Took me a shit long time to install it. Kept trying to download the game rather than install it from cd. And unfortunately I only have a shit capped connection at the moment. Needed to download a new installer and copy the cd files to it's own folder... A bit irritating. So I got everything working, but haven't played. Will play tonight.

T

COOL STORY BRAH

60 bucks well saved.

this

this. they could rename it world of warcraft 2.

I started my first HC char yesterday. Level 12 and going strong.

First impression is very nice, but it does make me worried that you can reach lvl 60 in so short time. Hopefully it will be balanced and playable once you hit hell/inferno levels in HC.

will have to see the XP requirements per level around that stage of the game, the first bunch of levels in diablo 2 were easy aswell, but getting to 99 was too bothersome to me ^^

If you get your first hc char even into nightmare Im fucking impressed because sometimes I even get instaraped with 16k life :x

We will see :)
Got a lvl 29 (Monk in Act4) and a lvl 18 (Wiz in Act2) so far.

I played monk with a shield and 1hand until nightmare, dindt die until I changed to dual wield. speed vs surviving u_u
But its going tons faster without a shield, dieing now and then though.

Haven't decided how to build my char. Most likely depends on what I find in terms of items, currently dual wield though. :)

I do however play co-op with 2 others and I'm not required to tank with our current chars.. This is still not safe as you will get in trouble sooner or later. Just need to have a lot of HP and a few ways to escape with your skills, disables, stuns, colds and most likely a bit more defensive build than you average softcore build etc.

Surviving > speed if you ask me :)

No idea when I will play it or buy it, but I certainly will. As I can see 60th level is max one? Then its real bad, cause I watched few minutes of 2GD streaming D3 and he was level 60 in about ~40 hours not even having finished Hell difficulty. Meh.

preordered over a month ago, dont have it delivered yet lol!

kinda defeats the point in preordering.

BUT it doesnt seem like it matters much with the crazy amount of server issues :)

i ordered it the day before yesterday, got it 15th =PPPPP dont hate da playa, playa

i played 12 hours during the night. im broken, and now i will sleep

I still don't get it. 7k people watched thegdstudio yesterday, aka random ts talk of guys playin diablo3.

day9 had 9-10k.

the fuck? ql nc has 20 viewers in the meantime.

gonna play it when i've got more time on my hands.
some good impressions, some bad impressions.

best so far seems that the inferno mode is no piece of cake, whether if you're skilled and well equipped or not.

whats the point of inferno mode when you have already max lvl? serious question cos i have no clue... items, or what?

For me personally I play closed games with irl friends only and for the amusement with my friends.

We play hardcore only and our only goal is to complete the game from start to finish in inferno difficulty. We did exactly the same (with same group of friends) in Diablo2. The satisfaction is to just complete the game in all difficulties without trading or buying external items. This without anyone in our starting team/party dying. If one of us dies, we all start over with new characters and try to reach further next time...

Out of lets say 50-75(if not more!) times I've seriously played hardcore for Diablo2 with my mates, we have completed hell difficulty with the above rules of no trading or public gaming 3times. I hope that I will have time, motivation and skill to complete Diablo 3 @ inferno at least 1x time :)

I think the inferno mode is there for the ultimate challenge where all the monsters are higher level than you. This means you can't grind your way to better stats (part from items ofc!) and you have to rely on a good build / skill? :)

Until I actually see and play it this is what I choose to believe.

but it really looks like "hell" in diablo 3 is like "hell" in diablo 2. so inferno could be extremely tough. well, that's just what i hope :<

That is my hope.

I've stayed away from streams and youtube until I get there myself :)
Still level @ lvl 12 as this working day is never ending! I'm hoping my long weekend will let me find out!

I never played hardcore mode, but if Inferno is that hard, how can you play and not die even once? I've seen people 57lvl dying on hell like flies. In hardcore once you died, your char is permanently banned isn't? I'd rage so much losing my time/char/items after dying :o

I have no insight whatsoever in Diablo3. This will be known in the process of dying, most likely :)

The knowledge that your character / build is going to be wiped out when you die is really what hardcore is about. If Diablo2 did not have hardcore built in? I would have gotten tired of the game after 1 week as I have with all other clones and similar games, without hardcore mode as well. I would even have given WOW a go if you could die... It really gives the ultimate (casual!) challenge for me and my gaming friends. Without hardcore these games have no replay value for me as you can always just grind or do it again...

You'd like roguelikes then. This is where hardcore comes from and most of Diablo's mechanics.
Actually more hardcore than Diablo's hardcore in games like Adom eg. legendary "Suddenly a stone block falls on your head. You die." message :-)
D1 is basically roguelike with graphical interface and without hc.
D2 brought a lot of dynamics. Teleporting, spaming static field/charged bolt/frozen orb, healing yourself and your merc, picking shrines and opening chests with telekinesis - all in the split of second is something uncommon to roguelikes.

I always give up playing a roguelike somewhere mid-late game because hc makes it boring for me. Maybe it will work for you ;)

The door opens.
The hobbit zaps a tin wand! The death ray hits you!
Do you want your possessions identified? [ynq] (n) y

You start to put on the uncursed clothes of protection [+0, +4]. You hear a ripping
sound. You are done putting on the uncursed clothes of protection.

I played hardcore mode aswell in d2 for a while.. but the game was already to known so it was pretty easy to do .. reached lvl 95 or something but the economy at hc was not has good as i thought it would be to make a big profit in fg.

Anyways in d3 it is the ultimate challenge since the game is fresh and still very unknown.. can be kinda frustrating tho to die in later levels but.. that's the thing that makes it so great!

gl purri keep us informed.

Yeah, if you wanted to do this in Diablo 2 you simply played locked server and don't trade, as the game had no real currency or protection against cheated items.

I currently have 5 chars (1 each:) and highest lvl is a 38 monk. I've died 2x times @ lvl 10 and lvl ~23. One of them was definitely my own mistake by being greedy and not clicking my health potion (trying to save it for later) and basically got backstabbed by 3x poison exploders while shooting other enemies from distance thinking I was safe :)

I've noticed that I want to progress slower and 'gear' up all my chars and play 1-2 acts / character so you basically don't start progressing to fast and make stupid mistakes. This also makes it easier to deal with a loss as they will happen, so you don't start from scratch all the time.

well, i consider getting maxlvl before reaching the highest difficulty obviously a design flaw.

but yes, getting and selling items, build specializations, bragging, whatever

Nope. It's to encourage item grinding for ye olde auction shoppe. Blizzard aren't fools, they want to make lotsa monies off of this game.

they even implemented content to sell the game afterwards. but aint fukk wit me, nigga

Barbarian level 25 atm. It's the first diablo game I try and I like it. I'm still playing at normal difficulty, which is rather easy, as sometimes I only play with the mouse, not even using the abilities.

What I like is the general hack and slash feeling, where you don't take it seriously, you have a good amount of rewards, efficient mechanics (town portal, sell/melt items) and a variety of landscapes.

As for going more in depth, what I feel could be good are presets for the abilities, so that you can create a few "profiles" for how you want to fight and quickly load them. Atm, changing them requires too much time, so I just do it incrementally when new stuff comes available.

Yeah changing whole build by one click bind would be awesome.

Unfortunately minimum ping I can get is 600, due to have 3g at the moment and there being no local servers.

Even if I get better servers, there will still be bad lag, and it definitely detracts from the game. I doubt I will be playing again until I get a proper connection.

Monk lvl 40 and have few comments:

brilliant fun, fighting is extremely rewarding and exciting, nice graphics, apart from that things get worse though:
- only four players in one game and you can't really choose the game you want to join, only the quest you're interested in (battle.net search the game for you).
- public chat window is really small and all in all it doesn't really have the openness of d2, it's far more private/intimate. So the true brilliance can be experienced once you play with your friends and I still wait for my friends to buy the game, which will happen after their exams etc.
- no taxis possible, as Blizz strictly gives the lvl boundaries to join each quest, which sometimes leads to ridiculous situations (ended act 1 on nightmare on my own and wanted to play act 2 online, but the system said my lvl is to weak, so I had to exp in act 1 for an hour or so)
- I personally like the story behind Diablo universe and was kind of expecting a cool storyline, which is rather a failure, no consistency at all, really infantile. Only talks between characters and banter seem fine, but the main storyline is disappointing
- you gain lvl 60 in the middle of hell and which means the rest of the game is not about levelling, which in opinion was the coolest part of d2
- you can't really fully exert influence on your character, system does that instead of you, so once you're lvl 60, the only difference between your wizard and other person's wizard is the clothes and weapons you're wearing...


All in all, brilliant fun lacking a great deal of things that truly defined awesomeness of Diablo 2. Maybe I'll change my mind once I get used to all these new things, which are not, in my opinion atm, any sort of progress.

And PS: watching streams from guys playing inferno, it's seriously insane how hard it is, so ending inferno is prolly gonna be a new ultimate aim for everyone (just like lvl 99 in d2)

Out of curiosity, did you enable elective mode? It allows for a bit more skill customization. See here.

I did, at the very begging, but it doesn't make any difference in terms of how versatile characters can be: in d2 you had to decide which path you want to follow with your character and stick to it forever. While here you change everything whenever you want, that's why two wizards or two monks on the same level are pretty much equal, depending on the toys you wear

that leaves us with question what replay value will this game have... for example whats the point of making 2nd wizard? and i heard that you level your artisan once per account :S and stash is shared with all characters too?

Replay value already seems gone, since the world and dungeons do not seem to have randomized layouts.

lol?

Really. I've played through 2 characters. One made it to act 3, the other has made it through the whole game, and is on nightmare. Map layout is completely the same.

so what they were working on all these years? btw. you can put only gems in sockets? are there any runes or smth?

I haven't found any runes so far, and only 4 different gem categories - emerald, ruby, topaz, and amethyst. No skulls, either. The gem progression is much more difficult, though.

hum.. the lvl cap to go to the next act is not that bad IF they think of a realistic level to do it.. since in d2 you could reach hell mode with lvl 1 because people found a bug in it .. and even without that.. you could go pretty far without that then do some baal runs and you are hell player with lvl 80 in 1 day or so easily.. so i think they are trying to prevent that.

About the story.. i haven't played the game yet coz i have exams and don't wanna fuck up but.. if that's true im really sad.. i always played diablo for the story mostly .. and then the desire to find the best items have best char etc etc.. but mainly the story!

ok this game is shit theres no winning beyond nightmare

Well, the game is awesome but also there are a lot of things they could or should have done better/differently, but I won't talk about that.
With that said, I'm having a great time and that's what matters.
Got to lvl 50 with 22 hours played on launch day.
Killed Butcher tonight on inferno, was pretty insane.
It's very similar to wow pve in many ways such as cooldown management, teamwork, also extremely fun figuring out your tactics and builds for a certain fight.

I got a free copy from my friend who won it in a raffle while getting his copy. I wasn't going to get it at all, but it was free, so worth a try to see if it was as bad as it looked. Overall, it's an average game. Bad compared to Diablo 2, but average standing on its own.

I've played a demon hunter to 26, and a wizard to level 35. The wizard has just begun nightmare mode. Combat is pretty weak overall. Yeah, it's pretty, but quite bland. Hopefully higher difficulties will make this better, as nightmare already seems to be getting a bit more interesting. Normal mode diablo was a joke - hit me once in phase 1, not at all in phase 2, and once in phase 3.

The graphics are actually underwhelming. They did a great job with the art for the level of graphics, but it's certainly less than I was expecting. I guess they wanted to make it viable for a wider range of computers.

Is there a way to overlay the map? That has to be my biggest gripe so far.

Also, take a look at gem progression: http://i.imgur.com/Fcchc.png

normal difficulty is an absolute joke difficulty wise. I'm halfway through NM right now and its definitely a lot more challenging and interesting, hopefully this trend will continue through to inferno.

you say that now, but when minions are harder than bosses i doubt u will!!

I've made it to act 2 in nightmare now, and the difficulty makes it a lot more fun. The elites with multiple enchants (and more deadly enchants) can be quite a pain. I had a ranged vampirism/extra health elite that took me 15 minutes to come up with a proper strategy to kill. The first boss was only marginally more difficult than normal mode, though.

NM should of been normal, nightmare should of been hell, didnt die till towards the end of NM and hell ive died alot, some Wiz solo'd inferno with 7k hp 4 days after release so the game is too easy

He solo'd it with a bug. Using force armor, any damage that does more than 35% of your life is reduced to just 35%. Using low health makes that number trivially small, so you can stack regen to the point where you basically regen faster than any possible damage.

On top of that, since you are using energy armor, you can get the galvanizing ward to give you extra regen just for using force armor. If that wasn't enough, the percentage is based on your health, so using diamond skin basically gives you invincibility because it absorbs around 20k damage (after the above reduction).

Base build here:
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/wizard#..XO!fY!..aY

Sadly you can't even call it a bug, it's just a horrendous lack of foresight with the design.

yeah, well, it's been nerfed (along with several other exploits)

There are quite a few, too. Nerfing it pushed me into other creative builds, and I've settled on this:

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/wizard#bXOSjh!gTY!caZYaY

This will probably get nerfed in the near future. This build also does not require any vitality, but does not work the same at all. Enter any fight with diamond skin on, and then just spam the shit out of living lightning. Venom enchant gives EVERY hit a poison dot, and living lightning hits like crazy. Each hit (and your poison) can crit, triggering critical mass - giving you a chance to reduce all current cooldowns by 1 sec every time you crit. While living lightning and the poison won't do amazing damage (but nothing to scoff at), it will constantly reset EVERY cooldown you have instantly. At that point, you can literally spam diamond skin and explosion blast, while tanking through anything.

For best results, stack int/crit/crit damage gear. Even an ungeared character can pull this off, but if you don't want to run the risk of unlucky RNG, you'll need some +crit. The more enemies you face, the more living lightning hits, and the more likely you can sustain infinite diamond skin. For solo, it's best to run with the scoundrel, for his crit bonus passive. Arcane enchant and fire chains elites can give you some trouble, but nothing that moving around can't cure. Anti-magic shield elites pretty much hard counter the build.

edit: and... nerfed =(

the fuck

There is no cow level.

there is something better (inb4 spoilers)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LB0XHZ7Ee1o

This is really gay

You have a very loose definition of "better".

lvl 58 barb - starting act 3 hell difficulty

So far the game is great, there are obviously some areas that could use improvement but I'm not to worried about it.

As for the story I actually enjoyed it a lot, D3 brings the story back to who it was all about from the beginning, Diablo. As for the cinematic scenes, easily the best I've seen to date without question.

As for the difficulty, hell is when it starts becoming a real challenge. The only thing I could complain about is some champion combos are so much harder then bosses.

And for the people that haven't seen, Inferno was beaten today by some guy solo and by team Method. But from what I've heard they were using some cheesy tactics that Blizzard plans on changing in the future.

barbarian and monk and stupidly broken in inferno act 2 and up

Can't do any damage and get 2 shot by white mobs.

Can't farm bosses so magic finding isn't fun, also loot rates are terrible

Story so was also pretty bad, considering how rich Diablo lore is there was much better routes to explore.

Itemization is boring and legendaries are pretty bad.

Most of this can be fixed by patches, but I'm growing bored already.

With all that said, it was pretty fun going from Normal-Inferno

Does the game require high end rig?

no

http://oi47.tinypic.com/2pte4qb.jpg
Sup
Level 60 monk I can run butcher solo on inferno with a usual 5 stack nephalem buff of valour.
Usually though I play with my mate and coop its actually harder

I farm act 3. SUP?

Act 1 - Feels like a Diablo summarization
Act 2 - Feels like a Diablo 2 summarization
Act 3 - Pretty uninspiring
Act 4 - Too short... did they need to finish the game fast?

+ It's Diablo
- Skillsystem
- uninspiring items
- general lack of customization

After all it's ok for Diablo 3, but I'm looking forward to Torchlight II tbh. Doubt that I'll be playing much D3 after TL2 is out.

It's pretty disappointing in many ways but still a lot of fun as dungeon crawlers inherently are.

D3 is a VASTLY better game in single player than D2. As far as multiplayer longevity is concerned, I'm not sure. The creator of Braid (an arcade title on Xbox Live) had some interesting things to point out about games such as Diablo:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqFu5O-oPmU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGTV8qLbBWE

(silly me I can't remember which one...)

Jonathan is probably a lot more fascinating if we could examine his thoughts in detail somehow, because he is bad at explaining them.

Such as "baller" Q3 players, and the "mental Iceberg".

single player? theres no single player in d3

How so? I'm not sarcastic...?

I just sold my account. Gameplay is boring crap and servers are annoying crap.

Sold it? Yikes.

What was the problem(s)?

It gets old REALLY fast, and they have admitted that drops are purposely nerfed in order to justify the AH economy. You're pretty much forced into using the AH, and now that the real money AH is running, anything remotely good will cost you money. $100/item isn't uncommon.

yes, the AH is part of the loot table. with that exploits/hacks and bots are just more important than in d2-lod or d2-classic.

i got a friend who made like 5000€ in the last month just by running goldbots. with bots starting to pick items this will continue a few months i guess till it's not profitable anymore (or ladder resets get implemented).

while hack and slays don't have any educational value by nature, it just looks more than ever as a poor mixture between a "game" and "work". poker for dummies

Exactly. Hell, I won't pretend D2 was challenging game that required a lot of thinking... but D3 is just much more shallow. It's stupid hack & slash grind where you brain isn't required at all (no stat and skill points distribution, etc), it plays like interactive screensaver. But it still requires a lot of time and effort to get good items.

So in the end you feel like you are working and wasting shitload of time while not having any fun.

"anything remotely good will cost you money."
not true. the best items are still on gold AH because they're worth more than $250 is worth in terms of gold at the moment ($250 = ~25-30mil).

The buying power of gold continues to drop, as massive inflation sets in.

Well, problems are what I wrote in my first post: boring gameplay and stupid server errors. There's just not enough variety in game compared to D2, it's vastly more item dependant, there's no real endgame content and/or challenge....

I don't know about the game algorithms to have an opinion. Nor do I have enough experience. I haven't even reached 60 yet with one character.

I play too many games at once....

levelling is very boring, just as it was in d2 (too easy until late hell mode in d3 - in d2 people just got rushed by other people to reach the end-game)
inferno is awesome fun, though. loving it. love the skill system (though plenty of balancing is in order), & gear/loot systems. farming is more enjoyable and varied than it was in d2 which is a massive plus.

rarity of really good items is about the same as diablo 2, but to progress inferno you actually need those good items, unlike in d2 where you could find okay items (which would be considered quite mediocre by d3 standards) that would allow you to progress (due to the game not having anything as hard or gear-dependant as inferno)

as far as endgame goes, it's about the same as d2 content-wise & longevity-wise, just without the pvp, which is coming though I'm not sure how it will turn out. very much looking forward to it anyway.

story was actually quite poor, though, and is one of my big disappointments with the game. but, after a couple of playthroughs of d2 the story became kind of irrelevant, just as has happened for me with d3.

''My only concern is that some people have already 60lvl, 48h after release. I remember that in D2 after ~70lvl you needed to sacrifice a lot of time to get 1-2 lvls, and here people are already finished with their characters in one day and AFAIK they were already done with them in the 2nd-3rd act on hell.''


The game really begins when you hit lvl 60.

Oh hi guis,

How's Diablo 3 going?

I've just read that they added pvp?! Not going to play that shit game but interested in some opinions as well.

this game was massively dissapointing

It was like diablo 2, but a 3 instead of 2, imo