DiabloFans

People are underestimating the potential uses of the mana for the WD. Remember, this game is going to be more cooldown oriented than previous games, thus, having mana AND various cooldowns will still make the WD a flexible character to play. You might choose to high short cooldown spells which will probably burn a lot of mana per fight, or choose longer cooldown spells which will probably save more mana per fight. There's a lot we don't know and can only speculate about, but people need to stop oversimplifying something that we haven't even see yet.

As for comparing mana to arcane power, from what I've been able to scrape up, the Wizard has a lot less cooldowns. Most of their spells are based on amount of arcane power consumed. You wanna use a super powerful spell? Okay! It'll only cost you 60% of your power. Go for it! Maybe it has a really short cooldown or no cooldown! You just need to have the available resources to use it.

The DH also has a similar resource system to the WD and Wizard from what I can tell. The only difference could probably be that using skills from one side regenerates the other side a little faster. However, the DH can still be quite interesting to try different combinations with due to cooldowns and regeneration rates.

Taking another look at these orbs, I'm wondering how these look when they're not completely full. Since they're all fully filled orbs, it looks exciting for the murky liquids to be spiraling and rotating.. But what happens when the orb isn't completely filled? If it's the same animation with the top cut off, that'd be disappointing(and odd looking). Then again, these orbs are supposed to go up and down quite often, so this would also probably be by far the simplest way to animate the orb liquids..

Any thoughts?

THOSE ORBS LOOK GORGEOUS! Except the Wizard's. That one I just think is okay. d: It's not sparkly enough!

Definitely interested!

This. Is. Awesome! Definitely a good, detailed recap!

Quote from akainu

Anyone else thinking what I'm thinking holding on to at least 1 of each rune just to see their effects on skills/spells for first couple chars? I figure hold them in shared and when I i go back to town I check see what I want in my spell/skill.

Yeah, I plan on doing this. The runes will come in different ranks, so I'll just leave the level 1 rune of each type in my shared stash. Will probably do this until I can afford to keep a set of max level runes in stash, too. But, hopefully, by then we'll have a very knowledgeable source(wiki) to not have to resort to that kind of method.

Zero benefits? It's fun to play with others in the same room as you. There's no need to type to communicate. More than likely, these are your friends or people you know, so it's easier to converse and do other things, like go out before/after, order food, etc.

Think of why it is more fun for two(or more) people to share beers over the same television set watching football than it is to watch in their own homes, alone.

I dislike set loot tables like WoW. It made it really predictable of which bosses gave you what, which made runs quite boring. And if I knew I didn't need anything, I wouldn't try very hard. However, a mixed system could work very well in Diablo III, in my opinion. I think there are two types of mixed drop systems that could work pretty well; I am calling one of them "related drop system" and "small loot tables system".

A related drop system(has no loot tables) would just simply convert dropped items depending on what enemy dropped it at a certain percentage chance. This would make a little more sense in prolonged monster killing, but still give that "HEY! I found this heavy armor off this ghost" moment that D2 players are expecting. For instance, if you would normally get 5 light armor pieces and 5 heavy armor pieces from an enemy, then you would instead get something like 6 L.armor and 4 H.armor instead. Enemies and bosses clad in heavy armor are more likely to drop heavier types of armor and weapons, and talismans? Enemies and bosses in robes or are magic based may tend to drop magic weapons, light armors, and accessories?

A small loot tables system would basically use a purely random drop system based on monster item levels or w/e they plan to use, but give special loot tables to certain bosses, creature types, or other groupings of monsters. This can be especially useful(and I personally believe it's how D2 worked), where set items drop from certain creatures(think Cow King set). For example, if they had a unique amulet named "The Skeleton Key", it would have a slightly higher chance to drop off skeleton-like enemies than normal enemies of the same drop level, but could still drop from anything.

Agreed; a "bind-on-second-equip" would be extremely easily exploitable. Even if it was a "bind-after-x-minutes" would be exploitable because people would write scripts to re-equip stuff so they never become bound. I don't think BoE is so bad; they did say it was going to be mostly end-game stuff. It'll just become a "risk" if you aren't sure, and everyone will get used to it eventually. And later on, I'm sure there will be a site like The Arreat Summit that will show how weapons and equipment look on different classes.

My rule of thumb: If you're unsure if it will be an upgrade, attempt to sell it first.

Yes, there is no such thing as "true" random(when it comes to electronics), but whether it is pseudo-random drops(which most of us are calling pure random) or altering the randomized results to prevent "infinity" from happening, it will, in the end, balance itself out at some point in time. In my opinion, you definitely could alter a drop system to drop loot more evenly across players or even to individual players, but that won't solve the problem of inflation or deflation of any particular drop because you cannot predict to WHOM those items are dropped to.

Example: There have only been 20 Top-Tier Unique Item#1 that dropped in USWest today, and 40 Top-Tier Unique Item#2. Even if the system recognizes that Item#1 needs to be dropped more often, what if the increased drops went to players that like to hoard and/or decided to never trade them? The market would more or less be in the same condition if you didn't have an assisted prevention of "infinity".

Any of you guys think there may be a riot? Lol.

Watch all the cosplayers wreak havoc.

Hmm.. He could be be floating, but his head doesn't rise up very much when you look at the background. He floats in Act 4, if I remember correctly, but in the cinematic for the destruction of the worldstone, he is standing on the ground.

However, I wouldn't say this is anything significant. You guys are all having a D3 equivalent of a hysterical pregnancy.

Quote from Aever1

Any sort of serious competitive PvP system needs to have that separation or it becomes a joke.

I don't think (or want to for that matter) this will happen in Diablo 3, simply because PvP is not as "serious" business as it is in WoW. PvP in WoW is more like chess, using your abilities to negate the other guys abilities, keeping the pressure up to drain their resources and spiking your damage output to force a kill. This can be a lengthy process. PvP in Diablo was usually fast and furious, nothing like WoW.

I don't agree with that first line up there. I played Ragnarok Online for years, living almost entirely for PvP, which I would consider pretty damn competitive. There was no PvP gear or rewards back then(not sure about now), but all equipment is found through PvE. There were certain stats you would prefer over others, but essentially everything you wanted for PvE was pretty much what you used in PvP as well.

I would agree with the chess thing. WoW and D3 will be completely different in PvP game play aspects due to how the game itself functions in PvE. WoW players are used to spending several minutes to hours at a time concentrating on taking down one or several targets, so PvP team play is naturally like PvE bossing in that you have to manage your actions and the actions of your target(s). In D3, PvE game play will be spamming, dishing out damage, and avoiding damage. From the internal PvP videos released so far, that looks about right.

So what bosses do we know about so far?

We know..

Skeleton King (A1)
Thousand Pounder (A1)
Siege Breaker (?)

And we're going to assume Diablo, though I don't think there has been any kind of direct confirmation of that.

Any others I'm missing? What about ones you want to see? Do you want to see Mephisto and Baal again?

I'm like 99% sure there are more bosses in each act, but I do not know how mandatory they are. We've seen a few boss fights already and I'm pretty sure none of them are act bosses, because Blizzard probably wouldn't have shown us those. I remember a blue post also saying that the Skeleton King was not an act boss, so I know for sure that one isn't.

I'd like at least two important, mandatory bosses per act. But of course, the "act boss" will obviously be a lot stronger. But it'd be nice if the quest related bosses were tougher like act bosses.

Also, in D2, I consider the Ancients a boss.