I also had a good run with the game. It was a rainy Sunday here, so I just dumped some hours in to the game and maxxed out both a barb and a wizard. The barb was a bit more fun, very action based with loud shouts, flashy moves and bodies (or parts) flying around as he heaved his heavy weapons around. I can see this class being popular.
As for the wizard, he was quite good as well and could lay down some solid destruction. Lacking teleport though was a real drag.
I do feel like the game is dumbed down notably though. Rather than having a large number of mapped skills, you are essentially locked in to 4 keys and your right and left mouse button. For the beta (which only allowed you to get to lvl13) you could only use 2 of those 4, which made it even more limiting. I didn't like that very much as I liked to make use of lots of skills in D2.
Items weren't bad though. White items appear to be 100% useless as they only sold for 2 or 4G. Perhaps they will have some value later on, but I doubt it. All magic items were of some use though as you could blend them down to crafting items and in the beta at least crafted items were much better than what the average monsters were dropping. Will be interesting to see what the full version items roll out to be.
Maps were nice, you could either go for a stroll and see the sights (did that in a few single player games), or just cut to the chase and get right through it (did that in multiplayer games). Character variety is not great though as all builds get all the skills. So if there was a wizard of a certain level, you could pretty much predict the exact skills. Somewhat boring compared to the more diverse D2 builds. I suspect that there was be very little incentive to replay a character. Once you have done a wizard, you will probably have done all wizards.
anyways, enough ramble...
