The following is a guest post.

This highly-anticipated dungeon crawler from Blizzard Entertainment is set for release in early 2012. The groundbreaking Diablo I and Diablo II have created high expectations from die-hard fanatics. Here’s a brief preview of elements that distinguish the game from others.

Classes

Diablo III will contain Wizard, Monk, Witch Doctor, Demon Hunter, and Barbarian classes. We may not see classes carried over from Diablo II such as the Amazon or Sorceress. With a new set of classes, Diablo III will introduce new concepts and variety to gameplay. The Barbarian, as expected, defeats enemies through strength. The Demon Hunter manipulates shadows while incorporating skillful use of mechanics. Harnessing energies, the Wizard relies on creation, while the Witch Doctor relies on the nature of life and death to manipulate opponents. The spiritual Monk is fast and accurate. Fans are anxious to see what these new classes will bring to Diablo.

Skills and Artisanship

Mystics, Jewelers, and Blacksmiths will be available to assist you during your journey. Diablo III will allow you to pre-determine skills depending on the class you choose. For example, if you’ve chosen to play a Demon Hunter, you will be able to choose between various hatred generators, hatred spenders, and disciplines. If you choose to play a Monk, you will choose between various spirit generators, spirit spenders, and mantras. The array of skills offered will allow you to create a unique skill set of your choosing as opposed to skills that have been strictly determined for you based on class.

Unique Features and Combat

Although the idea is controversial, Diablo III will require an online connection and will allow you to connect with friends, introducing a new social aspect to Diablo. The online connection will also allow you to participate in item auctions to potentially rack up real-life cash. This hack and slash incorporates various combat technicalities in addition to its active and passive skill sets. Additionally, the simple, clean interface Blizzard is known for makes for easy transitioning between skills during combat. The linear gameplay (as opposed to quest-based games) is enhanced visually by the game’s clean design, which is less cartoony than Blizzard’s World of Warcraft.

Only time will tell if fans will accept or reject the incorporation of new classes, strategies, and online play. The game will likely be released in a matter of months, so get ready for Blizzard’s next adventure. For more in-depth Diablo III info, visit http://us.battle.net/d3/en/.

Ryan writes as a guest and likes saving money with an HP coupon. In addition to writing for the Blog Content Guild, he also enjoys PC gaming and reading about technological advancements.

I didn’t participate in the beta when it was available so when I upgraded to Cataclysm I didn’t know what to expect. Thankfully, the amount of hand-holding that Blizz has implemented is so rampant you’d have to be blind to miss it.

I’m leveling as Assassination. The experience might be different for Combat or Subtlety but till I respec I won’t know what it’s like. As a dual-specced rogue Sin’s second spec is non-existent. EJ says that Assassination is the clear winner in raiding DPS and I’ve also read that Combat is “missing” damage, whatever that means, which are the reasons why I haven’t set it as my second spec. If this was WotLK, I’d be Combat in a heartbeat because of the cooldowns, AOE attacks and simpler rotation—okay, mostly because of the simpler rotation. Cata re-introduces Rupture in the Assassination cycle and also brings in Backstab, but the details on that are for a different post.

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Take a good look. This is the full class list for Diablo 3. From left to right: Wizard, Witch Doctor, Demon Hunter, Barbarian, Monk.

I had a good laugh at Fan of Knives.

Real ID. When Blizzard announced that it was implementing it back in the day I thought it was pretty cool. I’d be able to communicate with my real-life friends across factions, realms and even games. It sounded like a convenient way to keep in touch.

Then the patch arrives and here comes the implementation. Frankly, I don’t like it. It just feels wrong to see my real name displayed in-game like that. Sure, my real-life friends know who I am and my online persona is not too different from how I actually am but that isn’t the issue. There’s a reason why we have avatars and usernames. We don’t want everyone to know who we are. We want to play the game and interact with other people yet still remain hidden under the anonymity of our toons.

By revealing that they want to implement the Real ID system to the forums as well, Blizzard is effectively removing our choice to be anonymous. You want to post? Then you have to identify who you are. It’s going to be an effective way to remove trolling, sure, but it’s also going to kill their forums. It’s not worth revealing who you are just to ask where Mankrik’s wife is or how to tank properly.

Now, I don’t post in the forums very often. In fact, I rarely visit it. My reasons are purely circumstantial; at work, where I am most likely to view it, our corporate firewall is blocking it. At home, I’d rather play the game than go to the forums. In short, this issue doesn’t affect me directly. This leads us to the simple solution: if you don’t want your real name displayed in the forums, then don’t post there. It’s as easy as that. Yet here we are, raising a collective voice.

I’m going to end this with a question. What if Blizzard/Activision goes further? For example, what if they automatically create forum accounts with your Real ID readily available and they modify the ToS so that it’s mandatory, something you have to agree to in order to play their games? I know I’m creating a possible worst case scenario here but it’s a thought. I’ve been a fan of Blizzard for a long time now but this whole mess makes me think that it’s having an identity crisis wherein it wants to be the Facebook of gaming.

I broke my iPod last week. I was installing an update for an app. It prompted to reboot. When I did, it gave me the recovery screen, the one that told me that I should plug it to iTunes. I slept it off since it was late in the day. When I woke up, I plugged it in and got no change in the error. It was then that I knew that I was in trouble. My authenticator was in my iPod. If I didn’t get it to work, I wouldn’t be able to play WoW.

So I hauled my ass off to work, figuring that I’ll try to resolve the problem there. iTunes needed to download the recovery software needed to restore my iPod back to factory settings so that was the first thing that I tried. I then found out that our corporate firewall blocked iTunes from doing so so I had to try something else. How about a manual download of the recovery software, I thought. So I did, downloading the latest version for my iPod Touch. I went back to iTunes, tried to load it and it gave me another error. A little digging revealed that it was caused by a digital signature issue that Apple stopped using. Which meant I was stuck.

It time to think out of the box. What could I do to force my device to load the restore software? I already had it so I figured there must be some other app out there that would do it. I found two other things but they also failed miserably. I was a little tired at that point. If I gave up on the problem, I was looking at the possibility of bringing it to a service center then waiting at least a week before I could get it back. It wasn’t a prospect that I was looking forward to.

I don’t know what led me to it, but I eventually found out that my iPod Touch wasn’t a 3G model. It’s a 3rd gen device, sure, but it was only 2G. I had been using the wrong restore software all along. I then downloaded the correct one, went back to iTunes. This time, there was no digital signature error because Apple was still using it for this version of the software. After a few minutes, my iPod was restored. From the start of the repair process to the end of it, I spent 6 hours fixing it. It took forever, but you’re looking at someone who had zero knowledge when it comes to fixing iPods so I just took it for what it was.

When I got home that day I installed my apps and songs. It was then that I found out that my authenticator was out of sync so I still couldn’t log in. I informed the officers in my guild and filed a ticket with Blizzard to sort things out. I just found it incredibly ironic that the very thing that was securing my account was also preventing me from accessing it.

And now, for the nitpicking.

Redirect (available at level 81): Rogues will be getting a new ability to help them deal with changing targets. Redirect will transfer any active combo points to the rogue’s current target, helping to ensure combo points aren’t wasted when swapping targets or when targets die. In addition, self-buff abilities like Slice and Dice will no longer require a target, so rogues can spend extra combo points on those types of abilities (more on this below). Redirect will have a 1-minute cooldown and no other costs.

This is a nice, welcome change. We won’t be wasting time building up combo points on fights that have a lot of target-switching, which then mean that we can do finishers more often. Too bad there’s no mention of transferring Deadly Poison stacks though. It wouldn’t make sense but it would be convenient.

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Logging on to WoW has become an adventure of its own lately. All of my addons obviously became outdated after patch day, so I tossed caution to the wind and checked the “load out of date” box anyway. Only one of them wasn’t working. Unfortunately, it was an addon that was responsible for how the bottom half of my UI looked. When my screen finally loaded, it looked like someone had walked all over it. I had no choice but to disable it. I did so with a heavy heart though. It was kgPanels. What made it tough was that I used it to design a custom UI of my own. I’ll check for an updated version and see if there’s a way to save it.

I’m also running into the loading screen problem. I’d log on, select a toon, then wait for the loading progress bar to go from left to right. If this was the first time I ran WoW since I turned my computer on, it would fill the bar to the max then stop there. It will not load the actual game screen. I have to shut down WoW then reload it. It works fine afterwards. Our guild’s main resto shaman, Itsuki, told me that he was also running into the problem so at least there’s the consolation that it’s not only happening to me. Is anyone else running into this?

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