I played an Embermage last night, and I have some thoughts on a pretty major difference between the TL2 and D2 dynamics on elemental damage. It has long been my impression that elemental damage in D2 was considered secondary to physical damage, since only physical damage was buffed by stat investment and the only damage common to all weapons. Well, the jury's still out on my conclusions on the totality of the TL2 elemental damage system, but I did observe some things that I like. First, the base damage on caster weapons is not physical - it's elemental of some sort, depending on the type of weapon - for instances, there are wands and staff that have base fire damage (and it's cool to see your character toting around a flaming staff!), ice damage, electric damage, or poison damage. Further, you pump your magic damage by investing in TL2's version of Energy, and your skills generally combine base skill-based elemental damage with DPS from your weapon. There's also cool skills that give nice attributes to your character swinging a staff or wand, such as reducing a target's resistance to all elements by a percentage per hit. But the actual casting spells steal the show. I used this electric charge blast skill that I ended up really liking - it had a nice AoE and carried more than just a damage jolt (like D2), but it also had stunning and explosive effects with a % Chance to happen, and what appeared to be the same kind of chance to hit critical as a physical attack by another character. The closest I can describe it would be a directional Nova attack with the secondary effects of cold damage. I had a lot of fun playing her, but I didn't get as far as I did with the Engineer.
I did get into the IFT of the Runic forums where they were showing some of the uniques they found, and some of them looked like the generic collection of affixes that could happen on any rare like in TL1, but I did see a couple with some unique affixes, such as weapons that upgrade after you've killed a certain number of a specific kind of monster, chance to freeze, etc. Knowing that Runic bragged about having a much more extensive itemization than any other game they've been involved with (and this from the guys who created D1 and D2), and knowing that anything I'm seeing is effectively stuff that can be found in Normal Act 1, I'm a lot more optimistic about the kind of items that will be available later into the game.
Oh, one distinction I should mention is that monsters do not respawn when you quit and restart the game - it even saves the loot laying on the ground through an Exit/Restart - I'm really not sure how you can mine a monster over an over again with this system, but the drop rates appear much higher than D2, so it may not be nearly the grind (that's just guessing at this point, though).
Unfortunately, today is the last day of the Beta, and I don't even know if that extends to tonight, so I don't know if I'll have any more opportunity to test it out. However, based on what I've seen, I like the game a lot and do not regret my decision to pre-order it. I'm sure there will be changes, but as I did a couple different characters and learned the game, I found myself enjoying the game more and more.
Now let's see if they release a launch date soon *fingers crossed*
