Out of Pod Experience

I only played the barbarian and only plan to play a barb after release.
I have pre-ordered the collectors edition and will play this game very often.

#1 reason I'm buying:
Enemies are fun to fight for the first time in ARPG history. D2 was the best but still 'meh'. Torchlight came close. D3 is MILES ahead of anything else in enemy style. The Beta doesn't really do it justice because it's so easy you don't actually need to 'fight' them, but you can see that the design intent is there, and they have specifically stated that intention many times including basing the end game on engaging game play you can't overcome with status in Inferno mode, rather than a WoW style content heap.



+Auto gold pickup.
You have to be REAL close to pick stuff up, but there are common bonuses to the range of picking it up, and anything is better than clicking 50 stacks of gold like every other ARPG out there including D1 and D2.

+Neat Enemies.
The beta is basically the starter tutorial area on the easiest setting so the enemies don't really present a challenge at this point, but you can see they are putting in something interesting to fight instead of an endless stream of loot pinatas like other ARPG's. Skeletons with shields, archers that change position instead of standing there like turrets, summoners, etc. Even the boss is a neat fight. Yes... he's easy... but try to beat him without ever being touched and it's suddenly a very neat fight. Assuming Inferno lives up to difficulty promises, it's going to be a lot of fun vs engaging enemies

+Skill system.
No more rolling twenty characters to play twenty builds. Change whatever on the fly. Don't even have to go back to town, it just sets the skill you changed on cooldown for about 10 seconds or so, then you're good to go.

+Crafting.
Basically what the Horadric Cube should have been in D2. You make an item with stats (damage/armor) for it's level and a number of random properties. Good for when you haven't found a new shield/helmet/whatever in a few levels.

+Shared Stash
Your basic stash is shared between characters. <3

+Individual looting
Whenever something dies, everyone in the game gets their own loot drops. You see ONLY your loot, and only YOU can pick up your loot. No fighting over items. No one asking you to give them the good stuff you find. No headaches. Just loot.

+Graphics
People have compared it to WoW... that's up to you to decide if you like it or not or if it's too cartoony, but overall I think it's a great improvement over previous ARPG's because I can SEE WHAT I AM DOING even in dark areas. Glowing effects look especially good and jump off the screen really well. Shading and movement are well done in the enemy art so it's always easy to see them and pick them out against the background.

+Random Quests
Stuff just 'happens' while you're playing. You will run into a ghost that wants you to do something, a mass grave that suddenly spawns tons of zombies, a person hiding out deep in the dungeon under some bodies... some things are scripted as part of the story but others are not always there. Much better than 'go kill X skeletons' or 'go talk to so and so' or 'go kill the goblin king'. Events always have triggers, too. You don't just get sandbagged with fifty guys the trapped chest is REAL obvious or the ritual going on will continue until you run up and engage someone.



-Drop rates.
Another ARPG running off the cliff like a ******* lemming. Everything that drops is trash, and they added a bunch of random attributes to the game that are stupid. +trivial amount of XP per enemy killed, gold find and magic find are separate still, gold pickup range... lots and lots and lots of complete trash loot and they think we like that according to some of the community and dev leader posts on the D3 forums. Playing solo I have found only one rare (when I killed the boss for the first time).

-Questification/Going to town
Lots of 'go back to town and talk' quest moments. They specifically added to the game, and then TOOK BACK OUT, features to sell things inside dungeons and break down stuff into crafting components while in dungeons, so again you have to go back to town to do those things.

-Potions
Potions are completely half assed now. They heal in a strange sort of half instant half HoT way, are on a timer, and you pick up health globes which heal you so you don't really need them the way they've been made available as occasional HP boosts, and they're not really available when you do need lots of healing because of the timer.

-Stupid Options and Interface.
Chat is dumb, game joining is dumb, options are dumb, UI is pretty, but dumb. You have to ENABLE switching skill slots, otherwise every spot you assign a skill to can only be like four options instead of any skill.

-Item Selection
The range of items dropping seemed much narrower than D1 or D2. There was only one version of each drop type, maybe two of a few, and judging by the items page on D3.com that doesn't change. There are very clear gaps in levels between them unlike D2 and other ARPG's where they overlap to a degree and always give you a selection.

-Random Extra Hard Monsters.
They went to the trouble to make neat enemies to fight, but then the random extra hard enemies (named, elite, rare, whatever...) completely ignore their own design. Slow enemies you're meant to duck in and out of aggro range will spawn with crazy super speed, fast enemies will spawn with knockback and you can't get near them for more than one hit, etc.

-Status Effects.
Fear (run away from the monster when it hits you), stun, knock back, and I think I read CHARM is in the game to hit players with, but I haven't seen that one. Very unpleasant to fight, unnecessary annoyance that detracts from the game IMHO.

This x10000000000000.



Don't forget that the beta is only the very earliest levels, and may not include all item types yet. You're getting those worthless bonuses because you're not high enough level to get the good ones. Good bonuses clearly exist (I found a few with % attack speed, etc), so I wouldn't complain too much about it until we see the drop rates in the actual game.



The point is that health globes reward you for constantly killing stuff, while potions are your emergency "get out of jail free" card. The timer is so that you don't compensate for your lack of tactics or proper defensive equipment by just spamming potions as fast as you can press the button.



So what? You aren't allowed to pick more than one skill from the same category even if you enable it, so 90% of the time you'll just leave it with the default numbers. The option is there if you need it, but simplicity in UI design is a GOOD thing.



It's called a challenge. The random monsters force you to think about your tactics, and adapt to each individual fight. And it's not like any of the ones in the beta were even remotely difficult.

So what? The graphics are modest enough that I can play it on my old laptop, and they still look good on my real computer. I'd much rather have a fun and balanced game that's available on the widest possible range of hardware than yet another tech demo for the latest fancy graphics inventions.



It's called balance. There's a reason every RPG has a skill tree instead of letting you pick anything at any level. And really, Diablo 3 does an even better job than usual. Instead of obsessing over which unlock to pick at each level, you just gain more options every level and decide what skills you want your character to be using at that moment.



If you're looking for story in a Diablo game, you're really missing the point. The series is about killing hordes of monsters as fast as possible, and Diablo 3 looks like it got that gameplay exactly right.



There isn't, and nobody will miss it.

Doubt im going to get it. Building the character with skills, stats etc, is what I like the most about rpgs and they ruined it. Having no lan for an action rpg is so stupid, I remember going to lans and play d2 with my friends. IMO Titan Quest is better in pretty much every single way and it´s $10.

I will miss it. Every time it rains, I loose my DSL.

I got D2LOD running on lappy, play it while doing long trips in EVE or when internet is down and I can not play EVE.

I agree that my situation is kind of unique, so I am not buying D3.

I agree it was bad form when people could chug pots, but the current system is barely better than no potions at all. Maybe health globes are super rare on higher difficulties but it seems like if you aren't seeing health globes (boss) one pot isn't going to save you from anything. Sure I can work up a hypothetical where a pot saves you, but I think they could have been done better.


Yes you can. My barb did not use a rage spender. I just put the lv13 green skill on there. Revenge I think it was called. It's an option down in there that is enabled by default called 'guided mode' or something like that. Once you turn it off you can use multiple skills from the same category, and you can equip them in whatever spot you want.


They are already built with a challenge to adapt and deal with. As you said the difficulty is not high enough here to worry about it unless you want to but the idea of Inferno mode is that you'll have to eventually. That contradicts with the randomness of the extra hard monsters.

It's not that they are 'harder' that bothers me, it's that supposedly you will HAVE to play the game and dodge things or quote YOU WILL DIE in Inferno, but if they give a slow enemy you're meant to duck in and out of attack range of and then make it super fast that option is gone. You CAN'T duck in and out of melee range AND it's stronger. So either they lied and we can tank them even on Inferno with godly gear and we are going to be expected to have it, or they lied and Inferno is impossible as soon as you come to something with a random boost that compensates for it's weakness against the player.

The only way out I can come up with is crowd control. I kill super fast enemies that charge me using my foot stomp to stun whack, and my leap attack to regain distance. I assume (key word 'ass') stun won't last this long on Inferno, but that could be plain wrong. If our crowd control abilities still work to an acceptable, I could see this all working out, but I am skeptical.

There are lots of other combinations that would potentially mess up the design intent of an enemy and turn it into something you can't play with and just have to tank and beat on.

The point is that a combination of proper defensive equipment, active healing from other players, killing stuff fast enough to keep the health globes dropping, etc, is supposed to be enough to keep you alive. Potions are there to deal with an occasional emergency, not to provide the majority of your defense. And they certainly aren't there as a substitute for having a good plan for keeping yourself alive like they were in Diablo 2.



Really? Obviously it's too late to check now, but the D3 website very strongly suggested that you were limited to a single skill choice from each category, and that "unlocking" the UI would only allow you to change which skill goes on which button/key. So, for example, you could put one of your rage spenders on the left mouse button instead of the 3 key, but that was all.

If it's actually the case that you can enable an option to pick multiple skills from the same category (and not just a bug that lets you do it), I agree, that's incredibly poor documentation and UI design.



Which is more likely:

1) Blizzard, a major game design company with a huge budget and an extensive testing process, has missed an obvious problem that makes their endgame (the major selling point of the game) impossible to beat if the wrong combination of monster attributes spawns.

or

2) There will always be a way to beat any given monster, but the random "elite" spawns may require you to change your strategy in response instead of just mindlessly using the same approach to every monster of that type.

I think the answer here is obvious.

No... before you had specialization and a bit of planning ONE TIME.
Now... you have specialization and a bit of planning ALL THE TIME.

The differentiation doesn't come from your wizard's spec, it comes from the player's ability to play it and how your gear looks (Dye/Crafting). That's what an ARPG is supposed to be. Not some ******* WoW gear grind that the genre has tried SO HARD to turn into up till now.


I don't know what you mean by 'real sense of iteration upon the series' it's a direct continuation starting in Tristram and it plops Deckard Cain in front of you to explain that before the first mini boss (Skeleton King) is fought. What do you want? Shattered Mt. Arreat to be the starting zone? Tyreal still standing there with a question mark over his head?

Except that's not true at all. The skill system is significantly improved (and completely new), the graphics are much better, various annoyances in the previous games have been removed (for example, you now have infinite arrows), etc. If you can honestly say that the game does not improve on anything, you clearly haven't played it.

I played for about 4 minutes.

That was about all I could stand.

If I wanted to play a kids version of WoW, this would be the way to go.