Welcome to the Diablo 3 Wizard blog!
This is a blog for all the Diablo 3 fans out there who would plan on playing a wizard and would like to keep up-to-date on skills, skill trees, runestones, PvP, gameplay footage, strategies, and the community of both Diablo 3 and the Diablo 3 wizard. We’ll be bringing you all the newest information, as soon as it’s available. Check back regularly to see new videos, article, and updates. You can now watch beta videos of the wizard as well (below). More videos to come!
Please “Like” us on Facebook (to the right of this post), and stay tuned for weekly posts about what’s new with the Diablo 3 wizard. Have a look around the site and please leave some comments, or post any questions, requests, or ideas on the forum.
Thanks!
TJ
Level 60 Diablo 3 Wizard Gameplay and Strategies
This video contains level 60 Diablo Wizard gameplay footage and strategies. Less than 3 days after the release of Diablo 3, Archon and DreadNought of Inferno Friday have hit level 60. This is there first end game video, and while they’re still working their way through Hell mode, there is plenty of excitement and difficulty to be had as they quest in Act 3. In addition to sharing some gameplay of level 60, they’ve also shared some tips and stategies they’ve found while grinding up to level 60. This is a great video to watch if you’re interested in leveling as fast as possible with a wizard in Diablo III.
If you haven’t already, I suggest subscribing to their channel on YouTube. They’ve made some great weekly videos so far.
Creating a Diablo 3 Wizard Build / Skill Combination for Leveling
Inferno Friday’s second video was posted today. This week’s video talked about created a leveling build (or skill combination) for a Wizard in Diablo 3. They go over some things to keep in mind when creating a build, and then shows some sample leveling builds that might work well at level 20 and level 40 if playing in a group.
If you haven’t subscribed to that channel, I suggest you do.
Diablo Wizard Strats to Know Before Release
The first video of a new series called “Inferno Friday” was posted last week. The series will be covering strategies for beating bosses on the Inferno Difficulty of Diablo 3. This channel specifically will be covering Wizard strategies and builds.
This first video, however, goes over 5 things any Diablo player will want to know before playing Diablo 3. They are 5 quick tips that will definitely help you get to level 60 faster if you haven’t been reading the forums over the last few weeks. Save yourself some time and check out the first video of Inferno Friday:
Diablo 3 Beta – Wizard Beta Preview (HD)
With all the new Diablo 3 Beta videos popping up on YouTube (since Blizzard opened beta up to friends and family of their employees), I decided to created a preview of the Wizard in Beta (which only includes Act 1 on Normal). The video below is made up of clips I pulled from the best Diablo 3 Beta Wizard videos I could find. Hopefully this video will get you as excited about playing a wizard as I am:
As you can see, it’s no wonder why everyone on the forums is saying that the wizard seems overpowered. Hopefully Blizzard doesn’t change too much, because I’m ready to pwn Act 1 in the face once I roll my wizard. Let me know what you guys think of the Beta so far. What skills do you anticipate using the most in Act 1? Are you going to play a male or a female wizard?
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Diablo 3 Beta Wizard Leaked Gameplay Footage
It’s official: The Diablo 3 Beta is now open to Friends and Family of Blizzard employees. While this may not be exciting for those who are hoping for a beta key themselves, it does mean that we’re going to start seeing more gameplay footage from the Beta. YouTube already has a handful of Beta videos, and so I went on a search to find the best Diablo 3 Wizard Beta video I could to share with you guys, and here it is: 6 minutes of wizard pwnage (as much pwnage as you can have in Act I on Normal I suppose)
As you may have heard, the Beta will only cover Act I on Normal and will not include PvP. However, this is some of the first footage that includes the user interface (also, it’s in HD). The consensus from us who have been watching beta footage of different classes seems to be that the wizard is a bit overpowered (at least in Act I) which is fine by us who plan on rolling wizards on release.
Blizzard has said that this will be a short Beta, so hopefully it won’t be too long before we’re layin down some pwnage ourselves. I hope you enjoy this quick preview, and I’ll continue to post awesome wizard beta videos whenever I find them.
Diablo 3 Press Event Updates from the July 27th Meeting
As I mentioned in my post last week, there was a Diablo 3 Press Event Meeting at the Blizzard HQ where some of the big players in the Diablo 3 community were shown the first look of the Diablo 3 Beta. Until today they have been unable to discuss what they learned at this meeting, but as of this morning DiabloFans and other sites released a TON of information about the beta and changes in the game itself.
If you’re interested in hearing a detailed description of the meeting and everything they learned there, I suggest you check out DiabloFans post: Diablo 3 Press Event Visit. I’m going to be giving you all the highlights as well as any information related specifically to the wizard right here if you’d prefer the short version (I’ll also post a video at the end):
Quest-Item Slots
These slots have replaced the talisman and will hold 3 items which you’ll get right away (in Act 1):
Cauldron of Jordan: Used to sell items wherever you are. This means you won’t have to travel back to town whenever you need to sell stuff.
Nephalem Cube: Used for salvaging goods; also useful for keeping your inventory from filling up.
Stone of Recall: Creates a portal back town to and allows you to walk back through the portal and continue fighting (like a scroll of town portal).
Stash
Your stash will be account-wide – no personal stash. You’ll share it with all your characters, and you can purchase up to 5 pages of space! Allowing a lot of room for storage.
Revamped Skill System
Each character will be allowed 6 active skills (down from 7).
The trait system has been removed and replaced with “passive skills” – which has its own section on the skills window. You’ll be able to have 3 passive skills at any time, unlocked at levels 10, 20 and 30.
Skill points have also been removed. You’ll now unlock each skill (active and passive) at certain levels. This is to avoid players saving up skill points as was popular in Diablo 2. You’ll be able to swap out the skills as much as you want, but you can only have 6 active and 3 passive at any given time. This also removes the hassle of respec’ing and allows you to test different combinations.
Skills will now scale with your level and gear instead of the amount of points you’ve put into that skill.
Wizard’s Archon Skill
Allows the wizard to turn into a being made of energy. This completely changes her skills while she’s transformed.
Battle.net 2.0
Will include public games, a PvP matchmaking system, a quick-join system, and co-op (to play with party members).
Banner system: You’ll be able to create a banner specific to your character. You can customize it based on achievements, character level, PvP rating and other things. It’s very similar to Starcraft’s avatar system but you’ll also be able to change the “primary sigil”, accents, patterns, and colors. Also: While in game, you can click on another player’s banner to teleport directly to them – sounds awesome!
The naming system will also be the same as Starcraft’s. You can have the same name as other characters, (not including characters on your account) but everyone will have different RealID names, of course.
Auction House
There will be 2 AHs… one that uses in-game gold, and one that uses…. real money?!?!
Real money auction house: I was really surprised at this, but yes, you will be able to buy AND sell your items for real money. You’ll also be able to buy and sell gold, but only from other players (not from Blizzard). Not sure yet how people will feel about this, but maybe it will get rid of the 3rd party sites selling items and gold… I guess we’ll just have to wait and see. The real money AH will also be regional.
Blizzard said they did this because players wanted it (otherwise they wouldn’t be buying in-game items from 3rd party websites I suppose). They also mentioned that they eventually want to allow players to buy and sell characters.
In-game, gold-based auction house: It looks like it will work very similarly to WoW’s auction house.
Both auction houses will be accessed completely through battle.net and not found in the game.
Party Size
There will be 4 people in a multiplayer party. You can form parties in battle.net, just like in Starcraft, and they want parties to be able to stay grouped even if they’re not with each other in the game.
PvP Changes
PvP will be more casual than originally intended. Instead of the high-intensity “last man standing” feel it had at blizzcon; it’ll be more of a “team deathmatch”. When you die you’ll be out for a couple seconds, and then come back. Winning will be based more on kill count. You’ll still be matched with evenly geared and skilled players, and they’re trying to make it as balanced as possible. They say that this more casual version is more “approachable” and “fun”.
There also won’t be a visible ranking system. The system they use to match you with equally skilled/geared players will be invisible. However, there will be a progression based system which gives you a level based on how much PvP you’ve done. With higher levels you’ll also get achievements and banner customizations
Diablo 3 Beta
Blizzard has said that the Beta will be relatively small and short. It currently only includes Act 1, and doesn’t include PvP. The fact that it’s short opens the possibility for a 2011 release, but we’ll just have to wait and see.
There will be a Blizzard conference call on this Wednesday (August 3rd) which will very likely give us more information as to when the beta will start. Check back for updates on Wednesday or Thursday.
In-depth character details page.
Your character page will include Damage Increase, Attack per second, Casting speed, Crit hit chance, Crit hit damage, Block amount, block chance, dodge chance, damage reduction, max life, life per second, life steal, life per kill, life per hit, max resource, move speed, gold find, and magic find. This sounds a lot like WoW’s system, and should make choosing gear much easier.
“Rushing” characters
With the banner teleport system it will be easier to be “rushed” through acts by high-level players, however they’ve lowered the amount of experience you’ll get for monsters that are much higher level than you. Therefore, the only real benefit is being able to play with friends that are already a much higher level (similar to WoW)
No Stat Customization
This isn’t necessarily NEW information, but you won’t be able to choose, or customize your stats as you could in Diablo 2. Blizzard said it just wasn’t a good customization system, as you could mathematically find the 1 best way to spend your stats. I think this was a good change.
Changes to the Rune System:
Blizzard said that the rune system is probably “…the only significant system that still has a significant amount of revision coming to it.” They’re still figuring out exactly how they want to address some issues with it. Runes won’t be in the beta, however, as you won’t get them until Act 2 (and beta will most likely only cover Act 1). All the changes that they’re currently discussing are just theory, but “theory worth sharing” they say. The idea is that runes would not be actual items – in that, they wouldn’t have any randomness to them. “A rank 7 Indigo rune is a rank 7 Indigo rune. It doesn’t have a better or worse version of it.”
Instead of explaining it myself, I’ll let Jay do it for me. He says “…what we’re thinking about doing is essentially having runes dropped Unattuned, which means they’re kind of grey and generic, they don’t actually have a type. And then you pop them into a skill, and when you do that, the rune attunes to that skill; you can still remove the rune freely whenever you want, but now that rune is not an Indigo rune, it is a Magic Missile splitting rune. And on top of the Magic Missile splitting effect, it might give you a couple other affixes, like +10 Attack or something like that.”
The reason for this is so that players focus more on the skills, instead of finding the right runes. Again, this is just theory, so it may change. To quote Jay, “We haven’t tried it out yet. So it might suck. I’m gonna put that caveat out there…” I’m sure they’ll come up with a system that works well. It’s probably too early to have an opinion one way or the other, as it’s sure to change a lot in the coming months.
They spoke much more in depth about this system in a Q&A at the meeting which you can read on DiabloFans’ Diablo 3 Press Event Post. However, it seemed so vague and undefined at this stage, that I didn’t want to get into detail until we have more information.
Blizzard Conference Call
This Wednesday (August 3rd) there will be a conference call which should give us even more information about changes to the game and the start of Beta. Check back here to see any additional announcements that have been made.
Beta GamePlay Video
I told you I’d share a video with you. Here it is, it’s some B-Roll footage of the Beta gameplay. I hope you enjoy it:
Please visit the Diablo 3 Press Event Updates post to leave comments (only if you’re currently on the home page)
World First Look at Diablo 3 Beta and Wizard Updates
As you may have seen on DiabloFans.com or ForceStrategy, Blizzard has invited some of the big players in the Diablo community to the world’s first look at the Diablo 3 Beta tomorrow (July 27th). From what we’ve heard, nothing is to be said about the event until August 1st, but there is a lot of speculation about what information will be released as of then.
Hopefully this will open a “flood-gate” of new information regarding the Diablo 3 Beta release date, the game itself, and maybe even Battle.net 2.0. Check back after August 1st, and I’ll make sure to keep you posted with any new updates from the meeting.
But you guys don’t want to wait until next week to get Diablo 3 Wizard updates, do you? Lucky for you, I have a few blue posts by Bashiok that came in last week discussing cooldowns. The first one is specifically about the Wizard skill: teleport. I know a lot of you have been wondering how the cooldown might differ from Diablo 2. Check out what he had to say here:
Bashiok poses an interesting idea here… it’s hard to tell if this is merely theory-crafting, or actual information. Is it possible that with the right customization you’d be able to “spam” teleport (or other skills) for an amount of time before triggering the cooldown? We probably won’t know for sure until the Beta announcement.
Many people were interested to hear why we wouldn’t respec at a high level and get all the top tier skills. Bashiok mentioned long cooldowns, and explains why they’ve made the change from Diablo 2. Bashiok goes on to talk much more in-depth about how cooldowns on top-tier skills will work in Diablo 3:
I hope that’s enough to get you guys excited for what lies ahead after August 1st. Blizzard will most likely want to have all the system and game information revealed before they officially announce the Beta, so be looking for that soon. It looks like there’s a good chance that we will get our Q3 Beta, but we’ll just have to wait and see.
Diablo 3 Wizard Skills Preview
I was going to make a Diablo 3 wizard skills video for you guys, but as I was looking through footage, I came across this great wizard skills preview by BlizzPort. It shows some awesome footage of most of the wizard skills including: Storm Armor, Disintegrate, Diamond Skin, Teleport, Spectral Blade, Slow Time, Magic Missile, Arcane Orb, Charged Bolt, Mirror Image, Ray of Frost, Energy Twister, Hydra, Wave of Force, Frost Nova, Electrocute, Meteor, Blizzard, Arcane Torment, and Explosive Blast. I decided I would just share it with you instead of going through the trouble of making my own video.
I hope you enjoy it, and please let me know what you guys would like to see more of in the comments (if you can’t see the comments below this video please visit the actual post: Diablo 3 Wizard Skills). I’ll be making another video soon, and would like to show more of what you guys want to see, so please let me know! Enjoy =)
Diablo 3 Update – Randomized Events, Boss Fights, and Visual Sets
Although there haven’t been many updates regarding the wizard specifically, Blizzard (specifically Bashiok from the Diablo 3 forums) continues to give us all kinds of exciting information that is getting us more and more anxious for the release (or at leas the beta). I know many of you are on the forums every day (like myself), and read every blue post you find. For those of you who are not, I thought I’d share with you some of my favorite updates of the last month or two. Hopefully this will get you guys as excited as I am to start melting faces with the wizard:
Randomized Events
Bashiok recently addressed the issue of Randomized Events, and put our minds at ease by telling us that we wouldn’t have to wonder around aimlessly like we did in Diablo 2 (if you’re like me, you’ve walked around the perimeter of Act II way to many times). Check out this post he made on the forums:
I’d like to hear what you guys think about these Randomized Events. Personally, I’m excited to see that the game content will be changing every time we play the game, without causing us to get lost. Every blue post I read like this reassures me that they’re fixing and upgrading a lot of the features in Diablo 2 that caused frustration, or boredom.
Visual Sets
I didn’t want this post to get too long, however, I’d still like to share some very recent blue posts with you guys. Over the last few days Bashiok has been discussing the Diablo 3 visual sets on the forums.
As you may have heard before, Blizzard is planning on creating item graphics on a “tier system”. This would mean that there would be a set amount of tiers (possibly 18), each with their own look. So that each piece of gear you get, will look the same as other gear in that same tier. Each difficulty would have a certain number of tiers, and ultimately, everyone with the highest tier item (in Hell difficulty) would have the same gear graphics. Although, with the introduction of dyes, and runes, there will still be a lot of visual character customization.
Here is what Bashiok has been saying more recently:
Diablo 3 Visual Tiers Forum Thread 1
Diablo 3 Visual Tiers Forum Thread 2
Post threads are fairly long, which is why I decided to just post the links in case anyone was interested in learning more about Visual Sets.
Boss Encounters (Boss Fights)
I thought I’d leave you with some awesome footage of 3 different boss encounters. You might have seen a few of these already, but even so, you can’t watch these fights and not get uber-excited for the release. It culminates with the Wizard vs. Skeleton King battle. Check it out:
Diablo 3 Wizard Runestones – 2011 Runes Preview
Since Blizzard released new information on runestones, the web has been buzzing with new posts and videos talking about them. I wanted to share a video with you guys showing you some of the Wizard runestone footage specifically, and so I set off on a quest to find the best Wizard Runestone Preview I could find… unfortunately, even after the release of this new information, there isn’t much out there yet.
So I decided to find all the footage I could and create my own video (which you can see below). Most of the footage is from other videos, or pictures I found online. I added some music, text, and graphics to make it less boring. Now you guys won’t have to search the internet for 2 hours like I did trying to find all the best footage. I apologize that some of the footage is low res, however it was filmed at Blizzcon, so that’s the highest quality I could find.
Enjoy, and please leave a comment below (good or bad), and hit that +1 button if you like it. (You must be on the post page to leave a comment: Diablo 3 Wizard Runestones)
