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DIABLO 3 » v2.0 - A turn for the worse?
Posted by Roguey on Saturday 18th January, 2014     0 comments

Today I have been reading up on the changes in the next patch, v2.0 which is going to change the game majorly. This is free patch will change the gameplay, skills, items and more. You may wonder why go to all the effort of changing the game now? Well, it's in preparation of the new add-on; Reaper of souls (due later) – if you havnt heard about it (but im sure you have).

So you might be wondering what has changed exactly? Well on the official site, you can find the patch changes here. In summary, most characters have had changes the most noticeable ones being that both the wizard critical mass build and the infinite fury whirlwind builds are no longer possible (due to changes). For some this will come as welcome news, whilst others will hate the new decisions. Myself I am not keen seeing things removed - I know the CM builds were very powerful / popular. Ive been using a CM build a lot myself recently. So I thought it was a go on the public testing realm (PTR) and try out it.

The first thing which hit me was all the changes to the user-interface. Some things have been moved around, whilst others like the difficultly settings have changed completely. There is no longer a normal, nightmare, hell and inferno modes but Normal, Hard, Expert, Master and Torment (1 to 6); and Monster-power is gone. For many, this is bound to be confusing at first. These difficultly-levels will vary the strength of the monsters, whilst scaling to your level. Potentially this makes the game much shorter, saving players from going around the game 4 times.




One good addition to the game is guilds. You can now join a guild and talk to other members, something which was missing in the original release. Joining a guild should make it easier to find other people to play with, as your only option before was your friend's list.

So let's look at the loot-system now (one of the most important things in the game). In previous versions, you had a warm-up (as such) where you killed 5 elite monsters to gain the maximum nephalem valor bonus. This meant you gained a large boost to your magical find (75%) and usually meant better rewards. This meant players felt had to stick-around (to me this was a good idea), however in v2.0 the whole nephalem valor perk has been removed. This can make the game feel a bit more drop-in/drop-out as players won't feel committed in staying in 'slow' games. The new loot system also states that items will be tailored to your character, rather than being random. Again.. This has two sides to it; one its good that items will be for your character but equally could mean its difficult to find stuff for other classes. With the removal of the auction site, it's going to make trading of them 'good but not for me' items near impossible. The system promises to drop less junk. Once again this as two sides to it; its nice to know there is stuff dropping but equally better quality items would be nice (99% of the stuff was just rubbish).



So, the next thing after the loot-system is magical-find. In the Diablo series magical find is very important, improving your chances of getting something good. Paragon levels were added later, allowing players something to work towards after level 60; a way of increasing damage and allowing players to remove magical find equipment. Each paragon level added a small amount of magical-find, and meant in the long-term you could remove all your magical find-equipment. Now in v2.0 Paragon levels have changed completely. Firstly Paragon levels are account bound rather than per character. However they no longer add magical find, but Paragon points. These points can be spent like skill-points, into certain things like improving your health, armour or movement speed etc. This is a great way of being able to change your character finally… however this could mean the game forces you to grind endless paragon levels (since they are unlimited now). You will also see a massive drop in magical-find (forcing you to re-use your magical-find equipment) because the Paragon levels don't really help with magical find any-more (apart from one paragon skill type).



So next, how does combat fair? Well, first glance with my Demon Hunter is that the life-steal property has been reduced greatly. In pre-v2.0 I could usually leech enough life from Shadow-power without any extra runes. Now in v2.0 (with the Blood-rune selected) I struggle to get enough health to come in. However this is a fairly common thing, forcing players to focus more on defence than attack. So you will probably see a lot more deaths in Diablo. It's a nice touch you can resurrect at corpse now, but once again this can make team-play less important (why wait for someone to resurrect you, when you can yourself).




To me, these changes feel the game now been optimized for drop-in/drop-out game-play, rather than long term players. Its nice there is a new gem class (Diamond), but I would of preferred the return of rune-words. Maybe I could change my mind over a longer period of time, but there doesn't feel much pull any-more (especially knowing all your level 63 items will be classed as junk when reaper of souls hits). It feels to me that the grind-feast has been extended rather than improve the over-al structure of the game. Maybe things will change between public release?

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Site activity during the past 3 months
Posted by Roguey on Saturday 11th January, 2014     0 comments

Well during the past few months we seen quite a change in the site activity - linked to the release of X-Rebirth no doubt. However after the release, I noticed a slow decrease until things more or less returned back to normal. I know the reason why, however I wanted to share with you how this site faired. So the first graph is the amount of people visiting the site (as you can see there is a large increase around Nov - x7 times);



So since the site was under a lot more stress, the next question is how did it effect the site being under all that stress? At the launch of X-Rebirth you may of seen the official site die because of the traffic (admittedly they were dealing with more traffic).. however this site appeared to carry on without any problems (even dealing with 7 times more traffic). Below is the average page load time during the same period;



I always tried to make my code fast and powerful, and to me these graphs improve I did it right. Basically these graphs say that the site didnt struggle with the extra traffic, as the load times were unaffected.

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DUKE NUKEM: FOREVER » Glitch insane difficultly
Posted by Roguey on Thursday 2nd May, 2013     0 comments

If like me, you started to pull your hair-out when trying to complete Duke Nukem: Forever on Insane (or very hard difficultly), then this may help.

Quite often you can walk into a area, you can be killed in a mere second then forced to wait 30 seconds for the game to reload (especially on the consoles). After a few tries, the load time gets very annoying. The end-boss is very annoying having no check-points between the battle. However this glitch works with him, as there are a check-point before and after.

This glitch basically allows you to play most of the game with God-mode on and Instant-kill enabled. You will need to unlock the cheats by completing the game on normal.

Background on the glitch
The glitch works between check-points (when the save icon/text appears at the bottom right). However you can not pass two or three checkpoints without reseting the glitch, otherwise the current game will be flagged with cheat and you wont complete the level on insane.

Using the glitch

1. Select your chapter, and the difficultly on Damn, I'm Good and start-game,
2. Play as little, or as much as you like until you hit hard secton,
3. Quit the game,
4. Go into the cheats menu and enable: God-mode and Instant-gib,
5. Go back to the chapters, then select resume game,
6. Now do the hard selection, and keep an eye out for the save icon/text,
7. When you see the save icon/text, quit game quickly.
8. Go back into the chapter screen, and resume game (the cheats will be turned off).
9. Carry-on with no cheats,

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10. If you get stuck again, repeat from step 3.

If there is no more check-points (as its the end of level), go into the cheats menu (in-game) and turn them off before you trigger the next level.

If the level is a two/three part, turn the cheats off when the screen starts to dim (or go black), then repeat from step 3 (when the next part is loaded).

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Enjoy

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BORDERLANDS 2 » Searching for Jimmy Jenkins
Posted by Roguey on Wednesday 20th March, 2013     0 comments

For the past few days I have been hunting a guy called Jimmy Jenkins in Borderlands 2. Jimmy Jenkins is a miniature found when opening certain ammo crates, in a few locations. He is the rarest miniature, so the chances are you will find the others many times before finding Jimmy. Here is the places you can find him:

- Wildlife Preservation,
- Opportunity,
- Thousand Cuts (Hyperion Expansion),
- Hero's Pass,

I have spent awhile(at-least 20+ hours) doing ammo crate runs in Opportunity without no luck. I did find a few miniatures however but not Jimmy (probably every other miniature). I also did a few runs in Hero's pass but that was even worse, I never found even one miniature there.

So I thought I'll try in Wildlife Preservation, on Vault-Hunter-Mode, with the Doctor's Order quest selected (2/4 unfortunately (I thought it had to be 1/4)); as said it's easier to find Jimmy there. I don't have the arena DLC (which is said to be a requirement; although it just saves time reaching a special set of boxes). It can take you 7-8mins to reach these boxes without, as you need to run from the start of Wildlife Preservation each time.



When you reach the boxes, make sure you kill all hostile monsters (Skaggs etc.) before opening the boxes, and open one box at a time. On my first attempt I saw 3 miniatures popup out of the 4 boxes (pretty good eh?). After 10-20 runs he finally popped up. The runs combined took around 1-2 hours to do.



So if you're looking for Jimmy, I wouldn't suggest doing the ammo crate run in Opportunity unless thats all you can do. You do have a chance of finding him when doing ammo-box runs but odds are very low. I suggest, read-up and do the box run in Wildlife Preservation. Good luck, hope that helps anyone trying to find Jimmy.

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DIABLO 3 » Diablo 3 v1.07 fewer legendary items
Posted by Roguey on Monday 18th February, 2013     3 comments

When v1.07 came out I was excited to about many of the new additions to the game; like public games with monster power (a bit over-due tbh), new crafting recipes and improvements to monk/wizard classes. So during the past few days I have been getting back into Diablo 3.

The new crafting recipes act like resource sinks, eating up a lot of spare resources that ive been collecting since Diablo 3 came out (good idea). However these recipes also eat your up money. This isn’t usually too big of problem as I do normally make quite good money from it.. well, before v1.07 came out.

I have farmed Act1/3 countless times on MP1 upto 6 during a few days now. I find very few legendary items now since v1.07 came out. It can be anything from 4 or 5 runs before I see a single legendary item now. Before v1.07 I used to see one or two legendary items every 2 or 3 runs (sometimes I was lucky and got 2 in a single run). Now; at one stage I went over 28 million experience before I saw a single legendary item (with 400% MF) - farming act 3 (over and over, just killing elites and avoiding white monsters as much as possible).

I have always ran at the maximum magical find (with my helper with magical find items too). In the picture below, I am running at 475% mf (MP4) yet found rubbish items during the whole of act 1. Not that I expect something during a single run, however to do 4 or 5 runs through act 3 (MP1) before, without a single legendary either isn’t much fun.



Im not saying I expect a legendary item every time, just that im finding it very hard work to find any legendary items now. I don’t know whats happened to my game but it feels like hit a permanent spell of bad luck in it now, maybe its just me? If you’re finding the same thing please add your comment below and let me know! Are you too finding less legendary since v1.07 came out?