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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 Wizard was a great deal of fun, and is both the most familiar and most challenging of the characters to new players. The Male Wizard was a playable character this year, and picking the gender was the easiest of a player's decisions, since the Wizard had a dizzying array of offensive skills and spells. New characters began at level 12, with a variety of offensive, defensive, and passive skills already selected and hotkeyed. (This helped players get right to it, rather than wasting their limited play time setting up their character.) Wizards had half a dozen offensive spells to start, all with radically different ranges, mana costs, casting rates, and damage types. Many more were available once your new wizard started to level up, and by level 14, as I finished clearing out the beta area, I had already filled my hotkeys and wanted more, as I tried to experiment with options as diverse as Spectral Blade, Explosive Blast, Magic Missile, Wave of Force, Arcane Orb, Charged Bolt, Frost Nova, Electrocute, and Energy Twister.
Of course you don't know what all of those do, but neither did I! New players to the Wizard are going to have a wild time trying out different builds, loading up different skills to see how they improve at higher levels, and using the game's planned respecing feature to change their skills around. I felt like I got a good flavor for how the other three characters played at the mid-levels, during my demo time. I spent an hour with the Wizard and felt like I'd hardly scratched the surface.|||Reading this and other class summaries is making me think that the Wizard is the most well built class in the game right now.
Nine low level active spells with some real variety possible in builds as opposed to the Barb or the WD skill set. And this is apparently not counting higher level stuff like Disintegrate, Slow Time, Blizzards, Meteors, and god knows what other great spells.
And the Barb has some annoying looking redundancy (Cleave with Slashing strike, Bash with Hammer of the Ancients), the WD's offensive options seem to be cut by the need to include curse and summon spells. The Wizard? Looks like pure multicolor fun. Here is to hoping other classes will be successfully brought up to Wizard's level in skill variety by the next big gameplay demonstration.
Also, I now officially can't decide whenever I want a LAZER Wizard or a KABLOOEY Wizard. Explosion looks like it has so much potential to be fun. I really hope it doesn't have a cooldown... Cooldown on the Meteor spell in LoD was the biggest heartbreak ever inflicted on me in a video game.|||Gosh, I'm sooo gona play the Wizard when D3 comes out
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