Skill

Skills are what all abilities the character classes in Diablo III have are called. A skill includes regular physical abilities like Cleave or a magical spell like disintegrate. While skills is the official name, players often refer to them as spells, talents, abilities, and similar terms. These are just synonyms, and are frequently interchangeable in use.

Respecs will be available to change skill points after after they're placed, and runestones can be socketed into skills, greatly modifying their forms.

Monsters can also use skills, but often not a Character skill. Primarily caster monsters have skills/spells, but others as well. Monster skills include all their abilities besides their "auto attack".

Barbarian Skill Tree interpretation by Muldric.

Useful skill links:

• Skill runes
• Barbarian skills - Barbarian-specific skill design.
  • Berserker Skill Tree - Berserker skills.
  • Juggernaut Skill Tree - Juggernaut skills.
  • Battlemaster Skill Tree - Battlemaster skills.
  • Barbarian skill archive - Removed Barbarian skills.
• Monk skills - Monk-specific skill design.
  • Skill Tree A - A skills.
  • Skill Tree B - B skills.
  • Skill Tree C - C skills.
• Wizard skills - Wizard-specific skill design.
  • Conjuring Skill Tree - Conjuring skills.
  • Arcane Skill Tree - Arcane skills.
  • Storm Skill Tree - Storm skills.
  • Wizard skill archive - Removed Wizard skills.
• Witch Doctor skills - Witch Doctor-specific skill design.
  • Zombie Skill Tree - Zombie skills.
  • Spirit Skill Tree - Spirit skills.
  • Voodoo Skill Tree - Voodoo skills.
  • Witch Doctor skill archive - Removed Witch Doctor skills.
• Signature skills - Skills that define characters.
• Active skills - Skills where effects are activated by the player.
• Passive skills - Skills where effects are activated automatically, by the computer or by special events.
• Skill Ranks

Known Skills

Monk Skill Tree interpretation by Muldric.

We know a fair number of skills from seeing them in demonstrations, and from taking notes of them at BlizzCon in October 2008 and 2009. More than 30 skills each are known for the Barbarian, Wizard and Witch Doctor, while fewer of the Monk's skills have yet been revealed. Click to the appropriate pages in the links above to learn the names and functions of all known skills.

How Many Skills?

There will be around 25 skills per character in Diablo 3, all active. Passive skills were found in the skill trees in earlier versions of the game but they were removed during 2010 development.

Before the rearranging and removal of passive skills, the team was planning to have about 35 skills per character, as Jay Wilson detailed in an October 2009 interview: [1]

Diii.net: We saw 30-35 skills for the Wizard (30), Barbarian (35), and Witch Doctor (34), at Blizzcon. Can you give us an idea how close to the final skill trees those are?

Jay Wilson: In terms of the number of skills, that’s about right. In terms of the skill tree we’re um... we’re still playing around with the actual layouts of skill trees and the working of the skill system. The skills for the Wizard and Barbarian their skill trees were very solid. We like their skills, though there are a few still missing. Especially for the Wizard, there are skills we didn’t put into her tree that we’re still defining, especially at the high end. The same for the Barbarian; we’ve got a few skills on the way for him. But for the most part, the content of those trees is more or less correct.

The Skill Design Team

Jay Wilson revealed the key skill designer guys on the Daiblo 3 team in an October 2009 interview. [2]

Diii.net: Can you place your heads into the lion’s jaws and name the 3 of you who work on skills?

Jay Wilson: Myself, Wyatt Cheng, and Julian Love, our lead technical artist. Oh actually 4. Chris Haga does a lot of skill work as well.

Skill Mechanics

Witch Doctor Skill Tree interpretation by Muldric.

One major change from Diablo II is that the various snaking lines of skill prerequisites are gone. Skills in Diablo III are arranged in tiers, with few dependency lines between them. This gives characters much more freedom in mixing and matching the skills they wish to use.

In Diablo 3 skills are enabled by spending skill points. In the BlizzCon 2009 build, a character had to place 15 points in various skills before using Tier 4 skills. Which skills you put those points on that tier and below is up to you. This general tier-mechanic has stayed the same since BlizzCon 2008, so will likely carry on to the final game.

Skill Trees

The skill tree format we'll see in Diablo 3 has undergone many design changes, and is still in flux. The form seen at Blizzcon 2009 (represented by images on this page) was thought to be fairly final, but in November 2009 Blizzard let it be known that the UI had been entirely reworked, and was now quite different. No further details have since been revealed.

The first word came on November 21st. Skill trees gone, via two Twitter posts.

• The skill system revision is in full force. Trees begone! I think it might be a winner.
• We’re implementing and will be testing a new system that changes how skills are acquired. That’s all I’ll say.

Wizard Skill Tree interpretation by Muldric.

Much player speculation ensued, some of it was shot down, and a bit more explanation (without details) was offered on the 25th. [3]

Can you say why you guys decided to drop the skill tree? What deficiencies did it have that you felt another system could do better? --by JeffKamo

Focus. --by @Diablo

That is hard, so many games rely on skill trees. My guess would have to be... “skill” items that you find or even create for skills. -by CaptainCasey

Sounds like you’re talking about our skill rune system, which is still very much a part of the game. --by @Diablo

Jay Wilson provided some overview of the concept behind the changes in an interview in late November. [4]

Jay Wilson: 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.

Diablo 2 in Style

One thing we do know about the skill trees in Diablo 3 is that they'll be fairly similar to those of Diablo 2, in terms of how quickly characters acquire new skills to play with. [5]

Diii.net: Another follow up on that issue. People are wondering if the skills will be like Diablo 2 or more like World of Warcraft. Will we see more skills forever, or get the top level at level 30ish?

Jay Wilson: Diablo 2. We’re following the same model. Here essentially our Nightmare and Hell difficulties are an extension of normal difficulty, not a continuation of more content. So normal difficulty ends our core game, and then nightmare and hell are replays of them on higher skills levels. So we are going to allow you to continue and develop your skills into the higher difficulty levels.

Skill Tree Changes During Development

Only Blizzard knows exactly how many versions of the skill tree format they've gone through, but they've alluded to dozens of different major forms, and countless smaller varieties during their development period. At the skill panel during Blizzcon 2008 numerous different skill tree mock-up forms were shown on the powerpoint presentation.

2008 Early Form

2008 Format.

The first skill tree shown to fans was revealed in the Blizzcon demo in late 2008. No official screenshots were released, though it was seen in many photos and videos taken from the event. Only the Barbarian's can be judged, since the Witch Doctor only had 11 skills spread over his three trees. Of the Barbarian's 50+ skills, they were arranged much like Diablo 2's skills, with three distinct skill trees, displayed on tabs in the same interface window. Each row had 3-4 skills, and there were no prerequisite skills linked by columns. To move down a row in the tree, 5 points had to be spent on each row.

The skills were not as discrete as those in Diablo 2, and there was considerable overlap between skills in different trees. It appeared that the D3 team intended players to specialize in one tree per character, and thus included skills with redundant basic functions, such as +damage, +defense, etc.

2009 Evolution

A new style for skill trees was revealed in early 2009, when several screenshots were released along with BlizzCast 8. This was an evolutionary change, and there were still 3 tabs/trees per character, though each tree was more open and a fair number of column-style prerequisite lines had been added.

• Screenshot example.

This style changed entirely by Blizzcon 2009 in August, with the individual skill tree tabs removed. All characters now possessed one big skill tree with all 30+ skills arranged in rows. There were a few column-style prerequisites, but for the most part it was a large skill "menu," with only prerequisites of 5 points per column required to move down to the more powerful skills.

No official images of this were released, but numerous exact recreations were mocked up by talented community artists.

• Barbarian Skills.
• Witch Doctor Skills.
• Wizard Skills.
• Monk Skills.

It's known that the skill trees were largely reworked in late 2009, but no images or further details have yet been revealed.

Skill Caps

Bashiok spoke to this issue in a forum post in May 2009. [6]

Currently we’re envisioning the majority of skills to be capped at 5 points, to begin with. As a form of progression we're planning for players to be able to increase the point caps of skills. More than likely to a maximum of 15. It's a system that’s still under heavy design, but the fact of choosing and increasing key skills beyond their initial cap is important to this new unified tier system.

Until June 2010 this was all we knew, and fans were free to speculate that skill levels would be increased by Clvl requirements, quests/in-game achievements, skill runes, item bonuses, or something else. The speculation ended in June 2010, when Bashiok confirmed that the caps would be tied to difficulty level. [7]

...the cap raises another five every difficulty level? So when you reach hell difficulty the caps would be at 15? No?

This seems the simplest method of doing things, with players able to move up to level 10 skills on Nightmare, and level 15 on Hell. (Plus potential +skill mods from item bonuses.) It might create some interesting strategy as well, with characters wanting to hurry to the next difficulty level in order to unlock their next five skill points. (That was not the case in Diablo 2, where untwinked/unrushed characters could find better gear and score bigger experience doing Baal runs from 30-45 or so, rather than moving up to Nightmare.)

Skill Display

Skill hover, May 2009.

The finer points of the skill hover have changed and evolved during the game's development, and will continue to do so. Expect further changes.

Hovering on a skill produces a visual like the one seen to the right. The name of the skill is displayed, along with the current and maximum points that a character may spend in it. The current function is shown, as is the increases you will enjoy with another point.

One prime difference from Diablo II is the slot for a skill rune that you see below the skill, in the skill tree. Only active skills (as far as is known) have slots for skill runes, and skill runes can be freely socketed and swapped in and out. (Subject to change during further development.) See the skill runes page for more details.

Active and Passive Skills

Diablo III skills are either "active" or "passive." A huge change was made to the skill trees during development in 2010, when all the passive skills were removed from the Diablo III skill trees. Passive skills remain in the game, but they are accessed in some undisclosed way, not through placing skill points into them. More information is promised at Blizzcon 2010. [8] [9]

Earlier in the game, the skill trees were much as they'd been in Diablo II, with a mixture of passive and active skills.

The first good look at skill trees came in October 2008, when there were as many or more passive skills than active skills. (Only the Barbarian and Wizard had a large amount of skills at that point.) Each character had three skill trees at that point, with several columns of skills in each, arranged in tiers. On each tier, one or two were active and the rest were passive.

By 2009, the skill trees were much like those in Diablo 2; around 30 skills, about 1/3 passive and 2/3 active. This changed in 2010, when skill trees were entirely remade, and all of the passive skills were removed.

Active skills are used by clicking their icon, and are generally direct attacks; things like Soul Harvest, Hammer of the Ancients, or Magic Missile. Active skills attack, cast a protective armor, stun monsters, etc.

Passive skills grant the character some sort of bonus that is always in effect. Passive skills do not need to be cast to activate them; they give a bonus all the time, as soon as points are placed into them. These are skills and spells like Efficient Magics or Power of the Battlemaster. (No passive Witch Doctor skills have yet been named.) Passive skills boost the damage of other spells, lower the mana cost of casting them, increase their duration, etc. Passive skills were often called "masteries" in Diablo II, and that term is still applicable to many of them in Diablo III.

Balancing Passives and Actives

The balance of active and passive skills is an issue that must be tackled in character balancing. Jay Wilson spoke on this issue in an October 2009 interview. [10]

Diii.net: Based on playing those two characters and examining their trees, the Wizard has tons and tons of active attack skills and very few passives, while the Barbarian has an awful lot of defensive passives. Early on he didn’t have very many active skills. So fans were thinking we’d still see a lot of changes, and especially that the Wizard would be getting some more interesting passives.

Jay Wilson: *sounding thoughtful* Um… yeah, the team has done more passes and passives on the Barbarian, so his are more developed. The Wizard is a little bit harder to do passives for. If you look at the Barbarian in D2, you see the same thing. A lot more passives and less actives than the wizard in D2. I think that’s more a difference between a melee char and a magic wielder.

The fact that the Barbarian has a lot of passive defense is because he’s supposed to be tough. While I think that the Wizard probably doesn’t have enough passives, I would agree with that statement, keep in mind that they are two different classes.

Abilities

Abilities are actions all characters can perform, such as throw, attack, unsummon, and resurrect. Just how many of these we'll see in Diablo 3 is not yet known, and this coverage is somewhat speculative, but we're assuming that at least the ones from Diablo 2 will return.

Skills Define Characters

D3 Lead Designer Jay Wilson discussed how skills drive game development, and vice versa, in a December 2008 interview with 1up.com[11]. The D3 team later coined the expression "signature skills" to express this further. Skills that truly guides the rest of the development of a class.

1UP: In creating this game, would you say that the character classes and their powers drive the rest of the game, or are their powers created as a result -- or solution -- to problems presented by the game?

JW: Probably the best way to describe it is that initially, when we're doing skills for a class, we're not thinking anything except "what makes this class awesome? Why do I care about this guy?" Then you say, "Because he can hit the ground and create a small localized earthquake that destroys everything in front of him." That sounds pretty awesome; that sounds like a guy that I'd want to play. So early on, that's really our fixation: What is going to make this class sing? But that only really drives the first half-dozen skills. After that, we start getting into what mechanics have we put in the game that we want this class to take advantage of. For example, with the Wizard, we gave her a passive skill that causes enemies to drop mana orbs -- just like health orbs. So that's a mana-recovery mechanic for her; it plays into her resource and plays into the health-orb system.

So there, we just said, "We need a recovery mechanism for her -- what would work? Well, we can give her something similar that we already give for health." But then that doesn't mean anything for the Barbarian since he uses a completely different resource. For him, we tend to focus on skills that make him play in a way that's interesting. His "fury resource" is designed to drive the player forward, like a Barbarian, because he's very tough and is a close-quarters combatant. He wants to move forward, because the mechanic is "I have a lot of fury, which helps me deliver a lot of damage, but I'm going to lose it just sitting around." It makes him very aggressive, which is what we wanted out of the character. So that was driven by [the concept of] how do we want this guy to play. Very aggressively, and hence we built this mechanic.

And lastly, [there's] the monster design. As we get further and further into the game, our goal is to make monsters that we can't figure out how the player can defeat [with the existing skills] and give the player the tools they need to defeat them. So the design of the monsters has a direct relationship to the design of the classes. That's kind of an ongoing thing; we [decide] "Let's create a monster that has really debilitating rooting attacks that just get you stuck when you encounter them." Then we see that this really screws with the Barbarian, so we give him a skill that lets him break out of roots so that he can counter that. Those things are interesting and allow for the player to have a broader, deeper character. On the other hand, we don't want to go too far -- a lot of mechanics of World of WarCraft are based heavily on control, and we want to make sure that Diablo 3 stays mostly a combat game based mostly on attacks.

Also on this topic, Jay Wilson spoke about how much planning the team puts into potential character builds. October 2009 interview: [12]

Diii.net: Do you guys work and plan in advance to plan multiple potential builds for each character? Or do you just throw in as many cool skills as you can and see how players find ways to use them?

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.

School of Skills

Skills currently lack a lot of information of what type of skill they are. When the game is released, we will be able to decipher a lot more of these. For now, terms such as "schools" of skills (or spells) are generally speculation to make it easier to understand the mechanics behind them.

All abilities, spells etc are classed as "Skills" at the moment, but this could also change. DiabloWiki is simplifying this by talking about three types of skills:

• Magical Skills
• Supernatural Skills
• Extraordinary Skills

Magical skills are all types of skills that use mana or is of a magical nature, like a monster being able to summon allies, despite not having mana, or being a traditional caster.

Supernatural skills are the type of feats a Barbarian typically would do. They are not magical as such, but they don't really follow traditional physical laws.

Extraordinary skills are just that: Extraordinary. Very strong monster/character, someone who can jump very high, use a chemical compound to "breathe fire", etc.

Development

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.

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.

Barely discernible Wizard Skill tree at PAX 2009.

Bashiok elaborated on this in a forum post in May 2009 [13] 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.

Fan-made representation of how it looked at BlizzCon 2009. Made by 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 skills.

The whole skill system is being reworked, and 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

• Diii.net Skill Trees Innovative Overhaul
• 1UP interview with Jay Wilson
• WWI 2008: Denizens of Diablo Panel
• Skill Tree Graphics Assistance thread at Diii.net
• Full Barbarian Skill Trees and Stats
• Full Monk Skill Tree Stats and Discussion
• Full Witch Doctor Skills
• Full Wizard Skill Trees
• Diablofans interview with Jay Wilson