Diablo 3 Characters and Skills

[SimbaTheLion]

Blizzard have revealed to us that the only character class likely to return in Diablo 3 is the barbarian. This could well cause problems; statistics on popular sites show that the sorceress was at least as popular as the barbarian. Hopefully Blizzard will take this into account and there will be a very similar character type in Diablo 3. I really enjoyed playing with the sorceress; she was very adaptable and could do massive damage with attacks like blizzard. The skill tree wasn’t so specialised either that she was forced to solely practise one type of magic; meteorb sorceresses were really effective too.

Do you think Blizzard will pick up on the popularity of the sorceress and release an analogous character in Diablo 3? They have announced that they are releasing a wizard character, but I wonder just how similar he (or indeed she now that we can choose our gender!) will be to the sorceress. I hope we see some striking similarities, but maybe some differences too – the amount of mana potions (or, as a substitute, skill points in warmth) required for a cold sorceress to function efficiently early on was unfortunately very large. This along with the tiny inventory space resulted in many, many trips to town that could otherwise have been avoided.

Here’s a thought: In some MMORPGs I’ve played, characters have been able to sit and lie down to recover HP, mana and stamina. This would be a nice feature in Diablo 3; if you are in a safe enough area with no monsters close by, and you need to recharge your mana or health a bit quicker than you might usually get the opportunity to, you could do so without having to use potions.

I wonder how different the barbarian’s skill tree will be in Diablo 3 from Diablo 2. Come to think of it, there might not even be the same sort of skill tree system in Diablo 3. One other possibility is that Blizzard will allow us to ‘buy’ skills from a certain trader; perhaps for gold, or perhaps in exchange for something similar to skill points. Maybe the first of these is unlikely since any player with rich friends could buy better skills earlier on. Blizzard could remedy this by also requiring that you need a certain level before being able to use certain skills. Blizzard could perhaps introduce a skill/ability tome that we could use by dragging and dropping skills into it. It would be a nice addition too if we were able to remove skills and spells from the spell book and sell them for gold. To feed this, it could be made so that some of the monsters in the game drop different types of skills, giving an alternative to buying them.

The other character class that Blizzard have officially mentioned for Diablo 3 is the witch doctor. Perhaps it would be too much to assume he will be directly linked to the necromancer, but that is certainly a possibility. Raising the dead to fight alongside you was a really interesting feature of Diablo 2, one I hope they repeat in Diablo 3. A very annoying problem with this though was that you simply could not walk in the same space as your minions. This led to silly situations such as when you teleported to the Arcane Sanctuary with several followers, they would get in your way and you wouldn’t be able to get down the steps leading into the main part of the Sanctuary. Very frustrating indeed; hopefully in Diablo 3 we will see a system where the narrow parts of the map cannot be blocked in this way. Several other MMORPGs I have played simply let the characters walk through each other. A tad less realistic I suppose, but at least the game doesn’t become unplayable at points.

How many character classes do you think there will be in Diablo 3? Which other ones would you personally like to see? Do you think there will be any completely new and fresh classes, seemingly unrelated to any of the ones in Diablo 2?

I think it would be great to see a healer type for use in multiplayer games. It becomes impractical carrying dozens of potions around, even with a great belt, so being able to heal friends or have a friend heal you would be great. I don’t think it’s necessary to have a character class like an amazon; these seemed to be very unpopular in Diablo 2.

Returning briefly to the idea of skills being ‘dropped’ by enemies, perhaps there could be skills that more than one type of character would be able to use (in addition to of course some skills that were solely suitable for one character class). Skills being dropped in this fashion would encourage teamwork and camaraderie in multiplayer games, and in single player games, unsuitable skills could simply be sold in town, or perhaps even given to a mercenary character. Or even as I mentioned in a previous post on this forum, there could be a ‘universal bank’ available for use by all characters you own. Hence there would not even be a need to sell the excess skills; you could simply transfer them.