Diablo 3 Beta Week - Do you believe in Magic?

This is not an episode of Lost. I asked a question on your behalf yesterday, and I'm going to answer it straight up. Why do I refer to every class in Diablo 3 as a he? Are classes in Action RPGs male, the same way ships are female?

No, that's dumb. Where in the previous games your gender was assigned to you based on your class - this made sense in the case of the Amazon, because you were playing a strong mythologically inspired fighter (not a long river wrought with peril) - in Diablo 3 you pick your gender.

So, when faced with the choice of being a male or a female in a game, I always make a male. It's not because I'm challenged by the idea of a strong female character, or because I'm not comfortable with the idea of 'controlling' a female. It's because I have a *****. For the purposes of immersion, it makes sense that the Player Character I choose has a ***** as well.

Anyway, on to the Wizard. Having heard from all and sundry that the Wizard was the most OP character in the game, I decided to issue myself a challenge. With just the clothes on my back and the wand in my hand at the start of the game, I would play and finish the Diablo 3 beta.


Me 'naked', 'wand' in hand, Age (level) 3.

You start off with the option of either Magic Missiling everything to death or simply firing your wand at things, quickly establishing the Wizard as a ranged DPS character. When Magic Missile hit, most things died immediately - giving me a lot of faith in my plan.

The wand in my hand did a pathetic 3 DPS, but most creatures in D3 seem to have about 5 HP so it wasn't a real problem. This being my sixth or seventh run through of the first act of the game I had a good sense of where to go and what to do - though a little after my first visit to the Cathedral I did encounter a brand new dynamic event I hadn't seen before.

I guess now is a decent time to explain the story as best I can. You're an adventurer, cruising around near New Tristram looking for barrels to break and piles of sticks to mess up when a meteor falls from the skies and wakes the dead.

This is actually how the dinosaurs died - even something as kick-ass as a dinosaur isn't ready to fight swarms of zombie dinosaurs.

As a treasure stealing, loot hungry maniac you roll on through to New Tristram to see if you can break yourself off a piece of that rock - naturally you can't tell people you're there to smash all their bookshelves, so you pretend you're there to help.

You meet up with the niece of the legendary Deckard Cain, who must be about 1000 years old at this point, and it turns out he was hanging out in the Cathedral when the meteor fell upon it. She makes you go help him out - he's woken up the Skeleton King - if you're gonna get yourself a little something something from that meteor it turns out you have to kill the Skeleton King. And maybe Deckard Cain, eventually. I'm pretty sure he's unkillable though.


Cain didn't say it, but I decided to stay a while and listen in the Cathedral.

That's all the story the beta will tell me so far - I'm sure at some point you make a deal with el diablo, he double crosses you and **** gets real, but I have nothing to base that on.

Back to the wizard, and my experiment. By the time you reach level 6 and you get "Electrocute" you start to get the feeling that the Wizard really likes Electricity (and there might be elements of the Diablo 3 team who view electricity as magic).

Along the way the Wizard earns a few defensive skills like Frost Nova which I quickly ignored - plus the deliciously random Shock Pulse, which spits out 3 random bolts of electricity with minds of their own. Equipping Shock Pulse makes things pretty hectic - most of the time things die, but occasionally the bolts will decide to find an unbroken barrel instead of the big nasty currently beating on you.

The Jedi-esque Wave of Force is all the proof you need that the best defence is a great offence - if you find yourself overwhelmed you hit WoF and everything around you goes flying back (usually in pieces).

Electrocute is essentially chain lightning, and it really does make things pretty easy on the player. You target something, Electrocute it and down it goes. It jumps to the next enemy - losing 30% of its damage on the way - and continues to jump until it no longer hurts enemies.

I made it to the lower depths of the Cathedral in my original equipment when the following occurred. About 15 times in a row.


I'm always getting slain by a !!Missing!!

My experiment had ground to a halt. The major problem was the 15 second cool down on Wave of Force, my complete lack of armour and the fact that I was fighting an 'Arcane Enchanted' mini-boss mob. Arcane Enchanted means 'if you shoot it with magic, it spawns little purple glow worms which fire balls of death at you until you die'. Combine this with the fact that those lightning bats just would not f*** off, and my path was pretty righteously blocked.

Thanks to Offensive magic damage being based off my Weapon Damage, and thanks to all my damage being 'Arcane Damage' (except for Wave of Force, sadly) I couldn't make it beyond this in my experiment. I threw some clothes on, swapped out my wand and returned to finish my playthrough once again - and while I made it to level 9, my skill choices never exceeded level 6.

With better gear the Wizard is a pretty powerful force - although if I had to pick a character I felt was "OP" I'd go with the Demon Hunter. The combination of ranged attacks, outstanding escapes and almost infinite resources makes the DH impossible to pass up.

That's it for our week of the Diablo 3 beta. Is there anything you're burning to know? Any details I skipped in favour of talking about gender roles in video games? Ask them in the comments below and I'll try to answer them for you!

Day 1

Day 2

Day 3

Day 4