Will D3 have 'talents'?

[5zigen]

What do you guys think? Will blizzard leave the system in place where active skills and passive skills compete for points or will blizzard modify the system slightly?

One interesting way I think they could do it is give your character 1 skill point and 1 talent point per level (or modified, 1 talent point every 2 levels), where skills are the active use spell things, and talents are basically the passive skills we saw in D2 like Natural resistance, skeletal mastery, fire mastery etc. I think this would also open the door for some more interesting character customization, if they had multiple types of passives for each class of character skill (Ex fire spells, war cries, summons, etc).

Another thing a system like this would do is eliminate the need for synergies, because they could be built into another tree that is dedicated to buffing your character and their skills.

Two possible downsides I see are it could confuse new users some. but I think with implementation like WoW's talents it could be worked in pretty well without encumbering the person when they just hit level 1.

The other downside I Think is it could potentially lead to more ultimate builds than actually encouraging variety. Which means it would take more careful balance, which is always a bit cumbersome.

Anyway I think it's a distinct possibility and I know some people will think "no WoW in my Diablo!" but just calling it a 'talents' tree is the only thing wowish about it, i mean, Diablo has always had passive skills, I'm just talking about adding more robust ones for all characters and breaking them up from the active use skills.

[Manovan]

It's an interesting idea but I would prefer an incorporation of the model from both D1 and D2 into D3, meaning the ability to have class specific skill trees as well as the ability to find rare tomes with unique spells independent of class.