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)
The real problem with talent trees that allow actual choices is that they are immensely more difficult to design properly because you require massively better balancing. In other words, if all tree specs are very close to equal, then it will work, but the more things you have to balance the harder it is to actually balance them properly. This is why talent trees actually remove variety, not add to it, in practice.
That's regardless of whether or not you have instant respec. But it is worth noting that Diablo III's lack of a tree allows for much more variety than an instant respec talent tree does.
Regarding customization: It is true that more customization does not necessarily equal more variety, and ironically can mean less variety if every character/deck has to take the best cards. A good example of this is Vintage magic, where you can play with every card ever printed that doesn't have a silver border (i.e. is not from a joke set). You can have an infinite amount of variety, but how much variety is there actually?
Interestingly there actually IS a lot of deck variety in Vintage, but almost all vintage decks contain several cards which are the same across all Vintage decks - in other words, non-choices like Black Lotus, Mox Sapphire (well, technically not REQUIRED, but virtually all Vintage decks play a little bit of blue, at least enough for...), Ancestral Recall, Brainstorm, ect. While there are some cards which do not overlap as much, and there are lots of cards which are played, ultimately there are probably a few hundred cards which describe the vast majority of most decklists, and many decks ultimately are a bit similar (save Ichorid and its variants, which are practically not like playing magic anyway - which is really awesome, though frightening from a balance standpoint). So even though we have twenty years of cards to pick from, the variety in cards actually played isn't that much larger than in Standard, where only two years of cards can be picked from.
I will note that one bonus of the elective system is that if one of the skills IS overpowered, then it means that you can still pick from the other skills in that particular slot.
Regarding not starting with runes: This is actaully good design for the purpose it has (encouraging exploration) because the first rune you unlock is inherently an upgrade to the skill then. Beyond making your character clearly more powerful, it encourages you to try out new runes more; if the first rune you tried wasn't much of an upgrade, then you'd be less inclined to further experiment with the system, but because the first rune you try is ALWAYS an upgrade, then you have a more positive experience with it.
Regarding magic find/gold find/bonus xp: I tend to agree here, I'd rather have real choices than have to choose between gaining power faster and being powerful.
Regarding PvP balance: Knowing Blizzard, regardless of their protestations, they're likely to do more with it. Possibly with the expansion. Honestly though, Diablo III PvP sounds pretty sucky, much like Diablo II PvP was.
Great analysis - it's refreshing to see this kind of thinking on paper.
I just wanted to give a little shout to the new base stats system (strength => armor, int => resists, dex => universal dodge). Shuffling around their purpose has really made it a good challenge to find a balance on what equipment/gems to socket (I'm now finding myself hunting down ways to incorporate INT into my monk build). Simplifying gems into four main types, and making upgraded gems more accessible, gives the same benefit as assigning base stats with none of the regrettable commitment, and it massively promotes diversity between players. All around great Kool-Aid, and I'm sippin.
ParappaTown: Yeah I agree with you on that. The way those stats work is simple and good.
I'm actually in a rather strange position on this one. Intellectually, I was very much for most of the changes that were being made in D3. I understand why many of the elements of the D2 skill system were not the best.
And yet I feel like I'm finished with D3 after a mere few days of play. I feel no desire to turn the game back on. (For reference, I was playing a Barbarian and reached the beginning of Inferno).
Some of it might just be that some of the skills aren't that interesting, or lack any interplay with other skills - but then again, not that many skills in d3 did that either - some of it might be that the interaction with weapon dps is so standardised between classes. Some of it might be that I have been able to go through every single skill that looked like it might appeal to me very rapidly, and now I am left feeling like there is nothing left to explore.
Even the items themselves somehow lack flavour - even the legendaries I find have clusters of stats identical to those of rares, with no actual unique or legendary elements.
And I feel really sad, and somehow like I must have missed something. Or maybe I'm just looking for something different in the game. I do feel like this article overstates the interest of many of the skills, especially the passive ones, because they do not quite represent the combinatorial explosion of interesting possibilities I was hoping for.
And the worst part is that the game gets so much right. The combat feels meaty, the animations are snappy, the physics is hugely satisfying, the graphics are fit for purpose. I suppose there is just a point where you have to simply say that it might just be a taste thing, and change your mental list of the types of things you enjoy!
Hi, Sirlin. :]
Since I'm eagerly anticipating my Collector's Edition of D3 (delayed since I live in Canada and ordered from Amazon.com), I thought I'd stop by and read some more of your articles. It's good to see someone shining positive light on the design choices/principles being practiced with D3's abilities system. :D
Having played D2x to death in high school, I remember actively seeking weird, off-the-wall builds just to be different, such as a Bow Barbarian. Here though, I'm free to try as many things as I want with just one instance of a class now, rather than creating duplicates if I wanted say, a Summoning Necromancer vs. a Poison Necromancer. It really is phenomenal, and elegant, and it's sad that the Blizzard forums are full of people who don't understand, or simply choose not to see that. :/
I'm still wondering about the itemization of the game though, since there's hordes of people complaining that magic (blue) items are stronger than the legendaries (orange) to the point where legendaries shouldn't exist. Everyone wants the stupidly powerful incarnations of Uniques from D2x (itself a misnomer since, what's so unique about an item like Harlequin Crest if EVERYONE uses it?). There's lots of whining about difficulty too, guess it's good that I'm not jumping into the game right away. :T
Thanks again for putting this article out there. ^^
PS: Have you heard of Path of Exile? It's a Diablo clone I remember playing for a bit since many claimed it to be Diablo II's "true" successor, though I've lost interest in it by this point. It has some interesting design aspects, but seems (to me) to be much like how D2x was heavenly for what I call "math whores", the people who will find the empirically right way to play that invalidates all other ways to play. >_>
Dragon: the Diablo3 crafting system (meaning the blacksmith) is not good. Gem crafting is fine. With gems, the very worst gems in the game do more than 0 for you. And you can upgrade and upgrade to do more. That means at every point along the way, it feels useful. The blacksmith is the opposite. In the set of all items he can make, only a tiny, tiny set of the random stats that he might roll will be even potentially maybe useful to you. So almost everything you get out of it is worthless. This encourages you not to participate in the blacksmith system at all.
Path to Exile's crafting system is way better. You can slowly morph items into things that are more and more useful to you. It would be much for fun if Diablo's system worked like that, and many more people would actually use and enjoy it. That said, notice the relation of the actual Diablo3 system with the auction house. In any economic system where people start with a bunch of random stuff that probably doesn't match their personal preferences, the economic solution is lots and lots of TRADE. So I think in this case, Blizzard tried to choose a system that made them the most money via the auction house rather than one that is actually fun or "well designed." And they ended up making a crafting system people kind of hate.
About legendaries being bad, I think this is easily explained. If you get a perfect roll on a legendary compared to a perfect roll on a non-legendary of the same item level, the legendary will be better. This is obviously true because the legendary has more stat slots. If this is the case, you may ask why people say non-legendaries are better. It's also true that a bad roll on a legendary can make for a worse item that a very good roll on a non-legendary. This is almost ok, but not quite. The thing is...you will see like...thousands(?) of blue items before even one legendary. And so will everyone else. So if you want a blue item that is in the top 5% of possible rolls for the stats on it, this is not even hard. But then once in a blue moon a legendary comes along and it happens to be in the bottom half or rolls for its stats and now you have to wait another blue moon.
So the bottom line is that Blizzard may be completely correct in saying that legendaries are better than non-legendaries, but the problem is (I think) that they need to be "more better" to compensate for the rarity because it's just too easy to get awesome-rolled non-legendaries compared to bad-rolled legendaries.
I definitely agree on the auction house front. I should be anticipating every drop - but because every single piece of gear I wear is from the auction house, all my drops turn into mere currency. It is as if every monster simply drops differing quantities of gold. This is another shame - the attraction of finding "ze lewts" has gone from the current version of the game. And i'm not sure how to restore it given their current systems.
Both Gemcrafting and Blacksmithing are massive gold sinks for no reward - the double irony being the opportunity cost of all that gold means forgoing items from the auction house that might have helped you more!
Also David have you had a look at how the builds have actually ended up in Inferno? I think you would be surprised by how undiverse the builds actually were. The game is so statistically hard that it ends up forcing players to pick from the few effective builds and certain (probably broken) skills, because trying to pick a playstyle and sticking to it simply isn't fun in the endgame environment. I think it's a tragic way for such a conceptually cool system to end up.
Building on TinyAngryCrab's post about Inferno:
Inferno sounds like it's simply poorly designed. Enemies have massive HP and do massive damage coupling with CC effects' durations being nerfed hard (something like half the duration) causes melee to be infeasible thus far and makes a lot of the interesting skill effects unusable. The only successful strategy so far has been kiting, which I've never found much fun.
I think what happened there is they sincerely intended Inferno to be way too hard for everyone at first, like they said, but certain builds turned out way more survivable than they intended. So people figured out how to get through Inferno with some very specialized builds, which they just nerfed into the ground. But now people have the expectation that Inferno is doable, and maybe there are still weird specialized builds that can do it. I guess having a super-hard difficulty is kind of at odds with their goal of "viable, not optimal" builds.
Excellent post!
Having now played D3 quite a bit (perhaps more than I should) I agree with Sirlin's analysis 100%. The skills and abilities system in place now is an order of magnitude better than the old D2 system.
Looking back I wonder why they did what they did.
Yet there's still more people playing Diablo 2 today than 99% of games out there. Bad design or nay, perma-specs did form the basis for incredible replayability and I honestly worry for D3's longevity without it.
Butler: the terrible system of forcing you to waste tons of time to respec is not good now and wasn't good then. Diablo2 has merits, but that certainly isn't one of them. Diablo3 has problems, but ability to respec certainly isn't one of them either.
Diablo 3's static leveling is the reason I haven't touched the game in weeks. The design is not at all conducive to multiple playthroughs and especially Hardcore (my favorite thing in Diablo 2).
I was hoping to mix and match skill runes, maybe forgo a rune altogether to put two runes in one skill. Maybe amplify runes in some way. No, all your skills just scale uniformly so you can't be a wizard with superior fire magic or anything like that.
Does Smash Bros. Brawl have an "illusion of choice?" No, I can pick Ganondorf and fight an uphill battle against Metaknight and savor every second of the challenge, just like I can build a Zealadin and fight an uphill battle in Hell and savor every second of the challenge.
The whole "illusion of choice" argument is a defeatist attitude anyway. It's a criticism of the execution of an idea, not its inherent validity and potential awesomeness in capable hands. Designers shouldn't resign themselves to "safe and boring" because in this case it totally killed the longevity of the first game I was legitimately excited for in a long time.
Illusion of choice and "safe and boring design" are not opposites, so I have no idea what you even mean. Both are bad and they basically have no relationship to each other.
I was harping the "illusion of choice" mentality as a catalyst for "safe and boring" design, not forming a dichotomy. I'm saying there's no good reason for a patchable non-competitive RPG to be conservative at the expense of bland leveling, that it's better to have fixable imbalance (D2) than be forever fail-safe to a fault (D3).
I find the system to be artificially constraining. The ability runes are artificial choice. Each ability only has one (and rarely two) viable runes. Additionally a lot of abilities are completely useless on inferno regardless of runes (meteor, etc).
I also dislike the system forcing you kill elite mobs for any kind of decent drop. Killing elites for their drops and a stack of nepalem valor until you get 5 stacks and kill a boss. That's the only way to play... except you can't kill all elite mobs depending on their affix rolls and your class.
So not only is loot random but your chance to have the opportunity to get loot is optional as is the chance to have a chance to get loot.
This is a terrible system that only favors 2 builds per class (usually only differing by one skill) on inferno. That is just downright sad.
Additionally the auction house is now divided. All the good items are on the rmah while nothing decent is on the gold auction house. Why didn't they just make it so you could sell and buy gold with eal money and have all the items in the same gold auction house so that all palyers had access to the same item pool?
Is blizzard just bad at game design? Do they just care about earning some profit on the auction house? I don't know but it isn't a very fun game at endgame or a game that can really hold any intelligent person's attention.
' 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.'
And you're wrong.
They've completely missed the point of the Diablo franchise, and why there are still 100k people on USEast right this very second, 12 years later, and maybe that many on the D3 server, just 2 months later.
Hi Dan, your comment is really not even good enough quality to approve here. "And you're wrong," is really out of place when you're actually the wrong one here, or the one using non-sequitur fallacy at least. You quoted me saying that one part of Diablo3 is excellent, then made the argument that the game as a whole is not great. Even if the game as a whole wasn't great, it wouldn't follow that what I said about that one part of it was bad. Actually, the ability system really is great and really does advance the craft. The specific balance of the abilities, the difficulty tuning of inferno, the endgame, and blah blah blah are neither here nor there when talking about the ability system.
in hindsight this flawed design actually pigeon holes players into fewer builds than having skill trees. clearly the system wasnt tested thouroughly in inferno level as admitted by blizzard by saying that non of their testers finished inferno.