The Joy of Grinding

I'm generally not a huge fan of games that involve seemingly endless hours of grinding.  It takes a certain degree of patience to want to complete the same actions over and over with the hope of some "phat lewtz" at the end.  Strangely I've been enjoying the Diablo III grind.  My little crusader who started out as a fun side project has turned into a hulking mass of holy destruction.  I'm not going to be topping any leaderboards, but I'm having fun.

The dominion of the greed demon.

I made the decision to turn up the difficulty a few days ago and am finding that this has really paid off.  I have seen significantly better loot drops and have managed to amass a decent amount of gold.  One really fun event happened the other day purely by accident.  A treasure goblin popped up and I desperately chased it all over the map.  I finally managed to corner it and proceed to pound on it like the loot pinata that it is.  In my frenzy of clicking I somehow managed to enter the mysterious portal to the realm of the greed demon.  If you haven't managed to get into the portal you're missing out on a fun experience!  Inside the portal you find yourself in a vault that is filled with riches--tons of gold (plus, it's 100% bonus gold and XP right now) and more treasure goblins to kill.  At the end of a maze of riches you enter the inner sanctum and face-off against the greed demon.  The demon wasn't a very difficult fight for my crusader, I just has to make sure that I avoided the charge attacks and falling loot chests.  Once you've downed the demon you are rewarded with a huge chest of loot.

Besides downing the elusive greed demon I also found my first greater rift keystone.  I don't really know much about these keystones other than they unlock rifts that function as a sort of challenge mode.  The goal seems to be to unlock more powerful rifts by completing them quickly--there is a timer that runs continually and the rift guardian must be defeated before the timer runs out in order to advance to a more difficult rift.  If you beat the timer you earn a loot reward which also includes the option to earn a legendary gem.

It's nice to have some fallback games that I can enjoy while I'm waiting for new releases.  Grand Theft Auto V is next on my playlist and it has already been delayed a few times.  In the meantime I'm going to keep grinding out some loot in Diablo III.