3141

Interesting. So I’m not trying to put words into your mouth, I’m just want to see if I understand you correctly. In a situation where “talent tree” resets aren’t possible, if you feel you’ve made a mistake and want to redo those choices, it’s a chore because you’re basically being forced to retread the same content just to get back to where you were before. If you choose another class, though, it’s different and new so you don’t feel like you’re having to “redo” all your work. Is that the general idea?

Because I can agree with that if you take a game where I don’t find the gameplay compelling. A perfect example of that is MMOs. Honestly, the basic gameplay (tab target, hit your 2-3 skill rotation, repeat ad nauseum) is pretty damn dull and it’s typically a long grind - gotta stretch those subs, after all - so I certain do not want to re-roll so I can redo my talent choices. That’s especially true since MMOs are constantly tweaking their talents so a build you might like one day may not be the same the next day.

The same doesn’t hold true to me for ARPGs though, at least not typically. I find the basic gameplay quite a bit of fun so building characters isn’t a chore. I actually enjoy going back through the game by designing a new build on paper, implementing it, and experiencing the game in a different way (similar to what you describe with different classes). I had a lightning sorc and a frost sorc in Diablo 2 and both felt really unique to me, I’d swap back and forth between them on occasion.

So… I guess, for me, I worry that Diablo 3 isn’t going to have much longevity for me. When I hit max level and can swap around between builds on a whim, I think I’ll tire awfully quick. Imagining, implementing, and experiencing new build sets are what draws me to this game. The loot aspect, while sorta fun, is pretty minor to me and I can do with or without it.

That leads me to my next question, if anyone bothered to read all this drivel. I wonder if there’s any difference from the “I want character choices to matter” and “I like the flexibility of picking spec at any time” camps in terms of what they find most appealing about Diablo games, whether it’s designing builds, finding all the epic loot, or just clicking and watching zombies explode.

3142

Great discussion so far, and I just wanted to chime in at this point. Me and my friends always played Diablo 2 as hardcore characters. For us immortal characters held absolutely zero interest. When we first finished the game, we had no interest in returning to it. But then, we discovered (by mistake) the hardcore option, and the rest is history. A history filled with tons and tons and tons and tons of dead characters. It was never the loot that attracted us to the game, except for the fact that anything that helped us survive longer was a good thing. So if we saw something that could help us survive by being more badass, obviously we got excited by it.

It took us many, many hardcore character deaths before we realized just how many points we should put into Vitality (a LOT). It took us many character deaths before we realized what skills are better at helping us survive compared to ones that don’t.

But dying was never a disincentive. Blizzard did a great job of front-loading the game and making the first two acts of the game really fun. We never thought of starting a new character as a chore, because like you said, it was always something fun to play through every time, with a new character after your old one died. This time you were going to do things differently. You learned something with each death, sometimes something even as basic as “don’t get cocky and leave your party behind and go into a dungeon alone”. Unlike MMOs, the actual gameplay in Diablo 2 is never a chore, but one of the stars of the show, so we never minded doing that part over and over. Plus we always gave each other permission to loot our corpses, so we retained any equipment that we had on us when we died because our friends would pick it up and pass it on to the next character we made. (Anything in our stash when we died was lost forever though).

So how do I feel about this whole respec thing? Well, I’m still not sure. Both sides make valid points. I do know that I have a lot less gaming time now than I did when I played Diablo 2. I’m married and play a lot less games now. So maybe this respeccing at will is a godsend for my hardcore Diablo 2 needs. OTOH, I’m still trying to imagine if constantly changing my character will get me killed more often and have to start the game over from scratch? If I don’t stick to certain skills and learn how to use them well in various situations, will I end up not being as good as I was in Diablo 2 with various skills because those were the only skills I had available so I had to make them work or die trying.

I just won’t know the answers until I get to play. So we’ll see.

3143

The thing you should be most worried about is that it’s no longer possible to dump points into vitality. Your HC barbarian is going to have exactly the same number of hitpoints as whomever’s non-HC barbarian.

3144

I suspect HC characters will prioritize Vitality-boosting gear. It might play out very differently anyway, since you don’t have the option of rapidly drinking a bunch of potions. High armour improves healing efficiency, so that would also help hardcore players.

3145

I think the action in D2 was great, and there were some great ‘moments’ in the fighting. But the skills system had pretty perverse incentives, and I got really tired of using the same couple of skills all the time. Everything seemed a little too repetitive and it would pull me out of the game.

So… I guess, for me, I worry that Diablo 3 isn’t going to have much longevity for me. When I hit max level and can swap around between builds on a whim, I think I’ll tire awfully quick.

It’s funny, because I think that will keep me from getting tired as quickly. I’m really looking forward to being able to try a lot of different approaches at high difficulty.

I wonder if there’s any difference from the “I want character choices to matter” and “I like the flexibility of picking spec at any time” camps in terms of what they find most appealing about Diablo games, whether it’s designing builds, finding all the epic loot, or just clicking and watching zombies explode.

There’s no doubt that D3 is undermining the roleplaying aspects of the previous games. I suspect people that want character choices to matter put a higher value on having their own unique character with their own story. I always thought that the story in Diablo was very thin (at least for the player characters), but that it had great atmosphere and action. It’s definitely best when it can create a sense of desperation.

3146

One of the things I find most interesting about this debate is that while some people prefer being unable to respec your character because your decisions made it more unique, the fact remains that past Normal difficulty there weren’t really any unique builds. If you wanted to make it through Nightmare and try Hell you put pretty much every single point that wasn’t required for gear in vitality no matter what class you were, and you put all your points in one of a handful of viable high level skills and (after that patch) their synergies. I should add that I find this interesting because it feels like the uniqueness argument has merit and I can agree with the spirit of it, but it flies in the face of reality and what actually happens.

I’m curious if any of the people who hate respeccing have played Guild Wars, since the idea of always having access to all your skills to build a character out of seems pretty similar. And Guild Wars barely even had loot. Did you hate GW because you could change your active skills whenever you went to town for free? If you liked GW why were you ok with that system existing there?

3147

I actually haven’t had much experience with Guild Wars. I tried it when it first came out but it didn’t really grab me. I think that was more related to the heavily instanced setup when what I wanted at the time was a big world to roam around and explore in.

3148

I’ve mentioned this myself in previous posts in this thread. Diablo 2 gives the illusion of character choice, but the reality is extremely confined if you ever intend to leave Normal difficulty. You can either 1) play one of the few cookie cutter builds that can succeed against end game content or 2) allocate points to skills that don’t scale and stats that don’t help, thereby ruining your character. Yay “freedom”.

3149

Guild Wars had 140 skills/class. 30 of those (per class) were Elite skills. The regular ones could be bought from skill trainers or, in some cases, acquired by doing quests. But the only [more or less] way to get the Elite skills was by limiting yourself to 7 equipped skills (rather than the usual 8), going out into the world to find boss monsters and capture the appropriate skill from them.

It was very, very difficult to get anywhere near all of those skills, so the decisions/role playing wasn’t just in deciding what skills to equip, it was in deciding what skills to acquire. In Diablo, everyone is going to acquire every skill for their class, and they are going to acquire them at exactly the same time.

Certainly there are Guild Wars players who bought access to all the skills via microtransaction, and then got their fun by designing/implementing/testing builds with all of their skills available. Those people would probably like the skill system in Diablo 3. There were other Guild Wars players (like myself) who treated it more like a role playing game and less like a PvP e-Sport. For us, the Diablo 3 skill system removes a central part of what makes the game interesting.

Edit: I should also say that I played Diablo 2 for a long time, but I was never the least bit interested in playing into “the real game”. I never got any further than about half-way through Nightmare, so even though I played it for over 100 hours, I probably don’t count as the real Diablo audience.

3150

Sounds like the Diablo franchise is about to get Star Control’d.

3rd in the series gets done by an entirely different studio that doesn’t understand what made the first two great.

3151

Just saving this quote for use later.

3152

Hahahahahha!

Oh, I don’t actually expect Diablo 3 to be bad like SC3 was. But it is a different studio from the guys who made the first two. I get that “Diablo” feeling when I play Torchlight, though… oddly enough. :)

I really haven’t liked any non-Diablo game made by Blizzard. I appreciate what they do, though, and know a lot of folks like that.

So for me, Torchlight was Diablo 3. Diablo 3 is some other game, made by a studio that makes games that make me go “meh.” So I probably won’t even bother with it. :)

For me, at least, the quote is true. I didn’t bother with SC3, either…

3153

I don’t know how they changed it in later expansions, but the original GW had what skills you could buy basically gated by which missions you had finished instead of levels. So other than the elite skills everyone had access to most of the skills at the same time. There were a lot of them, and you might not buy them all, but they were available at about the same time to everybody. Diablo 3 isn’t a pvp e-sport either, so it has about as much potential for roleplaying your build. So the main difference for you in the actual skill equipping mechanic seems to be that GW has a whole lot more skills to choose from than D3?

3154

I have played Guild Wars for about 500 hours and have never acquired more than half the non-elite skills for any class. I chose which skills I wanted at any given time from the pool of skills available to me.

In Diablo, you do not get to choose, they are just given to you.

Yeah, my issue with Diablo isn’t that they made the skills work like equipment, it’s that they give them all to you without any agency on your part. If there were a particular skill that I really wanted, there is no way to prioritize getting it above getting x other skills. You just get it when you get it.

What I was arguing for (once I saw just how much the runes change the skills – they are basically completely different skills) was giving you rune points that you could allocate to the skill of your choosing rather than just taking what they give you. SOME kind of agency. There is no agency for character development (in any normal sense of the word) in Diablo 3.

Even in something like Battlefield 3, you can at least influence the order of your unlocks – use the weapons/kits/vehicle that you want to improve. Diablo is now less of a Roleplaying game than Battlefield.

As I said earlier, I don’t really respond to the same hooks that the serious Diablo players do (uh, loot, I guess?), so when you take away the skill/attribute-based character development, it’s significantly less appealing to me. Or at least it no longer appeals to me in the same way that the previous game did.

3155

In D2, a lot of builds didn’t work (or at least weren’t optimized) without certain equipment. In that regard, it can be similar to GW in that you develop builds through the loot game. Now, you couldn’t gank them for specific bosses, but there was many a D2 character that I created solely because I received a certain item drop.

I personally never got anywhere near into GW as I did D2. The game had too little randomness in it for my personal tastes, so character building became too much like work.

3156

Why are people comparing an action RPG to Guild Wars? Genuinely curious, since I’ve never played Guild Wars. I always got the impression that GW was an MMO, not an ARPG. Heck, Tom even says as much on the front page right now in his Guild War 2 posts. I hate combat in all MMOs, as well as all RPGs with MMO-like combat (like Final Fantasy XII, for example), so I always assumed I’d also dislike Guild Wars. But if it has a lot in common with Diablo, maybe I need to check it out after all.

3157

GW isn’t an MMO at all, it’s the same setup as Diablo 2 but the chat channels are hubs where everyone meets up, accepts quests and trades. The actual PvE game is instanced. And then you also had a quite extensive and competitive PvP arena portion…

Its skill system is quite a beast. It coupled a “skill deck” aspect to dual professions and a shitload of skills. Everything was linked to the skills, even your attributes. You could only go out into PvE/PvP areas with a combo of 8 skills (which you could pick in the hubs). Levelling up and getting a decent amount of skills was rather easy, stats could easily be respecced as well. Only for the elite skills did you have to grind/go out in high-level areas. In short: it’s one of the better and more addictive skill systems out there imo, it offers a lot of variation and I am not worried at all that Blizzard are mimicking parts of it for Diablo III although it seems that items will have the biggest(/exclusive) influence on the skill powers instead of stats.

DII’s skill tree setup… it offered a LOT of content but more than half of it was pure throw-away stuff, even with the synergies. Add that to the grind, the stats which had to follow strict templates and the fact that only a few builds were viable after Normal and I can understand the drastical changes that Blizzard are implementing now. Guild Wars isn’t as fast-paced as a Diablo game but it’s the only online action RPG that I consider to be as polished as a Blizzard game while it succeeds at being innovative as well.

3158

So, I keep seeing a common thread of discussion crop up regarding re-speccing:

What I find interesting is that Blizzard’s solution to the problem of “most skills are trash; the only way to play Hell is to pool points for the 3-4 good skills at the top of the tree” is to say, “Okay, you get all skills all the time forever!”

I suppose a far more interesting and Good-with-a-capital-G solution would be to ensure that you don’t include useless or worthless skills. Skills that only make sense for a certain playstyle? Sure, why not. That’s fine and dandy, and entirely the point of different builds. But skills that just flat out suck past level 5? What is the point of a skill like that?

Scaling, synergy, and skill-based skill-usage (that is, timing attacks, combos, skill interactions, etc.) would help to keep early skills relevant throughout a playthrough. . . or you could ignore them to focus on flashier skills that bring different gameplay elements to bear later on in the game.

Diablo 2’s problem was that it punished you for spending points before level 30. So the fix is to remove points? That seems a like a bit of a logical jump to me, at least. Seems more like the punishment aspect is where they went wrong.

NEW TOPIC! OMG!

Looks like the latest build of the game, by forcing you to have certain skills in certain slots (and even changing how the slots operate in the “Free Choice” mode), the devs have eliminated “Basic Attack” for characters. As such, it’s no longer possible to really build a melee sorcerer (something they said they wanted to be possible early on) or melee demon hunter (which was surprisingly viable).

It doesn’t appear to be an oversight, either: they removed passive skills that gave benefits to these character types for basic melee attacks.

Seems sort of crappy to me, and really diminishes the importance/feeling of basic skills even more: your level 1 skill is now just “basic attack,” since you’re gonna have it bound to LMB for the next 40 hours. That, combined with the sudden disappearance of a number of quirky builds, is really saddening :(

3159

That’s because Torchlight IS Diablo 2. The main difference being… a pet. The only other differences are things TL lacks thanks to a minuscule budget, like secure online servers, environmental variety and cutscenes.

Diablo 2’s problem was that it punished you for spending points before level 30. So the fix is to remove points? That seems a like a bit of a logical jump to me, at least. Seems more like the punishment aspect is where they went wrong.

On the other hand, what exactly is so amazing about points that we need to keep them?

3160

I’m not a fan of this change either.