3161

I don’t think the actual “point system” is the part that’s vital.

I think it’s the level of commitment and the strategic planning that went into the point system that I’d like to keep.

Naturally, with a much smarter implementation.

Rule number 1 should be that absolutely no skill should be clear-cut worse than any viable alternative.

Synergies can alleviate the problem with poor low-level skills, but I’d prefer skill “evolution” rather than skill “replacement”.

As in, any given active skill should evolve as you level up and invest in that skill “tree” (or whatever) - rather than be replaced with something that’s clearly superior.

3162

Rule number 1 should be that absolutely no skill should be clear-cut worse than any viable alternative.

Rule number 1 is already completely unworkable outside of a completely homogenized system. What does this even mean?

it also puts a significant damper on interesting niche skills like aforementioned Curse of Visions. Or Warmth (you aren’t going to Warmth your enemies to death no matter how hard you try). Or Static Field, which is amazing at 1 point and every other point is useless. Is every skill going to be a damage skill now that “equally” rewards investment in points?

Then, are all enemies going to be the same so they don’t make certain skills better than others?

3163

Um… that’s a horrible change. Quirky builds were my favorite thing to do in D2. Melee sorcs and such. Taking that away… that’s a bad move IMO.

3164

That would be a horrible change. The new rune system sounds retarded too, so I hope the beta testers are giving them plenty of feedback on it.

3165

It comes down to what you mean by no skills should be worthless/all skills should be valuable.

No skill should be unusable. Not every skill needs to have a direct combat usage (damage), but those that don’t need to clearly state what they do do and assist an actual playstyle.

For instance, it’s the case that a “proc flame damage on melee strike” is “useless” to a sorcerer wielding a distance wand to do ice damage. However, such a skill is useful in a melee-focused sorcerer build. Similarly, abilities that, say, escape from combat, confuse enemies, or change the lay of the land are all combat “tricks” that don’t directly kill a foe, but can be (if well-designed) used by builds that need such tricks.

A bash-their-heads-in barb doesn’t need much. A low-HP stealth character might.

So, no, having “all skills be good” doesn’t mean “Lightning Ball, Fire Ball, Ice Ball, Poison Ball, and Baseketball” for every character. It does mean “Don’t have a Static Cling Spell that tops out at 10 damage Burst 1” when in Inferno difficulty the weakest enemy has 3,000HP.

3166

I’m not sure you get my meaning here.

I’m not saying all skills should be equally viable. Support skills, for instance, will never be able to replace primary skills. But low-level primary skills shouldn’t become obsolete as you gain access to higher level skills. Instead, I want that low-level Firebolt to “evolve” as you ascend the tree. As in, instead of replacing it with “Fireball” at level 6 - make it evolve INTO Fireball if you go for it as a primary skill - or let it branch out into a stronger single target fire spell instead (keeping the initial investment as additional damage) - or have it remain a useful support skill through interesting combinations. As in, let it “ignite” stuff regardless of damage - and then have other skills interact with that status effect.

it also puts a significant damper on interesting niche skills like aforementioned Curse of Visions. Or Warmth (you aren’t going to Warmth your enemies to death no matter how hard you try). Or Static Field, which is amazing at 1 point and every other point is useless. Is every skill going to be a damage skill now that “equally” rewards investment in points?

As noted above, support skills should all be viable - and they shouldn’t become obsolete.

Never let everything be about simply “damage” - but instead, let them have meaningful side effects and passive bonuses.

Then, are all enemies going to be the same so they don’t make certain skills better than others?

Why would all enemies be the same? It’s ok to encounter fire-immune enemies - for instance, because it SHOULD be possible to specialise in fire and deal a LOT of damage - but then having to find other means to defeat fire-immune mobs. One way is to have gear provide otherwise inaccessible skills. Also, immunities should probably be capped - so that even a fire build can defeat a fire-immune enemy - it would just take a LONG time.

3167

Except the useless skills in D2 aren’t useless because they don’t scale. Everything scales. I built a Charged Bolt sorc who is easily viable in Hell. Charged Bolt is a lvl 1 skill.

And yet there are still useless skills and skills that scale badly with points. Building an Icebolt sorc is stupid because even though it scales it’s still terrible compared to nearly strictly superior spells like it’s lvl 6 counterpart (Ice Blast, i think) and Glacial Spike (which has an AoE freeze). Firebolt and Fireball is another great example, Fireball is awesome and AoE (and Firebolt is not), which better suits the ARPG hordes of enemies. Should all skills tend towards AoE?

Bonewall is a cool skill. It lets you wall off an area with bone. Why would I ever max out bonewall? It scales, but its utility is mostly achieved with the first point. Yet it’s the kind of skill I would like to see in this type of game.

How about some skills that exist in D3. Like Sorc time warp which slows incoming projectiles. Isn’t that a cool skill? How is it going to work when time warp has to be “equally viable” as fireball?

3168

It’s not even that some of these skills are useless- it’s that when you’re forced to choose, one occupies a much more relevant niche than the other (like Fireball vs Firebolt). When you AREN’T forced to choose, you can actually use niche spells when the situation arises, which leads to more diversity in the way your character plays. I’ve played D2 recently. It gets kind of tedious spamming the same 2 AoE skills for 80% of the game. I’ve also played Torchlight recently and it suffers from a similar problem. A tiny bit less so, thanks to the scrolls.

Saying that all skills must be interchangeable in utility is directly incompatible with a model where you have interesting niche skills.

3169

I’m not happy with the removal of basic attack, but I don’t think this has effected the viability of a melee wizard. Spectral Blades is the basic attack for a melee weapon, with an area of effect. I don’t see any reason to prefer a basic melee attack over spectral blades.

They did remove the possibility of forgoing a basic ‘signature’ skill and taking Virtuoso with a wand instead. The Virtuoso passive turned a basic wand attack into a better version of magic missile and saved you a skill slot. I can see why they thought it conflicted, but I not particularly happy with it.

your level 1 skill is now just “basic attack,” since you’re gonna have it bound to LMB for the next 40 hours.

Note that there are a variety of skills that you might want to use as your basic attack, you don’t have to use the same one for 40 hours.

3170

I’m not saying D3 doesn’t solve the problem in some way, but that it’s possible to solve it in another way - AND keep the strategic planning and the character investment.

“Interchangeable”?

I’m just saying that support skills should all provide a meaningful choice that WILL be the superior choice in a given situation, but an inferior choice in another situation.

Obviously, this means that level design and encounter design needs to take this into account.

But, it’s not like I believe all ~30 skills for any given character can ever be fully balanced in all situations. That’s utopian.

They should just all FEEL like good choices, IF you manage to find good combinations of them.

D2 failed miserably in this regard, by the way.

3171

Well, I thought they were doing a good job of making you invested in skills (and character building/planning) through runes. But now they’ve changed all that, so who knows? I don’t know enough to comment on how successful they are going to be, but I do suspect they are aware of the issues.

3172

Fiery:

I think you might be too focused on the parts of D2 that were wrong to really grasp what we’re saying about skills here. I don’t want to imply that I think you’re dumb or mean or covered in poop, just that you seem to be still hitting the same “But Diablo 2 had bad skills, so I don’t want to have to choose skills!” button.

Tower Defense games (the best ones, at least) often have a similar dynamic. You might have a “laser” or “sniper” tower that is phenomenal at 1-shotting any-Goddamn-thing. At the highest levels of play, it still takes down anybody who passes its way. . . but is best suited for single targets, since that’s all it hits. Then you will have a Cannon or Bomb tower that blasts high damage across an area. Great for mid-level mobs, but it’ll never take down a boss character. Slowing towers, freezing towers, high-DPS towers, etc.

Runes allow D3 to branch out even more from this. Maybe sacrifice attack speed or range on your high-damage, single-target spell to make it multi-shot; pay more mana to use it. Maybe up the damage of your AoE fireball, but lose some of the radius. Etc.

Point is that well-designed skills (whether they be the direct damage stuff I’m focusing on now or the non-damage skills you mentioned) don’t necessarily have to suffer from “Skill A is always better than Skill B; therefore, do not waste points on A if you know about it.”

If someone wants to Bone Wall off a pack of enemies and plink 'em down with single shots from a high-damage spell, let them. If someone wants to charge into the group and unleash a frost nova to slow their attack speed and damage them all, have at. And if someone else wants to blast firebombs offscreen before they even see the enemies, why not?

D2 had bad skills (decidedly bad, actively useless, or later “replaced”). It made you stick with them, which was great from an ownership standpoint, but hurt from a gameplay perspective.

The point of all this is that an alternative to what Blizz has done in D3 would be to actually focus on making sure all skills could be useful. Yeah, you might have to think about how to do it (i.e., using Bone Wall or Slowing to let your high-damage, single-target work its magic), but that’s part of the charm (to me at least).

So, you’re right: some utility spells probably don’t need a lot of levels, or investment opportunities. That’s okay. Maybe Bone Wall or Hands of the Dead or whatever is “cheap” enough that anyone can grab it. Maybe it doesn’t even use or need Rune effects, although I say why not go ahead and use 'em. That still doesn’t seem like a reason to say that “all skills for everyone” is a requirement for D3 to be good/fun/balanced.

3173

Yea, I want builds and choices but I don’t want Diablo 2. That’s pretty much an example of how not to do abilities/talent trees. Skills should never be “the same but better”, which was a huge problem in D2.

3174

You know, the best action rpg that I’ve seen for making skillsets that are all worthwhile in their own ways is still Din’s Curse. It also features a very reasonable solution for respeccing. Pity that more developers haven’t learned from what Soldak is doing.

3175

Exactly.

People who keep harping on the fact that D2 had useless skills and therefore having to make choices is bad are completely missing the point. Instead of scraping the system, why not fix the skills that are the problem? Instead of making every skill worth using they’ve decided to take the easy route of just giving everyone everything. This seems to be the current Blizzard trend, they are doing the same thing with WoW.

3176

It is a given that d3 is not going to be balanced. Blizzard just isn’t good at that and since there is no forced pvp, i will just put up with it as long as they are viable (viable, not equal) in pve. Pvp is a completely lost cause though, although hopefully it will be a little less horrible than d2.

The war against character customization by people whose first rpg was CoD leveling mechanics is nothing new though. It is the new ideology becoming more common in gamers. If developers can’t do something absolutely, 100% perfect, then nothing is better than any other result. For example, if a game generally has very good music but it could be better, a game with no music at all gets a higher score for music. Applied here: Diablo 2 could have had better skill customization (and it could have as there was always some HUGELY overpowered fotm skillset, but they were generally interesting so it was still good), so diablo 3 would be better without any character customization at all.

3177

Thus, the Star Control reference. :)

3178

I fail to see how in a game where loot is 95% of your character, removing the choice to put all of your points into Vitality or be fucked is a bad thing.

3179

I keep wanting to say something about Dark Souls, but it keeps ballooning. But basically:

  • Dark souls doesn’t allow any respeccing
  • But points are put into stats, which have multiple uses
  • And the core mechanics are largely the same with all different builds
  • Dark souls doesn’t have any classes at all, gear determines all of your abilities
  • So you can “re-spec” in a sense, by swapping gear
  • Enemy weaknesses are usually exploitable in many ways (fire spell or fire weapon or fire item)
  • Each individual level is relatively unimportant. Most people beat the game at level 70+
  • The rate at which you level is variable and user defined.
  • Because the single currency is experience and gold, you can purchase items instead of levels without artificially handicapping your character in the meantime
  • So, most players won’t level up very far until they understand the core mechanics pretty well.
  • There’s no level cap, and enemies respawn, so if you do screw up a build, it’s never a complete dead end, you can always grind out the stat you ignored.

I don’t know exactly how all of this maps to Diablo 3. But I’m noting it here to highlight that there are a lot of considerations into what makes a respeccing system make sense or not, and to provide an interesting data point.

3180

The whole D3 skill setup, in my limited beta experience, just feels clunky, which is weird for something that’s attempting to feel streamlined.

The runes, from what I can see, amount to “this rune makes this a better single target skill. This rune makes it an AoE skill. This rune makes it a grouping skill”. OK, great, I see where you’re going there. But now, when I swap skills, it takes 30 seconds for that new skill to become active. So it’s obvious you want me to use rune A on groups and rune B on bosses, and you let me swap at will…but I have to stand around for 30 seconds before charging into the boss room. What is the point of that, honestly?

There are ways to make choices feel meaningful without being punishing. WoW does this by allowing unlimited respecs, but makes you travel to specific NPCs and the respecs cost progressively more gold. SWG is similiar to WoW.

Personally, I would prefer that skill selects are semi-permanent with the runes being swapable to modify the skills you’ve selected. So you can be, say, a pet-specialist witch doctor who modifies his/her skills using the rune system. That way you have choices to make, but aren’t really in danger of gimping yourself. You could then have consumable items that drop that can be used to swap skills out. Make them skill-class specific (“allows you to swap one offensive skill”) and tradable. Open up a secondary market in the AH, etc…