin it?)

So stay tuned, kids! Oh, who am I kidding, all the hits I've gotten so far are web crawlers.