I hope you all are as excited as I am about counting down the days to release! With that is the time to start thinking about customizing your hero. The purpose of this article is to take a close look at the underlying design of Diablo III's skills in order to help the community create more powerful hero builds. The opinions contained within are based on my experiences with and understanding of what worked and what didn't in World of Warcraft, Diablo II, and select trading card games.
The following notes will serve to lay down the general procedure of evaluating a skill as well as some basic tips to keep in mind, especially in regards to how a Diablo game plays.
There are various aspects of a skill (and its possible runic alterations) that need to be scrutinized to better understand it. Here is a general guideline to follow:
Applicable Game Mode
Which mode of the game does the skill support?
Player vs Environment (PvE): The standard gameplay.
Player vs Player (PvP): A mode in which the value of a skill must be determined entirely differently from PvE.
Hardcore (HC): A specialized mode of PvE that puts higher emphasis on survivability.
Skill Uptime
How often does the skill benefit your hero? This is defined by cooldowns, buffs, and automated attacks such as minions.
Skill Purpose
Is the skill (by design) an offensive, defensive, or utility tool?
Single Target vs Area Effect
How many targets does the skill affect? And, if multiple, how reliable is its hit rate?
Cost vs Effectiveness
Consider the resource costs of the skill and what you are getting in return.
These categories will help to give you a better idea of how good a skill generally is overall. These explanations are simply broad overviews so we'll need to go into detail on each subject to better grasp exactly how to gauge each of the above aspects of a skill.
Applicable Game Mode
This topic is fairly straightforward and acts as a good starting point on skill evaluation. First and foremost, you'll want to check if the skill matches the game mode you are building your hero for. To do that, you'll need to understand the gameplay concepts that each mode puts higher emphasis on.
Player vs Environment (PvE) is the standard game mode, also known as Softcore, in which your goal is to destroy as many enemies as efficiently as possible. In short, your hero's offensive capabilities are much more important than his defensive capabilities. While defense is still something you should be aware of, it is not strictly vital in this mode. Killing monsters and dying is better than not killing anything at all.
PvE also focuses on the average of your hero's performance. This means that skills with low uptime, such as skills with long cooldowns, are typically substandard and should only be considered for special events like act bosses. It also encourages high cost-effectiveness ratios, because, again, you want to average out the capabilities of your hero over time. Finally, PvE encourages the use of reliable area effect attacks. The style of Diablo encompasses slaying hordes of monsters more often than a single, tougher enemy.
Players love to impair control, stun, fear, and charm in PvP!
On the other hand, Player vs Player (PvP) is an entirely different game in which your goal is to defeat the enemy player team. This mode often favors high-powered single target damage skills as well as utility skills to either control the opposing team or to enhance your options on the battlefield. It is almost the exact opposite concept of PvE because you no longer care about averaging out your performance. PvP revolves around the use of skills that benefit only the short-term, not the long-term, potency of your hero. Therefore, you should take into consideration powerful skills with cooldowns because the battle is going to be over long before you need to worry about the future availability of your skills.
Both offense and defense are crucial in PvP. Because of this, it is always up to your own judgment to balance these two characteristics of your hero. However, don't forget the saying: "The best defense is a good offense."
The third game mode available is Hardcore (HC) mode. This mode mirrors PvE with the incredibly notable exception that survivability will forever take precedence over all other hero attributes. Absolutely nothing is more essential to you than your hero's defense! There's little more to say about HC other than skills that save your life are absolutely paramount.
Skill Uptime
Understanding the idea of how often a skill is of use to you will aid you immensely in the development of your hero's skill customization. It is also the prime reason why a hero build composed entirely of attack skills cannot be ideal.
The catalyst of the issue at hand is the limitation of available skill slots in Diablo III. This restraint requires that you should aim to receive the most benefit from each of your skill slots as often as possible because your hero can only execute one action at any given time. This puts an increased value on active skills that augment the rest of your arsenal. The gist of it is that "buff" skills are inherently good.
Magic Weapon is a second Glass Cannon with no downside.
Buffs are active skills that simply make your hero better over the course of their duration. But what follows this is also their uptime ratio. Again, according to your applicable game mode, some buffs are short-term and some are long-term. In regards to standard PvE, you'll want to be obtaining buffs that come as close as possible to 100% uptime; a case in which the duration of the skill matches or exceeds its cooldown. This tricks the system into transforming some of your active skill slots into additional passive skill slots. It is in this way that you can maintain a stronger state for your hero.
The other element of skill uptime to be aware of is the potential for some attack skills to be performed parallel to your other actions. This circumvents the fact that you can only use one skill at a time and allows these types of skills to be used in conjunction with your primary attacks. An exact example of this skill style is one that creates an AI-controlled helper-minion. After the initial time spent using the skill, it can be viewed as a free and automated source of damage that requires no further input from you.
Skill Purpose
The purpose of a skill (offense, defense, or utility) fundamentally defines its applicable game mode, but that's already been covered. The actual intent of this segment is to assist you with easily identifying the best of the best. This is possible because there exist skills that serve more than one purpose. These skills are almost twice, sometimes thrice as powerful as they first appear to be.
Revenge is both offensive and defensive by design.
It's not terribly difficult to identify a skill that, when runed, becomes multipurpose (offense + something). The real jackpot is finding the select few that are already multipurpose by default and thus can only become even more omnipotent when a rune is applied.
Conclusively, the more problems a skill can solve, the more versatile it is. The more versatile it is, the more you will be using it (which directly relates to the importance of the skill's uptime). Skills that have a wide array of usage are innately better than skills that are too narrow in their use (situational). As a final note, situational skills are not to be confused with conditional skills. The former describes when you would want to use the skill with the latter being when you are allowed to use the skill.
Single Target vs Area Effect
To reiterate, Diablo III's standard gameplay focuses more on the quantity over the quality of slain enemies, favoring area effect attacks. Single target attacks are not entirely ruled out, but because of their situational nature they will not be the focus of the following details. Thankfully Diablo III's skill system supports the ability to hotswap skills in and out as needed!
The numbers game is touched on in the next section, but it unavoidably begins here. When you're directly comparing the killing power of two area effect skills, you'll need to estimate the total net damage of each skill. To do that, you can multiply the skill's weapon damage by the number of targets it hits on average to approximate an overall damage value.
We'll end the math there, but in terms of skill evaluation, it's not entirely that simple. Some skills are less reliable than others when it comes to hitting targets. Ultimately it comes down to personal preference and practice so you'll need to try out various skills to get a feel for them.
You're always going to want the most out of your attacks, and part of that includes effecting as many targets as possible. After all, your class's resources are a very valuable asset...
Cost vs Effectiveness
For a time, most Wizards chose Arcane Orb because it was exceedingly efficient.
Finally we arrive at the last chapter in our road to enlightenment. This subject matter is all about the numbers of the skill. How much damage does it deal and how much of a resource does it cost? The raw power of a skill ends up being the most volatile portion of its evaluation due to the fact that, through game updates, the numbers of each skill will constantly be in flux in order to achieve global game balance. It is much easier for Diablo III's developers to re-tune a skill than to redesign it entirely which is the reason why this section is the last thing to consider about a skill.
However, that's not to say that the numbers don't matter because they do ultimately determine if you should be using the skill at the present time or not. Skills that are well-designed allow you to keep an eye on them for the future, but the current power level of a skill will always end up making the choice for you in the end. To determine the efficiency of a skill, you must compare its cost and damage output to each other skill of similar style (that's to say, try not to compare a summoning skill with a channeled skill). There's not much more to it. It's simply a question of: "How much bang am I getting for my buck?"
In closing, I sincerely hope you take something away from this article. These theories are the driving force behind the decisions I currently make on the official skill calculator. Only time will tell whether or not these ideas can withstand the ferocity of Inferno difficulty. See you in Sanctuary!
Nice post. As a bit of a number-crunching min-maxer myself, this article looks like a solid starting point and I think you've laid some good groundwork here.
I think the next step would be to talk more about build synergy. You touched on it briefly as far as why it's probably not optimal to load up on six attack skills, but there's a lot of room to expand. For example, you could talk about how a skill might be mediocre on it's own while it might be powerful in combination with certain other skills. You could also examine the pros and cons of a focused build such as a Barb crit build, a Monk dodge build or a Wizard Arcane Power regen build vs. more general strategies like taking the six "strongest" skills. It also might be worth talking about how gear fits in, though we don't know all of the affixes yet.
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...and if you disagree with me, you're probably <insert random ad hominem attack here>.
Rep for you! I'll be honest I didn't get a chance to really read it in depth, but your categories look like the exact same things I evaluate in my skill analysis. Raw damage is not the only thing you have to compare skills with, but some people get caught up in what does more damage overall.
Well-written, good job on your effort. I've read over this and I must say, this is an article that can definitely be used as a guide later on for newcomers that want to welcome themselves into the world of Diablo. This article is actually a very good reason to support a suggestion I've made in another sub-forum regarding "guides". You can check it out here: Adding "Guides" as a new sub-forum and give in your input.
I would consider putting a section in there about resource systems. Most classes will need a resource generator in their build for example. Maybe that would be better for the class by class sections though? Each class is a bit different but really it's the same basic principle. You'll want 1 generator/low cost skill in your build.
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I hope you all are as excited as I am about counting down the days to release! With that is the time to start thinking about customizing your hero. The purpose of this article is to take a close look at the underlying design of Diablo III's skills in order to help the community create more powerful hero builds. The opinions contained within are based on my experiences with and understanding of what worked and what didn't in World of Warcraft, Diablo II, and select trading card games.
The following notes will serve to lay down the general procedure of evaluating a skill as well as some basic tips to keep in mind, especially in regards to how a Diablo game plays.
There are various aspects of a skill (and its possible runic alterations) that need to be scrutinized to better understand it. Here is a general guideline to follow:
Applicable Game Mode
This topic is fairly straightforward and acts as a good starting point on skill evaluation. First and foremost, you'll want to check if the skill matches the game mode you are building your hero for. To do that, you'll need to understand the gameplay concepts that each mode puts higher emphasis on.
Player vs Environment (PvE) is the standard game mode, also known as Softcore, in which your goal is to destroy as many enemies as efficiently as possible. In short, your hero's offensive capabilities are much more important than his defensive capabilities. While defense is still something you should be aware of, it is not strictly vital in this mode. Killing monsters and dying is better than not killing anything at all.
PvE also focuses on the average of your hero's performance. This means that skills with low uptime, such as skills with long cooldowns, are typically substandard and should only be considered for special events like act bosses. It also encourages high cost-effectiveness ratios, because, again, you want to average out the capabilities of your hero over time. Finally, PvE encourages the use of reliable area effect attacks. The style of Diablo encompasses slaying hordes of monsters more often than a single, tougher enemy.
Both offense and defense are crucial in PvP. Because of this, it is always up to your own judgment to balance these two characteristics of your hero. However, don't forget the saying: "The best defense is a good offense."
The third game mode available is Hardcore (HC) mode. This mode mirrors PvE with the incredibly notable exception that survivability will forever take precedence over all other hero attributes. Absolutely nothing is more essential to you than your hero's defense! There's little more to say about HC other than skills that save your life are absolutely paramount.
Skill Uptime
Understanding the idea of how often a skill is of use to you will aid you immensely in the development of your hero's skill customization. It is also the prime reason why a hero build composed entirely of attack skills cannot be ideal.
The catalyst of the issue at hand is the limitation of available skill slots in Diablo III. This restraint requires that you should aim to receive the most benefit from each of your skill slots as often as possible because your hero can only execute one action at any given time. This puts an increased value on active skills that augment the rest of your arsenal. The gist of it is that "buff" skills are inherently good.
The other element of skill uptime to be aware of is the potential for some attack skills to be performed parallel to your other actions. This circumvents the fact that you can only use one skill at a time and allows these types of skills to be used in conjunction with your primary attacks. An exact example of this skill style is one that creates an AI-controlled helper-minion. After the initial time spent using the skill, it can be viewed as a free and automated source of damage that requires no further input from you.
Skill Purpose
The purpose of a skill (offense, defense, or utility) fundamentally defines its applicable game mode, but that's already been covered. The actual intent of this segment is to assist you with easily identifying the best of the best. This is possible because there exist skills that serve more than one purpose. These skills are almost twice, sometimes thrice as powerful as they first appear to be.
Conclusively, the more problems a skill can solve, the more versatile it is. The more versatile it is, the more you will be using it (which directly relates to the importance of the skill's uptime). Skills that have a wide array of usage are innately better than skills that are too narrow in their use (situational). As a final note, situational skills are not to be confused with conditional skills. The former describes when you would want to use the skill with the latter being when you are allowed to use the skill.
Single Target vs Area Effect
To reiterate, Diablo III's standard gameplay focuses more on the quantity over the quality of slain enemies, favoring area effect attacks. Single target attacks are not entirely ruled out, but because of their situational nature they will not be the focus of the following details. Thankfully Diablo III's skill system supports the ability to hotswap skills in and out as needed!
We'll end the math there, but in terms of skill evaluation, it's not entirely that simple. Some skills are less reliable than others when it comes to hitting targets. Ultimately it comes down to personal preference and practice so you'll need to try out various skills to get a feel for them.
You're always going to want the most out of your attacks, and part of that includes effecting as many targets as possible. After all, your class's resources are a very valuable asset...
Cost vs Effectiveness
However, that's not to say that the numbers don't matter because they do ultimately determine if you should be using the skill at the present time or not. Skills that are well-designed allow you to keep an eye on them for the future, but the current power level of a skill will always end up making the choice for you in the end. To determine the efficiency of a skill, you must compare its cost and damage output to each other skill of similar style (that's to say, try not to compare a summoning skill with a channeled skill). There's not much more to it. It's simply a question of: "How much bang am I getting for my buck?"
In closing, I sincerely hope you take something away from this article. These theories are the driving force behind the decisions I currently make on the official skill calculator. Only time will tell whether or not these ideas can withstand the ferocity of Inferno difficulty. See you in Sanctuary!
I think the next step would be to talk more about build synergy. You touched on it briefly as far as why it's probably not optimal to load up on six attack skills, but there's a lot of room to expand. For example, you could talk about how a skill might be mediocre on it's own while it might be powerful in combination with certain other skills. You could also examine the pros and cons of a focused build such as a Barb crit build, a Monk dodge build or a Wizard Arcane Power regen build vs. more general strategies like taking the six "strongest" skills. It also might be worth talking about how gear fits in, though we don't know all of the affixes yet.
Good work.
You may expect this soon™
A QUADRILLION MAGIC FIND is worthless if you can't kill shit!
I support more posts like these to the fullest!
Really well done! +1
I would consider putting a section in there about resource systems. Most classes will need a resource generator in their build for example. Maybe that would be better for the class by class sections though? Each class is a bit different but really it's the same basic principle. You'll want 1 generator/low cost skill in your build.