Diablo III: Review And Hands-On With The Monk

The new character class the Monk can only described as a skilled holy warrior. His huge buddha beads around his neck gives you a slight Shaolin monk-esque feel. His fighting style is lightning fast combo based attacks.

Attacks tested first hand:

Inner Sanctuary - Casts a seal onto the ground creating a AoE that prevents creatures for stepping into. In effective toward ranged units, useful for crowd controlling while soloing.

Seven Sided Strike - Blinks into enemies and attacks all enemies within a certain area. Very effective, but mana draining. This was one of the few moves that does not have a stackable combo. It was a move demonstrated several times in gameplay footage to show his speed.

Exploding Palm - Stackable strikes onto one enemy that increases in damage each combo. As the name suggests the end result is messy. Very effective for clearing grouped enemies. Weak against too many fast enemies.

Blinding Visage - Explosion of light that temporarily blinds enemies. Excellent crowd controller. I personally used it a lot after casting Inner Sanctuary.

Crippling Wave - Effects enemies by weakening their attacks and slowing their movement. Can be useful on tough mobs.

Impenetrable Defense - The monk spins his weapon forming a sphere deflecting all attacks. It was somewhat useful. When being barraged by a load of fast units, the second the spells ended it was face melting time. Complete avoidance of their attack was a far better strategy.

Personal Impressions of the Demo:

The difference between this years demo and last years was quite immense. Last year they debuted 3 classes and some ridiculous spells and abilities. Everything was packed in there and every skill was over-powered. You were also able to do multiplayer.

This year there was more open space for you to explore and it was single player. Lack of multiplayer made the single player more difficult as well as changed the pacing of the game. Last year everything was extremely fast. Since the balancing of the abilities per level is further in development, it requires a lot more investment of time to truly experience the demo in it’s entirety. Due to the press pass, I was able to demo the game longer than regular attendees. I have no idea how deep the regular demoers got to experience in a mere 20 minutes.

They definitely made this demo much harder. I found myself dying more than I’d like to admit. The Desert Dervishs kicked my butt so badly. The only strategy I could develop was blink in with a Seven Sided Strike, runaway to regain mana, rinse and repeat.

I felt that in the first demo, because of the overload of super abilities and addition of runes, more customized game styles could be experienced. This demo felt extremely one tracked and a limited amount of useful abilities. The missing rune system maybe one of the reasons as to why I felt this way.

All in all, I didn’t quite feel as satisfied with the demo as last year’s. But then again, last year’s was information overload, and I can’t help but feel that this years monk is a little too similar to Diablo 2’s assassin class. Hopefully, his abilities will evolve and take better shape into a more unique class. No rainbow Diablo 3 T-shirts this year, we’ll all have to wait for those shirts and the announcement date.