We thought the mighty Monk deserves some attention, so this Forum Watch will be all about the new cool martial arts specialist. Well, almost anyway. To join in on the discussion head over to the Diablo 3 Monk forum, where all the fist action is located.

However, we'll start out with some general threads. For a handy list of a few thread highlights of the past week, look no further.


What do you want in the Collectors Edition?

• A very good question by erichb, and if Blizzard is watching, perhaps your dreams will come true. Well, dreams you pay for, and in a limited edition, so you have to be quick, but dreams never the less.

Why do people get angry about 5th class threads?

• A second good thread by erichb, and he has a very good point. Why get upset about the fan classes? Go ahead and take a look at the Character and Skills forum, and make your own!

The Monk Seems Un-Diabloish

• Pode thinks the Monk doesn't fit quite as it should. Some agree, others disagree... what do you think?

What The Monk "Heavy armor" could look like.

• The veteran member and fan class creator Knight_Wolf has dug up a heavily armoured Monk. Is this the design of the D3 monk as well? Other suggestions ensues.

How satisfied are you with the Monk? 1-10

• Classic thread by LaZeR. What do you think of the man in robes?

What will you name your Monk?

• Akimbo started a similar thread to the ones available to other classes when the class was revealed. Definitely a thread worth reading, and even perhaps reveal your character name?

Thanks everyone for reporting on interesting threads. That's all for now, and remember to continue to send cool/fun/interesting/sad forum links to !

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Bashiok has made some good replies in the forums this afternoon. Here’s the run down:

A hopeful fan points to the 3:39 point in the Blizzcon 2009 gameplay movie, when the Witch Doctor “casts an AOE warcry-like shout around himself, then blinks/flashes/teleports forward several character spaces accompanied by a high pitched wind-like “whiiish” sound.” Bashiok is forced to shoot him down.

	Blizzard Quote:
	That looks like he just rubber-banded a bit. A slight desync between the client and the server and when the character position updated correctly made it look like a teleport. He doesn’t have any abilities like that.

I’ll also point out that the WD wasn’t casting any AoE anything. He was standing beside the Wizard who was casting a spell that created a Nova-like ring of damage. (Teleport + damage from a skill rune? Wave of Force with newer graphics?)

Elsewhere, a fan asks for little movie demos of what skills do when you mouse over them, since just the hover text and icon aren’t clear enough for him.  Bashiok replies:

	Blizzard Quote:
	StarCraft II is doing this to a degree in the single player game, or at least was last I saw. Before you pick a unit upgrade in between missions it shows a little video of how the unit or ability works. Pretty cool stuff. I think that more than anything it comes down to usability in our UI goals. We don’t pause the game when the skill tree is open, we don’t have full screen ‘level up’ interfaces, we specifically want the game space to be viewable (and playable) even when you have certain UI elements open. So more than anything it would be a matter of making sure it doesn’t interfere with important UI design goals, and of course ultimately that we’d have the desire and time to implement them. But yeah, cool stuff.

I have to say I think this would be a horrible idea. Imagine the annoyance of little movies playing every time you opened the skill tree? Sure, it would be sort of cool the first week you had the game, but you’ll learn what the skills do on your own or from online sources, and never use them again after that. Besides, what happened to actually, you know, playing the game and figuring stuff out? Should D3 ship with build guides and equipment recommendations too?

Finally, a fan posted a screenshot showing an odd defensive trap pillar thing, seen in one of the desert tombs we explored in this year’s Blizzcon build, wondering what it was and what it did. Bashiok replied cryptically...

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The third and final skill tree of the Wizard is completed from Flux's Full Wizard Skill Tree guide and added to the Diablo Wiki.

The Storm Skill Tree is the tree with the most spells from the Sorceress and crowd control capabilites, with many skills having the possibility of freezing the target, or stunning it.


Storm skills

Spells that bring in the cold air from the stratosphere, or brings forth lightning bolts flung at enemies.


Tier I

• Charged Bolt - Launch a volley of 3 electric bolts that deal X-Y lightning damage each.
• Ice Armor - A field of ice slows movement and attack speed of enemies that attack you at close range, and causes X cold damage.

Tier II

• Frost Nova - An explosion of ice pelts nearby enemies for X-Y cold damage. Has an additional Z% chance of a critical hit.
• Electrocute - Lightning arcs from the Wizard’s fingertips towards an enemy, electrocuting it for X-Y lightning damage.

Tier III

• Empowered Armor - Increases your armor by X%.
• Energy Twister - Summon an Energy Twister that deals 10 damage per second to everything in its path.

Tier IV

• Bonechilling Cold - Frozen targets take X% additional damage from all attacks.
• Ray of Frost - Project a beam of cold energy that deals X cold damage per second.

Tier V

• Blizzard - Call down shards of ice to pelt an area dealing X-Y cold damage per second for 3 seconds.
• Storm Armor - Surround yourself in electrical energy. Electric bolts are automatically fired at attackers for X to Y damage. Armor spells affect you and all nearby allies and you can only be affected by one armor spell at a time.

Tier VI

• Storm Power - Increase damage of all lightning and ice spells.

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This is the fifth (of six) part of our exclusive Jay Wilson interview. In today’s section Jay covers skill design concepts and character build variety, as well as touching on returning D1/D2 monsters, and letting us know how we’ll be quickly and easily making town selling trips, without Town Portal scrolls to help.

Check out parts One, Two, Three, and Four if you missed any of them, and join in the always-juicy post-interview comment conversation. Tomorrow’s installment will close things out with a bunch of miscellaneous questions, and I’ll post the full transcript on Friday,

Diii.net: The Witch Doctor build seems fairly narrow in concept. He’ll always have mongrels for tanking, some mini-mage support, and some minion attacks and a bit of mind control. Looking at his skill tree now, there doesn’t seem to be that many potential Witch Doctor builds, which isn’t true of the Wizard or Barbarian. Can you comment on that? Is it just that we don’t know enough about the Witch Doctor yet? 

Jay Wilson: The Witch Doctor is less developed than the Wizard and the Barbarian. His skills are on what we call a second round, a second revision, while the Barbarian and Wizard are firmly in their third, maybe even their fourth revision. So as every time we revisit the systems we expand the abilities. It’s based on playing them. We discover basically the same things, and we’ll say something like, “Oh, this class seems a little bit more focused than we wanted. We can’t make this kind of build the way we wanted to.”  So we end up expanding them over time.

In the game, every class is different. Some classes offer themselves up to a lot of variations. Some classes tend to have a lot more focus. We saw that in Diablo II, some classes had fewer variations and fewer possibilities than the others. That’s not really our goal though. Our goal is to make sure that every class is equally diverse in the types of builds they can be made for.

Diii.net: That’s what players hope for long term, but as you said earlier, it’s amazing the variety of things players find to use once they have the game in their hands. Look at all the weird builds in Diablo II.

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We have continued to add the Full Wizard Skill Trees Flux was so kind to summarize for us after BlizzCon 2009 into the Diablo Wiki. The Conjuring skills were finished on Wednesday, and now we're done adding all the Arcane ones.

These are some of the coolest skills in the game, including Slow Time and Disintegrate. Here are the ten Arcane skills:


Arcane skills
Spells that warp time, and brings out ancient arcane energy goes into this tree.

Tier I

• Magic Missile - Fire X missile(s) of energy at your enemies causing Y-Z arcane damage to them.
• Expanded Mind - Expands the Wizard's knowledge increasing the Wizard's mana by X%.

Tier II

• Wave of Force - Project a wave of force outwards, repelling enemies and projectiles and dealing X-Y damage.

Tier III

• Arcane Orb - An orb of pure energy deals X-Y on contact and an additional Z-Q arcane damage to all enemies in the blast area.
• Energy Shield - A protective barrier absorbs incoming damage using mana. Every point of damage costs 2 mana. Damage absorbed: 75. Duration: 120 seconds.

Tier IV

• Disintegrate - Emanate a beam of pure energy dealing X arcane damage per second. Damage is modified to 80% each time the beam passes through a target.
• Slow Time - Warp space and time, slowing nearby monsters and projectiles. Cooldown: 20 seconds. Enemy cooldown increase: 1 seconds.

Tier V

• Arcane Torrent - Meteorites pelt the targeted region dealing X to Y damage per second.
• Arcane Weakness - Enemies damaged by your arcane spells are affected with Arcane Weakness, increasing damage taken by 20% for 5 seconds.

Tier VI

• Teleport Teleport to the selected location up to 100 feet away. Teleport can only be used every 9 seconds.

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It’s been a while since Blizzcon, and a while since we saw any reports from that event, but there’s a “new” one up on Game Shark. The write up is fairly brief, but if you crave all known Diablo 3 reportage, then you’ll want to check it out. A quote from page two:

A strong defense is important for a vulnerable melee class. The monk has this covered with its Impenetrable Defense, a force field of sorts that rebounds ranged attacks. During my trek through the desert I encountered a few bug-like creatures that tried to assault me from afar. They failed since their attacks bounced harmlessly off my giant purple glowy ball and ricocheted back toward them.

Hordes of enemies rushing towards you at once may strike fear in the hearts of normal folk, but not for the monk. The Seven-sided Strike is a powerful area of effect attack that can take out clusters of mobs with ease. A few times I found myself surrounded by nasties, but I disposed of them quickly. I rarely made it out unscathed though and usually found myself at half health. Then again, that might just be due to my lack of skill as a player and not the fault of the game mechanic.

The Diablo III playable demo was very short but left a positive impression. It left me thirsting for more, which is obviously a good sign. Sadly, being that this is a Blizzard game, we’ll likely have to wait a significantly long time before we can get this long anticipated three-quel into our hands.

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Stillman returns with another victim for his character-devouring slab. This time it’s…. the Barbarian. Again.  Yes, the corpse so nice he’s carving it twice. Gruesome. It’s like Halloween in… October? At any rate, this column speaks lovingly of the Barbarian’s slightly less than original elements. He’s a cool character, and aside from his hair, face, beard, arms, legs, tattoos, muscles, weapons, and armor, he’s totally original to the Diablo series!

Here’s the start of the column, click through to read the whole thing, and let the author know what you think in the comments.

Barbarism, Part II

Haven’t I seen the Diablo Barbarians somewhere before? We’re back with another bone to pick with the Barbarian. Part 2 of Barbarism is about how borrowed the Barbarian is. It’s not that using good ideas from our mainstream culture is bad, but what is overbearing sometimes is when there is so much copying that not a trace of originality shines through. The result of borrowing too much is what you get with the Diablo 2 Barbarian, but this column will explore aspects of the Diablo 3 Barbarian as well. Are Blizzard’s Barbarians too cliché and copied? It’s time for him to meet his maker.

The Diablo 3 Barbarian stole the most from this guy (who is probably not too happy about it):

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Today’s section of our Jay Wilson interview focuses entirely on the Monk. These were the first questions I asked of Jay, and the answers were among the most interesting he gave during our interview. Read on to learn more about the Monk’s unrevealed skills, and share my surprise that they are probably going to include Auras. There’s also some info weapon-specific skills, the Monk’s un-monkish ability to wear heavy plate, and even a bit on the Monk’s lore and appearance. Enjoy.

Friday’s interview excerpt will cover items, and next week we’ll dive much deeper into character skill issues, the planned varieties of character builds, and much more. Here’s the first Monk question; click through to read the whole piece.

Diii.net: We saw 8 Monk skills at BlizzCon (all detailed in Diablo Wiki). All were melee offensive or defensive. Can you give us some idea of what other skills the character will have at his disposal?

Jay Wilson: Most of the Monk’s skills will focus on combat skills and attacks, along with his various escape skills. And we talked at Blizzcon that we’re likely to put some defensive and supportive abilities on him. Possibly Auras. We’ve not done the next round of skills on him yet so we’re not exactly sure.

Diii.net: Really? That’s handy, since I was also going to ask if he’d have any co-op or party-boosting skills.

Jay Wilson: We definitely want to do that with one class.  Whether or not it’s the Monk hasn’t yet been decided. The Monk does seem to be the logical choice. The only reason we might not do with him is that he’s too logical.

Diii.net: You want to mix it up?

Jay Wilson: Exactly.

Diii.net: There was talk of the Monk’s lore, that the Monks have 1001 gods and they give themselves tattoos to honor their gods and celebrate their glorious achievements in life. Are any of his skills going to be representative of those gods? Say there’s a fire god, and the Monk would have a fire attack in His name?

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A lot of work went in to Flux's guides of skills, like the Full Wizard Skill Trees, and they have been an invaluable source for the Diablo Wiki entries of all the new Skills. Muldric has also been a great help in visualizing the skill trees for all of us, and now it's time to add the "lost" Wizard skill trees to the rest.

First out is the Conjuring Skill Tree's 9 skills:


Tier I

• Spectral Blade - Summons a spectral blade that strikes each enemy in front of the Wizard 3 times causing physical damage with each hit.

Tier II

• Mirror Image - Creates an illusionary duplicate of yourself that lasts for 8 seconds that has 20-100% of your health.
• Stability Control - Health Globes also restore some mana when picked up.

Tier III

• Explosive Blast - A blast of energy explodes at the target causing arcane damage in a small radius.
• Stone Skin - Shield yourself with rock and stone, absorbing damage during an 8 second period.

Tier IV

• Hydra - Creates a hydra that attacks your enemies with bolts of fire. Hydra deals 6-10 damage per attack.
• Intensify - When you pick up a health globe, your critical hit chance increases for 7 seconds.

Tier V

• Mighty Impact - Increases critical hit damage by 10%.
• Magic Weapon - Imbue your weapon with magical energy granting it increased damage. From 25-35 damage and up, for 2 minutes.

Also, don't forget to check out the latest wiki updates on the top of the Diablo 3 news page, as this is just one of many updates in the last few weeks. Among the updates you might want to check out the Wizard skill archive, that we started with the creation of new ones and the archiving of the outdated articles.

Thanks Holyknight3000, Midoxp, DxAxxxTyriel, Veskin7 Bukito, Vipermagi, TheWanderer, Flux, Fronkenstein, Fighterbitsj, Dragonhelmuk, Krunkest404 and Bran Maniac for the last 2000 edits in the last 2 weeks!

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Our Tuesday morning interview with Diablo III Game Designer Jay Wilson went off smoothly (thanks to all who submitted questions), and despite scheduling issues resulting in our interview lasting a bit less than the anticipated 30 minutes, we were able to get off a lot of questions. Fifty-six, by my count, and having just finished transcribing them all, I should know. We’re not going to be posting them all at once just yet, and will instead put up a thematically-related chunk each day, before posting the full transcript next week. All the better for you guys to sink your teeth into the new info. And yes, there’s a lot of new info, and some very debate-worthy stuff. I’m personally itching to rip into Blizzard’s plans regarding one aspect of the game controls, but that will have to wait until another day.

For today, we’re starting off with some additional info on something we just found out about at BlizzCon, and that we’ve heard almost no details about yet. The non-mana resource system that the Wizard and Monk will be using. If you missed the Blizzcon headlines, let me explain. Only the Witch Doctor will have “mana,” in Diablo 3. The Barbarian has Fury, which is fairly well understood, but we don’t yet know anything about what the Wizard and Monk (or the secret 5th character) will use. Jay wasn’t about to spill all the beans, but he was quite forthcoming about how the various mana-like resource systems are designed to work, and what sort of play style they are meant to encourage. Here’s the quote; click through to see the equally-informative follow up.

Diii.net: Everyone seems pretty happy with the function and form of the Barbarian’s Fury resource, but nothing has been revealed about the non-mana resources that the Wizard and Monk will use. Can you give us some insight into what kind of play style their resources are meant to encourage?

Jay Wilson: Well for the Wizard we want to enforce the fact that she’s a glass cannon. I don’t think it’s fun to ever run out of mana. I’m not really interested in an extended resource for her. For the WD we’re okay with mana, since he’s got some pretty good skills to recover mana that also double as attacks. And he’s not defenseless when he’s out of mana. He’s got pets and ways to attack with them that aren’t mana intensive. For him that makes mana fairly interesting.

For the wizard, when she’s out of mana she just dies. And that’s not fun.  So if anything, we want to encourage how she plays. So she’s the kind of character that blasts first and asks questions later.  Very vulnerable. So we want to implement a system that makes her more blasty, but even more vulnerable. We want to make that a choice for the player. “Do I want to make myself more vulnerable in exchange for being more blasty.” And that’s a cool gameplay pull there.

For the Monk um… I’m not ready to talk about him yet since he’s just too early. We still haven’t decided exactly what we want to do with him. We’re still playing around with his resource system.

Diii.net: Do you envision the health globes will boost those other resources in the way that the Wizard and Witch Doctor were gaining mana from them at Blizzcon?

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