This year Blizzard unveiled the Monk class, which was playable at Blizzcon. I had a chance to play the demo and once I got the hang of it, the monk was a blast to play, wading in to large groups of enemies and watching them explode in pools of blood. You can never have enough enemies explode! The monk is an up close melee fighter but with a few tricks. My favorite was his Seven Sided Strike that allowed the monk to teleport around the screen striking foes.

The Monk's key ability (and in fact the default key bound to the left button of the mouse) was his Exploding Palm. It is a 3 hit combo, the first two hits do nothing but increase damage, but the third hit places a damage over time effect on them, that if killed with the effect on them, cause them to explode and damage every enemy in the area. This can cause some rather spectacular chain reaction of exploding enemies... I'm not cleaning up that mess.

The Monk also has a number of defensive abilities such as Crippling Wave that blinds surrounding foes and Impenetrable Defenses, that grants him 100% dodge for a short time.

The demo was set in the now very familiar desert and while it was very pretty graphically (it seemed to have a slightly stylized touch to it), I would like to see a more exotic locale. Now on to the next page and Starcraft 2!