Is skill trees okay for D4?

Really.
If you don’t think you should have to reroll to try something new, then you don’t think you should have to reroll to try something new. Counter with logic instead of blind assertions, please.

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A game shouldn’t be about a continual experiment sandbox environment. Where classes are just a collection of skills. Where all characters are suppose to be a jack of all trades and a master of none.

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Sounds like chaos orb spamming on maps. …

It also sounds like the following :

  1. Mapworks in Torchlight II(though this might be irrelevant)
  2. The debuffs/buffs on the Crucible DLC in Grim Dawn
  3. Delve in Path of exile as you get lower and lower
  4. M+ Affixes at 5/10/15 in World of Warcraft : Legion and BFA
    Is this a bad thing to you? And if so, please explain why…but I’m going to assume it’s because of this common argument against PoE:

PoE is complex(and arguably unnecessarily so…though admittedly I don’t share that feeling…but I sympathize at least)…or maybe complex is the wrong word…but you need information/understanding to progress the game…and it’s “tedious” to get that information (aka youtube/twitch/wiki/poe trade/poe db/filterblade/random example#59) but there’s a reason why instead of endless scaling they enforce player debuffs to slow down your progression. This doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to “repurpose” that philosophy in an easier to understand/fun format. I think the fact that it exists in WoW is probably proof enough.

In fact, just like my earlier comments on this thread on how I feel that because Legion implemented an artifact progression system to its endgame grind was probably going to manifest itself into Diablo 4’s skill system…I’d probably also venture a guess that because WoW : Legion stole D3’s Grift idea(and added weekly affixes)…I’d kind of assume D4 would return the favor whenever it comes out(or D3 expansion if that was ever going to be a thing).

I feel like it’s almost one of Blizzard’s legacies that they take good ideas from other games, and implement them in their game in a versatile format for a more diverse audience. I have no issues with them copy pasting a lot of PoE’s game mechanics and reformatting them in a way that makes more sense. D4 basically needs to be the middleground of ARPG’s, and in turn the competitor’s need to strive to do crazy, out of the box thinking to be unique(which in turn will eventually make D4 even stronger if that makes sense because they’ll eventually assimilate a good idea into their own making). It’s just going to make all ARPG’s better overall imo. Right now D3 and PoE are basically two sides of a coin…and if anything I’d say Grim Dawn is the middleground sort of speak, and I don’t like that.

This is all just ultimately a question if Blizzard is the same company as they were 5/10/15 years ago(and they’re willing to learn/improve from D3)…and if/when D4 is a thing the first thing I’m going to be checking for is if they learned anything from loot 2.0/skill runes. If they changed it massively, I’ll probably be happy…if they genuinely came to the conclusion that the Skill sytem and sets were great changes…then I’ll probably lose faith/temper my expectations quite a bit and commit a little more to other ARPG’s.

You’re comparing two different aspects that have little to nothing to do with one another. Not much to counter, besides what I’ve already said.

I have a simple & elegant ( in my opinion) way to deal with skill tree.

But before, let’s look at the 2 oppositing system & their main issue.
Diablo system, free to pick and choose any skills from the roaster of active skill given by the game. You don’t feel unique. There is no uniqueness to your character. You are just define by your class. The advantage is of courses high flexibility. You can easily switch builds for group, support, speed, push, bounties etc.

Then there is the traditional skill tree system like D2 and PoE. The advantage is you feel unique. It’s your character. You shape your char.
The disadvantage is you become one trick pony. You can have a balance char, but it never best at variety of gameplay modes( speed farm, multiplayer) or purpose. Also it can get bored fast as you keep playing and build. The counter argument is, it encourages you to have multiple character each specialise in different situation.

So what’s my fancy idea? Allow unique character, but allow more flexibility. It’s really not rocket science.

My idea is to as you level up, unlock 2 types of points, active skill points, and active skill modification points. The active skill points are used to pick active skills ( say multishot), the active skill modification points allow you to use to modify an active skill you picked for customization. It’s very similar to last epoch. The big difference in my proposal is until level cap ( say 100) you have total or about 20-22 active skills ( out of say hundreds) . Once you picked the skill, it’s fixed but you may respec at a cost.

22 skills is about the average skills a class have for D3. So Instead of creating a build, you create instead a avatar ( or any fancy word) of sub builds. The 20-22 skills that fit your playstyle & feel unique. Within these skills, you can allocated 6-7 skills to active skill bar and have different builds for different situations.

There you go. Let me know what you guys think.

So Instead of crest

Why is that so? , it’s your builds, you still have to make them, you can have 3 crappy builds or whatever.

The idea behind having a difficult time respeccing is to force someone into making multiple chars, because at on point it’s quicker and easier to switch chars than to change build. I don’t want that, I want to have my main char which I treasure and play to be the one I play the most, I don’t need more chars to cover all bases.

Good job making money for the game, chase away a big chunk of customers.

Still, they can sit in the forums and bother you I guess, never to play the game again but complain to the end of times, pining for the next game to not be as bad…

Sounds familiar shurgosa?

While I have no issue with skills having varying level of mastery, I inevitably find myself coming to the conclusion that I dislike how a number of ARPGs have come to handle them.

For starters, I’d push for a classless system with full-blown character avatar creation. I’m also going to assert that getting a skill point on leveling up or a small handful of alternative sources like a quest reward or drops is not the right way to be facilitating skill growth. While I view it as an easy way out in terms of restricting progression, it also inevitably leads to a soft “end of life” where all a character instead has left to chase is (better) gear or increasingly long EXP grinds that may not be all that appealing a la D2 level 90+ or whatever.

Instead, I’d be more keen on a system that facilitates aspects of skill growth based on what you do with them, with milestones leading to the desired skill growth options or even unlocking new abilities. You’ll still have base abilities tied to weapon choice or certain categories, but if you want to be something like a bow-wielding amazon that specializes in various forms of fire arrow attacks, you’ll have to put yourself in situations where you’re using those skills in various ways to build up their parameters and unlock different versions. Simply using an ability could be one avenue, keeping track of crits, how much total damage you’ve done with the skill over time, how many times you’ve hit 3+ foes with it, hitting foes with a minimum amount of fire resistance, and so on can lead to various aspects of specialization and experimentation.

And while a skill under the above may have an eventual cap point of growth, there would also be nothing stopping the player from investing time to build up cold skill attacks since skills wouldn’t be tied directly to character level or the like.

Now, some might think, “But then everyone would just learn everything and then be OP!” to which I’d simply counter that while learning everything on a singular character would theoretically be possible, what you can’t do is gear for all options simultaneously. As well, with a reasonable cap on active and passive skill slots, combined with the inability to change them or gear mid-combat, and you’re ultimately left with players having to settle for a specific build for given encounters even if they do have multiple builds that could work.

Since gear is an important aspect, I’d also clarify a few things. Similar to D3, they wouldn’t have stat requirements. But perhaps the most significant aspect would be an emphasis on Light, Medium, and Heavy gear types. The type category a piece of gear falls into would then influence the range and some types of rolls it could acquire. Want to be the tanky sort? Pick Heavy. You’ll see things like higher HP mods and damage reductions, but you also wouldn’t be capable of doing the same damage as characters decked out in Light gear. Medium would be, as some may surmise, the middle ground. I’d also maintain the concept of legendary powers, but instead of being something like Cindercoat where it’s an item with respective abilities attached, it is instead a power you can enchant onto any piece of body armor with the right materials as long as you’ve learned the “Cindercoat” power. Some powers may be better suited for specific types, but you’ll never completely be absent the option to make something if it does work in your build. And more generally, I’d strive to make crafting and enhacning gear not suck.

Here you have a downside as well. Having a character where you try to be a jack of all trades with the idea of being a master at all of them. To do that you would have to have the help of the community to pick the best class with that has the best builds in all situations. Otherwise you will find that you excel at some things and suck at others. Then you have a problem when the devs decide to make changes to the classes.

So your favorite class in that sandbox game may not be the best choice. There might be only a few things that the class is good at. Just talk to some barbs and you will see what I am talking about.

There is a game that you might not heard about that exist and is close to what you are looking for. It is called “Secret World Legends.” While there are starter classes you can change the weapon combo at anytime you wish. You choose what active abilities you have and buy them with ability points. Then with the skill points you buy passive skills and buffs to your character. You are in full control over what you get for your character.

Free to play players start off with only the two starter weapons for the starter class. You can use real money to unlock the other weapons a total of 9 weapons. The unlocks are account wide so unlocking assault rifle will mean that all characters will have it to choose as another option if you picked Gunslinger as your starting class having pistols and shotgun.

Google it for more details since this is D3 forums.

Just 5 slots for skills in definitely not enough and I think 6 is neither. 7 skill slots seem optimal to me. 8 might be okay, or probably even too much.

Initially, D3 had 7 skill slots, but they sadly reduced it to 6 because they had the feeling that with 7 skill slots you could have everything you wanted in regards to active skills.

Blizzard did exactly what i talk about, repeatedly for decades. An endless stream of costs, tension, and choices in games in multiple genres, and were Wildly successful and made staggering truckloads of money. They dont have to crap out simplified safe garbage to make money…they should know this already…

They dont complain about things on the forum…they love and enjoy the simplicity and safety of D3 and play regurgitated seasons until the cows come home…thats why we’re getting a dumb little phone game…they think like you and have to excuse blizzard for wanting to make dem monies…more and more of all that kid friendly convenience…

They would not bother me if they complained about things on the forum, they bother me because they dont complain, and instead embrace safe boring mindless trash…

Personally, I’m not asking to be a jack of all trades or to be able to use all skills. Only to be able to re-specialize into something else. For example, if I’m playing as a fire mage class, but then I find a item that seems to greatly compliment cold builds. Now if there’s no option to respec, then my only option would be to make a new character and build that character from the ground up as a cold mage.

However, if there was an option to respec, then I could have two choices instead of one. Once again, just have a system similar to Diablo 2 LoD, that way players won’t just respec at a drop of a hat, unless they have a massive amount of tokens (or whatever supposed respec would be called) saved up, and even then that’d only show the amount of time and effort it took for them to grind for it, or the amount of gold and/or items it took to trade for it.

Also, the developers will still make changes to classes regardless if Diablo 4 would allow players to respec or not.

No, but they will still aim for the more accessible choice, the one that attracts more customers. You can still set boundries ofcourse, but the attitude that you bring is exactly what they should avoid. The attitude of “i’m an adult, I dont want kids in this game, they’ll just dumb it down!”

Look mate, it’s not about making a game kid friendly, it’s about making it less annoying. After I had played d2 with the mod that gave free respecc, I couldn’t look back, it didn’t change the gameplay, just made me skip the part of making a new char because I messed up at one point.

You can make the game challenging as heck, but that should be the fights against the monsters, not if I researched my build in advance…

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The idea behind difficult respeccing is to provide a challenge and to maintain integrity. If D3 actually had all of the choices, progression and customization systems that it should, you would see just how silly your suggestion is.

I don’t think it intelligent design to give anyone unlimited respecs to several builds of their choice, trivializing content because someone treasures their main character and wants it to be instantly capable of being the most efficient at everything.

A lot of talk about the pro’s and con’s of the easy or not re-spec.
I think Blizzard has decided easy is the path at least in the two games I play, Diablo 3 and WOW. I don’t see them changing this formula anytime soon.

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Finally someone with a working brain, there is no D4. They are releasing new stuff for D3, stop talk about fried air kids.

You seem to consider most features that include any kind of significant consequence to be annoying. Maybe that is a flaw in your character not a flaw in design.

…Look mate, D3 is already about as “not annoying” as can be with infinite free respecs…

…The elephant in the room is that there is more to making a fun, interesting game than just bending it continuously towards streamlined convenience…

Maybe, but maybe I also have a different view on games, if the game gives me multiple choices, maybe I want to test around little to see what I find interesting. Given that I’m not young and have all the time in the world I had back then, my view on games have changed.

My favorite part of arpgs is to sit down and try out things for myself, find what class represents my playstyle in that game. But to do all this, you have to test around a bit, and given how arpgs are structered, most builds become functional later in the game. For me, I feel that the learning experiance should be while leveling up, to see your character grow, also to test around while leveling.

I think you can agree on that, but there’s one key difference, I want a single punish system, while you want a double.

Basically, I want the punishment to come while fighting monsters, seeing that my build gets crushed (either from my gameplay or my build), that in turn messes up my rift or dungeon or whatever, it gives me the choice to redo some things, change up my stats or skills, then retry. If I done it correctly, I succeed.

In a double punishing system you not only mess up your progress, you may in turn have to redo the whole char, which in turn leads to frustration for me.

Also, why I call it annoying is because it’s not making the game harder per se, but rather it’s limiting what you can do with your char. As I mention before, you have different builds to tackle different problems. As of now, I have both a single target build, a hybrid, an aoe build, speedrifting build and bounties build. All builds for different parts of the game, all on the same char/class. Whether they’re the best at it is irrelevant, it’s those builds I want to run. Now a limited respeccing system brings in the fact to have those builds in action, I have to have 5 different characters made, just to cover all those builds.

This is annoying to me, not hard or challenging, just annoying.

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