Diablo 3: Monster Power and stuff

Oh hi there!

So, over the past few months there has been a lot going on in my life that I won't go into here. Needless to say my posting had been infrequent and that's something that I have been addressing! Hooray for me. The outlook is looking quite a lot better than it has for a while, but I can honestly say I am nowhere near saying that all is rosey and perfect. There is still a lot that can be better but I am doing my best to make that happen.

What have I been doing gaming wise? Well, I guess the first thing to mention is that I am getting a new pc. It's getting delivered on Tuesday and I am super excited, more excited than an average 30 something year old should be at getting a new pc. I might post up some specs if you are interested but for the most part I guess its safe to say that it's pretty okay and it will hopefully enable me to get started on a new project related to gaming.

I picked up Diablo 3 again a few nights ago unfortunately it was on a maintenance night so I was unable to play any of the characters that I have worked not very hard on! So I swapped over to the US servers and decided to try a new character.. a female Barbarian. I figured why not, since I already have a level 60 Barb and kinda know and like the play style.. So I started playing and then remembered about something called Monster Power.

What is Monster Power? Well it was introduced back in October 2012 and basically it increases monster health and damage but also increases your magic/gold find and experience gain. I don't think I was in one of my D3 phases at that point and when I got back into it I couldn't figure out how to change it! To the point where(bearing in mind I hadn't read anything about it) I thought that I might have to have completed inferno on the character in order to enable it.

So I had a revelation when I changed over to the US servers for this new character, for some reason I opened up the options while in the game and noticed the option to turn it on! If you're interested, it can be found in the Gameplay section of the options menu. Once ticked, the next time you change the quest that you are on, you'll see that you have a new option - next to the difficulty level. For more information about Monster Power, you should check out the D3 Blog post about it here.

On the level 6 odd Barbarian, when I changed the monster power to level 10, I noticed no real difference in the difficulty. When I next logged on, I tried this on my level 60 Monk(with ok/bad gear), monster power 10 was actually unplayable. The first mob on act 1 inferno had like 200 million hp(ok maybe not that much but it felt like it) and considering my Monk does like 40k crits.. it took like 5 minutes to kill that first mob, though I was never in any danger of dying to it! I think the highest level that it was about playable for me was roughly around Monster Power 3 or 4.

On the other hand, I have a level 26 odd Wizard that I had been meaning to level up.. so I swapped over to it and changed from Act 3 to Act 1, Quest 1 with Monster Power 10.. of course I ploughed through the first load of quests with no troubles.. I've yet to really have any problems with it but I'm still only in the first Act. I intend to write up more about the Wizard in the next couple of days, when I have played him a bit more. I actually quite like the play style of it at the moment.. lots of zappy lazers.. pew pew.

I think that's about all for now.. though keep your eyes peeled for some new content coming pretty soon after Tuesday.

Ciao for now!

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I'm awake!

Don't you just hate it when you wake up from a lovely sleep and all you want is to try and get back to sleep, but your lovely brain just won't shut the hell up?! This exact thing just happened to me. So I was lying here thinking to myself.. what should I do, since I can't sleep? Yep, you guessed it! Real Talk time!

At the moment I'm working evening shifts which means I start work between 3 and 4pm, then finish between 11pm and 12am.. I got home last night at about 12:20 in the AM last night, so we didn't end up getting food till nearly 2am.. because we discovered that what we had in the cupboards for the evening had well, kinda seen better days, if you get me.

While if it were just me, I would have said.. meh and played some game till I fell asleep ... But it isn't just me! There are several other very serious factors that must be taken into account.. like the fact that for some reason I was really REALLY hunger!! And there is my lady to consider, she needed feeding too, as she had been waiting for me to get in so we could eat together, all together now, awww.

So we looked online for places to get food delivered from.. bearing in mind its like 1am on a Monday night... So there are like 2 places open.. a mighty fine kebab shop and Dominos. We end up deciding on the latter and upon visiting their site we find out a couple of things... They are open 24/7. This is a kinda new thing at least in Cambridge... They also have started doing some new fangled thing where they feed a hot dog through the crust..

Holy moly what in the ...

Feed a what dog through the...

A hot dog in the crust of a pizza?!

Whoever thought of that needs to be knighted like yesterday.

So anyway, apart from that glorious discovery, there isn't much else that I wanted to chatter about... Oh, I actually quite enjoyed playing Aliens: Colonial Marines. I guess because I didn't read anything about what it was supposed to be, just put my headphones on and didn't pay much attention to textures and all that and just had a giggle about dying loads!

I found out the other day that another of my friends has been at this blogging lark, so why not check him out! You can find him at http://vikinggamer.wordpress.com or hit up the fancy link to his page over there on the right hand side of this post!

That's me done for the moment, time to try and sleep again!

 Ciao for now!

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Dota 2: Hero of the week

Hey again all!

So I decided after having looked up some other blogs that I perhaps needed to give the ole girl a bit of 'love'. It took me ages, even though all I basically did was change between two templates!

So, the idea behind this post was to go into more depth about one of my favourite Dota 2 heros!

That hero is Jakiro, he is what is known as a intelligence hero which means that he gains more damage for each point of intelligence he has. You can find a ton of information about him on the Dota 2 Wiki, found here.

I don't mind which lane I am in with Jakiro, though I guess going to the top or bottom lane would be best as his first ability is a path of frost which freezes all units it's path for seconds and can lead to a gib.

I should explain a little about the lanes I guess..

The above is the map that you play on, as you can see there are different paths that you can take to the enemy "base". The main paths are commonly known as lanes, people will generally call out which lane they are heading to! The set up is usually that two will go to the top, two to the bottom and one to the middle(though most people just want to go middle so they can prove how tough they are as a solo artist.

But I digress! Jakiro! I guess what I like most about him is that he's a fricken dragon dude!!! With two heads!!!! and one of them shoots fire and like, the other shoots out ice and stuff!!! How totally amazeballs!!

With regards to leveling up his skills(the explanations of which you can find on the Dota 2 Wiki I linked earlier), I tend to go along with something like the following!

Level 1: Liquid Fire
Level 2: Ice Path
Level 3: Liquid Fire
Level 4: Ice Path
Level 5: Liquid Fire
Level 6: Ice Path
Level 7: Liquid Fire
Level 8: Ice Path
Level 9: Macropyre
Level 10: Dual Breath
Level 11: Macropyre
Level 12: Dual Breath
Level 13: Dual Breath
Level 14: Dual Breath
Level 15: Stats (Intelligence)
Level 16: Macropyre
Level 17: Stats (Intelligence)

All the way to level 25, which is the max you can be, if you're interested! Also on that Wiki page is the recommended item buys, which I usually stick to..

The Liquid Fire ability helps you push the creep and the Ice Path helps set up a hero kill. Later in the game when you have a point or two in Macropyre, it's best to fire it off, then Ice Path as that will freeze the enemies in your Macropyre, then throw out a Dual Breath to add insult to injury! 

I have found that this is best used when there are two-five enemy heros all in a line chasing you/someone else. It can easily end up with you getting three plus kills in one fell swoop! 

If you would like to know anything else about play-styles or have any suggestions, let me know! You can ask a question on here or @McKnublet on twitter!

For now though, I'm off to check out Aliens: Colonial Marines(when it's finished downloading..... I hate out internet)!

Ciao for now!

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Steam Market Place, Mike and Dota 2

Hi again!!

I told you I would be back soon! Not a lot has happened in the past couple of days. Though I did discover a couple of things!

Firstly, I found that a good friend of mine has been secretly(perhaps not so secretly) reviewing games on one of the most fabulous forums available: YouTube! You should check out FairlyAngryMike. Links will be provided at the bottom of this post.

Apart from that, I made one other monumental discovery!! Steam market place.. a place where you can sell items that you get in either Team Fortress 2 and Dota 2, both of which are available on Steam.. Team Fortress 2 is free to play as is Dota 2(if you get invited), otherwise you can pay for "early access" as the game hasn't technically been released as of yet.

Unfortunately it appears that once you have sold something for cash(note moat things on there are up for the insane price of £0.02), you can't withdraw the money from your steam wallet. If I'm wrong, please do feel free to correct me!! Their handy FAQ can be found here

But hey ho! Back to what I was meant to offer some chatter about! I was invited to play Dota 2 by a friend(thanks Andy!), which meant expanding my field of gaming vision quite exponentially by setting up a steam account.. thankfully its quite straight forwards. So I claimed my "beta" key and installed the game, which took much longer than I'm willing to admit - due to the shabby internet connection we are currently forced to accept in this house :sadface.

I went in having no previous experience of actually playing a Moba, I had seen the UI and knew that you pick a hero out of the multitude of available ones.. and that it was equal teams and that as you kill stuff(enemy heros and things called creeps) you get experience and gold which is spent on buying items to upgrade your hero and his or her abilities.

There are a couple of different game modes to try out, the main one I have played is the best for learners to try out really! It's called a Co-op Bot game, which means you will be teamed with other players against a team of AI controlled opponents.

Another mode is simply you and 4 others Vs 5 other players online.. there is a lot of chatter about how abrasive the community can be should you make a schoolboy error, thankfully I haven't witnessed this. The game can be immensely fun, or incredibly annoying depending on how your team plays and communicates!

I would wholeheartedly recommend that you give it a go, if this type of game interests you at all! If you don't have access, tweet me expressing your interest in getting a key @McKnublet!

That's it for now I think, I might do another one later going into a bit more detail about my favourite Dota 2 Heroes since I didn't really go into too much detail about the game itself in this post!

All that's left is to say, follow @FairlyAngryMike on twitter and check out his YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/user/FairlyAngryMike for game reviews or you can check out his blog in my Blog List on the right hand side of the page!

Ciao for now!

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I'm baaack

Okay so I know I've had quite some time off from writing here!

There has been a lot going on, obviously! I've been trying to concentrate on work and of course my little free time has been put into playing a few games.

But what have I been playing? Well, that is the question! I finally set up a Steam account - most people I know found it crazy that I didn't have one! I guess I was dubious about the whole thing.. then forgot about it for a long while! I never needed it when I was at Blizzard as I was more than happy logging into WoW for a few hours and massing many hours playing and watching Starcraft 2 and then Diablo 3.

So, my first impressions of Steam is pretty good! The whole reason I set up one, was because I got given a beta invitation for Dota 2. Which is a pretty darn fun game, when you get the hang of it! It's a MOBA - which means Multiplayer Online Battle Arena. I'll go into a bit more details about that at another time!

After I had played a few too many hours of Dota 2, the Christmas sale started on Steam.. oh boy, such an incredible amount of savings were to be had! Why hadn't I started up Steam before??

I managed to pick up a couple of games - X-Com: Enemy Unknown, Civilisation V: Gods and Kings expansion, Age of Empires 3, Bioshock 1&2..

I plan to write some sort of reviews for all of them as I play through them but since I bought them I haven't had too much time to sit down and get nitty gritty with all of them! Most of my game-time was spent playing X-Com and Civ 5... purely because I remember playing the first X-Com games and the first Civ games oh so many moons ago!

Then I picked up another game, Ace of Spades - which I didn't think I would be too keen on, since I hadn't played Minecraft.. and this is very much like Minecraft but with guns! You can check out the launch trailer here.

That's me for now I think, promise I will be back soon!

Ciao for now!

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