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→Instability Design Theory
::For the wizard, when she’s out of mana she just dies. And that’s not fun. So if anything, we want to encourage how she plays. So she’s the kind of character that blasts first and asks questions later. Very vulnerable. So we want to implement a system that makes her more blasty, but even more vulnerable. We want to make that a choice for the player. "Do I want to make myself more vulnerable in exchange for being more blasty." And that’s a cool gameplay pull there.
The logic behind the change to Instability is that mana did not work as a limiting resource in Diablo 1 or Diablo 2. The play style of mage characters in the Diablo series is one of constant spell-casting. Therefore a resource that tries to limit spell casting is flawed, since players will always work to circumvent it, or else be crippled by it. As Jay Wilson said, a Wizard that can't cast spells is no fun.
The design theme with Instability in Diablo 3 is to make the resource have an effect on the gameplay. Exactly how it will work remains to be seen, but the concept, extrapolating from what Jay Wilson said in the above quote, is a simple one. Instability will make the Wizard even more "blasty" with a trade off of becoming more "vulnerable."
In other words, <u>Instability will make the Wizard cast spells more effectively while increasing the danger to themselves</u>. [http://diablo.incgamers.com/forums/showthread.php?p=7479890]
The details of this; what buffs will increase the "blasty" and what debuffs will increase the "vulnerability" have not yet been revealed, and will surely remain under development and balancing for the remainder of the game's development.
===Why Not Mana?===
During the game's development, some fans continued to question the change to Instability, and to request a return to mana for the Wizard. Bashiok replied to a typical post on this issue in March 2010. [http://diablo.incgamers.com/blog/comments/blizzard-on-mana-wizards-and-witch-doctors/]
::We still don’t feel mana fits the feel of the wizard class, and making the wizard use mana to match some definition a magic wielder from some other game from some other decade would be shoehorning mechanics for the sake of nostalgia.
::We’re using the instability system for the wizard because it makes sense to the style of the class; thematically as well as mechanically. If mana filled those requirements we’d use it, but it doesn’t.
::I don’t want to sound like we’re being dismissive. As everyone should be aware we work iteratively and the main reason why we haven’t revealed a lot about instability is that it still hasn’t been proven. If it turns out it doesn’t work we’ll try something else. It may be that mana just works the best and we end up going with that, but right now we’re trying something.
This debate remains theoretical, since at the time of Bashiok's post no one outside of Blizzard had ever played a Wizard using Instability. (And it's unlikely anyone will before October 22-23, 2010, during BlizzCon.)
===Health Orb Benefits?===
But the key is that we don’t necessarily want to... we don’t want to cannibalize an existing gameplay mechanic. So when you take health globes that are already important, and you make them even more important, then that doesn’t really create gameplay. For the WD, the health globes weren’t that important a lot of times, since he very rarely took damage with his pets, so for him by enhancing his desire for health globes, we’re really putting gameplay where it wasn’t. So whatever we’re designing a class that’s what we look at.
==Instability Speculation==
