This month, I have been incredibly busy writing. Freelance tends to be a constant fluctuation between “feast or famine”. October has been the biggest feast yet. This morning, I finally had the opportunity to take my Barbarian, Zeta, into Nightmare mode of Diablo III.
I fully expected to get my head chopped off, and handed back to me, shortly after going in. Instead, it turned out that there were demons of a technical nature that were the first things to slay me. When I went to log in, I noticed some “Breaking News”:
That may be hard to read, so I will put what it says here: “We’re aware of an issue that is affecting our authentication servers, which may result in failed or slow login attempts. We’re currently investigating the cause and will provide updates as they’re available.”
Logging in took longer than expected. I ended up getting Error 3006. Not cool! My second attempt worked, and I was ready to start playing some D3.
The monsters in Nightmare are a bit tougher than they were in Normal mode. I’m finding this to be a really fun challenge so far! I didn’t mess around with the Monster Power thing that the new patch gave us, so the monsters were set at “default” difficultly, whatever that is. All I know is that I had fun, and that Zeta is now, officially in Nightmare mode of Act I!
Here are some highlights of her first adventure in Nightmare mode.
I found my first Page of Blacksmithing. I’d never seen one before! This was cool, because it meant that I could finally start leveling up my Blacksmith again. He was stuck at level 4, waiting for me to find the Pages he needed.
I also found my first Page of Jewelcrafting. Same story, my Jeweler was stuck, waiting for these, so he could level. This was the first time I’d seen one of these.
Killed Sarkoth, (again). He, and his kind, shoot a whole lot faster in Nightmare!
Did the quest where you kill the Wretched Queen. She, and her kind, are different in Nightmare, too. Instead of vomiting up one zombie, they can spew out two at a time.
Suddenly, the server announced that it would be shutting down in 15 minutes. I was in the dungeon that leads to saving Deckard Cain. I decided to see if I could make it to the checkpoint before the server went down.
Another really cool thing about Nightmare mode is that you got lots and lots of zombies! So much fun!
The server countdown said there were 9 minutes left. It lied. The server suddenly crashed, and I found myself looking at Error 33.
That might be hard to read, so I will retype what is says into this blog: The Battle.net service is down for maintenance. Please check the [Server Status] page for more information. (Error 33)
I tried logging back in, but it wouldn’t let me. I got Error 1 which said: There was an error loading Heroes data. (Error 1)”
At this point, I was very concerned that I’d just lost the minimal amount of progress I’d made during my first experience with Nightmare mode. There was nothing to do but wait for the server to go back up, and see where it left me.