There are a lot of folks saying that, in Diablo II, they only ever used 3 or 4 skills. That’s not really true, though, except for a small number of classes. When I built a necro, for instance, I would routinely find myself using Amplify Damage, Decrepify, Lower Resists, Iron Maiden, Attract, Life Tap, Bone Spirit, Bone Armor, Bone Prison, Corpse Explosion, Clay Golem, Summon Skeleton, Summon Skeletal Mage, and Revive-- That’s 14 different skills. With the paladin I’m playing now, I use Smite, Holy Shield, Fanaticism, Zeal, Salvation, Holy Bolt, Cleansing, Vigor, Charge, and Redemption-- 10 skills. With my sorc, I use Enchant, Frozen Armor, Energy Shield, Telekinesis, Teleport, Glacial Spike, Frozen Orb, Hydra, Static Field, and Attack-- 10 skills. In fact, I have a hard time thinking of any character I’ve played that used only 6 non-passive skills.
Hm. My bowazon way back when (of course that was vanilla DII) used seeking arrow and valkyrie. And sometimes the area of effect freezing arrow, basically against that one superfast melee pack south of Diablo’s big pentacle. Might not have been a viable build in later versions of the game.
I’m going to love this game. I don’t know if our friends list will transfer to the full version of the game on May 15th, but my BattleTag is Pangolin#1890.
I think that the multiplayer game-creation is kinda weird, but you can easily jump into parties and games with people on your friends list, so it’s not total garbage. I do miss the lobby-system of D2, though.
Really? I died plenty of times to Blood Raven. And I certainly couldn’t run headlong into swarms of 10+ enemies without dying, even in the Cave of Evil. Whereas that seems par for the course in D3.
It’s interesting to get to try all the new skills, but once you figure out which ones you’ll want to use it doesn’t seem like leveling up will be much of a point. If I already know I want to use the skill that unlocks at level 16, why care when I unlock a skill or rune I won’t use at level 18?
I’m hoping so too, but I’m not holding my breath. I think it’s far more likely to assume the game is the way the game will be.
Huh? Spell damage was fixed in that game. All items did was boost your stats.
Okay, then my assumption that DotA got it from WCIII (since it was a WCIII mod) was incorrect.
So then, now I think the D3 mechanic is taken from DotA.
It isn’t in Dota either, unless I don’t understand what you mean. A 300-damage nuke is always a 300-damage nuke.
What I’m finding worrisome is that it looks like waypoint progress isn’t persistent. I beat the Skeleton King with one character, then started another, then went back to the first one to try to reach the level cap, and all of my WPs were gone. It’s annoying to have to fight through all the first areas again to get back to where the XP is good.
Hrm. I’ve only played DotA derivatives, not DotA itself, but they all share this feature so I’m surprised if DotA doesn’t. In DotA, if you purchase a sword that gives you a plus to damage on your attack, then don’t you get that plus to damage even if your character is ranged?
I haven’t tried that yet. That sounds terrible–surely it can’t be intended?!
I can’t check right now because the server is down for maintenance, but I think it has to do with when you create the game, what quest you select to start on. If you select to start on the last quest you completed, you’ll have all the previous WPs. If you select the first quest, you don’t have any.
Remember how D2 was, where if the game creator had already completed certain quests, other players couldn’t complete those quests in that game. So the player that needed those quests would have to create game. But then the player who HAD completed them could enter the game and rush the newbie through by using the WPs. With this change, the higher level player won’t have all the WPs, thus making rushing much more difficult.
So the change is to discourage rushing, IMO.
Regarding the skill advancement system, I’ve found the following very interesting (and just a few hours old) comments from a dev.
ETA: Unfortunately it pastes in as a wall of text. 
You can find the original text quoted here.
That sounds exactly backwards to me. In D2, the “best” build was the hammerdin, precisely because they could handle almost anything. But in any given specific situation, there’s always going to be some other build that does better than a hammerdin, and so a character built to specifically deal with that other situation is still going to be viable. This led to a lot of hammerdins, yes, but it also led to a lot of other characters. If you never know what you’re going to get, though, then everyone has to play whatever the equivalent of the hammerdin is, since you can’t make anything to deal with the specific challenge.
Why choose anything other than a hammardin, if it’s the only one which can handle everything?
And why do you say “you can’t make anything to deal with the specific challenge”? I took the thrust of what Bashiok said to be that you can, for each challenge, make something to deal with it.
Ah, rereading I see what you’re talking about.
I guess it sounds like he’s saying you’re going to have to choose which battles to fight–but that doesn’t make much sense for a Diablo game, and doesn’t sound that fun either…
Well, at least for the Inferno difficultly and probably even before that, it sounds like they’re going to encourage/force partying-up to be able to go everywhere and kill everything reliably. Sort of like what they tried to do with the beefed-up Hell level, and Uber Tristram, although that turned out to be easily solo-able with the right build.
Remember, since you can’t play this game offline at all, everybody playing will be able to party up if need be. So, they don’t have to also design the game for people playing exclusively single player who can’t play in a party.
Because in D2, you didn’t have to handle everything. If you want to run the Maggot Lair and maybe the River of Flame, a pure fire sorceress works just fine, better than the hammerdin. You’ll have trouble in the Chaos Sanctuary where most of the monsters are fire-immune, but that just means that you don’t do chaos runs, and save those for some other character.
I have to say I’m disappointed. I was not a big D1 or D2 nut, so the changes to the stat and skill systems don’t bother me (to be honest, I couldn’t really tell you how they worked before) - it’s the gameplay itself.
It’s sort of the same game they released 16 years ago. You run around in random dungeons, looking at your map, and click on shit. It looks the same and feels the same. The graphics are of course better, but they are actually fairly mediocre for 2012. The models are low-poly, textures are low-res, and the animations are not particularly fluid or dynamic. You can’t zoom in or out. It literally feels just like the first Diablo, right down to the blurry graphics that prevent you from seeing any detail on anything.
I literally started laughing during the boss fights - the animations and boss “moves” are just like WoW (and that’s not a good thing). They appear, sort of bob around in space generically, then run around clumsily swinging at you. Periodically, lights flash and they do some canned special move.
The character animations also appear taken from WoW, e.g. the town portal summon. In fac t, the art style of the game is sort of like isometric gloomy WoW, almost as if they saved time on the models and animations by starting with WoW resources.
The voice acting is terrible and the quest interface is shoddy - 1999-style text popups.
I know it is a beta, but they’ve been working on it for 4 years and the release is 3 weeks away, so I do not expect tremendous improvement between now and then.
I don’t know what I was expecting - StarCraft II was also very similar to the original - but I think StarCraft’s gameplay has aged better in general. I guess I was expecting a genuine improvement in the gameplay mechanics and world environment, not just a 2008 refresh of a game released in 1996/2000.
Yeah, items that added +attack damage would work regardless of weapon type. War3 wasn’t really a robust RPG - you had an inventory, sure, but nothing where you had to equip certain items on certain parts (like only hats on head, rings on fingers, etc). The Claws of Attack +18 gave rangers, paladins and beastmasters all +18 damage to their normal attacks.
I know that League of Legends has various types of scaling - lots of abilities scale off attack damage (like D3), some scale off ability power, some scale off other stuff like health or armor.
The thinking is sound, which kinda makes me mad that they didn’t bother applying it to the stat system, and instead just forced everyone to get pre-determined amounts on level ups. Was the system in D2 flawed? Of course, because there was a rather obvious “best way” to do things (enough STR for equipment, enough DEX to hit things/max block, rest into VIT). But the solution to that isn’t “make people unable to place stat points” but instead “make every stat valuable enough so that there’s a reason to choose.” Let people decide if they wanna be a glass cannon, or a mana-rich always firing cannon, a nimble ninja or a damage-absorbing tank. Taking the choice out of my hands just seems lazy.
I’ve seen people claim that the items and gems and such have much more variation in the amount of +stats you can get than D2’s did, and so it basically switches the stat customization to items, but I’ll believe it when I see it.
I find your take interesting since I have a friend that feels the same way about SC2 as you do about D3 - that it’s a 1998 game with better graphics, and there’s no changes to the gameplay and that the genre has passed it by. (He then started talking a lot about all the extra gameplay mechanics in W40K Dawn of War, which I can’t touch on since I haven’t played it). I was fine with SC2 because I like the gameplay, so a refurbishing with better graphics was perfect for me. (The writing/dialogue was pretty silly though, it’s been going downhill for Blizzard ever since War3).
I kinda wanted the same with D3… the same gameplay with better graphics and nice UI features, with five new classes. But I can see why someone would want something better.