Hello.

Did the developers of D2 design the bowzon? The hammerdin? The boner? (bone necro)

To the best of my knowledge: No, they did not. The player base did and it was an incredibly fun journey.

Did the developers of D2 design ANY ]builds? Did they even design builds? I do not know for sure but it would appear to me all they did was balance the skills to the best of their knowledge and released the game. I could be wrong. But if I'm right: Holy damn! Those were some awesome devs. They created a vast amount of customization and let the player PLAY the game, and then balanced it with patches etc.

In a word: emergent

Furthermore...

Are the developers of D3 designing builds? Three for the monk. Three for the wizard. Three for the barb etc. One for each skill tree? I don't know for sure.

But to the best of my knowledge: Yes. They are.


THE BOTTOM LINE:

Are the devs designing you into a corner? Are they cutting emergence and player experimentation for the sake of balance? Are they killing our choice? Giving us the illusion that we are the ones making the ultimate build when they rigged it from the get go?

More importantly: which do you feel is preferable? Making choices for yourself and possibly failing miserably and breaking your character? Or being forced to follow the designer's path so long as you're strong in the end and get a couple switches to customize your characters skills?

Which do you prefer?

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Q u o t e:
Are the developers of D3 designing builds? Three for the monk. Three for the wizard. Three for the barb etc. One for each skill tree?

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There are no skill trees any more. Skills are still tiered by when you can buy them (essentially a level requirement) but there aren't any trees, it's one big pool.

Before this game even reaches a beta state there will be hundreds of people playing it internally, and most likely there will be builds that are developed during that time. But the game is specifically being designed in a way that skill progression is as much of a choice as possible. There will always be builds determined to be 'the best' as long as there are choices and options. Making every skill and every pathway perfectly equal would mean watering down skills, making bland options, and overall homogenizing the classes and skill abilities. So it's a trick of balancing unique and interesting and fun skills while also ensuring that no matter which ones you pick you're not totally gimped.

I also want to point out that skill runes can have a fairly dramatic impact on how skills function (and even look) so builds are further compounded not just by the skills you choose, and itemization and other stats that improve those skills, but skill runes that can potentially change their very behavior. And those changes can range from small things like adding a chance to stun, to very extreme things like causing an AoE knockback, and any creatures knocked back repeat that AoE knockback from where they land, and so on and so forth. So there's quite a bit of room for experimentation if not build potential within all of that.

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Q u o t e:
Monsters also play a role in the way builds are designed. Resistances, skills like Iron Maiden, teleport, etc all created some personal preference and specialization of characters beyond just oh my character does more damage to say Duriel. Not every spell needs to work the same on every monster, and not every monster needs to stand still and wail on the melee ignoring the casters. Interesting fight mechanics make for interesting builds.

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Very good point Bobbo.

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Q u o t e:
A few thoughts regarding this post, in no particular order:

1) Regarding Skill Runes - Have the developers implemented any restrictions regarding possible rune/skill combinations? In other words, are there certain skills that you CAN'T put a Multi-Strike rune into? I realize that the current state of this system is iterative, as are all/most of the systems, but I'd be interested to see what the devs have tried.

I think a rule like this would contribute to the "cornered builds" issue, since a player may really enjoy a particular skill but then realize they can't modify it the way they want to - "What?! Whirlwind is already so powerful that I can't put a Power Rune in it!! I protest!"

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This is tough to answer because skill runes have changed a bit and we haven't really given any information out about them (nor intend to right now). I will say that skill runes are not always specific to the types of bonuses they provide. So there's no such thing as a multistrike rune, but that type of effect from a skill rune is still possible if the rune/skill combo means it is.

Sorry to be so cryptic.

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Q u o t e:
1a) Secondary to Runes - do their functions have to be defined programmatically or can the engine make any sort of "decision" regarding what will happen? I liken my question to something I saw in an interview for (I think) Crysis, where the devs defined the basic rules for say, physics interactions, and then were stunned when they saw the possible chain reactions. Like mentioned above, this is an issue of emergence versus scripting. Now that I think about it, I guess these would have to be statically defined possibilities due to the animations involved.

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They are fully designed and balanced for every rune, for every skill. And again, there's no set effect for any one rune.

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Q u o t e:
2) Regarding the "cornered builds" resultant from synergies - keep in mind that synergies were also an attempt to reduce skill point hoarding, and they boosted the usefulness of lower level skills.

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I will keep that in mind!

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Q u o t e:
3)

I agree with this statement, but there are examples we've seen already, whether or not the designers planned for it. For example, in D2, a whirlwind barbarian only has a few options if he gets Iron Maidened:

1) Whirlwind anyway and die (counterproductive),
2) Run away until it wears off (time consuming, just get recursed anyway),
3) Switch to a low-damage, high-crushing-blow weapon (requires extra gear), or
4) Put a point into Berserk to deal magic damage.

That last option is the one we're interested in - sure, all it takes is 1 skill point in Berserk to be moderately effective in the given situation, but is the player effectively handicapped if they choose NOT to purchase this skill? And suppose they are a Double-swing or Frenzy barb - that would require 4 skill points to unlock the "necessary" skill. I'm not siding one way or the other, but the issue is on the table.

I fully realize that the above example is modeled after NOT-Diablo 3, but it's an illustration, not a prediction. And there will always be popular builds, I suppose, but I guess that's the developer's (hard) job of balancing skills to the point Bashiok mentioned -

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I'd say it's really too early to say what all creature abilities are and the give and take between them and player skills will be. But in general we don't want stories where a character is unable to deal with a situation because of the build they chose. There could be exceptions if someone really wanted to limit themselves in dramatic ways, I suppose.

Resistances and immunities can be interesting in creating situational awareness. But ideally that's simply an issue to overcome by thinking about the situation and not one that stops someone dead in their tracks because they chose a specific build. But again, we really can't know right now what those situations could be or how they could be resolved. We have a general outlook on not screwing over the player though, so hopefully that's comforting. :)

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Q u o t e:
It stands to reason that the passives have been cut down a bit?

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If it stands to Reason, then who is Reason to cut it down? And does he have the upper body strength.

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Q u o t e:
There'd be a crapton more drops that way, if each individual skill got its own rune instead of a "generic" rune. Good way to foster trade.

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That would be a lot of runes... yeah...

Let's say hypothetically that every class has around 20 skills, and let's say hypothetically that there are 5 types of runes even before separating those out into the varying levels of rarity/power. That's 500 runes. I don't know man, I think that's probably an unmanageable amount.

It's interesting though, and pretty much the system that WoW uses for Glyphs (clearly a rip-off of Diablo III skill runes!) They get around those number issues by only have a single glyph for any one skill, and also not every skill has a Glyph.

Meanwhile all of our skills can have runes attached, and not just one type of rune, but many.

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Q u o t e:

Quoted for truth!

Bashiok, I still hope you guys are able to go back to the "themed" runes (multi-strike, power, lethality, etc). I understand the difficulty of making all skills altered based on a template, but it would be so much more polished.

*crosses fingers*

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Runes still have general themes.