Last time we went to the center lobby of The Dark Library for some poetry. This time around with the delays due to our gallery wing collapsing we had to wait a week. Sorry about that. Go grab a torch and follow us. Please watch your step as we pass by there on the way to the very dark and not so well kept wing that contains books on long forgotten cultures, people, and creatures. Here’s our first book. Hold the light up for me I can barely read what the book is. The cover says “The Black Hand Magi”. Here I’ll read the beginning paragraph. Black Hand Magi - the members of the Black Hand order. Information about them among common people is only rumors. The church of Zakarum and the Vizjerean mages know about them and they both claim their order and their methods as completely forbidden. They don't like even talking about them. But they have a detailed description of the Black Hand Order in their secret books. Pretty interesting I must say. Let’s find another book here. Ah here we go a book on long lost creatures. The first chapter is on the Brutal Beast. Here have a look as I read. These creatures roam the planes of hell, consuming smaller demons and various minor monsters. Greater demons, like Diablo, will poke out their eyes and place spikes in their tails and tongues. This causes the beasts to be in constant pain but enables the greater demons to control them. Brual Beasts are immune to illusions since they rely on smell and hearing. Small pterodactyl-like imps called Harrier Imps live in symbiosis with these great monsters. Let’s get out of here for now and come back again in the future when we get some more books in. I’ll show you the second chapter of this book on Harrier Imp’s later as well. Don’t forget to put out your torches when you leave the wing. Next week we will bring you more from the fan fiction community in the same conveniently posted bitesize format as well as some works from fan monster creators. If you have made fan fiction that has not yet been posted in the Diablo fan fiction forum, or just got inspired to do so, head over there and post your material, or ask questions to other fan writers regarding lore, writing style or other input. See you next week!

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Giving us a break from the non-stop FeMonk coverage, on Monday Bashiok answered some forum questions on other matters.

In reply to a fan who asked if we might see some Paladins and Necromancers in Diablo 3, Bashiok all but confirmed something that’s been more than hinted at in the past.

	Blizzard Quote:
	The Knights of Westmarch and cult of Rathma still exist, so the chances of coming across a paladin and/or necromancer through your travels are pretty good.

I was just joking in the intro to this post—of course there’s more FeMonk discussion! In reply to various comments and complaints about how the character looks, especially in her animation on the official site, Bashiok made a common sense rebuttal.

	Blizzard Quote:
	We decided that it wasn’t worth holding up the update to fix the artifacting on her hand. Essentially it’s just that the green screen process used isn’t quite sharp enough to keep details like her dainty fingers. Probably something we’ll correct but it’s not going to stop the show. OR! You can explain it away by saying that she’s actually punching so fast it looks like she’s mostly standing still, but her fingers have broken the time barrier and exist in multiple dimensions. Regarding clipping: the geometry and animation isn’t final so there’s bound to be some clipping. It would take time cleaning something up for a web capture to then throw away the clean up and keep working on it. So yeah, little things we just have to live with. You too. Aside from that as was said some amount of clipping is fine, because having an animation that looks good from the camera distance is more important than a clipping artifact you won’t even see.

Bashiok also confirmed that they were planning to include the M/F selector on the other character pages (as they did on the Monk page) to allow us to see the resting animation for all the characters. So there’s something to look forward to.

Finally, Bashiok leapt into a long and rambling thread about everyone’s favorite joke from Blizzcon 2009 joke, i.e. “Isn’t a female monk called a nun?” with some semi-philosophical musings about why aliens always look basically humanoid in every movie, and how things in fiction need to be different, but not so different that we can’t still identify with them. Click through to read those quotes, cause they’re long and not exactly game-related.

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As promised the official unveiling, (somewhat dampened by the unofficial unveiling a few days ago), of the female monk has gone live on Blizzard’s Diablo 3 site tonight.  There is the caeser-esk concept art on the monk page we revealed in our collage news item from Sunday but of course it’s much better quality.  What is new however is the cool animation of her at the top of the page.

The female monk has received mixed reviews since the snapshots taken from the Jace Hall show first appeared, the massive pauldrons and the peroxide blonde hair being two minor gripes but now that you have seen her in a her full regalia in a high definition full body shot what do you think?  Does she epitomize Sanctuary’s martial arts warrior?

• Official Monk Page
• Monk at DiabloWiki.Net
• Monk Gallery
• Monk Forum

Update: A second, more action-y piece of female monk concept art was added to the official site. Click it for a much larger view.

 

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Thanks to the reveal of the female monk, we’ve got a nice new Diablo 3 wallpaper. It’s by HolyKnight3000 of course, and features the FeMonk in his patented fiery runes, where so many of the Diablo 3 characters have gone before. He’s done a very nice job cleaning up the image; even at the large size it looks okay, and that’s no small feat given the limitations of the source image. More cool wallpapers will follow when/if Blizzard releases some HQ concept art, but we can certainly enjoy this one for now..

Click through to get the full size image, in various dimensions to fit your particular screen.

With the revealing of the female monk i used screen caps to build her up and compile. I saw the one on the site and thought it looked a little smashed.

This one looks a little off still but i think it was best suited for the fiery runes series. I will make a better version when the artwork is officially thrown on the website.

You should also notice the fiery runes. Its the dim runes as a runecircle. I’ve been meaning to do this lately and they look so different from the old runes. But they don’t overwhelm the image from the target that the wallpaper is about.

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See Leord, Elly and Rushster Die. Literally.

I had the pleasure to play some Global Agenda beta together with Elly, Rushster and Maticus (who actually lurks around here but she mostly does MMO news for our parent site, IncGamers.com). We thought it would be fun to record some of these gun-slinging adventures, and discuss the gameplay. After long time of playing, and putting together the video, and giving it a voice-over; this is the result.

Well worth a look, if nothing else then to see myself, Elly, Rushster and Maticus die repeatedly (sorry, no Flux here), and/or to hear how me and Maticus sound IRL! What are you waiting for, check it out here:

• Global Agenda Co-op Video

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Since we’re now all FeMonk, all the time, here are couple of more useful images. We just created a new D3 Team folder in the image gallery, and besides a bunch of photos of the various key individuals on the D3 Team, it’s got quite a few high quality images of the team and their giant conference table, as seen on the Jace Hall Show. Thanks to MD for all of the screencaps.

One of those shots featured a better look at her heavy armor look, so I cut it out and posted it separately. It can be seen below on the left; click it for the full size. Not only is the armor worthy of study (comically high shoulder pads and all) but check out her half-profile view. The different angle shows off her hair to nice effect, and I like her face a lot in this one. The expression gives her a thoughtful, contemplative look that’s more in keeping with the Male monk’s expressions and lore.

Elsewhere, Inkarnus put together a nice collage of images that explore various aspects of the Female Monk’s look, features, and personality. Click it on the right for a much larger view.

 

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Everyone’s got an opinion on the newly-revealed Female Monk, but not everyone used Photoshop and modified their original artwork to make their point. I don’t much agree with it,but it’s worth debating. Here’s the quote from Sentioch.

If you want a battle hardened warrior feel, you usually go with the male class.

If you want a sexy looking body, you go with the female class.

But the female monk is really not sexy in any way…it really defeats the purpose of having a female version at all. Most guys who want to play women (which compromise the majority of the people that would play her) really just want to look at a hot avatar.

Most girls who want to play her…will also want their avatar to be hot. Nobody wants to play a butch girl.

Bashiok tried to dismiss this with sarcasm, saying only, “Nice story bro.” but I think there’s more to say than that. Personally, I’m not sold on Blizzard’s view; this coed blonde beauty is a battle-hardened warrior? But Sentioch’s changes make her look like one of those pretty, pouting, fashion model characters from Guild Wars. Furthermore, his description of why people pick their characters seems absurdly simplistic. Does everyone pick their game avatar for hotness? That might have some validity in a game with a trailing-camera-FPS style view, but Diablo 3 is isometric, and the characters are always in heavy armor and helmets anyway!

Other arguments, pro or con, are welcomed in the comments.

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Bashiok added a couple of replies to the ongoing Jace Hall Show thread, confirming the reality of the female monk, and promising us a better look fairly soon.

	Blizzard Quote:
	Yes, that is indeed the female monk. We’ll have an official site update and a couple high-res goodies soon. Although the shoulder pads do look ridiculous, you gotta remember that you’re not going to see the character zoomed up. I have to agree that these screenshots make it look like the monk just stole some spare shoulders from the barbarian while he was sleeping. End game is going to be really hard to distinguish which class is which if all the armor looks like this. Bashiok: Yeah, didn’t I just make that post yesterday? Anyway, considering the level at which the artists control the looks of the heroes and their progressive armor appearances I don’t think there’s any chance you’ll be able to mistake one class for another. Being able to easily read the heroes on screen is probably the first and biggest bullet point for our art design. Her hair being a near-white blonde wasn’t a random choice or simply for aesthetics. You’ll be able to identify any class out of the corner of your eye, or almost wholly obscured by effects/monsters. It’s absolutely necessary. The heroes are designed at every step of the way with that in mind. Gameplay first.

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When someone talks about the Diablo Drought, Breakpoints, Amp, BotD or mentions EIAS. What do you do?

Naturally, any remotely sane community member would pretend s/he did know what was said and sneakily check out the Abbreviations page in DiabloWiki! The drought simply implies we get litte attention from Blizzard, a breakpoint is where things start to get better, Amp is a Necro skill, BotD is a runeword and EIAS is the actual attack speed you end up with after all modifiers.

There are literary hundreds of terms relating to gaming, Diablo, Diablo II and Diablo III. Naturally, we mostly have terms related to Diablo II since this is the game most of us have played, but there are already Diablo III terms budding. It's a gaming cultural heritage in the making!

Make sure you check out both the Abbreviations article as well as the more elaborate Glossary, and bookmark them for future use.


Being a "gaming cultural heritage in the making", this is also a fantastic opportunity to make your mark as the library of phrases is expanding. Make sure to add anything that's missing, and help us making "stub" articles on what they mean and how they are used. This thread can also be of help, if you need to ask about "candidate" words, or anything about wiki editing.

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After all the jokes and snide remarks we all made about the silliness of the Jace Hall show as they pretended to film secret material that Blizzard didn’t want them to show, episode 2 of their new season went off tonight and… they debuted the female monk. Not very clearly; but the camera panned across a number of colorful print outs of her various looks, and we’ve assembled the best available images in the gallery. Click any of these thumbs for a larger view.

Let’s hope that Blizzard has something bigger and better planned, and that they’ll release some full quality images and screenshots later today, after letting Jace Hall get the publicity and attention for the big reveal.

Player reactions so far seem to be fairly tentative, with, “A blonde?” leading the early comments. thanks to FriskyDingo in comments, for the tip.

   

Update: Cleaned up the images quite a bit. New headshot uploaded.

Update #2: Full Jace Hall show and summary of the Diablo 3 content on the click through.

Update #3: Check MD’s post at BlizzPlanet for lots more screen caps.

 

 

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