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)
This was a great article that put emphasis on a few points that I hadn't quite considered. I definitely feel that this is a far superior system to Diablo 2 as this actually encourages people to take part in all the content.
In Diablo 2 you were punished for doing what was good at the moment. Both in the sense of that you want to have fun all the time, not save the fun until the end (saving skill points), and in the sense that if Blizzard made a patch that made your build a lot worse then all the time you spent on getting the power you wanted was lost. Just start over. Not with a new class but with the exact one you've spent a couple of months on.
People that complain about the system making individuals of the same class too similar don't seem to view it logically. In D3 you can't use all the skills at the same time and there are builds to make different skills viable. Sure, some might be better than others but that's the exact same scenario as in D2, where every long time player still just went with the most powerful build or did other builds just for fun. That's exactly the same, but in D3 you won't have to spend an enormous amount of time on different versions of the same class just to test which styles you think are fun.
@tinfoiltank
I see that you like starting over again every time you want to change something, and while I don't have the same opinion I can see why. I do have one question though; why aren't you going play that way in D3 then? Sure, you don't have the same minor power to choose when things become available, but you can still aim for one build and decide not to use the rest of the skills and runes that you don't want for that particular build. The difference between that and D2 isn't too big. What little you lose might be weighed up if you realize that you made just one single little error and can fix that instead of starting the exact same character again.
My point really being that it's not just the game that decide how you play. You do have your own say in the matter and 'fun' should go over 'optimal' in my view.
@tinfiltank, what is stopping you from playing the way you want to. Why don’t you just play D3 never changing you abilities once you have selected them. You start off with basic attack, so u can still kill stuff. Then, when you use a special move, never swap it out. Once you rune a skill, never change that rune. One you select a passive ability, never change it. Now you’re playing the way you want to play, but not forcing other to play your way.
@tinfoiltank
"You're absolutely correct, which is why I'm disappointed. I'd rather the entire game be fun,"
Well then you're in luck, friend, because it is! It's more fun than D2, in fact.
Yeah, I find the complaint that the "entire game should be fun like Diablo 2" personally perplexing because in my experience, after you've played a few hours, and figure out how broken the systems are in regards to saving points and such, Diablo 2 is incredibly boring and utterly un-fun for the first 20 levels or so.
Starting a new character just to try a new build, and then playing for 10-15 levels while actively avoiding taking interesting skills so that I can save up the points to be powerful later is the epitomy of unfun to me. An attribute system where only one attribute (Vitality) is actually useful is unfun to me. But that's just my perspective I suppose.
I look forward to Diablo 3 where I can have fun playing each class all the way up to 60, since I'll be constantly getting new abilities to experiment with, and learning to play the game better as it gets harder, and then I'll be set to attack Inferno with my friends, with a great idea of what skills appeal to me and how I can put them together to create my preffered playstyle.
@Stormcrow/fuddy: That is probably how I'll play, since I like to create identities for my characters in RPGs (like, "My Wizard is an ice mage, who dabbles in Arcane"). But since skills don't get any better than when they're first unlocked, the sense of progression will be nonexistent, and rather than trying out a unique character progression path I'll mostly just be handicapping myself, which isn't much fun.
@forty: It has fun stretches in the second-to-second gameplay (which has a lot of good improvements of Diablo 1 and 2), but it lost the over-arching character building aspect that was fun in Diablo 2 (for me).
@Answermancer: If you personally didn't find Diablo 2 fun, why would you expect Diablo 3 to be? Aren't sequels supposed to imply that the people who liked the previous game will enjoy the new one? To be blunt, why is Blizzard aiming the sequel at people like you who didn't even like Diablo 2, rather than someone like me who played it for years?
@tinfoiltank: If that was the case, then why did Blizzard aim Diablo 2 at an audience who wanted talent trees and building characters that way when Diablo 1 didn't have it?
Things change, even in sequels. Blizzard recognized that the contortions Diablo 2 makes people go through in order to get good builds were a poor design and removed them.
I didn't say Diablo 2 wasn't fun, I said it wasn't fun for the first 20 levels or so. I never considered the early game or Normal the real game, and neither did the vast majority of hardcore Diablo 2 fans who always focused on late game builds, farming Hell, and trying to get to ridiculous levels.
You're acting like what you liked about Diablo 2 is what everyone liked about it, and that is not only not true, but I'm fairly confident that most of the people who played Diablo 2 for years were focused more on "endgame" and Hell than what you seem to be interested in. That is of course just my perception, but I don't think it's any less accurate than yours.
My personal opinion is not that Diablo 2 wasn't fun, but that the skill system was boring until you got into the 20's or 30's, and that its attribute system actively worked against creating interesting, unique characters (since all stats but Vitality are useless). Therefore, it is also my opinion that Diablo 3 fixes both of these problems, and that is why I expect Diablo 3 to be fun despite any issues Diablo 2 may have had.
It's funny that you bring up building legos, since the funnest part of building legos for me was taking apart what I had built and building something completely different from scratch. And what I had built certainly couldn't be transformed into the same thing that somebody else had built in the space of 3 seconds. It takes time and effort to build what you want, and if you want to build something else you have to start again from scratch. That's what made it so rewarding for me as a kid. -tinfoiltank
I wouldn't call it building something completely different from scratch, though, if you're comparing it to how Diablo 2 works. It's more like you spend 20 hours building a cool lego barbarian figure holding a sword. Then you wonder what he'd look like holding a club. Only in this universe, legos cannot be taken apart, so you decide to spend 16 hours rebuilding the same barbarian you built earlier, then spend the last 4 hours building a new hand holding a club. With the Diablo 3 system, instead of taking the entire thing apart, you're allowed to take apart the hand and the sword, and build a new hand holding a club to replace it.
Some people will like the repetition of building something that's mostly the same again from scratch, and some people won't.
I just hope they don't patent the system.
Good article. I'm not sure if you saw this, but someone on the Blizzard forums wrote a very detailed account of the ability system changes from D2 to D3 and how they affect game balance: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/3811455085
I'd like to point out that part of the fun of Diablo 2 was the severe unforgiving nature of the game. Yeah, if you messed up your talents, you can be completely screwed for ultra high level online play above level 90. But for the people who wanted to put that much time not the game, having to put so much time into research and perfecting character builds was rewarding precisely because it was so difficult.
What you've missed is that during a singleplayer normal difficulty run through the game, pretty much every talent has its uses, and you can spec however you like and still finish fine.
My only problem with unruned skills being unilaterally less powerful than the runed versions is that different runes have different graphical variations, sometimes extreme variations, for example the demon hunter companion is a different animal for every rune and unruned.
But that's really a super minor gripe, and gameplay wise, the system as it is, is probably better.
Great post. As a rule, I'm for removing any mechanic that requires the player to sacrifice real world time (not the word "sacrifice," not "exchange"), and skill points do just that.
I'd say the second most tedious RPG trope--that, thankfully, is becoming less and less common--is elemental damage/resistance. Elements absolutely plagued Diablo 2. How is it interesting to put on special armor to resist a particular element that's common in an area, or to use a certain skill because an enemy is weak to it? It's the mental equivalent of fitting a square peg into a square hole, and necessitates tedious inventory management.
How is it interesting to put on special armor to resist a particular element that's common in an area, or to use a certain skill because an enemy is weak to it?
I've already used Tales of Destiny PS2 as an example in these comments, that shows a way. (btw, it would be interesting to see a Sirlinized version of that game as well)
The key thing there is that you do not have the same skill with different elemental flavors, like a fireball/iceball/lightningball trinity or something, but instead you have skills that work completely differently. In fact, with this being a party-based RPG, they're usually on different characters! The end result is that the elemental resistances/weaknesses determine your party/skill/equip composition, which determines your strategy. It's not unlike varying matchups in fighting games invalidating some of your options, having you alter your game plan accordingly.
@ pkt-zer0 (sorry, not seeing a proper reply button)
I completely agree. I think, for example, having lighting "chain" through enemies while ice slows and fire provides an explosive area effect can be perfectly interesting and functional. But when resistance is simply a question of resisting flavors of damage, it becomes tedious to: A, constantly change equipment to cope with different situations (what D3's Valor system seeks to remedy), and B, tends to turn what should be an interesting gameplay element (say, arranging a party formation to avoid area attacks) into something passive/uninteresting (resisting fire because you're wearing the correct armor).
Of course resistances can be used to interesting effect, like what you're saying. The tricky part (for the developer) is ensuring that every enemy and player has multiple options, which frankly in most RPGs they don't. In a typical JRPG, some enemies literally can't hurt the player and are highly vulnerable to player attacks, rendering those encounters pointless. As a general rule, I feel any player ability should define the ways he can approach a situation, not give the player a free pass through that situation (or just make it easier), which is what straight-up resistances tend to do.
not to distract from the discussion, but I think the article has a typo or something, because when i played the open beta the ability switch cooldown seemed more like 15 seconds than 3, and 3 seconds wouldn't really be much of a problem anyway. (even with 15? seconds i switched skills during the boss fight with one or two of the classes.)
It was 15 seconds in early beta, 5 seconds in late beta. If you want to switch skills in combat, you are certainly welcome to do that, but the interface is not designed to encourage that, and in endgame play you will lose your Nephalem Valor buff.
The one exception to the 5 second switch is with skills on cooldown, you're not allowed to switch out skills that are currently cooling down, since this would encourage some pretty degenerate behavior. You can't, for instance, use the Wizard massive self-buff Archon (120s cooldown), and then swap in another skill in its place while it's cooling down, that would defeat the very purpose of high-power, long cooldown skills.
Hey I know I'm late to the party but there is something I wanted to mention. recently, I've been playing the MMO TERA. This is a game that has been out in korea for at least a year. They did away with talent trees with this game and instead have a thing called glyph points. You buy Glyphs which are exactly like runes. Each glyph costs a certain ammount of glyph points and you have a glyph point total that increases as you level. The system reminded me of this. I'm not really posting to say hey someone else did it first because I'm sure there are games that did this even longer ago. I just wanted to point out a similarity I noticed by circumstance.
The idea of thoughtful, interesting skill restrictions is good but the way they designed the skill system was with 3 classifications of abilities per class. While I appreciate their attempt to classify them into more gameplay related categories, it really doesn't work and they didn't do a particularly good job with every class. Furthermore, the introduction of Elective Mode and the current skill UI created more confusion and made for a less elegant UI.
First off, "Elective Mode" is not descriptive at all and is buried in the options instead of being a clearly visible option in the skill UI. It was interesting to follow the beta forums and see the transition from no confusion about the UI to a lot of posts complaining that they couldn't choose whatever skills they wanted to. People have a hard time finding the option and many people who do see it simply skip over it (I know two gamers who have been playing for 20+ years who did so). It should be renamed to something along the lines of "Advanced Skill Selection".
As for the UI itself, it went from a clean, compact, space efficient interface to filling up the entire screen and only allowing the player to look at a handful of skills at a time and a lot of dead screen space. Furthermore it can take up to five clicks just to find the skill page with the skill you are looking for. One thing that it did improve on was not having a seperate page for runes which replaced the skills page. All of the runes for the skill selected and a few skills are visible at a time in the current UI.
The skill classifications which try to define the purpose of a skill is good, unfortunately a combination of runes and a poor job actually classifying skills makes the classifications commonly wrong and sometimes confusing. For example the Defense category for the Barbarian has one skill which is strictly defensive. A Mobility category would have made a lot more sense (Sprint, Leap, Furious Charge). Considering how late these classifications were introduced into the system, it was clear that it was a good idea that came too late. Had they kept the skill limitations along with the classifications that they were inspired by from D&D4E, they probably could have pulled it off. That said, I'm happy with the skills themselves and how the system plays.
That all said, I'm with you that Diablo 3 is leaps and bounds better designed than Diablo 2. I was really excited when I first read that skill trees were being replaced with the current system and really excited when runes were changed from items to being, for lack of a better term, skills.
Still, there is one thing that concerns me with Diablo 3 and that is the community managers', on the behalf of Blizzard, repeated statements of contentment with unbalanced design elements. Here's one talking about how they're okay with players finding and exploiting flaws that break the mechanics of the game. Furthermore Bashiok, the community manager in question, presents the false dichotomy between balance and variety (which may show his lack of understanding more than Blizzard's).
PvP is also worrying as they clearly haven't read your articles or book about playing to win. Here's Bashiok again talking about how it's a "for fun system" and that they aren't concerned about balancing it. Anyone being realistic knows that it will be competitive and I agree that it shouldn't be focused on until PvE is all sorted out. Still, the suggestion that it's "unreasonable" to balance two games is laughable given WoW and the income stream from the real-money auction house. I think it might happen anyway a few years down the road. I do appreciate that it sounds like they will be using a matchmaking system based on StarCraft II's, something I originally worried they weren't doing.
Thanks for the article, it was a good read as always!
UncannyGarlic, my understanding is not that they don't understand the concept of competition, but that they're saying, PvP is going to be imbalanced and they're not going to make changes to fix that. Sounds good to me, because I never cared about PvP in diablo, but I suspect it won't be long after a PvP mode is added that they go back on that conviction and try to balance it. I just can't imagine Blizzard leaving an official gameplay mode untweaked for very long.