With the server migration last night we are a little behind today and missed an interesting Tweet from last night.

	Blizzard Quote:
	The skill system revision is in full force. Trees begone! I think it might be a winner. Jay says hi.

Skill trees have been an area in the game that we have seen changes over the past year.  As you’ll see from this section in Diablo Wiki  we’ve gone from the traditional 3 separate trees with their own prerequistes and tiers to one large tree separated into three groups of skills, still with tiers but each tier becomes available in all groups at the same time.  Before this latest Tweet that’s where skill trees stood.  It’s documented in more depth in the Diablo Wiki.  “Trees begone” seems pretty cut and dry to me that trees are being removed.  In a later Tweet Blizzard had this to say:

	Blizzard Quote:
	We’re implementing and will be testing a new system that changes how skills are acquired. That’s all I’ll say.

This seems to be in addition to the removal of trees.  Are they simply talking prerequisites or are they applying a similar system as in World of Warcraft when you purchase skills based on your class?

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We’re in the process of migrating the site from diii.net over to diablo.incgamers.com this weekend. During this move you may notice some problems with navigation paths and image loading, especially in the wiki and the gallery. Please bear with us and we should have everything sorted out by Monday.  Thanks for your patience, and if you see something that’s not working right, feel free to note it in a comment to this post.

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Bashiok fielded a question about character collisions and physics, in the forums on Friday:

	Blizzard Quote:
	I noticed in the 2009 b-roll that the characters walk through each other. This was not the case in d2.  I like the realism of solid characters, anyone agree? Bashiok: For the co-op game allowing players to clip through each other just makes for a better and more enjoyable experience. You’re already dealing with enemies surrounding you and blocking movement, there’s no reason for your friends to do the same. Of course clipping wouldn’t be able to work the same way in PvP situations, but we’re not talking about that yet.

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A quick note to the commujity that the latest IncGamers Podcast is now online for your listening pleasure featuring all the top game news of the past week. It’s great way to find out about what’s happening in the world of videogames and upcoming titles. Don’t forget our regular features, the BS story of the week and the Special Needs Forum Post of the Week’. Listen to the podcast now and leave your comments and feedback.

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You might not realize this, but the Diablo novels have a pretty big impact on the world of Diablo and even the Diablo games. Three of the main character classes of Diablo II exists in lore purely by the ancestry of Sanctuary's Nephalem, the union between angel and demon. A fourth class (Druid) is also basically an offspring of Barbarians anyway.

Rathma was one of these Nephalem, and is the progenitor of the Priests of Rathma more commonly known as Necromancers in the words of ignorant locals. Despite the fact they deal with life and death, they are not using demonic magic.

Perhaps because he is so different and misunderstood, it has become one of the most favoured Diablo 2 classes, and there was an outcry by fans when it was announced he was not returning for Diablo 3. Jay Wilson said it was because the class was already "too perfect" and left little room for new thinking and improvement without mucking up a working concept, and he's probably right. Still man tries to explain why he's so cool, and the rest of us are here presenting the Necro's skills.

Take a look at his skills below, which shows some of the game mechanics later used for both pet classes, DoTs and debuffs, all in this 10 year old game.

If you have any cool images of these skills in use, please don't hesitate to add them to the skill pages.

Necromancer Curses	Poison and Bone	Summoning
Amplify Damage Dim Vision Weaken Iron Maiden Terror Confuse Life Tap Attract Decrepify Lower Resist	Teeth Bone Armor Poison Dagger Corpse Explosion Bone Wall Poison Explosion Bone Spear Bone Prison Poison Nova Bone Spirit	Raise Skeleton Skeleton Mastery Clay Golem Golem Mastery Raise Skeletal Mage Blood Golem Summon Resist Iron Golem Fire Golem Revive

BTW, also see the Amazon, Assassin, Barbarian and Druid skills!

A huge thanks goes out to all our contributors in the last week: JMJimmy, Leugi, Bandreus, WildKard, Martym, Widus, AtheistInHell, Siomer, Gluecks, Holyknight3000, Krischan, Veskin7 Bukito, Butch Audacity, Kire and - V -! The Diablo Wiki would not be the best Diablo resource on the web without you!

If you like DiabloWiki, do help out. There's over 600 pages waiting to be made, lots of pages that could need filling out, and of course the Stubs that need more detail.

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The audio and transcript of the interview I recently conducted with Runic Games CEO Max Schaefer is now online, and if I do say so myself, it’s worth a read. (Or listen, though I cringe at the audio quality via my crappy mic in the noisy coffee shop in which we met, a block from Max’s house in SF.) Most of our conversation was (naturally) about Torchlight and their plans for the upcoming Torchlight MMO, but we talked a bit about general game design issues as well, and Max had some interesting comments on what made D2 so slow and TL so fast.

Flux: Do you think, looking back, at games like Hellgate and Diablo 2 and other such games that take four or five years to make – could you apply any of the lessons you’ve learned with Torchlight to those sort of titles?
Max Schaefer: Yeah, I think so. I think that the era of the five-year, eighty-million dollar project is largely over.

Flux: Tell that to Blizzard!
Max Schaefer: Well not for Blizzard! *laughs* They have their own rules over there, for sure. But as far as the economy downturn and a lot of failed projects out there, people are looking for faster, quicker development and cheaper development and less risk, and I think that there’s a pretty good gap in the market right now between the casual game and the super-big budget project, and I think that customers will like it, especially since you can get a lot more product out.

Flux: Could you imagine, if you went back and made Diablo 2 or Hellgate right now, could we shave a year off?
Max Schaefer: I think that if we started over with Diablo 2 right now, we could have easily shaved a year off. That would’ve saved some marriages, by the way. *Laughs* But yeah, we didn’t have anywhere near the kind of tools that we do now, and that really makes a huge difference. If a level designer, a quest designer, a particle designer, an item balancer, and all these people can get their work in without having to bug a whole staff of programmers and wait a day for the build to see if it works – that’s a huge time-saver.

So, better tools, the knowledge that development isn’t running on a blank check, and a commitment right from the start to work quickly and efficiently. Paging Diablo 3 in 2012?

Click through for some more comments on what Max said, and what we talked about during the half hour when the mic wasn’t running.

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Continuing to cut a swath through the Diablo 2 characters, this week’s column tackles the Necromancer. Here’s the opening, click through to read the whole thing.

Why the Necromancer is Cool

The Necromancer seems to be a favorite among us dead beats and die hard Diablo fans. With Cain always boring us to death the Necromancer is the only old creep in Diablo 2 done right in Blizzard’s quest for the holy frail. But really, he is only ten feet tall when we the players put him on this rack here and give him a run for his Gumby. I always knew he was stretched thin. Tonight we hook at what exactly it is about him that players like so much. We will take a trip down memory bane as we stretch his limbs and give him a pul ruin. And speaking of stretched skin, what’s this cheap snare drum set doing here?

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Something Awful has contributed a comedy piece purporting to answer that very question. They’ve got (fake) emails from various imaginary Blizzard employees on the issue, which you may find amusing to read. Here are a couple of their “quotes” from the Diablo team:

“We were actually ready to send the gold master out last month, but it turns out somewhere along the line spellcheck turned every instance of ‘Diablo’ into ‘Dublin’. Right now we’re regrouping figuring out whether we want to start the whole thing from scratch or just roll with it and rework the graphics/story to go all-out Gaelic with what we’ve got.”
Eric Hiccupcure
Diablo III Speedboat Physics Consultant

“A few weeks ago one of our testers told us, ‘You guys do realize that there’s no such thing as magic in real life, right?’ and we’ve been scrambling to rework the majority of the skills ever since.”
Skeet Faultline
Diablo III Test Animal Wrangler

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No, I didn’t miss an I in that title. There are a pair of “new” Diablo 2 wallpapers available. These were added to the official site a few weeks ago, when Blizzard redid all of their game pages, including the D2 page, in their new, flash-o-rific format. Neither piece of art is new (compare the 2000 version of the Amazon vs. Reaper), but these wallpapers are new takes on them, and both are quite lovely.

 

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In an almost unimagined event, someone on the Battle.net forums asked a genuinely new and interesting question. Even better, Bashiok replied to it.

	Blizzard Quote:
	I myself am not color blind, but I recently heard that this guy that is visually impaired is sueing Sony for not making games cater to people who are visually impaired. I found out that there are actually some games out there that have an option for “color blind mode” which changes the color pallette and such. I know D3 will change the color of the item types to help color blindness, but will there be a color blind mode option? Bashiok: There are people on the development team that are colorblind so it’s something we’re constantly aware of. Aside from that though as a company we’re always interested in making our games as accommodating as possible. World of Warcraft for instance added a color blind mode which helps clarify item quality levels through text and not just color, whether Diablo III will need that option or not - it may.

 

Elsewhere, it was more of the same, with someone agitating for Ninja and Samurai class characters in the Diablo world. As though medieval Japan just floated in from the east?  Bashiok’s reply was wordless; he simply pointed to the image you see below:

	Blizzard Quote:

Click through for two other Bashiok posts, following up on issues brought up earlier this week…

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