Did you feel too limited in Diablo and Diablo II with your skill choices? As promised so long ago when Diablo III was first announced, runes will be adding a ton of customizability to your Diablo III skill armory. When the announcement first came, though, who would have thought that, base skills and rune combinations combined, we would be fighting the hordes of Hell with over seven hundred skills?
Official Blizzard Quote:
Amount of skills in Diablo III, with all player runestone variants included, is currently topping 700.
Official Blizzard Quote:
It's staggering really, even to me still. Those are all unique in their visuals too, which is important to note. Sure some of them may be simple color shifts but most of them are unique mechanics with completely unique visual effects. It's crazy. Big up to our effects guys.
The flip side, of course, is that not every skill can possibly be interesting or useful enough to bother exploring every possible rune combination. Or will they? Perhaps Blizzcon 2010 will give us more to chew on as we near the as-of-yet unknown release date of Diablo III!
The flip side, of course, is that not every skill can possibly be interesting or useful enough to bother exploring every possible rune combination.
And that's 700 potential excuses to use the nerfbat - and 699 skills that may need to be adjusted in response. So, almost a half-million iterations to test. :miner:
Even in Diablo 2 with 30 skills per character, about 25 of them were completely useless. I am very excited to hear about 700 potential skill combos but I have serious doubts that more than a small handful will be useful, especially late game. Also, I hope they don't count fireball lvl 1 2-4 damage and fireball lvl 2 3-5 as two different skills.
many d2 mods could only have up to 300ish skills due to the size of the mod but to ballpark d2 could hit a max of 1024 skills without having sync errors.
this shows us that with the new d3 engine hopefully that is increase tenfold.
The flip side, of course, is that not every skill can possibly be interesting or useful enough to bother exploring every possible rune combination.
And that's 700 potential excuses to use the nerfbat - and 699 skills that may need to be adjusted in response. So, almost a half-million iterations to test. :miner:
for once i'll agree with you that its gonna be something that needs testing and balancing because so many combinations inevitably have big chances to provide many quite useless and some quite overpowered results.
but the fact they're talking numbers, saying that each "has" (and not "will have") their own visual effects means they're only gonna need some tweaking to make sure they're at least interesting (if not too useful, Blizzard always liked that - proof for that is that Jay called the Necromancer the one "perfect" class Diablo II had cause none of the skills was completely useless but rather interesting or fun to use). Still it needs time to check out and see if it works as intended.
Also, I hope they don't count fireball lvl 1 2-4 damage and fireball lvl 2 3-5 as two different skills.
i dont think you should worry about that. talking about 25-30 different active skills it means they're different skills, not variations of the same (as it happens with the usage of runes). so its 25-30 abilities for each class that end up being around 700 with the changes provided by the runes.
cause none of the skills was completely useless but rather interesting or fun to use
Insofar as they had an interesting and unique play mechanic, which many necro skills did.
Pretty firey lens flares with a dozen different colors and a dozen slightly different stats attached aren't necessarily so interesting.
Anyhow, glad you're objective enough to see the subtext - this is how development schedules become truly infinite. The 2011 camp shouldn't be cheering this news, they should be , IMO.
as long as there isnt an official release date nobody should be cheering or whining, i'm just saying.
i'm optimistic that the skills (with and without variations) will only require tweaking to be ready and even though it takes time, there's plenty to go around to support a release within a year from now (i'm optimistic by nature, what can you do? ). its not like many more things will require balancing anyway. at least they wont have to check different builds for stats which could change damage output, attack rating hit points etc etc - that could delay it even more.
good thing its only items and skills.
It's staggering really, even to me still. Those are all unique in their visuals too, which is important to note. Sure some of them may be simple color shifts but most of them are unique mechanics with completely unique visual effects. It's crazy. Big up to our effects guys.
Does that mean were are going to have to add 700 pages to the wiki just for the skills. I really hope all o them are viable like they said in the beginning.
Well, we'll obviously have to wait for more information before we're able to determine how we'll be handling adding the skills to the wiki. But, I'd assume for the moment that there'll be one page for each skill with info regarding the rune effects all on the same page.
Oh, really? I haven't played Borderlands for long (horrible game, imo), but I don't even remember more than 5 weapons that were anything "different". Having 1 less max ammo per clip or 2 more bullet shot per second hardly justifies calling all of them "weapons".
What I'm trying to say is, even I when I look at mods and what I do, could pack up some big, impressive numbers of something like that that makes it look more impressive than its actually worth.
I'm not saying its not impressive works. But I hate when they give that kind of numbers. I'll count them in the final product and not more than 1/4 of these will be unique, I would bet on that.
I'm just happy that skills we start out with will still be viable in endgame situations.
(I hated having to waste 1 point in a useless skill to get to the skills I wanted)
For me, having 700+ skill combinations is just a plus to that, and is pretty amazing.
Even if only a quarter of those skill combinations are actually unique, that will still
be a couple multiples of the number of skills each character had in D2.
In the end, Diablo has always been about customization and being able to try new things,
so the fact that we will be allowed to do these things in D3 makes me feel pretty good about
the game.
Sooooo.... It sounds like there are 5 different runestones and that's it. No tiers of runes? No more minor or major runes?
Oh well. I guess 700 is enough
I guess better types of the same rune will just enhance the effect.
E.g. Minor rune of multiplication in lightning skill --> chain lightning hits one extra target.
Greater rune of multiplication in lightning skill --> chain lightning hits five targets.
I don't know whether a better rune would also increase the damage though, maybe you need to increase the skill level for that. Or maybe it's the other way around, that skill level enhances the effects and better runes grant more damage. Or a mixture of both. :mellow:
And that's 700 potential excuses to use the nerfbat - and 699 skills that may need to be adjusted in response. So, almost a half-million iterations to test. :miner:
many d2 mods could only have up to 300ish skills due to the size of the mod but to ballpark d2 could hit a max of 1024 skills without having sync errors.
this shows us that with the new d3 engine hopefully that is increase tenfold.
for once i'll agree with you that its gonna be something that needs testing and balancing because so many combinations inevitably have big chances to provide many quite useless and some quite overpowered results.
but the fact they're talking numbers, saying that each "has" (and not "will have") their own visual effects means they're only gonna need some tweaking to make sure they're at least interesting (if not too useful, Blizzard always liked that - proof for that is that Jay called the Necromancer the one "perfect" class Diablo II had cause none of the skills was completely useless but rather interesting or fun to use). Still it needs time to check out and see if it works as intended.
i dont think you should worry about that. talking about 25-30 different active skills it means they're different skills, not variations of the same (as it happens with the usage of runes). so its 25-30 abilities for each class that end up being around 700 with the changes provided by the runes.
Insofar as they had an interesting and unique play mechanic, which many necro skills did.
Pretty firey lens flares with a dozen different colors and a dozen slightly different stats attached aren't necessarily so interesting.
Anyhow, glad you're objective enough to see the subtext - this is how development schedules become truly infinite. The 2011 camp shouldn't be cheering this news, they should be , IMO.
i'm optimistic that the skills (with and without variations) will only require tweaking to be ready and even though it takes time, there's plenty to go around to support a release within a year from now (i'm optimistic by nature, what can you do? ). its not like many more things will require balancing anyway. at least they wont have to check different builds for stats which could change damage output, attack rating hit points etc etc - that could delay it even more.
good thing its only items and skills.
Official Blizzard Quote:
It's staggering really, even to me still. Those are all unique in their visuals too, which is important to note. Sure some of them may be simple color shifts but most of them are unique mechanics with completely unique visual effects. It's crazy. Big up to our effects guys.
"There are millions of possible weapons!"
Oh, really? I haven't played Borderlands for long (horrible game, imo), but I don't even remember more than 5 weapons that were anything "different". Having 1 less max ammo per clip or 2 more bullet shot per second hardly justifies calling all of them "weapons".
What I'm trying to say is, even I when I look at mods and what I do, could pack up some big, impressive numbers of something like that that makes it look more impressive than its actually worth.
I'm not saying its not impressive works. But I hate when they give that kind of numbers. I'll count them in the final product and not more than 1/4 of these will be unique, I would bet on that.
(I hated having to waste 1 point in a useless skill to get to the skills I wanted)
For me, having 700+ skill combinations is just a plus to that, and is pretty amazing.
Even if only a quarter of those skill combinations are actually unique, that will still
be a couple multiples of the number of skills each character had in D2.
In the end, Diablo has always been about customization and being able to try new things,
so the fact that we will be allowed to do these things in D3 makes me feel pretty good about
the game.
Oh well. I guess 700 is enough
E.g. Minor rune of multiplication in lightning skill --> chain lightning hits one extra target.
Greater rune of multiplication in lightning skill --> chain lightning hits five targets.
I don't know whether a better rune would also increase the damage though, maybe you need to increase the skill level for that. Or maybe it's the other way around, that skill level enhances the effects and better runes grant more damage. Or a mixture of both. :mellow:
Awesome news though. Can't wait to see what they have for us at blizzcon. Hopefully some very polished videos of the new demo build.
Do you guys know how many runes can be used
at one time?