Een maatje postte vorige op d2 community forum dat hij een beta invite had,dus ik dacht " goh, zal ook weer eens m'n battle.net checken "en ja hoor...
" A wilde Diablo III Beta appears, it's super-effective ! "
Leuk kerst-kadootje van Blizzard <3
Bij deze m'n indruk tot nu toe ( te lui om te vertalen, vandaar in het engels :p )
Diablo III Beta experience sofar. :drums:
I started with a female barb (man that eastern-european accent is pretty horrible though :wall: )
Started off with 1hand (found a pretty nifty rare dagger early on) + shield and fairly defensive skills which actually saved me from dying once already, i didn't think this would happen since i heard so much QQ about the beta being so easy (which is pretty silly since 1/3 part of act1 on normal should be piss easy)
Ran out of town and straight into frozen enchanted scavenger pack which nearly got me, had to ran back to get some cover from the guards while using ironskin (shield-wall sort of skill)
But once i had finished the Beta i switched to dualwield + more offensive skill setup for faster killing and such, i'm really looking forwards playing a tanky-style barb in co-op though when the game is released.
Eventhough they have tuned down the skill system a lot already (which ofcourse is a shame) it still seems to work very well, lots of ways to spec still and they haven't even put in the runes yet, which will add so much more to it.
As mentioned before D3 takes many things from WoW (and of course D2) but all of this has proven to work, and seems to work really well in this game as well. I personally see it as a positive point but haters gonna hate huh. :-\
The game looks really polished. Awesome environment, and lots of stuff is destructable which is really neat, especially since it builds up fury. Which i can imagine should be really usefull when the game gets harder later on.
The crafting stuff is pretty amazing as well, you level-up the artisans for your whole account. And compared to D2 crafting is made a lot more convenient, although i hope it will not turn out to be too imba.
You can apparently craft set items too once you've found the plans for it that is. Should be good for gearing up new chars once you've got your blacksmith sorted out.
I like the fact pretty much all of the items, both crafted but also unique (legendary) ones later on have random properties ( much like rare items in D2 )
Also the stash and gold is shared for your whole account which will save so much trouble muling away stuff, especially if you're quite the pack-rat like me. :whistling:
You can buy extra stash-slots and then even extra tabs after that if needed.
The mercenary/follower is pretty cool so far too, though i'm glad you can't use them in multiplayer. Hopefully it will stay this way since 4 chars is more then enough already really. It seems like a huge step back from 8 to 4 max players per game, but you get used to it pretty quick.
At least you can actually see who kills what, instead of 8 players spamming aoe spells and then everything dropping dead instantly.

Also i'd like to add i really liked the fact they use randomness alot again area-wise aswell, just like in D2 it will lead to alot of replayability. Lin got a random event in some crypt several times already, while i got another one. Also i ran through a pretty early area and there was a cave with 2 levels which we hadnt seen before yet, so even random dungeons.
So, finished the beta on my barb, and Lin on her DH. All in all, it's great really !
Only downside, on my laptop it seems to lag quite a lot, esp in 4 player game. And well, we just want moar now after playing thru this bit. >_<
Edit #2:
Just played some with a friend, and while gameplay-wise it was ezpz ( since we were lvl12 & 13 ) it was intresting to see some nifty features like;
- Item linking in chat, no need to type out your over 9000 stats of items everytime anymore.
- Inspecting other chars, you can even see which skillsthey have atm and such.
- Shrines get shared, wefound this out by accident. So no need to wory about who gets which shrines. Sort of related, everyone gets his own loot, yet you can ofcourse trade it afterwards, but no more hassle about drops pretty much.
- Friendslist shows how full them games are. No need to ask howmuch room there is left.
- The banner system seems to work really well, you justclick someone's banner and you teleport to that person.