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→Selecting Skills
Early development builds of Diablo III had a handy menu that popped up above the belt interface. It's not known if this menu will still be in the final game, with the other changes to skills (limiting chars to using 7 at once) that have taken place during development.
===No Skill Hoarding===
One of the design points of Diablo III is that players should be using their skill and trait points as soon as they earn them. Skill point hoarding is common in some RPGs, and certainly was in Diablo II, where most skills were not very good or only needed 1 point as a prereq.
In Diablo II, wise players saved most of their skill points for the more powerful skills, most of which were available at Clvl 24 or 30. This meant a fairly slow/boring early game, as characters muddled along with just one point in some lesser skill, but a very fun later game experience when the desired skills became available, and a point could be dumped into it every level, leading to rapidly-increasing character performance.
This is now how the [[D3 Team]] wants things to work in their game, and they're trying to make all of the skills useful. Furthermore, cheap/easy [[respecs]] mean that players have no reason not to spend their skill points as soon as they earn them, since it's not a problem to change things around later, if/when another higher level skill becomes more desirable. Bashiok argued for this philosophy in a forum post in November 2010: <ref>[http://diablo.incgamers.com/blog/comments/skill-tiers-point-hoarding-and-delayed-skill-investment/ Bashiok forum post] - Battle.net, November 3, 2010</ref>
<blue>Respecs aren’t nailed down, but it’s very likely they’ll be introduced through questing and one awarded to you. So that’s one for each difficulty (probably).<br>
I think it’s awesome people are trying to plan out builds already. I think it’s crazy to think about going through half of the game without taking a single skill. I’ll admit I haven’t tried it, but I can’t ... I don’t know, it just doesn’t really seem doable. This isn’t Diablo II. I remember going 20+ levels before spending anything.
If your goal is to level as fast as possible, I don’t see how point hoarding until level 14 would actually grant you any benefit with the ability to respec. Even if it’s not until later. Having [[Spectral Blade]] until you can respec into [[Teleport]] isn’t going to kill it for you. Not having a skill for the first 14 levels, I think, might.
When I have some free time (haha) I’ll try to test it and see how well I do with no skills and no traits. Ugh. Sounds painful. </blue>
==Skill Mechanics==