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

It seems that Diablo III Barbarian gameplay is very similar to that of Diablo II, and that some skills have been carried along. We do see a serious change in the character’s look, though: the Diablo II Barbarian was a huge, young, tattooed male, but the D3 Barbarian has a white beard, grey hair, and muscular physique. The female Barbarian is a strong, bodybuilder-esque woman with orange hair. 

As usual, Barbarians rely on dual wielded weapons and melee combat. Leaping attacks and ground stomps have carried over into Diablo 3, using blades, hammers, axes, and huge weapons in general. Dual wielding is awesome because you can get so many bonuses and perks from two weapons – and we love dual wielding weapons, don’t we?

The resource that we see used by Barbarians instead of Mana is Fury, using it to enhance their strikes and send enemies to their death! Barbarian war cries, or Shouts, either perk their allies and enhance their skills, or scare off enemies. Fury, as opposed to the resources of other classes, is gained with each blow. Damage actually fills your Fury orb! If you have enough, you can use Fury for explosive blows and jumping attacks, and brutal attacks against enemies. Fury actually depletes if you don’t battle enough!

The Barbarian skills are the ones we all know and have grown to love. Bashing, summoning axes to slay your enemies, weapon swinging, stomping hard on the ground, screams and battle cries, jumping attacks and Frenzy enhancing spells are just some of the primary Barbarian attack skills, which get even stronger bonuses with each Skill Rune you’ll. Passive skills include armor increases, berzerker spells, critical hit bonuses, damage increase, and many more.

In general, the Barbarian is a strong character, relying on the Strength skill points. However, as we’ve mentioned in earlier articles, skill points are evened out automatically according to your class as you advance levels in Diablo 3, so there’s no need to focus on what skill to focus on.

Armor progression in Diablo III Barbarians is simple. They start out with basic padded leather garments, with much skin exposed, and not much armor worth. Later on, closed-faced helms, armor plates and spikes will enhance their armor. After gaining lots of heavy armor, you can see the scary difference in gameplay – make sure you’re not scared of your own character! Remember the cool bone helm we used to see in Diablo II? Well there’s a similar helm to wear in Diablo III, which will make your character even more formidable than ever!

Diablo III Barbarian Screenshot

Choose the Barbarian in Diablo III if:

- You loved the Warrior and Barbarian classes in Diablo I and II respectively;

- You’re into melee combat, strong armor and huge weapons;

- You love war cries, stomping and jumping attacks, and just like to wreak havoc on the battleground!

Let’s take a closer look at the auction screen and see what we need to do.

Step 1: Make sure you’ve selected the class you’re looking for items for. If you haven’t, you might want to switch characters so you can compare the items you see with the search results.

Step 2: Select “Armor” or “Weapons”.

Step 3: Input the level range of your items and try to give a wide range of levels because you might find a lower level item that gives more statistics than an item 5 levels or more above. For rarity, I always go for “Rare”.

Step 4: You really should add the stats of your preference. For Monk and Demon Hunter your items should have Dexterity and Vitality, for Barbarian go for Strength and Vitality, the Witch Doctor needs Intelligence and Vitality and so does the Wizard. It’s important for items to have great stats, because even a small increment to the stat of your choice gives your character a great boost. Add one or even three Preferred Stats, but the more stats you select the more pricey our options are.

Step 5: One of the most important steps is adding a Max Buyout price. We do this because you will find the same item many, many times, and with different prices. What we need is the system to show us the items that have our stats and at the same time are cheap enough for us to buy.

For example, for items lower then level 50, I’d put less than 5000 for armor and 10000 for weapons. There’s no way it won’t show something to your liking.

Step 6: If you need, you can also sort by Buyout Price in order for you to start viewing the items sorted by lowest price first.

If after defining everything you keep getting too many pages, you can also add specific values to your preferred stats, asking from the item to have, let’s say more than 65 Dexterity.

This setup has not only saved me thousands upon thousands of gold, but also has made me able to easily reach Level 60 without thinking about upgrade costs.

Enjoy!

As I just mentioned, the attack style of Monks are fast martial arts, and the class indulges in frequent meditation. They channel divine power and utilize healing waves, holy might attacks, and protection mantras. The Monk fights equally well with weapons or unarmed, focusing on the use of melee attacks.

The Diablo 3 Monk class can move quickly between and around enemies to attack them at their weakest points, and can easily maneuver away from enemy attacks, perhaps the best ability to dodge of all five Diablo III classes. Many melee attacks used in succession will build up the Monk’s necessary vital resource, Spirit.

Spirit regenerates very slowly. By making use of specific attacks and a variety of skills, or completing combo attacks, Spirit can be generated much, much faster. So, you can actually perform a sort of “chain-attack” using your Monk! Skills which use up a lot of Spirit include defensive moves like dodging, empowered strikes and finishing blows.

Other skills the Monk uses are enhanced punches, kicks and blows, blinding and knockback throws, dashes, sweeping attacks, multi-hits and waves of protective shields and healing spells. Think of protection mantras and waves! Passive Monk skills include increase of Spirit and movement speed, dodging attacks more easily, damage and resistance increase.

In Diablo 3, the Monk’s equipment, weapons and gear remind us of the Diablo II Assassin equipment, but with some new touches. We see the use of fist weapons, knuckles, talons and spikes. A new weapon, the Daibo, are banded lengths of wood used to attack and defend alike. Think of it as our familiar “bo staff.”        

The Monk starts out with plain, cobbled simple armor to allow for fast movement. As the character grows stronger, we see more ornaments and fancy armor. Even later on, the armor gets really pretty, almost genie or wizard-like, offering the best defense possible.

The Diablo III Monk class relies on Dexterity and Vitality to progress in the best way, but as we’ve mentioned before, skill points are evened out automatically in a linear fashion in this game, contrary to the other two games of the Diablo series, so there’s no need to examine the stat point delegation further, other than getting items that enhance and add to these skills.

Choose the Monk in Diablo 3 if you:

- Want to try out something new that you haven’t seen before in the Diablo series

- You are into melee attacks, but prefer the martial arts to brute force

- You find the mix of religious power, mantra chants and martial arts interesting!

Tips on playing Monk

The Monk is an amazing class to play and they’re a Jack of all trades! You can easily play solo, with a party, heal, off-tank and even main tank on most of the cases with great success.

The Monk relies on AOE (area of effect) skills to get great damage output, and that will cause a lot of monsters to hit him. You NEED to add a lot of points to Vitality too if you want to be able to survive on the Hell difficulty and up. Don’t overdo it and lose all your DPS, but get items that also have some Vitality as well. To get a better understanding of the ratio, my Monk currently has 669 Dexterity and 1083 Vitality. While my damage is still good (4100 DPS), I have to have 39,000 Hit Points in order to be able to withstand huge attacks without dying.

When it comes to Passive Skills, two are very important: Seize the Initiative (which increases your armor by 100% of your Dexterity) and Transcendence (which heals you for every point of Spirit spent). You need both of these; Seize to have a good damage reduction and be able to take less damage, and Transcendence in order to have 4 skills to heal yourself rather than only 1. Especially Transcendence is what made my character become much, much better because my survivability went up a lot.

For the last passive skill, things are more complicated. I now have the skill Near Death Experience (when receiving a fatal damage, you get your life restored to 35% instead of dying). This can take place every 90 seconds, and it’s an amazing way to stay alive even in very difficult situations, because it gives you one more chance. Before changing to that skill, I used the skill The Guardian’s Path, that gave me while dual wielding +15% of dodge chance. That’s great too.

For the active skills I have:

• Way of the Hundred Fists with the Fists of Fury rune.
• Lashing Tail Kick with the Scorpion Sting rune.
• Breath of Heaven with the Penitent Flame rune.
• Sweeping Wind with the Cyclone rune.
• Mystic Ally with the Air Ally rune.
• Mantra of Healing with the Boon of Protection rune.

Your Mystic Ally is very important on higher difficulties, because you can easily help the ranged classes get far by your ally getting agro from monsters and helping them nuke from a distance. There might be a better choice for Mystic Ally, but for my kind of gameplay, I think it’s the best.

Do you have any other tips for Monks that can help our fellow Monks? Shoot it in the comments below!

The first main difference we see, that we haven’t seen in any Diablo character, is the split resource orb. We’re accustomed to seeing and using Mana. The Demon Hunter however uses two resources: for offensive skills, Hatred; a fast-regenerating, red half-orb, and for tactical, defensive and evasion skills, Discipline; a slowly regenerating blue half-orb. Although it may seem confusing at first (I needed about an hour of gameplay to get it through my head), it’s a nice touch and ties in with the darkness of the character.

You’ll notice that Demon Hunters are, obviously, not as reliable in melee combat, due to light equipment which we’ll talk about later on, but absolutely awesome against clusters of baddies from a distance. So, make sure your Demon Hunter character doesn’t get surrounded, or you’d better have a friendly Heal spell or lots of potions handy!

The specific weapons that Demon Hunters use are fast-attack bows, slower but steadier crossbows, hand crossbows, which are less damaging, but a lot faster and can be wielded dually (dual-wield crossbows? Sweeeet!), and the normal melee weapons of axes, daggers, maces, spears, and swords. But why would you want to wield a melee weapon with a Demon Hunter, anyway?

I’ve also read much about longbows and hand-thrown weapons (I figure like D2′s daggers) but have yet to get more details on all those!

Also, remember that you can choose from both male and female Demon Hunters! (I’m sure this will be the ladies’ favorite – it sure is mine!).

A favorite of mine while playing with a Demon Hunter is using traps. You can get your mobs to chase you, and then trick them into a trap you’ll lay right behind you, slowing them down and draining their health as you run along. I love this stuff! Traps include caltrops, steel-jawed traps, and mines.

Here’s a really cool part: Shadow Magic! Smoke screens, shadow power for life regeneration, summoning animal companions, Death Marks – so many cool tactics to fool your foes and vanish from right before their eyes. The Demon Hunter’s Battle Tactics include swinging Bola shots, smoke bombs, swirling Chakrams, even throwing grenades.

The Demon Hunter’s armor is light and flexible. When you think of it, it makes sense, since they need to move and run around so swiftly and tactically. A Demon Hunter will start out with low-protection leather and hoods. As the character progresses, slight plating is added, like on capes and legplates. Even further on, you’ll be able to don faceplates, hooks and climbing spikes!

Demon Hunter Shooting Zombies

Choose the Demon Hunter if:

- You were a fan of the Rogue, the Amazon, and the Assassin classes of the other Diablo series games

- You’re a ranged weaponry enthusiast (just like me!)

- You want a good balance of weapon attacks and spell casting – something between a Barbarian, and a Wizard, so to speak.

As you’ll notice, since the progression of stat points and skills is linear – which is a huge change in the Diablo game series, since in the other two games, you were able to choose which stats you had to and wanted to boost, and you chose skills that treed out – there’s no need to focus on stats you’ll need to boost for any specific class. (Do any of you find that weird as well? It’s almost like they’re making it easier!)

Why play Demon Hunter: If you’re into character selection and you’re into Demon Hunter but don’t know what happens in end-game material, let me tell you that in hell and above, Demon Hunter is a must and every party should have on in order to be able to travel and move forward. It’s a very much needed class and you’ll enjoy the privilege of constant invitations from other players to join their game.

How do you like your Demon Hunter class character? Do you like the new dual-resource idea? (I’m pretty sure I do!)

Even after 10+ years from the release of Diablo II, Blizzard made us remember things we had almost forgotten. It’s a blast from the past and we surely loved it!

• The sounds and the type of music were kept very close to the original, making us remember the first time we opened our Diablo clients. A HUGE plus!
• We met our old NPC friends again, like Deckard Cain, Adria, Tyrael, and all the bad guys like The Butcher. Seeing the Butcher as the final Boss of Act I made me remember the last time I was fighting him, at Level 5 on the second floor of a starting dungeon

What we loved:

People who played the previous game will notice the following differences when trying to play Diablo III:

• The two previous games made us familiar with cartoon graphics but Diablo 3 takes a different approach. It tries to become more realistic, but at the same time keep the style of graphics intact. It’s a good blend, to tell you the truth.
• You don’t have to pick up gold! This is an amazing feature because, let’s face it, it was a pain in the ass, gathering all that gold from the floor.
• Health Globes: A great feature that balances not being able to spam health potions and makes the game so much better. When you kill monsters, some of them drop a health globe, that when you walk on top of it you regenerate life faster.
• For the farmer within us, there are new types of item bonuses that include the gathering of gold from a longer distance, getting more experience per kill and getting more gold from monsters killed.
• Achievements always give a great boost in the gameplay value and something to brag about to your friends, a much needed addition to the game.
• No more scrolls! This one’s a killer because it saves time plus it’s much more convenient. Right-clicking identifies an item and pressing the keyboard letter “T”, teleports you back to town.
• Interaction with the surroundings. This one is one of the best surprises of the game since none of the other two games had it. You can fire at and drop chains, have roofs collapse on your enemies (or you), drop lava, and much more. It’s a very welcome addition.
• Multiplayer is much, much better. You are able to interact with your online friends instantly and create a party in just a second. Joining one is also a breeze. That’s what online gaming should be like; logging in and playing in a matter of 5 seconds!
• Cinematics have changed a lot but still keep the old Diablo style. A huge plus.
• We now have only 6 Skills to choose from (and three passive ones). That’s a huge plus. Some hardcore World of Warcraft players might disagree but the beauty of Diablo is that it is simple. You don’t have to have a toolbar with a million hotkeys and macros to keep things interesting. By limiting the amount of skills you can use, it gives a lot of choices to the players to select what really fits their gameplay better.
• The minimap is very efficient especially for multiplayer mode. It shows where everyone is and where your destination is (if you have discovered it yet) without having to open the full map.

There are only three drawbacks that I can think of and thats:

To play the game you really need to be Online and login on Blizzard’s servers. It’s a huge penalty for people who want to play with their laptop on their vacation, but with things like the Auction House where you play with real money, you can’t risk anything.

They didn’t release Auction House for real money from the beginning, but this might be a good thing, because people need to become familiarized with the items first before they pay real money for something very common.

Wish they could release the Arena from the first day… Oh well, we can’t have it all!

Last but not least, on the first two days,  login was a pain in the @#$@! but with the new queuing system they implemented, everything works flawlessly!

I missed playing Diablo and I was looking forward to something funny, simple and yet great to play and I think Diablo III is exactly that: something that will not make you go full throttle on a game (at least after the first 2-3 days that you won’t sleep) but at the same time give you hundreds of hours of fun with friends. Let’s see how it will evolve.

What did you like the most about Diablo III and what is its biggest drawback? Did you expect something more from it?

Now with the introduction of Cauldron of Jordan, we won’t have to do that! After doing one of the first quests, you will be given the Cauldron and when right-clicking on it, you can click all the items you want to sell and they will disappear, giving you the exact amount of gold that the vendor would. Can’t stress enough how important this item will be and how much time it will personally save me.

Let’s now hope that we’ll be testing this and all the rest features really, really soon.

What about you?

Demon Hunter will be called to play the Ranger part of the game but with a twist! He’s going to also use grenades, acrobatics, and shadow magic. There’s no need to explain more since I’ve added two videos, one of the official trailer and one with actual gameplay footage.

We hope you’ll enjoy them!

Diablo 3, after 11 years of waiting is around the corner! What we can only do (at least for the moment), is to check out the released videos of how the game will be. Take a peek at one boss fight, it’s actually really good