DiabloFans

Hah - trust me, D3 is going to be soooo easy to pick-up-and-play :P. They recently nerfed the first pack of monsters (a bunch of zombies) you fight just because someone's mom got her character killed at that part, or so I hear :P.

'Easy to learn but hard to master' is Blizzard's current design mantra, and from the looks of things, the game is definitely living up to that. You could, as KageKaze said, pick up Titan Quest or Torchlight. Both are very cheap at the moment and will give you a ROUGH idea of how an action-RPG is like. I'd recommend you start with Torchlight though, as it is easier than TQ on the lower difficulty settings - a good way to ease you into the appropriate mindset.

Note, however, that D3 was designed from the ground-up to solve many of the issues that Action-RPGs have. For this reason, it really may not be a bad idea to just NOT play another A-RPG until D3 comes out.

Just like there are players who like the voodoo aesthetic of the Witch Doctor, but don't like some of his creature-themed spells like Plague of Toads (it may seem inexplicable to some people), so too are there players who feel that a character should be defined by her or his skills more than what items that character is wearing. If skills are as nebulous as they are now, then there's no real character.

You don't have to understand if you don't - you only need to know that there are people who do feel that way.

I'm one of those guys who do like a DEGREE of commitment to a build (not total permanence), but I like commitments to builds specifically because they come with unique strengths and weaknesses. It's cool to be able to have an actual character instead of going: "well, I'm up against some ice-resistant badguys, time to swap out some skills" all the time. You can be sure that I'll be taking advantage of the current system just because it's there (in D2, boss runs aren't the most fun way to play the game, but everyone still did it), but I wish that Blizzard didn't make it QUITE that easy.

I'm not saying that re-speccing is necessarily bad - only that it is bad if it becomes too easy to do.

Blizzard themselves have stated this. In fact, the ease of re-speccing and lack of connection to your hero's build was the reason why Blizzard introduced the Nephalem Altar and the current 15-second system in the first place.

I think I recall hearing somewhere that the current system is itself a placeholder, so I'm hoping that they come up with a better compromise in future, because I think that the current system is still too close to the old 'swap your skills whenever you want' (it's pretty much the same).

In Titan Quest, you had ramping gold costs. If you kept re-speccing, you'd eventually never be able to afford it.

One alternative could be a FLAT gold cost to respec, based on your level. That way, you won't feel bad that you have to pay more each time you want to respec (the price to respec at lvl 60 will stay the same for that level), you'd always be able to earn enough money to respec, but you'd still have to consider before making a decision. The cost to respec could be on a per-skill basis, so you don't feel horrible if all you want to change is a single skill. Switching out runes could probably still be free. People can probably come up with a better system, but I'd still prefer this over the current one.

Yeah, I'm still of the opinion that part of the reason why the Demon Hunter was concepted as such (and not as a Ranger as she once was), is because they want to leave room for a Nature-themed class in an upcoming expansion. That's one archetype that's noticeably absent in D3.

The Necromancer is still up for grabs. in my opinion. I could see a very pet-focused class, but in terms of design sensibility, what would differentiate a D3 necro from a D2 necro is that a D3 necro would have lots more ways to interact with his pets, acting as a kind of general. Perhaps he would have a spell that marks a target enemy, causing that enemy to take additional damage and attract your minions to it, and he'll have spells which enhances and/or protects your minions. In this way, the Necro would still be far more pet-based than the Witch Doctor, while still being a very 'active' class, as opposed to running into an area and standing around doing nothing while your minions kill everything,

It's not customisation which the OP is concerned about, so much as build COMMITMENT.

On this, I actually agree - this is probably my #1 concern with Diablo 3. When we make a character, we like that to mean something. If I have a build no one else uses - a build I've stuck to even through parts of the game before it fully comes online (say I'm missing a key skill that I only get at a later level) - I'd like to be proud of it. If all someone else has to do is freely switch around skills and wait 15 seconds to use the exact same skill/rune build I'm using, it takes away from a sense of character identity.

I agree with Blizzard that no re-speccing is lame, but they also said that they don't want it to be TOO easy, and at the moment, I really feel that it is.

If anything, we have more options than we did in D2. Some of the rune effects on skills changes them so drastically that in D2, they would have been a separate skill entirely!

All runes in D2 did were just making existing skills better, not changing their nature. The element of finding/crafting the right runes to become the most powerful character possible will still exist in D3, since +runes will be an item affix. It'll take a long time to fully optimise a particular build, I assure you.

I like the RUNE system more, but in terms of interface? I'm not a fan as yet :S.

Issues I have:
1) Since runes unlock in a specific order, it sets up a hierarchy among them - new players may think that the higher the level it takes to unlock a rune, the better that rune is.

2) You can't see all your skills at once like you could before. I think that being able to have a broad idea of all your options at once is something that Blizzard should find a way to work back into the current interface.

3) It's just plain clunky-looking :S.

You know, I was also just thinking - what skills would be a 'primary' attack for the Witch Doctor? It looks like with its damage nerf, Firebomb might be one of them...Poison Dart is another no-brainer, but after that, a lot of his other skills could be interpreted as either Primary or Secondary.

Plague of Toads, for instance, can be pretty mana-intensive if you're playing a petless build and are spamming them a lot. I'm surprised that the WD's passives weren't reworked with these patch notes. How will passives like Fetish Sycophants and Rush of Essence be re-worded?

Nerfs to Plague of Toads and Corpse Spiders hurts both pet builds and pet-less WD builds, because even pet builds rely on other spells for primary damage output. I just hope that Blizzard introduces at least one new passive specifically to enhance the power of petless WDs, so that that playstyle doesn't get TOO gimped from the damage nerfs.

Wow, I'm surprised by that Spiritual Attunement nerf to the Witch Doctor :(. Toying with the skill calculator, it's quite evident that a pet-less build struggles with mana, even WITH those mana masteries T_T.

I'm also surprised that Corpse Spiders and Plague of Toads were nerfed, considering that most feedback from the beta is that neither of these spells are very reliable sources of damage. I hope that to compensate, Plague of Toads is a little less erratic, and more reliable, and same for the damage on Corpse Spiders =/.

I really had my heart set on those two skills for my favourite Vermin-based Petless Witch Doctor T___T.

This system did take them a while to come up with, but remember that they were probably working on it since before July last year. It's been under development for some time, and they've done a really good job at keeping it under wraps until now :P. I mean, they could have talked about the change at the last Blizzcon (they teased us with those Rune images during that fansite visit).

I do vastly prefer this system overall - starting with the equivalent of a rank 4-5 Rune right off the bat? Yeah!

However, it comes with one ginormous downside - some of us won't get the desired rune effect until LEVEL 60. Like let's say that hypothetically, I really wanted Toad of Hugeness with Plague of Toads - I'd have to play through Hell difficulty just to get it. I won't get to enjoy having a giant toad with me in the earlier difficulties of the game, even if its weaker like in the previous rune system.

I dunno, that's my only real reservation but it is a big one, I think. Some builds are DEPENDENT on specific rune effects for skills! It just makes me so bummed to think that I may not be able to play a pure Spirit Witch Doctor, or a Vermin-based pet-less Witch Doctor throughout Normal/Nightmare/start of Hell, if I get shafted by the order in which I unlock runes =/.

This game has tons of pros, but there is really just one major concern with the game: with the relative ease of skill-swapping, will my character still have a sense of identity? I do agree that I shouldn't have to lvl a character from 0-60 just to try a new, full build, but I think that the current system makes it too easy. This is the thing I'm worried about the most.

Well, that and the con that Diablo 3 will basically kill my studies and whatever semblence of a social life I have T___T.

I'll be listening to in-game sound/music all the time. And of course, Deckard Cain ;)! Poor guy just wants someone to listen to him T_T.

Come to think of it, I actually don't listen to non-ingame music in ANY of the games I play :P.

This new Rune System - I wonder why they didn't just stick with the colours like Crimson, Indigo, etc? Diablo 3 is being designed in such a way that it'll be newbie-friendly while providing even more depth for non-casual gamers, so wouldn't making the runes look like this be less-intuitive?

It's unlikely that they're still going to be named after colours, and I kinda liked the idea that a newcomer could remember the names and effects of Runes in the previous system. If they give these new runes similar names to D2's ones like 'Zod' or 'Sur', then it's going to take them a while to remember which rune does what, or even what the name of the rune IS.

Ah thanks for the explanation, guys. Hopefully we'll get patch notes soon :P.

But if they are indeed patching now, then where's that article from Jay explaining the new skills/rune system? I thought that was supposed to come out before the patch.

This change doesn't seem to solve one of the problems I had with the previous system though - think of how limited your stash space is and how many sets of armour/weapons you need for all the different runes? Like imagine having 5 sets of pants, one for each rune for Plague of Toads, or 5 sets of headgear for the runes for that skill. Then imagine needing items for all the runes for all the skills for all the classes in the game :S.

I'm still not sure if having runes being tied so closely to items is a good thing. I get the feeling that I'll feel compelled to hoard a lot more than in D2.

Where are you getting this from? The main site hasn't even updated with patch notes or anything :P.

But wow, this sounds exciting! 'Terror', 'Decay', and 'Voodoo' sound awesome for the Witch Doctor! Funny how they went from 'Voodoo' to 'Physical Realm', back to 'Voodoo' again :P.

This probably means that there's going to be A LOT of Passive reworking. I do admit that I miss the distinction between the Physical Realm and the Spirit Realm for the WD's spells - I feel the physical/spirit realm was one of the things that made the WD the WD and I was really happy when they first re-sorted his skills into those two categories. I hope it still exists to some extent.

SIX categories could look a little messy in the interface, though. I wonder if it's possible that given how there are so many categories now, each class is getting a couple more skills. Really not sure how I feel about this yet, since what spells one would consider 'Primary' or 'Secondary' could vary from person to person and build to build.