Blizzcon Monk Observations

Here's an excerpt from a sort of general audience D3 @ Blizzcon article I wrote for incgamers.com. (Not yet online.) I'll get into some more detailed gameplay reports this weekend, once the rush of getting the skills articles online is past. But here's something for now.


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The Wizard, Witch Doctor, and Barbarian were all playable as well. (Cleverly, only those three characters were visible to select when the show first began at 10am, but around 12:30, when the opening ceremonies ended, the Monk was suddenly added to the character selection screen.) Each of the other three characters were improved and refined from last year's version, with huge changes to their skill trees and the order of their skills. This year's demo characters were higher level as well, allowing players to experiment with a wider variety of spells and techniques. "New" characters started out at level 6 last year. This year they started at level 12, and could be leveled up to 14 or 15, in the much larger "dungeon" area.



The Monk was the big new feature of the demo, and though he was a lot of fun to play, he was clearly a work in progress. The fact that he was a "he," for instance. All of the characters in Diablo 3 are available in male and female versions, and it's not some simple head switch in the graphics. The males and females are very different in body size, posture, dimensions, armor, etc, a fact that essentially forces the artists and animators to create 10 character models for the 5 characters. This explains why the Monk was only available in the male flavor, since the female version wasn't yet playable. Nor viewable, judging by the fact that only the male appeared in the concept art Blizzard passed out to the media at the show.

Only the female Wizard was playable in last year's Blizzcon demo, but at least the male could be seen in concept art. No such luck with the female Monk, who will be called the... um... well... Nun?

Besides the single gender choice, players of the Monk had but 8 skills to choose from. All 8 were well-animated and fully-functional, but compared to the 35 or skills available for the other three characters, 8 seemed a sure sign of a some last minute development. They were fun, though. The Monk is a melee combat specialist, with fast, hard-hitting attacks but far less defense than the tank-like Barbarian, and all of his Blizzcon build skills supported this play style. His unique skill approach comes chiefly from his "combo" skills, which work like a series of moves from an arcade fighting title. Each of the 3 combo skills available in the Blizzcon build had three stages, which could be chained together by clicking the mouse key quickly enough to trigger them, one after the other.

With each of these combos skills, the first two "stages" performed some sort of melee attack not so dissimilar from those possessed by the other characters. The third stage though, was a much more powerful and visually-impressive attack, one that could only be used after running through stages one and two. And that's not all; the cleverest innovation of these Monk combo skills is that they can be mixed and matched. They all have 3 stages, and a player with quick fingers can use stage one of one skill, stage two of another, and stage three of the third, or any other permutation of combos.

This should provide for some interesting strategy. For instance, Exploding Palm, the most powerful combo skill, had a weak stage one and two, before the explosive stage 3 finale. That seemed like a wise balancing move, but as players immediately realized, they could use the first two stages from another combo skill, then switch to Exploding Palm for just the third stage, triggering the massive AoE explosion that skill was immediately renowned for.




I posted excerpts about the other 3 chars in their forums, if you want to check those out too, in advance of the full article's publication. I realize the monk one is less interesting/news worthy to hardcore fans since so many of the "hands on" reports from Blizzcon focused on the Monk. But I'll post some longer, more detailed stuff next week.|||nice update. thanks flux. as cool as the monk is, i like to keep up on the development of the rest of what will be an epic game.

-d