how can there not be a thread here when the game came out today? So who's playing it? What's awesome about it? What sucks? how is it different than D2 which I played to death. Someone convince me to buy this.
Diablo 3
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Just beat it on my first run through as a Barb... It took me 3 days, but I'm not sure of the hour count. Loved it, but as a HUGE fan of Diablo 2 I was dissapointed at the things left out from previous games.
Things like the secondary weapon set, charms, scrolls of town portal/Identify and ethereal weapons are missing.
Some other issues are the way death was treated, when you died in either of the previous games you lost gold and unless you planted a TP you had some big leg work to do, and you had to go get your body with worse weapons and armour while likely fighting the thing that killed you before.
In Diablo 3, you simply respawn at the last of far too many checkpoints with no penalty unless you count your weapons taking damage when they can be very easily repaired for next to no money. Unless it's a bossfight or event online. In which case, unless your friends die too you end up having to wait until they kill the boss, I can imagine a few groups letting themselves die so they could all play. There are also WAY more Waypoints that you'll almost never use, because you have infinite Town Portal, although you cant leave portals, because you teleport instantly. It wont matter as you wont end up doing too much backtracking. Between checkpoints, infinite town portal and the Waypoints (yes they're different.) You basically end up just needing to shell out some gold for repairs.
You wont end up dieing too often on Normal, I died, you ready? ONCE in the first act. Because of arguably the biggest problem, COOLDOWNS ON POTIONS. Now, potions are different here. Unlike the first two the belt doesnt let you store a limited amount of potions, you keep potions in your inventory and then on the HUD you select which strength of potions to use. (I've only played a Barb, so I dont know if Mana potions are still around, barbs haave a recharging Fury bar instead of mana.) Now, after using a potion, you need to wait around THIRTY SECONDS before you can use another one.
The only, I REPEAT, ONLY reason I EVER died was because of this. If I could spam potions like the other games I probably never would have died. It makes no sense that only one potion can be used, I recall in Diablo 2 you could use a certain amount of Stamina Potions (now missing because you cant run and rely on speed boosts from equipment to move faster.) Mana potions and Health Potions. Something like 5 before you couldnt use anymore. A SINGLE potion is just blizzard flipping the flood valve in a way. Because death is unpunished and the game isnt that difficult on Normal you end up dieing ONLY because of potion cool down or being overwhelmed before you can hit the potion button. I died two or three times against bosses, because I got caught by the minions they spawn and the boss did their big damage attack. I basically walked through Diablo himself, the only real problems coming from Azmodan and Ghom due to their odd size making it hard to circle them.
Also of note, runes have been implemented as bonuses to your classes skill in the skill menu, no longer an inventory item. Gems have also been changed, instead of elemental bonuses and resistances, they boost your skills when socketed into items. Socketed items are also more rare in this game, only really showing up in the third act. Barbarians also now have no access to any form of ranged weaponry, instead one of the class skills allows you to throw an axe, but you'd need to replace the exceedingly usefull shouts to use it. So really, Barbarians dont have any kind of ranged attack. It really helps to be in a game with a ranged character, of which there are two. Wizards and Demon Hunters.
As for online, I DID play a spot or two of D2 online and was pretty surprised to see how far from what I considered to be a pretty sweet lobby system this game deviated. It feels very un-social and claustrophobic and the lack of any central lobby area is puzzling. As finding a gorup would be easier that way, also, 5 classes and only four spots in a game? Why? Not to mention you have 9 spots to create a character, and there isnt enough different that you can do to warrant two version of any one character. 3 new classes coming in an expansion maybe? Anyways, the online worked well, minor lag and the issue with not being able to rejoin boss battles are the biggest problems.
One fantastic addition though is that everyone playing get's different loot drops, so you dont need to spend time sorting or chasing loot or gold. Simply pick everything up and if you have a good item for a party member, click-shift to show them the weapon too see if they are interested and have anything to trade, this also removes the dangers of drop trading. In Diablo 2 you needed to drop items to give them to the other guy. Now, a problem with that was a person could, if quick enough, steal all items being dropped if you decided to drop at the same time, or a third party could take all the dropped items. Another item of note is how gold is handled, it's way more important in this game, even without the auction houses. You not only have to pay too upgrade your stash, but you have a blacksmith and jeweler to upgrade as well. The jeweler can combine gems together to make larger, better gems as well as make jewelry. The blacksmith makes weapons and armour, but is really only usefull on higher levels and difficulties. You can usually find or buy better gear in the auction house. There are also dyes you can use to colour your equipment. Nice touch.
Now lets focus on the Inventory and Stash systems.
Diablo 1 Inventory. Inventory is 40 squares, no stash. Belt is 8 squares.
Diablo 2 Stash/Inventory. Inventory is 40 squares, Stash is 24, Belt starts at 4 squares can be increased to 16.
Diablo LoD Stash/Inventory. Two sets of weapons could be held, Inventory is 60, Stash is 50.
Horadric Cube, 12 squares but it takes up four in your inventory.
Diablo III Inventory/Stash. Inventory is 60, Stash is 210 squares total, with all three tabs and all squares purchased. But it is shared by all characters and costs 420 000 gold to fully upgrade. You start with 14.
You start with 14 spaces, items take up 1 or 2 spaces, a bizzare but welcome change from the odd shapes of one, two, three, four and six spaced gear cluttering your inventory, horadric cube (not in this game) and stash in the previous game. You might think you have wayyy too much space in this game, but you'll find yourself picking up all the magic gear you can hold to sell for gold to upgrade your stash and vendors. You'll find yourself with a completely full inventory quite often and with much more gear in it as a result of being able to fill it with gear whereas in Diablo 2 you had four spaces to the cube which should have been on you at all times, then four to six spaces for your tomes one for Identify two for Town portal, then your charms, which varied from 1 to 3 spots and then your extra potions after you filled your belt, which as I stated above maxed out at 16. Not to mention any extra bolts or arrows. Which would take half to two thirds of your inventory in Diablo 2 vanilla.
As for the Stash, in Diablo 2 as seen in the picture, you mostly kept Gems/Skulls/Runes on rare ocassions the cube and Wirts leg in there so it had enough spaces for what it was used for, in Diablo 3 though. As seen in the picture above, from my Monk Characters account you tend to keep lots of items in there to auction later, as you can only have ten auctions going at once. So you'll need all the spaces you can get. They also changed up gold, there used to be limits to gold held in inventory and stash, now gold seems to be locked into a weird purgatory where it's not really held on you or in the inventory and I'm not sure if theres a limit either. There are players with millions of gold.
The game was still fairly solid overall, and I'm sure the other difficulties are going to be a little closer to what I expected difficulty wise and the patches obviously will help. Despite the quote, "WoWitization" of the game it still retained that distinctive Diablo feel. I do wish some places from Diablo 2 were revisted, but seeing tristram and the cathedral was pretty awesome.
As for DLC, the only class that returned from Diablo 2 was the Barbarian. So virtually every class is a possibility for an expansion. I personally wouldnt mind seeing the Druid again, (my personal favourite), and a Necromancer CAN be seen in game in Act II. Also of note is that there are 5 classes but 9 slots for classes as I touched on above. So three expansion classes could be expected.
Things like the secondary weapon set, charms, scrolls of town portal/Identify and ethereal weapons are missing.
Some other issues are the way death was treated, when you died in either of the previous games you lost gold and unless you planted a TP you had some big leg work to do, and you had to go get your body with worse weapons and armour while likely fighting the thing that killed you before.
In Diablo 3, you simply respawn at the last of far too many checkpoints with no penalty unless you count your weapons taking damage when they can be very easily repaired for next to no money. Unless it's a bossfight or event online. In which case, unless your friends die too you end up having to wait until they kill the boss, I can imagine a few groups letting themselves die so they could all play. There are also WAY more Waypoints that you'll almost never use, because you have infinite Town Portal, although you cant leave portals, because you teleport instantly. It wont matter as you wont end up doing too much backtracking. Between checkpoints, infinite town portal and the Waypoints (yes they're different.) You basically end up just needing to shell out some gold for repairs.
You wont end up dieing too often on Normal, I died, you ready? ONCE in the first act. Because of arguably the biggest problem, COOLDOWNS ON POTIONS. Now, potions are different here. Unlike the first two the belt doesnt let you store a limited amount of potions, you keep potions in your inventory and then on the HUD you select which strength of potions to use. (I've only played a Barb, so I dont know if Mana potions are still around, barbs haave a recharging Fury bar instead of mana.) Now, after using a potion, you need to wait around THIRTY SECONDS before you can use another one.
The only, I REPEAT, ONLY reason I EVER died was because of this. If I could spam potions like the other games I probably never would have died. It makes no sense that only one potion can be used, I recall in Diablo 2 you could use a certain amount of Stamina Potions (now missing because you cant run and rely on speed boosts from equipment to move faster.) Mana potions and Health Potions. Something like 5 before you couldnt use anymore. A SINGLE potion is just blizzard flipping the flood valve in a way. Because death is unpunished and the game isnt that difficult on Normal you end up dieing ONLY because of potion cool down or being overwhelmed before you can hit the potion button. I died two or three times against bosses, because I got caught by the minions they spawn and the boss did their big damage attack. I basically walked through Diablo himself, the only real problems coming from Azmodan and Ghom due to their odd size making it hard to circle them.
Also of note, runes have been implemented as bonuses to your classes skill in the skill menu, no longer an inventory item. Gems have also been changed, instead of elemental bonuses and resistances, they boost your skills when socketed into items. Socketed items are also more rare in this game, only really showing up in the third act. Barbarians also now have no access to any form of ranged weaponry, instead one of the class skills allows you to throw an axe, but you'd need to replace the exceedingly usefull shouts to use it. So really, Barbarians dont have any kind of ranged attack. It really helps to be in a game with a ranged character, of which there are two. Wizards and Demon Hunters.
As for online, I DID play a spot or two of D2 online and was pretty surprised to see how far from what I considered to be a pretty sweet lobby system this game deviated. It feels very un-social and claustrophobic and the lack of any central lobby area is puzzling. As finding a gorup would be easier that way, also, 5 classes and only four spots in a game? Why? Not to mention you have 9 spots to create a character, and there isnt enough different that you can do to warrant two version of any one character. 3 new classes coming in an expansion maybe? Anyways, the online worked well, minor lag and the issue with not being able to rejoin boss battles are the biggest problems.
One fantastic addition though is that everyone playing get's different loot drops, so you dont need to spend time sorting or chasing loot or gold. Simply pick everything up and if you have a good item for a party member, click-shift to show them the weapon too see if they are interested and have anything to trade, this also removes the dangers of drop trading. In Diablo 2 you needed to drop items to give them to the other guy. Now, a problem with that was a person could, if quick enough, steal all items being dropped if you decided to drop at the same time, or a third party could take all the dropped items. Another item of note is how gold is handled, it's way more important in this game, even without the auction houses. You not only have to pay too upgrade your stash, but you have a blacksmith and jeweler to upgrade as well. The jeweler can combine gems together to make larger, better gems as well as make jewelry. The blacksmith makes weapons and armour, but is really only usefull on higher levels and difficulties. You can usually find or buy better gear in the auction house. There are also dyes you can use to colour your equipment. Nice touch.
Now lets focus on the Inventory and Stash systems.
Diablo 1 Inventory. Inventory is 40 squares, no stash. Belt is 8 squares.
Diablo 2 Stash/Inventory. Inventory is 40 squares, Stash is 24, Belt starts at 4 squares can be increased to 16.
Diablo LoD Stash/Inventory. Two sets of weapons could be held, Inventory is 60, Stash is 50.
Horadric Cube, 12 squares but it takes up four in your inventory.
Diablo III Inventory/Stash. Inventory is 60, Stash is 210 squares total, with all three tabs and all squares purchased. But it is shared by all characters and costs 420 000 gold to fully upgrade. You start with 14.
You start with 14 spaces, items take up 1 or 2 spaces, a bizzare but welcome change from the odd shapes of one, two, three, four and six spaced gear cluttering your inventory, horadric cube (not in this game) and stash in the previous game. You might think you have wayyy too much space in this game, but you'll find yourself picking up all the magic gear you can hold to sell for gold to upgrade your stash and vendors. You'll find yourself with a completely full inventory quite often and with much more gear in it as a result of being able to fill it with gear whereas in Diablo 2 you had four spaces to the cube which should have been on you at all times, then four to six spaces for your tomes one for Identify two for Town portal, then your charms, which varied from 1 to 3 spots and then your extra potions after you filled your belt, which as I stated above maxed out at 16. Not to mention any extra bolts or arrows. Which would take half to two thirds of your inventory in Diablo 2 vanilla.
As for the Stash, in Diablo 2 as seen in the picture, you mostly kept Gems/Skulls/Runes on rare ocassions the cube and Wirts leg in there so it had enough spaces for what it was used for, in Diablo 3 though. As seen in the picture above, from my Monk Characters account you tend to keep lots of items in there to auction later, as you can only have ten auctions going at once. So you'll need all the spaces you can get. They also changed up gold, there used to be limits to gold held in inventory and stash, now gold seems to be locked into a weird purgatory where it's not really held on you or in the inventory and I'm not sure if theres a limit either. There are players with millions of gold.
The game was still fairly solid overall, and I'm sure the other difficulties are going to be a little closer to what I expected difficulty wise and the patches obviously will help. Despite the quote, "WoWitization" of the game it still retained that distinctive Diablo feel. I do wish some places from Diablo 2 were revisted, but seeing tristram and the cathedral was pretty awesome.
As for DLC, the only class that returned from Diablo 2 was the Barbarian. So virtually every class is a possibility for an expansion. I personally wouldnt mind seeing the Druid again, (my personal favourite), and a Necromancer CAN be seen in game in Act II. Also of note is that there are 5 classes but 9 slots for classes as I touched on above. So three expansion classes could be expected.