Diablo III Preview

The Gaming Vault is offering a new preview for Blizzard’s highly anticipated and long awaited third chapter in the Diablo franchise, based on some time with the title’s closed beta, which is pretty evident they enjoyed. Here’s an excerpt:

I was very suspicious when I heard that you neither pick your stats nor what skills to level up, but that it’s instead based on a slot system. The way it works is like this; you unlock a skill once you reach the required level for it (very often in the start), but you only have a certain amount of slots to put them in. You start off with two, and you only ever get six (plus four passive slots).

So instead of removing customizability, like it initially felt like, they have pushed it from selecting where to put points individually, to selecting whole skills that compliment each other. Every time I leveled up and unlocked a new skill, I carefully considered if I should exchange one of my current skills with it, or maybe I should even (respec) and use it with a different set of skills.

This got convoluted pretty quickly, so let me provide an example. When I was trying out the Wizard, I was playing him as a typical long range damage dealer, with Magic Missile, Arcane Orb and Electrocute. However, after a while I switched from a wand to a dagger, and I switched my spells to things like Spectral Blade, Ice Armor, and other skills designed for closer combat.

So I was pleasantly surprised when I realized that while I was doing this, I got the same little joy I get from placing points in the traditional RPG leveling system. I was reading the description and stats carefully, weighing one skill against each other, thinking about which one went well together.