Yes. Diablo 3 still hasn't lost it's power over me, I must admit. I've been playing the Diablo games by Blizzard since the very first one that came out in 1996, and I'm still hooked till this day!

_{Diablo III: Reaper of Souls - image by BagoGames - source: flickr}

Diablo, for me, is the quintessential action-rpg game. The basic premise has never changed: you enter an area, meet lots of monsters and you kill them all. And you have a good time doing that because the controls are easy and intuitive, as the game is centered around the action and the collecting of items that make your avatar more powerful; the role-playing elements are kept fairly simple and points have to be distributed between just 4 attributes: Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence and Vitality. In Diablo 3 it is even simpler than that in practice, because from the first three, only one is important for each character-class.

However, I'm not writing this post to give you a game-review or recommendation: this is just me celebrating going back to the Diablo-universe to do some happy monster-hacking. I thought I had given up the game forever, but I'm actually surprised to fall back in love with this game so easily. See, not so long ago I saw the DLive stream from my fellow Helpie, @bembelmaniac, playing Diablo 3. I stopped playing 4 seasons ago, a full year ago now, and I thought I'd never come back since I actually achieved almost everything there is to achieve in the game, mastered all classes and killed Diablo hundreds, maybe even thousands of times...

No, really: I have thousands of hours playtime in this one game alone. Look at the screenshot below: that shows I have more than 5000 hours played on the Barbarian alone, as that's my favorite class. On the Wizard and Monk I have around 1000 hours each and more than 500 hours in all other classes except the Necromancer; that latest expansion I haven't bought yet.

_{So many hours of Barbaric monster-slaying... and there's more to come ;-)}

But I apparently haven't had enough yet: another friend of mine also started playing again and he asked me if I didn't wat to try completing season 14 together. First I hesitated, because my personal life is still very busy and I want to post at least once a day here on Steemit, but the second time he asked I faltered and said yes. So yesterday evening I started a Barbarian and my friend power-leveled me to Paragon 139: if you've ever played this game, you know I went to bed very, very late after a session of more than 5 hours straight...

I think it's save to say the Diablo games have kept me in their grip for more than 20 years now, and maybe I should seek professional help with this addiction. But I do have to give a huge shout-out to the people at Blizzard: they have been updating and fine-tuning the game for years now, just for it's loyal fans. Don't forget the game was released way back in 2012, and since then the creators at Blizzard have kept the game (and my addiction) alive. There's no auction house in the game anymore and Blizzard doesn't make money with the sales of in-game items. And they've been doing this for more than 20 years now since they started this admirable practice with the first game in the series.

_{Tristram, the village in Act 1 is where we usually do all equipping, enchanting and transmogrifying}

I think you know why I keep this post on the short side :-) I already played some more hours today and am already Paragon level 157 now, but I have to keep up with my friend who's reached level 354 already... Also, I'm posting this with the #ulog tag: #ulog is an initiative by @surpassinggoogle that encourages Steemians to not be hesitant to write about their own lives and events in their personal sphere. Mainly new users, but also experienced Steemians sometimes struggle what to write about, or revert to copying other people's work if they don't think they have something interesting to write about. #ulog aims to show that there's nothing wrong with writing about the personal stuff you're willing to write. Thanks to @meno also, who made a sweet and short video explaining all about #ulog; you can watch that here.

Thanks for stopping by and reading about my addiction ;-) Tomorrow I'll be back with a "normal" article. Keep Steeming!

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