Diablo 3 OPEN BETA

Tried the beta, but I think the game's been casualised by blizzard to appeal to a bigger audience.

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vigst wrote:

Tried the beta, but I think the game's been casualised by blizzard to appeal to a bigger audience.

Well is clicking on buttons in a predetermined path 'hardcore'?

Imo requiring actual skill is 'hardcore'.

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vigst wrote:

Tried the beta, but I think the game's been casualised by blizzard to appeal to a bigger audience.

Well you should watch this if you think so: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzhoGX_7uFY&feature=player_embedded

If you still feel the same then there are plenty of games out there.

Dear Tagek,

thank you so much for trying to understand my admittedly convoluted explanation. You're ten times the D3 fan than that alcovitch fellow, who has moved onto easier targets than I. Weak.

By my explanation, you get to pick one rank 1 rune at level 10, right? Let's say, by the old system, rank 1 crimson. At some close level, say 12 or 13, you get another rank 1 rune to choose. Heck, let's make it level 11. Either another crimson or an alabaster or whatever. You now have two rank 1 runes to allocate to your skills as you see fit. This continues until level 20, at which point *all your existing runes* upgrade to rank 2, and all runes you pick thereafter to allocate to your skills are also rank 2. You continue to pick them as you wish, gathering quite a selection, no? By 30, you'd have a good 20 or so runes of various combination to allocate to your skills as you see fit. At level 30, all runes jump to rank 3 -- and so on and so forth until level 60, at which point all runes become max rank, and you'd have about 50 rank 6 runes to choose from AT WILL at ANY TIME.

...That's 50 rank 6 runes made up of a selection of 5 types. This should be more than enough to customise your skills into almost any desired configuration, shouldn't it? Since you'd have, what, maybe 10 or so base skills you'd use regularly.

And if it's not enough, we could just go one step further and unlock TWO rank 1 runes at level 10 of any chosen colour/type.

...It'll never happen now, like I said, but it would have been the best of both worlds, I think. I'd have had my crazy branches early on, speccing one wizard into fire, another into lightning, another in melee...etc...and you would have had all your rank 6 runes at 60, all properly maxed, to be switched in and out at your whim.

Did that make more sense?

It did, but I'm still not sure I understand all of it.

You have the 5 basic runes types, that, back then, were still named the same for every skill.

At lvl 10 you unlock 1 (or 2) of these.
And then I guess you can only put the one let's say alabaster rune into 1 skill at a time right?
So your other skills would still be in their base forms.
And then as you go along you can choose to unlock a random selection of runes, so you end up at lvl 30 with maybe 2 alabaster runes 2 crimson runes and 1 each of two other types. You can then have 2 skills with the ala runes at once, 2 with the crimson at once, etc.

Or you could just have 6 alabaster runes, and no other types, so you can always have all your skills in your 6 slot bar equipped with the alabaster rune effect, correct?

So this would mean that after (6x5)=30 unlocks you would have 6 of every rune type, and thus you would be able to equip any skill in your hotbar with any type of rune.
(This would be the case at 60 then)

Sorry, still no actual reply.
I just want to make sure I fully understand your system before I make assumptions based on things you never said and / or meant.

still don't understand that rune thing... I will wait till the game is released and find out for myself.

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Achilleios wrote:

still don't understand that rune thing... I will wait till the game is released and find out for myself.

The in-game system is very simple. You just unlock runes as you lvl up, to skills you already have.
Eventually you have all the runes for all the skills.

That's precisely it, Tagek. I'm very glad my latter explanation helped clear that up.

The increments between rune unlocks is flexible. Whatever is required for you to have all max runes at 60 to play with for all your possible equipped skills -- i.e. what you have at 60 now.

What I'd essentially be doing is heavily modifying how the game plays until 60 but at 60, it'd be the same as the current system, really. Before that, you'd be playing as though you 'found' a rune of your choice every level or two past level 10, given that up to level 10 might as well be the 'learning' phase. Of course, if we made it that the first rune unlocked at 5 or even 2, I'd be even happier. Runes were never about 'more power', just 'more variety' per skill. This is what the new system has obliterated, because now runes, not just ranks of runes but runes themselves, have been assembled into a hierarchy of power.

It was awful.

...My method or something like it would, of course, have required a lot more time to balance than Actiblizz gave themselves with (what I saw as disastrous) the May 15th release date.

Well I want to note one thing on this though.
The runes do not have any power hierarchy.
They are just distributed to you as you gain levels, and naturally that means some of them will unlock at a very high level.

And although the ones unlocked later in the game are probably the most flashy runes, like ones that completely alter the animation and goal of the skill, they aren't meant to be better than the very first one you unlocked.

Every rune will be equally viable.
Not exactly of course, as that would be impossible, but as much as they can manage.

So yeah, they are still about variety, not teh powerzzz.

Alas, once again night-time is approaching.
I'll have to postpone my 'actual' reply by one more day. :P


Good night everyone.

It's an artificial hierarchy but anything that unlocks level by level will be perceived as a hierarchy by players.

To be continued.