Changes

[[Image:Skill slots.png|left|thumb|150px|Spending points]]This became very straight forward, this UI idea that at a glance you know what to do. You look on your left and you can choose a new skill or spend points in your old skills. This was good. If you can see a blinking plus sign that means you can spend points in it, if there's no plus sign that means you've maxed it out. Now a little extra insight into the seven skills. At the beginning of the game every skill that you choose has five skill points that you can put into it but throughout the course of the game you have ways to deepen that and augment the skills so that you can spend more points into them, So, initially, it's much easier to make builds, it's easier to thinking ahead, to respec when you want to do that as well and you can try a lot of things very rapidly. But there's a lot more to the skill system than just this.<br><br> '''Wyatt Cheng - Technical Game Designer'''<br><br> We've also been working on fleshing out and getting new skills for the four classes we had already announced and we want to show you some of those today.<br><br> '''Barbarian''' We knew that he needed a ranged attack so here is an example of Ancient Spear. We don't want to turn the Barbarian into a ranged class so this is something that feels very appropriate for him. We want to sell the theme that he's strong, he's tough, he's melee so we had to come up with something that felt appropriate for that.<br><br> '''Wizard''' We are going to bring him back another fan favourite, the same way we brought back Multishot, bring back Meteor. Meteor was also a popular skill in Diablo 2. People liked it, we liked the gameplay of it so we brought it back, artified it up and I tell you right when you get some runes in Meteor it's five times the fun.<br><br> '''Witch Doctor''' I alluded to it earlier, that we want some movement options for every class and Spirit Walk is the movement skill for the Witch Doctor. We wanted something that stays thematically consistent for every class and in the Witch Doctor's case, he's about spirits and voodoo so in the Spirit Walk ability where he turns incorporeal, he can walk around, through enemies, walk round corners and when Spirit Walk ends he comes back in his physical form that becomes teleported to wherever his Spirit form is when Spirit Walk ended.<br><br> '''Monk''' Wave of Light. He summons a mystical bell that he shoots out at range. It's kind of a combination of a melee and ranged attack. One of the things that I really like about this skill is that we need to differentiate the Barbarian from the Monk, they are both melee classes and in his case he's abbot combining mystic arts with martial arts and I like the evocative imagery that happens here. The concept of a mystical bell that he fires off, it's very vivid.<br><br> '''Jay Wilson - Game Director''' I'm going to tell you about a new system that we've introduced into Diablo 3 in the last year. It's called Traits.<br><br> [[Image:Traits.png|left|thumb|150px|Introducing Traits]]Essentially they are passive skills. They are a way you can customise and modify and essentially role play with your character and diversify your character builds. You can them as you level up, every other level, you don't get a point in every level but it's every odd numbered level you get a Trait Point. The goal of these is to alter your core attributes and aspects of your character. If you have a Barbarian and you want to be stronger there is a Trait for that. If you have a Wizard and you want to focus a lot more on elemental skills you have a Trait for that. A lot of it is also to take the opportunity to add flavour to the game world so every Trait has, in addition to just instructions on what it does it has a little excerpt of some flavour text that tells you about the world and it also was designed as a skill that tells you something about your character and your class.<br><br> [[Image:Trait inner rage.png|right|thumb|150px|Barb's Inner Rage]]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.