The Final Redesign of Diablo III’s Rune System

[André Axe'm]

Well having people try to collect 50 items, making them unsettable and then deciding on having loads of teirs is going to cause problems for people that don't have infinite loot capacity.


Oh and ragecancelpreorderquit.

[yeapal]

Diablo 3 is way too complicated, much like most other games these days.
I'm glad they're simplifying the rune system. If I had a say in it I'd ask them to simplify it a little more.

All they really need is to make the game like a movie and when it gets to boss fights two buttons pop up on the screen and give me 1 minute to choose one "win" or "lose". That would make the game much easier on my simple mind. I don't want to strain it with variety.

[Marius]

To be fair, Diablo 3 is already way more complex than Diablo 1 and 2. What do people want - World of Diablocraft?

Without keeping feature creep in check, Diablo 3 will end up as an MMO and lose sight of the Diablo fundamentals (which never, ever involved grinding for skill builds) and I don't want that.

[Plonker]

Played through to level 12 or so on the Wizard tonight.

Whilst I'm none too happy about the way this is now implemented, it must be said the way you can modify the behaviour of your skills via runes is awesome fun. Seeing your Magic Missle or Arcane Orb fundamentally change is fantastic and it something that I'm really looking forward to exploring with the rest of the classes.

Would have been great to find these enhancements via drops, but at least they didn't remove the runed skills completely.. although I'm sure there's still time prior to release. Cynical much? I know.

Cheers.

[Marius]

Played through to level 12 or so on the Wizard tonight.

Whilst I'm none too happy about the way this is now implemented, it must be said the way you can modify the behaviour of your skills via runes is awesome fun. Seeing your Magic Missle or Arcane Orb fundamentally change is fantastic and it something that I'm really looking forward to exploring with the rest of the classes.

Would have been great to find these enhancements via drops, but at least they didn't remove the runed skills completely.. although I'm sure there's still time prior to release. Cynical much? I know.

Cheers.

Those two paragraphs seem to contradict each other, though.

If you have to find your skill build via drops, then you don't really experiment or explore the skill system... you just take what you get.

That's bad. Especially so if it makes competitive play even more dependent on item drops. Not only do you need the best gear, but you need to grind up a cookie cutter build too. Oh joy.

What would happen is that people would rely more and more on what others on forums told them, because they wouldn't have the time to loot every rune in the game. This would lead to a lot less diversity, as people would just trade for what others said were the cookie cutter 'best' runes.

I'm personally looking forward to the complexity and play of being able to easily respec and experiment. Maybe the people who are complaining don't like exploring different builds, though...

And rune drops are at odds with the D2 community's number 1 request, which is easy respecs. Skill rune drops make respecs a lot harder, unless the drops are so common. But then it becomes a pointless system and you may as well just be given them all automatically.

[Plonker]

Those two paragraphs seem to contradict each other, though.

If you have to find your skill build via drops, then you don't really experiment or explore the skill system... you just take what you get.

Incorrect.

You could experiment freely with low ranked runestones which were intended to be easily attainable (via common drops or vendor/mystic). They would have provided the same functionality as the high rank runestones, just less effective, so you would have been able to experiment to see which high rank runestones you'd want to farm.

[Marius]

I'm not sure on that.

Skills need to be tested in terms of what they actually do on your level or else you're just guessing. A level 20 rune would be useless in a level 60 area, and would show nothing about what the skill is like at the high levels.

[Plonker]

I'm not sure on that.

Skills need to be tested in terms of what they actually do on your level or else you're just guessing. A level 20 rune would be useless in a level 60 area, and would show nothing about what the skill is like at the high levels.

So you could tell *nothing* from a Rank 1 Runestone that split a Magic Missle into three, compare to a Rank 7 Runestone that split a Magic Missle into three but with more damage?

No wonder we need to make these mind-boggling complex games easier for the kids to play these days.

[Marius]

You're not considering that there are many effects that depend on a critical mass to be effective.

Take life leech, for example. At 1% life leech it may well be absolutely useless in a high level area. 10% life leech may be OP as it goes past a tipping point.

So you'd take your 1% leech into an area, find it does nothing, and then say 'life leech sucks'. But all you needed was more numbers to see the way the larger life leech interacts with your damage vs the enemy damage.

Snare is another example. A 30% slow may not be enough to make even a dint - if something can still catch you, then it's pointless. But a 70% snare may make you untouchable, and then this has flow on effects where various other skills get more powerful, because you've now got more time to spend on offense, rather than running away or evading.

Good skill enhancements are a lot less simple than just 'moar damage'. And to fully test their effects and the various flow on effects you need real numbers.

[André Axe'm]

Can't you just shuffle your runes around to different skills?
By the time you get to level 60 you should have a few level 3/4 runes and since there are only 5 types you shouldn't have that much trouble testing them on different skills.
And its not like you are suddenly level 60 and haven't tested what the runes do at all, you should have a fair idea which ones you prefer on what.
This is all storm in a teacup.

[Shuth]

This is all storm in a teacup.

I agree. The rune change is a good one.

[sgt_Pitt]

So they went from 3000 runes to 120 ?

They should've made the gems lootable with only 120 of them now.

[Quietwulf]

If you step back from it, all they've really done is transplant in the notion of "Talents" from WoW.

But instead of grouping the talents into major tree's (based on class roll) they created "micro-talent" trees for each skill, based on the rune applied.

Given the amount of actual, hands on testing Blizzard does, I have no doubt they're going to produce an extremely polished, enjoyable experience.

They simply don't leave anything to chance.

[poida]

just had a quick play through then with a few characters, and while its nice to get that character customisation early in the game it kind of saddens me that they've taken the rune itemisation out of the game. the high end runes could have been extremely hard to find and an absolute must for the many min/max players that d3 will bring, and it may have brought with it a massive supply/demand scenario where finding a good rune drop or two may have been more beneficial that many of the items, both on your own characters but also if you wanted to sell it on the AH.

That feeling of finally finding that rune to augment your characters skills into a much powerful build is gone in one massive sweep, and im not too sure the inventory management benefits will totally outweigh that feeling of finally min/maxing your build. Diablo is an item looting game, and high level runes as item drops would have been a massive part of the economy and end game.

[Shuth]

That feeling of finally finding that rune to augment your characters skills into a much powerful build is gone in one massive sweep, and im not too sure the inventory management benefits will totally outweigh that feeling of finally min/maxing your build. Diablo is an item looting game, and high level runes as item drops would have been a massive part of the economy and end game.

Runes have been by far the biggest design hurdle we’ve had in the game, and as you know we’ve been continually iterating on them. We fully expect that some of you will be disappointed that runes won’t be part of the itemization system. Internally, it took us a long time to let go of that notion too and stop trying to force them into being items, and instead embrace the intent of the system. Integrating runes with the skill system directly gave us a bunch of great benefits, and even without runes we’re launching with more item types than Diablo II had. We knew we were making the right choice by letting go of runes as items and focusing on the core objective of the system: to customize your skills in awesome ways.