Diablo 3 Beta

[spectre]

I'll definitely go with flix's opinion here. There's good things and bad things about it. What's really annoying me is that I have no way of getting to know whether my tiny lags are lags of my internet connection or lags of my system...

But other than that...I found it fun enough to play again today (if they'll let me...). But buying it? Time will tell...

[jaelrin]

Online only is a really bad thing. Yesterday at night was able to play fine, today it was really laggy (and not due my internet speed). Maybe will buy the game late summer or autumn when they'll fix all lag and connection problems.

Character impressions:
Monk - really fun, and female version looks cute, got her to lvl 12.
Witch doctor - quite interesting, but don't like the looks.
Wizard - gameplay ok, female has extremely annoying voice.

Demon hunter and barbarian - didn't like the gameplay, feels boring.

[jiaco]

My experience so far is that it downloads realtively quickly.

Apart from that:
I successfully logged in once, got timeouts on attempted friend request and game starts, and was not able to even log in since. Yay.

Thats a pity, the demo inspired me to play Diablo2Lilith, great work. I am pleasantly pissed at the monsters you have added so far, my Sorc's only hope is that you nerfed the skill disruption in the black place where Mordak is hiding (currently at the cemetery).

Sadly, since there really are not many hack and slash games, my favorite genre, I enjoyed the demo, found it too short and bought d3 on amazon shortly after. Anything that can scratch my itch before GrimDawn comes out.

[ArrowofThyme]

I was able to play on my friend's account and during the open weekend. I ended up racking up around 10-15 hours total and tried out all the characters. I didn't have any lag issues that others are talking about but I also didn't hit any peak time periods (like the very start of the open Beta).

I played a bit before and after the rune changes and I'm really excited about them! Adding runes to modify skills is an excellent way to add customization. I still think it is odd that you have unlimited respecs, and usually re-rolling chars is my favorite thing to do, but we'll see how it works out. Obviously your char development path is very limited at the start but should branch out quite a bit once you are at the end of Act1.

My char impressions:
Monk - I love the feel of this guy! Absolute favorite. Teleporting punches are the bomb. We also have the same beard.
Barbarian - Had lots of OOMPH. I really started to like him once I used the leap attack skill to smash into things. Good kinetic feeling - the destructable environments really help.
Witch Doctor - Fun skills, and really fun to play as. I love his style; I don't think I've seen any class quite like him in a D2 clone. The downside is that his skills are pretty distracting if you have another one on your team - spiders everywhere for the first few levels!
Demon Hunter - Several of her skills didn't seem so useful in the early game, and I had trouble dealing damage with her. Meh.
Wizard - It took me awhile to like him; his free spells are kind of boring and some of his early spells were hard to use (small radius or too random). I do like how runes change his skills though and his higher tier skills look really promising.

I'm going to go ahead and say that I don't care too much about the online-only requirement. I won't be able to play it visiting family, but in return there is a promise of much less cheating. Duping and hacking made it so that I never ever ever traded with anyone in D2 even on ladder, and I rarely played with anyone besides friends. I just hope they didn't make items too stupidly rare like in D2 - you basically had to rely on hacking for the items to actually enter the economy! Anyway, if I don't need to worry about cheaters it will be a huge weight off my mind. I think the worst we'll get is some botting.

[Violos]

Yeah @Jiaco, unfortunately it stayed that way for the remainder of the "free" weekend. Not impressed.

And no, unfortunately I didn't nerf it. That is one of the difficult phases for the Sorc, who does have the easiest start in return.
But using persistent or DOT spells helps.

As for the online thing, I don't like it either, obviously, but less cheating is a point - if that actually helps to achieve this.
Though I fear that actual rarity raising prices, and people hoping for D3 to become as huge as D2 or StarCraft (which I don't see though), will encourage a LOT of bot farming.