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The forty-eight episode of The Diablo Podcast features Flux, Wolfpaq, and The Eliminator talking about all things Blizzcon. Both the guests were at the show, it was the first Blizzcon for both, and they loved it. They've got general reactions to Blizzcon, tales of Diablo III developer encounters, and more. General Blizzcon chat aside, the bulk of the show focuses on the new PvP Arena demo, which each of the guests played at least a dozen times. They both experimented with all five character classes and tried out a wide-variety of strategies, and this podcast shares tons of brand new info on high level skills, runestone effects, strategy and teamwork in the Arena (or not), class power rankings (you'll be surprised by which class both guys think is the strongest in PvP), and much more. It's one of the most informative podcasts ever, much though it vexes me to admit that when I'm not at all the source of the info. After the podcast, The Eliminator used the character builder on Blizzard's site to recreate all five classes, as they were playable in the demo. Check out these links for the skills and runestones each class was set up with, in the pre-made level 60 characters available in the Blizzcon 2011 Arena. Barbarian Demon Hunter Monk Witch Doctor Wizard On top of this podcast, we've got a lot more coming up on the PvP demo, including more highly-detailed hands-on reports, full details on all the skills/runes in use, strategy discussion, and more. Check back for that later today/this week. The Diablo Podcast Episode Guide in the wiki provides easy navigation with a short summary of every show. Listen and subscribe through iTunes. View video versions of all The Diablo Podcasts on You Tube, via our all-encompassing Diablo3Inc channel.

The forty-sixth episode of The Diablo Podcast is a conversation with Fluddastud, one of the first wave of Diablo 3 Beta F&F testers. Fluddastud has posted numerous screenshots and gameplay movies, and as much of the beta as he's played, he knows its ins and outs very well. Tons of first hand info covered in this one, so if you want to know more about the game, don't miss it. Topics covered are too numerous to list. They include how he got into the F&F beta, his first reaction to D3, his favorite characters for full play throughs and for Clvl 13 item hunting, game balance, nasty boss mods, hardcore mode, the economy, the game UI, B.net game creation and friend features, SP vs. MP benefits, magic find issues, bugs and technical issues, and much more. The Diablo Podcast Episode Guide in the wiki provides easy navigation with a short summary of every show. Listen and subscribe through iTunes. View video versions of all The Diablo Podcasts on You Tube, via our all-encompassing Diablo3Inc channel.

The forty-fifth episode of The Diablo Podcast features Flux, Wolfpaq, and The Eliminator discussing the skills and runestone effects. Now that all the skills (currently in the game) and all of the runestone effects have been revealed, what are the coolest ones? What are the weirdest ones? Which are clearly still works in progress? The guys run down all the most interesting tidbits for all five classes with the usual mixture of game info, analysis, and humor. Apologies in advance to Witch Doctor fans and hot dog-craving Buddhist monks. Refer to the class skill pages and rune details for full details: Barbarian skills and rune effects. Demon Hunter skills and rune effects. Monk skills and rune effects. Witch Doctor skills and rune effects. Wizard skills and rune effects. The Diablo Podcast Episode Guide in the wiki provides easy navigation with a short summary of every show. Listen and subscribe through iTunes. View video versions of all The Diablo Podcasts on You Tube, via our all-encompassing Diablo3Inc channel.

The forty-third episode of The Diablo Podcast is a conversation with Thomus, one of the busiest of the Diablo 3 Beta testers. Thomus has played over forty hours of Diablo III in the past week+ and has leveled all five classes to the maximum level (13) possible in the beta, and he's got anecdotes and experience with everything in the current version of Diablo III. Topics covered are too numerous to list, but here's a partial list: Thomus' gaming background, how he got into the F&F beta, his first reaction to D3, his favorite characters for full play throughs and for Clvl 13 item hunting, game balance, nasty boss mods, hardcore mode, the Arena, the economy, the current failings of the Auction House, the game UI, B.net game creation and friend features, SP vs. MP benefits, magic find issues, bugs and technical issues, and much more. A few of the things I found most interesting in this one: Thomus doesn't think the is working well. Gold is WAY too abundant at this early level with no sign of sufficient gold sinks, and he thinks long term trading will be for or other items, with gold too plentiful to hold value. This is partially due to the ease of and selling items without ever returning to town, especially since everything you salvage yields common scraps, so there's quickly no reason to salvage any white items, and soon after that no reason even to salvage blues. (Since you have way more of the common materials than you need.) So players end up quick selling all that junk with the Cauldron of Jordan, and the gold adds up. He stressed something I've noticed in the gameplay movies; that are really rare. Even with , it's almost unheard of for any boss to drop a rare item, much less a legendary. (Chests do, but only very seldom.) The first kill for each character is the source of 99% of the rares in the beta. Diablo 3's difficulty is exactly like Diablo 2's. Very easy 99% of the time, with the only danger coming from occasional nasty . That's ironic, since avoiding that game style was the whole point in the no-potions, , combat-system overhaul the D3 developers implemented. Let's hope things change later in the game. The is pretty bad now, with inadequate sorting and searching options. It's hard to find something you want with just a few hundred testers. Imagine when there are millions of people playing and flooding the AH? Thomus even shares an interesting tip about why it's far faster and more profitable to play in an MP game. And no, the answer has nothing to do with the fact that more people can team up to kill the monsters more quickly. All that and MUCH more covered in this episode, and we'll have some more Beta Tester interviews coming up later this week, plus other podcast features. The Diablo Podcast Episode Guide in the wiki provides easy navigation with a short summary of every show. Listen and subscribe through iTunes. View video versions of all The Diablo Podcasts on You Tube, via our all-encompassing Diablo3Inc channel.

The forty-second episode of The Diablo Podcast covers the Diablo III economy from a financial, analytical, commodities broker-type perspective. Azzure, our new site chief economist, is heading up a new site for IncGamers, one that will cover the Diablo III economy and Auction House. Topics include the purpose and function of our new Diablo 3 Markets & Economy site, which Azzure and his economics degree will be heading up for IncGamers. We also discuss how Real Money Trading will work, and as Azzure explains, it doesn't matter if players want to use it or not, since the gold and money economies are linked, like any two currencies in a forex. Even if you refuse to use money, other players will just convert money to gold (or vice versa) and buy or sell on either type of auction house. Those are the people who will make the real profits with the Auction House, buying low and selling high like commodities traders, and making a nickle on 500 sales a day. And they will laugh at even the mightiest item finder's "Windforce a week" profits. Other economy issues covered in this podcast include gold sinks, gold as a viable currency, barter, the huge differences between WoW's and D3's economy (no one trades for items in WoW since everything worth using binds), character sales, botting in Diablo III (should be much harder to do than in WoW or D2), tools for players to track economy movement over time, and much more. The Diablo Podcast Episode Guide in the wiki provides easy navigation with a short summary of every show. Listen and subscribe through iTunes. View video versions of all The Diablo Podcasts on You Tube, via our all-encompassing Diablo3Inc channel.

The fortieth episode of The Diablo Podcast is part two of a two part show (see part 1), in which we put Hardcore mode under the microscope. This show concludes our Hardcore discussion, and includes conversation about the Hardcore community and how it's generally more co-op than Softcore, corpse looting and life without a PK switch, trading and the likely impact of no RMT in HC, the likely differences in builds between HC and SC in D3 (which should be noticeable, since HC chars can't just manually allocate more Vitality points in D3), and the Hardcore Arena. The Diablo Podcast Episode Guide in the wiki provides easy navigation with a short summary of every show. Listen and subscribe through iTunes. View video versions of all The Diablo Podcasts on You Tube, via our all-encompassing Diablo3Inc channel.

The thirty-ninth episode of The Diablo Podcast is part one of a two part show, in which we put Hardcore mode under the microscope. I played a lot of HC in D2, Xanth is our new Hardcore columnist, and we're joined by Woflpaq, whose entire D2 HC experience was a Clvl 19 Necromancer. That balance is on purpose, of course, to get a variety of opinions on the issue. This is part of the show, since there was so much to talk about. In this one we cover a little bit of new Beta info, before going all hella hardcore. Issues debated include: The general differences between HC and SC play style, character design, and public games. How different it is to make a new HC character now, compared to during the glory days of D2C and D2X. The basic philosophical differences between HC and SC player mindset. What's the goal when making a new character? Is a SC character only about the end game boss running? Do HC players enjoy the journey more than just a rush to the destination? How will the shared stash affect the gameplay in Diablo III, and will HC characters exploit it to switch away their best gear in case of danger? Is ten character slots enough for Hardore players, and will Diablo III include some sort of in-game Hardcore Graveyard? Will there be special HC-only achievements? Is the banner system distinction enough for HC characters? And how about a "never died" achievement for Softcore characters? Is the Inferno difficulty a big deal, or just more of the same for a Hardcore player? Those topics and more are covered on this show. Part two, to be posted tomorrow (now online), will cover the Hardcore community, co-op and the removed PK switch, differences in character builds in HC and how the removal of manual stat points will impact HC builds, and (of course) the HC Arena. The Diablo Podcast Episode Guide in the wiki provides easy navigation with a short summary of every show. Listen and subscribe through iTunes. View video versions of all The Diablo Podcasts on You Tube, via our all-encompassing Diablo3Inc channel.

The thirty-seventh episode of The Diablo Podcast is now online for your listening pleasure. On this show, Flux, Neinball, and DiablosMinion run down a variety of recent topics. Could Blizzard be planning to secretly sell items for $ via the Auction House? Should Legendary items always have special graphics, and is that going to be a bad thing, given how over the top the Inferno armor looks? Why does anyone think ten characters are enough for Diablo 3? What was best (and worst) in the recently-leaked class skill movies? All that plus Flux's grand theory of Blizzard fanboy defensive rage. The Diablo Podcast Episode Guide in the wiki provides easy navigation with a short summary of every show. Listen and subscribe through iTunes. View video versions of all The Diablo Podcasts on You Tube, via our all-encompassing Diablo3Inc channel.

The thirty-sixth episode of The Diablo Podcast is now online for your listening pleasure. Once again it's Elly and Flux running down the news items of the past week, with our customary wit, insight, and occasional bad impressions. Topics include Jay Wilson making the same (not so good) RMAH argument in every interview at Gamescom, Max Schaefer trolling D3 from Gamescom, the overwhelming fan approval of the Inferno difficulty level, the awesome new leaked skill and runestone display movies, growing a D3 beard, our new beta start countdown timer, and more. The Diablo Podcast Episode Guide in the wiki provides easy navigation with a short summary of every show. Listen and subscribe through iTunes. View video versions of all The Diablo Podcasts on You Tube, via our all-encompassing Diablo3Inc channel.

The thirty-fifth episode of The Diablo Podcast is now online for your listening pleasure. On this show, Flux, Neinball, and The Eliminator jump into the fire and fan the flames of this burning issue... INFERNO. Inferno is Hell to the second power; Acts 1-4 repeated again, but with higher level monsters, new and more dangerous random boss properties, and the best possible items in the game. Inferno is said to be a "flat" difficulty, with Act One about as hard/rewarding as Act Four, to encourage players to use the entire game, rather than just running the most rewarding, not-too-hard areas in Act Four. Can Blizzard pull this off with any kind of balance? Won't one or two areas always be the easest/tastiest, and thus crowded with min/maxing players?

The thirty-fourth episode of The Diablo Podcast is now online for your listening pleasure. Neinball and The Eliminator join Flux for a dual show; with 30 minutes of one topic, and 20 of another. The first half-hour of this show covers D3's early game structure, including the story, quests, and general presentation, based on the detailed information revealed during the Beta demo. There's a great deal more story and interconnection between the quests in the full game than we'd seen previously during the Blizzcon demos, but there might actually be too much? Several of the people I talked to from the media event in July said they felt a bit overly-guided, cattle chute-style, through early Act One, and that they hoped for more allowed exploration later in the game. I hope so too, and think it's just that Bliz has the early game set up on training wheels to guide noobs through without confusion. Then again, both Neinball and Eliminator are long time WoW players, and they testify that the entire game in WoW these days, level 1-85, is basically the same sort of "led by the nose" character/quest progression. Might that be a sign of D3's overall design concept? The second half starts at the 30:50 mark, when the topic changes to the skills system. All of the new changes to skills are covered, including six max skills, the new tiers when skills are enabled, the removal of skill points, the big changes to traits, and more. Will skills scale up enough to feel different? Will freespecs end "builds" since players can shift their skill points around perpetually? Can cooldowns make higher level skills balanced but still powerful? Can Blizzard keep the levels difficult, if players can always change their skills to the most optimal for a given area? The Diablo Podcast Episode Guide in the wiki provides easy navigation with a short summary of every show. Listen and subscribe through iTunes. View video versions of all The Diablo Podcasts on You Tube, via our all-encompassing Diablo3Inc channel.

Elly and Flux run down the news items of the past week, with our customary wit, irreverence, and Flux's inappropriate jokes. Topics include the newly-announced Inferno difficulty level, new screenshots and over-blown character armor looks from Gamescom, street art in Germany, Real Money Trading issues, Diablo III's death penalty, and more As usual, the YouTube version is basically a video feature, with numerous video clips, photos of the issues under discussion, game artwork and screenshots, and much more. The Diablo Podcast Episode Guide in the wiki provides easy navigation with a short summary of every show. Listen and subscribe through iTunes. View video versions of all The Diablo Podcasts on You Tube, via our all-encompassing Diablo3Inc channel.

The thirty-second episode of The Diablo Podcast is now online for your listening pleasure. On this show, Flux moderates a debate/discussion about Blizzard's controversial plans for a element to the Diablo III . The Diablo Podcast regular Wolfpaq supports the RMAH and thinks it will be a beneficial feature. TDP newcomer Nico opposes the RMAH and thinks it will corrupt the game and cause unpleasant real world considerations to intrude on what should be a fun gaming experience. Tune in to witness their fight to the death! This episode isn't exactly a debate, but both guests are given ample opportunity to make their cases on a wide variety of Auction House and economic issues. Topics covered include: RMT in the game is just wrong. People should use items they find themselves, or obtain with in-game goods. Not external resources. Should there be non-RMT servers? Other than Hardcore mode. Can the current state of D2 trading/economy be compared to D3, given all the duping and bots in D2? Will Diablo 3 maintain a functional gold-based economy? Is the always-online DRM requirement, and the lack of no-RMT servers, designed to force all players into the same RMT economy? Will high end items only be sold for $, thus forcing any player who wants to buy, sell, or trade them to use RMT? What will happen with the high level Hardcore economy? RMT via 3rd party sites; exactly the scenario Blizzard says they introduced the RMAH to prevent in D3? What happens shortly before a patch or expansion, when everyone knows a whole new tier of top end items will come in and upset the market values? What will Blizzard do if the RMAH doesn't take off and they don't meet their revenue projections? Listen for all the arguments, whichever side of the equation you're standing on. The Diablo Podcast Episode Guide in the wiki provides easy navigation with a short summary of every show. Listen and subscribe through iTunes. View video versions of all The Diablo Podcasts on You Tube, via our all-encompassing Diablo3Inc channel.

The thirty-first episode of The Diablo Podcast is now online for your listening pleasure. Once again it's Elly and Flux running down the news items of the past week, with our customary wit, irreverence, and Flux's inappropriate jokes. Topics include Diablo III's cinematics, item and experience sharing in parties, new secret ninja game screen photos, D3 at the imminent Gamescom expo, Max Schaefer's comments on D3's new controversial features, and more. This one runs a bit longer than our usual weekly news shows, since there was just so much to cover. Plus we ended up debating the issue of experience sharing and item drops in parties. Basically, Elly is much more forgiving than I when it comes to the issue of "do you have to be alive and present to get items when a boss pops?" I don't think it's asking too much that your character be, you know, alive... to get items. Elly countered with a what if you do 95% of the tanking work, die right at the end, and then the back row DHs and Wizards finish off Diablo while you're running back from the checkpoint. Don't you deserve the drop more than the others in the game? Probably, in video games as in real life, but deserves got nothing to do with it. Other topics include news about D3's Cinematics, the excellent new screenshots, the mysterious "Inferno" difficulty level/thingie, Max Schaefer's surprisingly supportive comments about D3's new features, and more. The Diablo Podcast Episode Guide in the wiki provides easy navigation with a short summary of every show. Listen and subscribe through iTunes. View video versions of all The Diablo Podcasts on You Tube, via our all-encompassing Diablo3Inc channel.

The thirtieth episode of The Diablo Podcast. In this episode we take a break from Diablo III to focus on another game, the upcoming free-to-play, dark fantasy MMORPG, Path of Exile. PoE's lead developer Chris Wilson joins Flux for an in-depth conversation about the game's innovative features, their financial plans to fund development through "ethical micro-transactions," the game's impending beta test, and much more. Besides the game feature info, II was curious to hear about the experience of making a game. PoE is Grinding Gear Game's first title, and as far as I know, many of the developers, including Chris, had never worked on a video game before. What's it been like to go from a fan of games to a developer? Dealing with the press? Meeting fans? Handling forum fights over nerfs in patches? Listen for insight into all of that. The Diablo Podcast Episode Guide in the wiki provides easy navigation with a short summary of every show. Listen and subscribe through iTunes. View video versions of all The Diablo Podcasts on You Tube, via our all-encompassing Diablo3Inc channel. Here's a newer quote from Chris, updating us on the first days of the Path of Exile beta test. We entered Beta this week, and it has been an awesome experience. Right now, the game servers are bustling with players who seem to be having a great time and are writing up some useful notes with their impressions and feedback. The game itself hasn’t run into any major technical issues, but we’ve ironically been struggling to keep the website up. Daily traffic has ramped up to 20 times our previous average now that we have tens of thousands of fans eager to play. We wanted to avoid swamping the game/patching servers by inviting users in waves, so we decided to trickle users in at a controllable rate. Our solution was to add a countdown timer to the Path of Exile site which invites a new user every (currently, but has been lower) 15 minutes. It shows who the last/next users to be invited are. Many fans seem to spend much of the day watching it count down to each new user. This “beta troll device” created a lot of controversy. Many people applauded the the novel approach, but a lot of fans really hated to see dozens of relatively quiet users get invited to the Beta for each prominent community member. After a lot of discussion with the community, we settled on having a second timer, which invites “veteran” community members who signed up before the recent Beta rush and actually posted on the forums. All in all, it’s really exciting as developers to see our game getting played. We really look forward to adding content, revamping systems and generally improving the game over the next few months!