#0 - Oct. 30, 2010, 1:26 p.m.
However I'm also concerened about some major potential issues.
Throughout Blizzcon and since I've generally heard two important statements fairly frequently which both lead into my problem.
1) "this skill wasn't really that great and did pretty poor damage until I put an _____ rune in it and it suddenly became a 1 hit aoe killing machine"
2) Our intention is that players never use a spell without a rune.
Don't sound so bad right? But the more I think about it the more it seems that this suggests all of the skills in their default form are going to be inferior. I thought the purpose of skill runes was to provide more variety to spells, not to make them way more powerful.
This is particularly worrying to me because it is the defualt spells for each class which comprise the majority of the class defnining skills, whirlwind, blizzard, hydra etc.
The best example here I can take is Hydra.
default: fire
rune 1: arcane dmg
rune 2: electric dmg
rune 3: acid dmg
rune 4: frost breath
rune 5: single head / fire wall
If that was the only effect of runes I would be fine as the original version still remains viable. However I see reports that even low level runes make a huge difference in damage. The fact that skill runes have 7 tiers is going to compound this inequality between runed /un-runed spells even further.
What if I loved for example the D2 sorc and had the cool idea to make a throwback sorc type build with my wizard focusing on Blizzard and Hydra both in their default state to keep the theme from the old game.
Can I even do this or will my character simply be gimped because Id rather stick with the default effect?
Will normal fireball spitting hydra be totally useless compared to the next wizards sorc jsut because he plugged it with a rank 5 rune??
If so thats a real downer on the whole system for me.
