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Quote from flawkstawker45

Yea what you are saying makes tons of sense. And the only argument I can make to that and I made it earlier is that yes you get more options of what skills you can use but it gives you all of them and "bad" skills such as arcane missle will not feel as good or powerful to other skills of the same tier because you have them all and you can very quickly figure out which is best that is player psychology too. When you have everything and know what it does its cool but things out everything you have you immediately realize kinda suck and that gives you no incentive to use them. where as the skill point system gives you the illusion that yes this skill is awesome and it keeps getting better(might be the worst skill in game) and since you aren't good at everything you don't know that it actually sucks and that feels better to a player.

What say you on this?

I say that you are still assuming that Magic Missile sucks, when you don't know that. Let me ask you this, if Magic Missile is low enough cost that you can use it as your left click attack (low enough cost and low enough cooldown that it has little to no effect on your energy drain, but is better than your regular attack) will you do it? At least for a time, I mean. I'm sure many will bail on low-level skills, but some might like having something that can serve as their basic attack and be worth it.

Even if we're competing Magic Missile against the other first tier skills the Wizard has, we're still finding a first tier skill that works with our build. And I have my doubts that people will find one first level skill to be better than the others, and I'll use Diablo II very quickly to describe my point. At the low levels of play, did it really matter whether you used Fire Bolt or Ice Bolt? You went with the one that suited you depending on if you were planning on exploiting the ice or fire tree. Similarly, people will find in this game that the low-level skills they implement into their high-level builds will not necessarily be the "best" but the one they like or the one they think works best with the other skills they use as well. And that becomes the "best" by definition, because in that player's head, it fit.

You can bet that if someone decides to use only high cost skills, they're going to need a skill to help them regenerate their resource more quickly... well, what's the difference? And who can say which route is better? Both players are using 5 skills that take up resource and devoting 1 skill to the attempt to regain some resource. Maybe one does that job better, but one has been attacking non-stop while the other is going to come back with bigger skills sooner. It's the player that will decide the winner, not the use or disuse of lower-level skills. Critical decisions made with the six tools available will determine a build's success, not the tools themselves.

Maybe we should see if there's a problem before we go about fixing it, hmm?

Quote from flawkstawker45

why can't I make that claim? Jay him self said they were noticing a trend where people would take points out of a skill to put it it in "better" one. The arcane missle vs arcane orb comment. taking away skills hasn't changed the fact that arcane orb is better than arcane missle other wise why would people have wanted to dump all the points into it. And the new system where you are good at everything promotes you figuring out the sucky skills way to quickly

Because that's how player psychology works. Who said that Arcane Orb was better? Maybe it's stronger, and if I'm not mistaken, I think it may do splash or something along those lines. But it is, by merit of being higher on the tree, more costly. But that doesn't matter in the head of a player. All that matters is "it's stronger, so it deserves the most points." Is that not a fair statement? I think that's what you were getting at too. But what I think Jay Wilson and his crew are getting at is that while it was indeed possible to maximize the capabilities of a move, that meant that you had committed to not using other moves. That meant that while the system "worked" and one might beat the game on all difficulties with that one beefy skill... that's not what the design team wanted. The design team wanted to make a game where you had to creatively use multiple skills together. A tree system limits the number of builds to approximately the number of skills there are available, including rune changes. That's not customization. That's "I'm a Whirlwind Barbarian, but look, I'm totally using my other skills... level 1 leap, level 1 bash, level 1 shout... etc."

In short, then, yes. Arcane Orb is better than Magic Missile. I bet we all agree. I find that likely. What skill will you use when you can't afford Arcane Orb, then? Or will you stop and wait for your energy to regenerate so you can just Orb again? That's the idea. Big moves kill big enemies or big groups. Little moves kill little enemies or little groups. You waste your resources and cooldowns, and you'll get surrounded and taken down fast, and no potions or town portals to save your hide this time.

Quote from Soulmancer

Oh I'm sorry I didn't realize you had played Torchlight 2 Diablo 3 before it's even been released. Try researching a topic before throwing out ignorance. Torchlight 1 Diablo 2 was a novelty game. Torchlight 2 Diablo 3 is an entirely different beast. And at least Runic Blizzard cares about their fan-base and community and doesn't find new ways to step on them for the sole purpose of making an extra buck.

Fixed.

Furthermore you can sense the mentality and friendliness of Runic's positive fanbase. As opposed to the negative, bitterness and constant arguing that's rampant throughout the Diablo 3 community, since Blizzard is working wonders at tearing it's own community apart.

This was the most bitter post I've ever read. Do you take this same attitude on the Runic forums? If everyone there is as friendly as you are, I can't wait to never get involved in that community.

I think you are assuming that builds will become obsolete. That's dangerous thinking, because you don't know that. You don't know that at all.

The problem with your claims that people will give up this or that move for stronger ones until everyone has the same build is that it is a flawed claim based on simplified arguments. An earlier example you used was, and I may not have these skill names right, "You can't use a Black Ice wizard in PvP, you need the damage output of a Disintegrate wizard." Well that's an overly simplified argument. Because it's not a Black Ice wizard, it's a Black Ice/Magic Missile/Shock Armor/Disintegrate/Teleport/Arcane Orb wizard. The beauty of the current system is that if there is not a one-skill fix to every battle situation, then every build has inherent weaknesses that can be exploited by someone of the same class with a different skillset. Maybe this Wizard goes for pure mobility and damage output, but this other one sacrifices that same mobility for moves that freeze or slow the enemy. Well now we've got someone who uses easy to aim moves because they're jumping around so much, and someone who plans on keeping you in one spot and doing way more damage. Which one is better, because if their specialties (mobility and immobilizing) are so at odds, there's not a better and worse build, there's just a better and worse player.

Now that no one of our six moves is weak by the time we're level 60, the idea of "better" and "worse" builds fades. Yes, obviously there are high level moves that do high level effects and high level damage. But those moves take up high level resource and have high level cooldowns, and I can see someone who relies on these moves getting steamrolled by a player who uses enough rapidfire moves with small resource cost to basically never stop hitting you.

Reality check: there is just no such thing as a wrong way to play in this new system. I think it was you who said earlier that if everyone's perfect, then no one is. Well, that's true in this case, because if everyone can play their own style and have it be viable in the arena, then no one can inherently be better than the others.

Really, I can't take you arguments very heavily when none of us have played the game yet until you can provide arguments on your side that account for the facts that
A. everyone will be forced to use their entire skill pool (6 skills) to be effective in high level arenas.
B. no one can spam the most powerful moves in the game thanks to cooldowns and smart resource systems.
C. anyone who uses X or Y move as their staple is vulnerable to someone who utilizes in any way a move or fighting style that exploits the weakness of that staple.

You may have what you are asking for if you will accept receiving Diablo 3 in two years minimum.

First off, just to set the mood, I love the new skill system.

A couple of points I would like to touch on... If you think you will ever even meet another player with the same setup as you in the skill department, I think you're underestimating how many combinations of 6 you can make out of 24 elements (especially when there are 7 versions of each of those 24 moves.) Yes, EVENTUALLY, people will adhere to something that works well that others are doing. But now, more than ever, people can viably deviate in huge ways, unlike in D2.

Second, let me just share a brief story. I played Diablo 2 for the first time many years ago. I started a necromancer, because I loved the idea. I looked at his skill tree and saw a path devoted to skeletons. I was more excited about a video game in that moment then I ever had been before. I'm here to tell you that I loved Diablo 2, but I never truly forgave it for the sin of promising me skeletons, but not allowing me to beat even normal difficulty with it. NO. I don't want to get Iron Maiden. NO. I don't want to max out resurrects. I want skeletons. And if you think I got over the idea of not being able to play the way I wanted to play when logic dictated by looking at the skill tree that I should have been able to, you're dead wrong. Now in Diablo 3, you'll see Witchdoctors with Mongrels in the lategame often (I assume, because who really knows?), because now skills scale properly. If you never had your initial game plan crushed by the horrors of the D2 skill trees, you will never understand why Blizzard did the right thing with this new update until you accept the reality that people deserve to play the way they want to play if a game is going to present them with options that it claims are all viable.

I bet it's out the week of August 16. That gives them time to announce it next week and start it the week after.

Quote from kjolnir

Quote from theSkaBoss

The Rune system is awesome! So what if you don't know what you're getting? You certainly didn't hate unidentified items, did you? That's all this is.

Not really. While nothing has been thusfar changed, what has been DISCUSSED is making it so:

1) You don't know what a rune is until you socket it (no big deal)
2) You can't ever socket that rune to another skill once you do socket it (big deal)

What this means is you won't know if the rune you socketed for Magic Missile is the one you ACTUALLY wanted for Arcane Orb until you socket it in Magic Missile - and by that point, it's too late, because you can't ever use it in any other skill but Magic Missile. If runes weren't known until you socketed them and you could change them to other skills once they WERE known, nobody would really be issuing forth serious complaints about the change.

Well, then I guess you have to be careful about which one you pick to stick the rune into, don't you? Heaven forbid you get forced to try a rune you didn't intend. Heaven forbid you don't have to try it at all, but have to (gasp) find another rune. Really, though, I know why it all seems less than ideal to you. I know level 7 runes will be a rarity, but so will each piece of gear you wear at that point in the game. Since when did a little gear-hunting scare off a Diablo player? Frankly, if you're bold enough to stick a level 7 rune into an item, you're probably committed to using that skill with or without a rune. So what's a little monster-mashing in the quest for the perfect rune? (That is, if you can even claim that you know what the "perfect" rune is. Don't forget, each skill might look nice with this or that rune, but when you're playing the game, you'll have to consider it in the light of your OTHER five skills, and THEIR rune modifications, if any.)

Quote from mrlamoe

I can't believe it.

Blizzard are so damn lazy, instead of fighting against 3rd party sellers, then they support them, and makes it a lot easier for them to sell their items.

I dont like the idea...
Think about this; 2 players both level up, same speed, with the same items etc etc. When they both hit level 60, 1 of them suddenly stop playing. The other guy uses many many hours to get his gear and feel that he finally got that gear he wanted. But then the other guy that had left the game earlier comes back. He notice the RML-AH and put in some money. While the other guy used many many hours on his gear, is this guy simply buying all the guy.

The point: I dont understand why I should be using many hours on a game, where some people can use 10min to buy their stuff.

I saw some ideas on the forum earlier, and here is just a few a liked;
1. Make a badge or something that tells us if the people had bought any of their items.
2. Make diffrent kind of characters, those who wants to use real life money, and those who doesn't. Just like HC/SC
3. Remove the real life money AH, and simply make items soulbounded, like WoW. Now you maybe think "Hmm, what if I am a barbarian and a WD item drops". This is how to fix THAT: Simply make the item trade able for 1 hour or 2 hours, just a moment, so you can give your friend the item.

I am strongly against this. I see Blizzard as some greedy and lazy company, atm I dont know if I want to support something like that. I accept when you can buy pets or something like in wow, for real money. I accept it because it doesn't affect the game at all.

Sorry my bad english, please tell me what you think.

So you played the game and that guy didn't. If you didn't enjoy playing the game and acquiring gear, you wouldn't have played. If you didn't want to play the game, but wanted the gear, you would have bought, begged, or traded for it. He felt like he needed to buy gear. So what if he did? Does that affect you and your gameplay experience at all? No, not really, it only affects his.

Look, what people seem to forget is that someone somewhere found all this "godly gear" that apparently everyone is going to be buying. Someone somewhere would have had it, and they may have found it as easily as they found life orbs. In a random system, you can't ensure that anyone with godly gear spent any amount of time getting it. And what if they traded gold for all that gear? Is that bad? Is that something that should be frowned upon, because they "got the gear in 10 minutes?" If that's the logic we're rolling with, then gold should be removed from Diablo. In fact, trading is out too. Soulbind everything, because the only way anyone should get anything is if they went out and killed something for it.

Hey guys, new member.

So, I am on team Blizzard with this entire update, and I shall now discourse on why every single thing they did was genius.

First, some Economy 101, since plenty of posters here seem to have acquired the HURR-odric scroll after bumping their head on the Tree of Idiots. The RMAH is ingenious for a few very specific reasons, a few of which have been touched on by previous posters. First, since you can sell gold, you can acquire money to spend in the RMAH, which means you just spent gold to get something on the RMAH. Second, those of you who think the RMAH is not ethical will (according to your ethics) put anything you want to sell in the AH on the Gold AH, which means that there will be plenty of good items on the Gold AH. If your ethics are so strong that you don't like the RMAH, then I'm sure we can trust you to not try and sell there. Third, this puts a value on Gold, so you know what you have. Sweet, finally.

Further, you guys need to understand economics on a deeper scale if you're going to attack Blizzard for bringing real world economy and grafting it into this virtual universe. In particular, you need to understand the ebb and flow of money coming in, the money sitting around, and the money going out. Let's say that out of one million players, fifty thousand buy SOMETHING in the RMAH, whether it be 50 cents for basic gloves, or 50 dollars for a sweet-axe axe. That's fifty thousand multiplied by the average expense that was just put into the D3 economy. Some went into the real-world pockets of the sellers, and some went into Blizzard e-balance. Now, assuming that another four-hundred and fifty thousand players are okay with selling gold for e-balance and buying on the RMAH with e-balance, they're just recycling the money put in the economy already. What does this mean? If there's a total e-balance amongst the five-hundred thousand players of $5000 (obviously low, but just for example, let's roll with that amount) then people are just shifting that $5000 around to acquire things that they want/need. So eventually, our collective e-balance will begin to move into real-world pockets, but more e-balance will come in from more cash expense into the game. What this means is that our Diablo economy will function much like the real-world economy. The more cash there is in the system, the less it's worth. Conversely, the less cash there is, the more it's worth. What this means for Diablo economy is that if everyone is buying into the RMAH with cash, we have more cash in the system, which means each e-balance dollar is worth just a little less because it's easier to come by. This is a GOOD THING. It's a good thing because we also have Gold that has a comparable exchange rate to our e-balance cash. If cash is valuable, gold is valuable, and if you can acquire gold, you can acquire cash, assuming you sell. What I'm getting at here is simply this: for every ONE player that spends their real money (buying power, as ragers call it) we get a stronger gold economy for all of us, and fewer of us will get scammed out of our transactions because we know what gold is even worth.

Long story short, people, the RMAH is not going to beat out the Gold AH. It's going to become the supplementary force that makes people like the AH altogether. I don't even think it makes sense to think of it as RMAH and Gold AH so much as a single AH with two ways to pay. Your gold can be spent in the RMAH just as your cash can be spent in the Gold AH, thanks to the possibility of currency exchange and e-balance.

*whew*

As for PVP, who cares if people buy godly armor and go PVP? You'll never play against them unless your armor compares, so what does it even matter? "Oh, but I spent time, and they spent 5 minutes." Well good, then you should be able to beat them on the pure merit of knowing how to play, and they'll see what all their godly spends were worth them.

As for skill points, awesome. Brilliant even. So what, you're sad that you won't feel different from other players with Whirlwind? How is this better than D2 when you were fighting other Barbarians who beefed out Whirlwind there? At least this time around, you can be a whirlwind/leap barb while they're a whirlwind/berserker barb. You're different from every other barb because you have 6 ways to play! In PVP, I bet we'll see a never-ending ebb and flow where you are Barb 1 and you get beat by Barb 2, so you shift to have his skillset, and now you get beat by Barb 3, so you switch to that skillset, and suddenly, you get beat by someone who's playing Barb 1's skillset again. And people are honestly crying about the ability to switch out often? So what? Are YOU going to switch out often? If you are, then it was a good move. If you're not, good on you, you found a playstyle that works for you, and that is GOLDEN. That's Blizzard's goal anyway. They don't intend for every player to switch skills between each scenario. People are going to use what they want to use. People want identity, and if they can have the freedom to perfect that on the fly, they'll do it, but they'll still lock into what works for them best. This is aided even further by the new (possible) rune system. And speaking of the rune system...

The Rune system is awesome! So what if you don't know what you're getting? You certainly didn't hate unidentified items, did you? That's all this is. If you try it and don't like it, well, better luck next time. That's how good item finding has always worked in Diablo. And if you have to think carefully about what skill you're going to toss a rune into, well then you're not going to be switch out your skills that often are you? You gotta know what you're going to use so you know what skill is worth throwing that oh so precious level 7 rune into. This reinforces identity, it reinforces the treasure hunting we've always enjoyed in Diablo, and it reinforces the idea that just because that Barb has the same skillset as you, it doesn't mean you're identical, because his Whirldwind is alabaster while your whirlwind is something else entirely. Trust me, there's no such thing as "better" or "worse" runes for each skill, because when you compare any change you get from runes to the changes OTHER skills get with whatever runes they get may make what you currently THINK is a bad change into the perfect fit for your build. Essentially, everyone will have different preferences for runes, and I think this random method is going to help us all explore that a little better, which will have us playing different styles for months -- nay, years -- to come.

THANK YOU BLIZZARD! I can't wait to get my hands on this and ruin my life by only ever playing it!