DiabloFans

I was going to work on some of the images and some content, but it appears that most of the pages I wanted to edit are locked. Is there something I can do about this, or should I just despair and note that Willpower for example is still listed all over the Wiki and I can't remove it?

Or at this point are we not really trying to keep the wiki up to date everywhere because things are changing so fast?

Man, I never noticed that before. Sharp eyes there Doomscream!

Is it just me, or does he look like he's armed with D2 assassin weapons?

I assume that mouse movement will be the only way to move around in Diablo 3, so it wouldn't surprise me too much if there's some kind of indication as to where you are moving to. That being said, everything in the B-roll stuff they have could easily have graphics swapped out, or be an internal build, so who knows what it will actually wind up looking like.

I figure it's something to ask the people who get into the Beta though.

I think the title of this thread says it all. "Lucky beta entrants"

5 Million SC2 accounts, 5 Million WoW accounts, several million other types of accounts for U.S.

Lets assume that the first wave needs 10,000 people. They have probably already invited about 2500 or so through contests and media, so let's hope that means another 7,500 invites.

Let's say that only a million people have their account set up to request the D3 beta, but I will freely admit, that's a guess. We're talking about each person having significantly under a 1% chance to get invited into the Beta. Now, hopefully if you can invite friends and family we can increase that number here, but I expect that very few of us are likely to get beta invites.

So, all you people who do get into the beta, you better show us some cool stuff or we'll have to beg more!

As with a lot of things I think this will eventually boil down into two camps:

Camp one: Min/Max people who will go for the absolute most DPS, no matter how boring it is, or what kinds of utility they give up to achieve it.

Camp two: Those who want to look awesome. They will dual wield pistol crossbows while wearing an outfit dyed all black and kill monsters with style, even if they give up a small amount of total DPS to do it.

Personally, games are about fun for me. If I can look awesome and do awesome things, that's what I'm going to do, even if it's not the 100% most efficient way to play. That was how I played in D2, that's how I intend to play D3.

I think it's highly unlikely though that there will be any sign of him in the Beta.

I think it will be very interesting to see how some of these new bosses work, some of them look absolutely huge, which could make for some interesting combat mechanics. Like destroying limbs, or having to hit him from behind to do damage, or who knows what. It's all very exciting!

I think all the travel spells now have a significant cooldown to prevent people from teleporting around combat and speeding through runs.

I think the intent is though to have Inferno eliminate the need to bounce around quite so much and leap and teleport, etc. are not quite as vital if there's not a lot of jumps that need to be made to get to the boss faster. IMHO at least.

My Wizard is going to be a little bit more boring, but the reason is, I'm assuming that skills past the first couple tiers are going to have increasingly longer casting delays/cooldowns which is going to mean if you don't have at least some early spells you're going to spend a lot of your time running around hoping your cooldown is up before the monsters catch you.

1. Magic Missile runed for maximum one target damage.
2. Frost Nova runed for maximum slowing ability
3. Slow Time runed for lowest cooldown or largest area.
4. Arcane Torrent runed for maximum damage in AOE
5. Ray of Frost runed for maximum damage
6. Familiar runed for maximum rate of fire or accuracy for helping mop up little guys while I focus on bigger targets

Passive skills:

1. Glass cannon (can passives be runed?)
2. Quickening
3. Temporal Flux

Wouldn't it also be very strange for the Barbarian who killed Diablo the last time around to suddenly not have any of his gear, remember any of his abilities or anything like that? How would they explain that? Amnesia is a little overdone for Diablo 3 I would think.

It was a cool idea, but I have to think they will scrap it when they realize how strange that would make the lore. On the other hand, if they just don't address that issue, or find some way to explain it, like maybe he hung up his loot sometime, or it was destroyed by the Worldstone and he was knocked into the future.

It's Blizzard, they can find a way to make almost any ridiculous thing sound perfectly reasonable.

The one I can suggest, although I'm not sure what rune it would be, is that it takes damage but doesn't reduce damage, it just absorbs it and for every percent of your health you lose while it's active, you do another percent of damage. A "diamond cannon" mode for the armor, it makes you do more damage quickly, but at the cost of not actually providing defense. Obviously the damage stacking would reset, or have a time limit, i.e. how much damage you've taken in the last 10 seconds or something to prevent you from doing insane damage by healing yourself somehow.

I figured it had to be something like that, thanks for pointing that out. Now I guess the question still is, how much is "not as much" as in D2. Will it be a matter of killing mobs faster or having enough resistance to make killing them significantly more dangerous and difficult?

Quote from Shades_X

I wonder if they considered how gems are valued in real life. For example a diamonds value is based on such things as clarity and type of cut. This might explain their direction of the less glamorous look.

I seriously doubt they look at "real" gems as much of a guide for their high level gems. Almost no real jeweler would cut gems like that because it doesn't maximize the gleam and the appearence. When you digitally make a gem, who cares? It can shine as much as you want it to, you just increase the "shiny" nob in your graphics program.

Besides, the only time you'll even have to see the gems are in your inventory, when they are actually on your armor I suspect that at most it will change color slightly, I can't imagine you'd actually see the shape on your armor as that would be insanely detailed.

So here is what I am basically thinking regarding this. In Diablo 2, in Hell (let alone the new Inferno mode) most enemies were immune to at least one thing and most elites were immune to at least several things. I have not yet seen any official remarks from Blizzard or anyone here about the subject of resistances and immunities and how they play a part into the new skill system, so here's my take on what I'm expecting. If this topic has already been discussed somewhere, if someone could point me in that direction it would be appreciated.

These thoughts are primarily focused around the Wizard because most of the other classes rely far more heavily on physical damage so resistances are not as big a concern for them I would expect.

With Blizzard giving us 6 skill slots to deal with I would expect to have about 3 of them with utility spells, such as Teleport and 3 with combat spells. Since there are passive abilities that do things for arcane damage spells (slowing) and the like it seems that the most beneficial build would be one where you have at least a couple spells of the same damage type, which would limit you to only having 1-2 different types of damage.

Blizzard has also said that they don't want to force people to be constantly hot swapping skills as that's not a lot of fun so I think we can safely assume that they won't have a lot of triple immmune monsters wandering around because they have to realize that for Wizards that could make them completely invulnerable unless you get out of combat and swap spells, and without the ability to town portal in the middle of combat, that means if a fast triple immune monsters was chasing you around, you might have to run for ages to be able to get in a place safe enough to swap skills. I can't imagine for a second that Blizzard thinks this would be a good idea or any fun.

So that leaves basically two possibilities, one that nothing will be immune to more than one type of damage or that immunities will be completely eliminated and replaced with strictly resistances. In Diablo 2, you couldn't really make yourself totally immune to elemental damage, but you could post huge resistance scores. I have to assume this would be the way Blizzard will set it up.

So if we assume that few monsters have immunity to more than one thing, the next question becomes "how much resistance can we expect monsters to have?" If they have very little resistance it doesn't do much to make the monsters different from each other but if we give them too much you run into a similar problem, I imagine in Inferno the difference between a monster with 95% resistance and 100% resistance is going to be effectively none as you wouldn't be able to kill either monster fast enough to get rid of it before it whacks you.

So how as Wizards are we going to need to prepare for immunities in Inferno? Are we going to have to have 3-4 different skills with different damage types, or can we focus on maximizing one damage type safely?

I'm curious as to other people's thoughts on this and if anyone has any good information on what the state of play is on the resistance/immunity issues. Sorry this was so long, thanks for reading and giving any thoughts or feedback you might have.

Trying to get back to the previous topic, doesn't anyone think it's more likely that instead of it just taking 3 gems to upgrade it's going to be far more like D2 rune upgrades? 2 gems and some other stuff? That makes it not entirely about gems, makes gems more readily available, and also requires you to break down gear to get upgraded gems as opposed to just farming gem after gem after gem. I suppose the 3 to upgrade is possible, but it seems that Blizzard is trying to add some different crafting options and systems here.