The Longest Damn Reviews - Diablo III (v1)

I heard so much about Diablo III over the years but the price was a constant barrier to entry.  I got lucky with it and the expansion going cheaply at Gamestop and I managed to buy the whole thing minus the Necromancer class for a whole $5.  I started with a Witch Doctor just to see how the game ran and got to the end of Act I before shelving it for a while.  I started a seasonal Monk and it took just under 25 hours to get to the end of Act V.  I started on Expert, kicked it down to Hard for most of the game, and brought it back to Expert for the last leg of Act IV onwards.  I played solo for the entire thing.

Diablo III is a more casual experience than the two prior games, but I honestly don't think that's bad.  You no longer get to allocate stat points for the first 70 levels with the game instead giving you a number of points spread out across Strength/Dexterity/Intelligence/Vitality for every level.  I guess this was to address the min-maxing that was so prevalent in D2, the whole "you put one point in Energy?  Delete and restart" thing.  Each class has one of Strength, Dexterity, or Intelligence as their primary stat and the automatic stat allocation puts most of your points into that with some into the others so you have a generally offense-focused build at all times.  If you need more health, you can't just stack points into Vitality anymore and instead you need to rely on gear to make up the difference.

There are three new values useful for at-a-glance looks--Damage, Toughness, and Recovery.  Damage is an approximation of how much damage you deal per second, with Toughness being an approximation of how much damage you can take total, and Recovery is how much Toughness you recover a second.  You still have the full stat readout on your items at all times and you have a small slide-out list on the character window for exact details too.  The approximations can throw you off, for example if your class is reliant on hitting several enemies at once to exploit Life on Hit mechanics, an item that has a higher Recovery rating than what you're using might not be useful if the new item has only Life Per Second or so on.  Weapons now list their average damage per second as well as attacks per second on the stat readout and you can even see the affix stat ranges by holding CTRL over the item.  Character equipment options have also been slightly expanded to include shoulder armor and forearm armor (separate from gloves), but you no longer can switch between two different sets of weapons with W.

Skills have been completely reworked and no longer have trees.  Instead, characters either learn a new skill when they level up or they learn a Rune that modifies a skill they already know, and you continue to unlock these for every level up to 69 or 70 depending on the class.  There are now six categories of skills and these all have their own slot on Left Mouse Button, Right Mouse Button, and the 1234 keys.  The game initially locks skills to their assigned keys but you can turn on Elective Mode to control where each skill goes and use more than one of a given category (with some restrictions still, like the Monk can't assign two Mantras to his slots).  Each category has three to five skills to it, and every skill unlocks five Runes that modify the skill in some way, though you're only able to use one Rune for each skill at a time.  Runes either increase the effects of the regular skill (more damage, a wider area, etc) or they change how the skill works.  The Witch Doctor's Hex summons a Fetish Shaman that disables enemies by turning them into chickens.  The Hedge Magic rune lets the Shaman also heal allies, the Jinx rune has the Shaman further debuff enemies with an increased damage taken curse, and the Angry Chicken rune doesn't summon a Shaman but instead turns the Witch Doctor into a very speedy giant chicken that then explodes after a couple of seconds.

Instead of being powered by your stats or by as many +skills effects on your gear as you can fit, skills are now fueled by weapon damage and both your and your gear's stats.  This threw me off when doing my test run as the WD, as I'd normally have expected to use something like caster wands or even the class-specific daggers to do more with my magic, but carrying a big two-hander sword somehow made my firebombs and summons do more damage.  Okay then!  Skills still use the attack speed on your weapons, so you still have to decide if you want heavy hits or faster attacks even if you're not actually using your weapon in the process.  You very likely will only see the "attack with weapon" during your character's first level since the second level gives you a new skill that takes its place.

You're also able to respec Paragon points at any time and swap out skills or Runes anytime when you're not in combat.  No need for items, nor needing a once-per-difficulty quest to do so.  I was one of those people who made several characters mostly to experiment with builds no matter how dumb or silly or thematic they were in D2, but you can easily experiment with one actual character per class now.  Which is a good thing since Blizzard restricts you on the number of character slots you can have, with ten being the max for me due to having the expansion.  Given that I only played two characters and created five total, that limit didn't seem so bad to me but it might be problematic for others.

You no longer have to go through the game three times on different difficulty levels to get the full Diablo experience, though this comes with the tradeoff of your first run likely being very easy, especially if you're familiar with Diablo-likes.  I only turned the game down from Expert at first because the enemies were pretty damage-spongey, and I doubt that once I got running that the rest of the game would've been that much of a challenge anyway.  I didn't die until I hit Adventure Mode and very smartly turned the difficulty to beyond what I was ready for and promptly died to a boss that one-shot me...seven times in a row.  Whoops!  You start with your choice of three difficulties that increase enemy health and damage but also give more gold and EXP, and you unlock the other fourteen difficulties as you play.  You're able to lower the difficulty at any time but you need to be out of the game to raise it, and you don't reset story progress or anything so it's quite different from the first two games.

I think the game was set up to make the campaign reasonable enough for most people to get through, and then you open up the options that really make things a challenge afterwards--and once you unlock difficulties or Adventure Mode with one character, you permanently unlock them for every non-seasonal character you have, old or new.  You really only need to go through the story once though nothing is stopping you from doing so with every class, and you definitely don't need as such an easy time with it the next few times.

Adventure Mode is basically the endless post-game.  You're given complete access to all five Acts and their waypoints, and you're given five Bounties per Act with tasks such as clearing out X area or killing boss Y.  When you complete all five Bounties, you can return to town and get a Horadric Cache that has a bunch of goodies in it, but I didn't see if you got a giant reward for doing all five Acts' in one go.  You need to do all of one Act's Bounties in one sitting since if you leave the game, they all reset.  A little annoying but manageable.  There are also random-dungeon random-enemy Nephalem Rifts where killing enemies slowly fills up a meter that summons the Rift Guardian boss when it fills, and these

Diablo III is a game of numbers though.  It's like someone decided what the series needed was a dose of Disgaea's ridiculous number inflation.  I forget what the absolute highest amount of damage possible in Diablo II was, but here I was dealing out millions of damage and not actually one-shotting things, granted this was post-game stuff too.