Diablo III Forum Activity

Diablo community manager “Bashiok” discusses synergies, forced leveling, and gender differences in his latest responses on the official Diablo III forums.

On synergies:

Synergies aren’t being planned for nor are they expected.

It’s sort of a funny question, because broken down you’re essentially asking “Are the skill trees in Diablo III going to be boring and require incentive to spend points in skills no one wants?”

Ideally the answer to that is no. 🙂
There are some other things going on too that make sure synergies even less of a necessity. Clear separation of active and passive skills, respecs, … and MORE!

On forced leveling:

Forced leveling? I’ll just have to go along with what other people think that means. If forced leveling means a requirement to move through the game, such as “level 10 is required to move to Act II” etc. then no, there are no current plans to put level requirements on progressing through the game.

As far as I’m aware it hasn’t been mentioned by a Blizzard employee as being potentially included in Diablo III, but I could very well be mistaken.

So this level requirement business is usually discussed as a solution to ‘glitch rushing’ or a way of quickly leveling a character through use of bugs and loopholes. The assumption that these bugs and loopholes will exist in Diablo III in the first place is somewhat of a stretch of logic (maybe not as much as I’d like ;). So, the most obvious and popular solution is a level requirement. And yeah, it could work, but unless you can normalize XP gains you’re probably fairly often going to be simply holding people back for no good reason. They’ve completed the act legitimately, but they’re a single level shy of the requirement. Now they have to go grind for no reason other than to level so they can continue playing the game. It’s not a very graceful solution. No, but there are solutions… nay, improvements! in how progression through the game can be handled. Ones that offer not only regulations on progression, but enhance the game itself.

On gender differences (or lack thereof):

No. There are no gender specific items, skills, advantages or disadvantages. Choosing male or female is simply a choice of aesthetic.