::'''Jay Wilson: '''A little bit of both. We try to anticipate what we think will be good builds. For example, there’s lots of things we put into the wizard, to try to make a battle mage more viable. But sometimes we put in skills that we’re not 100% sure is an awesome skill, but that we think somebody will find an awesome use for. We try to plan things ahead of time, but we’re not foolish enough to believe that the three of us who work on skills can come up with as many possibilities and variations as the millions of players who will take the work we’ve done and have fun building stuff with it. We mostly try to make sure they have the tools to have a lot of freedom and create a lot of cool stuff.
==Development==
[[Image:Barb-berserker-tree.jpg|thumb|150px|Berserker Skill Tree. Oct 2008.]]
The first sighting of skill trees was in the [[BlizzCon 2008]] build where more than 50 skills were shown for the [[Wizard]] and [[Barbarian]] and placed in three individual trees, similar to how the system worked in [[Diablo II]] and [[World of WarCraft]]. Each 5 points spent in a tree opened a new tier to put skill points in. That game design favoured specializing in one tree, and did not have any prerequisites, instead totally based on points spent in each tree.
At that point there were just 4 tiers of skills. Tier 1 was available at level 1, Tier 2 at level 5, then at 10 and 15. There was a fifth tier at level 20, but no skills were displayed in it. The image to the right is from that era.
The [[D3 Team]] mentioned that they were experimenting with allowing certain skills to have higher skill caps, but did not give details such as if it would be [[Clvl]] based, item based, points spent or something completely different.
[[Image:Skill-tree-berserker.jpg|thumb|left|150px|[[Berserker Skill Tree]]. April 2009.]]
This layout had changed a great deal by March 2009, when the next skill tree image was released. You see it to the left. The basic form remains, but the skills are staggered out over more tiers. Also note that the tiers are not labelled; they may no longer proceed at 5 point intervals. It's also possible that tiers will grow longer, with higher level skills being added as development proceeds.
[[Image:Wizard_skill_tree.jpg|thumb|right|150px|Barely discernible [[Wizard]] Skill tree at PAX 2009.]]
[[Bashiok]] elaborated on this in a forum post in May 2009 [http://www.diii.net/blog/comments/diablo-iii-skill-trees-innovative-overhaul/] saying the trees had been unified to one single page that "allows you to spend wherever you like." This overhaul of the skill system merging the skill trees but the group of skills kept their skill tree names.
The skill requirement still opened up in tiers, but opened up to all trees at the same time, enabling a player to pick low level skills in one tree, continuing with medium level skills in another and high level skills in the third.
The general theory of skill trees is to encourage character specialization, but not force [[cookie cutter]] style character builds. The removal of individual skill trees means that every character can now pick from all the possible skills; this is great in theory, since players can all use whatever skills they want, Tier conflicts permitting. On the other hand, if the skills aren't very well balanced, every character will end up using the same few skills, since those are the best, and the cookie cutter-ism on [[Battle.net]] could be insane.
[[Image:Skill-tree-blizzcon09-barb-muldric.jpg|thumb|right|150px|Fan-made representation of how it looked at [[BlizzCon 2009]]. Made by [http://forums.diii.net/showthread.php?t=739038 Muldric].]]
Bashiok defended the design saying it "diversifies the types and amounts of builds available to players," and explaining another advantage is that the [[D3 Team]] "don't have to throw in skills that are important, such as damage mitigation, all over the place."
"Every barbarian is probably going to want [[whirlwind]]. And why not? What this tree style allows for, and one reason we’re pretty keen on it, is that we aren’t saying “You’re a ‘berserker’ barbarian, you can’t have whirlwind”. Instead, you’re a [[barbarian]]!, pick the key skills that define you and your character as you want them to be."
Exactly how the D3 Team pulls this off without making every character use the same "best" skills is something worth monitoring as the game continues its development.
The overhaul did also see the removal of many relatively redundant skills, primarily removing [[passive skill]]s.
The whole skill system is being reworked, and [http://diablo.incgamers.com/blog/comments/skill-trees-gone1/ Blizzard has said] that the skill tree system is being removed completely. [[Bashiok]] mentioned Blizzard is "implementing and will be testing a new system that changes how skills are acquired." (Nov 20, Blizzard’s @Diablo channel at Twitter). Also, on an interview between Diablofans.com and [[Jay Wilson]], the latter explained a bit about how the new skill system might be. Removing the tree-type architecture and moving into a purely skill-based system. How the skill system will exactly work remains unknown for the time being.
::'''Jay Wilson:''' ...We've decided to remove the tree-type architecture and we are moving into a purely skill-based system. This new system is still in the development stages and if it does not work, we still have plenty of options to fall back on. Right now, we're just trying different things and getting a feel for the few ideas in regards to the skill system that we have going on right now. It differs from the World of Warcraft/Diablo II type hierarchical styles and is more of a skill pool/path than a tree per se.'''
==References==