Isn’t there a respec option in Diablo 2 now?
As of last year, which hardly counts, they did add 2 respecs over the course of the game.
Even that isn’t the same as infinite recustomization.
Here’s an article:
I appreciate what he’s saying about the value of choice, and I could see this working for a lot of people. But personally I’m not crazy about the concept.
Three respecs, actually, plus the ability to get more via endgame boss drops.
That article sounds pretty awesome to me. The last I heard you had to buy skill respecs in town, so they weren’t really unlimited free things you could do on the fly. Did they change that part? Plus in Diablo 2 half your “build” was what items you had. Now you have the equipment plus the runestones for skills, so just totally changing your character into something else isn’t quite instant and on the fly.
I enjoy the idea of characters being more mutable and open to experimentation. In D2 in order to be effective enough to even finish normal mode you had to sit down and decide on a build before making a character, and for a lot of people that was using a build posted online. Let’s be serious, no one really invested in any lower level skills, you hoarded for higher level skills and then put points in synergies.
It’s like whoever is usually in charge at Blizzard went on an extended holiday, and the D3 team made a break for it and tried innovating instead of polishing the standard mechanics. Trying to come up with creative new things for a genre is a huge departure for Blizzard, so I kind of hope it works out.
And let’s be honest here: having to skip all those interesting and fun skills in order to save points for the REALLY powerful skills you needed to beat the higher difficulties was very annoying. I stopped playing before respecs existed at all–if you made a mistake in your skill allocation by sinking points into something that sounded useful at the time but that became useless later, you had to start again from scratch. And then there were the constant nerfings/rebalancings that rendered some builds unplayable, again requiring you to re-roll.
Yeah the urge to save up skills points is a pretty damning symptom.
KevinC
2047
That’s just poor skill design, in my opinion. Higher level skills shouldn’t out-mode lower level skills, they should be sufficiently different and provide unique utility that makes them worthwhile to have in your arsenal. Having “Fireball” followed by “Better Fireball” and then “Best Fireball” is just poor design, and Diablo 2 suffered from it quite a bit (especially the ice sorceress… why use anything but the Orb?).
Then why even arrange them into a tree? Maybe they should’ve ditched that concept entirely and had a flat list of skills to choose from. No skill tree: Every skill is available from the start, and every skill is balanced for level one. Sounds a little bland and boring.
That’s where synergies came into play (also patch 1.10).
That was always going to be the case if they added respecs.
But in fact, you’re wrong, because there are builds-they’ll just depend on runes and gear. I imagine quite a few builds will be unplayable without the correct runes of sufficient quality.
Well, if it’s anything to anyone (it’s not), I’ll throw out my standard, tired rant that always-online is bullshit for a game that very well could have been built to include true single player. I tried D2 Bnet for about a week once. Played with my cousin for about an hour before we got sick of lagging out with each other, then tried playing with random people who always ended up being assholes. Gave it up, and went back to singleplayer, where I could happily give myself a million gold when I got bored doing everything else I could with a character and then just see what ludicrous loot I could gamble for.
Kills me to see stuff like that going the way of the dodo. I still carry my D2 disc around to play with on the road on my laptop, and my experience with TimeWarner here in the last few days has made me anything but confident in their ability to let me properly play always-on games. Take out the retarded banners and kick me out of the Real Money AH and just give me offline, please :(
Interesting post by Bashiok on the official forums:
The general philosophy is that we want to make finding better loot at the end game more enjoyable, and attempt to address ‘path of least resistance’ style gameplay.
There’s a couple ways we’re doing that, some of which we’re not talking about just yet.
Primarily it’s focused around Inferno and creating a consistent difficulty across the entire act. By having a flat difficulty across the entire game in Inferno it evens things out so that no matter where you want to go you’re being challenged, and you have a good chance at getting good drops. That’s intended to open the game up so there’s simply more freedom for the player to go anywhere in the game and have an equal chance at good drops.
There will probably still be a slight difficulty curve in Inferno, as enemies simply become more complex and have greater abilities later in the game, but we’re making an effort to make it as even across the board as possible. It’s something we’ll very likely have to keep tweaking after release.
In addition we’re attempting to de-emphasize path of least resistance by creating a more equal value across monster types. We’re not going to get into specifics about who can drop what or how much, but our intent is that being out in the world exploring should be as lucrative (potentially more) as simply aiming for the quickest-to-reach boss and running that over and over.
Getting people out into the world of the game and away from repetitive boss runs is essentially our goal. It’s going to be tough because people will find a path of least resistance, and they will make that the game. We’re going to have to keep on top of it, and truthfully it’s something we’re still working on. We’ll likely want to have some additional features to support these ideals, but just getting Inferno tuned right is our current end-game goal for ship.
So, no more endless Meph/Baal/whatever runs to find the gear you want (assuming they get this to work), which should make the endgame far more interesting, fun, and long-lived.
Panda
2053
If they can get that working, that’s essentially my dream scenario for a game like this. It always drove me crazy that the only way I could compete with anyone at the end of D2 was to forego 99% of the content and just do one short encounter over and over and over again. If they have found a way to make the endgame most efficient and lucrative by running through the entire game then that’s basically the best thing ever.
Freki
2054
I think they will make it work - if not right from the start then later down the road - they stated that they are commited to fine tune inferno so there will be no “best” run.
I noticed that the official forums were massively overhauled earlier this week. There are now subforums for each class, for items, for trading, for lore, for quests, and so on. The vast majority of these will be of little use until the game goes live, so I take this as a good sign that release draws ever closer (though of course not imminent).
Freki
2056
Beta Invitations are send out to the press - so I hope at least beta draws nearer
Ninyu
2057
Resource systems explained for each class:
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/3390853#blog
Ooooooh, pretty lightsssss.
Everyone gets different bubbles!
Huh. So every class is going to use a different energy system? That will certainly be different. It looks like the Barbarian will start all fights at zero, but I’d think everybody else has to enter into each encounter with some initial charge. Each of them sounds very different, though - makes me wonder how many classes they can add. Also makes it that much less likely I’ll ever finish the game at anything other than the basic difficulty, since they seem to be going to so much effort to make the classes different from one another that I’m going to feel compelled to play them all.
The Demon Hunter having to manage three things sounds like a real PitA.
