Diablo 2 has better controls than D3, GD, or PoE. Diablo 1 had a skill bar and the system evolved to where we didn’t even have a skill bar. Oh please tell thee, why the heck does a player want a skill bar?
Skill bars are clunky, they take up UI room, and the controls are worse than D2. D2 evolved from D1 skill bars and the genre of arpg has regressed back to Diablo 1 days.
not again 
stop advertising this
Diablo will never capture the Diablo 2 magic with skill bars. It will always be mediocre if they continue on with these console, doomed designs. They are setting themselves up for failure again.
Items and multiplayer aren’t the only things that severely regressed in Diablo 3.
I know some folks disliked how Diablo 2 mostly relied only on the RMB/LMB to use skills; but I actually had liked it. Although what made it really great for me was the ability to hotkey certain skills, it literally made my builds and playstyle all the more versatile as not only did it up the number of skills that I could use, it also allowed me to seamlessly switch between them without pause. That said, I don’t see hotkeying returning; instead we’ll just have to make due with skill bars (which aren’t completely bad).
This D2 fanatic just loves the D3 forum.
You won’t find me coming here for D3 discussion lol. I’d rather go watch grass grow.
They don’t need to have an actual skill cap, but there is no way I’m gonna think that having me select the skill before being able to use it is in some way less clunky than letting me use it with a single button press.
When I spam Ice Bolt and Orb on Mephisto, I hold right click and just press the button once to cast multiple times (as soon as the orb goes I swap to bolt or static and alternate back and forth while holding rclick). Can you imagine pressing a button for ice bolt or static so many times so quickly? Orb and teleport don’t have super long cooldowns either. No skill bar is the only way to enable D2 like play.
A chaged boltress? Spam teleport? You pretty much can only spam one or two skills if you have a skill bar and it’s also clunkier imo.
Is there a reason why hold to spam functionality can’t be a part of a hotbar?
The hotbar allows for easy use of any skill with a single button press. It’s faster, it’s smoother, and if your designer is worth their weight then the UI intrusiveness is kept to a minimum.
Also having played WoW as long as I have, the idea that a hotbar means you can only spam 1-2 skills is laughable. Back in the day some classes had over 30 keybinds.
So that point is objectively wrong.
Wonder what the conversation had been if d2 had skill bars? Is it that the skill bars are bad, or is it the fact the games didn’t straight up copy d2?
My personal guess is that it doesn’t really matter what op’s own opinion is, anything not being exactly as d2 is garbage in his eyes.
Yes, I’d rather have my hand available to switch skills or use a potion instead of holding down a button to spam the skill.
Maybe spamming skills when you have 30 is more reasonable in a game like WoW on a hotbar, but for Diablo which often spams 3-5 skills I’d argue that the skillbarless system of D2 is superior. There could still be a bar for consumables or whatever.
Wonder why D2 didn’t take bars from D1? The idea already existed. Could it be that D2 was designed to be a computer game and D3 was designed for multiple platforms? Problem is, it affects the quality too harshly. It changes the gameplay substantially in a negative way.
Could it be, and bear with me here, that they wanted to test another system?
Quite a lot of other games chose not to copy that system, in the aRPG genre anyway. Other systems were more or less continued, but not that, wonder why…?
But as I said, I don’t truly believe that you actually care about this, if d2 had skill bars, I bet you that you would have enjoyed it, probably even more than the current game.
If your hands are on the button for switching, then it’s not much of a change that they’re on the same button for simply using the ability. You should already be able to easily move to use a consumable in either system.
Especially considering that, unlike WoW, we don’t use the keyboard for movement in Diablo.
The hotbar system is faster when using more than 2 skills due to the fact that you don’t need multiple button presses to do it. You can try to argue that is somehow clunkier, but at this point your argument has little to it beyond “But I prefer the other way”.
Hotbars are simply faster in all those 10+ skill builds that the Diablo 2 fanatics are quick to rush in and tell everybody all about whenever the topic of the 6 skill limit pops up.
you dont need to switch a skill when the skill is right on that button my friend 
Listen, u know what I want ?, a jedi machine that reads my mind and implements exactly on the screen in realtime 
Until we get that, we’ll all have to get satisfied with “rougher” options
You don’t need multiple button presses to do skills in D2. You have the fine tuning to hold right click or to just right click when you want to use a skill. Skills switch superfast and are ready to spam in an instant. Skill bars would never be faster for D2. I can’t imagine holding F to teleport across the screen instead of right click, sound awful.
Fixed that for you. 6 skills in D2 is the exception. As we know, most builds don’t handle immunities with little effort, need teleport charges, need life tap charges, or have plenty of buffs.
I too wonder why no one else has used D2 controls, probably because it would feel like a D2 rip or other developers didn’t have the resources to make a D2 depth like game - which is absolutely fine for the Diablo franchise to use.
As for D2 with skill bars, I highly doubt that. I’ve played as much or more D2 than most and I’m pretty sure I know what I like and why I like it. I don’t arbitrarily enjoy D2 and find D3 to be a chore.
Same amount of button presses for the skill as D3, one button - but now I can spam, don’t even have to release the spam button; or I can fine tune it and click once or click multiple times for precision.
So much this.
Although I do think there should be a skill cap.
Now, it could be a more dynamic skill cap; like each new skill after number 6 costs more and more skill points to acquire just the first lvl of the skill. So if you go above 6 skills, it comes at a drastic high cost to the power of each of your skills.
Like 1 point each for the first 6 skills. 7th skill, 3 points, 8th skill, 6 points, 9th skill 10 points, and 10 for every skill after that.
All skill lvls above lvl 1 in unlocked skills would still be 1 per point. Only the “unlocking” would have a higher cost. But unlocking a 9th+ skills slot would cost half of a fully powered skill. So it better be really useful for your build.
In Diablo 2 if I have Frozen Orb/Teleport selected and I want to use Blizzard, I need to press the hotkey to bring up Blizzard first and then mouse button to use it. That’s 2 buttons to use the ability.
With a hotbar, I just press a button and it’s fired off which is faster. You can try to say that D2’s system is still pretty fast and you’d not be wrong, but the stance you started out with here is that Diablo 2’s system is superior.
Yet in speed it is in the best case scenario as fast as a hotbar, and in most cases it’s a bit slower.
6 or 10 skills doesn’t make a difference.
Soon as you’re regularly using more than 2 abilities hotbars become faster. If you’re only using 1-2 then hotbars are equally as fast.
If you already have to aim the skill it’s the same speed. Also, for one time skills such as passive skills or cloak of shadows, a person can click with both hands at about the same speed (or hold rclick when you press the button). Maybe slightly faster for that one time you want to cast ice nova that has a 10 second cooldown because the developers can’t figure out how to put resource management into Diablo - because there is no resource management and because there are skill bars in Diablo 3 it makes D2 spam impossible.
When people complain about D3 cooldowns in regards to D4, the underlying issues are resources that don’t allow for spamming because they regen via a rotation and the controls don’t compliment spamming. Doing a forced rotation to regen my resource is a forced rotation that doesn’t feel good like D2 rotations where I use alternate skills for utility, extra damage, or alternate damage source.
The time difference isn’t going to be measured in high amounts but sorry man, pressing 1 button is faster than pressing 2 buttons in rapid succession. Even if it’s 0.1 second faster, faster is faster.
and again, you were originally trying to argue about how Diablo 2’s system was so much better. Now it seems like the goalposts have been moved to you trying to argue that it’s equal.
I don’t care about what Diablo 3 is doing.
I’m arguing in favour of hotbars, not in favour of Diablo 3.