Diablo 3 Beta

[Arlos]

Just got my invite today. Was gone all day, so haven't played yet. 2Gig+ download.

Anyone else in? Let me know, and we'll exchange character names or whatever.

I'll post thoughts in a few days once I've had time to play it for a bit, if anyone cares and is interested.

-Arlos

[Tikker]

meh


never really got the love for it

[Lyion]

I bet they'll give preference to people with active WOW accounts, which is smart.

Diablo is great fun. I do admit I'm not nearly as interested in the hack and slash as I was, and I'm more of a Bioware/Black Isle fan, though.

I'm much more interested in Skyrim and Reckoning than Diablo III. I'll still buy it and play it.

[Harrison]

I can't wait!

[Arlos]

Just finished Act 1, which is all of the game that's available in the beta at the moment. I got to 10th level by the end. Played as a Wizard. Loved the class, had really good single target and AOE capabilities.

Still somewhat buggy, but that's to be expected.

Skill system is TOTALLY different from previous Diablo games. Basically, you get a new skill/ability every level or two, but you are limited in how many different ones you can have loaded at any one time. At the start, there's only 2 slots open, 1 bound to right mouse key, for one you'll want to use all the time or nearly so, the other to the hotkey bar. At level 6, another hotkey bar skill slot opens up. At level 10, you get your first Passive skill slot. Ultimately, you'll have at most 6 total active skill slots, 5 hotkey skills and 1 bound to right mouse key. You'll also eventually have 3 passive skill slots available. Skill calculator for the wizard can be found here: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/wizard Just click one of the other classes if you want to check them out.

As for gameplay, the new emphasis on vertical dimensions as well as the normal X/Y adds a lot to dungeon design. This is heightened when you get things like bats flying up to attack you from a floor below you, or being able to stand on an upper walkway and fire down on stuff below you when it can't hit back. There are destrucable elements in the environment as well, many of them set up as semi-obvious ways in which you can take out entire groups of enemies. (blow out some support beams, and a wall collapses on them, for example) Some of the dungeon environments are pretty large to explore everything. You even get bonus XP for destroying large groups of enemies at once. I think my record was 19 in 1 shot of the Wizard's point-blank AOE. It'll even give a bonus if you destroy a bunch of objects at once, like setting off a big AOE in the Graveyard, which blew up a bunch of headstones.

Resource management for your character is also completely different. No more HP/Mana like it used to be. There's still a HP globe, but different classes have different things in place of Mana. The Wizard, for example, had Energy, which acts very like mana, but is capped at 100, and regenerates insanely fast. (rather like Energy for rogues in WOW) Chain firing Magic Missile didn't even really drain it. Firing off 3 Arcane Orbs in quick succession would do it, but it'd be full again within 10 seconds or less. Other classes have different mechanisms. The monk, for example, one set of abilities builds up their resource, while the 2nd set uses it. (very akin to Rage for Warriors in WOW, I think). There are health potions, but mobs also drop health globes that heal you by running over them.

One of the BEST new elements you get as a quest reward early on: an item that lets you sell things as if you were at a store, no matter where you are at the time. Yes, that's right, no more needing to run back to town to sell crap just because you ran out of room in your inventory. Now you can just stop, sell it all, and keep killing. As an alternate to selling it, slightly later you get a quest reward that lets you deconstruct stuff into crafting components. Only 2 components I know of yet, Scrap and an essence. Deconstructing normal items gets you a scrap, deconstructing magic ones gets you one of each. Once you finish the quest enabling the blacksmith, you can make items with the components. Also out there are skill pages, which combine into training books when you get 5 of them. Take a book to the blacksmith (or one of the other crafting masters that aren't in the game yet), and you can train to get access to higher difficulty items. One other utility thing you can find are Companion scrolls. Use one of those, and you get a small bird follower for about 5 minutes that flies around and picks up the gold off the floor for you so you don't have to.

You get a storage box in town that starts out with 14 inventory boxes. For 2500 gold, you can get another 14. Not sure how/if the cost scales, as I didn't buy the first expansion. From the size of the window that opens with the initial boxes, it looks like your storage container can get quite large. Also, items seem to take up less inventory boxes. A 2-handed sword took up 3, as I recall. A short bow took up 2. Most weapons/armor take up 2. Some take up 1. So, inventory management is much less of an issue when you combine the smaller sizes with the ability to sell off crap while in a dungeon.

Overall, I liked it a lot so far, obviously. I'll be trying out other characters soon.

Update: Couple additional notes: The Stash (your storage box in town) AND your gold apparently share across characters. Very nice feature. Also, bought the first size upgrade to my Stash. Cost for the 2nd upgrade was the same as the first. Item quality is a system similar to WOW: Grey for crap, white for decent. No green quality level that I've found though. Blue exists, and indicates something's magic. I also just found a Gold (legendary) item on my 2nd character. Haven't seen purple items either, but I would guess they exist.

-Arlos