Hydra's Claw

As everybody surely knows, Diablo 3 went live on Tuesday, March 15th. Since there's no official clan support in D3, this site will serve as the central hub for clan activities. We can use this site as a way to organize events and negotiate trades.

I encourage everybody to get registered and use the forums. Any suggestions on how to improve the usefulness of the site are welcome.

Today a new version of the D3 Beta is being released. It includes skill runes, and will re-enable gold in the Auction House! It also completely reworks the levels at which skills are unlocked for all classes, and adds several new proc enchantments. If you don't already know, a proc effect is something that has a chance to happen on hit. So for example, a knockback proc is a chance to incur a knockback on hit.

I'm pretty psyched about messing with skill runes, and it will be interested to see if new skills are playable now that everything has been readjusted.

Unfortunately Blizzard keeps pushing back the "outage" time by 2 hours at a time. So although the outage started around noon, it won't be over until at least 11 pm. At least...

Oh, Blizzard!

I got in the D3 closed beta last Thursday. Woot!

The beta is pretty limited, but all five classes are playable. The max level is 13, which is a fairly good sample of each class' play style, but only unlocks approximately a third of the active skills for each.

The beginning of the game includes a plot that goes all the way back to Diablo. The boss of the beta is King Leoric! The boss fight feels much more like a major encounter, although they took out the player insta-deaths you may remember from the original videos.

Expand this article to read shitloads more about my impressions of the beta.

This says it all:
Battle.net thread

The forum is back online. I'm sticking with an integrated Drupal forum this time, since bridges are nasty. We're at Drupal Camp this weekend, so I may make some additional updates/modifications to the site in the near future.

I had to deactivate the forum because it was being spammed with pornbots. Eventually I'll put up a better forum, but not for a while. Diablo 3 is still at least a year away. At some point within that year I'll be revamping the site and putting up a new forum.

Meanwhile, Starcraft 2 Beta is coming to a close. In two months, SC2 goes retail. I hope some of you will join me in enjoying the long-overdue sequel to one of Blizzard's greatest games.

As you may have already noticed, we've moved! Thanks to Prof Cornbread, our new primary URL will be d3clan.com. You can still visit the site by visiting any of our other URLs, however.

I've taken this opportunity to make some major site changes. We have a new forum system installed (phpbb3) that can be backed up separately from the rest of the site (to prevent another data wipe if something goes wrong in Drupal). The new forum has some nice added features, so I hope you'll enjoy the upgrade!

I'll get the rest of the pictures/stories up at a later point in time. The forum is live! Don't mind the construction while I'm tweaking it.