SKILLS & TALENTS
Today, we‘re going to look at skills and talents—a topic many of you have asked about. But first, a quick update on the things we’ve Shared in our previous development blogs. Ancestral/Demonic/Angelic Powers To begin, some of you let us know that the fantasy of Ancestral/Demonic/Angelic Power just isn’t cool enough in the current version of the pitch. Duly noted! Another problem we identified was the ratio of effort to rewards. For example, in order to gain specific, minor bonuses, players would most likely have to carry around several extra pieces of gear, each with different amounts of Ancestral/Demonic/Angelic Power on them. You would then need to constantly calculate each of the power levels of those items and compare with their overall power. It felt like an excessive amount of bookkeeping for the player. However, one thing we really liked about the system was the gameplay of managing stats in meaningful ways to hit certain bonus thresholds that then make your items better suited for the playstyle you are going for. We need some more time for iteration/rework here and look forward to sharing more on itemization in our next quarterly blog. Legendary Items We are exploring some big changes in this space for two reasons: 1. We agree with the feedback that a character’s power is currently too dependent on items. We plan to put more of the player’s power back into the character to make build choices more impactful, rather than have the majority of player power coming from the items they have equipped. That said, it’s important that we strike the right balance so that itemization choices always feel meaningful. 2. We’ve also had very mixed team feedback regarding core itemization. We’re currently looking at how to best differentiate our various item qualities. For example, should Magic quality items have higher affix stats than Rare items? You can expect to hear more about legendary items in our next blog. New Skill System As Luis mentioned, we have made some major changes to Diablo IV’s Skills and Talent systems. We’ve been reading through a lot of the comments from the community and agree that the Talent system needs more depth. Similarly, Skill system progression felt too simple, which created issues where a player would have no meaningful reason to spend their skill points. With this valuable feedback in mind, we’ve have been iterating on a new Skill System. As you can see from the screenshot below, we have separate sections for Skills and Passives in our freshly painted Skill Tree. Take a look:
The Sorceress skill tree. The branches contain skills and skill upgrades, while the roots contain powerful passive effects.
You can spend skill points on square nodes to unlock new active skills for your character.
Spend points on circular upgrade nodes to enhance active skills you've unlocked.
As you explore the branches of the tree, you will find passive points.
You can spend passive points in the roots of the tree to unlock powerful effects.
SORCERESS ENCHANTMENT SYSTEM
Many of you might remember the Barbarian’s unique Arsenal system—their ability to carry and smoothly swap between multiple deadly weapons—which greatly increased their power. We’ve also been exploring unique class mechanics for our other classes. The main goal for us here is to have very unique class-specific mechanics in Diablo IV. We have this goal because Diablo is the kind of game where many players try out different builds or classes, especially during seasonal play. We believe that unique class mechanics with very different strengths and playstyles compared to other classes will make exploring the different classes—and playing the game—much more fun. For the Sorceress, we’ve been trying out the Enchantment System. This is how it works:
The Ball Lightning skill. Unlike other classes, each Sorceress skill has two possible effects.
Ball Lightning as an enchantment. You can gain the secondary effect of a skill by placing it in an Enchantment slot instead of an active skill slot.
Here is an example of this system using the Meteor skill. Meteor allows you to call a fiery chunk of rock from the sky. If you choose to slot it as an Enchantment, you won’t be able to control your Meteors, but they’ll fall onto enemies periodically. This skill is still under development and may be different in the final game.
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