No More Rune Ranks = Skill Balance Issues?
Posted 28 February 2012 by FluxWe recorded The Diablo Podcast #60 over the weekend with a revolving cast of guests, and there was a lot of interesting conversation about the state of all five classes in the 
Diablo 3 Beta Test. We also debated general issues related to the big skills / runes system remodel, and the issue of things being under or overpowered due to the removal of skill ranks came up several times.
In the previous system, runestones were found ranging from rank 1 to 7. Each rank was more powerful, dealing more damage, increasing the duration, adding more projectiles, etc… whatever was appropriate to that particular skill and rune effect. This is no longer the case, as all skill rune effects now work like base skills, with a base function that scales up with your Clvl and attributes, but does not get directly boosted by any sort of skill rune item. Here’s what Jay Wilson said about it in his explanatory article:
So what’s the potential problem with that? Click through to find out.
Jay’s explanation sounded iffy to many of us right from the start. Wouldn’t every rune effect be grossly overpowered if the game had been built for them to be level 1 or 2 in Normal, and now they were all instantly equivalent to level 4 or 5?
Furthermore, the removal of skill levels had been explained and justified largely by reference to skill rune ranks. No levels to skills was a big loss in customization, and an even bigger problem for balancing. Compare the power of level 1 vs. lvl 20 (or 30, or 40) skills in a game like Diablo II to get a sense of the massive changes RPG fans are used to enjoying as we improve a skill over the course of the game. No skill ranks makes sense for skills like teleport or other one-point wonders, but it seems unworkable for damage output attacks that generally start at say +50% dmg, and rise to +300%.
The D3 devs insisted they had that under control, and that skills were balanced in D3 since their damage scaled up or down depending on a character’s attributes, equipment, Clvl, etc. Most fans accepted this, since after all, we had rank 1-7 in the skill runes, which largely stood in for the removed skill levels.
Except that now we don’t have skill ranks, and skill rune effects are all one size fits all.
Ironically, there’s a very easy solution to the removal of skill runes. Since their drop rate/quality/frequency was largely determined by the difficulty level, why not just bake that property into the game itself? Rather than players scrambling to find rank 1-3 runes on Normal, 4 on Nightmare, 5 on Hell, and 6-7 on Inferno… just give the runes roughly that level in the new rankless system. Thus something like the Fork effect in Magic Missile would yield 3 projectiles on Normal, then, 4, 5, and 7 on the higher difficulty levels.
Problem solved! And yet that’s nowhere near what Jay said in the official explanation, so apparently the devs think the “one size fits all” style is a better approach, as they argued previously when they removed skill levels.
Removed Rune Rank Regrets
This issue came up several times on the podcast (as each new guest stated his worries about the system), but Wolfpaq summed it up nicely in his opening comments, from about 36:00 in the show.
I’m a little bit concerned about how they’re going to replace skill ranks. The new skill calculator just came out yesterday, and a lot of the skill runes are drastically nerfed from what their rank 7 counterparts would have been.
The
As Wolfpaq pointed out, the change is most obvious with rune effects from what used to be the Indigo Rune (which was the Multishot rune earlier in development).
Check out the video for more visuals; it’s from Blizzcon 2010 and shows off a wide variety of runestone effects that used to be possible with rank 7 runestones. Note the Wizard’s multishot Magic Missile, as well as the huge boosts the Indigo rune granted to the Witch Doctor’s Poison Dart (a true machine gun, very unlike the 3-shots we’re stuck with now) and also his Zombie Charger skill, where it summons literally a dozen charging zombies in feverish succession.
So, is this a real problem? It’s certainly a loss in fun; anyone who wanted to use Magic Missile with multishot wanted as many projectiles as possible, for more damage as well as more fun. The developers can obviously tweak the damage so that 3 shots deal roughly the same as 7 or 8 would have, but it’s going to be radically different in usage, with no chance to be the crowd control Arcane shotgun we’d been anticipating.
The Insufficient Customization Situation
Rune under/overpowered issues aside, how about the larger issue? Are you guys worried about the structural integrity of the camel’s spinal cord as straw after straw of removed character customization is stacked upon the poor beast? Since the early design theories of Diablo III, the developers have removed skill ranks, runestone ranks, customizable attributes, charms via the talisman, two of the six gem types, the Mystic and her item enchants, and no doubt several other things I’ve forgotten or that we never knew about in the first place.
Is there a point where “just equipment” becomes insufficient to differentiate your character from every other character of the same class on Battle.net? Especially since the game is designed to so that every character will max out at Clvl 60, and the freespecs system will encourage everyone to duplicate each new cookie cutter build the second it grows popular.
Hi flux I think youve miss spelled the title shouldn’t it be rune? Not rule?
It should also be rank instead of level. I shall fix.
It’s not a balance problem, but it’s certainly a flavor loss problem. My big hope is that, should the +% skill affixes still be in game, they would counter-act this by effectively ranking up the runes in their primary effect.
For example, get an extra magic missile for every +5% to magic missile on the Indigo rune.
P.S. Really wish Blizzard would bring back the colored runes/names. It’s so much easier to refer to them that way instead of memorizing the farking 500+ skill names.
this.
since patch 13 ; a lot of the skills got more and more ho-mogenized the effects are now super flat in comparison to the time they first revealed the talent calculator on their homepage. eg the Zombie dog damage absorbtion went from 50% something to 10%, wohoo now that is an exciting skill …
well other stuff aswell , the increase in power is just way closer to the base skill than ever, eg poison dart 100% + 80% over 2 sec —> multishot rune 3×70% wow thats a whooping 16% damage increase ! get your party heads on we can go crazy now….
or chakram 150% weapon dmg by default , twin chakram is 2x 101% and unless i hit the enemy directly where chakrams meet i deal even less damage per cast than without the rune. i didnt upgrade that skill with this rune , i merely traded area effect for damage.
all % for passives , Debuffs and buffs got extremely reduced most buffs and selfbuffs are only a 1/3 of what they used to be ; which largely diminishes anything like synergies. there are still themes like singletarget dps /ae dps / buff / slow / movement / heal. but they have all become so mundane and interchangeable that building a character is not really interresting anymore … i think a lot of runes have become redundant with the latest streamlining / ho-mogenization.
all the changes Blizzard has made since they started removing skill ranks / talisman / complex traits / rune ranks;
hints to the situation that Blizzard Bit off more than they can chew. all those removals are testament to the fact that they FORCED the runesystem to work. maybe it works now in Blizzards Spreadsheets ; but is it still the feature they advertised so proudly when they first presented it ?
I’m guessing the +skill/effect suffixes are what we’re going to be seeing here myeself. We hadn’t seen anything of the higher difficulty suffixes and prefixes yet so I think a lot of the concern is pretty premature. Again, Jay Wilson has told us that normal will only have about 30% of the items available.
I think the idea is to get us to 60, and then we’ll be customizing and making builds as we grind up gear with stats to make our ideal builds and make perfect gems to compliment them in Hell and Inferno. Which I’m more or less OK with. It sounds like it’ll be more or less like Vanilla D2 but better tuned in a lot of ways.
Lack of time and difficulty of development and balancing of several rune ranks is imo real reason. Like said, nothing would stop them to add skill levels for each difficulty.
>>Lack of time
Are you serious?
if you go 3 steps back back for every 4 steps forward you can still lack time.
Lots of speculation on aspects we never even got to test? Lauding the old system which was probably awful in practice? No levels to skills was a big loss in customization? No, it wasn’t, stop using buzz words. No “customization” was lost, as you were always going to use the highest rank available. Any removed aspect of the game does not equate to a loss in customization necessarily, so quit with the false causality.
The new system has its problems, but don’t hold up the ridiculous old one like it was forged by Neil Patrick Harris using the hammer of Thor and the tongs of….Tongman.
I love this site, and the work that you guys do (Flux too) but this just seems like a blatant attempt to troll based on hypotheticals.
There will always be remorse over what could have been, regardless of knowing the outcome. Kind of human nature.
Didn’t Jay mention the possibility of runes imparting random properties to skills beyond the base rune effect?
It was always possible to introduce more choices in the system, a simple one would have been something like allowing the player to choose any two skills that can attain the highest rank leaving the other four at base. Still has it’s downfalls, but there are obviously numerous possibilities for differentiation.
It definitely could have been a better system. I think Blizzard will find that players will not be “attached” to their characters with the current system. If you don’t feel like there is any weight to your choices, that you didn’t “build” that special something for yourself, you won’t care about it (no personal investment). I currently feel that way now, just playing a little portion of the beta, but maybe the story will pull me in (the same story over four replays with the same character)? I’m already a little put off by the looks of my character… I like the witch doctor’s play style, but… please let the necromancer return in an expansion.
I think the debate would be better focused on whether or not they are diminishing the connection between the player and their character. If that turns out to be the case it could lead to poor player retention (not as much of a social aspect to tie people in) and a little problem for the RMAH… if I’m not attached to my character I’m probably not going to buy items for it. I think we’ll probably see some changes eventually.
….so you say we didnt lose customizacion with the new runes sistem?
every F****** rune had 1-7 levels of more awsomnes, we believe that afixes will come on items but something tells me they r gona cut even that for an expansion later on….
so that means that for now the max of missiles that the wizard can fire is 3 with a rune insted of 10…
look…i grow tired of people defending blizz but i kinda understand your point (YOUR opinion)
….to me we yust lost 1 of the best features that D3 had and it choped 1 more piece of my heart
I hate how they took out the talismans, mystic, the original passives system..
That is a big loss in customization.
I was one of the ones that agreed with auto stats BECAUSE of the talismans, and other systems that are now gone.
I suppose it was inevitable that the issues I brought up in the last paragraph would be what most people started commenting on, but it’s funny, since the steady loss of character customization options in D3 wasn’t at all the point of this article. That bit just occurred to me at the end, and as I didn’t really have a conclusion to the article, I tacked it on as something to stir debate. It’s kind of silly to argue (as the CMs have repeatedly) that D3′s skill system allows more customization now that they’ve removed so many pieces of it, but hey, that’s their job.
A strong argument can be made that it’s better now with fewer choices, or that it’s awesome even without skill ranks, skill levels, with freespecs, etc. I’d actually make that 2nd argument, as I think the skill/runes system in D3 is very cool, and VASTLY better than what we had in D2. (Here’s where cognitive dissonance comes in, and goes right over the head of most fanboys) The D3 skill/rune system can be great, even though it’s much less good than it could have been.
This is where Bashiok and the other PR voices fail, since they are not allowed to be honest and say something like, “This change kind of sucks and it’s a shame we had to simplify things and cut features due to time constraints, but we think the product will still be quite compelling, and we hope to add some features back and improve things in an expansion.”
I thought the issue of how they’ll balance skill rune effects, now that skill ranks have been removed, was a much more interesting topic for discussion, and that’s what I wrote this article to explore. Pity I hijacked my own thread with the unpremeditated conclusion.
As long as everyone aims for the max there isn’t that much loss in customization. Only if, for example, it forces you to choose different levels because you can only equip one of each level would it really help customization.
Your posts comes off as having missed the point. Leaving aside considerations whether one system is better than the other, we can at least see and KNOW that the new one is much more watered down in the expansiveness of what your abilities could do. You can’t argue against that nor can you call that trolling. It’s ****ing plain to see.
Really you can’t see how removing ranks will include re balancing? I skill which was optimized for a rank 7 inferno before now has to fulfil the same role in the new system while also retouching items to make sure they can boost skill ranks to what was previously there. That or completely nerf the difficulty.
Yes some people will bitch about customization and a lot of other irrelevant things but you can’t sweep under the rug the obvious.
This post is upvoted by the sheep that are the soul reason for the new and streamlined generation of game development. It really is a shame that some people can reason their way to logical conclusions and form pretty sentences while at the same time fail to grasp any form of bigger picture. Tis’ a peculiar thing, the brain.
There is a 15 second cooldown on skill switching. No more than what it takes you to pick your nose and think a happy thought. Lots of skills have a similar or longer cooldown. Completely take away the power of choice and you will take away what drove a lot of players to the genre in the first place. Yea, all of the changes that were made can be explained in a manner that makes some form of sense. That’s how streamlining works. That’s how you can water down a game for the sake of evolution and money while keeping a straight face.
The problem is not that the game lacks a bit of customization. The problem is that people were expecting an Action Role Playing Game, but have come to realise that’s not what’s being delivered.
That’s not to say the game wont be a blast, for a while. As a matter of fact I’m still pumped, and yet I recognize the screaming truth in this article.
The most tremendous fallacy surrounding this whole skill system debacle is the confusion of “loss of customization” with “linearity”. We are NOT losing customization, but WE ARE BEING FORCED INTO A LINEAR SYSTEM. The overrall progression has changed from an item finding (luck-based) progression to a simple unlock (time played) basis.
Just because you have to wait till level X to unlock a skill, doesn’t means we’re being forced into a linear system. D2 had level requirements on skill unlocks. The choice comes from only one out of 5 runes being available.
Right. However, in D2, even if you met the level requirement for a particular skill, you wouldn’t necessarily use it. You wouldn’t necessarily level up that skill either; thus, characters in D2 would follow a less linear path. For instance, you may have max level Blizzard, whereas another sorceress may have max level Frozen Orb. By level 80, you may BOTH have max level Blizzard AND Frozen Orb.
In Diablo 3′s new rune system, there is no difference. All skill unlocks and “skill points” (to equate D3 to D2) are predetermined. So, if you want a stronger Blizzard before your buddy in D3 while he specialize in Arcane Torrent, tough luck. You gotta go find an item that adds to the skill while potentially sacrificing the quality of your current items, whereas in Diablo 2, you’d simply allocate another point to the skill you want.
The point is you don’t lose customization you lose customization of your progression which, in a word, sucks.
Hi Robotgravy,
I have no issue with the new rune system – other than liking the idea of working for them (in the previous version).
But I am interested to hear your idea of where you see the customisation in D3 being now, if it’s not within any of the removed system. You didn’t go on to elaborate, just that nothing removed so far means less customisation.
Well duh! You should be even more concerned if the equipment list stays static. We were all pretty underwhelmed with the “place-holder” (did anyone buy that crap?) items list. They need to drastically improve the attributes on those and I’m thinking they need to double the list. Think about it. It’s seeming like TL1 more and more but without the skill tree and I don’t know how I feel about it. The game looks and seems cool, but replayability is concerning to me. At this point, the player-gets-everything design could be an achilles heel. We’ll see. Either way, launch will be exciting. 5-6 months out will be the true test.
Kind of odd, but I was hoping for item modifiers boosting rune effects or individual skills (my desire to simulate point based skill system with itemization I guess). I agree that there could be more options as far as item modifiers go if that’s what you mean. A lot of things that feel lacking or were cut may popup in an expansion.
It angers me. Every revision is basically a simplification. The worst part is, it is made in the name of innovation and iteration. Retards.
What might likely happen is that, as you unlock the skill rune at higher levels, you might get (what were previously) higher-ranked effects. Which would not be too bad…
How was adding mods to runestones a simplification?
I dont know what mods you’re talking about. I am just disappointed at the lost promises, thats all. Not that I think the present system is bad. It’s the very best they could do at this point. But given all the promises, it still feels like a letdown. Worst part is, those who aren’t fans won’t even know about what they’re not getting.
Maybe we are wrong in our never-ending thirst for information. Who knows, had we seen this as the final implementation without knowing about all that came before, we might have whooped with joy. Now that we know what we’ve lost, it becomes a letdown…
Ok, I wholeheartedly agree with you here. People who haven’t been following progress will be in blissful ignorance. But in a way we are too – we’ve heard about loads of systems that sounded fantastic. For one reason or another Blizzard reckon they don’t work – they’re not fun (I could see why people might argue that) or people don’t ‘get’ them (unlikely). We’ll never know the truth of that. I would have liked to play with some of the systems that have been iterated out, but I’m happy trusting that the one I end up will, in the long term, be better :s
I’ve been playing a little bit of the Path of Exile beta, and in that game you sort of level up your skills just by having them and using them…
I think that would be a neat way to RANK UP your Diablo skills and the rune effects. For instance, every single skill and rune effect can be ranked 1 to 7 (as it was). The Skills (or Rune) you ACTIVELY USE gain experience for each kill or use and quickly build in RANK. And to not let all your unused skills/runes lag behind, perhaps they would also gain small amounts of experience and rank up more slowly (but cap at say rank 4 or 5, so they need to be USED in order to rank up).
Thusly this encourages you pick a skill or rune and stick with it, but you also have the option to quickly switch to something else and you have to level that up to max. Eventually some people would have all there skills top ranked being like a “Master Barbarian”, but it would take time.
Alternatively, you continually earn a “skill experience pool” and each time you RANK UP a skill or it’s run effect, you draw from this pool. Let’s say you have 150 pts in your “pool”, you could choose to rank up SKILL A from 4 to 5 and it would cost all 150 pts, or you could choose to rank up SKILL B from 1 to 2 for 10pts, then 2 to 3 for 30pts and so on. Ultimately you will eventually have all the HIGH ranked skills you want, but the game will at least MORE RPG elements to it. And give reason for people to play for MUCH longer trying to master all skills.
Also it would “FEEL COOL” each time you leveled up a skill and made it more powerful, as we all know this is Blizzards main driving force to dumb-everything down.
Sorry man but I don’t think Blizzard’s main point in dumbing down has anything to with coolness. The system you talk about seems cool, but it would confuse a one eyed midget with an IQ of a wheelchair and thus is not in the design philosophy of Blizzard.
you believe in your heart of your cards my friend
Agree with Robotgravy. This isn’t a loss in customisation at all. And from the sounds of it, rather than skills getting better with skill rank they’re getting better as the character does. Now, I’ve been purposefully avoiding all the info taken from the game files etc but that seems to me that nothing’s actually changed in the integral aspects of the system. I don’t know whether that means with every so-many clvls a Wiz will get an extra Magic Missile with Indigo or not, or whether it’s simply capped out at 3. But it does mean that there is skill growth throughout the game equivalent to the obtaining of rune stones.
Customization:
Skill ‘levels’ and Rune ‘levels’ never benefit customization. The only thing they do is boost your damage, not the ‘customization’ per se.They argue that customization is being able to pick a set of skills and for each skill apply a different rune on it.
freespec and cookie cutters:
I’d change my skills to the new cookie cutter every second rather than creating and lvling the same class character all over again just to test that build. There will be a lot of testing by players and eventually you’ll see everyone building a ‘Crit Barb’ or ‘HP Pool Barb’ because it seems to be the most viable without items. Later on you’ll see ‘AOE Barb’ because the new set of items that we get from inferno will boost up damage in order to be viable for AOE but never forget you’ll need the right gear for the right build.
There is still time for changes…
There is still few (not much but few) things that can still be cut out before release…
Just give them some more time…
I for one am over the stage of “ooh they’re blizzards, let them do it how they know, we have all the time in the world, I really trust them and hope the game will be purrrfect”.
No, that ship has sailed. Right now I am checking the news and when I see **** like this I just go: meh, only one more week till mass effect 3.