Pugnacious Priest's Warcraft Blog

Our GM was kind enough to canx Wednesday nights raid so we could play D3.  I don’t think anyone in guild has admitted to not playing it. It’s so very quite in the streets of Azeroth. It’s worse than when various people vacated for Star Wars or Rift.

We managed to start Thursday nights raid with 23 people, and eventually collected our 25 but everyone was on edge.  They wanted to play Diablo, not raid and it became as our gm said one of those raid nights ” we shall never speak of again” as people’s hearts and minds were certainly elsewhere.

My D3 adventures so far involve me rolling a Witch Doctor first  – I played around with a few classes in the beta and even though it does look a little messy I love the stuff they throw.  It’s like a mega perpetual hissy fit, throwing jars of spiders, flaming bats, and toads.

The Witch doctor is the new noob player.  It hasn’t seem to cause group issues yet, but my Zombie dogs agro radius seems to be outside my screen and one of the earlier areas this caused a little bit of grief when I was getting charged by these massive beasts, attacked by buffaloes, and strangled by trees all at the same time.

I have friends playing, but now some of them have shot past me leveling wise, ( darn you people with more time.. ) so grouping has proven hit and miss depending on who is where.   I know its not a MMO,  and I miss the feeling that your never alone in a MMO even if its the trade troll ( and general chat option on didn’t help) everyone is playing in their own little universes right now, and it’s a little disconnecting.  I find it a much more immersive story wise though,  my experience is better if I can hear the journals as I play.  It means however music/2nd screen other entertainment needs to be  a lower volume.

There were lots of people needing to readjust to not clicking to move once they got back to wow, and I had some difficulty adjusting to clicking to move in D3. Getting used to now holding down the shift button when I’m spamming attack and clicking things all over the place, and putting myself in the middle of the mobs because I clicked the ground in my clicking frenzy.

I also worry more about RSI in d3- we don’t talk much about how long periods of gaming can affect the body when we play, and once upon a time when it was end of financial year at work, and I was doing a lot of spreadsheets and numbers for long long hours without proper breaks and I got RSI in one of my wrists to the point it was clicking when I moved it, it was a horrible feeling, like it was going to fall off at any moment and one I never wanted to repeat .  So I am more conscious of the fact that if I am doing the same thing for long periods of time I need to have a real break, and I found that it is easy to do the same kind of movements over and over again in D3,

Aussies were lucky – US midnight launch was our 5pm  and by the time I got home from work around 7ish,  set up the install,  pottered around a little it was ready to play ( with no errors for me) in less than half an hour.

But Alas our Thursday night raid ended with the happy idea that we could all seek the embrace of the new  temporary method of excitement,  in the arms of D3 – only to find that there was a 2 hour maintenance ( was supposed to be 1 and finish by raid end. BUT Noooooo

and so you get a blog post, and I go to bed early.