3181

If loot is 95% of your character as you say, then putting all of your points in to Bird Watching wouldn’t fuck you.

As with basically all choices, it is about trade offs. Do i become stronger in X or do i become stronger in Y?

I don’t really know if i think removing stats was a bad thing in d3 though. It has been a while, but from what I remember playing d2, basically all of the characters i played were ones that you got their non stam stats to the bare minimum needed to equip your items and then you pumped the hell out of vitality.

3182

You’re right. Thanks for pointing out that a purposefully over-literal reading of my post doesn’t quite work.

As with basically all choices, it is about trade offs. Do i become stronger in X or do i become stronger in Y?

I don’t really know if i think removing stats was a bad thing in d3 though. It has been a while, but from what I remember playing d2, basically all of the characters i played were ones that you got their non stam stats to the bare minimum needed to equip your items and then you pumped the hell out of vitality.

That’s … my point. The choice wasn’t “stronger in X vs stronger in Y”. It was “Put all of your points that you don’t absolutely require elsewhere into Vitality or die constantly, unable to do anything”.

It’s still a choice, sure. You have the choice to gimp your character. That’s not a meaningful choice; you might as well say you have the choice to not put your stat points into anything, and you’d be right.

Same thing with skill points. All you’re granting is the right to gimp your character and have to spend another 20 hours leveling up a new one.

3183

No one is arguing that Diablo 2 didn’t have shitty implementation of a lot of mechanics. Should they have removed talent trees from WoW just because they didn’t work out well in D2? Of course not. They looked at what worked, what didn’t work, and tried to improve on it… those were the kinds of things Blizzard 1.0 used to be great at. D2 had a lot of problems especially when it came to skills/skill trees, but that’s understandable given that it was a first attempt. I wish they would have worked on making it better/more interesting than just eliminating any player choices beyond the character select screen.

The mechanic isn’t the problem, the implementation of the mechanic is. I don’t think anyone would argue that having to put “95% of your points into Vitality” was a good thing nor crappy stuff like “Don’t spend any skill points before L30 or you’re hurting yourself”.

3184

So you think that Blizzard shouldn’t have implemented respects in World of Warcraft? Because that seems to be your argument.

3185

It’s not my argument at all. I’ve obviously chosen my words poorly, apologies for any confusion. I would not like if WoW had no talent respecs, it would be quite horrible actually.

My argument is that just because Diablo 2 had poor design that led to “right” choices and “gimped” choices doesn’t mean they should take away any player choices/customization/specialization beyond the character select screen. They should instead address those problems to give the player interesting decisions to make along the way. The problem with Diablo 2 is that there weren’t many interesting decisions due to so many skills being bad or scaling poorly or being outright replaced by other (better) abilities.

3186

Nope, that isn’t it. Rather, in order to have interesting situational skills, you have to have skills of differential utility. You cannot ask for a system that is simultaneously homogenous between skills and also has oddball, quirkier skills which have niche uses.

Leaving aside strictly superior versions such as Fireball vs Firebolt - which still leaves open the question about whether everything should be AoE since that is the highest utility niche- turn to skills like Bone Wall, Time Warp, etc. and explain how these are supposed to be turned into equivalents to Fireball, Blizzard and Meteor.

And it isn’t just D2 either. It’s not like other ARPGs have solved this problem within a point-system framework, Torchlight has just as many issues. Oh look, it’s Exploding Shot, the skill that makes nearly every other damage skill look like trash. There are AoE knockback skills which work best with a single point. It also has the tedious “sink a point into this exciting passive skill!” stuff that D2 had going on.


The issue is you get access to all of them. That way you get to use them when the situation is appropriate. Exactly, dude! Don’t make me choose between getting Bone Wall and getting Fireball. Let me get both.

WoW solves this problem the same way. I like that my priest has Mind Control. If I had to choose between Mind Control and leveling up Mind Blast would I ever pick the former? Gimping myself for a fun skill is just not as cool as having access to both. Now I get to use Mind Control in the 1% of situations where it’s really cool (like Vortex Pinnacle, or doing Firelands achievements) while still having a non-gimpy Mind Blast.

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.”

Did you even read what I wrote? The issue is not that A is always better than B; the issue is that A occupies a much more relevant niche than B. I’m going to quote that post.

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.

This isn’t just Firebolt v Fireball either. I can put points into my Necromancer’s Revive- pretty much always goddamned relevant- or I can put it into Curse of Terror, which is a much more minor niche spell that is occasionally fun to use. Yet I like that a skill like Curse of Terror exists. I don’t want every skill to be a Revive.

3187

As another example of a game that suffers from this issue, look at Baldur’s Gate 2. (It’s really just RPGs in general.) The Priest spell system is better than the Sorcerer spell system. Pretty much every Sorcerer is forced to choose the absolute highest-relevancy spells like Fireball, Dispel Magic, Magic Missile, Haste, Breach, Stoneskin. The Sorcerer who builds around Grease, Chromatic Spray and Power Word: Secret is going to barely skate by at best. Are you really going to replay a 100 hour game with a slightly different Sorcerer? (speaking as someone who has played through it 6 times).

The Priest just gets every spell, so even though if you had to choose just a few spells things like Righteous Magic would never make the cut, you still get to use them for those one or two times they are useful, or just play around with them occasionally.

You could make an argument that the Wizard has the best spell system between them. Access to every spell, but you only get some for free and the rest are drops or purchases. So you retain that “ding-grats” factor with spells, and have some room for character investment and differentiation. I would probably agree with you on that. This is the Guild Wars system too, I believe? I thought they were going for that with runes in Diablo 3, but now who the fuck knows.

3188

Fiery

You’re saying that because very few systems manage to balance spells/skills - they’re bad systems?

Because even as unbalanced as D&D is (talking 3.5 here) - it’s still a very entertaining system, and there are still a ZILLION effective character combinations.

Even years after release, people are still coming up with unique builds and with unique uses of spells/feats/whatever.

Also, because MOST people seem to consider certain spells vastly more useful, it doesn’t mean that it’s objective truth.

I can’t tell you how many people I’ve encountered in my life where we’ve had debates about what’s the more powerful spell, or whether Wizard or Sorcerer is the best class.

On and on.

As long as there’s a debate - and as long as there are enough people using the “weaker” spells - there are people having fun with the system.

Diablo 3 is not a PvP competitive game. It’s OK if some spells are somewhat weaker than others. The concept is that they should FEEL useful - and that the number one design rule is that no spell should ever be redundant.

Giving people access to everything at any point in the game is simply lazy design, from where I’m sitting. It’s “balanced” sure - but it’s also lacking in terms of character investment, and the sensation of having an identity and a playstyle.

3189

I agree with that. In the sense that D3 should be a game about playing around with fun builds, not about super-cereal optimization around a raiding end-game. And there should be room for character investment.

The thing is, Jay Wilson said exactly this and that what people enjoy about Diablo is planning and tweaking out their weird builds. So I’m inclined to believe there will be some measures to this effect. The new rune system has me a little bit puzzled because I thought the old system was accomplishing this, but they have talked about this issue. This is obviously a game they want to make long-term viable, and a game with no differentiation where every Wizard is exactly the same is not going to last very long at all.

However they accomplish this or fail to accomplish this, I am really glad they’re not going with skill tree points. I’m really tired of that system after trying Torchlight and replaying D2. Tired of picking 3 skills to base my whole character around and spamming those all day (whatever they are). This is leaving aside the whole issue of balancing all those skills, and I still maintain that any system that asks you to invest heavily in only a handful of skills is going to shortchange interesting niche skills in favor of skills with a broad, general relevance.

And I’m realistically never going to run through this game to experience the same class with a different 3-hit wonder build, even though I might get momentarily excited about trying them all out when I first boot up the game. That moment of excitement is not worth the reality of grinding out those levels.

3190

Well, if they do manage to make this happen in some way not obvious to me now, then that’s great.

I’ll gladly return here and eat my words :)

As for Torchlight - I consider that a very weak Diablo clone. It had a very short development cycle, and I personally found the classes and the abilities rather dreary. Not saying it was a bad game, especially not considering the low price. I just don’t think it’s a good example of a fully developed hack/slasher.

3191

I would have to agree with this. TL was good, but not anywhere near D2 good. One thing I can say was missing from it was the urge to replay it with another class. In D2 I played the hell out of that game. When I was done with TL for the first time, I started another character, but it just couldn’t hold my interest. I didn’t even make it to the bottom of the mines a 2nd time before I stopped playing.

3192

That’s pretty subjective. I played Torchlight multiple times with each character.

3193

I have to agree with DeepT and DK myself, Torchlight was fun but pretty shallow with most abilities just being passives shared by all classes. I don’t think that alone is very subjective. I also played Torchlight multiple times with all the characters, it’s a lot of fun, but that doesn’t change the fact it’s very much Diablo Lite.

Now, with only an 11 month development cycle and a $20 price point, it would be foolish to expect more (in fact with Torchlight I had honestly expected much less and was fairly blown away by it). Torchlight II is going to be pretty special at this point, but considering how much I’ve played just the first hour of the game (the beta) and just how delightful it is to play that damn thing over and over again (for me, at least) I am personally more excited for Diablo III. I’m getting both, however.

More on topic, I played my first co-op game in Diablo III last night (after spending two weeks playing it before realizing I should probably try that out) and it was a blast!

My level 10 wizard, a level 9 barbarian, a level 8 demon hunter, and a level 13 monk made very short work of the final stage and the boss even though enemies had LOTS more health with four players (I went from one-shotting things with Arcane Orb to that same skill taking like 3 or even 4 shots). But it was a big pile of awesome having all those abilities get pulled off in the massive and satisfying hordes of enemies that came at us.

I REALLY like the loot system - you only see the loot that’s yours hit the ground, so if a sweet rare bow drops it’s yours to trade, store for one of your other characters, or put up on the auction house. Very refreshing.

I also like that back in town everyone has a banner that situates next to the waypoint portal and you can click on any party members banner to be teleported right to them. It’s a very nice touch, I felt.

3194

I have to say that I find this change to the rune system rather disappointing. They’ve switched them from being a variable to a constant, which is A Bad Thing™ in my opinion.

3195

Having played it extensively, it’s not a bad thing, it works fine and is a lot of fun to use skills you might have other wise skipped. The UI for selecting your runes and mapping your skills needs work though.

3196

So do we actually have a hard release date for this, or is it still on hold due to the RMAH stuff? It’s starting to get a creepy Daikatana “rewrite and sit on it forever till no one cares” vibe, a bit.

3197

No hard date, but the developers have kinda indicated that this is the last major revision they’re doing before release. My guess is Activision is starting to apply some pressure.

3198

I would agree from the things I’m seeing and reading. I suspect we’ll get another patch with some minor tweeks, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if the beta doesn’t get any more updates and the game itself comes out in April some time. I imagine April is their internal goal.

3199

It’s a bad thing if you like more variety in your gameplay. Yes you get to play around with a few of them earlier on, but you will always end up getting the exact same variant at the exact same level every time. The end result is nice in that once you hit 60 you will have all of them, but randomness is kind of the point in Diablo. This method removes some of the flavour, in my opinion.

3200

Wait, what? “It’s a bad thing if you like more variety in your gameplay.” doesn’t make sense - you literally couldn’t possibly have more variety available to you with this sytem - you have EVERY possible skill and rune by level 60 to build the specific character you want to build.

And the randomness you speak of is still here (items, events, quests are random) but why in the WORLD would you want randomness in how you build your character?