Pandas are quite interesting animals, but who knew they'd star in the next World of Warcraft expansion "Pandaria"? This update is just to recap the launch of the latest WoW expansion, the levelling session that followed, and all the progress I've made up till this point.
I'm not normally one for server-first races, but I do like to be ahead of the curve when it comes to new content and generally gearing up as fast as possible. This was my goal but the midnight launch proved quite a stressful event...
First, I was expecting another day of preparation before the launch hit but this stupidly wasn't the case. Since the launch was at midnight I had been thinking all week that it was the night of the following day, but of course I was wrong and had less time to actually prepare. Panic! This meant I had to rush down to the supermarket straight after work and collect 2-3 days worth of supplies.
This also meant I had less time to familiarize myself with the new zones on the Beta, so I was typically going in blind (but hey that's fun too!). You can normally expect to encounter server issues due to the thousands of people logging in and populating areas, but the initial starting quests for the Alliance were true examples of the poorest design choices ever!
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Probably about an hour after Pandaria went 'live' things started to stabilise and become playable. Questing through the first zone fairly quickly was imperative to get ahead of the initial huge crowds. By now alliance were at least an hour behind all Horde players, which made for interesting confrontations as both factions eventually crossed path. Zone by zone, level by level. Playing through the night. The following day. Then the night after. It was roughly 24 hours of non-stop grinding/questing before I finally reached level 90.
Towards the end it became clear that my methods of levelling were efficient as I was ahead of all other mages on alliance side for a good amount. But because I knew that horde players had had an hour head-start due to lack of server issues, I knew being the server-first mage to hit 90 would be impossible. Regardless, I had found another mage on my travels and we paired up for the final couple of zones. It was probably after 22 hours in when a Horde mage claimed the title. After a bit of slacking I eventually claimed Alliance 2nd Mage spot - not too bad considering I never even wanted to participate in a levelling race!
A lot has happened in the last 6 months following my last posting; new game releases, further gaming progress, and I can also proudly announce that the new PC is 'complete'!
One big change I've made is the new blog design. The previous was fine but I was growing forever unhappy with how the content was laid out on the left side of the screen - this new one is more central and generally looks and feels better.
I plan to post a bunch of updates soon and try once again to make this a frequent thing... so watch this space!
Just a small update to say I've finally cleared Inferno by killing Diablo himself! This was a very exciting kill as it took me a couple of nights of wiping, making the kill that much sweeter. There were several attempts where I thought I had it, but one small mistake was all it took to get my barbarian killed. Below are a few shots over the nights of trying and the kill-shot itself - sadly I couldn't record anything :C
As I went full protection and max life-on-hit (~1800) my damage output was pretty darn low resulting in lengthy attempts (I think the kill was 20+ minutes?) - FREAKING INTENSE SHIT!
Going into phase 3 I had ZERO health potions left. One mistake = almost certain death. I'm sure he hit an 'enrage' timer part-way through as he was casting 3 fireballs (circles on the ground) in a row.
       Now I've cleared Inferno I personally have little interest in spending much more time playing Diablo 3. It's a real shame but there's simply a lack of content considering all gear can be gained by playing the Auction House - highly uninteresting in my opinion - and actually playing seems painfully repetitive.
I may give Hardcore another try and level my remaining alts to 60 but I won't be in any rush to do so - regardless I hope to continue posting updates and adding more crap!
Despite my last blog post hinting towards changing my main character to Demon Hunter, I decided to stick to my guns and continue on with my Barbarian. After a bit more research into gearing & stats I decided the gear that I had been sporting was completely insufficient and needed a drastic overhaul if I were to progress through Inferno.
My priority for gearing this time was a heavy focus on: +life of hit, +armour, +physical res and +all res - Obtained by using a smarter method of searching on the auction house. I splashed out no more than 300k gold on new items for every slot - I hope to create a separate post for a more detailed overview - and the change was immediately noticeable. Needless to say I was quite glad considering the vast investment!
Now the preparation was complete... I set on and started Act III. I could stay alive much longer now with health rarely dipping to fatal levels but I have to admit a couple of champion packs were skipped for two reasons: 1) They had insane affixes and proved too much for my 'budget gear'. 2) I wanted to kill Azmodan as quickly as possible. Needless to say, he soon fell without too much trouble.
Act IV was a slight increase in difficulty but nothing I couldn't handle. The first few bosses required multiple attempts and some patience but I knew I could get past them and then it came to Diablo, the big cheese himself. A had a couple of unsuccessful attempts but sadly I think my gear is slightly lacking especially when it comes to damage output and surviving sudden damage spikes.
That's pretty much where I left it for now. Hopefully when the AH comes back online I can snipe some upgrades to achieve a solo kill, or perhaps grab a friend for a sure-thing if I get impatient.
Diablo III Progress: Hardcore Death & Possible Re-roll
Diablo III has been a rather interesting game since it's release and continues to change with each passing patch. I haven't posted much of my progress in a while so I thought it was time. So what's been going on? Quite a bit... I started up Hardcore mode after getting bored with Inferno & gear farming, started leveling few alts and a potential re-roll to Demon Hunter.
Inferno Act I was pretty enjoyable but even though following Acts have been nerfed to be more 'in line' with the first, it's still pretty horrendous with my gear and stats (above). This continued for a while - buying decent gear wasn't really possible with shitty amounts of gold and so I decided to focus on some alts and try Harcore mode to pass the time...
Hardcore was surprisingly fun and as I rolled Barb again I had the advantage of good knowledge about the class. My progress on hardcore was smooth with little or no threat to my well-being and to be honest most of it still felt like softcore. This was probably the only downside. Little challenge lead me to take more risks and not think twice about leaping into packs of creatures or thinking much about tactics/strategy. This lead to my inevitable downfall:
I died at lvl49 and at the end of Act III on Nightmare - the last zone before facing Az'modan and completing the act. The most annoying thing was not getting the achievement for the kill or for reaching level 50. The death itself came from a champion pack of 'Bloated Malachor's' (big fat dual-wielding guys) who hit freakishly hard and just ended up catching me in a corner. Cry.
After that downfall I decided to focus on leveling one of my alts to 60 and progress through Inferno as playing Barb was still rather boring. After some grinding I finally hit level 60 with my Demon Hunter and proceeded to gear her up. At the time of the screenshot my DPS is a decent 23.6k:
I'm not going to re-roll my main character completely but I'm definitely having more fun than I ever did whilst playing Barb. High damage certainly wins over full-out defense when it comes to enjoyment.
Whilst gearing up I've managed to kill Belial and thus clear Act II Inferno. Before stepping into Act III I'm constantly doing Act I runs for better gear and should only need a couple more upgrades to move on. I've also been working on achievements and am currently at just over 3000 points:
My aim now is to clear all of Inferno with my DH and to start another Barbarian on Hardcore. As far as Hardcore goes I'd happily settle for clearing Hell, as Inferno would be guaranteed suicide without OMG-AMAZING gear. We'll see!
Day 3 and the finishing line is in sight. Well, at least it was...
This weekend was finally time to add water to my system and get the cooling done with, once and for all. Things didn't seem so bad. I was confident the loop I had put together was in good working condition since it was looking rather awesome, and this was a pretty fun stage of the build so I was really excited to get started.
Side shot. All the components are now fixed inside my case including fan controller and Floppy/Card reader. I've decided I'm not going to use the Card reader so this means a lot less cluttering of cables. I've also unplugged all power cables from the motherboard as I am going to power only the pump to get the water circulating.
CPU Water-block before adding water coolant:
Rear fan. The red LED's are slightly underwhelming but it still looks great:
In order to get the pump working on it's own I had to use a jumper on the main power cable using a paper clip (connecting the green & black wires):
My trusted funnel sitting in the reservoir:
Commence the filling! I recorded whilst I was filling the reservoir and you can watch the fluid steadily rise.
The waterblock is now visibly red and thus filled - Looking good!
Reservoir levels are lookin' good:
Then disaster broke. One of the connectors between my cards was actually leaking pretty bad (left-side), mainly because the fitting wasn't on tight enough and whilst trying to fasten the top, the bottom was coming undone and releasing more water. Another issue here was also using two rubber rings instead of just one & a washer - fortunately you can't see the mess made from the leak:
The second leak wasn't quite as disastrous as the first but still proved difficult. The tube going to the reservoir (black) was a smaller size than the fitting it was connected to and proved almost impossible to get on - this meant I had to cut a 'slit' into it and shimmy the tube over the fitting. Sadly the slit on the top tube, pictured, was too long and meant water was leaking from under the connector. The fix? I cut a bit of the tube and tried even harder to make it fit, and eventually it did, thank gawd.
The aftermath? After struggling quite a while with the aforementioned leaks and issues; things seemed to be stable. The leaks caused a bit of a mess and a lot of kitchen roll was used in the process.
I left the system to run over night to get rid of all the air bubbles caught at various places in the loop and to check for any further leaks but by the morning everything looked fine. I've just ordered another set of extension power cables for my other graphics card to hide them behind the motherboard tray. As it stands everything else seems complete and I'm now looking forward to start installation.
I think that's all I need for now - Let's hope so!
Another night of work and a lot of progress has been made! I'm actually excited posting up new pictures as you can really get an idea of how things will look once finished. I'm also going back with the proper name of this project: Sindragosa Mk.II
When I first build this PC, about 4 years ago, it was born into this world with the name Sindragosa - largely because it coincided with the release of the 'Wrath of the Lich King' and because the colour scheme was blue. The name is also pretty freaking awesome on it's own accord.
Anyway, so. Last night I finalised all internal connectors between components to make sure I was ready to start the water cooling, but also managed to keep all cables well hidden to reduce the amount of clutter in the main chassis. The following pics I've added are from the start of the night before the bulk of cables & components were added - so mostly just tubing.
EK Waterblock. It's clear-plexi so the blood-red fluid I've bought will be nicely visible and add additional colour. Here you can also see the silver coil within the tube that I'm using to help keep the water/fluid purified:
GPU's - I've gone for a parallel orientation instead of in series. Hopefully this should give me lowers temps on the second (bottom) card. The fittings between the cards are the 3rd or 4th I've tried and the only ones that can keep the cards together whilst in adjacent expansion slots:
New quick easy-connector fittings let me unhook my loop without having to drain any fluid. This also required me to cut back most of the black tubing that comes from the reservoir - this wasn't an easy feat but looks clean:
New exhaust fan - Since the loop of air isn't quite as important in a water-cooled case I've turned this into a powerful 'inlet' for addition air. It also gives sexy, subtle red LED's:
Cables from the front panel are fed through to the bottom of the motherboard tray. After this I actually added a red sleeve to house the cables and make things a bit neater. I think it is also UV-reactive, so yay!
New network card - Since the motherboard has a lack of PCI expansion slots (it's mATX afterall) I had to buy a new NIC (Network Interface Card) to fit the smaller slot. The initial card I bought was micro-PCIe to fit onto the motherboard attachment itself, however due to various issues I felt this was the best option:
But this wasn't without it's own problems! Argh!!! The back-plate for my 2nd graphics card covered the space where my network card would poke through the back. I had to resort to cutting holes in the grill so that the antenna would stick out. This meant not using the supportive backplate for the NIC but it shouldn't move around much once stationary:
From the back - You can see where I had to cut and compare it to the card above :
Side - At a glance:
Front view - Still missing DVD drive, storage box and card reader:
On top - Here's the all-in-one cooling. I've added a grill to the fan to make it more attractive otherwise it still sits in the top two bays as it did before, except much, much cleaner!:-
So it's crossed my mind that I haven't actually posted any updates on the newest computer build in a fairly long time now, so here goes! (Better late than never right?)
There are a few reasons behind my slacking lately and the lack of posts, and it can mostly be blamed on the sheer amount of time I've been investing on Diablo 3 - Other than that I've also been on holiday in Spain for a week and only been back a short while - so it hasn't all been counter-productive. I'll cover Diablo progress will in another post as there's quite a lot to catch up on and the focus now is my computer and where it is at the moment.
Things have progressed fairly nicely since stripping my case down and painting it black. Pretty much all components have been connected to the motherboard (CPU, RAM, GPU, etc.) and it has been mounted into the case without too much hassle. This also involved fixing my new EK CPU waterblock which is looking rather sweet!
Some retrospective pics;
Motherboard within the case accompanied by power supply & graphics cards (wires aren't actually connected or anything yet):
Motherboard on it's own:
Before I attached the waterblock on the CPU:
Afterwards - The block is clear-plexi, which is a nice change as I now get to watch the coolant flow through it. It was also a lot easier to connect than others I've used in the past (yay thumb-screws?):
That's all there is for now. I've definitely fallen behind on the whole 'documenting' my progress and there's certainly loads to catch up on. Updates will probably be sooner rather than later now as this is all that's keeping me from adding some finishing touches and actually USING this thing - now is the only chance to take pictures before the point of no return.
It's been quite a while since my last Diablo 3 update and a few days since reaching the level cap with my barbarian. Although HELL was quite a jump in difficulty it didn't take too long to clear. That means the last couple of days have been spent in INFERNO - The hardest difficulty in the game - And boy is it!
Inferno difficulty is near-impossible without grinding or buying gear. So far, I've cleared Act I minus Butcher (the last Act boss), and Act II isn't currently doable with the gear I have. It's impossible without endless dying (fun... :S).
It's almost come to the point where playing my Barb just to die whilst gear-farming has no excitement anymore and has forced me to spend more time on my Wizard for a fresher experience. At the start of the game I was torn between these two classes and which to focus my efforts on... did I make the right decision?
Last night before logging off at 3am I managed to hit level 50 with my Barbarian thus unlocking HELL difficulty. It's been a long sleepless grind with a lot of deaths along the way (especially through NIGHTMARE) but it's time to up the game once again.
Diablo 3 launched on Tuesday and I was prepared with some time off work. Now I'm back I think I'm suffering from withdrawal and lack of sleep but I can say I'm pleased with my progress so far. Along the way I also managed to achieve quite a feat by solo killing the last boss, Diablo, at only level 42 (very under-geared/powered), with some special tactics. Otherwise I've mainly been teaming with a pro group of friends.
It's been a couple of days since hell was unleashed upon us and Diablo 3 was launched, but here's some snaps of the Collector's Edition in it's glory. This box is truly awesome and it's obvious that a lot of thought went into it - a good purchase in my opinion!
Last night Deathsworn Verdict cleared the final encounter in Dragon Soul - Madness of Deathwing. This means we've cleared everything now until Mists of Pandaria hits in a few months. Saying that, we still need to go back and kill Heroic Ragnaros, but he shall soon fall beneath our feet just like the rest.
The fight itself was nowhere near as challenging as Spine thus took significantly fewer attempts (25?). The kill itself was somewhat anti-climatic considering we fucked up on the last phase and was a messy kill - only 3 survivors including myself (<3 cauterize!).
Still... good game! It was a fun fight and a very decent step up from normal, even if it did feel like a breeze with the 20% debuff. Sadly I don't think we have a video of the kill but at least we can now relax and this also means more time to spend on Diablo 3!!!
So the preparation for my new PC build is almost done. Last night I finished painting my case despite running into a few problems with the paint, but all that's left is a few final coats on the motherboard tray and I think I'm done! Here's some latest shots and a comparison from before.
The hard drive cages before being fitted inside the case:
And a comparison to before. Needless to say they are so much more awesome.
Motherboard tray looks a bit patchy but it still needs a final coat of paint.
For comparison, here's how it looked in the default gray colour:
I didn't have time to finish the motherboard tray since it was getting too dark to continue. I'll finish this tonight although I might leave the back since it won't even be visible anyway:
Waiting for me at home today was a box full of goodies that I had ordered before the weekend. Needless to say, I didn't wait long to get stuck in and unbox everything.
Let's see what was inside...
Here's everything out of the box and spread out on the table:
Inside the Maximus V box we find a sexy mATX ASUS motherboard:
Next up is a Crucial M4 256GB SSD:
Some new red tubing to match the red theme of the motherboard. This stuff looks awesome already!
I didn't really bother taking any pictures of the Ivybridge CPU seeing that it's only the OEM version thus only comes in a boring box - it's the small black box beneth the motherboard in the 2nd pic.
I took other pictures of some more cool stuff. This is the MPCI-E card that comes with the Gene V and my mini Wifi card. I have a sneaky feeling the Wifi card won't work too great, if at all, so I may have to buy a new PCI-E one instead.
I had already ordered my RAM whilst it was on special offer but here it is with the rest. These are Samsung Green DDR3 8GB and are extemely low profile - they're so cute!!!
Here's now the RAM fixed onto the motherboard - I couldn't wait. Again, these things are so low profile they barely stick up out from the slots!
Also whilst I was doing this I have been continuing the spray painting from last night and hoping to get it finished tomorrow.
I'm currently in the process of preparing my PC case for the new parts that should arrive soon. Over the weekend I took everything out and cleaned most parts including water blocks, which was a real hassle seeing that I didn't have a drain tube - definitely something I'll be adding in the next build! I've starting to spray paint various parts in a sexy, but subtle, matt-black. That is till I ran out half-way through :C
My desk has so much extra free space without it and I kinda like it - I definitely need a bigger desk. Maybe something to do down the line?
This is the motherboard tray detached from the case & water-cooling loop. The easy-connector-things made this relatively easy (except for some minor leaks) but cleaning the water blocks was insanely annoying. I should have drained the system whilst it was still powered but I definitely have some improvements in mind for next time.
Ready for painting! I've stripped everything except for the cables at the top for the power/reset buttons (I don't dare trying to remove these) and the power cable for the radiator fan. I may also have to remove the small black box sitting on the bottom that holds the HD cage, but we'll see.
The hard drive cages; the two smaller ones fix to the bottom of the case will probably be used over the large one to save some space around front fan.
Painting has started! Looking back I probably should have started from the top but this stuff dries in seconds.
Well it was going well till I ran out of paint. Definitely going to remove that box since it made things awkward but here's where I left things. Once I buy some more spray paint tonight I'll finish this and start on the motherboard tray and other small bits (fan, grills, etc).
IvyBridge has finally been released which means it's time to upgrade my main rig (Codename: Sindragosa)! Despite the overall disappointment over the small performance increases over SandyBridge, I think it's about time to upgrade from the now-ancient Q6600. Before I get to work on ripping out the innards of this beast I thought I'd take some pics just for the records...
