Breaking News! Bashiok says One skill tree.

[The Vortex]

Re: Breaking News! Bashiok says One skill tree.

Everyone should not forget skill runes...
That leaves countless possibilities on which skill to choose even on tier 1 as I'm sure there will be builds about taking specific tier 1 (2,3..) skills and combine them with specific skill rune.

 

[Telzen]

Re: Breaking News! Bashiok says One skill tree.

I bet every wizard will have slow time now, and every barb death proof lol. I do doubt that skill runes are what raise the max on skills, since everyone would just raise the lvl and then we would all miss out on the interesting rune effects. Don't think they would let that happen.

 

[Stile]

One tree to rule them all

This whole scheme from Bashiok sounds fantastic to me, I'm a big fan of what I've heard so far. This turned into a long post, skip to the conclusion to get my gist if you don't feel like reading.

Starting out, you can choose whatever low-level skills are directly important. With respecs, we'll be able to shift these around as the character develops to whatever becomes more important later in the game.

Now, this appears to create a problem that everyone will eventually have the same skills in the same characters. I mean, if we can just change our skills to whatever, then we're all going to end up with "the best skills", right? I don't think so. I think skills in D3 aren't like skills in D2. I think "the best skills" in D3 is going to be very dependent on whatever items your character has. Therefore, different items = different "best skills" to complement those items. And I think we've been informed that the item variability in D3 will be huge compared to D2?

With respecs and the new tree freedom available, every piece of equipment or runes or whatever else throughout the entire game is now viable whenever you pick them up, regardless of how you've been so-far-focusing your character. Find an armour with benefits to an elemental attack you aren't currently using? Now you can alter your character to maximize the skills available on this armour. At level 2, at level 26, or at level 89. This idea of editing skills to fit whatever items you find creates a very flexible game for anyone as they are progressing through. Now I'm not running around killing everything over and over searching for an extremely specific piece of equipment. Now I'm able to search for "good equipment" rather than "good equipment that benefits the extremely specific and hard-to-find skills I've chosen to focus on." That choice, for those who enjoy such things, is still there for anyone who has the motivation (and time) to do such. But now I'm not forced to do so. Which is a very good thing, to me.

I always hated finding a great item and not being able to make use of it without getting another character (sometimes of the exact same class) up to speed. However, this hasn't been removed completely because there are those who love this sort of thing. I'm sure there will still be "that awesome sorc item that's just useless to the barbarian" and similar issues so this aspect of the game isn't being removed, it's simply being reduced somewhat. Finding an item that's useless for your character happened far, far too often in D2 as far as I'm concerned.

For those who have the motivation and time to find the elite gear for the perfect character... this is all still available in D3. These latest freedom edits have only made the game more enjoyable for those, like me, who simply can't afford (in a put-the-required-grinding-time-in sense) to get whatever gear we want. Now I'm able to make a character and use more of the gear I actually do find.

This may even open the door to fun mini-games. Think of time-limited (1 day?) tournaments where everyone starts with a new character (perhaps at an advanced level even?) and only uses items they find in-game within that time-frame to see what kind of damage they can create or how far they can get.

Conclusion:

From what I can tell, D2 was more skill dependent, and then you find the items necessary to maximize the skills you've chosen to focus on. This leads to builds all based off of skill placement which is very easy to map out and plan. Using whatever gear you find is possible, just harder. This creates a simple system that is very prone to cookie-cutter builds.

D3 appears to be leaning in the direction of being more item dependent, and then you organize your skills to maximize equipment and runes you're able to find. This leads to builds all based off of item finds, which is only easy to map out and plan for those who are "rich" in the game (have the time to grind). For a lot of players, this is very difficult to map out and plan because we won't know what gear we're going to have because we can't afford the time required to get every piece of gear we desire. Using a specific skill plan and gear is still possible for those who have that ability, I'm just not forced to follow that plan which pretty much requires the player to be "rich." This creates a vast system that may still have some cookie-cutter builds, but such builds are reduced greatly.

 

[mouseman]

Re: Breaking News! Bashiok says One skill tree.

I think this guy Krugar got it about right in the comments:

Well, to be clear about it, this system has as much potential to generate cookie-cutter builds as pretty much any other. As much as Diablo 2 skill trees system. But…

The concept behind a cookie-cutter build is that of a specific choice in skills/etcetera that either exposes a themed character or provides a proven choice for some to play with. In this context, any system can allow for the creation of cookie-cutter builds. Players will experiment and start sharing their successful builds. Virtually any game with a character development feature has cookie-cutter builds. From AD&D pen-and-paper to any computer game you can think of.

What this system does however is give players a lot more choices on how to choose their skills. Since players are no longer limited to skill pre-requisites, they will be able to choose skills more freely. Consequently, the number of so-called cookie-cutter builds (builds players explore and share) will increase significantly. It’s a little like having one, two or three WW builds for the barbarian in D2, but on D3 having 20 or 30. “Today I will make a WW/Frenzy barb because I’m no longer restricted by skill requirements or synergiesâ€.

 

[Apocalypse]

Re: Breaking News! Bashiok says One skill tree.

I tend to agree that this will actually limit variety of builds but as I said before I don’t know nearly enough to say its more than a initial opinion. Also people keep comparing it in terms to d2 cause we don’t have d3 and until we do that’s the only thing to compare it to (or wow for some people). In terms of d2 this would be a terrible idea but it is possible it could work in d3 I just personally feel it will limit builds. Also a lot of talk about skill runes to add variety, I agree this could be the case by why limit yourself in 1 area just cause you can customize somewhat in another? Oh well guess I just gotta wait and see

 

[Krugar]

Re: Breaking News! Bashiok says One skill tree.

Mouseman did bring it a little out of context with the remaining of the thread But it's ok in fact. Thanks mouseman.

What I'm trying to argue Apocalypse is the exact opposite. You will have more variety in your choices since you are no longer formally limited by skill pre-requisites, or balance limited by skill synergies. The only constraint will be the tier in which the skill is, and how many points you need to reach there. As such, you can mix your skill choices more freely than ever before.

I agree any comparisons with D2 should be careful. But it's only being used there to illustrate the point, not as an attempt to support the validity of my argument.

 

[Stile]

Re: Breaking News! Bashiok says One skill tree.

Also a lot of talk about skill runes to add variety, I agree this could be the case by why limit yourself in 1 area just cause you can customize somewhat in another? Oh well guess I just gotta wait and see

I can't argue with your personal opinion of this new scheme possibly leading to less variety. Your feelings of where things are headed are just as valid as anyone elses.

I can, however, ask you a question:

This new scheme only adds freedom, nothing has been removed.
Why do you think that adding freedom leads to more limitations? The idea is intuitively skewed. Can you explain a possible system in which removing restrictions leads to an increase in limitations?

Perhaps I just don't understand what you're saying. What area is being limited in this new skill tree scheme?

 

[Apocalypse]

Re: Breaking News! Bashiok says One skill tree.

the reason i feel this with actually make more cookie cutters is there will end up being a best teir 1 skill, a best teir 2, and so on so eventually (and i am just throwing names out here that i made up) i want fireball of death which is a top teir skill as it proves to be the most damage at that level. everyone else will also want it that plans to do pure damage, then someone will come out with a plan what skill in each teir is most important to support your new fireball skill. like i said this may not end up being true but i can see everyone getting the same skills on each level and everything else being left behind. this will be especially true for passives.

a guess an example could be (using d2 here as i assume we are know it well enough, pre synergies) you want blizzard, or ice orb, or whatever. no one wants ice bolt but you need points there to advance. say you needed 5 points into ice tree to move on to the next level there, you would need to get ice bolt but in this system everyone would dump 5 points into warmth as it would have longer benefits. now throw respecs into the mix, you will see character plans pop up for faster method of leveling and when to respec to a better end game character.

again this is just all my initial opinion, and i admit i am probably wrong, its just how i see it now

 

[Flux]

Re: Breaking News! Bashiok says One skill tree.

Bashiok made a 2nd post with some more details, and it's all quoted in the news post now, so if anyone hasn't seen the whole info, do check it out.
http://diablo.incgamers.com/blog/comments/diablo-iii-skill-trees-innovative-overhaul/

I've got mixed feelings on this. The freedom to pick skills from the menu however you like is very cool, but I'm not entirely behind the user friendliness of it. Bashiok's, "if everyBarb wants to have WW, we'll make the skill tree so they can." sounds nice, but i've played Diablo when ever barb had WW. It was D2C, and it sucked, since there was no character variety.

I'm not a fan of free/easy/unlimited skill respecs. It was stupid to not allow minor fixes in D2, but I like a character to have some kind of identity. But since respecs are in D3, isn't that enough of an easy way to fix problems or move between skills come end game? If bliz can balance well enough to make multiple viable skills that's cool. But I'm not looking forward to every barbarian being a JugSerkMaster hybrid, with the same 5 active skills.


Skill point limits. The oft-stated goal of the D3 designers is that each character will use 5 or 6 active skills all the time. They don't want cheesy builds with just one uber skill. They designed the hotkey system to fit with this, they removed synergies to fit with this, and they're capping the skill levels to fit with this. If you've got 15 points in your 5 or 6 main skills, then 5 points in 4 or 5 various passives, that seems to pretty well fit the imagined end game character design.

I don't know what would enable skills to go up higher than 5 points, but it seems like item based is the likeliest. Quest bonus? Clvl bonus? everyone would get it then, eventually, which takes it from a cool feature to a default. However I'm not sure about skill runes doing it, simply because everyone would use that skill rune. It's hard to imagine a multistrike or power or other cool rune giving you something as useful as 5 or 10 more points in a skill. Maybe skill runes have multiple properties, and +cap as well as giving other bonuses?

If some other item type gives the bonus, that's also problematic, since that would become the most popular/powerful modifier in the game. Who would change their weapon if it meant giving up +5 to everything?

Also, just by the math it seems like the +cap bonuses have to be fairly common. If you never find any way to up your skills above 5, you'll have a lot of points and nothing useful to spend them on past lvl 50 or so.


Fewer skills. They'll want to remove some of the redundant passive skills now. Every tree has various "+damage to this tree" skills, or "increases critical strike damage to this tree," etc. With the skill menu, it seems like these can be combined.

Seems like a lot of balancing work. It's not enough that a character's tier 3 skills are better than the tier 2 skills in the same tree; now they've got to be equivalent to all the tier 3 skllls that character has.


I hate to point it out, but anyone remember HGL's skill menu system? It was basically this, with some dependency lines. But every skiill was available in one big menu, so chars could pick and choose whatever they wanted. I sure hope D3 handles skill balancing better, but it's not an entirely happy precedent to follow.

 

[Grug]

Re: Breaking News! Bashiok says One skill tree.

Here's what I've gleaned about +Cap:

1. It will not come from items, for the same reason flux cited.

2. It will not come from Runes, because runes are meant to augment the skills and a straight up cap boost or +skill is boring.

3. It will be Permanent. If you spend six skill points in a skille, what happens when the cap goes back down to 5? Not gonna happen.

4. It will be Limited. Bashiok had sort of said that the players have to carefully choose which skills will get the +cap. so you can't give every skill a 15 point cap.

5. It will not be random. The cap raises will be level based, and/or given in Main Story Quests, such as at the end of an act. If they happened in the random side quests, then A, there would be no limit how many you could obtain, and B, players would go "quest farming" to get the things.

 

[Telzen]

Re: Breaking News! Bashiok says One skill tree.

Yeah I also think all characters will get the same amount of +cap in the end. The customization is to pick how to use them best. How much do you think we should get? 30? So that 3 skills could go from 5 to 15. Or more?

 

[Krugar]

Re: Breaking News! Bashiok says One skill tree.

Well, this system is very close to my favorite method for skill distribution. It's close to what many pen-and-paper RPGs pretty much standardized and it does offer an excellent method for a larger array of skill options. Feels to me like going back to the roots but with pretty modern face.

The determining factor will indeed be what skills they will put on those trees and how they progress with each skill point spent. This method does shift a lot of weight to the difficult issue of skill balancing. Without many hooks to force skills into predetermined paths, skill balancing becomes harder to ascertain. Too powerful skills or too useless skills may indeed lead to your scenario, Apocalypto. As certain skill combinations may prove fatal (make it too easy for the player). Certainly I would expect, if that was the case, for players to explore any deficiencies in skill balancing and end up limiting their choices based on their findings(*).

This method does force Blizzard into a lot more thought about skill balancing. And here we agree. It's a fact, no matter what Blizzard comes up with, they are almost certainly bound to fail for at least the fist tries. So I would expect upcoming patches to still be fooling around with skill balancing for quite a while after the initial release. On the other hand, we can only speculate at this time about this and other potential problems. Of immediate notice, and thus more useful to us, is the fact that is undeniable this method does give a lot of room to customization.

(*) but neither I or you should expect it to ever be bullet-proof. I know of no game in which the game balancing systems in place haven't exposed their flaws to careful player scrutiny.

 

[Brother Laz]

Re: Breaking News! Bashiok says One skill tree.

If the balance things well enough, point hoarding won't be a big issue.

That's beside the point. What if I want to use strafe (or any high level skill)? In D2 I levelled up to 30 by using fire arrow, ice arrow, multishot, ... In D3 there are no prereq arrows, so where do you put your initial points: right, PASSIVES. ALL of them.

Any point into any attack skill you don't plan on using at level 90+ would be a wasted point, whereas points into passives are (almost) never wasted. So if you were smart, you would put ALL points you don't need for your main attacks into passives... and if you chose a couple of high level skills as main attacks, you have only passives for the first 20-30 levels and nothing to actually attack with. Yawn.

Skill balance has nothing to do with it, maybe I do want to use armageddon or lightning strike after all.

'No prereqs' has been tried in mods. That sucked as a result.

 

[Brother Laz]

Re: Breaking News! Bashiok says One skill tree.

This new scheme only adds freedom, nothing has been removed. Why do you think that adding freedom leads to more limitations? The idea is intuitively skewed. Can you explain a possible system in which removing restrictions leads to an increase in limitations?

Easy. Many games don't have character classes at all and just lump all skills together. Result: there are like 2-3 main builds in the entire game!

Also, sometimes it is a good thing that you have to make trade-offs. Do I get Pyroblast or do I tech to Ice Barrier (or whatever)? The new system makes it so instead of having to choose between a few build-defining skills, you can just get them all and forget about the rest.

 

[Krugar]

Re: Breaking News! Bashiok says One skill tree.

Incredible. We don't even know what skills we will have and you are already concluding the system doesn't work because of passives or whatnot.

 

[Apocalypse]

Re: Breaking News! Bashiok says One skill tree.

Brother Laz the only reason why people wont dump all the points into passives is because of respec. how i see if going is players will find a good low level spell/skill then find passives to boost that spell/skill then when they reach a high enough level just respec and forever forget about the lower level skill (this is why i dont like respec. daoc as an example, it was hard to level a pvp hunter, they allowed respecs and hunters became very easy to play and very common).

 

[Krugar]

Re: Breaking News! Bashiok says One skill tree.

Folks... one last time, what passives?

What do you know of the skills distribution in each tier? What do you know of passives stacking or no stacking? What do you know of number of passives? What do you know of number of skills in each tier? What do you know of the amount of skill points needed to cross to to next tier? What do you know of max cap and how to cross/achieve it?

I agree one should be cautious and raise questions. What I definitely do not agree is speculating to reach a conclusion whether you like or not like the announced system... which I must remind you have been said to most probably still see more changes.

 

[Bad Ash]

Re: Breaking News! Bashiok says One skill tree.

This is a great thing.

Here is why there will be variety: Not everyone wants a jack of all trades. If I want to have 5 skills from a variety of trees, my skills will not be powerful enough because of passives or synergy like (I know synergys are gone) to make them better. If I want a WW barb I wont be able to put skills all over the place, Ill have to stick to that tree to make an uber WW barb.

Hell is going to be hard, I highly doubt you can have a successful char with a ton of skills maxed out all over the place.


Sidenote: For those complaining, you can stop because you dont know how the final product is going to turn out. Blizzard isnt going to make a game where you jack all your points into passive the first 10 levels and go around hitting things with a stick. That is making a broken game.

You will want to level up skills early on, they have stated several times that they want early skills to be end game skills. I think its ok to dis-agree and counter arguement the idea, but to say "this wont work because people will spend points in passive skills" makes no sense. We dont know how the final product will be.

Seriously though best quote to sum this up is what I said before "Jack of all trades, master of none". Some people will go that route and others will be the masters. I love this and cant wait to play

 

[Mad Mantis]

Re: Breaking News! Bashiok says One skill tree.

This new system seems somehow wrong to me. I have to agree with Flux and Brother Laz. I'm afraid that this system will have the exact opposite effect of what they want to achieve.

The majority of the players will probably go to the single most effective cookiecutter build. Instead of there being several good builds for a single class I'm afraid that it will turn into a single good build for a class. Most gamers want to min/max. With all skills available to a class the number of mathematically optimal distributions drops.

For the few people that will try out different and unique builds this sytems allows a lot of creativity. However everything stands with the balancing.

Sidenote: For those complaining, you can stop because you dont know how the final product is going to turn out.

That is a ridiculous argument. Most of us have played a lot of games. We know how various different systems work. We have been given a lot of information on the skills of both the Wiz and Barb. We also know how gamers tend to think and act. If we keep that in mind we can argue over what could and what would not work. How the final product turns out is anyones guess, but we can already spot some of the pitfalls.

 

[Krugar]

Re: Breaking News! Bashiok says One skill tree.

Problem is those pitfalls can't really hold to scrutiny as of now. You, Flux and Lax agree the crux of the problem is skill balancing. They get that right and there won't be much of a problem. However some of you are establishing a priori there won't be any skill balancing. Where exactly this differ from assuming Blizzard doesn't know what they are doing type of argument?

I mean, we have been playing computer games for a long time, as you say. And I agree. On my case, I've been playing them for 42 - 14 = 28 years. But I'm still an armchair game designer. I don't kid myself about it. I do not pretend my knowledge of game design is superior to Blizzard team when I don't even know the particulars of what is being discussed. None of us do. We have no knowledge on the decision process that lead to this system, how long it took, what was discussed and what is being planned to address the pitfalls and disadvantages it offers.

...

But on you folks concerns, we do agree entirely. I'm not a yes man. I do raise questions. And that's definitely my main concern. This system places all its weight on skill balancing. However I think you folks are missing a point...

The notion of a one-build (or maybe 2 or 3) everyone will chose is definitely a big danger with this system. However it is really only feasible to expect this to happen if the skill balancing is so screwed that the trees will offer "One Build To Rule Them All". This would be a major fail. Skill balancing in this context is not a matter of balancing them against each other, but balancing skills against monsters. If by making a skill choice, the player is letting go of the advantages of making another choice, they will be excelling in one area and be penalized in another.

This is a general principle I'm sure they will try to achieve when deciding about skills, their powers and their placement on the skill "trees". One way I can see this happen is -- keeping in mind they want skills from T1 to be usable throughout the game -- for skills distribution to follow a pattern where the most skills are at the early tiers and as we go down to later tiers skill numbers become rarer. Another way, of course, is for them to ensure no skill ever again repeats the mistake that lead to the infamous hammerdin in D2.

I think it's a genuine concern you guys have there. I however think the system is highly capable of being fine-tuned to tackle these type of situations. It seems to me the system is very mouldable to the game designers wishes.