Diablo III’s Ability System, Deconstructed

If you want to hear one player’s thoughts on the revised ability system in Diablo III while also brushing up on how the mechanics behind it all have been re-tooled and re-geared, then you might want to make this new blog entry/editorial on Gamasutra required reading. I can’t say that I agree with his enthusiasm over all the changes Blizzard has made, but to each his own:

Allocating stat points as you level up: gone. Great, this was busywork that contributed basically nothing, so the subtractive design makes the game more elegant overall.

Talent trees: gone. You have exactly 6 slots for abilities, and you can put whatever you want in those slots. There are approximately 24 abilities per class, so your build involves making meaningful choices about what to keep and what to leave out.

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There is one more surprisingly great thing about the Diablo 3 ability system. That you can respec at any moment as much as you want does create one problem. If you are super hardcore, you will have a different spec for like every encounter in the game once you have memorized it all and are farming for items. That means the best way to play is tedious once you reach that level of mastery. It would really suck to “fix” that by limiting the respec in any way though. Normal humans want to explore the system freely and I’m so blown away by this infinite, instant, free respec thing that we should NOT ruin that to address this hardcore problem.

Of the top of my head I thought, “Hmm, maybe have a separate mode where respecing sucks or something, let hardcore people play that.” But Blizzard’s answer is much better. The Nephalem Valor system kicks in at the max level (60). So before that, meaning your first run through the game, you really can respec all you want for free with no drawback at all. Go for it! Once you reach 60, you can get a buff called Nephalem Valor that can stack a few times, maybe up to 5. Each buff increases your gold find / magic find stats. Also, if you kill a boss with that buff on, the boss will drop extra loot. You get the buff by killing rare or champion monsters.

The genius part is actually how you lose the buff though. I think it lasts about 15 minutes, so you have to keep progressing to stay buffed. But you also lose it if you *leave the game* or if you *change your abilities or runes at all*. Ok think about that. If you plan to farm the same 3 minute segment of the game over and over and over, you can do that. But you’ll be doing it without the buff so it won’t be optimal to get rare items that way. Also, if you want to respec before every single encounter, you can. It’s just that you won’t have the buff so it won’t be the optimal way to get items either. The optimal way to get items happens to line up with the fun way to play: to go an entire big run where you stick to one spec. This is a very clever way to solve the problem for the new player and the expert without really sacrificing anything.