[Mezza]

I had the good fortune of being able to participate in the D3 beta, with all thanks going to nirvAnA and his site (this one! sc2sea.com, obviously) so I'd thought I'd leave some of my thoughts of the beta for the guys who weren't as fortunate as me so at least you have something to keep you guys going till you get your key!

Well I've read somewhere that there's gonna be tons of D3 beta keys going out, perhaps even more than the SC2 beta because of the way that the D3 beta is, short. As a result there's not much replayability unless you're mad and want to grind all the way to level 12 on low level monsters, which takes helluva lot of an effort, so with people dropping out and all, there's a high chance you guys will be able to get your keys, so just keep praying and hoping Even if you don't get one, take heart that the retail version will likely be released in the next 6 months, because once again that's supposed to be a track record Blizzard has for their BETA to release dates.

One other point to bear in mind, this beta is meant for hardware and server testing, so they say, so they didn't exactly have "player satisfaction" as their top priority. So yeah, I might complain abit about how 'short' the beta felt, but well, I suppose that's just the way it is for Blizzard to make you WANT to buy the retail.

Introduction

Spoiler alert, I'll be talking about monsters and quests and crap from now on.
So if you don't want to know which boss comes first or who's alive and kicking in the game and what you're supposed to be seeing and want to be wowed for the first time, just stop reading and wait for a BETA key or the retail version

+ [Introduction] +

Basically the BETA consists of you playing through act one. You'll be seeing the return of Deckard Cain (yeah, the most iconic dude around) and he's got a niece Leah that will go on a quest with you to search for him.

Act one revolves around you investigating a fallen star that has crashed into a cathedral into the area and there's a plague and shit which are turning regular civilians into zombies and crap, and Leoric (yeah the dude that gave his name to the Necromancer summoning wand in D2, y'know that guy? yeah) is revived and you're supposed to pwn him (which is pretty simple, honestly).

Yep that's the end of act one, and it's pretty damn short! If you blast through the game, you'd be there at level 8 and in real time, maybe a little less than an hour! By that, I mean you just run straight for the dungeon exits and stuff and don't bother to explore every nook and cranny in the level. So yeah.

So I've managed to play through all 5 classes in the game, namely:

1. Monk
2. Barbarian
3. Wizard
4. Demon Hunter
5. Witch Doctor

And I've ranked them in order of which one I liked playing the most (up to around level 9~10) and I'll go on and write a short bit about every class.

Monk

+ [Monk review] +

Basically the most fun class of the 5 that I tried in the beta. It's a melee class with all expectations of the monk. Y'know the fist-pumping, way of the empty palm, mad fists of fury, five point exploding palm type carnage and shit. Yeah, that's the monk.

The attack animations get prettier and you just basically get more badass when you get past the first spirit generating skill (oh yeah, you generate spirit with your attacks and then you spend them on spirit spending skills, for those of you who aren't in the know).

It was a pretty easy runthrough to Leoric for me and I enjoyed just basically smashing everyone and everything in my path without even needing to drink a single potion because the monk has heals (and a pretty powerful one to boot)!

I've been pretty much a caster type person for D2, I played Nec, Sorc, Trapsin, Bowazon (WOW SHE SUCKED SO BAD IN HELL) and Hammerdin (effing OPed) mainly, with an economically made Smitedin for the prime evils, characters created in that order. So come retail, I might just buck that trend and go with the Monk for a first character, but we'll see.

And oh yeah, its got this tattooed with dots and shaved bald head with a full beard shit going on and has a weird Rasputin type russian accent which makes it like a cross between the Chinese monks and the Russian ones, which is like WTFMATE?! But hell, past the weird cosmetic shit, it was pretty fun to play.

Barbarian

+ [Barbarian review] +

The barbarian is akin to the D2 one, I didn't really level one in D2 all the way up to like level 80 or anything but yeah, if you're looking for a really easy walk through act one in the beta, just play the barbarian.

I enjoyed it more than the caster classes in the beta mainly cos there was a pretty damn lot of damage output in the early levels and there's something immensely satisfying about wading right into the thick of the action and laying the SMACKDOWN on some zombie/skeleton ass. Yeah.

The barb still sports the regular muscled hunk/meatloaf type look similar to its D2 predecessor, which I'm not really a huge fan of, but I guess its a typecast thing, and yeah, they don't really have much of a choice.

Wizard

+ [Wizard review] +

They're chinese, WTF? Yeah both the wizard guy and girl portraits are of the mongoloid stock, so yeah. Remember like the chinese wizard in The Sorceror's Apprentice? Y'know the whole slanted eyes and thin eyebrows shit, yeah the wizard has it all. I mean there's lots of other very good looking asians to model your character on, so yeah.


This is a really great example of a good looking asian female, why couldn't they do something like that instead?

I used a chain lightning type spell for most of the game which was epically sick as it bounced three times and had pretty high damage and a really long range. Downside though, it drains spell power like mad, but the upside is, just run around for a few seconds and your spell power would be really quickly restored!

Oh yeah, there weren't any mana pots in the game, not sure if that's gonna stay and its only particular to the beta, but if that's the case, it'll be awesome! Because mana pots just take up more space and are pretty useless for non caster classes.

Demon Hunter

+ [Demon Hunter review] +

Basically the class skin to the rogues/amazons. Fires ranged weapons and has two resources to manage. Hatred and discipline which makes it slightly more complex (though the beta was too short to actually utilize both resources fully due to the lack of skills available on the skillbar).

Didn't strike me as particularly interesting to play, mainly just shoot shoot shoot back up and shoot more. Probably would get better with the retail version because the beta is just too short to get a good feel of it.

Witch Doctor

+ [Witch Doctor review] +

Wow, this was effing disappointing. The class akin to the necromancer in D2, and my favourite class in D2 as well. I had some pretty high hopes for this class.

Firstly the whole voodoo, mojo and jamaican thing didn't really do it for me. So that's a personal point but as part of the player experience, non-appealing art can so easily turn you off the class.

Mongrel dogs also take too damn long to kill crap, they do so damn little damage! And basically its 3 summons at a go and they have a really long cooldown and if one dies, you can't really summon just one out of the 3 to take its place. Also, the lack of a proper primary attack was frustrating, so you mainly had to rely on poison dart, which was really slow and sucked ass as an early levelling skill as you had to shoot really slowly to clear crap out. It gets slightly better when you unlock your 3rd skill slot but even then, the AOE skills that you have aren't targetted, or are very very short range. So for me, it wasn't as satisfying as the other classes.

Did I mention how much I disliked the whole Jamaican voodoo thing? Yeah.

Well hope it gets better in the retail because as of right now, as much as I'd like to play the WD right from the start as a tribute to the nec, I might be put off enough to want to play something else, like monk for example, cos its just so much more badass, which the WD unfortunately, was FAR from it.

As much as this isn't like an objective review of the WD, I must say the whole voodoo type thing thing probably put me off quite abit, so perhaps there was some unfair bashing there.

Next will be a compilation of random thoughts on what I think should be fixed, or just the good bits and bad bits of D3, perhaps in comparison to D2, but yeah.

Stuff that could and should get some fixing:

1. The chat bar does not get bumped to the middle when you open another window
This is a real peeve, for example when you're in a game with a friend, or just messaging someone and you open a window, for instance, your skills tab, your chat bar gets blocked off instead of bumped in to the middle where you can type and continue chatting while viewing your skills/stash, whatknot. Should be fixed, as its a really simple GUI issue that just makes things less convenient.

2. Hirelings/Mercenaries pathing can be improved
Yeah they still get stuck behind pews/barrels/doors and shit, and its irritating. Also, more control over their actions would be great. Sorta like pets in WOW, like offensive/defensive/passive type stances where they're either actively aggroing shit, or only aggroing shit that passes your way, or just sit back and chill kinda thing, yeah.

3. Companion doesn't follow you into new instanced dungeon
Well basically you've got these companion scrolls that allow you to summon a small little non combat pet that will pick gold up for you as you wander about, saving you some trouble. Lazy man's issue but yeah, saves mouse clicks which in turns saves mouse life and decreases incidence of carpal tunnel syndrome, or leftmousebutton death syndrome. All in all a good thing! So why on earth didn't the summoned companions be allowed to persist past going through portals? Mind is blown.

*added*
Maynard posted about these two other bugs that I encountered while playing the beta too.

4. Missing variable names
When killed by a named monster. It would say "Maynarde was killed by $<Missing!>" or something like that lol. Fixable bug I'm sure.

5. Bookshelf pathing
Sometimes when you're on a lower level in the Cathedral and you open the book case, the pointer highlights on the floor above when you click on it sometimes stuff will drop on the floor above not in front of you. You can usually tell which bookshelf is going to do this by the character spazzing out and not being able to walk to the bookshelf when you click on it. Reasonably serious bug.


The good stuff

1. The background items/world/corpses is interactive
Not a huge point, but nice all the same, your fists of fury/arc lighting bolts/darts and whatknot can interact with the environment, destroying crap, pushing corpses about in pretty much a decently coded physics engine which is more eye candy at the moment that anything, but yeah, I live for such detail. Thumbs up there.

2. Being able to switch skills when in game
Gone will be the days where this happens "**** NOOOOO! I ADDED ONE EXTRA POINT TO TEETH AS A NECROMANCER WTF USELESS SHIT" So yeah, you have your full arsenal of skills now and they're tied to weapon damage instead of skill points and later on, to runes as well for customization, so you'll be able to switch into PvP or PvE mode with a few clicks, all in all a great change. Too much grinding involved and multiple characters will be needed like for example hammerdin vs smitedin etc. Painful all around.

3. It's a really pretty game
Well at least for the Monk and Barbarian attacks, they're really pretty, and just look badass. 'Nuff said.

4. You don't have to pick up up gold individually anymore
THANK YOU BLIZZARD! Now all you need is to walk past in close proximity to gold on the floor and it automatically adds the gold to your inventory, how cool is that? Gone are they days when you open a chest and it spews out 100 gold in "1 GOLD" denominations, effing nerdrage.

5. Gold actually has its uses and the shared stash is great!
Well yeah its more important now than in D2, and all of it doesn't drop on death and you have a shared stash and gold pool, which is just awesome

The Peeves

1. Skill slots
Man this really breaks my heart. You get 2 skills slots to start off and at level 8, you get your 3rd slot. And this is just painful, you know you have the skills in your bar but you can't use them. Yeah its great that you don't have to add points to them anymore and that the whole thing now revolves around your attributes and shit, but yeah 2-3 is too few, and at level 30 apparently you only have 5 skill slots out of easily 20 skills that you can choose from. Oh well. Kind of a letdown

2. Lack of rares
Nonsensical bitching, but yeah, its a beta, I get it, but the MFhound in me bemoans the lack of shinies, that being said, can't wait for the retail. Each character you get to leoric only drops you one rare, and when you haul your ass back to leoric after you've beaten the beta, all he drops are some shitty blues.

Yeah blizzard way to go for trying to make it more painful for the fans

3. Pink pants!?!?!?!?
Yeah when my WD killed Leoric, they dropped some sweet rare pants with +MF% and shit, but guess what, THEY WERE PINK, OMFG.



So that's a picture of the monk (IN PINK PANTS WTFONCEAGAIN, if you can make it out, yeah the pants are transferrable and thankfully not just WD only, BUT STILL, pink, gawd) laying the SMACKDOWN on leoric with the silly merc in tow.

Tip
1. Hold shift to stand still and hit stuff, applies to both ranged and melee classes so you don't end up moving around in circles around a monster you're trying to hit.

Well if you read all of that from start to end, I think you deserve an achievement. But the bottom line is, the beta definitely tantalized more than it satisfied and I can't wait for the retail version!

Quick Comments

	nirvAnA:	Really nice review!! :) Yea I want my wizard to b e jeon ji hyun too lol
	EscapisT:	I don't understand anything at all, but read it anyway :) The classes review was nice!
	neon:	awesome review, hoping the WD is fun later as I want to main it :(