Diablo III Preview

The folks at Blend Games have cranked out the latest hands-on preview of Blizzard Entertainment’s third Diablo installment.

In older Diablo games, you’ve generally got the two mouse buttons to click for attacks and then you can hotkey the number keys for potions and items in your inventory. This worked okay, but most of the game would consist of a player running into a giant mob of mobs, clicking like mad, and then hitting the 1-4 buttons to keep your health at max while you beat the snot out of some goblins. Blizzard has completely done away with health potions in your inventory (at least, from what I saw at PAX), and instead added enemy drops that automatically activate when you run over them. This frees up the number keys for hot-linked skills, greatly increasing the amount of skills you can use on the fly

I also took this chance to try out the recently announced Monk class. The Monk plays like a cracked out version of Lord of Destruction’s Assassin character, meaning he’s incredibly fast and powerful and destroys everything around him within a few seconds. I shouldn’t talk too much about how the monk plays, however, because Blizzard has already said that they’re nowhere near done with the character, and as of right now he’s overpowered.