Diablo 3

[TevashSzat]

I dunno... I'm sure Blizzard will sell a bazillion copies, but it's not grabbing my interest this time around (I played 1 and 2, mostly in co-op LAN mode with my S.O.). I like my games to have at least some minimal tactics in the combat, like use of terrain and doorways. The gameplay video with the barbarian whirling around through the zombies looked like just a mindless, hyperactive click-fest.

Click-click-click-click-(special move)-click-click-click-(special move)-click-click-click-(special move)-click-click-click-(special move)-click-click-click-(special move)...

That's not my kind of game. But maybe it's more interesting than it looks from the video. Or maybe I'm just getting too old for this type of game. I'll try a demo if one is released, but I'm for sure not pre-ordering or buying it on release, without knowing more about the gameplay.

That is the special thing about Diablo. If anyone gives me a description of Diablo II gameplay right now and I had no previous knowledge of the game, I would think that the game is utter crap. The weird thing is that even though it may sound bad with lots of aimless clicking and grinding for the uber items, the game is strangely addictive.

[pevergreen]

Looks quite like a slightly improved WC3 engine to me.

I disagre, I'm playing WC 3 and i've seen that gameplay vid. It's a lot better.

[TB666]

I think it's the same engine that Starcraft 2 is using.
The water effect looks just like it.

[BananaBob]

Man oh man. I can remember the days of my Hammerdin pwning it up with item I had ground for for so long... I reinstalled Diablo 1 after hearing about this. I cannot wait.

I hope they keep it more Diablo and less Warcraftish.

[naut]

Looks good, although I don't like how they recycle icons and sounds from WoW-WC:III.

[The_Doctor]

I don't like how they recycle icons and sounds from WoW-WC:III.

I hope this is because it is only a beta(not sure about this) version of the game and they have not added new sounds yet.

[CrossLOPER]

Well, the torrent of Diablo III media has gotten to me. I got the Diablo warchest. I'm sorry.

[TevashSzat]

Well, the torrent of Diablo III media has gotten to me. I got the Diablo warchest. I'm sorry.

Don't feel ashamed. Diablo II still remains as good as ever

[Xiahou]

Don't feel ashamed. Diablo II still remains as good as ever

I went back and looked at D2 as well. It's kinda hard to look at on modern LCDs, but if you have a CRT it should look good enough and if you've never played it you should be in for a treat.

[Whacker]

I'm looking for a D2 mod that'll remove monster immunities on hell. IMO that is what killed the game post 1.09 patches for me and my friends who played it.

[TevashSzat]

I'm looking for a D2 mod that'll remove monster immunities on hell. IMO that is what killed the game post 1.09 patches for me and my friends who played it.

Don't do it. That is the only part of the game that makes Hell even remotely hard. If you just play SC, there is no reason for you not to be able to get through the game on ANY build. Hell, there is even a person who beat the game with a NAKED amazon ie nothing equiped on hardcore.

I still play alot of Diablo II. If you need any advice on builds that can survive well in Hell and still take care of immunities, just ask and I can put some up for you. Just some easy untwinked builds include: meteorber, fishymancer, javazon, trapassin

[Crandaeolon]

Agreed, Hell difficulty is where the real action is. Immunities provide a good challenge to character build and group design.

[shlin28]

So... just ordered the game after all the hype over D3 and trying out the demo... (very fun )

What's the best beginner class to start with? I don't wanna die in the first dungeon

[TevashSzat]

It depends on whether you're playing on battle.net or not. I used to, but when I switdched ISPs, I suddenly got horrible pings and am mostly active on the Single Player community atm.

Anyways, any newcomer should start with a sorceress simply for MFing for better gear for your other characters. You can either go max blizzard and its synergies or make a meteorber which is 20 Frozen Orb, 9 cold mastery (try to get 17 after +skills), 20 meteore, 20 fireball, rest evenly split between firebolt and firemastery. Get all the prereqs and static field/teleport for misc use.

Always remember in Diablo II that you NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER put any stat point into energy. It is worthless unless you're building an ES sorc. For casters, have enough strength to equip your end game gear (which should be at most 80s unless you want to use a spirit monarch which would pump it up to 156), no dex unless you're going for max block(expect around a 150 investment to keep it at max around level 90), and always go for as much vitality as possible. For a weapons based damage char like a ww barb or a strafer, you should either go a balanced build or a titan which is essentially a glass cannon. Balanced, you try to have adequete life and still do decent damage (1 str gives +1% damage to most melee weapons, 1 dex the same for ranged weapons). Titan, you either max str or dex and depend on your insane damage to kill everything before they get a chance to attack

Highly useful forum with lots of guides, references. I go by the name Xdeathfire and am most active on the Single Player portions of Diablo 2

[CrossLOPER]

I have made it a custom to play Barbarian every time I play an RPG for the first time. Will this strategy work for Diablo?

[shlin28]

Anyways, any newcomer should start with a sorceress simply for MFing for better gear for your other characters. You can either go max blizzard and its synergies or make a meteorber which is 20 Frozen Orb, 9 cold mastery (try to get 17 after +skills), 20 meteore, 20 fireball, rest evenly split between firebolt and firemastery. Get all the prereqs and static field/teleport for misc use.

I played as the barbarian in the demo, so I'll probably play that...

Couple questions:

1. Is the game fullscreen? Because the demo I played is in windowed mode, I don't mind that but I'm just wondering if it has a higher resolution.

2. Could you use hotkeys? Like F1 for *insert skill here" or F2 for another skill? In the demo I can't figure out how to do it... (Yet I still beat the boss )

[Ramses II CP]

If you aren't playing hardcore, and you can't for your first character anyway, Barbarians work just fine. Any build works just fine really. Once you get the hang of it the game is 99% easy cruising interrupted by brief interludes of terror until you figure out what's hurting you and what changes you need to make to your usual tactics to get past it.

Personally I wouldn't recommend a sorcess as a first build. They can be frustrating at low levels when you have to fill your inventory with mana potions just to get through a few areas, and they will tempt you to waste skill and stat points just to speed things up. I'd play a simple melee character, like a Zeal/Fanat Paladin, which is extremely straightforward and difficult to screw up. Since you have to get through normal on softcore before you can play HC anyway you'll be irritated by the IM fest at the end of A4 as a Paladin, but not too frustrated to keep playing.

Once you get the hang of things, try HC. I usually recommend Trapssins for a person's first HC build. You can build a survivable one off of junk gear and tear right through everything without even slowing down until around the end of A3 hell.

I just started playing again (On US East) after the reset and I quit before the 3x Ubers were added so I'm probably not 100% up to date on all the latest developments.

[Togakure]

I'm looking for a D2 mod that'll remove monster immunities on hell. IMO that is what killed the game post 1.09 patches for me and my friends who played it.

Oh come on ... a properly designed character cruises in Hell difficulty; I'm doing it right now, playing an Uber-capable kicker assassin on the new ladder and having a ball. After all these years, this game is still loads of fun! It appeals to casual and serious players alike--the serious ones usually focusing on Hard Core or PvP dueling. I'm not into dueling; I enjoy designing different characters for optimum performance in Hell difficulty, the ultimate test being, can they solo the Big Three in Uber Tristram?

D2 LoD has been a nice vacation away from here. Granted, simpler and not requiring as much "skill," but I don't miss the hauteur and cliques that pervade TW. On the flip side, the 'omfg ur mom stfu u noob' stuff can be hard to deal with at times. But I just run with a pack of mature, helpful friends and we have a lot of fun.

D3 looks interesting. The gamspeed looks slower to me than D2 LoD. If it's not an MMO, I'll definitely be checking it out. Been playing Diablo games long before I even knew what TW was.

PS. You don't need to invest that much dex to get max block at 90 with gear. I have 85 hard points in dex and have over 200 dex with gear, max block easily atttained at my current level of 90. I am HonoredMatre on USA East Ladder.

[TevashSzat]

I played as the barbarian in the demo, so I'll probably play that...

Couple questions:

1. Is the game fullscreen? Because the demo I played is in windowed mode, I don't mind that but I'm just wondering if it has a higher resolution.

2. Could you use hotkeys? Like F1 for *insert skill here" or F2 for another skill? In the demo I can't figure out how to do it... (Yet I still beat the boss )

1. Yes, but I actually prefer to play it in windowed mode. To make it windowed mode, add "-w" into the shortcut. The max resolution is 800x600 iirc which is quite low. Anyways, I do a ton of AT runs and running it in a window makes the loading time between runs much quicker. Also, -ns will remove all sound which is also nice in runs, but you can't switch between acts online with that on.

2. Yes, basically, you go into either the right or left click menu and place your cursor over the skill. Press any key from F1-F12 and that skill will be assigned the hotkey. I'm pretty sure you can map it to keys other than the F#s but I don't remember how to do it atm.

A good basic barb build is whirlwind. You basically get 20 WW, 20 Shout, 20 BO, and 20 in your chosen weapon mastery. The most optimal one, I think, is axe and you use 2 of them allowing to get nice off hand modifiers, but if you're just starting out, polearm or sword is probably better off. For swords, though, you need to invest in dex for weapon requirements which is pretty bad since you're not going to use a shield and ar can be easily taken care of with either angelics jewlery or enchant from demon limb.

Anyways...I suggest to just save the weapon mastery points until you have a good idea of what endgame weapon you want to use first

[Whacker]

You folks are crazy.

The last patch I think we played with was 1.10, and we hated it. Monster immunities basically invalidated almost every single one of our previous chars, and we tried several suggested builds which didn't work out well for us at all. I remember trying some suggested bowazon and cold based sorc (my fav class) builds with twinked gear and lvl 80ish, and got my ass utterly handed to me right outside the Rogue camp in hell. Sorry, that sucked. And before anyone accuses me, I'm pretty damn good at D1 and D2, as are my friends. The game became an absolute struggle, even with the best, absolutely specialized char builds and twinked gear we could get. I want a challenge, not a hair-rending struggle with dying every few minutes. And I'm going to repeat it again; we were not "doing it wrong", and we know how to play the game and play it well. I guess the fact that one is either stuck with playing some very specific builds of characters in order to survive rubbed us the wrong way. That, and even with the best ones, forward progress would be slowed to an utter crawl in order to survive, and depending on the monsters one was often better off just running from them instead of trying to fight, because you'd end up getting killed in a few hits.

[TevashSzat]

The thing is that 1.10 made the game much harder and added synergies. Synergies really destroyed all of the character builds pre 1.10. Before, tri elemental sorceress were common and very powerful, now, you have no synergies and you just don't enough damage. You must focus on at least max 3 skills that synergizes each other.

Or, you can just go the hammerdin route. My lvl 67 hammerdin in Act 5 NM who I'm still leveling does about 7 k hammers and kills most things in 1 hit even in full houses. A synergized hammerdin with endgame gear can easily do 11-12k damage a hammer minimum. A decked out meteorber should be able to do 10k fireballs, 25k meteors, 500 damage FOs. Decked out strafezons: 5k 3 frame strafes, smiters can take out Hell Baal in less than 2 seconds. Basically, treat 1.10 and pre 1.10 as essentially different games. Also, 1.10 added a ton of horribly overpowerered runewords: Grief? +400 damage. Infinity? Conviction on wield Enigma? MF,STR,+1 teleport all classes and the list just goes on and on

Edit:

If any of you new guys starting out need help on good starting build or build/gear suggestions, or if you are going SP, want some starting gear, just PM me and I'll help you guys out

[Togakure]

Ok, that puts it in perspective a bit, and sorry, didn't mean to sound personally critical and put you on the defensive. As TevashSzat has written, 1.10 changed the game considerably. Builds prior to the patch for the most part were underpowered at best, and no longer viable at worst. Sorcs in particular had a difficult time in Hell difficulty if not built carefully (synergized primary attack, with a backup attack in another element strong enough to deal with immunes). The mercenary became a crucial part of your team, particularly for a sorc in Hell diff, and combining gear powers--especially runewords--became pretty much essential to doing well in the end game. It is very very difficult to survive and thrive in Hell difficulty without decent gear and synergized skills.

Perhaps it was the builds you chose. The two you mention are more fragile that many other popular 1.10 builds.

I am very curious to see if Blizz will maintain similar mechanics in D3, and whether the rumor is true that items may be "bound" to characters when found, like in WoW.