Here's a Trait example for the Barbarian called Inner Rage. This highlights something really important about Traits, they are not universal to all classes. Every class gets Traits that are unique to them, there are some that carry over that make sense but for the most part they are very unique to the each class. We want to sell the idea that the Barbarian, is not only an angry dude, you probably have figured that out already but he actually gets power through his rage.<br><br> [[Image:Prismatic cloak.png|right|thumb|150px|Wizard's Prismatic Cloak]]For the Wizard, a lot of the Traits take on a more mystical bent, we want to make sure we sell the idea that even when the Wizard's not casting magic missiles or summoning up tornados that there's something just inherently magic about her. Here we have a Trait called Prismatic Cloak that essentially makes all of her armour spells more powerful and it's the idea that she's just focused on this one ability such that's she's amped them up and, again, we put some player text that sells the idea of if you choose to be this kind of Wizard this is who you are.<br><br> Well, why did we decide to do this system. There's a bunch of reasons. The main one is character customisation and those of you who know and love the original Diablo and Diablo 2 know that character customisation is a huge part of the game and if you're new to Diablo that's what it's all about so that was a big focus for us. We used to have a system in Diablo 2 where you could spend attribute points on all your core attributes and this system was much loved as a customisation tool but in actuality when we looked at it most of the builds took the exact same points in the exact same areas even across the classes and so we didn't feel like it was a good customisation system. Traits is really to specifically address the removal of attribute point spending.<br><br> [[Image:Traits points.png|left|thumb|150px|Trait Points]]As I mentioned before, you want a really strong Barbarian, somebody who hits really hard and is really tough. There's Traits for that. You can take Legendary Might which increases your strength, you can take Iron Skin which gives you more actual armour but let's say you want a Berserker Barbarian, you care more about attack rate, hitting the enemy before they can hit you back well there are Traits that can increase your attack rate, increase the power of debuffs on enemies. More variety equals more builds. Every class has now roughly 30 Traits and those Traits you can spend 1 to 5 points in them, that adds up to roughly right now 90 points per character. When you consider you can only get about 29 or 30 Trait Points it's a lot of customisation. Even if we look at this and decide it's too many Traits we'll just reduce the point spending in it because we want to keep the customisation really high.<br><br> One of the last reasons we really wanted to do this was it was always a bad decision to make in the previous skill trees where you knew that a passive skill like "if I take this it gives me more armour", that's a good skill and mathematically it makes sense but maths kind of sucks. If Diablo is the active skill then this guy's passive. I want to spend points in Whirlwind, I don't want to spend points in more armour so by separating the passive skills from the move active active skills which now completely take up the skill system we get a much better decision point.<br><br> [[Image:To do list.png|left|thumb|150px|Trait To Do List]]So the last thing is making numbers awesome. How do you make maths cool. We tried to set it on fire and put skulls behind it, that makes it pretty cool but it wasn't really enough. A lot of the design behind the Trait system is if we're going to have you take a passive Trait I don't want it to be like oh if you if you take this Trait you get 0.1% more armour. 0.1% doesn't sound very awesome so for us it's like no, it's a big number, it's 25, 500, a 100% more. Whatever number basically sounds cool when we get it. So we're really working on the system to make sure these don't feel like weird numbers that you're not really sure what they do. Diablo customisation is very straight forward. The idea is very simple to grasp and that's important to us.<br><br> We don't consider the system done yet, I love to share our process with you. What's on our 'to do' list? Well the UI's not awesome and it's okay for me to say that because I designed it. It's just a grocery list right now and it's not very fun to use. Gaining them (Trait Points) every other level isn't perfect, it may be fine we may ship with that. Right now it feels a little weird like you almost don't know when you Trait Points are going to show up and that doesn't feel awesome. There's probably too many of them. When I talk about making numbers awesome, if you go and play with the Trait system, because it's fully playable on the floor you're going to say, "Hey, I thought he said the numbers were going to be awesome, this just seems like too much decisions or too low in numbers". The truth is you're probably right. We're looking at that now and saying maybe we didn't quite get it right.<br><br> '''Kevin Martens - Lead Content Designer''' [[Image:Talisman.png|left|thumb|150px|Talisman]]Before we get into the Tailisman I want to talk about Charms from Diablo 2. The charm system, if you are not familiar with it, was a very simple cost benefit thing. There were these objects that would sit in your inventory, they would take up some of your inventory space but they would give you a wide variety of bonuses. This was good, we liked the concept behind the system and we liked the charms themselves but what it led to was people keeping as many charms as they could and keeping a tiny bit of inventory space and we didn't think that was a great choice to have to make. You couldn't resist taking the charms because it augmented your build so well. How do we solve this? The Talisman is a dedicated inventory for your charms and not only that it gets bigger over time, it keeps all of the advantages of the Diablo charm system. You have more charms that you can fit in there so you still have to pick and choose which ones you're going to have to augment your build.<br><br> [[Image:Talisman 2.png|right|thumb|150px|Talisman]]So now that we had a better spot to put your charms we wanted to work on the charms themselves. So how have charms evolved? The bonuses for Charms in Diablo 2 were very varied, incredibly varied, there was almost no kind of bonus they didn't have and in Diablo 3 we are going to have them concentrate on your core attributes so this is very much about customising your build, about augmenting what weaknesses you have and making your strengths better etc. The charms are going to be a core part of your build so they are still very important and there are different tiers of them throughout the game so as you go forward you're going to be playing with your charms a lot. As you choose new skills you'll be choosing different charms to try to make up for the options you chose.