Just cleared normal difficulty today on my monk, good times. Onwards to nightmare...or my demon hunter alt. This is the build that I ended up using after a bit of trial and error. Gearing up appears to be, at least to my understanding at this point, stacking as much Dexterity as possible with some Vitality. I did end up sacrificing a bit of DPS for the sake of 2.25 spirit gen, which worked out pretty well seeing as how quick I burn through spirit.

I didn’t notice any significant difference in spirit regen when using Crippling Wave over any of the other three primary abilities, none of which seemed to have nearly as much utility given that Crippling Wave applies an AoE frontal Debuff in addition to the AoE damage. I am pretty sure that this will change at some point as I unlock some of the other runes (like for example, Quickening at level 42 until that trick is eventually nerfed lol).

So usually, I begin most encounters by activating Sweeping Wind, moving in (with a Dashing Strike occasionally), and spamming Crippling Wave until I have enough spirit to do one or two Dashing Strikes (the Flying Side Kick rune has a 60% chance to stun; seems to work on bosses). If there is a large group of mobs, Cyclone will pull most of them onto me so that I can AoE them down with whatever. If I get low on health, I have Breath of Life as well as my potions. Otherwise, Transcendence actually keeps me adequately healed up most of the time (if I am low. have healing abilities on cooldown, and have spirit to burn, casting several low spirit spells restores a good chunk of health).

Dashing Strike is great for repositioning, since it always teleports you to the opposite side of your target. Also great for teleporting out of crap on the ground as well as avoiding attacks. Basically, spam Crippling Wave or whatever attack until I see the boss charge up (ie raising a sword up in the air is a good indication), then activate Dashing Strike to avoid the frontal cleave. I am unsure if I like Lashing Tail Kick. I have a sneaky feeling that as we progress upwards in difficulty (Nightmare, Hell), LTK and most likely Cyclone will be replaced in favor of more defensive abilities.

Normal difficulty wasn’t incredibly hard, though sadly most of my deaths seemed to be due to standing in things. After playing WoW effectively since launch, main tanking as well as leading raids for several years (not so much lately though), you would think that I would know better...

In summary, if you did not receive your copy of Diablo 3 until Tuesday afternoon or evening, you did not miss out on a whole lot, given how utterly slammed the servers were (general rule of thumb: don't really ever expect to play online games of this popularity immediately after release).

I was actually able to login without any problems (seemed to get in before Error 37 was an issue), but got stuck on the character screen in and endless timeout loop. Apparently though, the characters were created, given that my account was full of level 1 monks when I had logged in briefly the next morning to check my account. I have heard that a few folks were able to not only login immediately, but also create characters and play with little to no delay. All of those people are bastards lol. There were a couple more major server outages (servers were down effectively all of Tuesday evening and then for about one hour Wednesday evening immediately after I had arrived home from work lol...). Otherwise, I have been able to play lately without any real connection issues. I have been enjoying playing my monk; Currently level 21 in act II.

We ended making a gigantic Fry’s run to build a new a computer a couple of weeks back because old faithful had been in the process of giving up the ghost for a about a year and some change. for those who are curious: It was a combination of 0x124 BSODs for hal.dll (hardware abstraction layer), random restarts, and lockups; BSODs most often with no discernible pattern other than it always occurs when I am doing something and never idle (albeit minor tasks like clicking on a link). It would choose to crash/restart about once every hour or two at the rate of about one day out of every two or three months (and then be fine for another month or two and then repeat the cycle).

As of late, the cycle has become more frequent (it was happening about once a week). I have narrowed the issue down to some piece of hardware, either the PSU or the motherboard (extensively tested everything else). I am pretty sure that it’s the motherboard that was going bad based on other issues this machine has been having. But, long story short: New computer toy time \o/. This build is what I ended up going with. Several compromises were made in interest of being able to pick everything up at Fry’s in one trip (and not having to deal with package delivery and pickup):

I am reusing my video card, soundcard, optical drive (HTPC has a Blu-Ray drive, don’t need one for this machine), media HDD, and two of my case fans. It is kind of tempting to pick up another HD 6870 to go crossfire because those cards do not cost too much (and just for the sake of running with two VGA cards). Overall though, I know that I am probably better off going for a single card solution. The 680 looks nice, but I don’t feel like dropping half a grand on even more computer parts independent of the fact that it is effectively sold out everywhere.

I am a pretty big fan of Antec’s Performance One case line; My previous two cases being the p180 and p182. They are great at dampening fan noise among other things but anyone who has ever worked with these cases probably knows how much of a pain in the ass they are to build with in regards the the general lack of able routing options in combination with the chamber partitioning (routing all PSU cabling through one or two holes without the benefit of a modular PSU is a small nightmare).

The p280 on the other hand was so much easier to work with. It is first of all, way lighter (by about 10lbs) due to changes with the internal design (no more partitioning or drive cages). It is a bit wider and deeper than the 183; Roomy enough to fit a long video card and route wires without any issues. For example, the SATA ports on my motherboard are located along the right edge, which would be hard to reach in most cases but easy in the 182. Also there are, at long last, cutouts that allow you to route cables behind the motherboard.

Speaking of which, I really do wish that the CPU power hookup wasn’t located at the way way top of the board. That is fine for most cases, but since the p280 has a bottom loaded PSU (though without the partitioning, good riddance), it was impossible for me to route that one cable behind the motherboard as intended.. Eyesore.

Oh also: Modular PSUs are nice. (Build photos are included below in the full post)

This happens to other people, right? Every once in a while (one out of every 8 to 10 games) the game will glitch out in such a way that I will not be able to interact with anything on the map. As in, unable to resurrect downed players, damage enemies, climb ladders, receive ammo or cap objectives. It doesn't happen too bad in this video since it eventually seems to go away after dying and being resurrected. Most of the time though, I end up quitting out of the match. Unsure if it's a glitch or just dodgy ass netcode. I had assumed that I was joining a game with a host on a bad connection, but we were hosting this game and the bug was inconsistent.

Just in case anyone else was curious, here is all of the collective knowledge that I was able to gather in regards to getting the Apple Magic Trackpad device to work in Windows 7 (64-bit in my case). It’s not really that hard, but the device seems to be somewhat finicky and just about every guide I read left out at least one critical piece of information. All of the one finger gestures and most of the two finger gestures will work on Windows 7. A compatibility chart can be found on this Apple KB Article.

I have seen two separate sets of instructions: What I typed below and another set that told me to rename the .bin file to an executable. I was able to install the drivers by renaming the .bin, but the trackpad would only function as a basic mouse without any gestures or any tapping. Anyway, the instructions below worked flawlessly for me.

1. Download, but do not install the Boot Camp Software Update. Here are the download links for 32-bit Windows and 64-bit Windows.
2. Extract 'BootCamp_3.2_64-bit.exe' with 7-zip. Doing so should create a file called 'BootCampUpdate64.msp'.
3. Extract or navigate into the MSP file and find the 'BootCamp3200aToBootCamp3200' folder.
4. Look for the 'Binary.AppleWirelessTrackpad_Bin' file which is in itself yet another compressed item. Decompress the contents of this file into a folder.
5. Look for DPInst.exe and run it.

Several things:

• I don't think that the trackpad will work with anything but the Microsoft Bluetooth stack. So, if you have 3rd party drivers installed, consider removing them. If you are having trouble getting the Microsoft drivers to install, this program is supposed to work: Bluetooth Driver Installer.
• If you have the Motionjoy bluetooth drivers install, you may have to delete them manually out of the Device Manager since the drivers remain even after uninstalling the software itself. For some reason, the trackpad would only pair as a motionjoy gamepad so long as said drivers were installed. All of this by the way was occurring while I was attempting to install the trackpad on the third party bluetooth drivers, so I don't know if there is actually any conflict at all.
• The pairing code for the trackpad is '0000'.

If you wish to customize the trackpad, this program works pretty well.