Diablo III Kore

This interview is provided by our colleageus over at diii.net.

• Jay Wilson about auras, mana, and the monk 
• Jay Wilson Interview: About Items and Mongrels
  

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? Almost ready, or they're still very preliminary and we're still going to see lots more higher level skills?

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 werevery 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.

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 charand 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.

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 atlevel 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.

Diii.net: The Talisman.You said initially it was some sort of stat-boosting thing, but it'sbeen disabled for the past year and a half, in playable builds anyway.

Jay Wilson: Mm-hmm. It's still on hold.

Diii.net: People are wondering if there?s going to be some mechanism to allow greater character diversification in stats, given that we can not manually assign our own attribute points in Diablo 3.There will be something more than just finding +10 on an item. We?ll beable to do something more to differentiate our characters from others?

Jay Wilson: Yes. We're stated in the past that we?re working on a new customization system. A system that's part of your characte rbuilding. Also that within the item space we?re looking for ways formore? we really prefer the single point stat customization be more item based. But we?re going to have a system to more or less replace the attribute point spending system.

Source:

Written by Flux @ Diii.net