Flux here: I got about 15 minutes play time on the wizard, and then spent 15 minutes looking over all of her skills and dictating their descriptions. We’re doing some live reports in the chat channel, and here are some quick facts, with more to come later.
There are 3 wizard skill trees. Conjuring, Arcane, Storm. All of the trees have 4 or 5 skills in each tier, and there are tiers at level 1, 5, 10, and 15. 20 is listed, but has no skills yet. there are no dependencies per skill, but you need 10 points invested to use any level 10 spells, and 15 to use any 15. In each tree.
There are a huge variety of skills. Multiple passives and actives in each tree, all mixed through. All 3 had one attack spell in the first row, and 2 or 3 passives or masteries. Bonuses were to things like spell casting speed, mana cost, critical strike %, type of damage, etc. There are spells of all types of damage, cold, lightning, spectral, etc. Also spells with physical and magical shielding, duplicate (like Decoy), slow time (slows missiles and enemies), increase weapon damage, increase odds of monsters dropping mana globes (fill 25% mana bulb), and much, much more. It looks like there will be several viable builds in each tree, and probably some multi tree ones as well. Massive variety and subtypes and builds.
Play style: The wizard felt like a more durable sorceress. fast spells, variety of early ones, melee and ranged. Lots of monster types and varieties in the early area. great npc dialogues; very realistic conversation. Awesome gory graphics; bleeding heaps of bodies, crows flapping overhead. Very atmospheric. Like D1 with vastly improved graphics. Can’t wait to play it on a home machine in a dark room with the sound up loud.
More to come…
All the Blizzcon 2008 Coverage.
