Diablo III Forum Activity

Diablo community manager “Bashiok” discusses the teleport ability, character twinking, and more in his latest responses on the official Diablo III forums.

On PvP and twinking characters:

We haven’t talked about any PvP, and it’s going to stay that way for now.

I think in general though twinking is a meta game, and while we wouldn’t design specifically for it (encouraging a player to stop leveling is just kind of weird from a design standpoint) I doubt we would take any steps to purposefully break it.

On the reduction of skills between recent builds:

When we changed the trees from each tree only unlocking tiers within itself, to the side-by-side approach where points in any tree would unlock the entire next tier in all trees, we could obviously then get rid (merge) a lot of the passive skills. So we then don’t need that many skills, don’t need as many spaces, and the trees shrink in size. Nothing was lost, just that the redundant passive skills were removed. Nothing to worry about, the number of actual active skills is the same.

edit: It should be noted that the Monk and Barbarian obviously don’t have the same amount of skills shown, but the OP was referring to the number of places skills could exist. The actual size of the trees.

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It kind of seems like a ton of different options would be good, I know, but more options doesn’t actually mean more customization. Sometimes it can mean less.

We want to make each skill, passive or active, as sexy as possible. Doing that means making each one useful and desirable in their own way. They don’t overlap, their use and appeal is specific and easily understood. Maybe not to every player all the time, there still need to be specific appeals to what a player wants their character to play like, but a bunch of filler would only create an illusion of options.

What would happen is there would be a few paths to take that avoided the skills that just aren’t that great, and so essentially all that filler might as well not exist. These are Diablo skill trees, every skill you use comes from spending points, we don’t want to weigh the whole thing down with a bunch of passives.

There is such a thing as complexity through simplicity and I think that’s something we strive for in all areas of the game.

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Being able to max out every active skill or even coming close would defeat an enormously huge portion of character build customization. That won’t be the case. You could essentially be a jack of all trades of course, a point or two in everything, but High Heavens forbid you meet up against someone who has built themselves to specialize in a few key abilities.

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Character customization as a whole will be deep, and it’s many systems working in concert. The skill system of course being the backbone. And respecs are intended to be pretty rare/valuable.

On the witch doctor being slow at killing:

You might be right about that. The witch doctor may be a bit slow, or at least it takes him a while to warm up in a fight. He has to do a bunch of things before the damage really starts flowing, but I think that’s just a different style of play and approach. I could see it potentially being an issue though if he’s just lagging behind in damage output. I haven’t heard any recent comparisons but for a while he was edging out the wizard and barb for damage done.

I don’t think he’s boring or lagging behind the other classes in cool skills though. http://www.diablowiki.net/Witch_Doctor_skills (Fansite reporting on skills, I haven’t verified it’s all 100% accurate but it looks pretty good at a glance)

But to each their own, I think the witch doctor has a lot of appeal but I think it’s ok if not everyone is super excited about every class.

On teleport’s cooldown:

In general most people seem to be concerned with the cooldown on teleport as it relates to other skills. As some have pointed out, the game isn’t finished. Cooldown times, damage amounts, etc. are all sort of best guesses at this point as to what will be close to balanced. It likely won’t be. Not until all the classes are implemented and the majority of skills are nailed down can we start finalizing runes and balancing the skills.

It’s a fine topic to discuss, what is or is not balanced, but to actually argue over it is ridiculous in and of itself.

Through skill point spending and runes the cooldown time on teleport can be reduced. But that’s not really the point.

Another concern, also a bit premature, is that now the barbarian leap skill will be the ultimate travel skill and everyone will play a barb because he can just jump through the entire game and do boss runs the fastest and we’ll have to add a leap-enigma to fix the game once it’s…

No. We don’t have intend to have any one skill as the ultimate travel skill.

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…the player should be allowed to self moderate how they choose to play the game.

It should DEFINITELY be the players choice… as to what class they want to play. If you’re playing a witch doctor you shouldn’t be essentially forced to level a wizard because they’re able to travel, kill, and get item drops faster than any other class.

Once a player finds the best way to do something they’ll do it. There’s no self moderation there. Once you discover that the fastest way to travel in super mario sunshine is to do a leaping belly slide, you slide around on your belly looking like a fool for the rest of the game. It’s obviously not intended for you to be jumping and belly sliding like an idiot for the entire game, but once your discover those little tricks there’s no going back. There’s no moderation on those things. It’s immediately accepted and adopted as an intended mechanic, because it serves our goals within the game. No matter how glitchy or silly it looks.

We want to encourage player choice and ability to play the class they want to play. Leaving one class with a skill that’s essentially broken like a cooldown-less teleport – we would be killing player choice.