ShadowDance

When Diablo 3 goes retail, there will be no more stage construction! Fancy computer? - Check! Comfortable chair? - Check! Cell phone off? - Check!

That’s right. Planning, and looking forward to unemployment in order to be able to play Diablo 3 the way it hopefully deserves to be played for at least six months straight. Taking a timeout from real life. Skipping karaoke nights. A rain check on singing lessons. Pause on telling girls stuff they love to hear. Oh yes, my Barbarian is going to do some serious sockrocking.

Bashiok: So yeah, we’re still working on the patch. It’s coming along really well. We’re getting there. I can’t give an estimate or date, we’re expecting there to be a good amount of testing required due to the types of changes being made. We want to take our time and put out a solid patch, and that means we don’t have a release date right now.

Some exciting news - and it also may be some comfort - due to the types of changes we’re making we will be offering the Diablo II 1.13 patch for testing and feedback on a test realm before its release. We’ll have more information about how you’ll be able to help test it in the coming weeks.

So, the system we have now… you’ll have to just picture it without any visual representation, sorry. They’re not radically different visually except that the trees are all viewable at the same time. Taking the barbarian trees for instance (berserker, battlemaster, juggernaut) they’re not tabbed now, but instead all viewable at the same time. Side by side.

This is important due to how they are now a unified tier progression. Instead of spending 5 points in the berserker tree to then begin spending points in the second tier of the berserker tree, the new design allows you to spend wherever you like. As long as your points in the first tier of skills adds up to five, the next tier for all trees is unlocked. This style of a unified tier approach also helps in a few other areas though. Since all of the trees are open we can clean up the trees a lot more, removing redundant abilities. We don’t have to throw in skills that are important, such as damage mitigation, all over the place. You will always have access to those skills no matter where you’re spending, so they can instead be focused into a few key skills.