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?
One of the.. I don't think I can call it a problem.. but more like a headscratcher is how exactly improving your skill will work.
We know that certain runes, like the one shown at blizzcon for magic missile, will add more missiles. So a rank 1 rune will give you 2 missiles and a rank 7 may give you 10.
In D2, pumping points into skills like Teeth gave you more damage and more teeth.
Also with auto allocating stat points, I believe skills will naturally do more damage as you level (at least to some extent).
So how will putting more skill points into skills work? If you stay with an un runed magic missile but put 15 points in it, will it just do more damage? And stay as one bolt?
Maybe more skill points give different effects depending on what rune you are using? If you have the multi missile rune then maybe more skill points adds even more missiles.
They look so tasty. I bet they're lime flavoured. My only gripe is that they don't come in raspberry, port wine, orange and pineapple flavours.
I can't really imagine a way they would make slimes look non-wow like... I mean, it's slime! What can you do to make slime stand out?
Make it a cubic instead of round?
Love you! SO Much! That was hilarious, my girlfriend yelled at me for waking her up I was laughing so hard. I do love the slimes (they're so cute!) and now they are even better.
I feel proud of myself for being able to disturb someone's sleep on another continent. Also I am suddenly craving jelly.