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Inferno will be really, really, hard. There's a good reason why no one has beaten it yet.

A DoT that does 1260% damage over 15 seconds is already quite strong... that's a huge amount of damage for a single cast.

Add on the fact that you can cast Hydra tactically - for example, casting it around a wall so it can hit a boss but the boss cannot hit you - and it is really not bad.

The concept of Hydra is the same in D1, D2, and D3. It doesn't do a whole lot of damage per second, but it does the damage safely, and continues to deal damage even if you are running around, stunned, or otherwise unable to cast.

In diablo 2, champion and unique packs are dramatically more common in hell difficulty compared to lower difficulties. (Seriously, go back and play D2, its quite obvious) There's no reason to believe this will be any different in d3.

I wouldn't be surprised if later-difficulty mobs were immune to CCs at least part of the time. For example, the normal Skeleton King can be chain stunned for a long time but when he uses whirlwind he is immune. As the difficulties increase it's likely that more mobs will have partial stun immunity, and the % of the time where they are stunnable may decrease.

Keep in mind that Witch Doctors and Monks have a LOT of self-healing abilities (mostly Rune effects), while Wizards and Demon Hunters have craploads of slows and stuns so that they don't have to get hit in the first place.

If you try to make the d3 beta "difficult" by playing entire games naked, you'll find that Potions and Health Orbs become awfully scarce, awfully fast. Once we get to harder difficulty levels, self-heals will be extremely valuable for all classes.

We're talking about a game company whose entire visual style is based on excessively bulky armor with spikes and skulls on everything, and then setting it on fire.

Diablo 1 and 2 armor had a ton of spikes on it, it was just rather low-resolution so you couldn't get all the skulls, flames and lightning bolts that we see in WoW armor sets. The increasing over-the-topness going from D1 -> D2 -> D3 armor is a logical progression.

Also if you go back and look at the early D3 character class concept arts, any time they wanted to show a "high level" character they already had humongously oversized armor with lots of embellishment. That's Blizzard's visual style, every bit as much as the exaggerated lens flares in the Mass Effect series, or the bright high-contrast colors of the Halo series.

Molten Arrow was renamed:

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/class/demon-hunter/active/elemental-arrow

The basic Elemental Arrow is still a fiery, piercing projectile. (you can see it on the Demon Hunter launchsite video) All of the runes change it into something that's not fire. However, the "screaming skull" rune has a 60% chance of a basic fire arrow, and a 40% chance of a skull projectile.

You really can't assess DW vs 2H balance in the beta because there aren't nearly as many +Damage affixees in play as there will be in the full game.

Due to its superior attack speed, DW will always get a larger benefit from flat + damage increasers.

Also, DW gives you twice as many available affixes. As affixes scale, you'll gain a lot of extra Strength, Attack Speed, etc.

However, 2H has one MAJOR advantage over DW for melee characters, and that's superior reach. The reason that Cleaving with a big sword is so much more effective than cleaving with two 1hs is that the Cleave area of effect is much larger. Even with non-AoE melee abilities, the 2h's longer melee reach can be a significant advantage for fighting other melee creatures.

Considering how incredibly dedicated some Diablo players have always been, I would be SHOCKED if inferno took longer than a month to beat. I mean, back at the height of D2's popularity you'd have entire teams of players playing in shifts, pooling gear, to get the fastest-possible-99 on ladder. And then you have the modern-era WoW guilds which are even more dedicated than that. 500 Heroic Ragnaros attempts to get the world first, they were spending something like 6 hours wiping per night for 2 weeks straight.

A large guild sharing items, gold, and AH purchases can get their 4 best players to the endgame in a really big hurry. In fact, I would bet that a large well-coordinated guild would clear endgame content a hell of a lot faster than any single rich dude playing the RMAH.

If the endgame is balanced to where a single player would have to farm gear for 2,000 hours before being capable of clearing Act 4 Inferno, then a guild of 200 players will only have to farm for 10 hours each to gear one guy. If they each farm 40 hours and gear out 4 guys, the guild's "World First Squad" is fully geared in less than 2 weeks.

Honestly, if there is one big improvement from D2 to D3 it's the removal of runewords and the addition of extra randomness to items. Runewords were incredibly tedious to collect due to the rarity of high end runes, and yet in many slots Runewords were overwhelmingly superior to any non-runeword item. (Just ask anyone with an Enigma, Infinity, or BotD) This effectively reduced the high-end item hunt to a single difficult to obtain "best in slot" item, with all other items being second class citizens.

Combined with the fact that Rare items were garbage in D2, and many Unique/Set items didn't have a whole lot of randomization (one full Trang's Set is the same as any other Trang's Set) the high end item hunt actually had relatively few viable possibilities for any given build.

Just look at any online Diablo 2 character build guide. They will usually list 3 sets of items (Cheap, expensive, and top slot). For any given slot there weren't a whole lot of different choices.

In Diablo 3, all high end items will have extra random affixes. One windforce might have +Damage to Uniques and +Attackspeed, while another windforce has +Multishot Damage and +Dodge while a third windforce has +Discipline and -Enemy Physical Resist. This introduces the possibility of a "not so good" unique rolling exceptionally good random affixes and ending up on the same tier as a higher-level unique. The possibilities are endless, and no one will be able to list a "best in slot" because randomized high end items can be so different from one another.

Beta is not a good guide for item diversity because there are a really tiny amount of affixes available at level 13. Blizz has already promised +skill affixes, and datamining has come up with a few more.

I think the point of the thread is that if you had the ability to break 128-bit encryption, you would use it to steal every bank account you wanted to, not to release a game 2 months early.

Once the game is released, it is pretty simple to emulate servers and distribute pirated copies. However, you can't copy a program that doesn't exist - and without decryption the program is effectively nonexistent.

Quote from Stabsey

There are some quite interesting implications to a Thorns build.

It's possible that dodge reduces your damage. If you dodge an attack it didn't hit and so shouldn't reflect. Damage reduction shouldn't, it's still a hit. Armour and Defence are likewise damage reduction effects not hit negation effects. (Source: http://www.diablowik...tings_and_Stats ). So those should both proc Thorns.

It's also not clear to me which Witch Doctor spell effects count as minions for their minions gain thorns passive (Fierce Loyalty). Spells like Plague of Toads and Locust Swarm look more like nukes than summons and I suspect that these spell effects don't create targets for mobs to try to hit. But some of the rune effects may do - Spider Queen and Toad of Hugeness for example.

So there's probably a Witch Doctor build around Thorns items and as many summons that count for the purposes of Thorns as possible. Eg 4 zombie dogs, a gargantuan, a fetish army, a huge toad, a spider queen, etc.

Another question I have regards monsters that aoe. If a mob cleaves and hits 3 dogs do they take triple Thorns damage?

Fierce Loyalty requires level 45 so it hasn't been tested in the beta. I would assume that a mob cleaving 3 dogs would take 3x thorns damage, but it's not testable right now.

It still bothers me that it doesn't work by reflecting a % of damage though.

Keeping thorns as a flat number actually makes it a much more interesting stat. In the beta, stacking Thorns lets you kill off weak enemies incredibly quickly, but doesn't help nearly as much against Unburied (big slow guys). This makes it a more specialized stat.

From what I can tell in the beta:

1) It affects melee only.

2) Thorns damage is completely separate from weapon damage and currently only exists as a flat number (not a percentage of damage taken). I have no idea if a +%damage buff (like battle rage) would increase thorns.

3) Thorns does not seem to proc life leech. (sorry, Classic D2 Blood Golem!) I highly doubt it would proc any effects that happen "when you deal damage".

4) Thorns is definitely designed to work best on weak, fast attacking enemies. Right now it is a fairly strong stat (mainly because Beta enemies are really weak), you can get enough Thorns damage to kill everything by walking around and letting it hit you. It kills skeletons, scavengers and carrion bats REALLY fast. Big stuff like Unburied still takes a while to die.

If Thorns (as a stat) continues to scale with level and gear, I imagine some melee players will make entire builds around having very high single-target damage and letting swarms of weak enemies kill themselves off with Thorns. Even in the beta, Bash-centric barbarian builds are greatly helped out by wearing several pieces of Thorns gear.

Quote from Nerax

I did a bit of testing using ray of frost. Some interesting observations:
The arcane power cost is multiplied with the attack speed.
1.53 attack speed drained 100 arcane power in 4.5 seconds
1.00 attack speed drained 100 arcane power in 8.8 seconds

The numbers are fairly consistent with the expected numbers of 1.53*20=30.6 AP/s and 1*20=20 AP/s

EDIT: Further testing of RoF suggests it ticks at roughly twice your attack speed and you only do damage at ticks even though the health bar moves continuously (can only kill one enemy per tick). This seems to be how channeled spells works in general, though the tick rate may wary between spells. Deamon Hunters Strafe for instance ticks at a significantly higher rate then the attack speed.

*Time measurements are somewhat rough

This appears to be correct. Ray of Frost appears to tick at twice your attack speed for 100% attack damage. Even though the enemy health bar moves continuously, the ray will always do at least 1 tick's worth of damage to any enemy you hit, and won't hit any other enemies during that time.

Extremely overgeared players will always "carry" other players, giving the other players more kills and loot than they deserve. That's true of any multiplayer co-op game. If you're ridiculously overgeared you will probably have guild or friend groups to team with. I don't see it as a problem.