In addition to the confusion caused by the stats, Blizzard has made it a goal of theirs to increase build diversity within the next game of the series. In Diablo II, everyone knew that you did not waste points into energy, you only put enough points into Strength to use the gear you had planned on, and enough Dexterity for max Block, so the rest could simply be dumped into Vitality for as much health as possible. Blizz wants to stray away from this mentality within D3, and they are going to do just that by creating core stats that apply to all classes and builds. Something else they had left out of the core stats was some sort of Resource stat, similar to how Energy worked in D2. However, by making this stat scale over time (through stats), they will be able to tune it a lot easier.
With the design flaws in mind, the stat system is being changed. The new core attributes are being changed from Strength, Dexterity, Vitality, and Willpower to: Attack, Precision, Vitality, Defense, and Willpower. Here's the rest of the official post on the details for the new stats as well as a short Q&A about the new system.
Official Blizzard Quote:
Attack: Increases damage
- This stat will be a universal damage increasing stat for all classes to prevent confusion about what you should increase to do more damage.
- We realize that ‘Attack’ is less flavorful than ‘Strength’ and ‘Willpower’, but we feel the pros of understanding clearly how to build your character outweigh that con.
- This stat has no secondary effects.
Precision: Increases crit chance
- This will be tuned to be comparable in power to Attack increases for the most part.
- So why have Precision? Mainly so we can play into it with affixes, runes, and traits. Linking effects to crits gives us another hook for designing skills and gives the player options to create ‘crit builds’ that play different than normal attack builds. Examples of the kind of crit effects we 'could' do (not saying we are, these are examples):
- - Cleave crits cause monsters to explode and do damage to those around them.
- - Lifesteal could be an ‘on crit only’ affix.
- This is a more finesse stat, and we’re fine with that. Most people will want Attack by default, but they won’t mind getting precision.
- This stat has no secondary effect.
Vitality: Increases health
- And it's staying that way!
- This stat has no secondary effect (seeing the pattern here?).
Defense: Decreases all damage taken
- This stat is separate from armor and resistances, each of which effects different damage types. This stat effects ‘all’ damage.
- This stat will allow players to control incoming damage rather than increasing health capacity, which is useful to reduce the need for health globes and pots, and allows players to double down on defense for survival focused builds.
- This stat is also useful for PVP, and likely will be valued in the arenas, but isn't tuned to be a 'PVP' only stat.
- This stat has no secondary effects.
Willpower: Affects resource in class-specific ways
- The effects of this stat will change from class to class. It will be our goal to make it roughly equivalently valuable across classes and versus other attributes.
- Basically this stat will give you more access to whatever restricts your resource by default: capacity, regen rate, degeneration rate, generation rate, etc.
This will change and affect several item affixes, but specifically we’ll be making the following changes to address issues with casters under-valuing gear (more below in Q&A), and to clear out attributes that are going away:
- Removing +spell damage affixes
- Adding Bonus % damage for wizard skills (wizard only)
- Adding Bonus % damage for witch doctor skills (witch doctor only)
- Removing Strength
- Removing Dexterity
Q&A
Q: Why do none of the core stats have secondary effects?
A: To focus their intent, making them simple and straightforward to understand. Your core attributes boil down to: damage, crit, health, damage mitigation, and resource.
Q: Since the attributes mostly only have one effect why not name them for that effect? Why not have ‘Damage’, ‘Crit Chance’, ‘Health’, etc.?
A: The main reason is so that we can value the attributes against one another. If you see one item with +15 health and another item with +3 Damage, and those are both core attributes, the general assumption is that the health is the better choice, because the number is bigger. But that may not be the case. By having representational core attributes we can play with the math under the hood so that +3 Vitality is roughly equal to +3 Attack, which makes assessing loot more straight forward.
Also, because common terms like ‘damage’ and ‘health’ are used in a variety of ways, re-using them for core attributes is potentially more confusing than going with symbolic attributes.
And finally, it sounds cooler to make a ‘Vitality’ barbarian than a ‘Health’ barbarian.
Q: Why is +spell damage going away as an affix?
A: Same reason we combined Strength and Willpower into Attack, it was inherently confusing as an attribute.
Q: Why add wizard and witch doctor only damage increase affixes?
A: Casters who don’t rely on weapons need a reason to care about their weapons. The monk, barb, and demon hunter all have the DPS stat that has a big impact on their damage. This was the purpose of +spell damage, so without it the wizard and witch doctor will be missing a damage modifier stat to make up for their lack of need for weapon DPS. We’re adding these stats as weapon focused affixes that will make wizard’s and witch doctor’s care about their weapons. This specifically addresses issues that Diablo II had where some classes could more effectively stack magic find gear than others without hurting their damage output or survivability.
This is one of many, many possible solutions we considered. This one ultimately felt the cleanest and most straightforward.
Q: How will items work that get these new wizard and witch doctor affixes? Will only class specific items get them? In general what’s the philosophy behind class specific items?
A: It is not our intent that classes always use their class specific items, specifically in the weapon department. But, class specific items will be predictable sources for stats good for your class, as we’ll restrict them to only carry affixes your class could want.
However, all affixes you could want will still appear on any weapon your class can use. So Wizards can get swords with '+% to Wizard Skills'. Such items will be more rare, so more melee oriented classes aren’t always getting their weapons ruined by wizard only stats, but it will happen.
Q: But I hate getting items that say ‘Wizard Only’, or ‘Witch Doctor Only’ on them when I could have used them otherwise!
A: Please re-phrase in the form of a question.
Nobody likes getting items that aren’t for them, but it’s the core of the game. Lots of class specific, weird, or flat out crappy items drop in Diablo. That’s part of what makes the really good items, good. Yes, seeing ‘this item is not for you’ effectively written on an item sucks, but it’s a con worth the pro of the class balance it promotes.
Q: Isn’t this a big scary change to make so late in development?
A: It’s not as scary as it sounds, assuming you, gentle reader, aren't frightened. The core of game balance is going to happen approaching the final stages of development. Most of this is a re-structuring of how things work, not a reinvention, so impact is somewhat predictable. Many of these changes actually make the balance process easier and more straightforward. We had also already been planning to go over, tune, or improve many of the parts and pieces that this change affects.
Don't misunderstand, this is a fairly big change, but it’s work worth doing for the most important reason of all: we believe it will make the game better.
I remember reading at one point that the reason equip requirements is based on level is because Attributes are auto-distributed. I assumed this meant that, because each class will have attributes distributed in different ways, each class would also have different level requirements for equipment.
Let's say that a Heavy Ax requires, in theory, 75 Attack. Supposedly, the Barbarian would achieve that level of Attack around... let's say level 30. But a Witch Doctor wouldn't have that much attack until level 35. Thus the level requirements for Barbarian and Witch Doctor would be 30 and 35, respectively.
Do you figure Blizzard would do something like that, rather than give all classes access to the same equip at the same time? Or is that way more complicated than necessary?
Won't feel like Diablo without the similar attribute names.
Well the change is from the previous Diablo 3 Attribute set up that actually separated magic and physical damage in the character attributes. I wasn't really speaking in contrast to D2.
To deal with the problems they were having with physical skills seeming like magic all they needed to do was add a magic component to them, even if insignificant to have it make more sense. They are removing so much flavor from the game by combining physical and magic damage in attributes, it also means that melee on a caster will either be comparable to a melee class or completely nerfed to an unusable level if one wishes to consider the melee caster build or magic barbarian. Completely confining characters to a preselected orientation of damage type. It also means that a hybrid of magic and melee will benefit far to much, and thus be confined by programming as opposed to base predictable escalation that the the previous attribute stats implied.
D2 did have a Str/Dex + to wep damage system. Most mods (such as ES and MXL) just decided to show how much more damage you were getting out of your str/dex. The new thing in those mods was the Energy increasing spell damage(energy factor).
As far as I know the amounts are the same for the mods and D2. (Did you not notice when you put 5 points into str that your damage increased(not by much since it's a very small percentage)?
Charms (in the talisman thing) is supposed to be where you customize your stats the most. So they better damn well be fair and worth it.
And this change don't hurt the depth of the game. Unless if you think that choose Spell Damage for Wizard, Strength for the Barbarian and Dexterity for the Demon Hunter have ANY level of depth and add ANYTHING to the gameplay. Those are just names, they all play the same. Any difference is a mere illusion.
Of course, this is not true if each stats has many substats. Then a barbarian who gets damage from STR blocks more damage, the wizard who gets damage from willpower have more resources and the dh who gets damage from dex have more critical. Theorically their damage type indirectly adds different elements to their gameplay. But this is good design?
The barbarian have better blocks compered to a bunch of classes that don't even use shields !
The DH have more criticals, so to make the DH's DPS = Other Classes DPS they would have to decrease it's non critical damage. In the end all DH's would play like a lightning sorceress, while in the current system EACH clas can choose between a critical and or stable damage build.
And why the hell the wizard should spam more spells then the other classes anyway ? Aren't all classes suppose to be equally fun and functional ? Or the wizard's skills would cost so much resources that he/she needs tons of willpower to do so ? In this case a willpowerless wizard not only have poor damage but can't spam spells. Or just make his energy independ of any stats. Great.
Can't you guys see the problem ? Adding multiple effects to each stat creats many forms of imbalaces. And 3 separate stats that purely add damage is just ridicolous. This change came to allows better diversification inside each class. In the old system each class choosed 2 stats, the offensive one and vitality. With this new system each class can choose between one of the two offensive stats, one of the two defenisve ones and the resources. There are much more stats builds possible now.
And class specific items will actually give our character's stats a good bonus as opposed to them just being special items that they use.
So, cool beans, bro.
When you start to think about 3 of the attributes previously just acting mainly as three different attack attributes and the pigeon holing of secondary effects common to simliar classes this new method looks better has a greater potiental.
Graphically the simlarity of names might be subverted if the graphics of the stats, or those adjacent, appeared visually different from class to class. (Just as an example say a silhouette of a archer firing behind the attack attribute of the demon hunter, and a mage casting for the wizard etc. Flavour could be regained in that sense)
I am also hoping for more item diversity now that chance to hit, block, dodge is no longer apart of character attributes.
So basically the builds are still being obliterated by the simple fact of the dev team wanted to sum up str/dex/eng into simple categories. The builds are simplified, and the hybrid/weirdo builds you're stating that vanishes along with, are they consider pvp effective?
Are they like an ice/electric sorc which are meant to threaten two genre of elemental weakenesses? As an outsider, I cannot comprehend the meaning of those stats you've experiences with, but I'm curious of what kind of damage is being dealt to builds organizations, and what hybrid/weirdo builds are suppose to be consider with.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding or merely ignorant of what this auto lvling feature is?
Anyways I was never into D2 in a RPG way, it was merely an obsessive drive for better gear that kept me going. I don't know how anyone could possibly play the game otherwise past their first character and difficulty level. Once you hit nightmare on your first time you realise that your build was probably shit and you can't continue. All immersion is gone.
So them making the stats work this way is a great and refreshing way of make the stats important to the game. Good on em.
Also I can see many builds based around precision. So many builds. But the question is at what point do they cap your crit chance? Or do they just give you impossible diminishing returns so that you can never realistically achieve a certain crit percentage. The thing about the latter is that people will just mathematically work out the point that investing more points into crit chance becomes worthless and stop. And there's nothing wrong with the former. Or even combining the two.
And then there could be builds focused on getting the highest crit chance while trying to sacrifice as little damage as possible. Ahhhh dear I like precision. Attack speed and crit chance build with chance on crit to stun (pvp)? oh yes.
For instance I think I just came to a class decision on launch. Sword/Board barb stack every item I find that has defense on it and socket it with emeralds(except weapon in our current iteration of the game)
However Defense stat does have an issue with it. If it is a static number that is fine, if it is a % then it will obviously have to suffer from level scaling which makes it completely boring as a stat before hitting level cap. But on further thought that happens with every stat except attack. I would like to see this changed for the better. It really is not fun seeing "you've reached level 13, health and all your stats went up but your stats are now worth less"
essentially you are now weaker than you were at level 12, but congratulations anyway. I'm hoping this is countered by appropriate level mobs dropping higher than your level gear. so you always have that "Next level I get to equip some sweet loot" feeling.