I've played three times today, around my work schedule, and I'll probably try again later tonight. Queue times were 38 minutes, 16 minutes, and then 44 minutes, and those seemed to be relatively accurate.

The actual game obviously has iterated on a lot from Diablo 3, in a good way, in my opinion. I'm playing a Rogue so far, level 10, and the skills, movement, dodge-roll etc. feel pretty good, although I feel like the Rogue AoE up to level 10 is basically shit. Your only good ranged 'aoe' is the penetrating arrow, which is actually amazing, but it's 30 resource out of your 100 max. Caltrops aren't bad, but the cooldown is around 8 seconds? 10? The game looks amazing, animations seem extremely well done, every NPC that has more than 1 flavor dialogue has full face motion for their lines.

I probably shouldn't even bother talking about potential balance, it's too early in the life of the game, and too limited in what we're actually seeing. Melee seems rough, I did get stun-locked or frozen-locked a few times and only barely managed to escape with some of the rogue dashes + the dodge-roll, along with potion use. Whenever I find a decent melee AoE that still generates resource on the rogue, that should change, perhaps. I did encounter some players in the open world portion, who were apparently level 20 about an hour after the beta went live, unless they kept their characters from the previous beta? Either way, Sorcerers seem strong as fuck at low levels, nice AoE farming class, just like D2.

Definitely an AAA experience in terms of visuals, audio, and the overall fit and finish of the game, as well as the cutscenes, of which there seem to be full Blender pre-rendered ones (obviously) as well as in-engine scenes that seem to use your character with his/her current gear, and still look amazing. Climbing, Jumping gaps, sneaking through cracks (to load between zones?) looks awesome. Lots of purposely nostalgic sounds and sights in the game, which I did enjoy, I hate to admit. Hopefully I'll get time tonight to take a more leisurely look at the crafting and so forth, it was a little ambiguous whether it was more useful to sell junk for straight gold, or break everything down for resources, assuming I ever get some decent blueprints.

I think I'll pre-order the vanilla version, I don't care about an extra mount enough to spend an extra $20, at least at the moment. I believe there is an incentive to get to level 20 with one character in the beta, to get the stupidly gorgeously rendered wolf pup backpack, that said, in about maybe 3 hours or so of total playtime so far, I am already level 10, and not really speeding through the beta in any sort of rush.

Respecs are 'free' until level 15, at which point you start getting charged 'a lot.' Although I did notice a price pop-up around level 8 or 9, for like 2-3 gold per point respec? Not sure if that's a bug or the price it'll be at Level 15. Also, they kinda cribbed from Grim Dawn, in terms of their skill tree. You cannot remove points earlier in the tree if they are needed to unlock another node in the tree, to prevent people from having all of their skill points in the late game uber skills, I guess. I know I've played games that handled that aspect in a more user-friendly way, but it still works. The view of the skill tree is annoying as fuck, however. It must be a console concession. Same for the lack of a full screen overlay translucent map, I think, it's either full map OR play the game, which is a marked departure from all previous Diablos(except maybe Immortal? Never played that)

Anyway, it's looking good overall, looks like a nice relaxing (to maybe slightly tense vs some bosses) ARPG, a nice throwback from everything being a Dark Souls clone these days.