I want to preface this with my experience in the beta this weekend had more positive aspects to it than I expected going into it. I had not been following the news on the game as I had not had high expectations for it following the flop that was D3. I’m a D2 die hard (100+ characters through Hell) and I found the overall D3 experience disappointing by comparison, so I didn’t expect the beta to surprise me with rather good moves back to many of the systems from D2 that made it so engaging.
Specifically, I was quite pleased with the rather open skill trees. Yes, I know these are not without some flaws with the way it is implemented, but it gives me infinitely more hope for flexible builds and improved itemization through item-skill synergy through skill points and corresponding scaling.
However… my optimism quickly soured with a heart-sinking feeling the first time I realized there were no ways to equip more than the skills that could fit in the skill bar. I regularly used all of the hotkeys available to me in D2. I distinctly remember my necromancer’s always required a few choices to limit to the 12 hotkeys. My standard load out was 4 minions, 4 curses for different situations, and 4 support/mana dump skills. It was infinitely worse when I realized that I couldn’t even drop the main heal/buff portion of skeletons to drop in another skill without losing my minions.
I don’t understand how Blizzard expects to establish any depth to combat strategy when you are constrained to only ~3-4 skills once factoring in the core requirements of a given build like necro minions, obligatory resource charging skill, an ultimate or other long cooldown skill. I can understand the combat being shallow for the first 20 levels (where I stopped for the beta), but the thought that it has no room to grow beyond that is baffling to me. I already had to begin dumping skills to take the new ones I was getting at this point. The shallowness intrinsic to such a limited skill pool was one of the most disappointing aspects of D3 combat that turned me off from the game after my first clear.
The real kicker here, and what might be the deal breaker for buying the game, is how terribly this all ties in with the skill tree and +skills affixes. The ability for gear to power up skills via skill points as affixes was one of the most optimistic moments of playing the beta as all of the combos and skill stacking of D2 came to mind. I worry that with the limits as they are, most of the affixes won’t be useful, worse yet they might muddy the affix pool as there is a large chance the skill that is boosted isn’t even one in your build. +all x type skills is greatly diminished in value if you only carry one or two types of the skill (unless the raw value of this is the equivalent in magnitude to + individual skills). These might often just become junk affixes that need to be enchanted away because if the skill isn’t explicitly one of the 6 in your build, you can’t even benefit from it the way you could in D2.
In retrospect, my favorite classes in D2 were the ones that were able to leverage a the widest array of skills strategically or otherwise combo many skills in specific situations to exploit a particular enemy, boss, or situations weaknesses (martial artist, summoner, auradin, shapeshifter, etc.). The classes that relied on spamming one or two skills all the time were frankly quite boring to me (hammerdin, WW barb). The idea that all characters in D4 are more or less guided to a few core skills and only a few support skills is saddening especially as the skill tree, skill point affixes, and aspects should do a fairly good job of balancing the power of a few heavily invested skills vs many lightly invested skills (barring a few considerations for cooldown skills with no other notable resource cost… an entirely solvable design flaw).
I worry that the open flexibility to build cool combos across many skills and bringing a mixed bag of skills to use strategically in various circumstances will be entirely handicapped by this constraint. Some support skills might be made entirely irrelevant given the cost of the skill slot they consume. That just isn’t fun to me.
The worst part was I was feeling that repetition of combat in the beta early on where every battle followed the same regimented set of just a few skills. At the time I had hope that this would open up with access to more of the skill tree and further skills later. It wasn’t until I couldn’t put my new skill unlocked onto my bar that I realized that I already hit the cap on combat depth only a few hours in.
Anyway, I just wanted to make sure that I also added my disappointment in this design on the slim hope that this can be opened up to more options in the future.
