Grampy_Bone
Arcane
I've always said that the Diablo 2 skill system is one of the worst things to happen to gaming.
Not because it's bad in that game, but because it has been so mindlessly copied into so many titles I am completely sick of it. Thus it was funny to me that D3 ultimately streamlined it out, realizing its inherent flaws were unfixable. Unfortunately they replaced it with nothing, leading to the game of "pick which color of magic ball to clear the screen with". I was surprised to learn the D3 skill rune system had been implemented and playtested extensively as loot drops, but was changed to auto-unlocks at the eleventh hour when they realized the runes cluttered up the inventory too much (uhhh, you guys never thought of a separate rune bag? Jesus).
In D2 you could put a point in every skill for a character and still have an okay time (trust me, that's what my first character looked like). I don't think you can do that here, at least not with the Rogue, you will get pulverized. So the obvious flaw of the skill system becomes apparent: players putting points into bad skills, or bad skills for your build, or they don't work how you expect, or they're just lame, and so you've wasted the skill point. "Good!" exclaims the Codex, while I disagree and it's clear the majority of players do as well, the common solution of respec is not good either. Respec is a tacit admission that the skill system is broken and does not work, but instead of fixing it they give you a built-in cheat to mitigate it. Its duct tape on a leaky pipe.
My solution, FYI, is to allow unlimited skill point grinding. PoE essentially did this by letting you level up skill gems. Or come up with some other system that doesn't require respec (and I think Diablo 4 REQUIRES respec--I have rebuilt my Rogue at least ten times and I'm only level 30). I'm not saying its unplayable, I just wish they had come up with something new.
I appreciate they are trying to get players to synergize their skills and not make the game about keeping everything on cooldown all of the time. However, skill trees and respec feel like a step backward. Forgivable if the later game systems prove to have enough depth to maintain interest; we will see.
Also, I'm not sure what people are upset about re: story choices or lack of immersion. Consider that Diablo 2 was put into development without any story at all, and all locations were built based on what the developers thought sounded cool and would be fun to kill stuff in. In the end a second team was tasked with piecing together the disparate pieces and making up some kind of story to go along with it, and the result is widely hailed as one of the greatest games of all time. Storyfags get rekt.
Not because it's bad in that game, but because it has been so mindlessly copied into so many titles I am completely sick of it. Thus it was funny to me that D3 ultimately streamlined it out, realizing its inherent flaws were unfixable. Unfortunately they replaced it with nothing, leading to the game of "pick which color of magic ball to clear the screen with". I was surprised to learn the D3 skill rune system had been implemented and playtested extensively as loot drops, but was changed to auto-unlocks at the eleventh hour when they realized the runes cluttered up the inventory too much (uhhh, you guys never thought of a separate rune bag? Jesus).
In D2 you could put a point in every skill for a character and still have an okay time (trust me, that's what my first character looked like). I don't think you can do that here, at least not with the Rogue, you will get pulverized. So the obvious flaw of the skill system becomes apparent: players putting points into bad skills, or bad skills for your build, or they don't work how you expect, or they're just lame, and so you've wasted the skill point. "Good!" exclaims the Codex, while I disagree and it's clear the majority of players do as well, the common solution of respec is not good either. Respec is a tacit admission that the skill system is broken and does not work, but instead of fixing it they give you a built-in cheat to mitigate it. Its duct tape on a leaky pipe.
My solution, FYI, is to allow unlimited skill point grinding. PoE essentially did this by letting you level up skill gems. Or come up with some other system that doesn't require respec (and I think Diablo 4 REQUIRES respec--I have rebuilt my Rogue at least ten times and I'm only level 30). I'm not saying its unplayable, I just wish they had come up with something new.
I appreciate they are trying to get players to synergize their skills and not make the game about keeping everything on cooldown all of the time. However, skill trees and respec feel like a step backward. Forgivable if the later game systems prove to have enough depth to maintain interest; we will see.
Also, I'm not sure what people are upset about re: story choices or lack of immersion. Consider that Diablo 2 was put into development without any story at all, and all locations were built based on what the developers thought sounded cool and would be fun to kill stuff in. In the end a second team was tasked with piecing together the disparate pieces and making up some kind of story to go along with it, and the result is widely hailed as one of the greatest games of all time. Storyfags get rekt.
