"As you mentioned and I had said in that rather lengthy post (
http://forums.battle.net/thread.html...40&sid=3000#48), we're under heavy iteration. The version shown off with BlizzCast was a prototype in many ways, and a jumping off point in others.
We're working with a modified skill tree system now of what we showed, under heavy testing and scrutiny. It's of course not final, the ideas it proposes are something we're happy with in their direction but they could very well change. In fact I would bet on them continuing to evolve.
So, the system we have now... you'll have to just picture it without any visual representation, sorry. They're not radically different visually except that the trees are all viewable at the same time. Taking the barbarian trees (berserker, battlemaster, juggernaut) and not tabbing them, but having them all viewable simultaneously. Side by side.
This is important due to how they are now apart of a unified tier progression. Instead of spending 5 points in the berserker tree to then begin spending points in the second tier of the berserker tree, the new design allows you to spend wherever you like. As long as your points in the first tier of skills adds up to five, the next tier for all trees is unlocked.
So, I could spend 2 points in Heightened Senses which is a berserker skill, and 3 points in Bash which is a Juggernaut skill, thus adding up to 5 points and granting me access to the second tier of skills for all of the trees. With this amount of freedom you can see how easy it is then to diversify yourself and your build. You're no longer gaining abilities through investment, but instead more through choice and personal preference.
It certainly diversifies the types and amounts of builds available to players, that's obvious. This style of a unified tier approach also helps in a few other areas though. Since all of the trees are open we can clean up the trees a lot more, removing redundant abilities. We don't have to throw in skills that are important, such as damage mitigation, all over the place. You will always have access to those skills no matter where you're spending, so they can instead be focused into a few key skills. Another way it helps is by allowing players access to the skills they want, and the skills we want them to have. Every barbarian is probably going to want whirlwind. And why not? What this tree style allows for, and one reason we're pretty keen on it, is that we aren't saying "You're a 'berserker' barbarian, you can't have whirlwind". Instead, you're a barbarian!, pick the key skills that define you and your character as you want them to be.
One important addition to this is the skill caps themselves. Currently we're envisioning the majority of skills to be capped at 5 points, to begin with. As a form of progression we're planning for players to be able to increase the point caps of skills. More than likely to a maximum of 15. It's a system that's still under heavy design, but the fact of choosing and increasing key skills beyond their initial cap is important to this new unified tier system.
So, once again these are things that are still under heavy design and iteration. They're changes we're testing, and while we like how they play there are certainly issues or flaws that could cause an entire switch to something else."
Its quite similar to what I was thinking but neater and alot more Tiers.
One reason you only have a few viable builds in WoW is that you gain most of your abilities outside the trees, and the trees mostly (though not always) buff the abilities you already got. You don't do so in Diablo.
That alone should lead to more varied builds.
If Diablo ends up with few interesting builds, its not because of the ideas Blizz has released now at least.
People speak of how WoW is making Diablo 'casual'.
Sorry to say it, but around 10 years has passed since the old Diablo games. This has nothing to to with WoW, but the simple fact that gaming has moved on. You could get by with a lot more 'demanding' (or lacking, depending on point of view) games in the 90's (just as it was perfectly fine to have games even further in the past with no save options, requiring players to get through it on one session).
Releasing a game like Diablo today without some reasonably streamlined interface, player friendly options like respeccing etc. would be quite stupid. Releasing Diablo 2 this very moment would have been a disaster, people would have hated it, also many of us who loves it dearly.
Now you might argue some games do exactly that (Sacred 2 for instance, which in many ways are an old-school A-RPG), but it mostly shows the fact that there are a few stupid game designers still around.
The real challenge is to make a game that speeaks to both those who want a somewhat easy time with their game, and those who want to get obsessed with it.
But this is exactly what Blizzard has been the masters of for 15 years, and Diablo 2 is a prime example. Very easy to play, but still fairly hardcore if you went into creating 100 different builds, magic find chars etc (and its the same with WoW for that matter).
Right now we got no reason to believe it would suddenly change with Diablo 3.
Anyway, back to the Diablo talents. One addition I could imagine to the proposed system, would be some incentive to spend most of your points in 1 tree, sort of a way to off-balance the nice skills you would lose in other trees, by stacking more points in one tree.
Example: Every point you spent in Tree 1 (lets call it the frost tree) gives you 1% more frost dmg. Every 1 point spent in Tree 2 'Fire tree' gives you 1% fire dmg bonus etc. (or whatever else it could be, 1% lower mana cost for fire spells or whatever).
This would accomplish two things (In my head at least). 1) it would add even more possible build options 2) it would bring back some incentive for making 'pure' builds, like a fire sorceress or ice sorceress, which I think should be there.
This way, you would have the option between picking 'all the nice talents from different trees', but it would have a small cost by being less specialized into one tree.
some even up to 6 other skills (sin skill fire blast for example)
but anyway i like the idea of synergies and promoting specialization.. so i like your idea
Diablo relies on having lots and lots of options to make your character build (which is why totally free respecs as in WoW would not work, it should be possible, but pretty much cost your left arm to do so, imo), I still have no reason to believe Blizz wont accomplish that though, pretty much no matter how the finer details of the tree setups are, so for now its all good
We are still pretty much locked to 3 themes. Skill trees still exist, they will just be viewable side by side, and if you put say 3 points into juggernaut tree and 2 into battle master, you can get the next tier of all of them now.
You can only direct different ways this must be worked around. You can keep this one skill huge tree idea (which I think is really cool by the way) and at least make it so the builds are flexible, therefore increasing the number of cookie cutters, and everybody has fun picking their favs. You can create synergies to make people want to stay within different styles. More points per sub-tree means a higher effeciency for all skills in that sub-tree. You can also make it so more skills points allocated to different styles means higher possible point allocation for those "sub-trees"? I.E. if you add a total of 20+ points to Berserker, all the skills under this sub tree get a higher skill level cap. make a combination of the two or something. This gets confusing and adds a lot of balancing issues, though.
I think complaining about cookie cutters is redundant, and erroneous, because we will always ask, "how did you set your character up?"
You can find guides for the most cookie cutter builds available, as well as guides for some of the more experimental 'just because I can' builds. If Diablo 3 can replicate that I would think they have done a great job.
Diablo isnt as competitive (outside of the possible PvP features they will introduce) as MMOs, which means you don't have to use the cookie cutter builds to succeed (although you would cleearly be able to perform better with such a spec). Pretty much no matter what you throw your points in youll be able to succeed, given the right gear, which by itself allows for endless possibilities in talent specs (and this is probably a place where Diablo 2 failed a bit, you had endless spec possibilities, but gear wise there were often a few items which was so much better than anything else around for your class, so in reality, you had cookie cutter gear sets instead of skill sets)
How about keep the skill system just as Bashiok has described it's current form, but add this: every point you have in a skill tree reduces the mana cost (and for those with fury, maybe increase the damage) of all the skills in the tree slightly. So you could potentially see a teleporting sorc with hydras and cold orb... but if the sorc decided to go all fire, she'd be able to do more impressive fireworks, albeit less varied. And by more fireworks I don't mean it's a better build, just higher rate of spells per minute, at the cost of lack of variety (which tend sto be useful).
So it's more efficient to go into one or two trees only... but there'd be no clumsy synergy system cutting down on variety.
They had to go and change it sooooo much. They are already taking away + skills? No more SOJ? Thats insane... I dont know how well this will work.
I think we should let them do their work though, its Blizzard I have confidence they will work something out.