Diablo 3's Ability System
Thursday, May 3, 2012 at 9:07PM Diablo 3 comes out in a couple weeks. I'm giving it the coveted award for "Biggest Comeback In System Design." Diablo 2's ability system was so bad that it's almost unbelievable, while the way Diablo 3 handles ability customization is one of the very best systems I've seen.
Diablo 2
Diablo 2 had talent trees where you spend points to unlock new abilities, very similar to how talent trees work in World of Warcraft. Also, you could allocate stat points into various different stats however you wanted as you leveled up. At first glance, these seem like ok things, but let's look at just how deeply problematic they really are.
Don't Use Points!
First, the best way to play Diablo 2 is have this big red "+" button on your screen almost the entire time, the one that says you have extra points to spend. The reason that will be on you screen for weeks is that you'd be a sucker to actually spend the points as you get them. You counter-intuitively (and unfunly) should stock up on those and spend them much later on. So the simple and fun thing to do (spend points as you get them) is just a trap for noobs.
Next, the whole system of allocating points in the first place didn't really customize anything. It was just a giant test of if you did your web research enough to know the only reasonable way to spend those stat points. You don't have to take my word for it either, let's see what Jay Wilson has to say. He was an avid Diablo 2 player, and the Game Director of Diablo 3 for the last 5 or 6 years.
Here's a written transcript of the relevant part, in case you don't want to watch the vid:
"You usually take as much strength as you need to get the armor that you're targeting, and that's usually around 120 or 220, depending on what type of armor. You take 75 dexterity because that's the amount you generally need for good block percentages. You take NO energy at all unless…there's like one type of build you can make on a sorceress that uses energy shield. And then you put everything else in vitality. That's a shitty customization system. That's just not a good system." --Jay Wilson, Diablo 3 Game Director on Diablo 2
Talent Trees
Next, there's the talent trees. There's two problems here, one medium sized and the other is one of the most mind-blowing fumbles in design out there. First the medium problem: it's pretty hard to make talent trees that give any real choice. They sure seem to allow choice, and in theory they really could, it's just very hard to balance it all so that there's a lot of good builds. Blizzard learned this in World of Warcraft, and I think we can see a clear progression in their thinking here. The first thought was that talent trees are great (and I was on board with this). Then there were too many talents that were "required" because they were so damn good, you couldn't pass them up. Stuff like +5% damage, you just have to take that compared to various utility skills. Blizzard reworked all the talents (well several times, but I mean one time specifically) to get rid of all those "required" talents. If something was just +damage, they mostly got rid of it as a talent. If a talent was an ability that was *necessary* for a class, they just gave you that ability outside the talent trees. So now what was left allowed for more flexibility in your choices.
I was on board with that, but it kind of didn't work that well in practice. Blizzard then gave it yet another try, trying to open up the reasonable choices even more. The next step in their progression in WoW talents was to get rid of the trees entirely, for the Pandaria expansion. In the new system, you will pick one of three possible talent powers every 15 levels. (Here's the Warlock one, for example.) Diablo 3 takes an even further step in this progression, but let's come back to that. There's one more thing about Diablo 2.
Start The Entire Game Over To Change Even One Damn Talent Point WTF
In Diablo 2, you can't respec your talents. Just think about that for a minute. If you spend a talent point wrong once, you have start over your entire character. What? Yes, really. If you want to try out a new ability and see what it even does...you have to start over your entire character. This is completely ludicrious. The best way to play the game is actually to download a hack that lets you set ability points to whatever you want instantly, just so you can see which build you might want to play, then go back to the real game. I've seen many players defend the lack of respec as "replayability" but that's not what replayability actually means. That's just an enormous time sink for no real reason and it severely damages the play experience. (Note that 9 years after Diablo 2's release, there was a respec thing you can do, if you jump through some hoops. Too little, too late.)
Years ago I saw several official Blizzard posts that defended a similar idea in World of Warcraft. Their claim was that the intentional difficulty (and originally, the complete inability) to respec talents was to create more diversity, and to make choices matter. This is really wrong-headed and actually the opposite of true. If you have a balanced system, you would not have any need to prevent everyone from switching their specs around. You're basically saying that you're happy that a lot of people are locked into bad specs they aren't happy with, because that means there are more different specs out there being played. What a terrible thing to inflict on your players. Again, you'll have varied specs out there if you actually have several viable ones and small or zero switching costs. Imagine if we made a fighting game and "balanced it" by saying you are stuck with whichever character you first pick! The big variety of characters played shows how great our balancing is right? (No.)
The no-respec mindset is actually counter-productive to the goal, too. When switching costs are really high (like creating your entire character over from scratch...) then no one really wants to experiment. It's too risky to do so, and it's better to go look up the cookie cutter build and go with that. So you get less variety, not more. The variety you do get is often from players who you pissed off by punishing them for mistakes or for exploring the system.
The good news is that Blizzard's thoughts on this have clearly changed over the years. WoW respecs got more permissive over time, and the next step in that progression is Diablo 3.
Diablo 3
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.
Runes: interesting new feature. I read that this system took far longer to design than any other system in Diablo 3, and I totally believe it. When I first saw the interface in the recent open beta test, I couldn't believe what I saw. I was so blown away, that I had to go read about it before clicking on anything because it appeared too good to be true. I think this actually happens a lot in design, where when you finally create / see / experience the "right answer," it seems so obvious, like it couldn't have been any other way, but it might have taken years for the designers to figure out that answer. Elegance is hard.
Here's how runes work. A rune is a modifier to an ability. Every ability (each of your class's 24 abilities) has 5 runes associated with it. And I don't mean the same 5 choices, these are custom for every single ability. You can only have rune selected for any given ability. So that means you have to choose if you want your Magic Missile to have 1) increased damage, 2) split into three shots instead of just one, 3) pierce through enemies and keep going, 4) generate mana ("arcane power"), or 5) track the nearest enemy and do slightly more damage. Here are the abilities for the Wizard, along with all their possible runes.
So the combination of possible builds here is ridiculously large, given that you fill each of 6 slots with one of 24 abilities AND for each of those 6 abilities you chose, you also choose one of 5 runes. Oh and you also choose any 3 out of 15 possible passive abilities for you class, so even more combinations.
Infinite Instant Free Respecs
Now here's the part that was too good to be true to me. You don't spend points on these runes. You don't muck around with them in your inventory. You don't commit to them and have to pay some annoying respec fee or something. At *any time* you bring up the ability menu, set which abilities you want, and for each one click on the rune you want. It's all in a nice menu with no hassles. Again: any time. With no cost. As much as you want. The only drawback is a three second cooldown so you don't do this in the middle of a fight. Wow!
As you level up, you automatically gain new abilities and runes. Gaining them requires no action on your part. And at any time, you can switch amongst any abilities and runes you have so far, eventually all of them. You can fully explore the system all you want. You can see what every ability does. You can try out any combination of abilities. The freedom is amazing and it shows newfound confidence from Blizzard. There is no need to slow the progress of people figuring out good builds: Blizzard is telling us that exploring builds basically *is* the game, so go for it.
Elective Mode
I do have one minor complaint here. Internally, Blizzard said they divided the abilities into different categories that helped them think about what's what, then they realized that players should be able to see these categories too. So they exposed them, and tied them to the 6 different slots you have. I think this worked really, really well. It makes the whole system easy to understand, elegant, and imposes an interesting restriction: that you can only have one ability from category one, one from category two, and so on. It would be absurd to think you don't have enough choices, because you actually have over 29 BILLION possible builds per class with that system.
But really, I think Blizzard had already done a lot of development that assumed you could choose multiple abilities from a category if you wanted. They were maybe already too far down that road. So while their new system is easy to understand, elegant, and has an interesting limitation, you can turn on "elective mode" in the menus to get a less elegant UI that lets you put any ability in any slot. And of course you have to because it's strictly better for you to remove that limitation. So yeah, too bad they couldn't have made the simpler concept with better UI and the category limitation work. But whatever, it's fine.
Nephalem Valor
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.
Conclusion
Thanks to Jay Wilson and the rest of Blizzard. I think this ability system with 6 slots, the lack of tech trees, the 5 runes per ability, the infinite instant free respecs, and the valor buff system overall is a very solid design. I'd go so far to say that it advances the craft of game design, even. Blizzard has come a long way in designing these kind of systems, and I think they've finally nailed it.
Reader Comments (126)
There are actually some other situations where you might want no Rune, but only early on.
The first unlock for Chakram and Poison Darts are only really side-grades in some situations. For Chakram it does less damage, but you get a 2nd Chakram. For poison darts it does more damage and upfront, but the animation is slightly longer which means you're stuck in place for a bit. Elemental Arrow, Rolling Thunder, Fists of Thunder, and probably others are the same way. Eventually you'll have a rune for each slot, but the 1st rune isn't always an upgrade depending on how you are using the skill and your situation (HC or normal). Then you also probably have some elemental concerns as well, you may not want a skill to be fire/lighting/whatever because the mobs are immune to that type of damage.
"Jay talks about how they want people to be able to make a Demon Hunter build that only uses Hatred and ignores Discipline, or a Wizard build that never runs out of Arcane Power -- they just don't want those to be optimal ways to play. Non-elective mode wipes out a lot of those kinds of options."
So because non-elective mode wipes out sub-optimal choices, that's bad? Did you miss the explanation of illusion of choice? Closing doors is a good thing to do when those doors lead to traps for the user. That's the whole purpose of affordances and constraints in design, be it for a game, a power cord, an ATM, or any other product.
Sorry, it looks like that link doesn't work - it's trying to connect up with a page here on Sirlin's site.
Here's a link that does work.
- Jon
@forty:
"your argument seems to be based on the idea that an unruned skill was ever viable compared to runed skills"
Actually, I'm saying the exact opposite: the only reason the no-runed skills are inferior currently is because there was a time in the game's development where that made sense. So let me try to explain things a bit better.
When you have runes as items, that makes them a limited resource you can allocate to your skills. Therefore, it makes sense to have the costlier skills (ones with high-level runes) be more powerful than the free ones (with no runes).
However, if you set out to design a system where you get to freely choose between multiple variants of the same skill, then the obvious choice is to (try) make them all viable. Even if you add character progression into the mix, that does not necessitate obsoleting early skills, just unlocking more options will work (hell, that's one of the reasons for moving away from the old skill tree system in the first place).
pkt, that seems totally false to me that the game's earlier forms have anything to do with why "no rune" is an option and why no rune is weaker than yes rune. Of course you start with it non-runed. And then you progress by unlocking some runes. This is like a non-issue.
You say "of course", but still don't explain why there should be a weaker version of the skill you can only use early on. If that question had an obvious answer, I'd like to think I would've figured it out myself already. So please, do explain. Anyway, here's a thought experiment for you:
Let's say you made the "+25% damage" or equally uninteresting rune replace the default, no-rune option, leaving you with just the 5 equally powerful variants. How would that be worse? As far as I can tell, it's just eliminating chaff, no harm done.
And yeah, this is a minor issue, but Blizzard has a well-deserved reputation for paying attention to the tiniest of details. I wouldn't be surprised if they patched this later on, actually.
Giving one "uninteresting" rune is not a choice for the player, so it adds no value. One of the other videos linked from the one above mentions that you don't get runes until Act 2 of the game. It appears to be a fully intentional and reasonable design decision to let beginning players get used to using their vanilla unruned skills through the first act of that character's very first playthrough of the game without runes as a learning experience.
Fundamentally, not having runes at the beginning serves both a tutorial purpose (learn the rest of the game/class before you deal with this additional aspect), as well as making it more exciting and rewarding when you do get your first rune (for that character). Your skills are only weaker for the first Act of that char's first playthrough of many.
Zero chance. For the reasons I described above, there's no reason or motivation for them to ever gives runes to a starting character on their first playthrough - a new player has enough things to learn and to try and to get excitement from that there is more fun value to unlocking runes later on. Theoretically they may add a way to get them if you have played through at least once with another character, but that would pose the problem that the first act (already not very challenging in all likelyhood) is balanced for unruned play - which again, they shouldn't change because it hurts the finely-tuned new player experience. The wait just makes that first rune you find all that much sweeter.
Uh, Demonac, in the open beta you unlocked the first rune for each ability just a few levels after you got the ability itself. I don't think they're changing that.
Since someone brought up Magic Find:
Anyone think Magic Find as an item property is another thing that should have died with D2? It's the same kind of anti-fun as saving stat points: the times you might need to use better (non-MF) equipment are the same times when MF is most effective, so you're using gimped equipment to find either better equipment that you won't use because it doesn't have MF, or more gimped MF equipment. Plus it makes it much harder to balance monsters as a threat against both kinds of equipment. They should have just balanced item drop rates at a reasonable level to start with, and left improving MF to things like the Nephalem Valor buff.
If they had never included +MF (or for that matter +Gold or +Exp) items in the first place, no one would miss it.
Yeah, I just read that whole interview, and they changed a lot of the rune stuff since then, for the better imo. Check out the link in Sirlin's post to the wizard skills. Now you just unlock the different enhancement options as you level up.
Giving one "uninteresting" rune is not a choice for the player, so it adds no value.
I'm not sure how you managed this, but you seem to be agreeing and disagreeing with me at the same time. It's like some sort of Schrödinger's counterpoint. One of the runes being a non-choice is why I said it's just eliminating chaff! And that's why I said that if you were designing a game from scratch, you'd just make all skill variants equally powerful, instead of having one be an exception.
So, umm, what now? I'm confused.
Fundamentally, not having runes at the beginning serves both a tutorial purpose
I seriously doubt anyone at all is going to be confused by the "+25% damage" type runes. If they replaced the default, you wouldn't even notice, assuming its stats were like that originally. (Note: In case it wasn't obvious, I don't literally mean just plus damage runes, but also lower cooldown, more potent buffs/debuffs, longer duration, larger area of effect, etc. The ones that were made for the people who wanted their skills working the same way as originally, just with bigger numbers.)
as well as making it more exciting and rewarding when you do get your first rune
This I can see as a possible reason, it's just a bit... unneccessary? Like, they could've doubled the number of skills by having every other rune be a weaker version of the rest, making "the rest" seem more exciting and rewarding in comparison. But what's the point? Just make all your abilities awesome from the start, and have you unlock different ones that are just as awesome, instead of better ones. That's the reason for scaling abilities in the first place, so they're usable all throughout the game.
As for this ruining the early game balance: I don't think that was a significant concern even for Blizzard when they made the switch away from rune items. You couldn't even get lv4-5 runes, which is where the power level of the current runes are, in Normal difficulty.
Another reason for the inclusion of no-rune skills that I could see being plausible, but hasn't been brought up yet, would be to have them serve as a baseline, so the variants could be more easily defined relative to them. So you'd have "no-rune, +25% damage, multi-hit, homing", instead of "no-rune, -20% damage and multihit, -20% damage and homing".
It's sad that you guys are going on and on in the comments about this non-issue. It's really not worthy of discussion, there is no problem to begin with, it's simplest the way they did it, and maybe move on.
I like the current rune and skill system but I'd like to voice one objection. The way runes are acquired (handed to you at a given level) seems to lose a lot of the magic of finding exactly the rune you've been hoping for drop out of a corpse. Finding loot is nice, but finding a rune would be an order of magnitude better, especially since they're so powerful now that combining them has been removed. I understand they want the skills to be accessible but how about this variant:
Runes are story quest and Event rewards (like from the Matriarch's Bones for example). A single play through of the story on each difficulty mode grants about 1/3 of the runes from story quest rewards. Without grinding a player can expect another 1/4-1/3 of the runes from Event rewards. One issue: How do I prevent Zod runes (statistically unlikely runes that require grinding). Selected events, on each of the difficulty settings, each use a small pool of runes from which it selects a reward. Once an event has been passed (The next story quest starts) the rune is labeled with the name of the event which can drop it (They are currently labeled with the Level Requirement). Tool tips allow players to see what certain runes can do, so they can look forward to finding the perfect rune for their build.
The quests can be picked so that the rate at which you earn runes remains more or less constant. The Events are not guaranteed to show up on a procedurally generated level. Neither is the exact rune you get, so there's an element of anticipation and surprise that's missing in the current form. On the down side, if you want to be a completionist, you would be forced to search for the events that award runes and suffer through (or quit / restart when you find) events which do not award runes.
Two consequences of this I can predict: Some players will be happy with whatever runes they get. They all have cool effects, they're all useful. Other players who want more precision can seek out the perfect rune for their build.
Love to hear what you think!
Goss, I think it's "too good to be true" that the runes are just given to you as you level up. The most exciting thing about the game to me by far is playing with all the combos of abilities. So having no barrier to getting all the runes and abilities is the best possible world to me. Having to muck around with them in my inventory or worry that I won't get some forever would maybe make me not play in the first place. But I know that I can go through the game and be guaranteed to get the entire palette of abilities/runes to play around with. Wow!
It's sad that you guys are going on and on in the comments about this non-issue. It's really not worthy of discussion, there is no problem to begin with, it's simplest the way they did it, and maybe move on.
Being a perfectionist is one of my flaws, so "moving on" isn't as easy a task as you might think. Especially when it comes to knowledge. You might say "It's fine to not understand X". No, it is not.
That's my excuse, anyway. Cluttering up the comments also bothered me as well, so to avoid that in the future, I'm moving the discussion to the forums, if anyone else still cares.
1.
Choice was one of the main strengths about the Diablo-Saga. Taking out are large chunks of choice, just because some players might do something wrong, appears not very viable to me, because exploring a game, having to improvise, learn and stuff like that, is pretty much the fun about most games, in whom you can win or lose. Players "have to understand" that.
In general choices aren't of much worth, if there weren't advantages and disadvantages to them. The more noticable the are, the more the player has to think about, to actually play the game.
If you want a gaming experience some sort of "adventure"(therefore bring the player in situations new to him), you will have a hard time achieving this by removing every possible obstacle and way to lose for the player, as it kills the bothe the feeling of danger(of having the urge to do something in way, which lets your survive), immersion and the feeling of having done something special.
Also, assuming that most players will do the same anyway(like the person in the video did) appears somewhat premature and pointless, especially when some moments later it is clearly pointed out, that the game is not so much about doing the perfect thing, but rather the viable thing you want.
2.
A "special choice"(aka YOUR choice) isn't of much worth, when just about everybody could do the same with minimum efford.
Therefore: If every player can respec as much as he wants to, the incentive to do things your way, will be quite low. Also, when there is no efford behind choices, you will be very likely to try all you choices in a short manner, and get bored really fast.
3.
The point about Diablo is to replay most of it alot(in theory, it's crafted in a way, that no two playthroughs are the same), at least in my book. Having to start and play new charakters and different builds - seeing how they fair, is my main motivation, as i don't care much for boring, practically ever the same items, which merely get stronger on a regular basis. So no primal-instincts-gathering of items for me, as long as an item does not open a new way to play the game.
4.
Giving a player so much freedom, that he can abuse it or actually use it to totally destroy the "you-have-to-improvise-portion" of the gameplay, and therefore forcing the developers to put some special rule in the game to avoid this, is NOT an elegant solution!
5.
I'm not hating the design-decision they made in Diablo 3, as they seem to have plausible strengths. I just happen to find it strange, how these decisions, in both the video and the article, are one-sided seen as "without downsides".
Erektionsgehabe, Diablo3's system has way more choice, not way less. Way way way more. So what are you even talking about?
And way more ability to explore the ability system, not less. It also offers more fun per moment of time, in that you can easily try many playstyles and go with the one you enjoy, rather than starting the entire game over (!!!) to try anything different. You also have the cause and effect totally backwards on easy respec -> more experimentation vs. less. You said it leads to less, but of course easy respec leads to WAY MORE experimentation of builds. If you have to throw out weeks of your time just to change a single stat point, then people won't want to explore the system, they will just read the web and use cookie cutter builds. The diablo3 way, anyone can try out anything, and exploration of builds will be massively more.
You seem to propose everyone be stuck with their build, no way to try out new powers, and fake-replayablility (rather than actual replayability) by making everyone start over for the slightest change. This seems worse in every way.
While it may be true that Diablo 3 has way more choice once you've unlocked all of the skills, there are significant chunks of choice removed from the beginning of the game. Essentially, in seeking to add choice to the hardcore endgame players, they've removed it from at least the first 10 levels I played.
Take a game like Titan Quest. Most, if not all of the skills are useful because each class has something like 4 skills, each with D3-Rune-like modifiers that you can focus into. You can buy just about 60% of the entire skill tree (mostly by focusing on the particular skills that fit your style), and point redistribution is behind a significant money sum that becomes less and less of a wall as the game progresses. It's very similar to D2, except, again, the skills are always useful. However, unlike D3, you get to choose the skills that you unlock, instead of them being fed to you.
I found D3's "Ding! Have a thing!" leveling system insulting, as if I couldn't be trusted to know that what I wanted was to begin unlocking my (currently useless) area-of-effect healing spells instead of getting more badass iterations on my monk's main and finisher attacks. If each rune is so balanced with each other rune, how come the game chooses in what order to give them to me? Why can't I go for the crazy teleporting punches immediately, instead of having to dick with several levels of seeing that the long range blow can get all short if I add this one rune?
Taking the idiotic "lookup and remember what stats you should be selecting" attribute system away is great; that wasn't a useful tactical choice. However, I'm totally frustrated that I can't immediately choose how to develop my skills by myself. Even if I eventually get enough points to buy everything, a game like Castle Crashers doesn't insult my intelligence by telling me what to buy first. To use the fighting game metaphor, imagine Street Fighter if you had to start with Ryu and had to beat everyone to unlock them as playable, but the game forced you to go in a specific order, starting with the tier 4 guys. That's how this feels.
I disagree there is any problem here. Having the designers choose the order you get the skills isn't "insulting" or a problem in the first place. It's just simpler that way. Nor does it even have anything to do with "lack of choice." You have billions of builds (literally) available by the end. You only need to get to level 30 to have ALL the skills. So by the time you are doing any difficulty past the very easiest setting, you already have all the skills.
For your Street Fighter analogy to hold, in Diablo it would have to be more like you can't play the Monk until you beat the game with the Witch Doctor. But that isn't how it is, so we're ok. A closer analogy would be that you want to play Ryu, and he is immediately available, but you have to wait a bit to get the exact rune for his fireball you cared about. And THAT would be a huge problem (non-immediate access to a gameplay relevant item) if this were a competitive game where there is a) the real game with everything and b) the useless annoying grind to get there. But it's not that at all. The grind *is* the gameplay in Diablo. There is no end where you have every item or something and are finally ready to play the real game vs other people. (Yes I know it will have PvP, which they bend over backwards to say is not real, and just a side thing "for fun.")
Much as I prefer D3's approach to D2s I don't really like it much overall. The problem is that most of my D2 play was co-op multiplayer (and so will most of my D3 play be) and in that context the new system reduces the number of characters massively.
On entry to a particular encounter in D3 each player character can only have one of five classes. In D2, the number was effectively far higher. Two sorceresses in the same party, for example, might have essentially nothing in common.
The result is that I will get bored of this game far more quickly.
The point here is not that D3's design is bad. Rather, I'm a little sad that the design focusses so tightly on the needs of single player PVE at the expense of other game types. I hope this doesn't become a kind of standard to be copied by D3's inevitable imitators.