Mysteries of the Mighty Barbarians.

[Uzor]

i dont really get day9's appeal.. but here's someone streaming right now.

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/nomsayin

personally i'm not watching it and just crossing my fingers that i'll get in the beta and i'll do my own goddamn stream for bg

So FF really dd start, despite blues on official forum flaming it hasn't and saying it'll be front page news when it do.

[avelle]

I needs it. This is good news nonetheless though.

[Gokulo]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEAue...el_video_title

Female Monk sounds Russian, haha.

[Sqwunk]

http://www.arenajunkies.com/news/389...i-closed-beta/

FYI, we’re getting very close to starting the closed public beta test for Diablo III. You might start seeing some new reports about the beta client as we’ve begun limited external testing with employees and their families, and there is no non-disclosure agreement (NDA) for that. We look forward to sharing more info about the beta test in the near future. Stay tuned.

If you have a beta license, you are free to show, share, or talk about any portion of the beta content to which you have access, as this beta test is not confidential.

And something they posted on facebook

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/3359129

It’s time for a challenge... not a challenge of will, or of strength, or to drink a gallon of milk. This is a challenge of follicular fortitude.
It’s time to grow a beard.

Over the past six months, many members of the Diablo III development team have risen to this challenge themselves -- and while you may have some catching up to do, the goal remains the same: grow and maintain the most awe-inspiring Diableard you can, and don't shave it off until the day Diablo III is released.

Some may choose to go the full distance, cultivating mighty mountain-man beards. Others may decide to trim theirs a bit to avoid the protestations of their loved ones. Whether it be braided, forked, or wild enough to house a family of squirrels, your beard will serve as a beacon of hope for humanity in the coming war against the Burning Hells.
Some of the ladies and less hirsute gentlemen out there may be thinking, “But what about me? My facial hair is fragile and wispy, like the gossamer of dreams.” To you we issue a separate challenge: craft the finest mock-beard you can from any assorted objects or substances you have handy, and then model it for the world to see.

With no release date for the game yet announced, the challenge of developing the ultimate Diableard will push you into limits unknown, but we're hoping you'll summon the courage to join the Diablo III developers on their quest.
To participate, simply send your Diableard photos to

[email protected]. We’ll be collecting the most impressive images of your beards and beard-like constructs to show off on the official Diablo III website as the release of the game approaches.

[Purrrfect]

“But what about me? My facial hair is fragile and wispy, like the gossamer of dreams.”

It's like they know me!

[Insanecyclone]

http://www.justin.tv/alexhjelm#/w/1736105856/7

[Cichy]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEAue...el_video_title

Female Monk sounds Russian, haha.

Butch Russian female at that

[Deadgye]

FFFFFFFFFFFFuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu. I just shaved off my jesus like beard. God damnit.

[Bilopdop]

FFFFFFFFFFFFuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu. I just shaved off my jesus like beard. God damnit.

Same, I grew it for over six months, then it got too hot. I guess I can do it again, all it took was a lot of being lazy.

[Ghost_Wheel22]

A worthy entry?

Spoiler: show

http://i30.photobucket.com/albums/c3...y/McBeard1.jpg

[bori]

http://btjunkie.org/torrent/Diablo-3...95e8c1b1587f9d


Installer!

EDIT: Seems legit. Official launcher, downloading files now.

[Kaelan?]

You still need a bnet account with a beta key, so that won't really help you (unless you're really desperate to just look at the launcher and the log-in screen).

Since the NDA is lifted on this, I figure I might as well start sharing the info. I hadn't really been keeping up on gameplay changes - partly because I didn't want spoilers and partly cause they were changing how everything worked all the damn time - so here's some notes on what I've noticed so far, by comparison to D2:

Spoiler: show

* Shrines seem to stack now: if you pickup multiple different ones, you'll keep all of the effects. They used to overwrite each other
* You also get a buff icon with a tooltip that displays how long until it wears off
http://i416.photobucket.com/albums/p...anbg/D3_01.jpg

* There's several little "mini-achievement" type things in the game. I've gotten some for killing several enemies in a small amount of time, killing multiple enemies with one attack and killing multiple enemies with environment destructibles.

All of these can be earned repeatedly and give experience rewards based on how many enemies were killed. It also seems to scale with either your level or the monsters' level, as I was getting considerably more XP towards the end of the beta for roughly the same amount of kills as I made earlier on.
http://i416.photobucket.com/albums/p...anbg/D3_02.jpg

* Every now and then I'd find these "Treasure Goblin"-type things. They run away from you as soon as they see you, dropping gold every few steps. If you don't kill them after a while, they'll open a portal and disappear.

If you manage to kill them before they leave, they drop a bunch of loot and gold. They seem to be reasonably common, I found like 5 or 6 in the beta, and didn't have any trouble killing them on my Barbarian. They seem to always drop at least 1 magic item.

* You pickup gold automatically now, by just running over it. It's one of those "holy shit, why wasn't it always like this?" type of things. Masses of small stacks of gold getting in the way of you actually looking at gear drops is no longer a problem.

* All drops automatically pop-up their names for a few seconds right when they drop. You can still hit ALT to display all drops on screen, but having them do it automatically on drop makes things a bit easier. I haven't found any way of turning the item labels on permanently, but this at least makes it a good bit easier to watch for good drops.
http://i416.photobucket.com/albums/p...anbg/D3_03.jpg
http://i416.photobucket.com/albums/p...anbg/D3_04.jpg

* There's plenty of gear slots available, for the item whores out there (myself included).

* All items I've found only take either 1 or 2 squares in my inventory. No more Inventory Tetris!

* There's definitely some interesting new affixes on items. Even at low level, I've been running into several I've never seen in D2, like fixed amounts of extra XP per kill (instead of percentages) and class-based modifiers (i.e. "Does X more damage when used by Witch Doctors"). One belt had a modifier that gave me health for every point of Rage I used on Barbarian.

* All magic items drop identified now. The only unidentified item I ran into was a rare, so I imagine only those (and presumably uniques) need identify scrolls now.

* Since there's no more stat distribution, there's also no more stat requirements. Items still have level and class requirements.

* Three of the slots are for special accessories. Sort of like a special place to put D3's equivalents of the Horadric Cube, so it doesn't eat up any inventory space. There's a bunch of different types of these available.

I've only found one for each slot in the beta - not sure if that's all we'll get or if other special items will be available as you go through the game. They're all pretty handy to have, especially the cauldron.

* There's no town portal scrolls anymore: now you can just equip an accessory that makes portals for you, doesn't have to be recharged and never runs out. No more wasting inventory spaces (or item drops) on scrolls/tomes.
http://i416.photobucket.com/albums/p...anbg/D3_05.jpg
http://i416.photobucket.com/albums/p...anbg/D3_06.jpg
http://i416.photobucket.com/albums/p...anbg/D3_07.jpg
http://i416.photobucket.com/albums/p...anbg/D3_08.jpg

* It always annoyed me that D2 had like 5 billion hidden stats about your character that you just never got to see. People eventually made UI mods that yanked the info out of the game and displayed them - pretty much every single decent mod ever since has used them.

Looks like they took the hint this time and are actually showing more detailed character info on the status screen. You can finally see shit like your gold/magic find, cast speed, life steal, etc.

* Have I mentioned that female barbarian looks fucking awesome? Female barbarian looks fucking awesome.
http://i416.photobucket.com/albums/p...anbg/D3_09.jpg

* I was a little worried about the skill system at first, but it's been making more sense the more I play the game. It now works like this: You don't get points per level anymore, you just learn skills automatically whenever you meet their level requirements. As you level up, skills get better, so you don't really have to worry about "leveling" skills at all.

You then have a certain number of slots that can hold active skills. You get more slots as you level (every 6 levels or so), but the number of slots is still always way smaller than the total number of skills you've learned. So now making a build isn't about making one-off choices on skill point allocation, but rather just selecting what skills you want to have active at any given time.

Since there are no points to spend, all skills level with you without you having to babysit them and you can switch your active skills whenever you want, you can effectively change your build as necessary, even on a dungeon-per-dungeon basis (or even encounter-per-encouter) if you'd like. It's functionally equivalent to being able to re-spec, except it's 50x faster and more convenient to do.

There's enough useful skills and few enough slots to justify this - I ended up doing that myself several times even at a very low level (I finished the beta at level 9 and went through about 3 different skill setups).

http://i416.photobucket.com/albums/p...anbg/D3_10.jpg

* Crafting looks like a good way of getting decent gear when you're having trouble finding that ultra-rare-perfect-item you want. Throughout the beta, crafted gear was better than any of the drops I found, including the one rare I found for beating the final boss.

All crafted gear has a combination of fixed and variable properties, sort of like crafted stuff in D2, though now it's all displayed in a convenient menu, so you don't have to run the game in windowed mode to go look stats up online, which was a pain in the ass.

You can break down any item into crafting materials, which I actually ended up doing more often than selling with all the junk gear I found, since the crafted stuff was almost always better than what vendors had.

Crafting recipes are also more streamlined: everything I could craft at first used varying amounts of the same two ingredients. One is what you get for breaking down normal items, the other for breaking down magic items. I also got something different for breaking down a rare, though I had no recipe that used one, so I imagine doing that for those and uniques will probably be important down the line.

The recipes available seem to be based on two things, outside of the starter recipes you get when you unlock the smith: first, you can just find recipes as regular loot; second, you can "level up" your smith guy, which teaches him new recipes.

He levels whenever you give him a Tome of ...something (I forgot what they called it), which you make from pages you find randomly as loot. He doesn't get any better himself from just making items, so there's no grinding to be found there, thankfully.

I haven't failed crafting anything yet, so I don't even know if it's possible. If it is, it shouldn't be a big deal since the materials seem pretty generic in any case.

http://i416.photobucket.com/albums/p...anbg/D3_11.jpg

* Companions are pretty meh. I got a Templar dude towards the end of the beta and he was pretty useless most of the time. Main purpose of having him around was as a distraction so I wouldn't get swarmed by everything.

He did like 1/4 of the damage I was doing with Bash and didn't take hits any better than I did. He did have a healing skill though, which was nice since he could cast either on himself or on me. He could only equip a spear/shield and rings/amulets.

http://i416.photobucket.com/albums/p...anbg/D3_12.jpg

http://i416.photobucket.com/albums/p...anbg/D3_13.jpg
http://i416.photobucket.com/albums/p...anbg/D3_14.jpg
http://i416.photobucket.com/albums/p...anbg/D3_15.jpg

* I ran into what I think was one of their random scripted events. While on one of the main story quests to find Leoric's Crown, I was searching a Tomb and found a large room with this magic jar-type thing. Clicking on it gave me a new bonus quest and started a timer, which counted down from 1 minute.

The objective of the quest was to stay in the room and survive until the timer ran out. As soon as it started, skeletons started popping from out of the ground. At first it was easy, since I could one-shot all of them, but as the timer got lower they started popping faster and faster, until it got to the point where I couldn't even move to pickup health globes anymore cause there was so many of them around me, despite the fact that I was still one-shotting them as fast as I could.

I actually managed to finish the quest and then die right after the timer hit the 0 second mark, lol. Wish I had gotten a screenshot, but I was too busy getting my ass handed to me.

[Uzor]

You were in the alpha Kaelan? God damn i hate you right now.

[Gokulo]

What about some passive skills window? :3

[Maaglin]

God that red targeting outline is fucking horrible. Hope they have an option to turn it off or at least diminish it at release.

Also, thought they got rid of tetris inventory??

[Celeras]

Maybe its just me, but: 5-8 damage, 1.3 attacks per second = 8.4 DPS?

[Maaglin]

Maybe it includes some kind of stats that are unidentified as of yet?

[Celeras]

It looks like its like that with all the weapons, even identified ones without stats. Just picked that one cos it was simple. And if it used unidentified stats the DPS wouldnt change after being ID'd.

[avelle]

Great screenshots and write up Kaelan, I am beyond jelly.

[Kaelan?]

What about some passive skills window? :3

Sure!

Spoiler: show

http://i416.photobucket.com/albums/p...bg/D3_16-1.jpg
http://i416.photobucket.com/albums/p...anbg/D3_17.jpg
http://i416.photobucket.com/albums/p...anbg/D3_18.jpg

Maybe its just me, but: 5-8 damage, 1.3 attacks per second = 8.4 DPS?

(8+5) / 2 * 1.3 = 8.45