http://diablo.incgamers.com/blog/com...d-skill-trees/
There are only 30 skills now listed, down from 57 at last year's blizzcon. Yes, 57. I counted. I was surprised that there were only 30 now, since I hardly scratched the surface of testing with the one wizard I played, while I felt like I'd done everything available with the barb and wd. the wiz just has so many active spells at a low level (not to mention higher up) that there seem like more. I didn't even get to try at least 4 or 5 I would have liked to.
And that doesn't include the uber chobo tier 4 spells that I could maybe have tried 1 of. (Had to get to level 15, which was just possible if you cleared out about 90% of the entire huge demo area.) hydra, disintegrate, slow time, and ray of frost sitting on that row. I'd have gone with hydra, but ray of frost = me curious too. would that I'd had another 3 hours of play time, to get 2 wizards to level 15! *sigh*
If anyone gets all curious and wants to compile a listing of the skills from last year vs. this year, and isolates the 27+ missing, it would be an interesting list. In my quick glance I noticed that meteor storm was gone. I'm assuming at least 8 or 10 were basically made redundant when they combined the 3 trees into 1 and eliminated skills that did the same thing in 2 diff trees. But there must be a good dozen that sounded like viable, real skills, that are now gone, or at least not listed?|||Fantastic job, Flux. Just wanted to point out Conjuring tree says Storm tree.
Also, Arcane Torrent IS the new Meteor when I try to make sense of it. I just hope its not purple meteors though ...
As for old skills, here is what I think of them:
Improved Magic Missile --> +X% magic missile damage and 1 extra missile per point
Arcane Power --> +X% damage to arcane spells
Empowered Magic --> +X% effect of willpower on damage.
Damage from spells will be increased through other ways? From item affixes, runes, and perhaps a stronger base bonus from willpower itself? All guesses at this point in time. Runes will probably also effect other parts of a spell, such as number of missiles, speed, critical damage etc
Lightning Speed, Spell Speed --> Basically faster cast rate.
I guess there is a lot of items granting that ability (back to FCR / FHR / FBR / IAS / FRW breakpoints from D2, I hope not, the game seems to be going back to D2 a lot in some areas!) Also I'm guessing and hoping even Agility (the new Dexterity) grants this in small increments.
Power Armor --> Increased storm armor damage
I guess that is now handled by more points into skill itself + runes
Static Charge --> % damage taken to mana
Efficient Magics --> -X% mana cost
Other alternative skills for mana recovery exist now
Static Residue --> Targets discharge X lightning damage / sec to nearby enemies, for X seconds
Could be once again a rune effect on Charged Bolt or Electrocute.
Improved Charged Bolt --> +1 Charged Bolt per point
Runes ...
Epic Storms --> Increase size of Blizzard + number of energy twisters
Once again, I strongly believe more of a skill rune effect. Interesting though, how much bigger should a Blizzard get, is it not that powerful? Or is it that small to begin with?
Thunderstruck --> +X% critical hit chance with lightning spells
Deep Freeze --> +5% critical chance (or was it damage?) with cold spells
Same effect for individual damage types. Now unified under Mighty Impact in Tier 5 of Conjuring tree --> Increases critical hit damage by 10%. I assume it effects all skills and damage types.
Deep Freeze seems to be replaced by Bonechilling Cold now, similar name 'style' (both mean frozen to the core, isn't that cool, but it should have stayed Deep Freeze!) and only slightly different execution (frozen targets take extra damage, in effect a kind of critical)
Penetrating Spells
Passive enemy resist piercing. Maybe we can now get it from item affixes or new socketables? We might not need a lot of this, for all we know the damage from spells will be competent enough and immunes or high resist enemies might not be so 'impossible' to handle this time around. I dont think this will be like in D2 LOD, where if you focus on one element you are doomed in most places and if you focus on two elements then you must make sure both those elements have a high rate of damage, or else both are useless. We will have to wait and see, however wizard seems to be competent with ice, lightning, arcane, tornadoes (physical?) and even melee, to a point!! Before she even had poison with Acid Cloud. WOW!
Arcane Armor
This gave an overall bonus in X% to armor rating when using the other Armor spells. I saw it kind of useless in that it might force some wizards to invest too heavily in something that might ultimately still not be that useful, endgame wise. Wizards are not about tanking, after all.
Or perhaps, they had various useful melee wizard builds in mind? They also seem to have removed Weapon mastery, Damage Resistance, Magical Impact, all related to melee weaponry or combat. It would have been interesting to see what direction that idea was taking ...
EDIT: Seems it has been renamed to Empowered Armor
Empowered Armor
Active Skill
Rank::
Requires: 1 point(s) in Ice Armor
Description:: Increases your armor by 5%.
Its an active skill now, not a passive skill which works on other active Armor skills. Will the armor / defense increase be worth spending points here>?
Arcane Speed
Reduce cooldown by 5% (level 1). Maybe the devs felt cooldown was necessary, and reductions this skill would have brought would have been imbalancing towards gameplay. And how would have skill runes affected this?
Arcane distortion --> Passive chance of slowing damaged enemies by 35% for 3 sec
Kind of useless as makes the chilling and freezing effects of cold damage seem useless and 'not unique'. The devs probably asked themselves, Why SHOULD arcane damage slow enemies? Cold damage and its criticals are enough. Lets find a way to increase cold critical chances and damage instead...
Runic Might --> Increase effects of all runes
Always though it would have been removed. Increase what effect exactly? And how, percentage or integer or length? By how much?
Mana Burst --> +25% spel damage cast from full mana
A very interesting concept which has been removed. Maybe D3 is really that more fast paced as its being toted to be by the devs themselves, and the wizard will be constantly spamming spells and thus wasting mana, and that chance to cast from full mana will only happen once every so often in the beginning of a fresh battle. On top of that, is that extra 25% really worthed, furthermore when used so sparingly? I think the devs said No, and Scratch That!
Mana Recovery --> Increase chance to drop mana globes returning 25% of max mana
No more mana globes!
Greater Mana --> Passive +X% to max mana
Renamed to Expanded Mind
Acid Cloud
Belongs to the Witchdoctor, now, which makes sense. It was very out of place on the Wizard.
Weapon Mastery --> +15 physical damage done by weapons
Never made sense of this. Did Blizzard really want to expand on melee sorcs from D2 so much? Either way, it was useful in conjunction with a high damage weapon and points in Magical Impact. But not for melee, and would my Wizard wear a Thunder Maul just to get that extra spell damage from this skill + its Magical Impact synergy, when I could get that elsewhere??
Magical Impact --> Increase all spell damage by 15% of weapon damage
Interesting mastery, see above.
Slowing Strikes
-X% to attack and movement speed of enemies hit by melee attacks, spectral blade, and magic weapon. More melee based ideas and passives to make them more useful. All scratched.
Armor Piercing
Conjured + physical damage decreases enemy armor. More melee oriented passive effects.
Damage Resistance
+% resists and +% armor. As far as resists go, both this skill and Barbarian's natural resistance have been removed. It is back to item bonuses for resistances, or maybe small increments from Vitality, who knows? As far as armor is concerned, the majority of melee oriented skills for the wizard have been removed.
Temporal Armor
Stops all damage from an attack every 6 seconds, lasts for 12 attacks. Why every 6 seconds, and do you really mean ONE attack, not all attacks hitting you at that point? Still seems like a useless and trivial skill.
Conjured Armor --> Magical armor giving 2% block?
Again, why should a Wizard be in the heat of combat worrying about block and defense?
Conjured Power --> +1% spell damage for every 10 points of vitality
Interesting, I wonder why it has been removed. Could be the low percentage, 10% for 100 points, and staves can give 20% easily. Or could be Wizard wont be so Vitality heavy from auo stats. Or there are other better ways to improve spell damage which give greater % bonuses.
Conjured health, conjured duration, duplicate conjuring
All Increase health or number or duration of conjured mirror images and hydras. Conjured duration also gave an extra second to Stone Skin and Acid Cloud.
All of these effects can be granted easily through skill runes, IMO.
Improved Spectral Blade
+14% spectral blade damage.
This could mean that Spectral Blade will have high enough damage? We dont know if Spectral Blade's physical damage is enhanced by strength or the base weapon, or other bonuses. Its base damage from the description of the skill trees seems very weak, though. I for one love the skill and its animation and would hate for it to be one of those skills which are completely useless in Hell difficulty. Now that the skills have been narrowed down to 30+ and the devs promised us that wont be the case, I am assuming this passive bonus is not necessary anymore, and Spectral Blade can be a powerful viable skill in many other ways.|||YES! Awesome, thanks for posting this man.
Ok, so to get this right, you're saying that there are 27 missing skills? I can deal with that, but they better put up some of the old ones in there.
Is there any info on whether they just didn't list the skills, or they made them completely redundant? If that's the case that's really too bad, especially if spells like meteor storm are missing...that was one cool spell.|||Ok, I get it now, the skills were made redundant. No matter though, there were 30 skills in DII, so having 30 in DIII certainly won't decrease gameplay experience.|||ancalagon good post there thanks. When you check the history so to speak you can really see the development going on - pruning away the unnecessary . I suspect a lot of those passives are actually transforming into rune concepts with will then be spread around for example a rune that lowers cool-down|||Great comparison. we'll have to get some kind of wiki article to organize and formalize the changes and comparisons.
Note that there are like 35 skills for the WD and Barb at this point, and only 30 for the Wiz. It's just that the wiz has very few passives or defensive skills, so there seem like more since so many of them have to be actively used to see their effect.
I'm fairly confident that we'll see more wizard passives added in, whether they have to lower the damage of the actives, or they increase monster resistances, or something. As it is the wizard defies their "6-8 active skills on the hotkeys" design concept, since I had that many at level 12. True, nothing had more than 1 or 2 points in it, and I was experimenting widely, but the other chars seem to be built so that at least half your skills are passives, allowing you to use 10 or 12 at a high level, while only 5 or 6 of those are on the hotkeys for constant use.|||Quote:
Great comparison. we'll have to get some kind of wiki article to organize and formalize the changes and comparisons.
Note that there are like 35 skills for the WD and Barb at this point, and only 30 for the Wiz. It's just that the wiz has very few passives or defensive skills, so there seem like more since so many of them have to be actively used to see their effect.
I'm fairly confident that we'll see more wizard passives added in, whether they have to lower the damage of the actives, or they increase monster resistances, or something. As it is the wizard defies their "6-8 active skills on the hotkeys" design concept, since I had that many at level 12. True, nothing had more than 1 or 2 points in it, and I was experimenting widely, but the other chars seem to be built so that at least half your skills are passives, allowing you to use 10 or 12 at a high level, while only 5 or 6 of those are on the hotkeys for constant use.
Yeah I noticed that too! Way too many actives for the Wiz. Also I recall some skill tree not listing tier 6? Yeah the conjuring tree
PS: You got my PM flux? I can organize it much better, maybe add some more detail or make it more concise, whichever you prefer.|||Quote:
Ok, I get it now, the skills were made redundant. No matter though, there were 30 skills in DII, so having 30 in DIII certainly won't decrease gameplay experience.
But only 23 of them are active. I really am hoping there will be more but since there hasn't been any actives added since last year(Explosive Blast is probably the skill showed off in the wizard videos that we never had a name for) it isn't looking good. And I don't intend to make one but a lot of those dropped passives were great for melee wizard builds.|||Quote:
But only 23 of them are active. I really am hoping there will be more but since there hasn't been any actives added since last year(Explosive Blast is probably the skill showed off in the wizard videos that we never had a name for) it isn't looking good. And I don't intend to make one but a lot of those dropped passives were great for melee wizard builds.
You are hoping there will be more actives, passives, or overall skills?
They can only increase an extra of 5 skills to be in line with the Barb or WD. Unless they plan to add a few to those, I doubt it though, the skill tree seems solid this year for all builds.
As for a melee wizard build you are right, they dropped a lot of those passive ideas for it, but maybe the devs felt that there was no way they could make a melee wizard build really viable. I could stand to be corrected though, we still have Magic Weapon and Spectral Blade.|||Quote:
You are hoping there will be more actives, passives, or overall skills?
They can only increase an extra of 5 skills to be in line with the Barb or WD. Unless they plan to add a few to those, I doubt it though, the skill tree seems solid this year for all builds.
As for a melee wizard build you are right, they dropped a lot of those passive ideas for it, but maybe the devs felt that there was no way they could make a melee wizard build really viable. I could stand to be corrected though, we still have Magic Weapon and Spectral Blade.
Both, I think all the classes need some more actives. Especially the Barb, that guy is going to be boring to play if he doesn't get a few more. And then the wizard needs more passives too. I'm thinking 40 skills for each class, or 42 to divide equally among the 3 trees.
I thought last years trees were great(not counting WD of course, and after getting rid of improved mm/cb/sp anyway) except they needed about 3-4 more active skills per class, disappointed there weren't a few new ones this year. The trees also just look so empty right now.
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