During the Q&A session with lead game designer Jay Wilson at Blizzard HQ Thursday, we were treated to a fairly lengthy discussion about the Skill Runes system. Evidently, runes will not come into play during the Beta test, which led a participant to ask when we’ll see them. Jay responded that Runes will first start dropping in Act II Normal and mentioned that Skill Runes were the only major game system that still had significant revision coming its way. This statement opened the floodgates on a new Rune system that they're hoping they can get into the game. Before I get into the specifics, Jay wanted us to mention:
Official Blizzard Quote:
By the way, this is all theory; we haven’t put this in yet, so this is the way we think we’re going to go, but it’s not solidified. So keep that in mind when you report on it, make sure you say “this is theory,” but I feel like it’s theory worth sharing, especially with the fan community… We haven’t tried it out yet. So it might suck. I’m gonna put that caveat out there, but that’s the one thing we still want to try with that system, and if it works, we’ll keep it. If it doesn’t, then the system works pretty well as it is.
Overall, this theory of Blizzard’s isn’t particularly earth-shattering. Runes will still be placed in skills to alter their functionality in the same way we’re used to. They’ll still be item drops off of monsters, but the team didn’t think that Runes felt like items in the classic Diablo sense. There was no variation, no randomization. A given Rune-Skill combination always produced the same result, so long as the level of the Rune was constant. In addition to this, when moused over, the UI for Runes simply displayed the effect it had on each of your active skills. During the internal alpha testing, they found that this became a nightmare point of comparison and, after a while, just got to be frustrating for the players.
To rectify these issues, they came up with the idea of having Runes drop “unattuned.” This basically means that when a Rune drops, it’s just plain and grey and doesn’t have any specific effect on your skills. Once you socket the rune into your skill, however, it becomes attuned to that skill, providing it a bonus based on the Rune type that it randomly rolls. In addition, they are considering adding an additional random stat bonus – much like the charm system of the now-scrapped Talisman – to attuned Runes. Bashiok had this to say about the new system:
Official Blizzard Quote:
Personally, I love it, and hope it finds a way in.
I'm not so sure about rolling to see which rune effect you get (it could still work), but I *love* the idea of random affixes. That you could have a end-rank rune for the skill you want, with the effect you want, but you still don't have ideal stats on it. That just makes the min/max item hunt that much cooler, and makes runes more important than... "Oh, I found another Crimson rune. Great. /salvage"
These features combine to add an air of randomness, familiar with most Diablo loot, to Skill Runes as well. Skill Runes of equal level can vary significantly from one to another, and high-stat or “Perfect” Runes will likely become incredibly valuable. On the other hand, if you socket a Rune into a skill and don’t get what you want out of it, they hope that it feels much more like any other piece of loot that drops that you don’t want and not like a let-down or a waste of a Rune (especially considering that Rune might be valuable to another player with a different build or playstyle).
Another difference from the current system is that when Runes are removed from skills, they will remain attuned to that skill. In the old system, if you removed a Rune from a skill, you could easily place that same Rune into a different skill to reap its benefits there. Not so with the new system. So, for example, if you put an unattuned Rune into your Magic Missiles and it rolls an Indigo effect (which adds additional missiles per rank), if you later decide to take that Rune out, it will forever remain a Magic Missile splitting Rune, unusable in any other skill. Even this isn't completely set in stone though, as they've hinted that they might add a functionality to the Mystic to wipe effects off Runes.
This proposed system would also play into the new skill system. Since skills are now freely swappable, they felt they needed a soft mechanism to encourage the player to focus on their favorite skills rather than swapping them out for whichever skill was preferable for a given situation. The fact that Runes are permanently attuned to a specific skill as soon as they are socketed in that skill accomplishes this. Although Jay described Rank 1 Runes as “candy that you can throw out and experiment with all you want,” higher rank Runes will be much more precious. Socketing high-rank Runes into a skill will represent an investment in that skill, hopefully discouraging the player from swapping it out for another on a whim.
While the core mechanic of Runes would remain unchanged in this new system, Runes - especially high-level ones - will become a much more valuable commodity. Since each Rune is permanently attuned to a single skill, they will be much more build-specific and, with random stats, highly sought after Runes will be far more difficult to obtain. What do you think? Do you like the sound of this proposed new system or are you happy with Skill Runes the way they are?
In fact, the rune system can in effect be considered a soft mechanic to limit respeccing. True, you can switch skills on the fly whenever you want, but unless you have the proper runes to go along with that switch it won't be feasible later in the game. It will definitely be possible in the early game, which will allow you to experiment with different skill setups. But the late game in Hell will not.
I like the system, even the random rune effect thing if they decide to go with that. It's the exact same system that Identify served in D2, so I don't see the big deal with runes being determined after you put them into a skill. You can always just replace them with the old one you just had in there.
Maybe that means he runs a wizard with my barbarian the first time through - then I inherit his unwanted runes for my wizard...
I can see this working.
I completely agree with you. They will definitely need to add something to the current system. As it stands now, once you find a level 7 rune, you are set, no need to find it again and can easily be moved around skills and characters (especially with the shared stash). At least with the rune system in Diablo 2, once you make a runeword, that rune is gone and you must find another one. This would have worked great if duping wasnt rampant, because of the chance to drop. With this proposed system, there will be a lot of hard choices to make with your runes, and luck when it comes to rolling your attributes. Also, I think that this bind to skill idea will definitely help with the removal of skill points and will prevent the swapping of skills on a whim. With that being said, I think Blizzard understands that the rune system needs to reworked a little with the changes to the skill system, and I think they are going in the right direction. Just my two cents
1) There will always be a Best-in-Slot item, and that's true for runes. It's unavoidable. So, yes, eventually you're going to get the best rune you can possibly get and won't have any more upgrades until...
2) With the monetizing of the AH and a consistent stream of revenue for Blizzard, they can now fiscally justify more regular updates like balance patches and, more importantly, the addition of new gear. Of course, this hinges on the RMAH being successful, but I don't think there's any doubt of that happening if other microtransaction games such as League of Legends or Dungeons and Dragons Online are any indication.
Personally, I'm the type of player that has very few characters. I like to constantly tweak my few mains to make them as strong as possible. In that light, both this (proposed) rune change and the removal of skill points give me tons of options when tweaking my characters to best suit my playstyle.
A level 7 Rune drops called "Rune VII" (I guess). I want a Crimson Rune for my spell that I've been after for quite awhile. I whack that level 7 rune into that spell and it goes Indigo. I go "$@#$" and keep looking while being left with a wasted level 7 rune that ONLY works in the one spell that I didn't want an Indigo Rune for?
Is that how the proposed system is meant to work?
EDIT: It would make more sense to me if it dropped as "Crimson Rune VII" and then when I whacked it into the spell I wanted it would attune and thus prevent me from using it in my other spells (stopping me from swapping them in and out), requiring me to get another "Crimson Rune VII" to use in another spell where I was after a Crimson Rune for.
~~ edit ~~
and the rune wipe ability could then work only for the random attributes and not the rune type.
I also feel like there could be the possibility of blank runes dropping, as well as preset runes dropping without random attributes. The only issue that comes from this is the "randomness" in drops. Shamans seem like a monster that would have specific runes, but a zombie type monster would not. There's a small discussion to be had.
I believe they should keep the attributes on a random roll when set in a skill and that the rune becomes set with the skill; however, I dont think they should make the type of rune unknown. With the current amount of work it takes to get to a level 7 rune, putting it a skill and getting a worthless rune type is just a kick in the balls...So keep everything in the new system except let the rune type be know, I think that is the best solution imo
Yep, you totally did, what he said, lol, just agreeing with you
I agree with you (and Lethal_weapon's comment - second posts below yours). Not knowing the type of rune you will get is just too punishing when you don't get the one you were looking for.
On another note, IF they make the rune type unknown it would be pointless to give the ability to the Mystic to wipe it. If that was the case, you would only need gold to get the rune you want, since after you get a rank 7 rune, you can just keep wiping it and "attuning" it again until you get the one you want. If they do this "new" system, it shouldn't let you wipe it. Otherwise it will pretty much be the same as knowing the exact effect of the rune. The only difference is that it will cost gold (and maybe a ton of gold) to get the exact rune you want.
Yea, I agree with you on this as well. They definitely should not allow you to "wipe" the rune clean with the Mystic, because it then eliminates the whole point of not knowing what type of rune it is; though, it will probably cost you heavily in gold/materials. Still think it is counter-productive if they let you do this...
I don't think that's a valid complaint.
Try viewing the "socketing" process as simply using a scroll of identify on the item. Lets go with unique rings as another example, if a unique ring drops and it doesn't turn out to be an SoJ, you don't complain "goddamnit! WHY DIDN'T THEY LET ME KNOW IT WASN'T AN SOJ AHEAD OF TIME!!!1!`" You have a moment of anticipation when you pick it up and right before you identify it, then its "goddamned nagelring" or "oh nice, its a 'ravenfrost,' i needed one for this char" or hell, it might be a BK ring. YOU DON'T KNOW. and when you find out its either trash, useful, trade fodder, or amazing. The same will apply to runes. Except now they can also be cash-money.
getting a (lets say) lvl 5 rune of the type you want would be similar to getting a skiller with a not-great affix attached, lets say like mana (did gc's give mana? i haven't played d2 in a whiiiiile). It gets the job done, but there are upgrades that you will continue looking for (and playing the game for).
lvl 6 and 7 runes will of course be harder to find, but who's to say that they even give THAT much more power. Maybe a lvl 5 magic missile rune lets you hit 6 targets and a lvl 7 lets you hit 8. I think you can get by without those extra 2 hits, but they would certainly help out. it gives you something to play for while not being completely absolutely necessary (opinions will differ on that).
And I hope that runes are re-blank-able. That will be a fantastic gold sink, which will be good for the game's economy.
And you don't just need 1 lvl 7 rune, you'd need anywhere from 6-100, depending on how flexible you plan to be with your character. That makes MASSIVE demand, which makes for healthy trading.
Some people seem to be arguing that there will be no gradient between lvl 1 and 7 rune drops. You'll get a taste of what a run does real early via candy-runes, and then you'll get hell-functional runes probably by the time you get to hell difficulty, with the absolutely best runes being an item hunt similar to an anni charm or hellfire torch or a windforce or whatever.
I don't see how any of that is bad.
edit: why is this post full of /br etc..?
There is a key difference between charms and runes though. Runes define how you play your character. An example I could take out of the press conferance is the battle mage. A rune for arcane orb, a spell you generally wouldn't use as a battle mage, made it swirl protectively around you (mario kart?). My point is that you would never replace your level 6 indigo (just a guess, I don't know what color it is) for a level 7 crimson if you're trying to build a battle mage. I should know what I'm socketing, and I shouldn't have to spend tons of gold if I'm unlucky, since it's a playstyle change, not just a stat change.
This is why I think that unattuned runes should still have a color. The random affixes is what should be random. You would still use a level 7 indigo rune if it had slightly optimal stats over a level 6 indigo rune that has more optimal stats (but less of them). I would feel a lot better about min/maxing by rerolling repeatedly on something that isn't a playstyle choice. Even though I would almost advocate for a complete removal of the affix if you unlock a rune through the mystic, to give your runes more of a sense of investment when you use them. Just my thought though.
I understand the attachment to wanting the effect to remain the same. When I first heard what JW had said I was very much "i'd better be able to keep the effect!" but upon further consideration decided that was less of an issure than i thought.
While I hope that a "perfect" affixed 6 is as or even less powerful total (account for both effect and stats) than a "mediocre" 7, I don't think that the difference between a bad lvl 5 and a perfect 7 will stop you from being able to play the game.
A 2 part re-roll where you can choose to not reroll either the affix or the effect would be a perfectly fine middle ground in my mind. i would like it if there was a flat cost to re-roll, but you could choose to re-roll the effect, affix, or both for that price.
edit: cybercheese, it looks like you're quoting the html rather than the standard text, dunno why.
http://forums.battle.net/thread.html?topicId=27822642899&sid=3000
I most definitely have, I also can spell "you". It does not change the fact that, as he said, high level runes will be rare drops, and this system is one that would make it frustrating for the player to try to get the customization he promised in skills via runes. Finding a set of armor that gives you 100% crushing blow is one thing, finding an item that is the only real way to customize the skill you use to kill hundreds of monsters, but drops only rarely, and giving you no idea whether it's the right one or not until you socket it in the skill is a completely different story. Perhaps this is your first diablo game. Imagine the following: You have six active skills. Three passives. Assuming you can also rune passives, that gives you nine skills to try to rune. Even if you can only rune the actives, that's still six skills you need to rune up with level 7 runes, in order to play the way you want to, at end game, so that you can -start- farming for equipment. You're looking at five different rune types. But, since you don't know what rune type you'll have until you socket it, it will go as follows: You have a 20% chance, when you socket the rune, that it's the rune you want for your skill. That's each time. That means there is an 80% chance it's not the rune you want. You could get the rune you want the first time, or you could not. Either way, the rune is used, and you either move on to the next skill, or continue searching for this skill. However, these are rare items, and they attune when socketed, therefore making them useless for another item. So you've experimented, you know you want a golden rune in skill one, an obsidian rune in skill 2, etc. That's great, however, your rune drops and it says "A rune.", you socket it in skill one, "An obsidian rune". Too bad for your luck, huh? You should have socketed it in skill two. But you can't now. Farm again.
Hours later, you may have over twenty runes of every type, except golden, that are attuned to skill one. This is different from farming for a pair of war travelers in one major way: War travelers is an item you use to enhance your magic find. Runes are used to customize your skills, and are the only real way to customize your skills. Anyone can swap out skills, anyone can use magic missile, but runes are the only way to make your magic missile split into two. Runes, effectively, are skill unlockers. Bashiok has stated in previous comments that you can have thousands and thousands of skill combinations. That's with runes. Without runes, you now have base skills. Sure, you can use lower-quality runes to try to fill those slots, but you could still be farming for hours just for lower-quality runes, and that's all just being done so that you can play the game the way you want to, with the skills you want to. That's all being done -just- so you can get to the point where you can farm. Meanwhile, if they dropped the rune with the rune TYPE visible to you from the start, you'd merely have to farm until you find the rune type you wish, then put it in the proper skill, and move on. If they're going to keep runes "Grey", then they need to make them -not- attune when socketed, or they need to let runes be ID'd to show the "color" before socketing. The proposed system, instead, only leads to one question: Why even bother including level 7 runes under that system? Only 5% of the gaming population will even bother with them, and they only serve to delay the release date, for a system not many people will use (same reasoning for why they scrapped a few other systems). As I said, it's unlikely to ship with Jay's proposed system, as it's detrimental to what the team has stated they wish for diablo 3.
I think there is some confusion over need vs want in your argument.
Before continuing, I will say that maybe we WILL need lvl 7 runes to farm endgame stuff. I think that unlikely, and think that lower levels of the same runes will be good enough to get by. They may not be. We won't be able to say until the game is out and we're 60.
Additionally, I think that there will be a way outside of actually putting the rune in the skill to pick the skill for the rune if they go with JW's idea, simply because requiring someone to pay to unsocket a rune just to ID a new rune seems excessive. I wouldn't be surpirsed if runes could be "set" by the mystic (either you get to choose its effect like you'd like, or she could reveal what effect the rune is going to be).
The 7-level gradient is actually fantastic for allowing customizability and viability without making optimum builds common. Think of a lvl 7 rune as a zod. How many people ACTUALLY saw one drop? In my view, and this is certainly contestable, lvl 7 runes are not meant to be acquired by everyone. Now, you may argue "if the chance is so low, why even bother?" but the fact of the matter is that most of the great drops in diablo also had absolutely miniscule chance to drop. That doesn't mean its not worth putting in. lets say that 10 million people buy the game the day/weekend it comes out. lets say everyone who is going to hit 60 is about 1/10 that. So now we've got 1 million people in endgame. If something has a 1 in a million drop chance (.000001) will happen as many times in as that many characters kill a single monster (guess: probably about every 1 second) which comes out to 3600 times an hour.
The market will be flooded. The drop chance is probably lower than that, or maybe the kill speed, but I think it illustrates the point. In fact, I think i've convinced myself that everyone will have lvl 7 runes without much wait.
This means your 20.1% chance per person is more like a .00001% chance per person, that you actually end up being able to get the rune you want. The factors that would be required to make "Millions" of a level 7 rune under this system are so astronomical, that they might as well not even include level 7 runes, or they'd need to make them drop as often as gold did in d2.
Also, as stated, Zods did not drastically alter the customization of your game, nor were they required for being able to obtain gear in higher difficulties. In fact, they were the end-game strive-after, mostly for currency, and slightly for wealth or a few runewords. You can't compare the current runes to diablo 2 runes. It's better to compare them to skill points. Which Jay even states himself, in a round-about way. ("We removed skill points, blah blah, runes basically allow you to power up your skills for nightmare, and fill the previous role").
Now, I'm -not- against runes becoming "Attuned" to a skill, NOR am I against random affixes on runes (Hell, I love the idea... It's like a charm, but for your rune), What -is- a major strangle-point against the path they claimed they wanted to take with the game, though, and what -is- a mistake from a game standpoint, is making you SOCKET the rune in a skill, to determine the COLOR. It's nothing LIKE IDing an item, because if you ID a ring in diablo 2, it does NOT restrict the ring to Sorceress only, if you're a sorc. It might be a nagelring, but you can -STILL- use that nagelring on your level 24 barb. Further, that Stone of Jordan you were hoping it was doesn't allow you to use frozen orb, nor does it make your frozen orb spit out fireballs instead of ice shards. It would be far better to keep attunement (Which would mean only your class and build would ever want it, so that -would- cut down on supply, yes, it's kinda like class-based soulbinding), -HOWEVER-, there is no reason to make it impossible to determine the rune TYPE (or even the bonuses on the rune) before socketing, and it will only cause frustration and anger whenever a rune is found, instead of the elation of saying "Oh yeah, this is a level 7 indigo rune, AND IT HAS +10 RESOURCE! I definitely don't need this on my barb, But my Wizard could do some great stuff with splitting magic missiles, and the resource bonus is just icing on the cake!" You'd have people going "Crap... That rune was a level 7 golden rune with +2 life... and I socketed it on my hydra... and now it's only one giant hydra.... when I want to use my Hydra for freezing crowd control. That sucks, it would have rocked if I knew it was golden, I should have socketed it in Arcane Orb. What a waste of a rune."
There's a crowd here that thinks it's more "hardcore" that way. You can be pretty much guaranteed that the same crowd would be the first ones complaining about it, come release, once they realize how much it would actually effect them. It's kinda the same mentality as someone who wrestles alligators, who says "yeah, there's a 60% chance he could bite me arm off, but don't worry, I'm hardcore, I'll be fine.", then they get stung in the heart by a stingray somewhere in the pacific.
I am aware that drop rates (say 1 in 10) don't guarantee that an item will drop in that given frame (you won't automatically get the drop on the 10th kill if you haven't gotten it yet). But in an average case, with a sufficiently large sample size, the ratio will be extremely close to the expected drop rate.
I see both sides of the chosen/random effect debate. Both sides have pros, both sides have cons, which weighs heavier for you will vary on a person-by-person basis. I like the random effect because it brings more of a focus to the AH/trading, which I really enjoyed playing around with in WoW. I like the chosen/predetermined effect because it means quicker satisfaction with regard to getting your skills exactly where you want them.
The gambler in me is a little louder on this than the lazy bastard, so I lean towards the randomization side. I would not be unhappy with either.
Also: too soon! :-p