DAWG6: I’m 47 years old, originally from a small town in rural, Western New York State (Andover, NY), but for the last 18 years I’ve lived in Orlando, Florida. I earned a degree in Computer Science from Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT; Rochester, NY) where I was also commissioned as an officer in the US Army. I served 8 years in the Army as an Armor (Tank) officer, and served at various posts around the world (Mannheim, Germany; Fort Knox, KY; Fort Hood, TX; Fort Lewis, WA) including a short tour in Kuwait during operation Desert Storm. I got out of the Army in 1998 and moved to Florida where I have been working as a Software Architect designing simulations for the US Army. While I was stationed in Germany, I met my wife, Michaela. We have two daughters, one of which is studying Chemical Engineering at the University of Florida and the other is currently a senior in high school.

DAWG6: My primary hobby is video games, Diablo of course occupying a great deal of my time. Aside from that, I also like scuba diving (Florida is an excellent place for that!), hiking, snow skiiing (we have to travel north to find some hills/mountains for both of those!) and for the last couple years I have a new interest in running Obstacle Course Races (OCRs), such as the Tough Mudder.

Here’s a video of myself and my daughter’s boyfriend running the Super Hero Scramble last year: (WARNING: explicit lyrics in audio) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Njv2oGkoZJs. You might also get a taste for the music that I like!

DAWG6: I started playing games, well, pretty much when the first video games came out, in the 70’s. From the first time I laid my eyes on arcade games, I was hooked. I played pretty much everything you could imaging back then, from Pac-Man and Space Invaders to pong and the Atari 2600 games. I got hooked on Diablo in 1997, soon after the game’s release and have been playing ever since.

DAWG6: From time to time over the years I have taken breaks from Diablo to try out other games. I played WoW for many years, and enjoyed every single minute of it, but the time commitment for a raiding game was just too much stress on my work and personal life (that’s probably why I enjoy the Diablo series so much – I don’t have to commit to several hours to complete a raid, I can just leave at any time).

DAWG6: I’ve played all classes some, and I’ve played Monk almost as much as DH. Since about a month into Season 1, I’ve been focusing exclusively on the DH. The DH has always been my favorite class, and I have to admit I got a little frustrated at game launch with the DH’s survivability (I play Hardcore, exclusively). Since then, the DH has come a long way and it really suits my play style the best.

DAWG6: I am very proud to represent Guild Medieval (http://www.guildmedieval.com)! We’re a group of mature, adult gamers (and some family members) spread across the planet and many, many games. Although the guild has been around since 2001, I’ve been with them only a “short” time (since 2013). The guild is all about helping each other, having fun and being nice to one another. One of the things that drew me to this guild is their strict code of ethics and courtesy (one of our biggest rules is no profanity, whatsoever!).

DAWG6: I’ve made several spreadsheet DPS calculators and also some EHP calculators, including a web-based armor mitigation calculator for Hellgate: London (anyone here remember that short-live game?).

DAWG6: Basically I was trying to answer the question that every player has to answer every day: should I replace piece of gear X with piece of gear Y? I had looked at some other calculators, most notably the DH Calculator by ReQal and graveman (http://d3profile.com/) and I had been looking at the battle.net hero/profile APIs and thought this would be a great opportunity to develop a profile import tool that did more than just display info you could see in-game. This project has been very fun to work on, and yes, I’ll probably do something similar in the future. I suppose if I had more free time I would even make one for another class, but as it is, I find it hard enough to balance work, play and family time!

DAWG6: I suppose my first Diablo 3 death: a few of us had been playing through the campaign and finally got to Act 1 Hell. I was a level 51 Demon Hunter and we went into the Cathedral to find Cain. We ran into an elite pack right away and realized we were way under-geared for the encounter. No problem, we said: we’ll just back out. Oops! You can’t back out of the Cathedral level 1! So we all ran around hysterically like scared little girls and eventually died. It was quite entertaining to listen to on Skype, I can imagine!

DAWG6: I think the highlight of the game for me was killing Maltheal on T6 the first time. Not so much because that particular fight was fun or the loot was rewarding, but because a group of us in our Guild had set that as an objective that we all worked toward. We worked for a few weeks to make sure we were all geared as well as we could, and none of really knew how tough or easy the fight would be. We had a Wizard Tank, a Monk, and 2 DH’s. We had all done the fight at lower difficulty levels, but we weren’t really sure if he would just one shot us or not. Well the fight went well, until that Soul Sweep effect he does. I ended up proc’ing my Awareness passive and almost died – but we ended up downing Mal and it was absolutely glorious!

DAWG6: Perhaps it goes back to Diablo 2 and the fun I had playing a Bowazon? I guess I just really like the play style of a ranged DPS class that focuses on avoiding damage. Early on it was very frustrating since I would find myself in over my head (I lost many DH’s in those days, as you can tell by my Hall of Heroes!)

DAWG6: Smoke Screen with Healing Vapors. I know a lot of players prefer tumble, but I find that SS is just so versatile: it gets me out of frozen, it heals me (Healing Vapors) and it makes me invulnerable. I think it’s key to avoiding damage, and if you’re using Pride’s Fall, you really want to avoid taking any damage.

DAWG6: Currently running the M6 cold build for both solo and groups.

DAWG6: I like the class right now very much. The only changes I would make are subtle quality of life improvements, like showing a range indicator for my Zei’s Stone of Vengeance or maybe increasing the # of Sentry max charges when you equip Bombadier’s Rucksack.

DAWG6: My DH is in pretty good shape right now, so other than Ancient upgrades to existing items, if I can ever find a fire SOJ, I’d like to switch to fire for groups (and keep cold for soloing).

DAWG6: I think Chakram needs some love. It was my favorite spender for a long time, and I’m kind of disappointed that it just can’t compete with the other spenders. I love the graphics for it and the current rune choices are nice, but it needs a damage boost to make it competitive.

DAWG6: Don’t look at sheet DPS. That’s why I wrote the DPS calculator. Sheet DPS is deceiving and I hear a lot of people comparing gear by simply looking at the tooltip DPS +/- numbers. You really have to take into consideration your build and other situational factors to effectively compare two pieces of gear (or skills, etc…)

DAWG6: Jaybird#1794, who authored “The TAO of Sentries” which was a great resource for me in writing the DPS calculator.

DAWG6: Do you think that the current M6 mechanics are overpowered (or underpowered) and need to be changed?

DAWG6: I would remove the Follower tokens’ legendary power that make them immune to damage. I think they are overpowered and makes them a requirement for solo play (along with 2 Unity rings). If not removed, then perhaps rework the legendary power so that they still take damage, but their HP doesn’t drop below 0. This way they wouldn’t completely cut all your incoming damage in half, since the follower would still take damage.