PixlBit

I finally stopped playing Diablo III and got totally committed to my run of the complete Borderlands series. Mark and I are about 18 hours into Borderlands 1 and getting near the last few missions. It's been so absorbing and fun with only a few of the usual frustrations and disfunctions. Here's the breakdown.

Diablo III:

I rage quit during a bounty run. It feels like bosses in this game are much stronger than everything else. I get they are supposed to be much harder, but I feel they are set too far from the rest of the enemies. I played at Torment VII difficulty with my 140 Paragon Witch Doctor and did just fine, with just the right amount of challenge when facing high level enemies, but whenever I had to fight a boss, I would get one hit killed pretty consistantly. It got so annoying that I stopped playing. It's like the game lulls you into a false sense of security and then suddenly kills you when you least expect it. I had this happen on high level enemies as well as bosses. Sometimes those big bad asses would throw everything and the kitchen sink at you and I'd get killed a few times. I don't like the way the difficulty seems unbalanced like that. If a skill level is too hard, it should be obvious from fighting even the regular enemies. If you have trouble with them, then you know you're in over your head. But what happens is, you do just fine against the regulars, to the point at which you kind of relax, and then, "bam!" a high level enemy shows up and, doesn't just challenge you, it kills you outright much faster than you could've guessed. It feels like cheap deaths to me. So I don't think I'll be finishing the 500 bounties. I got to 60% and that's where I'll stay. Maybe when the Necromancer update comes later this year, I'll manage the rest, but for now, I'm taking a break. 

Borderlands: 

Mark and I played a whole heap of Borderlands 1 today. At the beginning of our session I went through the usual complaining about the complexity of the weapon stats. It seems nearly impossible, without exercising some serious math, to tell what is better than what. You have a power rating and a rate of fire (just to name two). What formula tells you how to combine those two stats? Do you multiply them together, or try and decide how fast you pull the trigger and figure out how much damage you deal out in a set amount of time, like, let's say, 15 seconds? That's a lot to think about every time you go to empty your backpack containing a dozen or more weapons. But I got past my ranting and started coming up with simplified ways to approach the decision making which is, inevitably, always the same. I pick my favorite weapon type to be my number one most used weapon, and then keep the highest rarity version with the best damage that I can determine without getting out a calculator. Then I just use the weapon (assault rifle for my soldier in this case) and see how it performs. So far that's working for me, but in the past, sticking with the highest rarity weapon wasn't always the best idea, it's just the simplest one. So I may get screwed later on in the game. But Mark and I are near the end of the main story of Borderlands, and so everything seems to be fine. 

Tomorrow Mark and I will play some more of this best of all best co-op games and hopefully finish B1 and go right into B2 within The Handsome Collection. I hope I can curb my greed in the hunt for loot and be a better co-op partner. Right now, I'm disgraceful. But that's sort of what this game encourages. Players rush for the loot and shoot anything in their way. Sounds sort of like the history of capitalism, doesn't it?