Everything Ever: The Diablo III Skill-Splurge

With the Diablo III beta looming at last, Blizzard have flung open their heavily-defended wrought iron gates of informational doom -allowing an unfettered browse of the various skills and modifiers on offer in their forthcoming hacky-slashy opus. This comes by way of a extensive Skill Calculator, with which you can both try to devise the ideal character build for you, or simply explore the full delights of the game's various abilities. And delights they are - if you're expecting D3 to offer subtle, incremental ramping up of skills, as per WoW, you're in for a treat. This, clearly, is a game that entirely embraces over-the-top, giganto-slaying.

THE NUMBERS. THE NUMBERS ARE SO BIG.

The really ludicrous boosts come from Rune socketing, which enables you to reshape an already-attained Skill in fairly dramatic ways. Some of this is simply statistical, such as the Barbarian gaining an absurd 700% armour increase for a few seconds after peforming his Leap Attack, while others change the whole light and sound show entirely. F'rinstance, instead of summoning his standard Plague of Toads, the Witch Doctor can instead summon one ma-ha-ha-ha-hassive toad that'll cheerily swallow enemies whole.

The uniting ethos behind them all is that the Rune boosts go further than you'd likely expect. Go have a play. I'm liking the sound of the Wizard, I think - whole lot of summonable fun on that one.

Oh, and there's also a big ol' guide to the various classes and skills here.