Giving Diablo 3 a shot

I actually played Diablo 3 for about an hour last night.

This is both a big deal and no big deal, from different perspectives.

Its a big deal because I am not a gamer, in the traditional sense.  I don’t play lots of games.  I don’t have time.  I play WoW, and that’s the only video game I have played with any regularity for the past 6 years.  For any game to convince me to try it is a big step.

However, its not a big deal because I didn’t pay for D3.  I got the WoW annual pass, so D3 came with the package.  Therefore, there is no investment involved in playing D3.  No risk.

On the other hand, its somewhat notable because I hated Diablo 2.  Way back in the late 1990s I had played the original Diablo, and I got Diablo 2 the first week it was out in 2000.  I played it for an hour, and that’s all it took to convince me to uninstall it.  I really thought I was done with the whole franchise.

After an hour with D3, its got me involved enough that I plan to play it more.  I have no intention of going all hardcore on it.  I don’t intend to make millions on their real money auction house.  I’m not going to fly through the storyline.  However, based on my first impression it has earned a share of my leisure time.

Memories…

I had a funny memory from way, way back.

I was level 19 in vanilla WoW.  I had heard of PvP but I had no idea what it entailed.  I knew that people did long grinds to get titles.  I decided to queue for Warsong Gulch.

Alliance got trounced over and over.  It seemed like the horde would just group up and make a beeline en masse for the Alliance flag, grab it, and return as a huge group.   We could barely slow them down.  But when Alliance tried to do the same thing, we got torn apart at the entrance to the horde building.

From this, I got the early impression that (1) PvP probably wasn’t for me, and (2) Horde was OP.

However, on my eighth or ninth time queuing up, we ended up with a paladin in our group.  I rarely saw paladins back then, and no one I knew played one.  Me being a video game noob, I had this expectation that paladins, as divine warriors, would be immensely powerful.

We actually won our next WG.

I walked away from that thinking that paladins were amazing.  Every time I queued in PvP for the next 10 or so levels, if we didn’t have a paladin in the group I felt that we were doomed to failure.

The best thing about vanilla battlegrounds was that all the players came from your server.  You tended to see the same characters over and over, so you got to know them.  I casually dabbled in PvP now and then (only in WG), and each time I saw that paladin in my group I got an awestruck feeling.

Ah, to be that naive again.