Edit: Armando’s ninja post appears to be what they were talking about!
If that changed it went into what you are describing - in patch 12 I was able to select a basic attack and map it wherever I wanted to. I haven’t had a need to do it in 13, so I don’t know if you still can though.
EDIT - Ah I see, it was patch 13 that changed that. Odd, I hope we can eventually pick it, especially if you find a nice melee weapon that adds blindness or something for your wizard, you might want to use that!
There’s a number of builds that could strongly benefit from basic melee attacks, actually. Melee Wizards are (were) totally doable, as well as melee Demon Hunters and even a Pet-based Witch Doctor that needed to stay in range to proc an aura.
Actually, as it stands, the Witch Doctor no longer has an attack that doesn’t consume mana, according to redditors.
Now, strictly speaking, attempting an impossible skill (not enough mana, on cooldown, etc.) will result in a basic attack with equipped weapon occurring. . . but the point is that there are (were) viable builds that depended on being able to perform such an attack at-will, even if there was mana available.
Agreed. Hopefully that’s already been addressed at least internally.
Sort of an odd thing to see getting still kicked around this late in development though.
I’m fairly certain if you have a weapon that adds, say, a blind effect and you’re attacking with something like the wizard’s spectral blade, the blind effect will be added to spectral blade. I’d have to double check, but I’m almost certain this is how it works in the beta.
Yeah, I’m not sure there’s even any reason to use basic melee attacks. And yes, any weapon effects work with all attacks that do weapon damage, as far as I know.
liminal
3248
Ladies and gentlemen, we have our interesting decision.
What’s the point of having a weapon if you can’t attack with it?
What’s the fluff behind this then, characters suddenly discover they have amazing abilities and decide that swinging the sword in their hand is beneath them?
Why would you swing that sword when you can do that amazing skill with the same weapon and do more damage all the time.
The only problem I see with that view is that they haven’t bothered to give everyone an amazing skill to actually use all weapons. The summoner witch doctor in particular is kind of hosed.
Hosed how, though? The class is designed to use abilities pretty much exclusively. I reckon if you’re swinging your weapon at monsters as a witch doctor, you’re probably about to die.
But what isnt giving the player the freedom to do silly things part of role-playing?
Yeah, doing silly things like using all your skill slots on summoning spells and then hanging out with your army either shooting a bow from behind them or stabbing people. Now I guess you can put something with a long cooldown on your main mouse button and resummon it every time it’s up so that you can actually attack, which is a kind of goofy kludge to have to resort to considering that the whole basic attack thing started out being in the game.
Also they just updated the skill calculator on the website to mirror the one you guys apparently have ingame. They’ve super nerfed a lot of runes for balance it looks like. And boy is it ugly and awkward compared to the old one. It’s hard to understand how Blizzard of all people could go from the old one to THAT. :(
Clearly a matter of opinion, I think the new interface looks and works pretty slick, though I’m sure it could still be improved upon (in ways I haven’t considered).
I’m kind of with Bleed here. Until recently, I’ve tried to keep my nose out of a lot of D3 specifics, since I didn’t want to overdose on info. That means I only have a vague concept of how runes worked before this. But when I go to the character builder, I see a lot of skills I can use, and each skill has a bunch of runes I can use… and it looks like there’s lots of choices, and many of them seem interesting.
In an abstract sense, is it possible that the choices in the game now are fewer than before, will the game be less… uh “fun” than before? Maybe. But since I don’t have the choice between pre-change and post-change Diablo 3, but only the choice between buying or not buying release-version D3, it seems to me I’m still buying it. And I still can’t wait for the game to come out.
Are you in the D3 beta? I don’t remember if you had said you were or not. Anyway, the lack of a basic attack just isn’t an issue for the Witch Doctor because it was never part of the class design. I don’t know if you play WoW, but it’s like a Priest wanting to fight with melee weapons. They can do that, but it’s never been something the class was meant to do.
Also, I’ll have to test it when I get home, but I’m pretty sure I recall the right mouse button performing basic attacks if I didn’t have enough mana for the ability bound to it.
Well here is what the skill calculator looked like earlier yesterday:
Row of bars that you click on to pick a skill and then click on the rune to pick a rune. Note how the skills are put in sensible groups based on whether they’re free/resource generators, resource spenders, or utility (or in the case of the witch doctor they were divided between spirit and physical realm which was actually important for some passives).
Now they are sort of randomly lumped together in six meaningless categories that really make no sense. It immediately asks you to pick a rune for each skill, which is fine, but if you want to change the skill you have to go to the rune selection and then back out into skill selection, which is just terrible design. Also I think the new arrangement is ugly with lots of wasted space for no reason.
Edit: You and your ninja post, RobotPants! I don’t know or care if basic attacks were part of the WD class design, I was just stating a build I liked the sound of that didn’t include attack skills. And as I said, casting something to put it on cooldown in order to attack instead of standing there doing nothing seems like a goofy kludge compared to just having a basic attack option.
No, I get that you want to play the class a certain way, I’m just saying it never really allowed that in the first place. And I’m not even completely sure the removal of the basic attack button isn’t just a bug in the current build, so this might all be moot anyway.
How is having six summoning skills not allowed in the first place? Is there supposed to be some sort of limit of five summoning skills I don’t know about?
