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Something Borrowed
New to the fight against the Brothers of Evil are the Assassin and the Druid.
Andariel vs. Clan of the Cave Bear |
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The Druid, cleverly disguised as a bear in the above picture, carries with him the power of nature. The Druid shares a good mix of skills between the Necromancer and the Sorceress, having a fair array elemental magic abilities, complemented by the ability to summon forest creatures. As an added bonus, the Druid can polymorph into a werewolf or a werebear, temporarily increasing his strength and resistances.
After coming off a campaign with the Necromancer, I felt right at home with the Druid's minion summoning skills. The ravens act as cheap guided missile attacks, while the wolves and bears are excellent melee performers. The Druid can also summon spirits and vines to fight with him. The Druid's elemental magic is also very functional, providing decent magical attacks that I didn't really have access to with the Necromancer. Blizzard unfortunately had to cut out the planned ability for the Druid to fly, but even without this, the Druid is still a very worthwhile character.
The Assassin, probably the more anticipated of the two new classes, is also an excellent class to pursue. With her martial arts skills and passive stealth abilities, she makes for an excellent melee character, but she also has a wide assortment of traps and projectiles to use as ranged weapons. The Assassin's standard weapon type is a set of wrist blades that she wields like Voldo from SoulEdge. The weapon stats say that wrist arms have a very slow attack speed, but in practice, the attack speed is just fine.
The wrist arms work best with the Assassin's charge attacks. The Assassin uses a set of attack skills where she fights with charge-up attacks. Once she charges up, she can use a finishing strike which does additional damage based on how much the Assassin has charged up. The process seems a bit confusing at first, but it works well in the end. Unfortunately, the Assassin is strong enough to take out most of her enemies with just a jab or two, so the usefulness of her strike techniques is limited, best applied to unique monsters and bosses.
Choices, choices... |
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What both of these characters suffer from, however, is the necessity to switch skills quickly and frequently. This generally involves mapping some of the skills to the F-keys, but even with that in mind, it becomes cumbersome to locate the function keys (Since most Diablo players are likely keeping their left hand on the Control/Alt/Shift area), hit the correct one, and then move your hand back. It takes a fair bit of coordination, and in the heat of battle (Which is where most of these skills are likely to be relied on), it's rather hard. It would've been nice if Blizzard could have made the option available to map a key to a skill, such that it would automatically trigger the skill when the key was pressed, without interfering with the current left- and right-mouse-button configurations. I would have greatly preferred such an option to the increased number of mappable hotkeys Blizzard put in.
>> Something White
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