Only recently did I pick up a copy of Diablo 3 which was highly recommended by some of my friends. By default, I am not a hardcore gamer however, hearing great reviews about this game, it was time to give it a try. Yet, before I can go around playing the game, I searched for guides. Looking for the right Diablo 3 strategy guide, I was faced with countless options. In respect, there are many Diablo 3 guides to choose from. Unfortunately none of them contain specific leveling information I was looking for. I was looking for leveling strategies, deep, clear-cut walkthroughs and class analysis which could help me choose the perfect class suiting my playstyle. One of the recommendations by one of my buddies was to head over to KillerGuides.com. There the website hosts a Diablo 3 category. The category boasts 7 D3 guides including 5 class guides, 1 cash guide (in assumption this deals with the auction house) and 1 strategy guide.

Reading through the guide descriptions, I was interested in the Diablo 3 strategy manual claiming to provide players with ‘innovative leveling strategies’, ‘killer class builds and skill rune combinations’ and ‘how to earn twice the amount with your auction house sales’. By purchasing the guide at $29.99 USD and instantly downloaded the product, I opened to view the 100 page PDF guide. In the guide, I headed over to the ‘innovative leveling strategy’ section as claimed in the guide. Reading through its content, I was faced with interesting info, and as advertised innovative leveling strategies to help my class advance in the game. Each leveling strategy came equipped with recommended skill builds, the highest DPS build, skill and rune combination and so forth. Highly impressed with the gathered information, I put this to the test.

[*Note sure if this is allowed, but heres a snippet of what their guide looks like inside]

Each strategy the author provided was so simple to use, yet highly effective. I tested out the next strategy offered by the guide: the highest DPS build. By customizing my build, I immediately tested it out in the dungeon. I’m pleased to say the DPS build really helped me claim victory over several mobs. As much as I would like to delve into details, I couldn’t. However, for players thinking of seeing an instant change in their game, I believe players should really invest in this Diablo 3 guide bundle. You would begin to see a dramatic change in your gameplay and how you could easily customize each build according to your playstyle.

This guide overall really helped me advanced through the game, providing tips and secrets to maximize my class, which I chose the Witch Doctor. Needless to say, I’m a very happy customer. Plus, with KillerGuides providing free guide updates, I feel like every penny I spent on this guide was totally worth it.

For all you people who have pre-ordered the game and weren’t in the Closed Beta and are still dyingggg to play the game, this week is your lucky week. Blizzard is allowing Diablo 3 fans a chance to play this every so popular series which will be released on May 15 a chance to play in an Open Beta.

Open Beta Weekend:

From Friday, April 20 at 3 p.m., Eastern to Monday at 1 p.m, Eastern, anyone with an account on Blizzard’s Battle.net gaming service will be able to take part in all the demon-fighting fun.

There are still some restrictions, but the biggest thing is now you are allowed to play with your friends and play any of the five classes you want and only to level 13. Players will not beable to post in the beta forums or have access to the money earning Diablo 3 Auction House. Also on a sad note, Korean players will not be able to join in on this weekends test. Koreans will have their own invitation-only beta test on April 23

To get in on the action, just head over to Battle.net and create an account. Also of course, download the client onto your computer.

There are some rules to the beta, however. Players will be able to play with friends and play each of the five classes, but only to level 13. Users will not be able to post in the beta forums or have access to in-game currency for the Diablo III auction house. Also, Korean players will not be able to participate in this weekend’s test, though there will be an invitation-only beta for players in Korea on April 23.

If you don’t have a Battle.net account and would like to play, you can create a free account to download the client onto your computer. From there, you will have to set up an account.

If players are thinking of quickly learning all of Diablo 3′s respective classes, then I highly suggest players to go to this website and read all about it in this guide. Not only will you get a insider’s look to how the classes are broken down, but you can gain knowledge how to exactly use each of the classes to their full potential. Learn their strengths and weaknesses in the guide.

Below is a quick summarization of the monk class and all their attributes. Packing a punch with their fists of fury, the rest of their attributes can be read up at this website which gives players guides to read and reference.

Holy crap! Diablo 3′s Reveal site has launched its new addition to the series before the game launch its latest Diablo 3 Monk Video.

The Monks are known to be holy warrior driven to come to Sanctuary as they believe they have to bring the world into order. Chaos is brewing and these holy warriors can not stand the awaiting destruction. Diablo 3 monks are sacred warriors on missions to assist the people. They have been trained for over thousands of years and a masters of melee combat. Strong enough with their hands, they can also wield weapons like staves, blades, maces and spears (even though they do not need it). Here’s their latest video on how they hone their body and mind into on tool of destruction.

Here, we can take a closer look a the barb class and their abilities. As presented in this guide here, the barb is a class which shouldn’t be reckoned with. Provided with strategies and walkthroughs, this guide as it helped me can help you quickly tame the barb.

Another look into the might Barbarians where strength and ferociousness are too much for Demons of Tristram to handle. With their thick body and rippling muscles, the official Diablo 3 barbarian guide shows that are able to wield heavy armor and weapons, items which are simply too heavy for a commoner to even pick up.

For this week on ‘Reveal’, Blizzard unlocks the might warrior. More info on the Sigil contest here

Update (May 16th, 2012) – the skills system has been changed. To view the changes, you can refer to this recommended Diablo 3 Skills guide.

Now for a deeper look into the d3 witch doctor guide, all witch doctor skills are now based off of weapon damage and the cast speed is based off of weapon speed. So, instead of having some sort of arbitrary number attached to your abilities, all of the abilities of the casters now, of the witch doctor are going to be based strictly off of weapon damage and weapon speed. And for the witch doctor we actually are receiving two new paths of skills. Both of which I actually think are really cool. One is circle of life, unlocked at level 12. Whenever an enemy dies within 12 yards there is a 5 percent chance that a zombie dog will automatically emerge. That is pretty awesome I would have to say.

Then, next up, is jungle fortitude. unlocked at level 10. Reduces all damage taken by you and your pets by 20 percent. Huge damage mitigator there for that passive skill.

There you go! A preliminary overview. For more details, check out this witch doctor leveling for the guide is for serious gamers of Diablo 3. There, more changes can be compared before and after Blizzard implement the changes. Also, in addition to the guide’s content, it will give you a head’s up on what active and passive skills you should be using as the exotic witch doctor class.

http://twurl.nl/ltf3ve

Learning more about the changes in the skill of the demon hunter, subscribers are encouraged to try out this guide here. Serving as an extremely helpful guidance manual, players can reference it as I have done previously. In fact, I’ve suggested a couple more skill changes within the Demon Hunter guide. Why not head over and start reading?

Alright, next up is going to be the demon hunter. General chain for the D3 demon hunter maximum hatred has been reduced from 150 to 125. So now, the maximum amount of hatred, the resource there is now 125. With that of course there’s the major change that we’ve known for a while. It has finally come into place. There’s a split between hatred generator and hatred spenders. Discipline is still going to function the same, but now instead of just spending hatred, you’ve got abilities that can also generate it as well. Alright so hatred generators are going to be bowshot and tangling shot evasive fire grenades and impale. And the hatred spenders are Chakram, elemental arrow, hungering arrow and rapid fire. And the discipline abilities of course are going to be props, shower powder, vault and evasive fire.

In addition to this there have been some balance changes for some of the active skills for the demon hunter. Bola shot has had damage increase from 100 to 105 percent. Chakram has had damage reduced from 150 to 135. And again that just shows you right there Bola shot, single target shotgun being AOE. That’s the change. Single target going up and AOE going down. Grenades damage increase from 75 to 80 percent. And although that is kind of still technically an AOE, grenades were severely underpowered so that’s why I think they did buff those up. Hungering arrow damaging from 115 to 145 percent. And now the pierce chance is going to be a fixed 35 percent, as opposed to scaling with level. Impale has been given a new spell effect and it’s now a weapon throw, instead of a bow shot like it was in the past. Rapid fire damage has been increased from 95 percent weapon damage to 38 percent weapon damage per shot. And shadow power attack speed bonus reduced from 50 percent to 30 percent. The new passive skill for the demon hunter is going to be tactical advantage, unlocked at level 10. Whenever you vault, smokescreen or back with evasive fire, you gain 60 percent movement speed for two seconds. Pretty cool new passive and especially great for leveling your demon hunter

Awaiting the launch of the demon hunter class, KillerGuides.com recently launched an online downloadable guide for players to reference the demon hunter class. With leveling information and class walkthroughs, the guide can help you gain a jump start in the game before other players.

As we get closer to the launch of Diablo 3, Blizzard has launched a new Diablo 3 website in an attempt to ramp us its hype. Diablo 3′s “Reveal” site will unlock different looks for the hero, releasing each hero a week. The site also allows Diablo 3 gamers or fans unlock goodies for the game. Fans will basically have to access “Mark of Valor” (Diablo 3′s banner creation module), create a banner, earn a sigil, rinse and repeat everyweek.  Sigils are symbols that show on your banner. Below is the video trailer and a Diablo 3 demon hunter guide to show it’s sorrowful history as hunter.

Here’s a link to their new site.

Were you expecting more advanced content to refer to? Take a look at this monk guide breakdown which comes highly recommended.

Now onto the monk active skill change is Mantras. All diablo 3 monk guides will show that mantras now have a 15 second cool down, but in addition to this you are granted a bonus effect for the first three seconds after activation, which is essentially a double of whatever the mantra is basically. So if you’ve got a mantra with 50 percent dodge for three seconds as soon as you activate it will be a 100 percent dodge. This is an example of just throwing numbers out there, ah but just to show you guys out there. And again with that very reduced cool down of 15 seconds it makes it so the mantras become more of a spammable ability instead of just using it once every two minutes.

And then, in addition to this balance changes are going to be as follows. cost reduced from 50 to 30. Duration reduced from 5 to 3 seconds, so slightly less effective. Breath of heaven spirit costs reduced from 75 to 25, but also the healing was reduced. Crippling wave damage increased from 120 to 135. Deadly reach damaged increased from 110 to 120 percent. And fist of thunder damage increased from 100 percent to 120 percent. Lashing tail-kick spirit costs increased from 25 to 30, but with that the damage has been increased from 130 percent to 180 percent. So, it’s 50 percent more damage there. And then for passive skills, nothing new, but transcendent, the healing per second, healing per spirit was reduced, so transcendent no longer healing as much as it used to.

Below you’ll find a detailed post about d3′s weapon changes and evolution. Each weapon change can be found in Diablo 3 equipment guide section which includes the changes before and after the patches. Informative and detailed, the weapon changes should be taken into account when looking for the right weapon for your character.

Next up changes for weapons. Several significant changes have been made to weapons and weapon damage. And this is actually going to coincide with the fact that Diablo 3 class leveling casters have their now all of their skills based off of weapon damage. They’ve kind of scaled the differences between one handed and two handed. So the damage bonus granted to a two handed weapon or one handed weapon has been reduced from 15 percent to 30 percent. From level one to 60, 13 to 32 percent. So the range used to be 15 to 38 percent increase damage. From a one hand to two handed equivalent and now it is only a 13 to 32 percent. So this is making two handed weapons, although stronger not as stronger than one handed weapons are. In addition to this wands attack speed has been increased from 1.2 to 1.4. Quivers, orbs and mojo’s will now always come with plus/min max damage. Ceremonial daggers will now frequently come with plus manaregen. And wands will now frequently come with plus max arcanian power. So as you can tell all of these changes are based around trying to make one hand an off hand, much more alluring than just going straight for a two handed weapon just because it does more damage. They’re adding all of these extra bonuses and also closing the gap between one handed and two handed with these changes so it’ll make casters still likely want to use one handed and off hand, as opposed to running around with two handed axes. In the end, all these suggestions are to allow your Diablo 3 class to level faster.

The amount of inherent slow granted by cold weapons has been reduced from 3 seconds to 1 second. One handed cross was and daggers now pull from a separate pool of affixes four plus damage and the damage variants between weapons of the same type has been reduced. All changes to change the difference between one and two handed weapons.

Some bug fixes that took place, fix an issue that was causing two handed diablo 3 monk to receive comments about not receiving the proper damage bonus. And don’t worry my friends we are almost wrapping things up here. There are monster changes. There’s a new mortar affix added to the gamer, mortar monster will now wop grenades to enemies outside of melee range. Blizzard felt that most of the enchanted enemies drastically effected melee characters but not range characters so much. So adding this mortar is going to make it to that range characters are actually now threatened by these enchanted monsters.

Lighting bolt damage from electrified enchanted monsters has been reduced by 40%. Monsters that are enchanted to an elemental such as a molten electrified now correctly have 50% resistance of their chosen element. Electrified enemies have a 50% damage reduction against electricity. So there you go. Pretty basis stuff.

Treasury goblins are now immune to fear. I wasn’t fearing them anyways. Major buffs for the Skeleton King, the war on damage increased from 100% to 300%. That is a 200% increase in war one damage. And also the cleave for the Skeleton King has had his damage increased from 80% to 100%.

Crafting. The blacksmith now starts with a fist weapon and dagger weapon as a option of craft. That’s early game adjustments. Nothing major. Diablo 3 leveling and crafting recipes have and received a tune pass as well. So some alterations to the leveling of the blacksmith and crafting recipes.

And then finally, ages of training and now drop. Start dropping at level 6 as opposed to level 8. The chance for a magic and rare items to be salvaged to higher quality crafting material has been increased 1% to 5% and then salvaging blue items has now as a 1% chance of salvaging into legendary crafting material. Those last two changes are basically going to mean that we have an increased chance to pick up higher quality crafting items from salvaging materials.

So there you go guys. That is the patch. There’s a lot of tweaks and a lot of changes. Nothing in new game play. There hasn’t been any additional content added to the beta. Just some changes to basically the way the characters function and various balance changes. That was something I wanted to go through with you guys. Sorry for being about a day or two late. I know the patch came out later in the week. I now know it’s the weekend but I still wanted to get some time to cover it with you guys.

So that’s about it. that is a wrap up of the patch. Hopefully, you guys have it informative. Hopefully, I’ve cleared up some of the questions that some of you may have had about the patch and the changes that took place with it. And there you go. That is it.

There was also change to arcane enchanted monsters. They are now a little arcane laser beam. Not nearly as threatening so it’s a pretty interesting change at that.

To learn more about the recent patch changes, I would recommended heading over to this Diablo 3 guide for more in-depth information.

This post will generally be going through the patch notes one-by-one and every topic briefly. Basically an in-depth look into all the patch notes.

But without further ado, let’s go ahead and get things started. Again, we’ll be just taking a look at the patch notes and talking about each point briefly. First and foremost, I do want to mention that the Cauldron of Jordan is no longer in the beta. It has not been removed from the game itself, but will be rewarded after we defeat the skeleton king. So, although in beta prior to patch number five, you did receive the Cauldron of Jordan before killing off the Skeleton king, once the game goes live you’ll be getting it after. So, as such, it is no longer currently available. You will meet him right at the end of the first Diablo 3 beta footage.

As with most major patches there has been a full character wipe for this data. Any of the characters that were around prior to this data they’re no longer around. In addition to that there’s been a major change in terms of skill swapping. Now, in order to swap skills, you actually require use of the Nephalem Alter. Now the Nephalem Alter is going to be located in Nutritium, as well as various hot spots or key locations throughout the game and essentially, what will happen is you’ll have to run up to and click on the alter and that will open up the skill you want. Allowing you to switch out your active and passive skills. Now it is important to note that it is not just in towns that the Nephalem Alter will be, but the Nephalem alter is also found at the beginning of cathedral level 1. So you are no longer allowed to swap skills on the fly, and you require a Nephalem Alter in order to do so.

There have been some tweaks to quests. A gold reward from quests has been significantly reduced. In addition to that experience rewarded for a quest after level four is now based on the level of mobs you’d have to kill to earn the same amount of experience, rather than being a just strict percentage of a level. So in the past it used to be the quest that quest rewards experience-wise were giving you a percentage of your level. Instead of that percentage it’s going to be say, 30 or 40 monsters killed, I’m just making up a number there, and then whatever level you are. That number, that’s the experience that you would get relative to how much you would get killing monsters at that level. So, again it’s a change from set percentage to scaling with your level depending on the experience you gain from monsters killed. Again, whatever set number they end up choosing for that.

Next changes made about were skill changes. There have been new passive skills added for all classes. That’s something we’ll be mentioning briefly later all. Also, there’s been a significant reduction in effectiveness of area of effect abilities. Area of effect skills no longer do as much damage across the board. There was a damage reduction on that. But on the flip side of that, all single target skills for all classes have had their damage increased. While the area of effect is less effective now, the single target is more effective. All skills are now based off of weapon damage so this going to really alter how the casters play out, as opposed to the way it was prior, and again that is something I’ll be mentioning momentarily and in the future as well.

Now, just talking briefly on the area of effect versus single target change. My assumption is this, if we look at late game Diablo, area of effect is basically all everyone used. You would just spam AOE and it’s the quickest way to clear rooms essentially. So, by cutting back preemptively on the how effective the area of effect damage is, I think what Blizzard is doing her is their making it so that, it’ll take longer to reach that point. Because ideally, is most likely at all Diablo 3 classes, when we were talking about PVE well be going with some sort of area of affectability. Because it doesn’t make a lot of sense, in the game like Diablo to be single targeting everything. Area of effect is just a lot more efficient. Until we get to that point where it’s going to be really efficient, it’s just going to take a little bit longer. They want us to, kind of use both single target and AOE. But again, ideally at the end game we’ll probably just be spamming AOE because it’s just the easiest and quickest way to kill things.

The user interface did receive a intro overhaul as well. General art and usability. There have been improvements to that as well. Even just, the login screen and everything. It’s just looking phenomenal. Really polished now, artistically games looking a lot better. In addition to that I do want to mention, that I didn’t see it in the past notes, but anti aliasing was added. And the game is looking much, much, more crisp and clean right now. Because of that, so anti-aliasing was added to the graphic selection and that’s really awesome as well. Again it’s just looking a lot nicer.

New Diablo 3 Log-in Sreenshot