Diablo 3 Patch 13 Skill and Rune Changes
Posted 19 February 2012 by NizarisHere’s Jay Wilson’s full article, plus the new screenshots. We’ll be posting analysis and discussion of these changes later on, once we’ve had time to absorb the big changes.
I’ll start with the skill system. Our high-level goal with this system has always been to give players a great degree of power to customize their characters. We believe we accomplished that early on by abolishing skill trees and moving toward an open-ended system where skills, rune variants, and passives are chosen at-will by the player in a flexible customization system.
That goal and the system have been great successes, but the amount of customization we have available doesn’t mean anything if it’s not useful in combat situations. Combat depth is another one of our goals; Diablo III is designed to be a modern action game, built on the mantra of “easy to learn, difficult to master.” What that means for the player is picking a set of skills and abilities that work together, and then executing them in ways that lead to success: the wholesale slaughter of the demonic invasion. With that combat-depth goal in mind, we’ve been internally categorizing the skills since the inception of the system. Many of you could probably identify what these categories were if we asked, and some players have even mapped out what they are fairly accurately.
For every class we essentially created three common types of abilities, and then a handful of class-specific ability types. All classes have skills that fit into categories we call Primary Attack, Secondary Attack, and Defensive. Primary Attack skills are frequently used abilities that typically generate resources. Secondary Attacks are more powerful attacks that are limited in use through resource cost or cooldown. Defensive abilities are used to escape or control the flow of combat. Beyond that, classes have unique categories, like armor spells for the wizard or mantras for the monk. We used this methodology to help us design the classes and their skills, but we weren’t exposing this to the player despite the fact that these categories would give the player, like they did our own team, a better understanding of how the classes work.
Click through to see the rest of Jay’s article.
To fix these issues, we focused on two core changes: (1) exposing the skill design intent by categorizing the skills and (2) linking skill selection directly to the bottom-bar UI to make assigning skills a clearer process. When viewing the skill screen, you’ll be presented with your six skill selection slots; each of these correspond directly to your bottom bar, and each will provide a specific list of skills from which to choose. By providing a clear-cut guide on how to best maximize your build potential, we hope to cover that “easy to learn” half of the mantra.
You may already be fuming because you’re a “difficult to master” type of person, but before you run to the forums, we have you covered. In the Gameplay options, we’ve added an ‘Elective Mode’ for the skill system. With this checkbox ticked you’ll be able to place any skill in any skill slot, as freely as you could before. The Elective Mode option is available at any time with no requirements or need to unlock it. We hope the new, more guided interface will give you an in-game heads up as to the intent of each skill — and maybe even be the way you play through the game in Normal — but if you eventually have a build that simply can’t be accomplished the way we’ve laid things out, you’re free to pop on Elective Mode and take the skills you want.
While the skill system is largely unchanged save for some UI improvements and the helpful new (but optional) skill categories, we’ve been working to make some rather intense changes to the runestone system. Before we get too far, it’s probably best to clarify our terms: First, they’re now called skill runes, and they’re called skill runes because they’re no longer a physical item, but built directly into the skill system. Let’s back up, though, and go through some of the problems we were encountering and how this final design is intended to resolve those issues.
Our goal with the rune system has always been to provide additional character customization by allowing players to augment or completely alter their skills in new and significant ways. Originally, we tied this in to the itemization system because it felt like a good fit, as Diablo is all about the item drops. But with around 120 base skills, that meant there were around 600 rune variants; on top of that, each variant had five quality levels each, meaning ultimately there would be something like 3,000 different runes in the game… and we knew we were heading toward a problem.
Diablo is certainly about the items, but later in the game, having to juggle all of those various runes was not only un-fun, it was a serious and tedious inventory problem. We went through a number of different iterations, some of which we fully implemented and tested, to try to solve these fundamental issues while still keeping the customization intact. Ultimately we developed, implemented, and have been playing and testing a new system which we’re confident hits all of the desired mechanics and solves all of the related issues – and that’s what I’m going to talk about today and what you’ll see in Beta patch 13.
With the new skill rune system, you’ll be unlocking new skills as you level up just like you always have… but in addition you’ll also be unlocking skill runes. Now, when you open the skill window, you’ll choose which skills you want in which slots, the skill rune variants you’d like, and your passives. All of this is done directly through the UI, and all of the options from the skill, skill rune, and passive systems are unlocked through character leveling progression, leading to a cleaner overall integration of these systems. Just as we set different skills to unlock at specific levels, skill rune choices unlock at different levels as well.
Another thing we strive for in our games is “concentrated coolness,” and while rune quality levels made sense when we were attempting to itemize them throughout the game, they make far less sense as runes are unlocked through the UI. We didn’t want to get back into a situation where you’re clicking a button to pump points into skills. It’s far more concentrated (and cool) when your rune choices have a single and powerful benefit to your skill choice. The new skill rune system does not have ranks, and we’ve instead made each around the equivalent to what the rank 4 or 5 rune was previously. One click, you make your rune choice, and you get an explosive benefit to that skill. That feels a lot cooler.
Runes have been by far the biggest design hurdle we’ve had in the game, and as you know we’ve been continually iterating on them. We fully expect that some of you will be disappointed that runes won’t be part of the itemization system. Internally, it took us a long time to let go of that notion too and stop trying to force them into being items, and instead embrace the intent of the system. Integrating runes with the skill system directly gave us a bunch of great benefits, and even without runes we’re launching with more item types than Diablo II had. We knew we were making the right choice by letting go of runes as items and focusing on the core objective of the system: to customize your skills in awesome ways.
Before I wrap up, I did want to cover that one of the added benefits of the new system is that you’ll be unlocking something every level all the way up to the level cap (60). Now, with each level you’ll unlock at least one new skill or rune, and in most cases you’ll be unlocking three or four. The most immediately exciting part of that system is that skill runes begin unlocking at level 6, which means that players in the beta test will finally be able to play around with some rune variants.
Phew. Well, there you have it — the new skill and rune systems! We strongly believe that these changes are going to make for a better Diablo III, and we’re looking forward to you trying it out in patch 13, which should be live any minute now (if it isn’t already). As always, we’d love to hear your feedback on your experiences with these changes. To help center the conversation on these changes to a single location, we’re going to lock comments on this blog and encourage you to post in a thread we’re specifically making to discuss this: Skill and Rune Changes Discussion.
Thanks for reading.
Jay Wilson is Game Director for Diablo III and won first place in the team’s chili cook-off competition. Recipe available upon request.
First, i will buy CE for sure
now, i’m not sure to buy even SE and play.
Honestly, the old system as skill \items\ was broken due to maintenance and management. However, the excitement of finding the perfect rune for your desired skill is now obliterated into simply clicking a button. In my opinion, they should have created skills as consumable items. This rewards players for playing longer to find their desired runes, and an added achievement for collecting all low to high end runes. At level 60 you could have two completely different wizards just based on the skills they have available. Now at lv60, every wizard is the exact same! Just spend a few hundred bucks on the auction house and call it a day.
How anyone can look at this system and consider it a loss of customization is beyond me. Let’s look at the pros and cons of the new system vs the old item based system:
Pros:
-runes no longer take up inventory space which is limited to begin with due to the reduced stash size and character limit.
-removes the dead-zone of skill progress between lvl 30 and 60
-(debatable) you no longer have to farm/buy a set of runes for each character you make in order to gain access to his full skill range (if you want more of a skill based system and less of a money/luck/farm system this is a huge plus)
Cons:
1. loss of customization
2. loss of the sense of achievement
Now let’s take a look at the cons.
1. One can argue that this leads to a loss of customization but consider the alternative. In order to make runes a factor in customization you would need to make them rare enough so that not everyone could get all of them easily. Which would force people to do one of two things: buy them off of the auction house or go without them and thus not have access to their characters full potential. Neither of those is fun or desired if you want a fluent “skill” based game. Diablo is all about the loot… but gimping a characters access to skills unless they are rich or lucky is not a worthwhile sacrifice imo. Alternatively you could make the drop rate decent but then you are deluding yourself in thinking that a semi-hardcore player would not have access to all his runs at max lvl after a couple of days/weeks etc of farming… which really negates the whole customization argument.
2. Which leads to the second counter argument. The loss of the sense of achievement. Like I said before, Diablo is all about the loot. Removing runes as an item does indeed reduce the sense of achievement in that it reduces the amount of stuff you need to horde. But the alternative is again way less appealing. Make them rare and have people kicking themselves in the nuts over not being able to try a specific build because they can’t afford or don’t have the time/luck to find that super rare rune. Make them hard to find but attainable for all… in which case everyone will eventually be able to find or buy them off of the auction house (if this would still give you a sense of achievement I’m afraid your standards for “achievement” are very low) or make them common and again negate the sense of achievement. Personally I get more achievement out of kicking the stuffing out of someone I know has access to the same skill set I do rather then someone who might be hobbled by luck/time investment. But that’s just me.
Imo… good change… could the system be improved? Of course… any system can… we’re ****ing human and it’s impossible to please everyone. But I think they chose the lesser of two evils.
I like this, it’s not the second coming of Christ, but I like it.
Admittedly I was about to fume at that part Jay predicted me to fume but then reading on and everything was fine again.
the conspirator in me thinks they took out runes as physical items as they would replace gold almost totally as currency. resuming their role from D2lod.
I don’t play WoW, I never did and never will. The only Blizzard games I play are Diablo 1 and Diablo 2. Last few beta patches produced more negative feelings in me than this one. For once, I’m actually happy having tons of items in my inventory rather than having mules for runes.
They removed the rune ranks, but with unlocking the specific rune we already got it’s maxed potential (saves the time farming the higher runes if they would stay as items). The only downside (although you could not call it a flaw) is not having the choice of choosing skill rune we want. But then again let’s face it: you could play through game from normal to inferno and never find for example Crimson rune Rank 6 and you’re forced to spend gold or bucks buying it from AH thus reducing your buying capability for some cool items. That way the game will be more focused on items and their collection/buying/selling which is the core of the Diablo games.
So while most of people rage about this patch, I (who is a dedicated Diablo fan) am actually satisfied with the new changes.
I’ve never understood that rage against causal players…
Blizzard wants to make a game that is accessible to a lot of people and still please the ‘hardcore’ fans; it’s common sense to attempt to have your product reach as many potential customers as possible, and no one can justifiably claim otherwise.
For me, personally, games like Skyrim have died a slow death. I look at the scope of them and have to realize that I will never be able to get anywhere in the time I have available to play on a normal working day. On top of that, if I haven’t played it for a while, it’ll take me ages to work out where I was and what I was going to do, effectively reducing the active playtime available. I have always loved the idea of Diablo allowing you to play for half an hour here and there, and you still feel you’re getting somewhere. When you come back, you just have to quickly check your questlog or waypoints to know where you left off and you’re back on track.
Skill runes gone as an actual item – just one less itemtype to worry about, to be honest; yeah, I can see it’s super cool to finally get that rune you’ve been killing demons for an eternity to get, but I can also see how un-cool it is when you don’t get it. Drops are exciting early in the game, because everything is a potential upgrade, but as you start to refine what kind of gear you’re looking for, the pool of exciting items suddenly drop dramatically. If what you want is that fabled two-handed sword of uber awesome pwnage, no mace dropping will ever make you feel happy – instead of it being ‘Hey, a cool mace just dropped!’, it becomes ‘Bah, that sword didn’t drop again..’ – having that trend with equipment is more than enough.
“I’ve never understood that rage against causal players…”
It’s simple: game being dumbed down to the lowest common denominator.
“Skill runes gone as an actual item – just one less itemtype to worry about, to be honest”
That’s the thing. You are not supposed to “worry” about items. You are supposed to collect them, look for them, and be happy when you come across one as a drop.
“It’s simple: game being dumbed down to the lowest common denominator.”
I wonder how different the world would be had the Bible never been translated into English.
I’ve been mostly annoyed by all the changes and delays and explanations for each . . . but this is the best Jay Wilson has come across to me ever – and I don’t usually like hearing him and reading his thoughts. I like these changes – they seem well thought out. I never really liked the ranked runes anyway. I liked that there were different colors and the level 1 runes looked cool as items – but the ranking system jus always looked clumsy to me. All those different chassi that the runes sat in just seemed unnecessary (and not as cool or as simple as gems). I also like how they’re exposing the “mouse skills.”
We still have gems (a LOT more than we did in D2) and the itemized rune system was way different than D2 anyway. The runewords in D2 were unique, weird, challenging – and frustrating because of the difficult trade system (how the hell do I get an “UM” rune when I need it?) and the fact that non-ladder players couldn’t use certain words. Personally, once I got to level 30 I stopped putting gems and runes in my sockets because I was always holding out for the perfect runeword or gem. Remember, once you filled that socket, THAT WAS IT. You had to make it count, so instead of filling the sockets I’d just keep doing Baal runs in Hell. And that became more fun, and I forgot about the runes and filling my unfilled sockets.
I still play D2. In D3 they seem to want to make every system viable and necessary – not optional, not for the elite like they were in D2. I know this bugs some people and I guess you can’t make everyone happy. Many of you are saying this kills customization, but really it comes down to this: are there many builds? Do the builds truly feel different? And can each build be effective? That’s pretty much it, and if the answer to those three questions is “yes,” then Diablo 3 wins.
Oh, and I hate the Demon Hunter. Lamest class idea ever. Rapid fire Dual crossbows – but we won’t have guns because “that’s not Diablo!” And the name? Every character is a demon hunter. Duh.
I liked the idea of runes as items, but I’m ok with these changes… What I really don’t like is the new rune graphic, the old colored bulbs were much more cooler and easy to read.
I like it but it needs one significant change to be great – when I hit level 6 and a rune is unlocked, I get to pick WHICH of the 5 runes I want. If my intent was to have a build that depends on a skill’s Golden Rune effect, I shouldn’t have to what till level 53 till that rune is unlocked!