2701

This is a paradox. What is difficult about character development choices that can be easily undone?

2702

Freedom to make no choices that are worth a damn is not freedom.

I was talking about both. Skills directly working together because you get a skill bonus for having them and skills indirectly working together because if you cast a damage reflect after activating block stance, they work together to be greater than the sum of their parts.

The more depth there is in character customization, the more it opens up potential problems when people do stupid things, but at the same time it also allows you to customize your character more. With great power comes great responsibility.

2703

Why do you feel the ability to gimp your character is a good thing? This is such an alien concept to me.

That sort of thing works, some skills work together better than others, and some skills offer redundant ability. For example, there’s no real reason to take both ice armor and storm armor, as they are exclusive. Same deal with skills that offer short-range AE like electrocute and explosive blast.

There’s tons of depth to character customization; did you miss the 20+ skills with 5 runes apeice and 3 passive slots I discussed earlier? You’re just not locked in.

2704

You need it for contrast. A game you can never lose is a game that’s unsatisfying to win. So when the Diablo designers obsolete the very idea of a “jank build,” there’s less enjoyment to found from experimenting and discovering a powerful build. Everything works, just pick whatever. That’s how adding options can actually destroy the idea of choice.

2705

I don’t think he’s saying that everything works. Stusser’s saying that trying out something that doesn’t work is now less painful.

Admittedly, some people (perhaps a lot of people) only enjoy things that are earned through sweat and tears.

I ain’t one of them. Now more than ever, I do not have the time to develop a character through to Hell and then abandon it to start from scratch again. Alas, my care-free days are gone. Bring on the friendly system that will allow me to experiment more, with less pain.

2706

I’m very happy to hear this, because of this

I just hope it shows up in 2012. Regardless, I think I have it in me to wait.

2707

So what’s the way it works now, then? You just attack with. Magic weapon? You trade a couple of interesting synergies for a boring, repetitive skill? Or maybe you’re a melee wizard who also uses fireball because, well, you need something besides magic weapon, right?

There would seem to be drawbacks to this approach too.

2708

I was going off this post: “Their goal is to ensure that all the weird off builds like melee wizards are viable and capable of beating the entire game on inferno difficulty.” If that’s the case, then that certainly sounds like a “nothing is jank; everything is permitted.”

I ain’t one of them. Now more than ever, I do not have the time to develop a character through to Hell and then abandon it to start from scratch again. Alas, my care-free days are gone. Bring on the friendly system that will allow me to experiment more, with less pain.

Would you be satisfied with a restricted form of respec?

Also: if you’ve got the time to play through a game once, and then play the same game two to three more times on a higher difficulty, you’ve gotta have some time.

I’m a little perplexed with the system Blizzard’s opted for. They’ve been so… mercantile in many other decisions – removing true single player, implementing a cash auction house – that this laissez-faire skill system seems to contradict that. I think it will reduce the amount of replays, since a full Inferno run will give you enough time to experiment with probably a handful of sub-builds that would have taken much longer to test in Diablo 2. And since Blizzard will want players playing a long time (and making frequent use of the cash auction house so they can take their cut), this doesn’t jive with the business strategy. Maybe they’re willing to make the tradeoff to win some more good will and hook players that way.

2709

Melee wizards are viable because they have skills built into the Wizard class that make them viable.

Melee wizards were viable through Hell in Diablo II, too. Post-synergies patch, of course.

2710

No, my melee wizard would look something like this.

It’s pretty self-explanatory if you read the runed skill tooltips. You teleport in, doing a ton of damage with its rune, then pop a shield which explodes doing a ton of damage, enemies in melee range take a ton of damage from arcane orb, you knock them back doing a ton of damage, and you’re in a slow time bubble reducing their damage done and giving you 30% haste. Also yeah, you attack with the magic weapon.

But that’s only one possible melee wizard build, one focused on dealing damage. Here’s another focused on survivability. It doesn’t even take magic weapon.

The possibilities are pretty wide.

2711

I completely agree with you here.

It isn’t really the same game when the higher difficulties are opened up. New loot to find, tougher bosses to fight and then of course there was the whole uber bosses to be fought also. The game truly did open up in Hell mode, and it is a crap feeling when entering hell and having an unviable character which gets slaughtered by zombies right before the Den of Evil (and subsequently back to nightmare Baal for more level grinding).

2712

The way Diablo 2 worked is that you could do whatever you wanted for normal - builds only really mattered in Nightmare and Hell. Since these were just re-runs on a higher difficulty, I don’t think Blizzard thought that people were ‘missing’ anything by not being able to go through those difficulties. I liked the different builds that you could make hell-viable, especially with specific gear. I was a member at a site that was very interested in trying out different builds, as well as variants (Check out BNM for Diablo 1). Stuff getting invalidated between patches was certainly annoying though.

2713

I think some of you guys are severely overestimating the ease of re-runing your skills whenever you want to respec.

2714

Can’t believe folks are actually defending DII’s skill and attributes design. Like many have said: after Normal you didn’t have a choice, you had to follow rather strict templates laid out by fansites or you wouldn’t cut it in the higher difficulties. Respecs? After the three freebies of every difficulty you still had to grind for it to repeat it. It was hardly convenient. DIII seems to offer more varied and more viable builds. That’s really all I could ever ask for.

Anyone following DIII’s development since its announcement knows how the new team is handling all this. There really isn’t much you can disagree on with them as they’re taking some of the best ideas from competitors (like Guild Wars) and they are at least courageous enough to recognise DII’s design flaws, unlike the SCII team which barely changed anything about SC1’s faults.

I only got some fears for the storyline, I can’t sympathise as much with what I’ve seen of Leah as with Marius in DII.

2715

This. The runestone system, particularly at higher levels using harder to find runes, will almost certainly encourage people to find a build they like and stick with it.

To be honest though, we still don’t really know how the final runestone system is going to work, as I understand it’s one of the systems that’s very much still in flux.

2716

WTS FIRE KING’S PLATE BIKINI 29 OBSIDIAN RUNESTONES. SRS TELLS ONLY PLZ

2717

Nope. You can remove and swap out runestones at will without destroying them, so you’re free to experiment. Obviously that could change as the game isn’t out yet, but it’s where we are now.

You guys should really run a quick google search before making statements like this.

2718

I think what he meant is that runestones are like gems, with 7 ranks of quality that you can upgrade. So while the common ones will let you experiment, if you want to have a fully charged skill you’re going to have to put some effort into finding the stuff for a top tier one instead of changing on the fly.

For a while at least when you put a runestone in a skill it could only be used for that skill from now on, so if you wanted to swap from one skill with a gold stone to a different skill with a gold you would have to go get another golden runestone. I dunno if that’s still in the plans with how muddled version information is these days though.

2719

stusser, I will answer your most recent question later on. You’re doing a great job of selling me on Diablo 3 with your posts, but I still have my reservations. I wish Blizzard would just let me play the damn beta already.

Can you expand on this? What “faults” did Starcraft 2 fail to address? Starcraft 2 is not my favorite RTS or Blizzard game, but I really like it, and I suspect what you’re calling “faults” are actually intentional design decisions.

2720

Runestones are items and can be freely removed from sockets without destroying them. So if you only have one level 4 gold runestone, only one of your skills can use it.

SC2 core design was absolutely deliberate. They looked at WC3 as a relative failure, because it wasn’t popular longterm while SC1 was. Blizzard is desperate to remain relevant in esports.