Official Blizzard Quote:
Extensive character customization is one of the primary design goals for Diablo III. Players will have many ways to customize and build each of the five character classes, including charms, traits, enhancements, gems, armor, weapons, dyes, skills, and the feature we're highlighting in this article: runestones.
The page comes complete with recaps and demonstrations for a select skill of each character. Here's a selection of other articles that you might be interested in if you haven't been reading up on these lil' guys:
Resurrections, Shrines, Poison Clouds and Rune Effects
Bashiok on Rune Levels and Progression
Working Skill Rune Names Disclosed
Of course, the most accurate and up-to-date information on runestones is now all on the official page. Special thanks to peign for posting this information first!
Talisman Gets Cut
Furthermore, the Talisman, which was previously a storage device for the player's charms, has been cut for the foreseeable future.
The device essentially forced players to allot a specific amount of space for charms, a mechanic and item hold-over from the days of Diablo II, while simultaneously freeing-up real inventory space for everything else found on Sanctuary escapades. The decision between power and inventory space often left Diablo II players with conflicting desires to gather items and to become exceptional and efficient warriors, and so the talisman largely resolved this issue. Bashiok elaborates:
Official Blizzard Quote:
Well, I can say from feedback and testing we've made the decision to pull the Talisman from the initial release of the game.
It was a cool idea at its core, but right now it's just really too basic and doesn't provide anything you can't get from the armor and weapons you're equipping. It requires a lot of the player to invest time and energy into finding and storing yet another type of item just to add player stats. When they do all that, it's just to do something pretty boring that they can already do with awesome things like armor and weapons. Originally the Talisman had a much deeper design, but it proved very ambitious and it got whittled down over the years to a very basic +stat per single square. We like simplicity in our designs, but charms became superfluous in their purpose.
We really like the core idea, but we don't want to stop everything and spend a large amount of time trying to fix the Talisman, although we do have some great ideas already. So, it'll very likely come back in some form or another after the game ships. And be awesome.
So for now, no talisman. But perhaps we'll see one somewhere down the road, say, expansion one?
Possibly, yeah.
I think, while it might at first be lame to add the same thing for D3s expansion that they did with D2s, it would give them a chance to really really get it right, instead of tacking it on.
Bottom line is, I hear talk from Bashiok like "initial release of the game" and I get super happy! Even if it is when talking about cutting somthing.
Yeah, the detail was really amazing. I mean, Blizzard really scored this one. Even though they kept us waiting a long time, we can actually SEE the effort they're putting in the game. And well, it looks powerful, we can't actually tell until we've compared it to other stuff in-game but since it reaches a 360 degree radius, it looks like a really good tool to use against a swarm of weak melee mobs, what do you think?
Yeah, one that would have been nice to see variations of would be the confusion one. I mean, can you imagine setting your opponents on fire before putting them to fight themselves? Would be awesome. Or maybe cursing them,reducing their armor so they die even faster when they fight, something like that
Nice update too btw
Don't get me wrong, puking on someone and killing them is awesome! (I hope my parents never reads this lol)
What I meant was, the variations of that skill weren't as interesting as the variations of other could have been.
On the other hand, I can see a balance issue here. I mean, Blue has stated that balance will not dictate the game. But this must be within reason. Nobody wants to play a game where the Witch Doctor's Acid Cloud belch does 5x more damage than any ability in the game, given the right items. Maybe I'm just jaded, though.
(*My memory stinks worse than horse shit.)
Damn that was fast! The video is really good, the text descriptions of the changes right next to the animation is something Blizzard should have thought of.
I would say that the visual will get drastically better with higher ranks of runes.. but I agree 1 or 2 of the variations of WW were underwhelming. But.. how do you visualize less furry cost? I like that they changed the sound as well though.
that's from the site.. now, i see charms.. they'll jst go at the inventory like d2lod since we dont have talisman?
and.. enhancements? what about this?
And I didn't really care for the talisman that much anyway, so no skin off my back. Blizzard doesn't cease to amaze because the graphics for the skills look amazing and powerful and the sound effects fit the characteristics of the skill to a point.
This is definitely something I'll be playing around with.
I think the WD has by far the coolest rune variations. I'll prob roll a Barb and a WD at the same time.
Yeah a little confusion there but I'm sure bashiok will clear things up soon.