Their explanation leans back on the "it's not Diablo II" argument which has been touted since the game's announcement back in 2008:
Official Blizzard Quote:
We've been playing the game, we know what skill points were causing, and it was not interesting and unique builds. It was not meaningful customization. It was maxing out a couple skills, and that's it. It was Diablo II. What we have now actually forces people to make interesting choices, to craft interesting builds based on very strict limitations.
But the Diablo III team wants the latest game in the series to go beyond, as they see it, another shortcoming they saw in Diablo II's skill system. Bashiok says that "one common mistake people are making is thinking all the class skills are straight damaging attack skills... There's no variety because you just pick the most powerful six, and you're done."
Their latest iteration of the skill system essentially splits what would have been called passive and active skills in Diablo II into two exactly that: passive and active skills. Where passive skills are invested in separately and contribute to your character's brawn in secret, regular skills are the ones you will use to blast your enemies into gooey bits, as well as zip around the screen at lightning speeds and issue combo attacks. Not all of these skills are straight damage dealers. Some of them allow resource regeneration or life steal, which adds another level of tactical flare to your combat experience.
Whereas in the past you would have used skill points (awarded at each level-up) to augment the power of your favorite skills (or the potency of synergies), the new skill system in Diablo III scales your skills based on your level. In addition, runestones, including their numerous tiers, affect the look, feel, and effects of your skills. Beyond them, gear directly affects your battle potency. Bashiok laid out a Diablo II scenario for demonstration:
Official Blizzard Quote:
The base problem with skill points is that we found they simply put too much incentive toward pumping up one or two skills. If we wanted to balance the game it means we'd have to let someone be able to essentially beat the game with that build since it's the most obvious. You're not going to put a few points here, a few there, you're going to go the D2 route, horde points, and dump them all into a core skill or two. It really limited builds since points always went toward specific types of attacks that scaled well with additional points, and we're not going to keep systems that are stifling (viable) build potential and (meaningful) character customization.
So, removing functionality encourages customization? While many would argue the case of stat point removal for Diablo III, this might not be exactly the same thing. Regardless, this solution does directly address the "one or two skills" scenario (Diablo II cookie-cutter builds, anyone?), so maybe it is a big step in the right direction.
Interestingly enough, the removal of skill point allotment indirectly addresses yet another controversial topic: respeccing. Many have argued that allowing for respeccing caters to a "softer" gaming audience and drains the game of an element of challenge (just take a look through a 2008 article's responses). Without skill points, there's no longer any need for respeccing. Whether or not this appeases more hardcore players is another question entirely.
Force had some excellent one-on-one time with Jay Wilson to get the full story straight from the Diablo man, himself. Wilson talked about everything leading up to the latest decision, including observations from alpha testing and conclusions drawn from prior strategy scenarios in the older games.
But does all this wishy-washy skill softness mean something more than encouraging more diverse builds? As a user on the Battle.net board asked, "Do you come upon a particularly nasty group that this other skill would just be perfect for, so you hang back, grab that skill, then destroy the group?"
Bashiok did not shoot the idea down entirely:
Official Blizzard Quote:
You're far more likely to see a player sticking with a build and working to become better at it than constantly swapping around. That's not a rule, it's player psychology so there's going to be a wide range of variables, but it's what we have found to be true not only for Diablo III, but a lot of the games out there with similar free-swapping of builds.
The removal of skill points seems like a step away from the spirit of the franchise, instilled in us with Diablo II. It will restrict cookie-cutter and low-skill-count builds to an extent, and it indirectly removes the need for a controversial respeccing system. But it is a far cry different from the original games and many "Diablo clones," possibly alienating parts of an otherwise eager audience.
What you seem to fail to realize is that instead of augmenting skills via a skill tree, we are doing it through the rune system. And since Blizzard wants to make top tier runes extremely rare, unique to the spell it is used on, and with random enchants, finding the perfect rune for your skill is not going to be easy. This means that you probably wont be swapping spells around "at a whim" end game, unless you have completely perfected all of your spells. Chances are, this will take quite some time. And with regards to the fact that runes will be a random drop, this will make the skill system a little closer to Diablo 1 where you had to collect books for your abilities.
One could argue that these runes are only variations of one spell but let me point out that these "variations" can take a base spell and make its use completely different. For instance, you take a skill like whirlwind and you give it a rune to knock back enemies, you have just turned it in to an escape mechanism. You modify it so that it applies a confusion effect on enemies, you have made it an aoe crowd control. How you choose to tailor your spells to your play style will determine what other spells will compliment it best. This is a huge step away from cookie cutter builds as it will be very hard to say that "effect a" is far superior to "effect b" since both effects will synergies with other spells in different ways. Sure you could try to maximize damage, but that simply means that that is where you put the most value... this doesn't mean it is the "best" option. Will this end cookie cutter builds? No. But then, nothing will. What it does do is make it so that these so-called "optimum" builds will be much less concrete.
On a final note, I think it is definitely a good thing for people to voice their opinions both for and against the system but I also think it is important that every one realize that we haven't really seen these systems in action yet. It is not good to immediately draw a conclusion and reject all other possibilities with out having the full picture in mind. And this goes for people who support the system as well; I remain optimistic, but I concede that it is possible it wont be all that great. If you have doubts, that is fine but at least be open to giving things a chance. If you really don't like it, just wait for reviews of the game to come out before making a purchase. Simple as that.
No... they are simply shitting on those people who fear change and don't have much imagination for what Blizzard's proposed system could be. Diablo 2 did many things different than Diablo 1. And before its release, there was just as much controversy as there is now in regards to skills ("What?! They don't have to find their abilities? WTF!!!!"). Did that make it a bad game? Hell no... it is still played today and has many loyal fans (myself included). Now, like its predecessor, Diablo 3 is changing things up. But that isn't a bad thing... it just means that it is a different game. Not simply an expansion pack to Diablo 2 with better graphics.
This doesn't mean that I feel Blizzard is infallible in their decision, but I am not going to freak out and froth at the mouth until I actually see how things pan out.
Instead of allowing people to choose what "kind" of character they're going to make, they give you a generic character.
To be honest, someone should be answering this question: what would be better, tweaking JUST skills with rune items OR tweaking skills with BOTH runes and points. To me, diversity is always better.
and auto-stats... if it was broken in d2, aim for a better one in d3... but they choose to take the easier path... but i digress.
I do criticize them for choosing this path because I have played games that pretty much give you a generic character. and compared to other games that give you more choices, they pale in comparison.
By the way, i also realize that may be high, and that if blizzard were to spend their time balancing stats, skills etc in pve and pvp environments (to an extent) they probably won't make 2011 release.
EDIT: what.. skill tree? i'm not even talking about that... they got rid of the tree way back and i was glad.
i didn't see this question before so i'll answer it now. No, i won't. i'll likely choose something, use it for a while, decide that it's not for me then try out a modified version or another skill. to be honest, i was thinking respecing would have been a perfect gold sink. they can even make it based on level... the value of gold as a currency will only be valuable if there are valuable gold sinks that will pull gold out of the market hopefully in a progressive way. (something like higher level respecs cost more, higher level runes cost more to remove etc. so that the newer people aren't forced to spend too much of whatever small amounts of gold they may have acquired.) and right now i'm seriously wondering if they even plan on making gold a valuable currency, now that gold has to compete with the real world currency.
If you don't plan on respeccing willy-nilly, why is there a big assumption that a lot of other people will?
Also, I think that people will find the merchants to serve as very viable gold sinks. Of course, who knows? They might wear out their usefulness in the late game. But they have a lot more potential than Blizzard has let on, I think, and I find it extremely likely that making skills a gold sink, while perhaps viable in a gameplay sort of way, would have just felt out of place. It wouldn't have contributed to the feel or personality of the game. It doesn't logically follow that money can influence your talents, and I think that on a very back-of-the-mind level, that would have bothered the players who want to feel immersed in Sanctuary.
As for feeling "immersed" in sanctuary, i'm not really one of those people anyway. I do agree that the merchants have potential, but as I was saying, instead of "making" good equips via merchants, if you introduce RMAH, people can bypass upgrading merchants and just buy the gear, thus there should be another viable gold sink.
EDIT: as a side note, if they had like an item called "bottle of memory" or whatever that allows you to respec in field i wouldn't really care. i don't mind the respecing at whim so much, it's the fact that they removed the choice for upgrading one skill over another that doesn't sit well with me.
I love runes, and their interactions with skills. I truly believed that blizzard really did a great job for this one. I never use guides for character builds, never have, never will. I always believed in testing, seeing what worked for me, seeing what worked for others, then build accordingly. This obviously requires a lot of respecing but that's half the fun. Also, if there are skills with crappy rune affixes, i do hope that blizzard will address it somehow.
Perhaps with the current mechanics it may be tricky, and to implement it now would require a lot of work, because stats are really just one of those mechanics that need to be done in the beginning. I would go through the mechanics of this non-blizzard game that successfully(in my opinion) implemented a stat system where there really were a variety of stats. But i think it requires another great wall of text, and it'll digress too far from the original topic.
While i do agree that diablo 3 does have very good and innovative features, integral character customization removal is not one of them.
It makes no sense.
I want to defeat Diablo the way I want to defeat him, not the way others think is the "best way" to defeat him. This really is a non issue, and there are enough combinations and permutations to keep people happy here. In fact, this systems favours more variation in builds that work, than the old system, simply because most builds will, in fact work, whereas before, you would favour point dumps into big skills, and because there were few of them, most people would end up doing the same thing.
let me give you a very broad timeline so you *might* comprehend.
d2 systems - limited
d3 before 8/1 announcements - a lot of combination
d3 after 8/1 announcements - more limited than before 8/1 announcements but more variety compared to d2.
people are complaining that after 8/1 annoucements, d3=more limited than before 8/1 announcements
I understand that, but pre 8/1 announcement was still more variety than D2, however, it still focuses on pumping many points into a few skills, whereas post 8/1 you're encouraged to use everything from your skillset rather than just spamming a couple of uber maxed out ones.
For example, maybe i only want 1 point into hydra(runed so that it's 'arcane hydra') because i plan on using an arcane support build combined with temporal flux. I have a choice and get to decide that i only need one point cause i want to use the hydra as a support spell for slowing down enemies. and maybe i'll decide to put 10 pts into slow time because i want to have enough points to allocate to get 10 arcane torrent for AoE slowing support, and 15 disintegrate for main dmg, 15 diamond skin, 1 pt into teleport, and i can pump the rest into mirror image for pve purposes
i sure as hell will be using all of these.
edit: for clarification
Neither have you. Therefore, you can't say anything about people thinking it's shit. Therefore, you're just as accountable to be held "annoying" because you think change is good. It's a two-way road, my friend.
I reserve judgement until beta, but so far I can't really fault them for anything I've heard about so far.
This is not a Diablo game because it has abandoned almost everything that made Diablo II what it was. That's more proof than is require to prove my statement.
I'm not raging out, and I'm not insulting members. What on God's green Earth are you talking about?
You're acting like someone would have to try shoving a stereo up his ass whilst simultaneously listening to Lady Gaga music and watching a Ben Stiller porno to know that it would be annoying and unpleasant. I don't like the changes because I know what they are. I don't particularly like this game because I've seen how the changes translate in-game and I'm not an utter dumbass who can't predict how things will be like with enough information beforehand.
Diablo II was an utterly revamped version of Diablo I, which didn't have the same amount of production and effort go into it. Games were WAY different back then at the time of Diablo I, much different than they were during the development of Diablo II. They're not nearly that different now from how things were with Diablo II. You can also argue that Diablo 2 has a shitload of added things. Diablo III, thus far, has taken things from Diablo II, then went on to utterly ruin them. What have they added that's new besides the Artisans and the Auction House, both concepts that I don't particularly wet my pants over?