The Shrine

Pretty awesome, you should feel right at home if you liked the previous 2 entries in the series, no more run stamina bs, streamlined inventory management(You can Disenchant stuff for crafting materials), an actual story/plot that's easier to follow if you enjoy Blizzard's lore, lots of unique, fun, and useful abilities. Glorious graphics, interactive environments, etc etc.

Damn, they must have forgot to send my invite...

Eric wrote:Pretty awesome, you should feel right at home if you liked the previous 2 entries in the series, no more run stamina bs, streamlined inventory management(You can Disenchant stuff for crafting materials), an actual story/plot that's easier to follow if you enjoy Blizzard's lore, lots of unique, fun, and useful abilities. Glorious graphics, interactive environments, etc etc.

Are you actually in the beta or just watching the streams?

I'm in.

For those that doubt the word of Eric!

And there's no NDA! So I can ramble all I want about it! lalalalaa

Who do you know who works at Blizzard?

I've got a friend at Activision, but they are still very separate companies.

I've been in the Lich King Beta and SC2 beta, hoping the streak continues with D3....

How much WoW has gotten into Diablo 3?

That's a pretty good question actually, and not that much tbh.

It PLAYS just like diablo gameplay-wise. run-> click with left or right mouse, Bind a handful of keys here and there.

The game has alot more quests now to bring you from point to point, so it's not like 6 random quests per act, it's much more streamlined, and the story seems alot easier to follow. The quests themselves aren't like WoW, you usually are just on 1 quest with maybe a bonus objective on the side.

They got rid of stat points, so you don't have to worry about putting points in energy/health/str, etc etc. Instead you now have a crap ton of skills to pick from, the catch is that you can only have 7 skills active at one time.

You can sell loot on the fly instead of having to TP back to town all the time. They got rid of Town Scrolls and instead now you have a hearthstone basically. You can also Disenchant loot you find into crafting materials and make your own armor/weapons.

Speaking of loot, you don't have to fight with people for drops anymore. Any loot you see drop is yours, your partners can't see it, if you think it's something they want you can pick it up then drop it and let them have it. You only have to run over gold now to collect it as opposed to clicking gold every time you see it.

So if a boss drops a unique, its random as to who it goes to?... i kinda like the clicking war better. With my luck, ill get stuck with al the cracked boots of crapiness and corns.

Seems like they have idiot proofed the gameplay a little. Some uniques in D2 you needed to actually build a character around, stat wise. Like if a weapon needed a ton of strength to use, i would sometimes create a new guy just to be able to use it. With that gone, it sounds like almost every weapon is equipable, or many just equipable for a particular class only. Which also means, you wont be able to have axe wielding wizards? Sometimes, the crazy builds people would make were pretty fun.

I even dont like being able to sell on the fly. Part of the game was crucial inventory management, which includes TPs and scrolls of identification.

Is there a hardcore mode in the beta?

The boss will drop an item for each person that's there. You'll only see the loot that was dropped for you, though if you pick it up and drop it again then everyone can see it.

So you'll see some high quality loot for killing a boss. It might still turn out to be something you don't need, of course.

Sounds like the market will be flooded with items if a boss is able to drop 8 uniques.... While fair, its over saturation.

Think multiplayer is 4 in Diablo 3. It seems like the tradeskill stuff will deal with the flood of items since it sounds like the best stuff involve the equivalent of disenchanting a ton of stuff, and then hope that you get a high end mod from something with a range of say, 10-50. Of course you might ask is it really that important to get a +50 mod over the expected average +30, but then people sure paid a lot of money in Diablo 2 stuff that really didn't matter much since the game was generally pretty easy, so why not pay a lot of money for a +50 over a +30?