- Avatar Knockoff, or Blizzard Masterpiece?
I managed to get my hands on the Diablo 3 beta the other day, with the timing disturbingly similar to my finals schedule (only one more quarter of these things…). Not about to let that deter me I played through the monk class and played through to the skeleton king, and I feel it worth to give my first impressions after my first 3 hour playthrough of Diablo III. These thoughts are based on not pouring over new details when they happen or looking at prior beta runs, so if they seem intuitive to you well, congratulations.
Things I Liked
- The “mana” system: OK, so I only played the monk, I’m purposely saving some of the other classes for streaming because I haven’t seen very many of them (which means you wont see me play through with a demon hunter either…at least not at level 1). That said, I really liked the system of building using general attacks and then throwing out some burst damage for tougher/tight groups of enemies. One of the best parts of Diablo was being able to just spam your skills, and in essence that is all you do. Unlike Diablo 2 though, you arent starving for mana for the first 20 levels (I played a paladin, we ran out of mana fast in the beginning). A nice improvement
- The crafting system, as well as shared gold and stashes: Just from the standpoint that the game is all about scavenging for stuff all day long in the hopes of getting that one perfect item, and gold is trivial and always has been. This way, you can break stuff down to specific components and craft them account-wide. Makes it a lot easier to level alts, because until people figure out how to bot their way to inferno, you’ll have to do it the normal way.
- Quest selection: Thank you. For some reason this is awesome…and at least I dont have to start from scratch when running Skeleton King again.
- How the monk plays: I can see myself playing this class, very fluid, lots of AoE attacks (this is a Diablo game…so thank God for those), and high damage. My only caveat is why is my monk allowed to have dual-wielding swords?
- Achievements: There is a reason I have a TrueAchievements bar on my stream. I think this will help keep completionists in the game, as most of these achievements appear to be account-wide.
- New Follower System: Henchman were only customized by the weapon, their helm, and armor in Diablo 2. Here, while you are given even less to work with (jewelry, weapons, and maybe a shield) your “followers” are much more customizable. You can pick skills that complement your playstyle. We only get to try out the templar in the beta, but I like the idea of constantly being healed every second even if, at level 11, I’m already stomping the Act.
Things I Didn’t Like
- Forcing Us To Use Battle.Net: Battle.net crashed under the weight of the new testers, and that is understandable and part of the beta process. What bothers me is that without battle.net being up, I can’t play the game. It’s something they introduced with Starcraft and are codifying here: without Bnet you can’t play. Its an annoying issue that is a command decision, but we should be able to do something if Blizzard screws us over by being down.
- Arcane beams: Those things tore me up when I first experienced them at level 6, not so much now, but methinks that is a balance issue because its not like I got some arcane resistance in the interim.
- Targeting Issues: I would hope there is a way to lock your target, if only because I dont care about the minions, I want to kill the unique mob that is rocking my face. If this already exists, I haven’t found it yet.
I will be streaming Diablo 3 on Saturday, as the rest of the weekdays involve me being busy and as such my playtime is unreliable. If you don’t know what my gaming stream is it is here, and all announcements for when the stream starts show up in my gaming-specific twitter. Once I have played all 5 classes through, I will see which ones I like the most and which one I will likely to level up first when the game comes out…at some point in 2012.