1.10 sorc

[gekko]

First, War Cry doesn't cover half the screen.  In fact, it has a small radius -- perhaps 1/3 of the screen wide which in two dimensions means that it only reaches 1/9th the area of the screen.  One can't saunter into a room and expect to stun everything in sight with one War Cry cast.  It takes time and sometimes tactics to gather all of the monsters to you.

[...]

I hope you know that I don't use a character editor for any of my characters.  I started Grizabella, Gunter, and Maldar at level 1 and did every quest and hit every waypoint along the way through normal and nightmare.  I twinked Grizabella with equipment, but Gunter and Maldar were played completely untwinked in normal and nightmare difficulties.  In fact, in Gunter's case, he was played as a pure singer barbarian throughout nightmare difficulty in 8-player mode (although he had constant mana problems).

I start my accounts in hell, because for the most part I think the adventures of the characters in normal and nightmare would be uninteresting to read about for most people.  Let's face it, it's not like normal or nightmare difficulties are very dangerous.  They're just the long slow grind that one has to get through to get to the "big show" in hell.  Besides, if I talked about an oddball character's adventures in nightmare difficulty, I'd end up discussing a lot of tactics that I would end up using in hell which would take away a lot of the "tension" from the story.  For example, there are a lot of people over at diabloii.net who think that Maldar is going to get slaughtered by the hell Ancients and the intrigue and general "how's he going to pull this one off?" feeling is keeping people interested in Maldar's adventures.  I won't say that I think the hell Ancients will be easy, because they won't be, but I think that if people knew how Maldar beat the Ancients in nightmare, there would be less interest and intrigue in his story.

Besides, while telling Gunter's story, I had a hard enough time coming up with new ways of saying I taunted/war cried/firewalled/killed things.  If I had told Gunter's story in nightmare, can you imagine how many times I'd end up saying things like "Just like I did in nightmare, I taunted and war cried these guys to death.  Oh, just to make a pretty screenshot, I threw in a firewall for good measure?"

First off, I'll readily admit I overstated the simplicity of Gunter's tactics -- I've built a singer myself and know it's not nearly as easy as it sometimes appear.

I'd also like to reiterate that I've thouroughly enjoyed your character stories, and I hope more are on the way.

I've decided to go with blaze and either glacial spike or blizzard; I have yet to decide which. No merc, except for a very few occasions: ie, when I absolutely need another body in the room (duriel, anyone?). I'm also planning on taking notes through as much normal as I can remember to: if the character is the least bit interesting, I'll post what happened here along with my freshly inspired thoughts on the patch.

Until then,

gekko