Beta Wizard

[ursustas]

How do you activate/use skills that are set to 1-5 in the menu bar at the bottom of the screen? Do you just press f1-f5 and the skills activate?

You press the numbers 1,2,3,4 or 5 above the letters Q,W,E,R or T
As a wizard I used shift alot to force myself to stand still, but I will probably dual bind a few of these to extra buttons on my mouse.

One thing I only just noticed (thanks to your question) was that pressing the numbers on the numpad have your character 'say' something ingame, it appears each character can say different things for each key.

Perhaps these are used to direct the followers .. will have to try it out later.

Male Wizard
numpad 1: Get over here. Just stay with me. Come along. Follow!
2: Take this. Here. You want this?

Female Wizard

will have to finish this later ..

[StarMage]

Thank you for sharing your experiences in-depth! It is much appreciated. I hope you do the same with your experiences with the other classes.

I had a question: What if we wanted to use all our hotbar slots for skills then just open our inventory everytime we want to use a pot?

I know we most likely won't have enough skills to fill up the hotbar during the beta, but could you pretend that all slots were taken and just rely on pressing your inventory hotkey whenever you needed a pot to find out if it's really worth the hassle? lol

[ursustas]

What if we wanted to use all our hotbar slots for skills then just open our inventory everytime we want to use a pot?

You could leave your inventory open or tap it quickly and right click a pot .. that drinks it from your inventory.

My experience as a wizard when I decided to see how tough I was by wading in amongst it .. is that we are not overly fragile .. a boss or a pack of mobs will take a few seconds to drop your health bar down from max .. it's why I don't think a little latency will matter as much as it has in the past .. of course that .. obviously this is plenty of time to drink a potion .. but you don't want to drink a potion .. why?

When you are killing mobs you are continually getting health globes .. they take a few seconds to fill you up. Potions fill you up instantly but have a substantial cooldown before you can use them again ..

Typical scenario I have encountered is that as you run into a huge battle and start attacking and getting hurt, you get a health globe (hopefully before you are too injured) .. this almost certainly fills you up as a low health wizard (at low levels) but it takes a few seconds .. this repeats so basically it just depends whether you are taking more damage or healing more ..

Strategically when getting swarmed or when uncomfortably injured .. we have a few abilities to buy us time to heal up (or reposition) such as Frost Nova (Freeze enemies for 4 seconds) and Diamond Skin (5 seconds of damage absorption) that I would use before drinking a potion .. not because I was cheap but because once I drink a potion I only have one option left while my potion is on cooldown (at low levels, at high levels you can choose to have more) .. if I use a protective spell I can still use a potion but I also have a chance of healing up with a health globe or lasting until my protective spell is off cool down again

I have burned the odd potion or two though .. esp. when you kill a bunch of mobs at range and the health globes drop on the other side of the room and other mobs walk to stand over the top of them .. then again I was trying to see how many mobs I could gather up and still survive Normal mode for the first 10 levels or so is pretty easy.

I will personally keep the pots on my bar as I think digging through my pack in the middle of a battle where I am dying is .. probably not going to help the situation .. and it breaks the immersion for me

[ursustas]

How much Arcane Power do a Wizard have from the beginning? And, in D2 we could increase our manapool, will this be the case in D3 as well, or is influencing the regeneration rate our only option?

Several items have a bonus that returns energy whenever you make a kill .. but at low levels they are unnecessary as we regen. at a pretty impressive rate.
I have seen life regen items but do not believe you can increase regen of energy pools except by the items that return energy on kills. Not sure if there are items that increase the maximum of your pool, I haven't seen one yet.

A wizard has 100 Arcane Power and by default regenerates 750 Arcane Power/Minute .. so you regen 12.5/second .. or you regen your entire pool in 8 seconds.

Perhaps a few screenshots will explain this more .. posting below (so it doesn't distort this post) vitals for a level 1 and level 3 wizard. Same gear. From this you can infer the stat's that go up each level (I think it is linear) and the ones that need a boost from gear

[ursustas]

[perplex]

Thank you for the reply and the screenshots. I guess being capped to 100 Arcane Power is a good thing, since we can't line up two, or even three, of our heavy hitting nukes without some sort of delay in between (unless we can get a crazy amount of AP back after each kill).

Nice to see character screen in high detail as well! Out of curiosity, does the three small green bars to the left of the Arcane Power globe do/indicate anything?

[ADest]

You press the numbers 1,2,3,4 or 5 above the letters Q,W,E,R or T
As a wizard I used shift alot to force myself to stand still, but I will probably dual bind a few of these to extra buttons on my mouse.
One thing I only just noticed (thanks to your question) was that pressing the numbers on the numpad have your character 'say' something ingame, it appears each character can say different things for each key.
Perhaps these are used to direct the followers .. will have to try it out later.
Male Wizard
numpad 1: Get over here. Just stay with me. Come along. Follow!
2: Take this. Here. You want this?
Female Wizard
will have to finish this later ..

Cool, thanks. And yeah, The quotes are kind of a nod to D2 I'm guessing, in that game, since VOIP wasn't supported, you could have your character 'say' things by pressing the number pad keys. Stuff like "Help me!" "This way!" "I want that." "This is for you." and so on. Now that VOIP is enabled, I can only imagine they left these quotes in as an easter egg.

[ursustas]

Thank you for the reply and the screenshots. I guess being capped to 100 Arcane Power is a good thing, since we can't line up two, or even three, of our heavy hitting nukes without some sort of delay in between (unless we can get a crazy amount of AP back after each kill).

I have seen item buffs that increase your maximum AP pool and another buff that return's energy on a kill.

Nice to see character screen in high detail as well! Out of curiosity, does the three small green bars to the left of the Arcane Power globe do/indicate anything?

Latency Bar

[ursustas]

Worth noting, not sure if it is random mobs or they changed something server side .. but when I played through on a Wizard originally, I took my time to kill everything .. it was very, very easy, I think i came close to death once.

Ran through tonight 1-10 (repeated a few sections .. I want to try disintegrate) and there were several times I nearly died O.o .. elemental mobs that explode on death and several 'named' mobs .. perhaps it was just a lucky/unlucky run .. had to burn a few potions Packs of mobs seemed more numerous .. or perhaps it was rushing through the content faster. It certainly felt more perilous.

[JustAnotherOldGeezer]

I'm curious about these two questions::

1. What is the best academic spell? (magic missile, electrocute, spark pulse or w/e)
2. Which single-target spell do you predict will be the best boss killer?