My Favorite Companion

My favorite companion is the Enchantress. Why? There's lots of reasons why.

1. She can charm enemies to fight for me for 8 seconds.

8 seconds might not seem too long in real life, but in Diablo time, that's a lot. A lot of things can happen in 8 seconds which can spell the difference between life and death. The best thing is, she can charm not only mobs, but elite enemies and the big dudes like the one above. Imagine being in a situation of almost dying, the monster gets charmed, stops fighting you and fights others... you have time to recover your life as you continue hacking him unopposed. 8 seconds is a LOT of time. I've escaped many scraps where I could have died because of this.

Apparently, the only thing the Enchantress can't charm are the big bosses like the Skeleton King, Ghom, Rakanoth, Azmodan, Belial and of course Diablo himself.

2. She increases your armor by 3% just by being the chosen companion.

Again, it may seem like not a lot, but it is. It works even if she's dead.

3. She increases your attack speed by 3%, Attack speed is important for a Barbarian because increased attack speed is increased damage. Nuff said!

There's another skill that I would like to use, but that means removing the additional attack speed, and that's the Enchantress' ability to turn enemies (even Elite monsters) into chickens for 5 seconds, making them lose their ability to use their skills as well as make them easier to kill. I opt for the attack speed though.

That said, I'm now Paragon Level 69, Torment II and I think I've pretty much hit a wall with Belial. I've stacked a lot of my skills in defense and vitality. I've got a TON of life but not so much damage. It takes a long time to kill Elites on Torment II and it takes forever to kill something like Belial. It gives Belial time to trigger his enrage timer at which point everything goes insane and I'm dead. There's no more going past it until I get better gear which gives me higher life and higher damage.

Reaper of Souls is just around the corner anyway so it won't be long now before I get that better gear! Belial better watch out!

Hardcore Barbarian, Level 30

My Hardcore Barbarian has just killed Azmodan, the boss of Act III, and now I'm currently on the last Act on the way to killing Diablo.

To be honest, I never expected to make it this far.

Yeah, it's Normal Difficulty but since I'm not a hardcore gamer (I like to think of myself as just a casual gamer) this is quite an accomplishment already.

I could have taken Diablo tonight but my connection to Battle.net seems to be lagging at the moment. I had to stop because dying a "lag death" is very possible and very real. It's happened to me several times with my softcore characters.

I would be running and fighting and then all of sudden everything stops but my character. The monsters stop and even my mercenary stops. I can still move my character and I can still make it attack a monster but nothing happens. It's like time stopped and I'm the only one moving.

And then, a few moments later, everything starts moving again trying to catch up and, apparently, the monsters had been hitting me all this time and now I'm already dead.

LAG DEATH.

It's one of the many problems of the always-on-connection of Diablo 3. This would never happen if this game had an offline mode.

And with a Hardcore character (a character that cannot be revived once it's died ), I can't afford dying because of something stupid as this so the very first indication of lagging, I immediately stop playing and close the game.

Looks like Diablo can breathe a sigh of relief...at least for now.