Yeah, plus you have that invincibility spell. When you get surrounded just hit that then start slicing them up.
I don't disagree, Arcane blast will one shot a whole group of mobs, no problem. And this with the moving of the IceStorm ability to level 38. When it was still lower level, I could choose it, run into a huge group and hit stun and Ice storm for about 2 seconds and everything was dead. I actually like the Wizard, but that may be because I am used to playing melee and I enjoyed the simplicity of playing the wizard. the underpowered opinion is most likely from people who haven't played it too much, or found the right skills. Initially the Wizard is a pain, because your attacks don't do much. The Ice Beam is worthless and the rune doesn't really help it much. Once you get to blast though it is much better, Rune the Arcane shot ability and run with Arcane blast and you can run through the beta material easily.
I enjoyed playing the beta, though I can't imagine really wanting to play it for much more than a weekend just because of how short the content is. I tried all the characters out a bit except monk who I just barely played before running into a streak of connection errors that concluded my beta play for the weekend. I like the game, and I'm excited to play the live version. I discovered yesterday while playing that you can remap all your skills not only to new hotkeys, but you can have multiple "left click" or "right click" abilities active. For example with the witch doctor, the grasping hands and flame bats are default right click abilities, but you can put one on left click and one on right click if you want. Or if you don't need the Caltrops for the demon hunter, you can remap it to entangling shot, or whatever else you want. You don't have to have a defensive skill on hotkey 1, you can remap it to a right click ability. This might be common knowledge to alot of you, but it wasn't immediately clear to me until I started messing around with customizing my hotkeys.
Actually, via this admittedly unscientific poll on the official site, Witch Doctor is the least popular: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/4663256855 At the moment I write this, the favorite character standings are as follows: 23% Barbarian 23% Monk 19% Demon Hunter 18% Wizard 16% Witch Doctor When you consider that 20% for all is the design ideal, Blizzard has done very well in making all the classes equally appealing... they're all within 4 points of that 20%.
I feel like I have to say about the Witch Doctor, which is that he is easily the most powerful character in the beta by a very wide margin. Why? One skill in particular: Soul Harvest, unlocked at level 9. Soul Harvest is used as 16 yd ring around the WD, and for every enemy up to five enemies within that ring, he gets a boost to his intelligence for 30 seconds. This didn't sound too exciting to me at first, but then I realized how massive the boost was. My DPS literally went from about 44 to 90. I doubled my damage every time this effect was active. And since the cooldown is 15 seconds, all you need to do is keep finding groups of five to keep it active. When you pair the spell with Firebats, especially, the WD just become unstoppable. He kills champion packs in less than a second. It's ridiculous. People have argued that in later difficulties it will be harder for him to activate the spell without risking death, since it requires basically getting really close to a monster pack. But personally I think the spell is just too OPed. You shouldn't be able to passively double your damage with a single spell. In any case, I really am hoping for a nerf. I plan to play a WD, and that kind of OPed skill would be fun for a while, but I'd rather not have a skill that's so totally out of whack with everything else.
Not sure if anyone else ran into this...but... The game defaulted high settings for video (except Shadows which defaulted Medium). I kept experiencing brief (but annoying) hangs. The strange part, and what leads me to believe it is NOT my graphics card, is that this would often happen when in town just standing around or accessing a vendor. I could fight huge mobs and no hang but then run down the hallway and activate a trap and it would hang. Happened every couple of minutes, periodically, in no particular situation. Seemed to happen most though as something on screen activated such as a trap, bookcase, enemy spawn, etc. The only time I noticed an actual graphical slow down was when you encounter the four glowing pillars that you must destroy. There were like 50 enemies on screen at once. And even then it was playable, just slower. I think its my memory (or rather a combination of the high graphics settings and my RAM stats). I'm running 4gigs. Anyone else? My video card has 2gb dedicated.
i think people may be right. from what i read on the hardest difficutly a group of skeletons could be like a boss battle. so who knows how certain skills will help if at all in the hardest areas when people are maxed out.
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/X0Zqmfmzmy4" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> The 2:16 mark pretty much confirmed my choice to play WD as the first class.
I like how IGN has this up, but it's not on the official Diablo 3 site yet. Anyway, cool video. Had a lot of runed skills on there that I hadn't seen in action before.
For those of you who don't know about it, you may want to check out the Diablo 3 Hero Planner. Beyond letting you customize your skills, it also lets you pick items and affixes for those items and see what they do to your character as a whole. Effects of Legendary and Set items remain unknown, but at least it gives you a feel for what kind of affixes you can get. Less than two weeks to go now... I'm really starting to crave this game...
Only a few days now til launch at midnight on Monday, though I probably won't get to play til Tuesday evening.
Blizzard will open up the install download at 10 on Monday morning. If you have a digital copy you can start downloading and installing it then (I think it is pretty lengthy download), although you still won't be able to play until 2 a.m. on Tuesday. On looking at it, you can already download the installer app. I would recommend doing that ASAP because that will take forever on Monday. It just won't be able to install the actual game until Monday. I can't find any definitive info on whether what you can download now, pulls the 7.6 gig install package or if that will be what you get on Monday. I am not at home to check the size of th efolder the installer creates. If you had the beta there are several folders you need to delete or you won't be able to install the retail version. You can find those on the D3 blizzard forums.
I'm sure they are...they always do them for major releases. Then again they're usually for console games though, you may want to give them a call. I believe Best buy is (at least the one on highway 6).
I called my local GameStop who did a midnight release for Starcraft 2, they said they won't know until a couple days ahead of release. Having played the first beta weekend for Guild Wars 2, Diablo 3 has become just a transitional game from a stable for me. Time will tell. I also decided not to play hardcore as HC does not have the RMAH, as possibly the only thing that'll keep me playing is if I turn a small profit from the RMAH. Blizzard has lied about 'just polishing' the game and again about 'it's ready when it's ready' by not including PvP with release.
Yeah, I had been excited about the game, but after playing the betas for both, at this point I'm just going to play GW2.
