Diablo III Spoiler Thread

With LoD they added class-specific weapons and the Paladin's was a special kind of shield (Targe, I believe). I could see them doing that again. I'd like to see them doing a class based around a shield just because it seems to be an under-utilized item.

And Hypatian, Witch Doctor's have off-hands and ceremonial daggers.

The demon hunter has bow/crossbow specific skills.

fangblackbone wrote:

The demon hunter has bow/crossbow specific skills.

I meant "that" as in just creating a class-specific shield.

The guy the Templar kills when you first pick him up (Jondar?) sounds a lot like Saren from ME1.
Anyone know if it's him?

Jondaaaaaaaaar! To use his proper title

***
doesn't show up on his imdb page

kyrieee wrote:

The guy the Templar kills when you first pick him up (Jondar?) sounds a lot like Saren from ME1.
Anyone know if it's him?

There isn't a specific voice credit for Jondar, but Fred Tatasciore (who voiced Saren) is part of the additional voices list, so it is possible.

As far as the Archangel of Wisdom,

Spoiler:

it's mentioned in one of the conversations that he became obsessed with something and then left (I think it's implied that he was the one who helped out the Enchantress' group and sealed them away.)

Elycion wrote:
merphle wrote:
iaintgotnopants wrote:

The Belial fight still sucks in co-op Nightmare. That was the first time I've seen an entire co-op group get wiped and it happened twice.

Clarified that for you.

But the third time was pretty awesome, in my very humble opinion, since all 3 of us were dead at one point during the fight -- and THEN I clicked the resurrect button and proceeded to get you both back up so we could finish Belial off.

People keep posting about that fight and now I'm worried for when I hit it (probably sometime later today) in Nightmare. On my normal playthrough with my Barbarian I just WTFPwned the guy first shot with no trouble at all. After listening to people Female Doggo about the fight for a week now y'all have me worried it was a glitch or something that it was so easy. :)

melee classes, monks and barbs tend to breeze straight on through normal and nightmare. once they start hitting up the end of hell, they start feeling the squeeze if they haven't been maintaining their gear.

Once in inferno, the melee classes pretty much required to farm a certain level of resistances/protection + general stats to start progressing smoothly without feeling overtly frustrated. Some healbot monks I know (myself included) that finished up to Hell in coop got annihilated by the fat zombies in Act 1 of Inferno for example.

The non-melee classes often tend to struggle while they're in Nightmare/Hell as that's when the the game really starts to punish inefficiency and force players into learning what they need to min-max to survive (around later stages of Nightmare and Hell is when you start getting 1-3 shotted when you do something wrong as ranged). By the time they get to Inferno however, they seem to have a FAR easier time than Melee who run into a really rough gear-check.

That said, with Co-op a lot of variations can occur, your group's class composition, better geared players, and/or party members can do a lot to make these transitions seamless.

Was anyone else hoping Covetous Shen would say, "indeed!" like Lo Pan? I love James Hong.

drdoak wrote:

Was anyone else hoping Covetous Shen would say, "indeed!" like Lo Pan? I love James Hong.

I had asked earlier if anybody knew if it was James Hong or not referencing Lo Pan. I just did a google search and found a bunch of people asking if it was "the same guy that voiced Po's father in Kung Fu Panda", aka James Hong. That made me feel old (of course, I did just turn 30 so I may be feeling old for other reasons). He's apparently in the credits so it's undoubtedly him. Although, I didn't actually watch the credits since they were longer than the last act.

iaintgotnopants wrote:
drdoak wrote:

Was anyone else hoping Covetous Shen would say, "indeed!" like Lo Pan? I love James Hong.

I had asked earlier if anybody knew if it was James Hong or not referencing Lo Pan. I just did a google search and found a bunch of people asking if it was "the same guy that voiced Po's father in Kung Fu Panda", aka James Hong. That made me feel old (of course, I did just turn 30 so I may be feeling old for other reasons). He's apparently in the credits so it's undoubtedly him. Although, I didn't actually watch the credits since they were longer than the last act.

Nice! I thought it was just someone who was imitating him. Good to know.

Xeknos wrote:
kyrieee wrote:

The guy the Templar kills when you first pick him up (Jondar?) sounds a lot like Saren from ME1.
Anyone know if it's him?

There isn't a specific voice credit for Jondar, but Fred Tatasciore (who voiced Saren) is part of the additional voices list, so it is possible.

As far as the Archangel of Wisdom,

Spoiler:

it's mentioned in one of the conversations that he became obsessed with something and then left (I think it's implied that he was the one who helped out the Enchantress' group and sealed them away.)

Wait, did you just spoiler text something in the spoiler thread? We must go deeper!

WOW it is James Hong! Its even listed on his wikipedia page.

I had thought it was a stand in just cos he was so old. But apparently he's 83 and actively working. Kudos to him.

And he was an engineer for 7 1/2 years before going to acting full time.

PS. Big Trouble in Little China - was in 1986. Damn I'm old, I was 14 when I saw that in theaters.

In honor of Lo Pan, I've named my next characters JackBurton, Wang, Egg, and Gracie Law. A Barbarian, Monk, Witch Doctor, and Wizard.

ahrezmendi wrote:
Xeknos wrote:
kyrieee wrote:

The guy the Templar kills when you first pick him up (Jondar?) sounds a lot like Saren from ME1.
Anyone know if it's him?

There isn't a specific voice credit for Jondar, but Fred Tatasciore (who voiced Saren) is part of the additional voices list, so it is possible.

As far as the Archangel of Wisdom,

Spoiler:

it's mentioned in one of the conversations that he became obsessed with something and then left (I think it's implied that he was the one who helped out the Enchantress' group and sealed them away.)

Wait, did you just spoiler text something in the spoiler thread? We must go deeper!

Just wait. Before you know it, we'll be spoiler tagging something in the spoiler text in the spoiler thread. I call it spoilerception.

Spoiler:
Spoiler:

BWAAAAA

Spoiler:
Spoiler:
Spoiler:
BWAAAAA

I don't get it. Am I in limbo?

I don't know if I'm just super geared up by I just took down Belial with my monk in about 20 seconds.

What difficulty?

I'm looking forward to solo Belial soon in NM. In normal, I was very surprised that both of my friends (WD + DH) who were grouped with me fell over multiple times during the fight and had to be scraped off the ground. I stayed alive easily through the whole thing.

Normal. It's my second character. The first time through, as a barbarian, I died twice and it took quite a while. This time he barely got to his meteor attack before he was dead. Honestly, it felt like I was using my level 45 character on normal. That's how easy it was.

iaintgotnopants wrote:

Normal. It's my second character. The first time through, as a barbarian, I died twice and it took quite a while. This time he barely got to his meteor attack before he was dead. Honestly, it felt like I was using my level 45 character on normal. That's how easy it was.

That's as it should be... I just looked at belial on my 2nd run through on normal and he dropped. First time through it was a pain in the ass and the same for the first time through on NM.

Jennifer Hale, James Hong and Steve Blum rule. Especially Hale and Blum, because they weren't using their typical video game voices.

I was half expecting Diablo to split up his personalities so we could have the old fights again. Kinda disappointed that the final fight was just "Diablo" skills, not aspects of the other prime evils.

BadKen wrote:

Jennifer Hale, James Hong and Steve Blum rule. Especially Hale and Blum, because they weren't using their typical video game voices.

I definitely recognised Blum though, he's got a hard voice to disguise, took me a while to pick out Hale though!

It's almost become a drinking game of mine to identify them in, well, pretty much every game I ever play. I'm really surprised Nolan North isn't in this as well... Space Core in the expansion?

Also Morrigan from dragon age was the spider sucubus mother.

mooosicle wrote:

Also Morrigan from dragon age was the spider sucubus mother.

You say her name! You say her name, dammit!

It's Claudia Black.

Yeah, I'd agree with all of that. I just beat the game on Normal for the first time last night and was REALLY sick of the story beats by the end. For a game series that has historically had a pretty unique atmosphere (the understanded melancholy that you mentioned), everything just seemed so standard by the end. Oh, the Chosen One of good vs. the Chosen One of evil. Yay.

Not that I'm saying the story is any worse than most games out there, I just wish it had been a little less obtrusive toward the end. For example, every time I would get a new journal entry (one of the few pieces of exposition I did like) in the 3rd of 4th Acts, it seems like it would get cut off by some dumb voiceover from the spider lady, Azmodan, or Diablo. I liked the more solitary feeling of the first two, I guess.

That's not a patch on the game part though! Still loving that. I'll just be mashing the ESC key a lot, I predict.

Yeah, by all means, the game itself is still incredible, Blizzard still have a flawless record for amazing gameplay, Valve is the only other company that hits that level of consistency.

And there are bits of the story I quite like, I think they did a really good job with the companions. The Templar is super cheesy, but it really works in this case, and the scoundrel and enchantress are great as well, much improved over the companions in Diablo 2. I also like that the PCs are fully voiced, and really quite well, the female wizard in particular stands out, she's voiced by the person who played Azula in Avatar which was a nice surprise.

After some time to reflect about Diablo 3, I think my main problem with the story telling on show is as follows: they don't follow the techniques of 'Show, don't tell'.

The first two games were great at this, everything was foreshadowed but not outright spoiled right off the bat. The Butcher caused me to damn near crap myself the first time I saw him in the original Diablo, because I'd never heard peep from him, I step into this room full of mutilated corpses, and suddenly this fat bastard of a demon is running at me with a cleaver: "Fresh meat!" and CHOP... you're probably dead. Admittedly I was a lot younger, but it was an amazing moment.

Diablo 2 managed this as well, Andariel was talked about prior to you meeting her, but you never saw her, or heard her... she never gave you an Evil Overlord Monologue. When you finally came across her, she was terrifying, because it was a complete surprise, and she was so much larger than anything you'd fought at that stage, and her design was pretty damn creepy.

Spoiler:

Diablo 3 falls over when it comes to this, and Azmodan is the biggest offender here. The guy is practically a Scooby-Doo villain, he's constantly chatting with you. When you finally meet him, he's not scary... you're just happy to finally shut him up. Diablo was well hidden up until his reveal, but after that, he makes up for lost time with gusto, taunting you and berating you like a school yard bully. Surely he has more important things to do with his time?

I don't think this method of story telling is necessarily always a bad thing, but Diablo always had a melancholy about it, a tension and foreboding that's difficult to achieve when Azmodan is telling you he would have gotten away for it if it wasn't for those meddling adventurers.

Unfortunately I think they learned some bad lessons in WoW, I remember them saying that the Lich King needed to engage with the player more throughout the game than Illidan did, which is fine in the cartoon universe of WoW, and an MMO where you might not see the boss otherwise if you don't raid. But this is Diablo, I prefer my Prime Evils to a little more enigmatic.

But other than that, the game is great... carry on!

My frustration with the story elements is how disruptive they are to the gameplay, especially when you don't give a crap and just want to get on with the game. I much preferred D1 and D2's way of telling the story seamlessly in the game, with the between act cutscenes. I hate having to click through the stupid talking heads or escape out of the obtrusive in game crap.