I preordered my copy from JB - some friends went with EB Games. I'd be pretty surprised if most stores don't have copies on release day.

I preordered from JB, but got pissed at the delays and cancelled. I've been playing the beta and not overly impressed. Its like a diablo 2 reboot with better graphics and dumbed up ui.

Sounds good to me :)

Yeah it was pretty good until this last patch thats ont he way. Not sure how it will be after that.

Hmm, having not played the beta im unsure on how this impacts the game, is it positive or negative (Your thoughts)

I haven't played it since the last patch. But pre patch it was excellent. Post patch I think it will be very very dummed down and basically just be a loot fest.

In saying that the story looks good, I am just not a fan of all teh changes they have made, including some pre patch like the loss of skill tree's. It just feels too dumbed down.

It'll be good not to have to think and worry about stupid shit like skill trees etc.

A little bit over it TBH. Was it possible to respec?

What the? No you could not respec, well not till one of the later updates anyway.

Skill trees were how you made your character, you know YOURS. And not some generic here is a character go have fun.

Games might as well come with a max level char now, it seems all people want to do is loot.

the problem with skill trees was that most character types did not work at all until they reached a certain level.

and others worked well early on - but sucked hard at endgame.

it was a broken system.

All the more reason why I think they did the right thing.

I don't see how just giving everyone the same skills really avoids this? I mean you could just give everyone in skill trees a standard level of impact, for example at level x of the tree all skills are weighted the same.

Honestly - it's not as big a deal as people are making it out to be.

Instead of stopping in a dungeon to vendor or destroy your items, you take a 2-second cast portal back to town and use some vendors. It adds a bit of a break to the grind and as white drops are next to useless you aren't obliged to pick everything up to destroy/vendor for materials for crafting/gold (think grey items in WoW).

Regarding skills - the class has access to the entire tree but you can still customise your character enough. Choose your active abilities, choose your passive abilites, and each active ability can be runed up to 5 different ways to act differently. You could have 10 different wizard's that play differently. And unlike D2 where you basically pump all your points into a few abilities and ignore the rest, you can swap and change whenever you want by going back to town.

You can reset your skills everytime you go back to town? Like if mobs are frost immune, you can go respec fire or whatever (Dont think theres trees like that in d3, but just as an example)

Not sure about swapping between the different type of skills, I believe that requires going back to town though I haven't gotten that bit in the beta.

As for swapping regular skills you can do it on the fly now where ever you are but you have to wait 30 seconds before you can use the skill once you've swapped to it.

There is a pillar you come across in the game (and its in town) which will allow you to change your skills

This is the only way to change skills (unless its changed from when i was playing the beta, havent been on in a couple of weeks)