Old is New Again

And a little confusing.

(And two posts in one week? What madness is this?)

Anyway, looking at some achievements, I hadn’t played my barbarian since the middle of 2012. Or any other character in D3. I effectively dropped the game for nearly two years.

But all the fun with the Crusader got me thinking I should check in on my Barbarian.

After a good 20 or 30 minutes of cleaning out oooooooooooold, baaaaaaaaaaad gear on my mule characters, I was ready to enter the game.

I vaguely recalled that I was in Act II in Inferno level difficulty. The game had definitely stepped it up a notch and I was forced to evaluate my skills every few quests to pick what was best for the upcoming battles. It was certainly doable and I’m just a tad miffed at myself that I didn’t focus long enough to finish Inferno up… of course, I assumed Inferno would still be there.

And I assumed that with the original difficulty tiers being wiped, the game would dump me in Act II with a higher difficulty level, maybe Master since I wouldn’t have completed Act V yet.

Survey says… Creating Game…

Welcome to Westmarch!

WTF?

Where am I and what am I doing here?

The game registered that I had beaten Diablo and finished the original game, so naturally I would want to jump right into Act V, right?

Apparently stuff happens after Act IV… Tyrael starts a club and some other nonsense, but I have no real idea of what all transpired. Guess I’ll have to wait to slog through there on my Crusader.

(Crusader is now level 34 and in Act III with a monster weapon and laying waste to the world around him.)

Starting out at the beginning of Act V in “legacy” gear (and not very good, either – I had terrible luck with appropriate drops) was a little shaky. It wasn’t really “hard” per se, just time consuming. And my Enchantress is an idiot that will stand in anything gooey/shiny/glowy so long as it does damage.

I think the first decent weapon I picked up doubled my damage. From there, things got better quite a bit faster.

The game did put me in normal mode and I left it there. I was missing one skill entirely from my bar and had to replace it. The others still worked about like I remembered, but I have no clue what skill was removed.

The Barbarian is a little squishier than my Crusader. OK. She’s actually a LOT squishier, what with not carting around a steel door to stand behind, but with a little attention to the ground I was standing in, I only used one health potion (thank you for making them all one level!) in the last fight and that was the closest I got to dying.

And once I have some gold reserves built up and a weapon I don’t plan on replacing immediately, I’m transmogging back to this weapon model:

 

The ending felt a little weird for me, probably because it was disconnected from the story for me by 2 years and an explanatory cut scene or three. But the new environments were awesome, the fight mechanics were pretty (Malthael has a spiffy flame attack), and I really enjoyed moving the stories forward for the followers and crafting NPCs. I didn’t get to the quest line for the Enchantress or the Blacksmith (or the Mystic, if she has one), but I did want to save something for the Crusader to do.

I logged out with the Barbarian at 67 and puttering around in Adventure mode. I did one complete set of 5 adventures and a rift. It was an enjoyable way to go back through old content without it feeling like a grind again. Except for the one adventure where I somehow went the wrong way and just couldn’t find the bonus boss. Blarg.

…

So does this all mean that we can look forward to a bunch of Diablo posts?

Eh.

Other than comparisons between classes, there really isn’t much to talk about Diablo. I’ll try to keep everyone posted on my progress – I would like to complete the story with each character at least once.

Besides.

This happened.