I loved Diablo 1 (me playing it online actually forced my ISP to upgrade their servers, yes small town).  I really loved Diablo 2.  Diablo 3 has yet to make me care even a little bit.  To be fair part of my apathy is caused by "Hey we're making this game that will probably be released sometime before you die."  Maybe I'm not following it closely enough (really not following it much) but it all just seems like 'Diablo 2.5: Easy Mode'.

I really hope it's a good game.  I will probably get it.  But my expectations are low and my excitement is lower.

P.S. That change in art direction shown in your last image makes me cry.

Until I actually play it, I'll reserve judgement.  That said, the monk trailer was absolutely disgusting; it looked like a bad anime-fanboy machinema...

Class-wise, I'm hoping for a "Knight in Shining Armour" for the fifth class.  The barbarian is nice and all, but the dual-weilding savage with spiked armour doesn't have the same appeal as a glistening knight in platemail with a trusty sword and shield.

So they WoW-ed Diablo, toony graphics and all?  Somebody needs to fire the entire art department at Blizzard, especially after it did a similar art change with SC2.

have to disagree with you there. Titan Quest blows it out of the water with the much larger selection of classes and dual classing capabilities.  Was hoping Diablo III would follow suit but only getting 5 classes again.

I'd agree, this is the most likely outcome.  Each Diablo so far has had a dedicated archer class, and none of the classes that have been introduced so far really have any business using a bow as anything other than an auxiliary weapon.

If I were to hazard a guess as to what the final class will be, I would suppose an Aragorn-inspired ranger that can quickly switch between a mobile ranged-attacker and a direct melee-attacker at will.  Priest would also make sense, though a dedicated healer is out of the cards.  Last I heard on the subject, Blizzard has stated that the game will be playable solo as any class, meaning a dedicated healer is a non-starter.  Now, I do think the concept of the Holy Warrior Cleric has been unfairly type-cast as a healer and other interpretations have not been thoroughly explored, so I do think it's entirely possible that we could see a priest or cleric with a very non-standard flavour.

I suppose that depends on whose 'standard' you use for a Holy Warrior Cleric.  I agree in recent times, especially multiplayer games, clerics have become heal bots incapable of really killing anything.  But if you look back at the cleric from D&D through AD&D 2nd Ed. you'll find a class that could wear full plate armor, wield a nice big war hammer and a shield, smash skulls on the front line and still use buffs, debuffs, heals, and damage spells to great effect.  More recently there seems to be this need to differentiate clerics and paladins more 'clearly' and so clerics were demoted to squishy status.  Then most games aren't as complex or well developed as D&D (even the D&D video games are watered down for obvious reasons).

On another note the "just like WoW" aspects of D3 (mentioned above) make me think this sounds more like "Warcraft Mystery Dungeon" than Diablo 3.  But I will reserve judgment until it comes out.  I will say that if Diablo has become too much like WoW I will cry.

True it is all subjective, but on the other hand Titan Quest's mod community is very good and the Underlord mod in my opinion is the best example of the genre.  I agree that the original version of TQ was only ok, the Underlord mod added that something special.  If you own Titan Quest i highly recommend getting that mod and trying it once more.  It is a much more detailed game, with tons of added content.

I tried playing D2 recently, and it just felt so limited in comparison to Underlord in regards to re-playability, complexity, graphics, and interconnectivity that I had no desire to play for more than a short while.  The original game had a moderate amount of interdependence between each individual class choice, but the way your two choices mesh and how you work them together to create a character within Underlord just brings an element that Diablo won't ever have from the current state it sounds like.  Don't get me wrong I'll still most likely buy Diablo 3, but it has a lot to live up to.

It's a hilarious thought that a game would "get deeper" by stealing ideas from WOW (which is the definition of casual) but in this case, it may actually make sense. =P
D2 really was a simple Hack&Slash affair where you could hardly do anything in a wrong way.

I'm not so sure if the "potion nerf" is a good thing. In the more recent Diablo clones, red/blue pots typically worked as a heal over time so once you had it going, that was checked off.
Your ability to keep your potions organised so you would not run out of easily accessible ones (on your belt) in the middle of the fight did no longer matter so it did in fact dumb the game down.

I had the opportunity to play about 15 minutes worth of Diablo 3 at PAX 09 with the Monk class.. while undoubtedly many changes have been made since, it most definitely felt like a Diablo game, not a sped up World of Warcraft game. It also was not "cartoony" as such, definitely not comparable to Torchlight. It looked like a prettied up high resolution Diablo 2. It was a desert level, not a dungeon crawl, so I can't comment much on lighting.

Oh, and relating to the OP, Blizzard has put in better RealID controls. You can disable it entirely so you wouldn't even get RealID requests, turn off Friends of Friends so you could have RealID friends, but their friends won't see you, or just have everything on. I think the RealID-on-forums fiasco wisened them up a bit.

- They have confirmed that while some characters do have co-op friendly skills, "if you're not doing damage, you're doing something wrong" was mentioned on the twitter feed.  There won't be a dedicated healer - at least not by design.

- There was a lot of fear about the art direction, but they've had a lot of time with it since then, and that was also just the first act.  I suspect it will be dark and gritty torwards the end of the game.

- The salvaging system has me worried.  I really liked how in Diablo 2, before LOD, the best items were "rare" - meaning they had randomly generated stats,and thus they were unique.  Once they made the top level "unique" items, the best items were always the best, and there wasn't a chance to improve on them.  Everyone had the same stuff.  I'm worried that with people being able to salvage items and craft better ones, it will be more about just plain grinding for supplies instead of grinding for cool items.

- These guys have a lot of resources at their disposal.  The game might not be the diablo 3 you or I envisioned, but it will still be a great game.

- I'm really interested to find out who the first mini boss is - they are always memorable.  The Butcher from Diablo 1, Blood Raven from Diablo 2...who's next?

If the boss does his job - you are! =P

And the fact of having boss fights doesn't make the game "like WOW". Much less like a real MMO. =P

It's that they are supposed to be heavily scripted events so when it's between 90 and 70 % health you have to be hopping on one foot to do any damage.
At each 10 % after that an add spawns which can only be defeated if you kick the old tree with the bee's nest in it so the bees descend on the add and distract it.
If you fail to kill the adds quickly enough, they split in two and if you don't keep their health levels between 15 % while killing both, they immediately heal to full.
The more absurd the hoops you have to jump through, the more l33t the encounter.

The downside? Eventually a happy-go-lucky slasher game turns into work and requires internet research for the one-and-only way to beat the encounter.

I don't mind a game requiring some thinking but the danger with going overboard with the scripting is that you cannot use your character's special skills any more to find new and interesting ways to beat an encounter.