Build diversity

[Mall Ninja]

Originally Posted by Sampe

I would imagine that the time consuming part about implementing new skills are the animations and other insignificant stuff.

If it was mainly insignificant stuff they wouldn't have said that it was the most time consuming thing left to do. There's quite a bit of art involved with making a new skill, as well as balancing to take into account. And probably a whole slew of other things that I don't even know about, as I'm not a game designer. Crate has enough work to do finishing the Masteries with the current amount of skills.

Luckily there will be expansions

[Sampe]

Originally Posted by Mall Ninja

If it was mainly insignificant stuff they wouldn't have said that it was the most time consuming thing left to do. There's quite a bit of art involved with making a new skill, as well as balancing to take into account. And probably a whole slew of other things that I don't even know about, as I'm not a game designer. Crate has enough work to do finishing the Masteries with the current amount of skills.

Luckily there will be expansions

Yea.. I realize my earlier comment sounds a bit naive, but my thought was to maybe include simpler skills, if there is no time to create more time consuming ones.

I can't imagine that pen & paper type stuff can be too time consuming.

[Renevent]

To be honest that sounds worse...I'd rather have a lesser amount of really interesting and neat skills than a whole bunch of "skills" that are really just numerical placeholders.

[Sampe]

Originally Posted by Renevent

To be honest that sounds worse...I'd rather have a lesser amount of really interesting and neat skills than a whole bunch of "skills" that are really just numerical placeholders.

The suggested skills would be additional. Too much emphasis is being put in cool effects IMO.

[Renevent]

No one said anything about cool effects...the reality is a cool skill involves more than just adding some % of numbers. There's mechanical stuff involved. For instance, whirlwind in D2. There's animation considerations, the way it works (hitting multiple enemies, ect), and a bunch of other stuff. Yeah it looks cool (yay effects) but it's a really neat skill because mechanically it changes the way you actually play the game.

Personally I think they should be shooting for quality, not quantity. Adding a bunch of boring skills just so they can have more skills is not really improving the game all that much.

[Sampe]

Originally Posted by Renevent

No one said anything about cool effects...the reality is a cool skill involves more than just adding some % of numbers. There's mechanical stuff involved. For instance, whirlwind in D2. There's animation considerations, the way it works (hitting multiple enemies, ect), and a bunch of other stuff. Yeah it looks cool (yay effects) but it's a really neat skill because mechanically it changes the way you actually play the game.

Personally I think they should be shooting for quality, not quantity. Adding a bunch of boring skills just so they can have more skills is not really improving the game all that much.

Whirlwind is a nice skill for sure, but not even my favorite of barb skills in D2. Many of the nice skills like Frenzy could be made with much less resources. Build diversity adds to quality.

I think a kind of HC game like GD should be very steady on paper aswell.

[999]

Originally Posted by Renevent

To be honest that sounds worse...I'd rather have a lesser amount of really interesting and neat skills than a whole bunch of "skills" that are really just numerical placeholders.

Amen (or whatever the Cairn equivalent is.)

[Sampe]

Let's just hope that with their new resources they could maybe give the masteries a couple skills more.

[Renevent]

I think they are to be honest...I know they are increasing the max mastery level and I believe they also mentioned that there will be more skills overall.