Runes(D3) VS Support Gems(PoE), which one is deeper

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English is unfortunately not my first language, so I will make plenty of grammar and spelling mistakes. :)

It's okay. ;p

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As for your last point.. nope.
What you said there would be true... if the internet didn't exist and everyone would have to figure out their own build.
When the game is out for a bit anyone who wants to will just copy whatever the currently strongest build is.
You can choose not to, certainly, but saying player strength is not 100% determined by gear in POE is just false.

I'll let someone who has played POE discuss that. From my perspective, this appears not to be true.

In POE, though, it seems that two characters of the same class at the same level may look different (due to the passive skill tree), whereas in D3, they will have exactly the same options.

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Also, it shows that you haven't done a whole lot of research on D3.
The number of build possibilities is huge.

All of which seem to be based on gear which you buy; this means Blizzard will have a financial incentive to keep such gear expensive, so they can use it to milk money off the RMAH.

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Assuming the whole 'internet doesn't exist' situation, better players would also be the ones with the best builds.

Moot point, as we are talking about online games here.

No, the build options are based on the giant number of abilities available to you.
Also, just to note, POE's abilities are slotted in gear, how's that for gear dependent? :P

Not sure what you mean about keeping gear expensive.
Blizzard doesn't sell any of the items, and they especially don't profit from items being expensive either.
It's also funny you should mension items at all, as blizzard has done the exact opposite of what they should be doing following your (and a whole bunch of other people's) logic. They removed a lot of 'build-making' affixes like cross-class abilities etc.

Also, you didn't seem to understand that last part you quoted there. I meant it was the same as it is in POE.

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No, the build options are based on the giant number of abilities available to you.
Also, just to note, POE's abilities are slotted in gear, how's that for gear dependent? :P

What we have here is... failure to communicate.
In this case, the "giant number of abilities" comes to a grand total of five per class, with 6 skill runes to modify them with. (30 active abilities total)
In POE, you have 60 active skills and 37 mods that can modify it up to 5 times, leading to 4,160,637,420 combinations theoretically possible. (Edit:Ignore this, I borked the calculations)

The gear dependency isn't a problem in POE, as there isn't a RMAH, which puts a price tag on power.

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Not sure what you mean about keeping gear expensive.
Blizzard doesn't sell any of the items.
It's also funny you should mension items at all, as blizzard has done the exact opposite of what they should be doing following your (and a whole bunch of other people's) logic. They removed a lot of 'build-making' affixes like cross-class abilities etc.

As I said earlier, they enable the sale of items and take a profit off of that. It feels a lot like it will function like the WOW auction house, except Blizzard will take a profit off of it. Hell, even WOW had more customization (in the form of talent points) than D3 will.

What I meant by "keeping gear expensive" was that since they skim a percentage of every RMAH sale, they have a financial reason to manipulate the RMAH for their own profit. It smells like a scam to me.

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Also, you didn't seem to understand that last part you quoted there. I meant it was the same as it is in POE.

?

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Flauros wrote:

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No, the build options are based on the giant number of abilities available to you.
Also, just to note, POE's abilities are slotted in gear, how's that for gear dependent? :P

What we have here is... failure to communicate.
In this case, the "giant number of abilities" comes to a grand total of five per class, with 6 skill runes to modify them with. (30 active abilities total)
In POE, you have 60 active skills and 37 mods that can modify it up to 5 times, leading to 4,160,637,420 combinations theoretically possible.

The gear dependency isn't a problem in POE, as there isn't a RMAH, which puts a price tag on power.

Your math is wrong, or you are unaware of D3.

Each class has 6 ability slots, each of which has 5 skills, each of which has 6 runes, plus non-runed. (6 * 5 * 7, or 210 different options, per binding.)

Assuming you can't take the same ability twice with different runes, there are 210 options for your first slot, 203 for your second, 196 for your 3rd, 189 for your 4th, 182 for your 5th, and 175 for your last. 50,297,065,182,000

If you can, that means there are 210 different abilities that you can combine 210 * 209 * 208 * 207 * 206 * 205 ways - 79,803,206,683,200 ways.

That's way more than the 4.1 trillion combinations you calculated in PoE.(although I'm not sure about your numbers - for one thing, it depends on build, because 2h builds can get 2 6linked, whereas other builds can not.)

Even if 1/2 of the builds are bad (for example, if there is absolutely no reason in D3 to ever use a non-runed version of the spell) there are still an enormous number of builds.

The REAL question is how different each build feels - are Leaping Spiders really different from Corpse Spiders?

D3's runes are empty shells of what the POE system can produce in the long run.

D3 has a couple static modifiers, that can only be applied to a single skill, one at a time, in no combination with your items when loot is like 90% of the game... it's extremely shallow.

POE's system is so much more interactive and rich in comparison... Having them itemized ties them to the loot finding aspect of the game. Giving them quality ties them both to the loot aspect AND to the RPG aspect. Doing both ties them into the economy. Allowing them to modify more than one skill on a piece of gear through links leads to combinatorics, which directly affects player diversification and choice. Additions of future support gems affect a diverse assortment of skills, as opposed to D3's system.

I can see how some might like D3's system for being simple or perhaps because it offers some effect they particularly like... however I don't find it possible to have a rational argument for it being close to as deep as the POE system, nor has even close to the long term potential.

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AgentDave wrote:

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Flauros wrote:

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No, the build options are based on the giant number of abilities available to you.
Also, just to note, POE's abilities are slotted in gear, how's that for gear dependent? :P

What we have here is... failure to communicate.
In this case, the "giant number of abilities" comes to a grand total of five per class, with 6 skill runes to modify them with. (30 active abilities total)
In POE, you have 60 active skills and 37 mods that can modify it up to 5 times, leading to 4,160,637,420 combinations theoretically possible.

The gear dependency isn't a problem in POE, as there isn't a RMAH, which puts a price tag on power.

Your math is wrong, or you are unaware of D3.

Each class has 6 ability slots, each of which has 5 skills, each of which has 6 runes, plus non-runed. (6 * 5 * 7, or 210 different options, per binding.)

Assuming you can't take the same ability twice with different runes, there are 210 options for your first slot, 203 for your second, 196 for your 3rd, 189 for your 4th, 182 for your 5th, and 175 for your last. 50,297,065,182,000

If you can, that means there are 210 different abilities that you can combine 210 * 209 * 208 * 207 * 206 * 205 ways - 79,803,206,683,200 ways.

That's way more than the 4.1 trillion combinations you calculated in PoE.(although I'm not sure about your numbers - for one thing, it depends on build, because 2h builds can get 2 6linked, whereas other builds can not.)

Even if 1/2 of the builds are bad (for example, if there is absolutely no reason in D3 to ever use a non-runed version of the spell) there are still an enormous number of builds.

The REAL question is how different each build feels - are Leaping Spiders really different from Corpse Spiders?

This guy calculated it differently http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/4768346902

Also the number of potential builds for POE is so huge, that I wouldn't even bother attempting to calculate it.

It would take into consideration:

1) socket number, color, links
2) skills without supports, 5 skills with 1 support to 1 skill with 5 supports
3) passive tree, which alone is probably too big to calculate.
4) skill quality, support quality

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Your math is wrong, or you are unaware of D3.

I am a) aware of D3 b) mathematically correct and c) was looking at an earlier build of d3.
There are a total of 113 active skills. They can each be modified by a rune once or not at all. (113x7) 791 skills is good, but is only a fraction the number of skill combinations available in POE.

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Each class has 6 ability slots, each of which has 5 skills, each of which has 6 runes, plus non-runed. (6 * 5 * 7, or 210 different options, per binding.)

Assuming you can't take the same ability twice with different runes, there are 210 options for your first slot, 203 for your second, 196 for your 3rd, 189 for your 4th, 182 for your 5th, and 175 for your last. 50,297,065,182,000

If you can, that means there are 210 different abilities that you can combine 210 * 209 * 208 * 207 * 206 * 205 ways - 79,803,206,683,200 ways.

Putting a skill in a different slot doesn't count as making it a new skill.

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That's way more than the 4.1 trillion combinations you calculated in PoE.(although I'm not sure about your numbers - for one thing, it depends on build, because 2h builds can get 2 6linked, whereas other builds can not.)

I was discussing theoretically how many different discreet skills are possible, not combinations of skills. I got the math wrong, as I forgot to account for the multiple-shot gem being split in two, as well as a build possibly not using a gem. the actual number of theoretical skills appears to be 60x39x39x39x39x39, or 5,413,451,940. Five million combinations is much better than 791.

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Even if 1/2 of the builds are bad (for example, if there is absolutely no reason in D3 to ever use a non-runed version of the spell) there are still an enormous number of builds.

Not really. The number of builds or skills available has nothing to do with the quality of gameplay.

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zeto wrote:

This guy calculated it differently http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/4768346902

At a certain point it becomes irrelevant.

@Zeto: The guy doing the math in your link makes the mistake of raising the number of skills to the number of runes power (5^6). first of all, I believe there are 6 runes, not 5, secondly that fails to account for unruned skills, and lastly, that's simply mathmatically incorrect.

Actually, explaining that is also a reply to Flauros:

You have 6 skill slots - They default to Primary, Secondary, and then 4 themes (For example "fire, Lighting, Cold, and Arcane" for the wizard, for example. Those aren't correct, I just don't recall right now, and it doesn't matter, so I won't look it up.)

Each category (primary, secondary, etc etc...) has 5 skills, at least as far as I saw in the beta.

6 x 5 = 30.

Each one of those skills has 6 runes, plus an unruned version.

30 * 7 = 210 possible distinct options to be bound to your keys.

If you choose "Elective Mode", you are not limited to one spell of each category.

So, either you have 210 choices for your first key, 209 for your second, and so on (assuming you can bind Magic Missile with no rune, and Magic Missile with the first rune, etc.) or you have 210 choices for your first key, 203 (you've eliminated the 7 magic missile based options) for your second, and so on.

Flauros, no class has 113 active skills in D3, they're divided by class. But using that logic, you'd have 791 options *for the first slot* - a build includes comboing skills to, say, freeze enemies in place before calling down a meteor on their head - you're allowing passives in PoE (some of which are quite low key and boring - yay, it cost slightly less mana. Not really a "different" skill, you know? Not that all the D3 ones are amazingly different or exciting, to be fair.). I now understand that you're comparing how many passive/active combinations you can achieve in PoE, and quite possibly there may be more options (although, I think not - not every passive works with every skill, for starters. For another, that's assuming that you've managed to get perfect gear with all the right gem sockets, and links. For a third, even if the passives play nice, certain combinations won't be possible at high level - a high level skill gem of one attribute (say int) with a support of another attribute (say dex for multi-projectile) with a support of the 3rd attribute (say Str for Added Fire Damage)) - it's not really realistic to expect a character to keep all 3 attributes at high levels - looking at it, it's perfectly possible (I'd have to look at every skill gem and every passive gem and figure out which ones work together and not to figure out how many combinations there are.) that PoE has more options, but when you're comparing numbers in the billions and trillions, there's a point at which calling one system "more customizable" becomes irrelevant.

Edit:

You're right, if you pick skills 100, 110, 33, 72, 81, and 4, you are functionally identical to someone who picks skills 4, 81, 72, 33, 100, 110.

I suppose the math should look more like

((# of skills!)/(#ofskills-6!)) * (7^6) (oh, that's where he got it from, he just used the wrong number.). If there are 22 skills for each class, that's be 22*21*20*19*18*17 * 117649 = 53721360 * 117649 = 6,320,264,282,640 choices. For that one class. There are 5 of them.

And that's not counting passives.

I never said however that builds mean that gameplay is good. I merely pointed out that there are a huge number of builds in D3. Not 791, but trillions, if not more.

It's very easy for permutations to get into the billions or trillions.. that's actually TINY in the world of combinatorics.

I think that a more qualitative analysis can show that D3's system is actually quite shallow... The number of possibilities doesn't really capture how flexible a system is, because most people aren't capable of understanding what it means to have billions of combinatoric choices... let alone understanding what the difference between 10^12 vs. 10^50 choices implicates.

Also to note: you cannot calculate D3's possible skill sets without the Choose function.

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AgentDave wrote:

@Zeto: The guy doing the math in your link makes the mistake of raising the number of skills to the number of runes power (5^6). first of all, I believe there are 6 runes, not 5, secondly that fails to account for unruned skills, and lastly, that's simply mathmatically incorrect.

Actually, explaining that is also a reply to Flauros:

You have 6 skill slots - They default to Primary, Secondary, and then 4 themes (For example "fire, Lighting, Cold, and Arcane" for the wizard, for example. Those aren't correct, I just don't recall right now, and it doesn't matter, so I won't look it up.)

Each category (primary, secondary, etc etc...) has 5 skills, at least as far as I saw in the beta.

6 x 5 = 30.

Each one of those skills has 6 runes, plus an unruned version.

30 * 7 = 210 possible distinct options to be bound to your keys.

If you choose "Elective Mode", you are not limited to one spell of each category.

So, either you have 210 choices for your first key, 209 for your second, and so on (assuming you can bind Magic Missile with no rune, and Magic Missile with the first rune, etc.) or you have 210 choices for your first key, 203 (you've eliminated the 7 magic missile based options) for your second, and so on.

Flauros, no class has 113 active skills in D3, they're divided by class. But using that logic, you'd have 791 options *for the first slot* - a build includes comboing skills to, say, freeze enemies in place before calling down a meteor on their head - you're allowing passives in PoE (some of which are quite low key and boring - yay, it cost slightly less mana. Not really a "different" skill, you know? Not that all the D3 ones are amazingly different or exciting, to be fair.). I now understand that you're comparing how many passive/active combinations you can achieve in PoE, and quite possibly there may be more options (although, I think not - not every passive works with every skill, for starters. For another, that's assuming that you've managed to get perfect gear with all the right gem sockets, and links. For a third, even if the passives play nice, certain combinations won't be possible at high level - a high level skill gem of one attribute (say int) with a support of another attribute (say dex for multi-projectile) with a support of the 3rd attribute (say Str for Added Fire Damage)) - it's not really realistic to expect a character to keep all 3 attributes at high levels - looking at it, it's perfectly possible (I'd have to look at every skill gem and every passive gem and figure out which ones work together and not to figure out how many combinations there are.) that PoE has more options, but when you're comparing numbers in the billions and trillions, there's a point at which calling one system "more customizable" becomes irrelevant.

The issue here is why a particular system has x builds, not the exact value of x. In the case of POE, GGG has no direct financial incentive to make one build more popular than another. In fact, if all builds are roughly equal, the game will be more fun, and thus cause customers to be more likely to linger around longer to buy extras. In the case of D3, if Blizzard makes one build outshine another, gear for the better build will be more in demand. More demand for gear= higher price for gear in RMAH, and since Blizzard takes a % cut off each transaction, more demand for gear= more profit for Blizzard. If Blizzard slowly changes which builds are viable via patching, players will scramble to the RMAH to buy gear for the new builds. An ingenious plan, if it works.