A lot of recent discussion around itemisation in D4 and while everyone has an opinion one way or another I think the D4 team are heading toward giving us a good balance of itemisation.
Anyway onto the topic at hand. In D2 you can get items that grant you the skills of other classes or in some cases skills that only exist as part of the item.
Is there any plan to add this to D4?
These attributes were significant and in some cases were able to give amazing builds such as granting the Sorceress Zeal or Bear form.
I think this would really open up a massive amount of variety if there are some skills we can access that are not typically associated with our class.
(Like, maybe I want to play a Barbarian who has some good bois)
They could add good skills to Mythical items and affixes to support them with legendary affixes. I think this could also be an interesting way to bring back ancient items: not as a better version of legendaries but as an item that instead of have a legendary affix, it adds a skill, and it doesn’t have better affixes than legendaries.
This would be possible if all classes used Mana.
Diablo 4 seems to use the same resource system as Diablo 3 (each class has its own resource system). Converting the cost of a skill to the resource of another class seems to me quite complicated and difficult to balance.
Imo, at the present time, the best approach would be skills that are autocast based on triggers or procs. For example, activate such an aura skill when you wear this item, or after being injured,…
Clearly you never played later iterations of Diablo 2. For those who didn’t, it’s a Class specific Barbarian Helm that lets you use a Druid Skill to turn into a Werewolf and cast a few Werewolf spells. It’s a lot of fun and very effective. There were many cross over runewords that did this sort of thing too, which added more freedom and options for some pretty amazing builds.
It’s the right move when there are many heroes to come with expansions.
The tricky part is they don’t offer skills that break the identity of classes. For example, seeing a barbarian casting frozen orb would be lame. Or sorceress doing leap slams… You get the idea.
Oh right, I know they said they had some legendary effects that are not class specific such as the Hydra ring that automatically summons hydras when an equipped player deals damage but I’m not aware of them saying we’d be able to unlock some abilities that could be actively used.
Personally not a fan, since the puts us in the position of highly prioritizing +skills or outright giving away a powerfully invested class skill that would also further benefit from +skills.
D3 approached this issue with what they labeled “concentrated coolness” in that classes should fundamentally be retaining their identities by not sharing skills. Unfortunately, some similar-ish skills happened to manifest (Whirlwind, Tempest Rush, and Strafe as examples) where it generally became obvious there were superior versions while others wanted to throw balance out the window because they favored a particular one.
Frankly, the only way I’d personally tolerate it is we went with a classless system from the start and went about acquiring/improving skills differently. I guess I’m also amused we’ve got people grumbling about identity with respecs in another thread, but then being okay with throwing out class kits on gear.
I think that if they done that then the classes could lose their concentrated coolness. Where they just wouldn’t be unique anymore. Or worse you would get an item like Enigma that everyone would feel that they have to have because of the teleport.
I’d love this but you gotta remember, in d2 they had items with + all skills, lots of them and that was how casters progressed… It would be pretty useless for a druid to get a level 3 frozen orb… I’m pretty sure this is completely out of the question from all the teaser’s ive seen, even the talent trees are WAYY off from anything resembling diablo 2.