Monday, September 7, 2009

Diablo 3 news on Twitter

Twitter is a free social networking service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. The site is ranked as one of the 50 most popular websites worldwide by Alexa's web traffic analysis.

You can check the latest Diablo 3 news there. You just need to be my follower, here`s my Twitter - http://twitter.com/xXxTheMasteR

Diablo 3 - Witch Doctor Voodoo Skills Detailed


Blizzard moved some cool skills to this tree in the latest build, and now has both Skull of Flame and Firebats in it. I don't think anyone cares that the other very cool Zombie Wall was moved as it all makes much more sense now! Signature skills should be treated right, and now it seems more like a proper witch doctor.


Voodoo Skill Tree

The Voodoo skill tree comprises most of the Witch Doctor's offensive skills, in addition to a few summoning skills.

Tier I 
Skull of Flame - Lob a skull filled with fire dealing 4-5 fire damage to all enemies caught in the explosion.
Jungle Fortitude - Increase your Vitality by 5% of your Strength, 5% of your Dexterity, and 5% of your Willpower.
Tier II 
Hex - Summon a Fetish caster to cast hexes on enemies for 6 seconds.
Corpse Spiders Summon 3 spiders to attack nearby enemies for 8-13 poison damage per hit.
Tier III 
Locust Swarm - Assault nearby foes with a swarm of locusts that spread to additional, nearby targets.
Plague of Toads - Release a handful of toads that deal poison damage to anybody who steps on them.
Tier IV 
Pit of Fire - Call up to 4 Fetishes to bathe a region in fire.
Firebats - Launch a swarm of bats, saturated in a fiery blaze to burn targeted enemies.
Tier V 
Acid Cloud - Detonate a bottle of acid in the air to damage enemies with the initial explosion and, over time for enemies who remain in it's area of effect.
Blood Rites - Increase your spell damage by consuming health globes.
Tier VI 
Fetish Army - Summon an army of Fetishes to fight by your side.

Saturday, September 5, 2009

Diablo 3 Monk Skill Trees

Diablo 3 Monk Skill Trees is ready for presentation, there is currently 8 known monk skills from BlizzCon 2009.

Monk Skill Tree I

Tier 1 
None yet

Tier 2
Force Without Thought
Passive skill
Rank: 1/5.

Description: Counteract enemies without interrupting the normal flow of your attacks. When you dodge you automatically counter act the attacker for 10% of your normal weapon damage.

Tier 3
Seven Sided Strike
Mana cost: 30
Rank: 1/5.

Description: Dash at your enemies, striking six times in succession for 50% of your weapon damage.

Tier 4
Inner Sanctuary
Mana cost: 24
Rank: 1/5

Description: Creates a protected region on the ground for 6 seconds that can not be bypassed by enemies.

Way of the Hundred Fists
Rank: 1/5
First hit: A short range dashing attack that deals 100% weapon damage.
Second hit: Attack rapidly 6 times for 8% of weapon damage.
Third hit: Attack all enemies near the monk for 85% of weapon damage.

Monk Skill Tree II

Tier 1
Crippling Wave
Combo skill. Light attacks that apply a series of increasingly debilitating debuffs.
Rank: 1
First hit: Deals 50% of weapon damage. Enemy movement speed reduced 50% for 2 seconds.
Second hit: Deals 50% weapon damage. Enemy damage reduced 25% and they take 25% more damage from attacks.
Third hit: Deals 60% weapon damage. Debuffs refreshed on all targets.

Tier 2
Exploding Palm
Combo Skill. A quick succession of attacks ending with the deadly Exploding Palm.
Rank: 1/5
First hit: 35% of weapon damage.
Second hit: 50% of weapon damage.
Third hit: Target bleeds for 60 damage over 7 seconds. Moving causes 200% more bleeding damage. If target dies it explodes dealing 60-100% of its maximum life in damage to all enemies nearby.

Monk Skill Tree III

Tier 1
Impenetrable Defense
Mana cost: 5
Rank: 1/1
Description: Momentarily turn your weapons into an impenetrable wall that rebounds enemy ranged attacks and grants 100% dodge against weapon attacks.

Tier 2
Radiant Visage
Mana cost: 15
Rank: 1/5
Description: A flash of light sears the eyes of all enemies within 20 feet, blinding them for 2-4 seconds. If attacked they will fight back with a 40% reduced chance to hit.

Thursday, September 3, 2009

Blizzard on Binding Items in Diablo 3.

A Blizzard announcer provided some nice details in the Battle.net forums on the subject of binding items (both "bind on equip" and "bind on pickup") to your characters in Diablo 3. Here's what he had to say:

"Yes, true, as Jay said at BlizzCon we are planning to have some amount of items that will bind to a character upon equipping them.

We absolutely won't have items that bind when picked up, except for the obvious things like quest items and other character-specific items that wouldn't/shouldn't be tradable anyway.

That alone, I think, should dissuade the most severe concerns with binding items. And before I go on just understand that while a lot of this is very stable in its concepts, the details aren't final.

For Bind on Equip (BoE), the idea right now is that it would only be applied to "end game" items of specific quality levels. So to start, it's not every item, and it's not even every item above a certain level. For the BoE items that will exist, you can pick them up, if you don't want it you can still trade it, or give it to another character, a friend, vendor it, whatever you like. But, if you make the commitment to keeping the item and equipping it, yes, it's yours now.

The reasoning is that in reality we need a solid way to keep the economy stable at the end game. With items building up over a potentially infinite amount of time there's no way to have any measure of control over worth of items. While an item may be the rarest and best in the game, over four or five years a stockpile has built up and those items are now commonplace and hold little value as compared to their rarity. The gold being earned by players stays the same or likely increases as players become more proficient at playing the game while they spend less as items lose their value. Gold value drops, and we're skirting into a familiar cycle.

By ensuring we can rely on some amount of "consumption" of items, their relative worth stays high, the market is predictable and both sellers and buyers enjoy a stable marketplace for (hopefully) many years.

Diablo II has an inconsistent approach which is the somewhat stable Ladder economy, since it's quite literally flushed out every so often. But it's a very intrusive approach to a problem that could be solved through other means that don't require making everyone start over.

As a quasi-aside: There's an idea being thrown around, and this is really not guaranteed in any way, that some or potentially all items that are bound to you could be bound to your entire account. So if you yourself "own" an item from it being bound, you can trade it between all the characters on your account freely. Feed alts your old-but-still-very-nice items, etc. That's just an idea, it may not take shape, but it's a possibility."