I mentioned Kripparrian’s YouTube channel last week as a great Diablo 3 resource for those trying to work their way through Inferno. He’s spent much of the last month slowly and meticulously moving through D3’s end game content, without dying. So while Diablo was killed weeks ago on the maximum level of difficulty, Inferno, Kripparrian was the first to kill him on Inferno while playing the game on hardcore mode. He had his trusty Wizard Krippi at his side to share in the glory. Obviously it took some time and some preparation to beat Diablo 3 without dying, but until a couple of weeks ago I didn’t really know how many methods they utilized in order to do it.
Before explaining how difficult this all was it’s important to note that Blizzard’s Diablo 3 1.0.3 patch, which was released today, essentially nerfed some of the inferno content they were attempting to beat. As such, Kripparrian and his team decided the only way to really “beat” the game was to do it before today’s patch made it any easier. This gave them a time limit of only a few weeks to do it.
Leveling a barbarian apparently isn’t that difficult (I wish someone told me that) because Kripparrian has two, one for farming and one for progressing through the game. He also had to level up another farming Barb as his first was killed somewhere in Act 3. A task that would turn most people away from the game, but he was back the next day at level 60, farming away. A backup barbarian was always on standby.
The combat tactics are different as well. In normal mode it might be common practice for a barbarian to go toe-to-toe with tough mobs, but in hardcore mode that stuff gets you killed. There is almost always an excruciating amount of kiting and running around against mobs that have the potential to be a real threat; almost no chances are taken. Often times Kripparrian will run around or go back to town and wait for cooldowns in order to pass through content safely, something I wouldn’t think of doing in normal mode.
All this farming is necessary because the hardcore auction house is separate from the normal auction house, which means that there is an extreme lack of end-game items for them to choose from. Most of the time they have to get by with what they find or make themselves, but they do have a tight-knit trading community that operates through various message boards around the net.
They’re also restricted in what or where they can farm loot. Most normal players spend their farming time hacking through dungeons and killing bosses, but hardcore players don’t want to take the risk. They often have to go to extreme lengths to access the same gears us non-hardcore players do, which includes excessive amounts of “Gobo farming,” where a small group of them spend hours looking for treasure goblins in specific areas, when one does they all jump into the game to each have a chance at some loot. It’s just as efficient as regular farming, but dramatically more boring.
Since Diablo 3 is has to be played with an internet connect, hardcore players have to make sure that their connection is good before they proceed through difficult content. For the past few weeks Kripparrian’s connection has been slow, which lead to the discovery that he was under fire from DDoS attacks. Some real-life problem solving helped to mitigate the loss of connection speed, but it seems that even real life foes attempted to halt his progress through hardcore Inferno.
But in the end they killed Diablo without dying, despite all of the obstacles put in their path. Below is a video of their final run, it’s rather long so you can skip to the end if you just want to see the part where they make Diablo 3 history.
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