After a few hours of playing it's 'nice' to see that Bnet 2.0 is as bad as ever, I'll leave it at that though to avoid getting berated by ignorant fans.

Also for the oddest of reasons it's more graphically taxing than Witcher 2 despite being the far uglier game, I can only assume it's a lack of driver support at the moment and will be ironed out by or after launch.

What drivers are you running? My Intel/Nvidia buddy was running it just fine. As for me, Mr. AMD, I was running it, just fine. And taxing? An Xbox could run this game.

Bnet2.0 isn't that bad. They finally linked interactivity with D3 beta and SC2/WoW. Before, you couldn't do that. Joining a party and talking to your friends is simple. Group chat I don't care about but it seemed easy enough. As for no LAN, you really have 3 other computers just lying around that can play this game? I mean...I have 2 but still....

However, don't call me ignorant. I love Blizzard as much as the next guy, unless you're the next guy lol, but Bnet 2.0 is not that crippled. Not as much as it was 2 years ago.

That's generally what lan parties are for and its also good from a competitive perspective, it's why Valve went out of their way to ensure DotA 2 has LAN. Though I don't think the lack of lan will be detrimental to the game, what's really detrimental is the fact I need to go online to play the damn thing single player, but hey the best part of D2 I thought was the multiplayer eitherway.

As for the game, just finished the beta, I like the majority of what I saw, I find it extremely odd that you have so much flexibility in what you can do with NPCs, whether it be artisans or followers, yet when it comes to your own character, you're rail roaded and learn set skills at specific levels and can't choose to distribute your stats to your liking. Also for the entirety of the game I held down the left mouse button with the occasional right click without ever consuming a potion, they really need to improve the normal difficulty, because these days Normal seems to mean 'braindead'. I'm aware that Hardcore will be in the game, but I shouldn't need to play a mode that kills me permanently just to get a slight degree of challenge.

My major gripe though and I believe this is exclusive to people in SEA/ANZ, there was constant lag, I was teleporting at some instances without using the Monks teleport auto attack. If this is how the final game is due to us being forced to play on American servers, I can see myself canceling my pre-order along with many others, however I'll wait and see what some local reviews say about it upon release. I just don't get how a company as large as Blizzard can't afford both SEA and ANZ servers. Hi Rez has local servers for Tribes Ascend which just makes it all the more pathetic. I doubt Blizzard care though, we're nothing more than a speck on their sales charts.

Haven't played the DIII beta myself, but to be fair, Normal difficulty on Diablo II wasn't that hard as well. Even at Players 4 or above modifier you can go through Normal without dying once, and with proper builds, without even getting hit once. Diablo II only really started being challenging on Act II Nightmare.

I really don't remember just mindlessly mashing away on my mouse and beating D2, but hey we'll see with the final product I guess.

Trust me, even on more strategical classes like the Sorceror, you could simply select a left click skill (Fireball or Frozen Orb for the best outcome) and spam it by Shift clicking it. I just finished a Normal run with a Sorc like that, and even Nightmare hasn't been much different. 

My paladin is pretty much the same, Zeal everything on sight. Necromancer on Normal was just mashing Amplify Damage for my skeletons to kill enemies faster. Of course there are a ton of builds for the classes, but on Normal difficulty the build doesn't matter at all. 

Thank you, but looks like I'm not making the cut. Have fun guys, hope it's even better than Diablo 2!

How are your system specs?

To be honest. I didn't really like the art direction they took with Diablo 3. It feels wowified from an art perspective.
Diablo was always fairly dark and grim, Diablo 3 it looks like they threw in some bright cheery colours where-ever possible; even inside a crypt.

From the short amount of time I played it though, I miss throwing stat points onto something, I miss shoving points into a skill to boost it up. - They dumbed it down in other words, everything is linear as far as character building goes.

I also dislike the always-on internet connection requirement, but I guess it's fairly normal this day and age.

And... Again, Where is my stinking Eyefinity support Blizzard? I hate playing games at only 1920x1080.

The plus side though is that, Diablo 1 and 2's story was pretty crap, Blizzard have done some great strides in improving the lore and story it seems, their is bit more interaction with the characters this time around as well, not to mention audio logs/books to add more depth to the story telling.

The game is also very light on the system requirements, it will even run on a sun-dial, again nothing unexpected with Blizzard. But it is lighter on the system than StarCraft 2 which is very CPU heavy in large battles.

Blizzard are playing it safe with Diablo 3, nothing really new or ground breaking, much like StarCraft 2.
But, that's also not a bad thing, Diablo 2 and StarCraft 1 were highly regarded games and easily some of the best games in their respective genre's, so it makes sense to stick with something that works and build on it.

It's a definite buy for me.

1. When starting up a bnet 2.0 game, there should be a dropdown menu asking what you want to play and which server you want to play on. Like this:

Single player, LAN, USEast, USWest, East Asia, West Asia, AUS, EUREast, EURWest, so on and so forth.

2. See number 1.