yeah it will happen.

some skills might be a bit weaker because you have a ton of crits gear or stuff like that tho

Yeah, hopefully they have enough interesting skill enhancing type items that your gear is your skill/rune investment to some degree.

Otherwise it will be as one forum post put it, 5 actual characters with 6000 masks each.

Not really much to discuss, this has been a design decision from the very beginning. I don't really agree with it but its the way it is. Hopefully there'll be enough well balanced runes/skill combos so that its not all min/maxxed to hell but of course there's years and years of gaming history against them. We'll see I guess. D2 was essentially flavor of the month anyways with 1 dominate build for each class and maybe 1-2 others that could sortof hang in there.

they NEED PvP for the game to survive long, which is funny with their hostile stance to it

The conspirtards are saying they are gimping the replayability of D3 on purpose, it's a filler game until "Titan", their next pay to play MMO comes along.

If the real money auction house is producing a ton of revenue for them, I can see them wanting to keep D3 healthy for along time. If not I can buy the conspiracy.

Finally got to play beta. I hope some things don't make it to release:

Monk: what is up with his weapons when using attacks that generate spirit? Since he uses those attacks 2/3 of the time, his weapons are unequiped for the same amount while he's punching zombies bare handed. Weapons seem pointless in a visual style and really make the playing experience disengaging. I understand there will be fist weapons specific for him and the attacks will seem normal, but monks have their specific battle staffs so the problem remains.

Quests: they felt rushed to me. In Diablo 2 even the first couple of quests (the amount we get to try in the beta) took a longer pace to complete, and I enjoyed that. There where only six for each act, but I can tell all of them by memory, it felt that they meant something. Here I felt the need to skip conversations, which I don't normally do in such high caliber RPGs. I don't know much about lore, but Deckard Cain was always surrounded by mystery, and I have never seen him fight. There was something about him that was always hidden. Now I feel he's some sort of mascot, I hope he will regain his cool in the release.

I agree with this. Yes, some things in D2 were a pain in the ass, but on the other hand they were rewarding. They punished stupidity, but rewarded strategy. Now I feel the game is catered to the masses. I wish there was a way to leave the challenge D2 had without ripping every 'bad' part that seemed annoying. Jay Wilson's response to this? "It's a game that's easy to learn, but hard to master." I hope it's true and we'll see that in higher difficulty levels.

Anyhow I lowered my expectations for the game significantly. So far, it barely feels like Diablo 2 and more like a new, decent console game. I can finally wait for the release in peace not worrying that I'm missing out on something.

Kind of like D2 which everyone nerdgasms over.

Seriously, each class in D2 had maybe 4 viable skill builds. Amazons/Barbarians/Assassins had like 2. Having 280 vitality instead of 290 vitality does not a "unique build" make.

I'd love to meet these people who supposedly made multiple kinds of each class in D2 to have different playstyles available to them. I'm guessing when you nail these people down and make them answer questions about it, you'll find that they had like a Bowazon and a Javazon. And a MeteOrb sorc and a Lightning Sorc.

Nobody had 8 different Druids. Nobody had even 3 different barbarians.

Blizzard knows this which is why they're telling people to piss off as nicely as possible.

I like the latest patch minus the ui changes. Old ui was OK, new interface is undeniably awful. I was hoping that elective mode would just switch me to the old interface, but it's hardly any different.

I have no problem with idiot friendly features provided they don't ghey up the regular game and that's exactly what they've done with the "elective" ui crap. The moron friendly UI has basically destroyed the very flexible and functional UI that 95% of the player base will actually want to use.

Blizzard really underestimates the "casual" gamer. Casual means casual, not mentally retarded.

The oh so difficult mechanics they are simplifying are things an experienced gamer would grasp right away and things casual would understand after about 5 minutes of playing around with it. I mean is it really that big of a deal if casuals are semi-confused about a mechanic for a few minutes before figuring it out?

I mean are they really gonna just give up and return the game and tell all their friends not to buy it?

The real question is, has anyone successfully returned a PC game in the history of computers?

I'm pretty sure stores will tell you to eat **** if you try and return a PC game.

No.

No.

I understand the hate for Blizzard removing the skill trees, but I think they might be onto something with the new customization system. With the D2 skill trees, the player basically picks a set of skills he wants and then dumps 20 points into them (except for some utility skills that you only need 1). It's rare for someone to want 10 or 5 points in a skill. If I want to use frozen orb as my main nuke, there's no reason to consider only investing 18 points or 15 points or whatever. This is just a given in this day and age where any semi-serious player will min/max to some degree, and realize that the only real options for skill point allocation often end up being 0 vs (1 or 20).

D3's system basically removes the point allocation part (which is basically already predetermined). Sure, D2 technically has more potential builds, but the vast majority of them are junk builds that no one would ever consider (3 points in every skill or maxing skills that have no synergy, etc etc). In the end, no one cares if a game has 10^6 possible builds vs 10^12. If the first has 20 viable builds vs the second only having 10, it's pretty obvious which one will be more interesting for players in the long run.

I do think skill trees are more fun during the leveling process, which may be important to a lot of people. But for end-game content, the point distribution is no longer interesting. I still think skill trees are amazing for single-player RPGs, mainly because you can often clear the game with sub-par builds, and there's no competitive aspect. Plus, I don't often play a single-player RPG for more than 60-100 hours. But for multiplayer ones, where the end-game content makes up most of the game, I can see Blizzard's reasoning for doing away with them.

This isn't to say that their system is going to be the future of character customization in RPGs or anything like that. But Blizzard has had a lot of experience in the field developing WoW for all of these years, and I definitely think there's some merit to this new approach that they're taking.

apparently we're now in the home stretch and the game was pretty much ready to be released.

Sadly, we're stuck with the ****ty channels of battle.net 0,2.

No private channels either. thats gonna suck for the clan

:\

^ could always have everyone use IRC