Wizard Skills Removed in Blizzcon 2010

All of the Wizard skills are updated in the wiki, and it's interesting to see which were removed and which added since our last look at the tree.

3 skills were added:

• Diamond Skin


• Meteor


• Familiar

9 skills were removed between 2009 and 2010. Many of these were turned into Wizard Traits.

Conjuring Skills

• Stability Control


• Stone Skin


• Intensify


• Mighty Impact

Arcane Skills

• Expanded Mind


• Arcane Weakness

Storm Skills

• Empowered Armor


• Bonechilling Cold


• Storm Power

Most of the missing are passives, which were turned into traits. A copule of others had to do with getting mana from health orbs, since thsi was pre-instability, which was pre-Arcane Power.

Stone skin evolved into Diamond skin. Meteor Storm was a skill back in 2008, which was gone in 2009, and is now back (sort of) as Meteor. There are 2 other death from above AoE skills; meteor seems to be the "bigger damage, smaller area" option of the family. Which makes Familiar is the only really "new" Wizard skill.

Which shows that the class was really fairly well developed as of last year. Of course they spent all year working on runestone effects and functions, so it's not as if they were sitting idle.



Similar report on the Barbarian's skill changes. His underwent a lot more change, since he had far more passive skills.

http://diablo.incgamers.com/forums/s....php?p=7714991|||Tsk tsk. Meteor Storm became Arcane Torrent. Your encyclopedic knowledge of D3 is faltering!|||We can only conjecture how the development went, in terms of name vs. function. Meteor storm's function went one way, while the name reemerged on a basic repeat of the d2 skill. Just b/c we didn't see Meteor as a skill in 2009 doesn't mean it wasn't in the game concept all along...

They might have decided to they didn't need meteor storm since they had blizzard, and planned to make single hit meteor. and then they realized an inbetween level of DfA spell was needed, and transitioned meteor storm to arcane torrent for that. It'll be interesting to experiment with all of them, when the time comes.

Meteor was devastating in the PvP arena, but very hard to hit with thanks to the long delay, and the cool down was lengthy.|||Perhaps, but that it seems that old explosive blast somewhat fulfilled the function of "the conjuration AoE" skill. I honestly thought that Meteor would comeback as a skill rune of it, but they decided that it had more potential as becoming the damage nova spell and just brought back Meteor on its own. I think Meteor Storm became Arcane Torrent long before that decision, and had enough differences from Blizzard to be justified in co-existing with it.

I wonder how many of the tier 6 AoE will the Wizard's resource be able to handle at once. Stacking all 3 of them at the same time seems a bit brutal.

Christ, I cannot help but comment on the absurd variety of her attacks. It's hard picturing how they are going to balance obvious overlaps such as Arcane Orb, Arcane Torrent, and Energy Twister, but skill runes on top of this? Arcane Torrent seems ideal to wipe out ranged groups, yes, Arcane Orb seems best suited for melee enemies, but how does Twister fit into this? What is its niche? Potentially higher damage but more difficult control?

I hope that in their pursuit of "cool" they won't forget about functionality.