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"It's something we hope to do"? ...Really, that's all? The opportunity to hold onto rare, awesome items and easily transfer them to appropriate alts is an absolute no-brainer, simple feature that improves the players' enjoyment of the game, period. There is no reason whatsoever to stop to think about it. Just do it already.

The new names are a little wonky because they're inconsistent as a group. With gold, alabaster, and obsidian they seem to have a theme going of materials you could carve or etch a rune into, but it breaks with indigo, which is the name of a flower and of the color and the clothing dye made from that flower, and worse still with crimson, which AFAIK is just a color and nothing else.

But if they pick better names to go consistently with the hard-materials theme it'd be cool. Maybe cooler still is an idea that just crossed my mind with these materials-names, which is that you could create runes that have two categories of names, the rune itself and the material, with different effects depending on how they're combined in specific runes you find. There would have to be only a few of each type of course because the number of combinations could get out of hand in a hurry and be a bitch to balance, but could make for some interesting effects, and it'd be cool to see a new rune and guess what the combination might do based on previous similar ones you've had.

Just some fairly simple and rough elemental-related example ideas off the top of my head (all for attacking skills):

D2's Ort rune added lightning dmg/resist so it will do lightning-ish things:

Golden Ort rune: Attack releases charged bolts when it strikes.
Obsidian Ort rune: Attack gains the additional effect of reducing target's remaining health by a percentage (think Static Field).
Alabaster Ort rune: Attack gains added lightning damage and stun.

D2's Ral rune was all about fire:

Golden Ral rune: Attack sets the ground on fire around the target when it strikes.
Obsidian Ral rune: Attack becomes hot enough to melt armor, reducing target's defense and resistances.
Alabaster Ral rune: Attack gains added fire damage and burn DoT.

Off the top of my head I just brainstormed an AoE theme for Golden, a single-target debuff/boss-killer theme for Obsidian, and a straight plus-damage-and-standard-elemental-effect theme for Alabaster. Rough ideas to illustrate the concept.

Quote from "Samael" »

We'll let the Diablo development team worry about the balancing and I'm confident they are aware of priorities during the game development phase. Your initial reaction (or shall I say over-reaction) that a minor game improvement leads to an 'epic fail' was uncalled for.

Ugh, this forum needs a head-bang-against-wall smiley. Each response that has jumped on me has misquoted and blown out of proportion what I said. To accuse me of over-reaction is such complete pot/kettle madness, and with a big dose of strawman fallacies to boot, that this 'discussion' is worthless.

You know, I'd love for Diablo 3 to be a great game, and leading up to this point everything I'd seen has looked quite on the right track. But it's naive to take every idea Blizzard expresses as brilliant right off the bat. They are a venerable and good company that has produced a long run of fun games. They are not the holy church of perfect gaming.

My best guess is I've been scapegoated here by people who are tired of a lot of the whining that has been directed at everything in D3's development by the truly tiresome and absurdly vocal segment of Blizzard's fandom that want nothing to change, ever, from the previous games. I am not them, thank you very much, and I don't think most of this forum's population is either or I would never have posted here in the first place. But please try not to let yourselves drift too zealously far in the opposite direction.

Now, peace, please!

Quote from "Samael" »

Can you shed more light as to how a gameplay improvement triggers a 'potential for epic fail'? The differentiated energy sources for each character ensures a higher degree of replayability, even better than Diablo 2. This is a blatant proof that Blizzard have learnt from their past mistakes and are working towards delivering the best game in the Diablo franchise.

Oi, chill the fanboy heat. This subject just ain't worth that kind of stress.

Simple fact: if you take one simple system, and then replace it with four or five brand new and probably a bit more complex ones, you're creating a headache of balancing for yourself. It's just a whole hell of a lot more work on a pretty minor part of the game. I'm not excited about how I'm going to manage my mana. I'd rather see that large extra amount of work spent on spells, monsters, locations, story, etc.

Quote from "emilemil1" »

Have you even read Bashioks comments on this desicion?

I believe I did. Maybe there's something I missed you can point me to?

Quote from "badger2d" »

Gotta say that on the surface, I don't care for this. Making every character's "mana" work a little differently is just creeping complexity for its own sake. By tinkering with something that already works fine, for no other goal that I can see but a minimal addition of flavor, there's a ton of potential for epic fail and hardly any upside.

Something I can clarify here: I did read the stuff about designing resources differently to make different classes play differently, and the stuff about how all melee worked the same and all casters worked the same in D2. It just doesn't ring true to me at all.

The selection of skills available to each class makes them play very differently. If the skills are designed at all well in D3 the same will be true, and the whole notion that different types of "mana" are a good idea to differentiate blows out of the water. It just becomes unnecessary complexity.

Gotta say that on the surface, I don't care for this. Making every character's "mana" work a little differently is just creeping complexity for its own sake. By tinkering with something that already works fine, for no other goal that I can see but a minimal addition of flavor, there's a ton of potential for epic fail and hardly any upside.

Would rather see single player just get harder and better designed. Nightmare is the only difficulty that's fun to play single player in D2. In Normal monsters are way too sparse and fragile. Hell depends way too much on monster immunities for a cheesy approximation of difficulty.

I see two images and a broken link for the third one. The first image, sketch with reds colored in, is very good. The second one, the detail ideas are fine but in the execution I don't think they came out so well as they could have. The image looks over-CGed, kind of plastic-y. It doesn't draw me in anymore.

I like every one of them. Really. They've all got good style and they've all been showcased with distinctive and powerful moves. I expect nothing less from the fifth class, and the first time I play I'll probably just roll dice to choose.

I wonder what are their ambitions for this game they haven't told us about yet? For a game that we expect to follow such a tried-and-true formula, the development time is remarkably long.

I've been playing Titan Quest while waiting for D3, and there are two major interface improvements in TQ that D3 should definitely adopt.

The one that's thread-relevant is an auto-arrange button for the tetrispack. The minigame in D2 of your character saying "I have no more room," and then you opening up the pack and yelling "Yes you do, you jackass, you suck at packing!" was really a pointless drag on the game. In TQ auto-arrange is just a button on your inventory screen. Use it if you want, don't if you don't want. Easy and no-brainer feature.

The second is no identifying. In D2 it's purposeless. Boss dropped something awesome! Pick it up, click on identify scroll, click on item, see what it is. That's it, and you can easily cut the middleman there. Pick it up, see what it is. Done.

The only way identify should stay is if they bring back cursed items from D1, with some sort of mechanics that make them a real challenge if you get stuck with one, and make identify scrolls much rarer. Basically return identify to its roots in roguelikes, where if you have no identify scrolls you can still identify an item by equipping it, but it might be cursed and if so you won't be able to take it off for some time. That would be an alright fit for the grimdark Diablo world. You pick up a magical item - should you use it? It might mow down your enemies, but it also just might steal your soul...