Another nice touch, when dropping into a game, warp banners will be placed near your character that will warp you to each respective player in the game, making it easy to get close to the action relatively quickly. There's a lot of balance in co-op in fact, represented best with the previously mentioned new health system. Globes will give everyone in the party a health restore and any shrines you find get applied to everyone.
Overall there seems to be a great focus on co-op play and the classes and skills support this well.
Sadly the Diablo 3 beta ends before it starts. You'll probably have your character around level 10 once you defeat the end boss. Depending on how click happy you are there's about 2-3 hours worth of content here. Thankfully with five player classes to play as it's very replayable and I immediately started up a new character upon completing it.
We'd be remiss if we didn't chat about the controversial "always on DRM" the game contains. You'll always need to have an internet connection on to play the game. 99% of the time, this isn't an issue - but there were times that network hiccups seemed to cause a disconnect. When this happens there's no warning you'll just be dropped to the main menu with an error message that Diablo 3 couldn't contact the server. You'll be restarted from your previous checkpoint in the game - so there is a possiblity that you'll lose progress. Hopefully Blizzard can tweak this somehow, because there were a few times this occured and I lose some loot I had wished I didn't lose.
Check back with Co-Optimus every day next week as we explore each player class in detail, give some tips for using it, and some of our favorite moments with him or her. Blizzard has just confirmed that Diablo 3 will be released in Early 2012 on the PC.
UPDATE: We've begun posting the staff's impressions of the five different character classes. Check back here for links to all the Co-Op Character Focuses we've done!
9/26/2011 - The Wizard
9/27/2011 - The Witch Doctor
9/28/2011 - The Monk
9/29/2011 - The Barbarian
9/30/2011 - The Demon Hunter