Note: all screenshots open in a new window.  Every attempt has been made to keep the report plot-spoiler free.  I am aware the screenshots are dark; apparently, it doesn't save my gamma rating with the shot, because it's not THAT dark as I'm playing.

I've expanded my playing experience to include the Amazon and the Necromancer.  The variety in the characters is impressive, I'll admit.  Even two characters of the same class can be wildly different in skills, equipment, and effective playing styles.

I had hoped to have some PvP testing done for this report, but it'll have to wait until next time.  Instead, in this report I'll discuss the party system and cooperative play in depth based on my experiences thus far.

Ah, beta testing.  Also known as crash testing, where as of late I've been having numerous game crashes based upon trouble loading .wav files in the game.  At least it's giving Blizzard lots of juicy stack information when the game bites it.  Every time you crash, Diablo II writes a debug.txt file much like the .ERR files in Diablo 1.  This can be sent in to Blizzard rather easily.  I also encountered a bug with some other players in that a private passworded game at some point became public, and public players began to join!  Go figure.  We theorized it was due to a small problem at game creation, but were unable to reproduce it...

But, on to gameplay.  I've noticed a few discussions on various Diablo forums, Claudio's especially, about PKing, hostile mode, and co-oping.  I've generally stayed out of those discussions as I wanted to get more experience with things.  The party system in Diablo II is interesting, as a party works as a team on multiple levels...

1) Items in the shops are shared.  If you're in Akara's inventory screen and another player is buying/selling items with her, you can actually see the items leave and get placed there.  This means if you have a potion hog in your group, you could find yourself potionless.  But it also means that a group has to play carefully, lest the town becomes dry.

2) The more characters are in the game, the harder the monsters become.  Monsters get their stats beefed up as more people enter a game.  This only makes sense, but from what I've found the increase isn't enough.  More on that later.

3) PK'ing can be quite a bit more difficult than in Diablo I, especially when you factor out cheating, which has yet to surface in the game, and you consider the level lock on games.  A level 30 character can't join a game of level 1's if they put a level lock on it preventing characters above and below X number of character levels from joining.  Since hostile status can only be declared in town, it slightly removes the backstabbing aspect of PK'ing, and creates a higher "dueling" status to a fight.  A gamer can count on a good second or two of warning even for the fastest portal jumper, which is plenty of time to run away or to get psyched for battle.  Also, there is no MK'ing in Diablo II.  The only thing you can possibly lose is some gold and some pride.  Even if monsters swarm your corpse, a new game can be started and your corpse will be in town.  So, in my opinion, the cheesy aspect of PK'ing has been removed rather well.  If I'm in a public game and someone's looking for a fight, I think I'd enjoy the diversion.

PKing is always a hot topic, I know.  In my opinion, Blizzard has handled it pretty well.  Some would like the option totally removed; but you know, if someone wants to be a jerk in your game, there are other ways to do it than through simple PK'ing.  Removing PK'ing won't stop the "jerk factor" that is ever-present on the Internet and Internet games.

4) Experience points are shared completely through a party.  However, there are a few rules.  For one thing, you only get points if you're in the same "area" as the party, with area defined as a "level."  It's difficult to define a level in D2 since each Act is one gigantic level with instant loading times between areas.  However, in order to prevent cheesy "tanking," the amount of shared experience apparently goes down as the difference in level of characters goes up.  For example, a level 15 character tanking for a level 1 in a really difficult area of Act 1 won't give the level 1 character as much experience as the level 15.  Exact values are unknown, and the cutoff level for when shared experience starts dropping is also unknown, but the difference gets more dramatic as the character imbalance increases.

5) Paladin auras effect the whole party, as long as the party members stay near the Paladin.  This makes a Paladin a vital addition to any party, which plays into Das Regard's Protectorate Paladin strategy - Paladins quickly become every other character's best friend.  Auras also apply to purchased NPC's and Necromancer minions.

So, returning to point 2.  What makes the characters in Diablo II so interesting is their drastically different gameplay styles.  They bring about weaknesses and strengths in each character.  The Sorceress is very, very weak, and can wind up being quite the health potion guzzler if she's not very careful about staying away from monsters.  I can see many newbies getting frustrated with her.  My experiences as a naked mage apply very readily to her.  She can't take very many hits at all, and without a healing spell or Mana Shield (they don't exist in Diablo II), she needs to run a lot.  But that's just one character.  The problems arise when a co-op team is assembled.  While the monsters are tougher, they aren't made tough enough.  I have to keep telling myself that it's really only Act 1 in normal difficulty, and I hope that they truly make Hell difficulty live up to its billing as "suicidal to try solo."

What happens in a co-op session is that the power of a party isn't doubled when another character class entered, it's more of an exponential increase.  Take a party of all five classes and they'll be nigh indestructible.  Each class can cover for the others' weaknesses quite well in most situations.

So is the game too easy?  I'd have to ask someone who's never played Diablo before.  The penalty for death is near nothing.  All you lose is some gold, a percentage based on how much you're carrying and how much is in your stash, one that is never above 20% (yes, you lose money in your stash). Even if you can't get back to your corpse, it'll appear in town in the next game - an understandable design decision based on the obvious problem of ISP drop or other issues of lag and crashing causing the loss of months' work of equipment collection.  We can't just back up our characters if they are Realm characters.  Blizzard effectively does it for you.

I'm looking forward to Nightmare and Hell difficulties.  To me, normal seems just too easy, but I know that I (as well as most anyone reading this report) am quite an experienced Diablo 1 player, so it's old hat.  The other two difficulties will penalize you with experience loss when you die, and Blizzard has been promising that they'll be tough.  I hope so.  I get the general impression that Normal difficulty Act 1 is a "warmup" for the game, and that the truly juicy monsters are waiting for the latter portion of the game.  We all know that the church levels in Diablo 1 are only a challenge in three areas: the Butcher, King Leoric, and masses of skeleton archers.  In Diablo II Act 1, there are a handful of tough spots as well, but if you play in a group I think you'll find them to be much less daunting.  If all you had to play in Diablo 1 was the church on normal difficulty, what would you conclude?  I say let's hold off the judgments until we see more...as if you won't be buying the game anyway.  :)

But, here's some juicy screenshots.  Thought I was holding out on you, huh?

Equipment: Some unique items.  Gull, Spirit Hide, and the first set item I've found: Arctic Furs.  Set items are ones which will give you a massive bonus if you find and equip every one from that set.  What the bonus from the Arctic line would be, I have no idea.  But I'd bet it's a bonus to resistance.  Here's a normal suffix that brought a smile to my Sorceress' face.  Speed kills, and it is very much to a Sorceress' advantage to move fast.  It's also funny watching my Sorceress outrun other characters in the 40 yard dash.

So here's some shots from a party game I just had tonight.  Five characters, five different classes.  Here's the group getting acquainted.  I'm the Necromancer, of course, Boltholomew.  Boy, did he ever have a fun time.  With the studly Barbarian and Paladin protecting me, I was able to summon minions, kick back, and pop a brewskie while they cleaned up.  In due time I had my own little army of skeletons.  And, speaking of army, can you guess how crowded things get when each character has their own NPC rogue and I am packing my own group of pets?  Can you find all 13 people in this shot?  Yes, 13 characters and minions working together rampaged the lands of the east for a time (there's one minion at the very bottom of the shot).

See the Paladin's aura helping everyone out in this shot, and if you like gore and destruction, I'd bet you'd slobber over this one.  Note the game data information at the top of both shots; I wonder if that option will be included in the final game or if it's beta-only.  It sure was interesting when the action on my screen got so intense I'd drop down to 5 frames per second - and that's on an Intel Pentium II 350 with a Voodoo3 3000 and 128 megs of RAM.  I wouldn't run out and buy that AMD 1Ghz chip though; Blizzard's working on it.  The game slowdowns occur when you have lots of people in the game.  When playing solo I'd rarely drop below 30.

And here's something new: traps which fire continuously at you.  Something like a turret, this "Gargoyle Trap" would shoot firebolts at me every 10 seconds or so.  It actually took me a moment or two to figure out where they were coming from.  However, since I'm mobile and it's not, it falls rather easily.

Other quick gaming notes:
An acquaintance discovered that the little blue gemstone in the middle of the chat interface of Diablo II could be clicked on.  When doing so, the message "Gem Activated" or "Gem Deactivated" would appear in the chat window.  We couldn't figure out what it was supposed to do.  Perhaps an unimplemented feature?

When Blizzard has to take their game server (BetaWest) down, they tell you through the account name Diablo.  It seems funny seeing Diablo suddenly speak to you through red text "Sorry, gotta take it down a sec."

Getting all five characters together and then having them repeatedly press the NumPad key 0 to yell for help over and over is pretty hilarious.  Ok, you hate me now, sorry.  "He's got the beta and he amuses himself with THAT?"  The characters actually do yell for help; imagine if you will that the default 4 hotkeys of F9 through F12 in Diablo were audio and not text.  I would have assigned a key to "retreat," but Blizzard didn't.  

Being able to bind skills to both left and right mouse buttons is fantastic, but takes some getting used to.  For 3 years I've been used to left click = walking and attacking, right click = spells.  Now left click can = spells if I want.  A Sorceress with Ice Bolt on her left mouse button and Fireball on her right can pack a major one-two wallop.  The natural disadvantage is that you instinctively figure you can left click on a monster to physically attack it and you wind up casting spells.

The Trading Interface works now; when in town, you can directly trade with another player by simply asking them if they want to do it (an option when you left click on them).  Two inventory windows open and you throw your items into the other player's box.  When both players agree to the trade, it happens and the trade screen closes.  Very handy!

It became obvious to me quickly why the Amazon was the first character done by Blizzard.  She's very much the "jack-of-all-trades" character, one with skills that are warrior-ish (such as adding to critical hit percentage), mage-ish (cool passive skills and spells added to weapons) and archer-rogue-ish (lots of bow improvements, multiple shots, etc).  You could play her in many different ways depending on the skill tree allocation.  The other characters in the game seem to be variations on the Amazon, by becoming stronger in some areas and weaker in others.  This is a very broad generalization, of course, but suffice to say that if you like the versatility of the rogue in Diablo 1, you will love the Amazon.  She's a one-size-fits-all character.

I hope to get a lot of gaming/testing done this weekend, so expect a nice report coming soon.  Those of you going to a certain meet on Saturday might see me stop by to answer any questions you have.