Diablo 3 beta

[phantommaelstrom]

They made Leoric appear again... they should make the Butcher come back too. That monster is incredibly tough. It should give the scare and make players make a run.

[Falchion]

They made Leoric appear again... they should make the Butcher come back too. That monster is incredibly tough. It should give the scare and make players make a run.

Hmmm... Fresh meat!

[Lavarinth]

There's new artwork of the Butcher in the Book of Cain novel... I wouldn't be surprised if he returned.

[Hercanic]

> super excited over Open Beta
> played like a madman over the weekened
> beta ends, find out I can still log in
> had full beta access the entire time

I played through to King Leoric on every class, getting to level 10 on all (with Monk, Wizard, and Witch Doctor reaching the max of 13). My thoughts:

Barbarian: Tough, but generally slower clear-rate than the others. All classes regenerate their resource quickly and/or in combat, but only the Barbarian starts at 0 resource every fresh fight. Still, Fury generates quickly and there’s not a huge demand on it due to the staple skills (fury-generators) being just as effective. Leap is great for traversing a dungeon quickly, allowing you to jump across chasms and up/down levels, ignoring much longer, winding paths to the same end. Compared to the Monk, the only other true melee class, the Barbarian was behind on AoE power and overall mobility (leap is on a 10sec cooldown), but could hit bosses hard and CC them like no other.

Monk: Fast attack, movement, and mobility. By level 10 I had +16% movement speed (passive and boots), a constant and free short-range teleport with Thunderclap-runed Fists of Thunder (also the fastest primary attack, and the rune even gives it a small AoE on every strike!), and a rather long-range target-based teleport with Dashing Strike (costs Spirit, though). The downside is neither of these “teleports” will move you over environmental obstacles like the Barbarian’s Leap. They also require a target, either an enemy or a destructible object, to enact the teleport.

Demon Hunter: Bow and traps didn’t really appeal to me, but by level 10 I felt pretty good playing this class. Hungering Arrow for large mob fights (even if you completely miss, the arrow has a chance to turn around and seek out a target, meaning you can pretty much spam without much aiming), Impale for bosses, spam Vault with Tactical Advantage passive for insanely fast travel, and Smoke Screen to reposition (when solo, this might as well be a dungeon-wide stun).

Witch Doctor: I love pet classes, and I thought this would be my first pick for retail. After playing, however, I only plan to play one as an alt. Blow Dart is effective, but boring. Corpse Spiders is awesome, but so slow to chuck out jars. Grasp of Death is nice, but the 8sec cooldown is long compared to many fights. Firebats is hilarious, but sucks down all your mana in five seconds flat, and combined with its short range I found it exceedingly ineffective. The rune Dire Bats really made it shine, however, and I used this as my primary method of damage for some time. However, it is still very expensive per shot, and the big bat swerves left and right in a serpentine flight pattern that makes it very unpredictable and difficult to aim. If it wasn’t so effective damage-wise, I probably wouldn’t have used it. The skill Plague of Toads… oh god what the fucking hell! “OOOH-AH!” “OOO-ANG-GA!” “WAWAWA!” Every. Fucking. Cast. I was playing the female Witch doctor, and her constant shouts every cast on a SPAMMABLE skill was intolerable. I couldn’t bring myself to use this skill for long, not even for the sake of testing. The skill Haunt left me a little confused. It was spammable, but I had to Google to find out whether it stacked or not. Blizzard needs to refine its tooltip. Sacrifice wasn’t very effective so early in the game, as many skills that would make this useful weren’t available. The cooldown on the dog summon is just too long, and the passive skill has such a small chance that I never once got a dog from it (I couldn’t help but wonder if the skill was bugged). Soul Harvest, now here’s a powerful, if annoying skill to use. It gives you such a massive boost to damage that I don’t see why anyone wouldn’t take it, and that’s part of the problem. It’s also one of those "if you forget to keep renewing me, you suck!" type of skills. Personally, I think buffs should either be permanent or short-lived, none of this in-between chore-like maintenance. The Monk’s mantras are guilty of this. Soul Harvest at least has a #-of-targets conditional and a "short" 30 second fight-length duration, but despite these attempts to make the skill interesting I don’t find it particularly fun. Overall, the Witch Doctor has a lot of direct (Haunt) and indirect (Corpse Spiders) DoT spells, which when all stacked up drains health quickly, but it’s getting them stacked that makes the Witch Doctor feel slower than other classes.

Wizard: Yeah, this is going to be my first character. Most classes I didn’t feel badass until around level 8 to 10. Wizard? Level 2, Ray of Frost, monsters were my bitch. Level 5, Arcane Orb, and I’ve got my AoE Fireball back. GG. Shock Pulse with Explosive Bolts rune? Bodies fly offscreen from chain AoE procs. Arcane Torrent I’m on the fence about, as on one hand it gives me small AoEs on-demand anywhere on the screen, but channeling takes a few seconds before the arcane mini-missiles impact and it drains power so fast you don’t want to oversaturate an area, so you need to predict when enemies will die before moving the mouse frantically to other mobs you want dead. This delayed feedback is what holds the skill back. In some ways it’s better than Arcane Orb, in others it isn’t. They both take time to reach their target, but Torrent can hit specific monsters behind their minions, while Orb hits whoever is in the way, but Orb feels snappier because you aren’t anchored down channeling like with Torrent. I unlocked Energy Twister, but I didn’t use it before Beta ended, so I cannot speak about its effectiveness. Overall, the Wizard deals tons of ranged AoE damage, and Diablo is all about fighting swarms of monsters.

[Hercanic]

In anticipation of Diablo 3’s release, my wife and I have embarked on a Diablo 1 and 2 marathon. She had never played either, so watching her discovery is a thrill all on its own.

Right now, we’re both level 18 in Diablo 1 and slogging through the cave levels. I’m a Sorcerer and she’s a Rogue. I must admit, Diablo 3 has nothing on D1 when it comes to difficulty. From the onset your life is in danger. You cannot stand around and let monsters hit you and expect to live long, unlike D3. Unique monsters with their posse can often mean death if you don’t have a good choke to control the encounter. And the Butcher? Holy crap! We only beat him the two times we faced him by exploiting the map. The first instance there were bars and a closable door in our favor to keep him at bay, and the other time we managed to get him stuck on stairs.

Losing your items on death is certainly a frustrating pain, but it also makes death that much scarier. The prospect of having to frantically grab your items whilst running away from a sea of angry beasts clawing at your naked bits is terrifying. We made a mistake at one point, accidentally luring three or four dozen mobs to the dungeon stairs. Every time we tried to go down, we were instantly killed. The situation seemed impossible. When pressed, our creativity reared up, and a fast cast of Town Portal, followed by one of us baiting all the monsters away from the stairs to sacrifice themselves deeper in the dungeon, proved to be our solution.

Friendly fire isn’t. We’ve collected a few ears from one another due to errant spells and arrows. This alone has compounded the difficulty, as doors work against us as a choke just as much as it does against monsters. Oh, and never walk into a room full of monsters with your partner in crime following close behind. The moment you try to turn to run back through the door, you’ll wonder why your character isn’t responding, only to later realize after your swift death that your teammate happened to be blocking you in by standing in the doorframe.

Overall, we’re having a lot of fun, and I’m experiencing quite a bit of nostalgia. Remember tending your “item gardens”? Lol.

If anyone is interested in playing Diablo 1 with their friends or family, it takes a little effort to set up due to its old tech. We found out we couldn’t use Battle.net because we’re at the same location and Battle.net cannot differentiate our clients. IPX for LAN play seemed like a no-go, too, because the protocol was dropped in Windows Vista/7. There’s also a rainbow color glitch when you play D1 in Windows 7. Then you’ve got the sound-delay and slow load due to everything being run from the CD. Thankfully these all have solutions.

1. Get IPXWrapper to play LAN (and Hamatchi to expand your LAN to friends/family on the internet). Note that everyone must use IPXWrapper, even those on XP who can still use the native IPX protocol – they can’t cross-communicate.
2. Get MagicDisc to make and mount an ISO of your D1 CD.
3. Look up Diablo 1 Windows 7 color fix. Basically you have to terminate explorer.exe while you’re playing, and there’s a handy *.bat that will automate that for you.

[mAc Chaos]

See, that's why I always liked Diablo 1 the most. Each further installment feels less like it.

[Taeradun]

http://www.diablowiki.com/Diablo_III_Ba ... cter_Names

[Alevice]

fucking blizzard, why u no lemme name my char cumtaster

[Lavarinth]

Why do character names even matter, all you see is the account name in game anyway as the character name.

[Hercanic]

What. The. Fuck. Blizzard. So you waste my time during Open Beta with constant Error Code 37's (busy server, heavy load) during your stress test so on retail you'd be prepared. You just released, and what do I fucking get? Error. Fucking. Code. Fucking. Thirty. Fucking. Seven. Fuck!

[IskatuMesk]

You don't really want chat channels, do you?

[Ricky_Honejasi]

What. The. Fuck. Blizzard. So you waste my time during Open Beta with constant Error Code 37's (busy server, heavy load) during your stress test so on retail you'd be prepared. You just released, and what do I fucking get? Error. Fucking. Code. Fucking. Thirty. Fucking. Seven. Fuck!

Quite frankly, that's what I expected and feared. Although, I kind of hoped they would be smart enough to fix that in time.

[Lavarinth]

What. The. Fuck. Blizzard. So you waste my time during Open Beta with constant Error Code 37's (busy server, heavy load) during your stress test so on retail you'd be prepared. You just released, and what do I fucking get? Error. Fucking. Code. Fucking. Thirty. Fucking. Seven. Fuck!

Are you really complaining, Herc? It's been the same issue with every, EVERY Diablo game.

WC3 had this issue for about an hour.

SC2 I don't believe did, but then again it wasn't the most preordered game in history by Amazon, D3 was.

WoW had this issue for weeks, or months.

None-the-less, everyone I know got in after a couple minutes of retrying.

[Hercanic]

Yes, I am. I will not make excuses for an 18+ billion dollar company, who already operates an extensive service capable of supporting over 12 million concurrent MMO subscribers, that spent nearly 9 years developing this game, 8 months in public beta testing, and had three weeks prior to retail release to prepare after stress testing. They are also the ones who chose to make this predominantly single-player game reliant on servers and discontinued LAN support.

[Lavarinth]

You can't stress test the world without having the entire world trying to log on.

It happens one time per game release, if even, I think people ask too much of companies in regards to being able to log on the very exact moment the game releases. Valve doesn't unlock games exactly at midnight for the particular reason.