Diablo III Hands-On - The Demon Hunter
We jump right into the new ranged class announced at this year’s BlizzCon.
Blizzard announced the fifth and final character class for Diablo III at BlizzCon 2010, and not surprisingly, it's a ranged class called the demon hunter. When we jumped into the demo, we took a few seconds to check out some of the demon hunter's basic equipment. Her (only the female version of the class is available at the moment) equipment included dual crossbows, some fairly light armor, and a section to equip prayer beads. These beads function much like smaller trinkets, giving small bonuses to various attributes such as accuracy, and several can be equipped at once. Later in the demo, we found some really nice slotted armor and some other nice items to beef up our demon hunter. As far as attacks and skills go, there were quite a few available early on, giving us a pretty good taste of how a demon hunter can hold her ground when the enemies start piling up.
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The vault enables the demon hunter to perform cartwheels and other such speedy gymnastics maneuvers to evade enemies as well as any traps that might be present in a level. It's not a free skill, however--it takes quite a bit of mana, so you have to make a choice in some tough situations: Do you use your mana for some of your attack skills and try to fight your way out, or do you try to vault away, regroup, and potentially risk grabbing the attention of more foes? Thankfully, we discovered some new skills after gaining a level, so we didn't have to answer that question too often. Upon entering the skill menu, we saw options for grenades, a fan of knives, a spike trap, and a couple of others, but what caught our eye was the purchase-new-skill option, which opened up the multishot skill. Given how useful it was in Diablo II, we went with the multishot--an attack that showers a barrage of arrows in the general direction of a target. We initially started using it in combination with the entangling shot, but later found that the bola’s ability to also slow down enemies made it a better partner.
We were using all of these skills and attacks in the context of a mission to confront King Leoric--a name that should sound immediately familiar to those who played the original Diablo, in which he was also known as the Skeleton King. But first, we had to travel through the Halls of Agony, a dungeon filled with numerous torture devices, fire pits, massive guillotines, and all kinds of enemies ready to do horrible things to you. In fact, there was quite a diverse range of creatures in this rather imposing dungeon, including hulking demon-like foes. But the ones that gave us the most trouble, at least initially, were the more powerful zealots that were capable of teleporting, making it difficult to completely evade them. We also encountered some zombie-like enemies, which--when we used our bola attack against them--caused them to burst into two, but the torso was still alive and attacking.
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Unfortunately, that's where our brief time with the demo ended. We didn't reach the final encounter with Leoric (yet), but we did get a pretty good feel for the demon hunter class. It feels a little more defensively oriented in the early going, but a quick peek at some of its later skills revealed that a much more offensively minded strategy is also certainly possible. Either way, we're eager to jump into the demo a little more and see what else we can discover.
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