Blizzard’s continued to preview some of the “gear sets” we’ll see in the Blizzcon demo. The third image, posted this afternoon, shows off the female 
Barbarian. The image is to the right, and here’s the announcement, from the Diablo FaceBook page.
Our third (of six) armor preview continues with a behind-the-scenes look at the female barbarian. She stands ready to crush her enemies, see them driven before her, and hear the lamentation of their men. Enjoy! We’ll be back next Tuesday with a preview of gear on the female witch doctor.
What do you think of this Barbarian? I’m pretty pleased with the gear, and especially the fresh-ness of the visuals. We’ve seen FAR more Barbarian concept art than concept art for any of the other characters, I was afraid we’d already seen pretty much all of the different variety of Barb gear. Not so much, at least not at the low and medium range. (Most of the concept stuff is heavy plate gear.)
Note that this is not an Item Set, but a “gear set,” which just means a full outfit of items of equivalent level. This reflects nothing of the magical modifiers on the items; it’s more like these are all equivalent to low level plate mail, in terms of defense provided. We’ve heard in the past that there are 18 such levels of armor. Bashiok said this one is some wherein the middle; about what your wizard might be wearing by level 20.
More details from Twitter.
So is this Leather type armor?—GenericJargon
There are no armor types by material.—Diablo
So what are the individual pieces of armor called, then? I mean, how do you name 18~ levels of armor without using leather, cloth, plate, chain, etc, for names? They had such names previously, but that means little as much as stuff changes during development. Or does @Diablo just mean that the different levels of “gear set” are not sorted by material names, while the individual items in them are, simply because they’ve got to be called something?
And another via the B.net forum:
Does anyone here think that the female barbarians face looks much more feminin than before? Perhaps this is why she has no helmet, to intentionally show us that.
Both female and male barbarian have had pretty drastic make-overs since the original character renders back from announcement. All of the heroes from announcement have to one degree or another been gone over again since then, but I’d say the barbs are most noticeable as their actual faces were redone.
The gear set release schedule:
- September 30—Male witch doctor
- October 5—Female wizard
- October 7—Female barbarian
- October 12—Female witch doctor
- October 14—Male wizard
- October 19—Male barbarian
No Monk gear sets, presumably since they’re not yet finalized them all for the most recently-revealed of the four characters?