Anyone who has played Diablo or World of Warcraft or the multitude of games that have followed suit can relate to the fact that while the game promises "truly unique skills" based on the way you specialize, it isn't really the case. There are only one or two ways to specialize a skill in most games, and it's typically just more damage, or maybe a reduced resource cost, or something else fairly basic.
Blizzard aims to change this with the new Rune System announced at BlizzCon's Class Design Panel. It's another step in the evolution of how you specialize your character's skills, and it's damn cool to boot.
The system is fairly simple to understand: you have your skill, you have a rune, you augment your skill with the rune. You'll find these as random drops off creatures, much like many other aspects of Diablo customization in the past, and the cool thing is every rune will affect every class. You won't find any useless Barbarian runes on your Wizard, because that same rune will work for both of you. It'll also react differently depending on the skill you modify with it, so your Disinitegrate might change differently than your Magic Missle.
The overall goals of the system are twofold: to have a significant impact on skills -- i.e. something you'll actively seek to use -- and also to encourage experimentation. There are enough runes to where you'll find a number of different ways to alter your abilities, based on your playstyle.
We were then treated to some visual examples of what various runes do to your skills. Here's an overview of everything we were shown.
Teleport -- Teleports you around to locations to move away from enemies.
Striking Rune causes your Teleport to damage enemies near your teleport location.
Multistrike Rune causes your Teleport to split you into illusions of yourself to distract and confuse monsters.
Skull of Flame -- You hurl a flaming skull that explodes when it hits the ground, causing AoE damage.
Multistrike Rune causes it to bounce instead of exploding, dealing damage each bounce. The further you throw the longer it bounces.
Power Rune causes it to leave burning areas on the ground.
Electrocute -- Shoots out lightning that can jump to nearby enemies.
Multistrike Rune ups chain lightning aspect, allowing it to hit additional targets.
Lethality Rune causes targets to explode randomly, killing them instantly.
As you can see, these not only physically change the way your skills play, but also visually changes them -- making your skills fairly unique based on the runes you use.
This is just one of a number of Diablo III articles we have thanks to our BlizzCon coverage. You can find all of them and more by visiting our BlizzCon 2008 page.
