Diablo 3 - Skill Calculator

One of the game releases that I am very amped about, is the new Diablo 3. Unfortunately I did not receive a beta key, so the best I can do at this stage is look at gameplay videos that other people are posting online and peruse the new Diablo 3 community website launched by Blizzard.

I've been having a lot of fun looking over the new item sets, reading the background stories for all the classes and reading forum posts from other D3 enthusiasts.

Then I found the new skill calculator.

This handy tool allows you to 'build' your dream character long before you even have the game. So I had some fun and I built a few characters that I thought might be cool to use. Blizzard creates a unique link that you can use to send your build to your friends. Here are some of the builds I created:

• Bul-Kathos' Chosen (Barbarian)
  The idea of this build is to leverage the passive skill 'Boon of Bul-Kathos' which lowers the cooldown times of three of the barbarian's higher level skills, 'Earthquake', 'Call of the Ancients' and 'Wrath of the Berserker'. Some lower level skills 'Cleave' and 'Leap Attack' keep the Fury generation going and keeps the Barbarian mobile in times of emergency.
• Blade Master (Demon Hunter)
  This build is all about damage dealing and crowd management. Skills like 'Multishot' and 'Cluster Arrow' will keep the crowds of demons down to manageable levels. All these skills need a lot of Hatred, so one of the key passive skills is 'Fundamentals' which will keep your Hatred generation quite high allowing you to use these skills over and over again.
• Disciple of Ytar (Monk)
  Once again, I've built a character that revolves around one of the passive skills, 'Beacon of Ytar' which allows the monk to use a lot of his skills without any cooldown. The downside is that these skills cost twice the amount of Spirit to use, so most of the skills are augmented with Golden Runestones to help with Spirit generation. This build will deal huge amounts of damage to single enemies, but I'm not so sure about groups.

I know it will take me forever to get these builds going and I will probably never finish all three of them, but I can dream, can't I?

I had a lot of fun building these characters and you should try them out. If you have any interesting builds, share them with the world and post them in the comments. I look forward to seeing other people's builds and reasoning behind the builds.

UPDATE (2012/02/28):

Because of the systems changes brought about by the Diablo III beta, most of these builds are now useless. I'm not removing the builds, as the links still work, it's just that the builds don't make any sense now.