It's a good thing that, if you think the fun and replayability came from re-rolling new characters, that nobody has taken away your ability to do so.
Edit; Relevant:
Wow, people really don't like the OPs post. Well, if we're killing replay value by not making people have to level completely new characters just to try out a new build, we are ok with that.
Leveling characters is cool, and some people legitimately enjoy that process (me!), and we agree it can be fun and would still like to find ways to reward people who enjoy leveling additional characters, but being required to do it just to try out some different skills is no longer acceptable to us. That's a level of masochism we just don't care to revisit. We thank the 90's for their contributions to game design, and the 'crush the player's soul' dungeon master mentality, but we're moving on. We have this crazy notion that games shouldn't punish you for trying to enjoy them.
Fact of the matter is though that the longevity in Diablo II was not made by leveling characters. You can get a character to 80 in a matter of hours. The longevity was from experimentation, customization, and the randomized item drops needed to perfect them. And that's amazingly even considering that a huge portion of the item hunt was completely ruined due to the mass proliferation of what should be insanely rare items. Longevity in Diablo is from exploration, character customization, and more specifically, killing monsters to see what they drop - not leveling.
You can also add to this that in Diablo III killing monsters to see what they drop will not be made lucrative by explicitly predictable means, such as boss runs. Exploring entire areas, even playing from start to finish of each act, uncovering all the nooks and crannies is intended to be the way you'll be playing Inferno. You can pretend you're leveling a new character each time, if you'd like.
I like the new system, its annoying being locked on 1 path which you might find out is not very productive at the end, just because you got an option to switch builds on the fly doesn't mean you have to, and when you start investing in high rank runestones that might get locked on a skill (uncertain how it works atm), it wont be productive to switch from high rank runed skills to skills without a rank or low level runes, there are quite a few factors we don't know about yet, switching to a whole new build might end up being quite expensive if you want all of them runed, so it might not be that flexible as you think.
If they keep a system similar to the one showed last year, a runestone will be binded to the skill u put it into, and the last rank of the runes will probably not come cheap either.
I have a very positive outlook on the current D3 system. Most posts about this almost seem to forget that Blizzard said that they want gear to define your character more than skills. By this logic it's entirely possible that certain builds will be nearly impossible to play without the gear for it.
Say you have a build that spends x amound of mana a second, and by default you have 10x, then you only have mana for 10 seconds. So your options are:
- +dmg so everytime you cast a spell it hurts more so you only need 10 casts
- mana regen so you can spam your abilities and if you go oom it would only be temporary
- get more mana so you can spam 20 spells now but once you go oom then thats that
That's only a spin on a build that works in 3 scenarios. Other builds might simply require a specific stat to work. So you now can't just use this set of skills and make it work because you probably don't have the gear for it.
Then there are runes that throw another twist into things.
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Edit; Relevant:
~ Bashiok
If they keep a system similar to the one showed last year, a runestone will be binded to the skill u put it into, and the last rank of the runes will probably not come cheap either.
Say you have a build that spends x amound of mana a second, and by default you have 10x, then you only have mana for 10 seconds. So your options are:
- +dmg so everytime you cast a spell it hurts more so you only need 10 casts
- mana regen so you can spam your abilities and if you go oom it would only be temporary
- get more mana so you can spam 20 spells now but once you go oom then thats that
That's only a spin on a build that works in 3 scenarios. Other builds might simply require a specific stat to work. So you now can't just use this set of skills and make it work because you probably don't have the gear for it.
Then there are runes that throw another twist into things.