So anyway it's the Christmas season which means I can usually find some time to play a game or two that I've been meaning to for a while. Next on the list was Diablo 3 (PC). I dabbled in Diablo 2 a few years back and liked it, although I only played a little into Act 2, so I'm nowhere near being one of these min-maxing
poopsockers that the game seems designed to cater for.
Anyway, so playing Diablo 3, I'm sort of most of the way through Act 1 thinking "this is a bit easy" as I'm basically just walking through one-shotting pretty much everything. I don't need to use any attack or ability other than my secondary attack and the mana bar seems to refill itself faster than I can actually deplete it. A quick google assures me that this is actually quite normal and at some point during Act 2 I should expect to start to take damage. Okaaaayyyy.... So I keep playing and start ploughing through Act 2 in much the same way. The game is not getting harder, but actually easier and easier, so I google again and learn that I can increase the difficulty level. I increase the difficulty to the highest it will allow me to ("expert" apparently) and continue playing. No difference. Still instagibbing virtually every enemy that appears, even those yellow-aura boss-type chaps that show up even now and then.
So I'm starting to think that early on I stumbled into a brutal positive feedback loop where I picked up some decent gear which allowed me to kill stuff better, which levelled me up faster, which allowed me to kill even faster, which levelled me up even faster etc etc, so my player's power trajectory is on a much steeper gradient than the game's, if you get what I'm saying.
For a moment I considered purposely gimping myself by wearing shit gear, using crap skills and whatnot but then realised that would pretty much make the entire game pointless (i.e. without the mechanics of getting constantly better gear, there isn't really much of a game).
I'm not sure when it occured to me, but I realised at some point that every boss, even the act end bosses, were instagibbing as soon as they appeared, without me actually attacking them. Before, I was under the impression that my player was doing insane damage with the secondary attack - and that was true; the damage was insane - but there also seemed to be something else at work here. Sure enough, every boss would instantly explode the second it became vulnerable to damage, without me even needing to touch it or attack in in any way.
Narrowing down what was doing this, I found that the culprit was a ring that dropped somewhere in Act 1 called the Nagelring. This ring caused up to four little goblin creatures to follow you around and act as little suicide bombers, running up to enemies and exploding. I had to go into the Diablo Wiki to even figure out what damage they were doing and it turns out that each goblin (and there are up to four of these at any one time remember) - I shit you not - explodes dealing
10,000% the damage that your character does. So that's why I finished the game in a few short hours instagibbing every boss including fucking Diablo himself. Also my character was doing mad damage even without those suicide bombers, but whatever.
I guess what I'm saying is: why the fuck does a ring like that even exist and why does it drop in Act 1? Even if you chopped a zero off the end of the damage amount it would still probably be an instant "win the game" button, except it's not even a button because you don't even have to consciously press it, it's just active all the time. This game is stupid as shit.