I was able to chat with Diablo III Community Manager Bashiok this afternoon, and he was kind enough to answer a few questions about various Diablo III issues. He confirmed that that active skills only accepting 1 point was just for the Blizzcon build, and that the plan is to allow multiple points to be spent in all active skills in the final game. He also gave me some insight into the skill tree and interface development process, and had a few comments about when we might see some more Witch Doctor skills revealed. Click through the jump to see a cleaned up transcript of our chat.
Flux: A question about the skill points in D3. Active skills only took one point at Blizzcon, after the gameplay movie from WWI showed multiple ranks in active skills. Will they allow more points in the final game?
Flux: Understood. We try to stress that to the fans. That the interface especially is prone to changes and evolutions. Some fans see a bit of something 2 years in advance and start complaining that it’s not polished. The perils of having people care about your games, I suppose.
Flux: On a related question, any idea if we’ll get some disclosure of more Witch doctor skills at some point? the WD fans are bitter that they only got 11 skills and wiz/barb had 50+ at blizzcon. Of course most of the rest will be +11% poison damage passives, but anyway…
Flux: The revealed WD skills don’t seem to have that much obvious overlap. It’s not like there are 5 with fire damage that would be obvious ones to link with passives. Or multiple zombie skills to go with Zombie Wall. Amphibian mastery!
Flux: That would give them more range? The frogs didn’t seem to go far enough to be very homing before they blew up, when I used them at Blizzcon. A plague of toads chasing people around would be the coolest thing ever.