The Myth of Build Variety

[JEB90]

As expected, any attempt to say anything other than OMG what a great game!!!!!1111! is met with the usual level of lack of reading comprehension that is one of the things that hasn't changed around here since D2. For those of you that actually have tried to engage in a discussion, obviously this doesn't apply.

Let me try to rephrase things for the rest of you.

Premise #1: we'll have a flexible skill system that you can change any time you want.

That sounds OK. No one likes killing their character because they misspent a skill or attribute point. Note, however, that D2 solved this problem late in its run. It hasn't been an issue for a while.

Premise #2: We'll increase your attributes for you, because no one likes messing around with those.

Really? OK, using the D2 example, most people maxed vitality as much as possible. There were however, viable builds based around maxing strength and some builds that needed to pump dex for blocking. Some Warcy builds even had a need for Energy. Eliminating this choice simply restricts options. I can't see any down side at all to having a recommended or custom option for stat increases at each level. Perhaps one of you could educate me about why this would be horrible.

Premise #3: Once you earn a skill/rune combination, it never improves.

Um, why? Are we really to believe that this is a boost to how we enjoy the game? Why can't I focus on one skill and improve it if I don't want any of the others?

Premise #4: To offset the shallow nature of the skills (1 and done progression), you can change skills situationally.

OK, this sounds pretty good. So I can't pump WW, but I can swap it out for Rend, Hammer of the Ancients, etc., when appropriate. Except...

Premise #5: But if you change skills during the game, you lose the magic find bonus we give you for not changing skills.

What? How in the world does this encourage build diversity? Especially when...

Premise #6: To optimize your game play, you should pick a skill set that you think will carry you to the end of your run.

and

Premise #7: Because of the way we've designed the game to tear up melee characters, unless you have more money/gold than God, you will have to pick a defensive build to deal with some of the insane mods on elite packs.

Hopefully, the 1.03 patch will alleviate the need for maxing defense all the time, but we will still have the valor conundrum. You simply can't switch skills during play,which strips away all the advantages of the more flexible system, and just leaves us with a more shallow system.

[hubb]

The point of instant skill swapping was never to allow you to change skills on the fly to adapt to different situations, it's there to encourage experimentation and allow you to try every skill while leveling up. NV exists so you don't abuse this option end-game (which is cheesy) and rather settle on a specific build.

They could've put it in respecs at certain points in the game like D2's 1.13 did, but they decided to take it all the way and allow you to change your build at any time until level 60 when you start farming gear for Inferno, at which point you have to stick with a build to farm effectively.

[Damouse]

The point of instant skill swapping was never to allow you to change skills on the fly to adapt to different situations, it's there to encourage experimentation and allow you to try every skill while leveling up. NV exists so you don't abuse this option end-game (which is cheesy) and rather settle on a specific build.

This.

The ability to choose any skill at any time would be silly and would make the game easy.

Constraints make the game more challenging.

[Puckineh]

In my opinion, people have this illusion (well, for me it is a illusion) that a skill tree automatically makes D2 superior because "oh I have to choose some skill or another to dump the majority of my skill points" (so the skill actually continues to be useful the whole game without becoming obsolete), "so if I can't possibly test all skills/spells during a single playthrough with one character it makes the game better desigin!" (i.e. I have to create a new char to try a different build - re-specs in D2 was too little, too lale for my taste).

Really, getting locked to one build without damaging your character beyond redemption to later levels was boring as hell (no pun intended) in D2. I rarely create more than one char to test different builds because, for me, it was a cheap tactic to try and make people play more. So I never had a lightning sorceress or a shapeshifting druid because D2 system punishes hard the player in later levels if they try to spend points in many different abilities to, perhaps, have more FUN.

In D3 I lost count how many builds I tried with the classes I'm playing *with the same char*! On the fly! Trying to figure the best build for me actually USING the skills, instead of only reading tooltips of them! For *me* it is a total blast, pure, pure fun.
But apparently it is a way of "dumbing down", so perhaps these people will have more fun with a system that locks players in a build, punish them for trying to truly have fun and thus limits their choices.

This is the complete opposite to me. I had at least 5-7 of every character. id make my way through the game using different skill sets that provided different challenges and a different experience from one character to the next. That is build variety.

now every barb is the same, they may use different skills from time to time, but just because I'm trying out how well cleave and WW work doesnt make that my build, there was no building to do. once i hit level 60 im the same as everyone else and have no incentive to ever make another barb aside from hardcore.

it does makes a lot of sense to have every skill available to everyone. when i started playing D2 i found out the hard way how you need to plan your skill choices in advance and i broke a lot of characters that way, but in the end it was much more rewarding to find a build that worked and start planning new builds

[JEB90]

The point of instant skill swapping was never to allow you to change skills on the fly to adapt to different situations, it's there to encourage experimentation and allow you to try every skill while leveling up. NV exists so you don't abuse this option end-game (which is cheesy) and rather settle on a specific build.

They could've put it in respecs at certain points in the game like D2's 1.13 did, but they decided to take it all the way and allow you to change your build at any time until level 60 when you start farming gear for Inferno, at which point you have to stick with a build to farm effectively.

This.

The ability to choose any skill at any time would be silly and would make the game easy.

Constraints make the game more challenging.

Which leaves us with the following situation: we have a diverse but shallow system where you can't specialize in any skills, but you should settle on a build that you don't want to change once you are in the end game.

How does this encourage build diversity? If we are just supposed to play around with builds while leveling only to discard them when at the end game, that's pretty much the definition of phony variety.

[galzohar]

Before people realized what the "must-have for inferno" skills are, I actually couldn't find 2 people with the same build, and even Blizzard had a hard time if you read their statistics. Of course, since inferno is currently so tilted towards defense for melee characters, and even with the maximum defense you will still die in act 3/4 without 50mil+ invested in gear, there is no other option than picking skills that maximize your effective EHP-based healing and life per hit healing, and there simply aren't a lot of those so you just pick the ones that exist and fill up your skill slots, and the 1 slot that is left without a useful defensive skill usually gets the one that helps you kill elites the most - Wrath of the Berserker with insanity rune... We have exactly 3 defensive passives, 2 useful heals (overpower with 15s cooldown and no additional benefit doesn't really count), 1 attack that gets maximum life per hit bonus and 2 "passive-active" abilities that make us simply take less damage, so only room for 1 skill that does damage (because let's face it - a 6th defensive skill won't help us much and will make us completely unable to kill stuff before they enrage without buying even more expensive gear).

I hope they don't just nerf inferno. I hope they reduce damage while they increase the DPS requirements (higher monster HP is a good start, but not enough), and make it so ranged classes can't avoid damage as easily (make monsters smarter/more aggressive/maybe faster), so that they actually have to either find a way to soak up the nerfed damage or actually use more kiting abilities rather than just spam the invulnerability skill until they run out of discipline, die and try again. And of course in addition to all of that they need to actually fix the skills, since even after you adjust inferno there will be quite a few skills that are way more useful than a lot of others and you'll still see them in every build (warcry - I'm looking at you!).

I also really hope they either re-design or nerf all those "passive-active" skills. They just aren't any fun, even if re-casting them has some small amount of strategy to it (matra effects, cost of battle rage and wizard armors, fury bonus for warcry). Though I don't expect Blizzard to make such big and creative changes. They'd probably try to save as much as they can with minimum creativity now that the game is already out.


On a side note, there definitely isn't any connection between build variety and the nephalem valor buff. Variety means that there are a lot of options that can be considered good and nobody will agree which one is best, and thus you can try the different options and maybe even switch every once in a while. Variety doesn't (necessarily) mean that you change every 2 seconds. I find the nephalem valor a very decent solution to the problem where people could just swap to a "boss build" and then to "waller vortex molten frozen" build and later to a "reflect damage mortar fast jailer" build as they see fit, but instead will need to find 1 build that can kill everything. Though of course they can use a different one every run, at least if they have the gear for it. Sure it still allows you to progress through the game switching skills as you see fit, you just won't get loot, and since in the end Diablo is all about the loot, killing something without it dropping loot is as good as not killing it at all

[simokaar]

Update after Beating Inferno Act 2:

So I spent about 15 million to gear up my barb--not outrageous, but certainly a fair amount of gold and effort involved (no real money gold buying, thanks). Spending this much gold on some pretty decent items leaves you pretty much one viable build: the tank we all know and love.

Well, I leveled a barbarian to 60 couple of days ago. Had 7.5mil stashed up (was actually saving for andariels for my dh) but instead I spent the money on AH to gear the barb up. Went with 2h axe and steamrolled act1 with I think 2 deaths, and finished act2 on the next day (yesterday). Finishing act2 required dying when I actually had to first time learn the character better, so far everything had been quite easy. Now I've been doing 5NV belial runs, I still might have to try belial a couple of times before I kill him, also some packs require a death or two when getting NV's, but I consider this farming none the less.

So I do think spending 15mil on defensive gear to finish said act is by no means required.

Now, Act3 however seems to be out of reach for now, I think I need more vitality and resists to continue there and upgrades are expensive. Need to see how I manage to do that.

Anyway, 40-50mil is by no means required to go offensive - less than 10mil seems to work just fine.

[galzohar]

If you want to stay in act 2 sure. I meant actually clearing the whole game. Thought that was obvious. You can do hell difficulty with 10k items and inferno act 1 with 50-100k items with almost any half-reasonable build, but nobody really cares about that since it's easy.

[thendcomes]

As expected, any attempt to say anything other than OMG what a great game!!!!!1111! is met with the usual level of lack of reading comprehension that is one of the things that hasn't changed around here since D2. For those of you that actually have tried to engage in a discussion, obviously this doesn't apply.

Premise #2: We'll increase your attributes for you, because no one likes messing around with those.

Really? OK, using the D2 example, most people maxed vitality as much as possible. There were however, viable builds based around maxing strength and some builds that needed to pump dex for blocking. Some Warcy builds even had a need for Energy. Eliminating this choice simply restricts options. I can't see any down side at all to having a recommended or custom option for stat increases at each level. Perhaps one of you could educate me about why this would be horrible.

Premise #3: Once you earn a skill/rune combination, it never improves.

Um, why? Are we really to believe that this is a boost to how we enjoy the game? Why can't I focus on one skill and improve it if I don't want any of the others?

Premise #5: But if you change skills during the game, you lose the magic find bonus we give you for not changing skills.

What? How in the world does this encourage build diversity? Especially when...

Dude, you're ridiculous. Right now, you're mostly spewing invalid arguments and people are reasoning why your points are invalid. You have to accept the game is not D2 2.0. I don't know why you called these bullet points premises, but I'll respond to a couple.

#2: This has been brought up many times, and it's just absurd. You have the freedom to change your stats *with your gear*. The stats found on gear are in far greater quantities than the amount you gain leveling up, and you're afforded the ability to swing your stats in farther directions than in D2. D2 had a stat that increased your mana which doesn't exist in D3, but there are many ways to increase your resource and resource regen, via gear, skills, and passives. Not only that, but you can do it in many different ways, like gaining resources for getting crits. You have way more options than in D2.

#3: First, not all skills are static. A few skills/passives on the Monk, for example, heal/regen different amounts that increase with level. Second, how did your skills change in D2? They got more powerful as you got +skills items. The same *exact* thing happens in D3, except instead of +skills, you have +primary stat and stronger weapons. If you want to boost 1 particular skill, there are +x% damage modifiers to a particular skill. Where is the complaint???

#5: As explained by others, NV discourages constantly swapping out skills. This system only lasts the duration of your current run. If you want to experiment with a different build, just do it after the run! Whoa!

[edistotiger]

Not to beat a dead horse, but i really don't understand how you are against NV. NV actually encourages BUILDS, the thing that you claim that you want so deperately. You actually have to make some intelligent decisions with your skills, runes, and passives so that you end up with a well-rounded build that can combat different types of enemies. If i could start off using one set of skills designed to take down elites, and then switch to a different set for the boss, with no penalty, the game would be much easier and much more shallow.

It seems to me that you are countering your own argument.