Barbadus

Yeah another vote to Xsplit, super simple and efficient solution for live streaming. If you wanted to go completely free however, you could look into the rather antiquated method of using Adobe's Flash Media Encoder coupled with VHScrCap which also works great but is a bit more complex to set up since it designed to do plenty of other things besides streaming.

@myketuna: Nice! Upgrading/building up a new PC is always exciting. What kinda specs ya shooting for?

And yeah, barbarian is definitely loads of fun. Natural tanky-ness and just that extra over the top brutal edge he has with all his attacks make playing the barbarian super satisfying. He'll probably be my third class though since I have buddy rolling a barbarian already, figured it'd be nice to vary up the classes a bit.

@TaliciaDragonsong: Yeah the witch doctor, at least with the skills we're able to get to in beta, seemed to lack that satisfying UMPH that other classes have. Speaking of satisfying skills with UMPH though, I was loving the wizards Wave of Force which was decimating entire groups of lesser minions in a single shot. And it has a pretty crazy range. 200% weapon damage! AND a 60% slow! So goooood.

@MrMuscle: Nice nice. I unfortunately don't know where my Diablo 2 cd key is so I haven't loaded it back up at all though it may be for the best. I fear that the visual memory I have of the game is far different than how the game actually looks with it's what, max of 1024 x 768 resolution it had with the expansion? I feel it's best left in my memories, haha.

I also got in to Diablo 2 kinda late and only touched Diablo 1 at the occasional LAN party so my knowledge of Diablo lore is pretty weak too. I was rushing far too much in Diablo 2 trying to catch up to friends to really soak in the story. The Book of Cain has been a fun interesting read and has definitely helped me get caught up with what I only had a gist of at most.

@wmaustin55: Here are the min requirements that Blizzard has posted. They are quite low I'd say. Blizzard is well known for optimizing for a really wide range of systems usually.

PC:

• Fully-updated Windows® XP/Vista/7 with DirectX 9.0c
• Intel Pentium® D 2.8 GHz or AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 4400+ (or better)
• NVIDIA® GeForce® 7800 GT or ATI Radeon™ X1950 Pro (or better)
• 1 GB RAM (with Windows XP)or 1.5 GB RAM (with Vista or Windows 7)
• 12 GB available Hard Drive space, DVD-ROM drive (for retail disc versions only)
• Broadband Internet connection
• Video settings reaching a minimum resolution of 1024x768

Welp, I definitely enjoyed my time playing the beta. All the classes were enjoyable and interesting, enough so that I could see myself eventually wanting to have one of each class once the game is out. I'm having quite the internal conflict on deciding which class to focus on though. It's a bit of a toss up between wizard and witch doctor...I think, maybe the barbarian as well. Who knows! Probably will change my mind a couple times over before its out.

Anyway, the beta has definitely left me craving more! I'll need to find something to do to distract myself till then. If anyone else is in the same restless boat as I, what are you guys doing till release?