Blizzard has just released the first of some hotfixes that will go out for Diablo III. These ongoing fixes are meant to help balance out each of the character classes. With balance, though, comes nerfing, and that’s exactly what the developer has done. Of course, players are less than thrilled with the outcome.

The first fix has reduced the effectiveness of the Monk’s Boon of Protection rune. It used to offer protection to players being healed by Mantra of Healing. According to Blizzard the rune was “approximately ten times over its budget on the benefits provided, and it was quite simply a mistake on our part to let the rune ship as it was.”  Apparently they plan to issue a lasting fix sometime in the future, but for now it’s been nerfed so bad that players aren’t even using it.

As for the Wizard and Demon Hunter, they’ve had their Force Armor and Smoke Screen skills nerfed for less power. Smoke Screen lasts for a lot less time than it used to before. If you’re not coupling it with the rune that extends its duration, the skill is now practically unusable. For players who are attempting Hell and Inferno difficulties, your strategy has been reduced to kiting enemies around to avoid attacks and damage. The enemies are already overpowered, and these changes won’t help at all.

Blizzard’s Diablo III forums are being lit up by aggravated players, most of them who play the Monk class. The developer claims that their issue is with players relying on the same skills, but the argument in return is that these skills, such as the Mantra of Healing and Boon of Protection combo, are the best chance at support the Monk had on higher difficulties. Some are even saying that they can’t pass Act I with the way things are, even before the nerfs went into effect.

Personally if Blizzard is upset about certain skills being overused, I think they should buff the bad skills. Don’t take what works and break it, fix what doesn’t work and move on. The developer commented on their decision saying, “Class balance is an ongoing investigation, and by no means do we believe the game is now perfect, but we’re also seeing evidence that supports the Monk and Barbarian are not as bad off as they seem. The game is young, there were some skills that threw things out of what, and we expect the landscape to settle out a bit more evenly. Or at least change again so we can continue to monitor the impact. Maybe we’re wrong, maybe there’s no current chance for Monk or Barbarian to compete with ranges, but our current suspicion is that’s incorrect and until we know for sure we’re not going to turn any dials.”

This is definitely some defensive attitude that Blizzard is sporting on the issue. I don’t think that nerfing good skills instead of buffing bad ones is the right way to go, but the developer will do what they want. Taking away the single skillset that makes the Monk’s support build stand doesn’t make too much sense. Players seem to agree with this line of thinking as well. Of course balancing characters, skills, and overall gameplay for a title where players will pretty much be spending their every waking moment will always cause some controversy. The thing is, players who are attempting Hell and Inferno are already having their heads explode. Why make that tougher?

The pandaren are a new race being introduced with the upcoming Mists of Pandaria expansion for World of Warcraft. Currently the expansion’s beta is underway, and we’re receiving updated news about the game as the weeks draw on. This week we have gotten word of what the new race’s mount will be, and it’s a bit surprising. The pandaren mount will be a Dragon Turtle.

I know what you’re thinking, “Raine, how in the world will this mount even make sense? Turtles are slow, aren’t they?” You ask the same questions as many others, young grasshopper. There are a lot of players who think this mount simply doesn’t make sense even in the Pandaria setting. Others, however, think the mount just looks cool.

Apparently the pandaren have long been looking for a mount that embodies their core values: patience and strength. The Dragon Turtle has armored hide, stoutness, and a relaxed attitude that welcomes long journeys. This animal is indigenous to Pandaria, thus making treks across the island feel just like another walk in the park. It will be outfitted with maps, cushions, footstools, and even some brew storage for those hardy adventurers.

Now the second question comes into mind: how fast will it be? Though the description on the original post claims that it’s got a “slow, even stride,” I think the mount will work much the same as the Kodo mounts do for the Tauren. It will move to scale with other mounts, but do so with ease. I think the Dragon Turtle is pretty sweet, and I’d love to have one.

Over this past weekend Diablo III players were lighting up the forums with more issues about the game, though these weren’t your run-of-the-mill server issues. According to the messages, tons of players were chiming in claiming that all of their gold and items had disappeared. After conducting some research, it looks like some players’ accounts were hacked, which caused the major issue.

Diablo III servers did go offline for a bit over the weekend, spanning up to a four-hour outage in some areas. Some rumors have spread about the outage being a result of a SQL injection attack, though this theory is unconfirmed as of right now. Some of the theories on the forums suggest that the session identifiers were hacked, allowing hackers to take over any account without alerting Blizzard’s authentication server. Though the developer does offer Authenticators, accounts using them have fell victim to the attack as well.

There’s no pinpointed cause to the attack, but Blizzard is working to address the situation. Many players have been left with nothing, having all of their rare items and personal stashes wiped totally clean. Could this be an actual hack? Was it a bug result of server maintenance? Right now we don’t know, and we’re waiting for Blizzard to issue a statement. Were you one of the victims of the attack?

To say that the Diablo III launch was a bit rough would be a vast understatement. From watching the forums and their Twitter accounts, it’s been obvious that Blizzard has been working hard to get things sorted out. However, they have finally released a public statement apologizing for the issues, and outlining a few of the things they are working on. The full statement is as follows:

Diablo Players:

We’d like to extend a very sincere thank you to everyone who joined the global Diablo III launch celebrations this week, as well as to everyone who was ready to jump into Sanctuary the moment the game went live.

To that end, we’d also like to say that we’ve been humbled by your enthusiasm — and we sincerely regret that your crusade to bring down the Lord of Terror was thwarted not by mobs of demons, but by mortal infrastructure. As many of you are aware, technical issues occurring within hours after the game’s launch led to players experiencing error messages and difficulty logging in. These issues cropped up again last night for the Americas and Europe servers. Despite very aggressive projections, our preparations for the launch of the game did not go far enough.

We’ve been monitoring the game 24/7 and have applied several optimizations to help our systems better weather the global rush. As of late last night, specifically 11:50 PM PDT on May 15, all systems have been online and running relatively smoothly. We’re continuing to monitor performance globally and will be taking further measures as needed to ensure a positive experience for everyone. This includes some maintenance to implement additional improvements for each region.
In order to make sure everything is continuing to run as it should, we’ve decided to move out our target launch for the real-money auction house beyond our original estimated date of May 22. We’ll post further updates on that in the near future.

Aside from the tremendous number of players simultaneously logging in to the game, one of the launch-day service issues was linked to the achievement system. Some players began to notice early on that achievements were either not being earned properly, or not being saved between multiple logins. We’re investigating this issue and will provide a specific update as soon as possible.

We greatly appreciate everyone’s support, and we want to sincerely apologize for the difficulties many of you encountered on day one. Please visit the Battle.net Support site or Support forums for the latest service-related updates or for help in troubleshooting any technical issues you may be having downloading, installing, or while playing the game.

Thank you again for your patience while we reinforce the gates of Sanctuary and further strengthen it for your onslaught.

Respectfully,

Blizzard Entertainment.

Apologies are nice, but for many players, it’s not going to be enough to change their minds about the launch. Personally, I’ve been fortunate enough to not experience any issues once I was able to login a couple hours after launch. It’s the people still experiencing issues with achievements and lag that I feel bad for.

As for the real-money auction house, I’m not sure that many people are too troubled about it yet. I’m still not sure how I feel about the whole thing. I do like the idea of being able to sell off unneeded items for a little extra cash, but I imagine the market is going to be flooded with people who do little more than grind for items the way we see people grinding for gold to sell in MMO’s. We’ll let you know when there is a new date for the auction house to roll out.

Players from all over the world have been upset by the Diablo III servers going down for emergency maintenance. This brought to the surface the huge argument regarding the game making use of the always-on DRM, and frustrations were pushed to the boiling point. Even players who just wanted to play the game on single-player weren’t able to login, and it was a catastrophe.

Since the launch of Diablo III there have been numerous errors spotted by players, ranging from login issues to random quitting mid-game. Players have logged on to forums and other various sites all over the net and made their frustrations clear about the game. One of those specific sites just happens to be the Metacritic site, where Diablo III’s average score rating has shot down tremendously due to flaming reviews.

Right now Diablo III has just about 2000 reviews total on the site and an average score of around 3.5. The negative reviews popping up point towards the game’s DRM, though some of them lash out at poor graphics and “cookie cutter” gameplay. Right now the main issue is the fact that many players paid for a game that they simply cannot play. There are some people out there who are saying Diablo III isn’t a single-player game, but in my opinion it really is. If you’ve read the stories on the characters and follow the lore, the game is really about a singular hero. I love playing online with friends, so don’t get me wrong. When it comes to sides, I am leaning more towards the gamers on this one, which is easy to see. I still think Blizzard should have put more thought in the DRM process and had the game better suited to perform at launch. After all, they’ve had 12 years.

Here are a few reviews from the site, for your viewing pleasure, saving the best for last:

Ashin:                                                                                                                                                                

If you want a watered down, pay2win piece of junk, Diablo 3 is just the ultimate game in this regards. Don’t expect to find a game reminiscent of the jewels such as Diablo 1+2 (actually made by different people). Only saving grace is… no wait I can’t think of one.

Cur8r:

Diablo 3 is everything wrong with the industry, the price is higher than normal because the greedy developers knew people would still buy it, the gameplay is stagnated and boring, and is an overtly simplified version of the previous game, the graphics cartoonish and soulless. It requires constant online connection to play, and has legalised the Pay2Win auction house.

Le_monk:

helo i this this game is bad caus le monky fa, and not gut pvp n stuf so i hop it be beter soon so i can buy and pley this game pls no buy it no good now

Diablo III released yesterday and it’s all over the community. Whether it’s players who have already shot through the game or those who can’t even start it, there’s still plenty to talk about. I was able to attend a release event Monday night for the game and it turned out to be a blast. I came back home and got my install on, and I’ve been playing through the beginning of the game, which is pretty much the same as what was offered in the beta, though there are a few different features.

Since the game has released and many players will be trying out different things, I wanted to get a post up about my initial run through the game. My aim is to offer tips and hints that may help new players as well as those who are looking to get into the game. So, with that said, let’s get right to it.

For my first run through Diablo III I chose the Demon Hunter. I chose it mostly because it’s a neat-looking class, but also because Demon Hunter happens to be one of my favorite bands. I played this class through the beta and of all the classes available it seems the most versatile.  Not to mention it’s a really fun class to play, especially when in a party.

Demon Hunters are small in number. They live to hunt demons for countless days on in the hopes of saving lives. They believe that even if they can save one life the world will be better for it. Demon Hunters are plagued by nightmares of claws tearing flesh and men and women being drowned in their own blood. They are at war with themselves, using both Hatred and Discipline to govern their daily lives. Hatred burns within them to fuel their maddening attacks, tipping each arrow with a bit of spite, and their Discipline serves them well to take caution at those around them so that they may live to see, and kill, another day.

Through the beginning levels you’re just going to be shooting stuff. Just keep your distance from enemies and continue to lob arrows into them relentlessly. The Demon Hunter has a great beginning skill called Hungering Arrow which attacks enemies and bounces off of them. This makes crowd control a bit easier when dealing with mobs. As long as you stay at a safe distance from enemies you shouldn’t have a problem.

As you level, though, notice that your attacks won’t do as much damage and enemies will require more shots to defeat. This is important because it makes you stay on the move. Holding down Shift will allow you to shoot from a standing position, and it’s a good tactic to use so you’re not click-running all over the place to get to enemies. What you’ll want to do, however, is know your limit. When an enemy begins to close the gap between the both of you, either retreat to a safe distance away or circle around the enemy and continue to fire. Using the circling method helps keep the distance tight between you while preventing you from wandering too far away from your starting point.

You’ll soon gain a different type of primary attack called Entangling Shot which works a bit differently than Hungering Arrow. If I remember right, this skill wasn’t available in the beta. Instead of hitting multiple enemies this arrow has the ability to snare, or slow down, up to two enemies at once. I’ve found that this skill is helpful when fighting larger enemies though it really hinders you when going against multiple enemies at once. The added snare feature can sometimes work when needing to slow enemies down, but I found it much more useful to just bounce attacks between them and kill them quicker than it is to snare them at all with a shot.

Another thing is that the Demon Hunter gets an ability called Caltrops which is a snare all on its own. You basically set a trap down on the ground which will activate when enemies walk over it. This will slow all enemies for a rate of 60% within 12 yards of the trap. With this ability at your disposal you don’t really need to make use of Entangling Shot. You can just run up, pop Caltrops, then run back and bounce your Hungering Arrows off the slowed enemies. It’s a much better recipe for destruction.

The next skill in your arsenal is Rapid Fire. This skill is amazing and comes very much in handy. Using this skill will allow you to rapidly fire arrows for 228% the normal rate. This skill makes mowing down weaker enemies a cinch, and it really helps to get you out of tight situations. When you’re being overwhelmed by enemies or trapped in a corner just spam this skill and make a break to safety. You can then pelt arrows back at enemies while your Hatred meter refills and unleash again when the time is right.

These are some of the skills you’ll receive in the early levels of the game that will help you through the first part of Act I. This is where I’ve come to take a break in my game so these tips are what I’ve got to offer at this point. I hope you find them helpful, and are enjoying the Demon Hunter class as much as I am. Do you have any tips of your own? If so, post them below! I’ll be back soon with another post full of Demon Hunter tips.

With Blizzard’s decision to require an “always-on” internet connection for Diablo III, that’s left a lot of people understandably upset. Since the launch last night, the frustration has only mounted. What with server timeouts and two sets of maintenance preventing people for playing for several hours at a time.

Since most people do have a connection that’s always on, it really shouldn’t be that big of a deal, once the server issues are sorted. The only trouble you’ll encounter is if you suddenly do get disconnected. What if you just looted a shiny new set of boots that you’ve been needing? Will they be gone when you get back? Where will your character load?

If you haven’t been brave enough to test this yet, it’s okay. Eurogamer has tested this for you, and even recorded a video of it. They discovered that anything that is done before the connection drops is saved. Upon reconnection, you will find every piece of gold and every item sitting nicely in your inventory. Your character won’t be in the same spot, but rather will be located at the last checkpoint, as with any normal disconnection.

As of only a few short minutes ago, the Diablo III servers are back up for gaming! After launching at 3:01 EDT, Diablo III has been plagued with problems affecting game play. With potentially hundreds of thousands or even millions of people trying to log into the servers and play, it appears that the servers weren’t quite up to snuff.

That’s why for about an hour Blizzard shut down the Diablo III servers in order to do some emergency maintenance to fix the plethora of problems. Most were along the lines of “Servers are full” errors, but some game breaking issues were found, including the infamous Error 3006. Error 3006 happened whenever somebody would trade equipped items with their Templar sidekick, which would cause your local copy of the game to be desynced from Blizzard’s servers, and thus keep you from entering their servers.

However, Blizzard at least thinks that they’ve got the issue fixed for the moment. At this point, the only thing that’s going to keep the servers from overloading is time, as people quit trying to rush into the servers, and start settling into more normal patterns. Hopefully, none of us will encounter an Error 37 (Servers are Busy) when we log in!

After many hours of differing problems, from error messages out the wazoo, to problems involving inventory management with your Templar sidekick, Blizzard took down the servers for Diablo III for “emergency maintenance”. They said that the maintenance will be for about an hour, and that the servers should be back up by 3:30 PDT. However, because of some of the problems plaguing the game since it was launched almost 15 hours ago, I wouldn’t be too surprised if the servers are down for a longer period of time.

Many of the bugs that people are encountering are your standard “servers are full” bugs, but there are a few other nasty ones popping up. Error 3006 occurs whenever a person trades equipped items with their Templar follower, and caused your copy of Diablo III to desync with Blizzard’s servers. That prevents you from even being able to log back into the server, and thus keep you from playing your game.

Frustrating, yes, but these things happen when you have a game that’s a sequel to one of the most popular games of the previous decade. Despite the stress test Blizzard ran a few weeks ago with their Open Beta Weekend, it doesn’t seem to have been enough. Now all we can do is wait, and try to be productive people for at least another half hour!

UPDATE: It appears that the servers are back up! Get crackin’!

Though the game has only been out on the East Coast for about 8 hours now, there’s already been a player who has stormed through the campaign. This player is Yoshichan, who has finished the game in just 12 hours and 29 minutes. Yoshichan’s character is a level 32 Barbarian.

Yoshichan posted his stats for the final game on NeoGAF, which show his character in all its glory. In his comments on the character he used in the game, Yoshichan says, “Frenzy baba with lots and lots of mobility and defensive skills – 415 dps unbuffed. ~700 dps buffed.” He defeated the game on its Normal setting.

That being said, Diablo III comes in four difficulty levels: Normal, Nightmare, Hell, and Inferno. There’s also a Hardcore feature which means simply: if your character dies, no matter what level they are, they die forever and are gone for good. Yoshichan is now setting his sights on Nightmare, and I imagine he’ll run all the way through each difficulty as soon as he can. I personally plan to take my time and make this a nice, pacing process. I didn’t wait 12 years to blast through the game in half a day’s play time.