Alright so my last D4 post was 4000 words long...

Let's try to avoid that shall we?

The prerelease open beta has ended and the normal open beta has begun. As is common with Blizzard launches, servers are fairly unstable... but that's kind of the entire point of a beta-test, right?

This beta is weird.

I remember the D3 beta was very short and could be completed quite quickly. It was pretty lackluster, but the full game launched shortly after so it was no big deal.

The [D3] open beta began on April 20, 2012, and closed on May 1, 2012. Following the beta, the game officially released for Windows and OS X on May 15, 2012.

This time around the beta can be played all the way up to level 25 and you can complete quite a lot of quests before the main line ends. By level 25 you're almost able to test all of the skills available in the decentralized node tree they created.

It's also noteworthy that these two beta tests only last as long as the weekend and shut down operations early Monday. The full game isn't going to launch until 6/6 which is obviously over 2 months away. In addition they've dangled an "NFT" wolf-pack thingamajig to incentivize people to play the beta. The planning around all this seems much more coordinated and organized than it usually is for Blizzard games.

So let's jump right into it.

On this version of the beta all five classes are available to play so I decided to do a cursory test on all five and level them up past the initial starting zone. This doesn't take very long if you speedrun through & skip all the cutscenes and the talking. Ten minutes maybe.

When I created a necro and a druid there were no real surprises. The Necromancer (above) has the main attribute set to intelligence, which was expected. More INT == more damage. The Druid's main attribute was willpower, which was interesting but also I had already guessed that in my last post. This will make them an interesting class based on healing and 'overpowering' the enemy with fast resource generation.

Playing the rogue I noticed something odd:

The rogue can equip their two-handed bow and dual-wielded weapons at the same time. I found this to be a small but very convenient deviation from previous RPGs I've played. It can be so annoying to swap weapons in and out of your main-hand off-hand depending on what you want to do. Now you're always equipping both things and can seamlessly use both at the same time... kinda cool.

I played the Barb last and realized they took that multiple main-hand equip thing all the way with this class. You can carry around a slashing weapon (axe or sword), a blunt weapon, and dual wield all at the same time. Different skills require different weapons and once again you can seamlessly transition across multiple builds, but it looks like you get bonuses if you choose a particular theme.

This makes we wonder how common split builds will be, as on my sorcerer it already became worth it to use hydra (fire) within my frost build because of an item I got that made it basically twice as good. I get the feeling split builds may end up being pretty common depending on random gear drops. I guess that's the nature of a decentralized node skill tree.

Another thing that took me a while to notice is that at a certain level these skill enchantments unlock and you can choose a pretty big upgrade for your build. I was running around without using mine for a while... had to look it up online but it appears as though the first slot unlocks at level 15. That bottom portion on the skill menu doesn't appear until then.

We can see I chose to enhance my Ice Shards ability. This one shoots Ice Shards at any enemy that becomes frozen. Because I was already using Frost Nova in my build, this enhancement makes that ability magnitudes better. Every time I run into a clump of baddies I just cast a frost nova to freeze and most of them die just from the free shards that get summoned and flung at them, bouncing around.

These skill enchantments are super powerful and versatile.
Another very nice addition to the decentralized node system.
They can be swapped in and out at any time for zero cost.

Speaking of swapping skills...

Once again it's weird to say but I may of had a helping hand in how this all works. Back in the day I was giving advice to my friend who worked at Blizzard about what direction I think they should take the game. I told him they should incorporate all the best aspects of games like WOW and LOL into D3. No reason to reinvent the wheel.

In LOL characters only have 4 abilities; 3 normal abilities and one ultimate. Even with only 4 abilities LOL was a very complex and competitive game that ended up being the #1 E-sport for quite some time. I told my friend that perhaps Diablo avatars should only be able to pick a subset of the skills available to them for combat. This is also how Guild Wars worked at the time... if anyone remembers that game.

In any case the point being is that I told my friend that Diablo 3 characters should have a limited subset of skills (this also helps port the game to console) on top of having unique resource bars. This was already accomplished in WOW with Warriors having rage, rogues having energy, and mages having mana.

In D4 there are a maximum of 6 skills at one time.
A good balance IMO, especially compared to WOW which has so many.

There are four resource pools:

• Sorcerer and Necromancer have mana (INT)
• Rogue has energy (DEX)
• Druid has spirit (WILL)
• Barbarian has fury (STR)

It seems that the main stat-point may be linked to the resource globe, so if an expansion gets created with 2 new classes we might expect them to be something like a dexterity class with energy and a strength/willpower class with fury/spirit respectively.

Fury

I'll probably always call this 'rage' because of World of Warcraft, but the fury resource has diminishing returns. When you are not in combat your fury will dwindle to zero. Using lesser skills and getting hit will build your fury, and using the greater skills will expend it.

Spirit

The Druid's resource globe is pretty much exactly the same as Fury except it has no diminishing returns. The disadvantage is that getting hit and taking damage doesn't build any spirit, but you'll keep all the spirit you build up no matter how much time passes. Also willpower as a main stat will give a bigger bonus to spirit generation as the character scales up.

Mana

Mana is the standard resource that everyone is used to.
No surprises here.
In D4 the regen is relatively fast.

Energy

Basically the same as mana but the regeneration rate is notably faster.
Rogues often have the highest single target DPS.

Aspects

Another thing I didn't quite understand before were these Aspects that you can get by completing dungeons scattered across the realm. There are 114 of these things total spread across all five classes. Looks like the sorcerer has 35 of them which is quite a bit higher than the average so that's a bit odd... but now I see that the rogue also has access to 34 of them... and a good chunk of these aspects can be used for any class.

Originally I was thinking I'd just be granted the ability after farming it, but that's not how it works. These are enchantments that can be added to gear for a price. Using them on rare (yellow) gear upgrades that gear into legendary (orange) gear.

All legendary pieces of gear come with Aspects imprinted on them already, that's what separates legendary gear from rare gear.

Upon reading more about this feature...

Aspects seem to be a really cool mechanic in the game. All legendary gear you find will have a random aspect on it, and it appears that you can even strip the aspects off of gear you find and reapply it to new items.

This is a great way to do enchants on gear because it allows you to get the abilities you need while acting as a massive gold sink (the occultist NPC is not cheap). If you have an old piece of gear with a really good aspect you can disenchant that gear and reapply the good ability to something else. Tested it out just now and seems to work well. Best of all worlds. Very nice.

It also appears like there are bonuses involved to applying aspects to items that are already legendary or to the weapon slot. Will have to test more to know for sure. In addition many of these aspects can only be applied to certain slots so certain gear won't be available for upgrade depending on the one you need. Again: it's a pretty cool way to get all legendary gear and make gold actually useful for something.

Gems?

There's also a way to upgrade gems for gold at the NPC in addition to adding gem slots to items. Again these features are cool but not really necessary in the early game. However you can also remove good gems from gear so this could be a good way to Twink out new characters and power level them.

This is something I'll definitely need to consider because I'll likely end up playing hardcore mode. Characters that die are dead forever. Too bad so sad. The adrenaline rush is worth it though. Action junkie confirmed.

Conclusion

The more I play this game and test the mechanics the more I have to conclude that it's going to likely be the best Diablo game in the series. Of course this is the standard for vidya-games and D3 was largely a rushed fluke and disappointment. Will be nice when D4 launches on 6/6 so I can finally stop being salty about the previous iteration from a decade ago.