D3 is live

Diablo 3 is up.  A lot of people have commented that the servers had all kinds of issues on the first day like being delayed for an hour, requiring emergency maintenance for an hour and not letting people log in a lot of the time.  This is pretty embarrassing for Blizzard since they had approximately a bazillion years to get it all right and set up properly; launch was sloppy but at least we are all playing fine now.

The game is awesome.  I am eager to see how my predictions for endgame stats work out; I was basing my predictions off of the level 60 versions of skills and figured that people would probably have 50k health and 5k Int/Str/Dex and I think I overestimated.  I currently have 5500 health in the middle of Nightmare and 900 Int so I doubt I will hit 50k/5k even with endgame gear.  I will get into that ballpark for sure though as the amount of stats on gear goes up exponentially and the amount of health you get per point of Vitality goes up too.

My guesses for the amount of Int we will have are probably too high because I figured that Soul Harvest should not give more than a 20% damage increase and that is certainly not reasonable given how the game has played out.  Right now Soul Harvest is a moderate sized AOE centered on me that gives a bunch of Int (Int gives bonus damage % equal to total Int.  100 Int = 100% more damage).  At level 60 it will be giving 150 Int for each target it hits up to 5 - 750 Int best case.  After playing a fair bit in Nightmare though I think that it isn't reasonable to math it out at a 5 stack since maintaining that isn't trivial at all both because hitting 5 targets is often hard or impossible and sometimes it can get you killed.  Keeping that in mind I think endgame Int/Dex/Str scores in the 1k-2k range is quite reasonable; Soul Harvest will still be a very big damage boost but it won't be ridiculous.

I have not yet had an opportunity to test out the truly broken Witch Doctor build with Vision Quest and Soul Harvest that is set up to use 5 abilities with cooldowns and one spammable attack spell.  Normally you absolutely have to have an ability with a practically zero mana cost to spam but if you can keep Vision Quest up you don't have to - you can spam your power spell constantly.  I don't know yet if this is going to be the best build because I have to see just how all the spells and runes play out but Soul Harvest is definitely super powerful right now.  Both abilities require a lot of setup and both have the potential to be totally nuts; the only way to know if the setup is feasible is to play a lot more.

One thing I found is that one of the basic mechanics of the Witch Doctor is totally unusable.  Zombie Dogs started out being very tough and ended up being pretty near useless - they weren't good tanks and they just died constantly.  This is pretty unfortunate because a large number of WD special abilities work with or rely on Zombie Dogs and if the Dogs continue to be as junk as they are then a large piece of the class simply doesn't function beyond the first half of normal - sort of like skeletons were in D2 at launch.  Maybe there is some scaling with difficulty level that I don't know about, but if there isn't then the 'summoner' build is pretty much dead.