Skill

Skills are what all abilities the character classes in Diablo III have are called. A skill includes regular physical abilities like Cleave or a magical spell like disintegrate. While skills is the official name, players often refer to them as spells, talents, abilities, and similar terms. These are just synonyms, and are frequently interchangeable in use.

Respecs will be available to change skill points after after they're placed, and runestones can be socketed into skills, greatly modifying their forms.

Monsters can also use skills, but often not a Character skill. Primarily caster monsters have skills/spells, but others as well. Monster skills include all their abilities besides their "auto attack".

Barbarian Skill Tree interpretation by Muldric.

Useful skill links:

• Skill runes
• Barbarian skills - Barbarian-specific skill design.
  • Barbarian traits.
  • Barbarian skill archive - Removed Barbarian skills.
• Demon Hunter skills - Monk-specific skill design.
  • Demon Hunter traits.
• Monk skills - Monk-specific skill design.
  • Monk traits.
  • Monk skill archive - Removed Monk skills.
• Wizard skills - Wizard-specific skill design.
  • Wizard traits.
  • Wizard skill archive - Removed Wizard skills.
• Witch Doctor skills - Witch Doctor-specific skill design.
  • Witch Doctor traits.
  • Witch Doctor skill archive - Removed Witch Doctor skills.
• Signature skills - Skills that define characters.
• Active skills - Skills where effects are activated by the player.
• Passive skills - Skills where effects are activated automatically, by the computer or by special events.
• Skill Ranks

Known Skills

We know a fair number of skills from seeing them in demonstrations, and from taking notes of them at BlizzCon in October 2008 and 2009. More than 30 skills each are known for the Barbarian, Wizard and Witch Doctor, while fewer of the Monk's skills have yet been revealed. Click to the appropriate pages in the links above to learn the names and functions of all known skills.

Traits

Traits were introduced into the game in 2010. They function chiefly as a replacement for passive skills, which are no longer in the skill menu. Character earn a trait point every other level up (each odd-numbered level), and have a wide variety of traits to choose from. Like skills, traits have no pre-reqs other than Clvl. Unlike skills, traits are not all available at a fairly low level; new traits are available every 4th level, and they proceed almost all the way to the max level, with blocks of traits available at level 1, 3, 5, and so on, up to much higher levels. Later blocks of traits come online at Clvl 39, 43, 47, 51, and 55.

As of Blizzcon 2010 there were more than 30 traits per character, a fairly bewildering number that the developers said was likely to be decreased and refocused through further development.

How Many Skills?

There will be around 25 skills per character in Diablo 3, all active. Passive skills were found in the skill trees in earlier versions of the game but they were removed during 2010 development.

Before the rearranging and removal of passive skills, the team was planning to have about 35 skills per character, as Jay Wilson detailed in an October 2009 interview:

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?

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 were very 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.

Skill Requirements?

With the redesigned non-tree skill trees, as of October 2010 at Blizzcon there are no skill prerequisites at all, other than the Clvl requirement for each tier of skills. These are set at Character level 2, 3, 6, 10, 14, 20, and 26.

How Many Skills At Once?

Witch Doctor Skill Tree interpretation by Muldric.

Only 7 skills can have points placed in them at one time, in Diablo III. This fact was revealed via the @Diablo twitter feed in late-September, 2010.

Bash said U can only have 7 skills at a time, does that mean I can’t have skill points in an 8th skill or U can only have 7 on UI?—TheEliminator

You can spend into seven skills at a time, total. These are active skills and don’t include passives.—Diablo

This issue is further complicaed by limits the game places on how quickly new skills may be enabled. From what players saw at Blizzcon 2010, one more of the seven skills becomes available to put points into at each skill tier; 2, 3, 6, 10, 14, 20, 26.

Thus a level 9 character would have built up 8 skill points (assuming no additional from quest rewards), but would have only 3 skills to spend them in. A 4th skill would become available at level 10, a 5th at 14, and so on. This would encourage (force) players to concentrate their skill points into a few skills, making them more powerful and focused, rather than spreading them around too widely, too soon.

This is a better way to play in terms of building character strength, and fits with the D3 Team's design goal of directing players to play wisely. Since there are respecs, it's not a big deal, since players can easily switch points out of lower level skills to higher level ones if they so desire.

Maximum Skill Points?

It's not yet been made clear how many skill points can be placed into the skills, or how quickly points may be added to the skills. Characters could add one per level in Diablo 2, but many other RPGs have different limits, sometimes allowing points only every 3rd or 5th level up. This technique allows for skills to gain much more benefit per level, making them ultimately more powerful.

Skills are initially capped at 5 points, in Diablo III. No demo characters, PvM or PvP, have ever had any way to add more than 5 points to a skill. Despite that, the developers have made it known that the max point in skills will be higher, most likely 15.

Bashiok spoke to this issue in a forum post in May 2009.

Currently we’re envisioning the majority of skills to be capped at 5 points, to begin with. As a form of progression we're planning for players to be able to increase the point caps of skills. More than likely to a maximum of 15. It's a system that’s still under heavy design, but the fact of choosing and increasing key skills beyond their initial cap is important to this new unified tier system.

Until June 2010 this was all we knew, and fans were free to speculate that skill levels would be increased by Clvl requirements, quests/in-game achievements, skill runes, item bonuses, or something else. The speculation ended in June 2010, when Bashiok confirmed that the caps would be tied to difficulty level.

...the cap raises another five every difficulty level? So when you reach hell difficulty the caps would be at 15?

This seems the simplest method of doing things, with players able to move up to level 10 skills on Nightmare, and level 15 on Hell. (Plus potential +skill mods from item bonuses.) It might create some interesting strategy as well, with characters wanting to hurry to the next difficulty level in order to unlock their next five skill points. (That was not the case in Diablo 2, where untwinked/unrushed characters could find better gear and score bigger experience doing Baal runs from 30-45 or so, rather than moving up to Nightmare.)

Logical or not, Bashiok took it back a couple of weeks later:

Bashiok: Ignore everything I said about raising skill caps, that was an old, old design for how it could potentially work and I had a lapse of memory.

No further clarifications were in order, but when the issue was next raised in September 2010, @Diablo's comment made a max cap of 15 seem fairly likely.

Akumagin: How many skills, active and passive, will we be able to maximize with the 60 level cap?

@Diablo: It hasn’t been nailed down, but probably three, maybe four active skills at highest cap can be maxed out at 60.

Another update came in November 2010, when Bashiok said the new max might be 20.

...but can be increased up to Fifteen.

Bashiok: Potentially twenty.

The Skill Design Team

Jay Wilson revealed the key skill designer guys on the Daiblo 3 team in an October 2009 interview.

Diii.net: Can you place your heads into the lion’s jaws and name the 3 of you who work on skills?

Jay Wilson: Myself, Wyatt Cheng, and Julian Love, our lead technical artist. Oh actually 4. Chris Haga does a lot of skill work as well.

Selecting Skills

Available skill interface.

The method of selecting and utilizing skills with the hotkeys and with the mouse button are described in detail in the Interface article.

Early development builds of Diablo III had a handy menu that popped up above the belt interface. It's not known if this menu will still be in the final game, with the other changes to skills (limiting chars to using 7 at once) that have taken place during development.

No Skill Hoarding

One of the design points of Diablo III is that players should be using their skill and trait points as soon as they earn them. Skill point hoarding is common in some RPGs, and certainly was in Diablo II, where most skills were not very good or only needed 1 point as a prereq.

In Diablo II, wise players saved most of their skill points for the more powerful skills, most of which were available at Clvl 24 or 30. This meant a fairly slow/boring early game, as characters muddled along with just one point in some lesser skill, but a very fun later game experience when the desired skills became available, and a point could be dumped into it every level, leading to rapidly-increasing character performance.

This is now how the D3 Team wants things to work in their game, and they're trying to make all of the skills useful. Furthermore, cheap/easy respecs mean that players have no reason not to spend their skill points as soon as they earn them, since it's not a problem to change things around later, if/when another higher level skill becomes more desirable. Bashiok argued for this philosophy in a forum post in November 2010:

Respecs aren’t nailed down, but it’s very likely they’ll be introduced through questing and one awarded to you. So that’s one for each difficulty (probably).

I think it’s awesome people are trying to plan out builds already. I think it’s crazy to think about going through half of the game without taking a single skill. I’ll admit I haven’t tried it, but I can’t ... I don’t know, it just doesn’t really seem doable. This isn’t Diablo II. I remember going 20+ levels before spending anything.

If your goal is to level as fast as possible, I don’t see how point hoarding until level 14 would actually grant you any benefit with the ability to respec. Even if it’s not until later. Having [[Spectral Blade]] until you can respec into [[Teleport]] isn’t going to kill it for you. Not having a skill for the first 14 levels, I think, might.

When I have some free time (haha) I’ll try to test it and see how well I do with no skills and no traits. Ugh. Sounds painful.

Skill Mechanics

One major change from Diablo II is that the various snaking lines of skill prerequisites are gone. Skills in Diablo III are arranged in tiers, with no dependency lines between them. This, along with easy respecing, gives characters much more freedom in mixing and matching the skills they wish to use.

As of October 2010, there are no skill spending point requirements to use other skills. The listing is entirely a menu; any can be chosen at will provided the Clvl requirements are met.

This was not the case in earlier versions of the game. In 2008 there were numerous prereq lines between skills, and characters had to spend a certain number of points in a skill tree in order to unlock access to the higher tiers in that tree. This feature remained in 2009, though most of the prereq lines were gone.

Skill Trees

The skill tree format we'll see in Diablo 3 has undergone many design changes, and is still in flux. The form seen at Blizzcon 2009 (represented by images on this page) was thought to be fairly final, but in November 2009 Blizzard let it be known that the UI had been entirely reworked, moving away from trees and to a more menu/tier system. As of Blizzcon 2010 there were no "tree" elements in the skill trees. They were purely a listing of skills, grouped by tiers without any requirements other than Clvl.

The skills were further reduced by the 2010 removal of all passive skills, which became traits.

• See the skill trees article for much more detail and full citations for these changes.

• 

  2008 version.

• 

  April 2009 changes.

• 

  August 2009.

• 

  Fan-made recreations of the trees seen at Blizzcon 2009.

Skill Display

Skill hover, May 2009.

The finer points of the skill hover have changed and evolved during the game's development, and will continue to do so. Expect further changes.

Hovering on a skill produces a visual like the one seen to the right. The name of the skill is displayed, along with the current and maximum points that a character may spend in it. The current function is shown, as is the increases you will enjoy with another point.

One prime difference from Diablo II is the slot for a skill rune that you see below the skill, in the skill tree. Only active skills (as far as is known) have slots for skill runes, and skill runes can be freely socketed and swapped in and out. (Subject to change during further development.) See the skill runes page for more details.

Active and Passive Skills

Diablo III skills are either "active" or "passive." A huge change was made to the skill trees during development in 2010, when all the passive skills were removed from the Diablo III skill trees and moved to the traits.

Earlier in the game, the skill trees were much as they'd been in Diablo II, with a mixture of passive and active skills.

The first good look at skill trees came in October 2008, when there were as many or more passive skills than active skills. (Only the Barbarian and Wizard had a large amount of skills at that point.) Each character had three skill trees at that point, with several columns of skills in each, arranged in tiers. On each tier, one or two were active and the rest were passive.

By 2009, the skill trees were much like those in Diablo 2; around 30 skills, about 1/3 passive and 2/3 active. This changed in 2010, when skill trees were entirely remade, and all of the passive skills were removed.

Active skills are used by clicking their icon, and are generally direct attacks; things like Firebomb, Hammer of the Ancients, or Magic Missile. Active skills attack, cast a protective armor, stun monsters, etc.

Passive skills, now called traits, grant the character some sort of bonus that is always in effect. Passive skills do not need to be cast to activate them; they give a bonus all the time, as soon as points are placed into them. These are skills and spells like Prismatic Cloak or Inner Rage. Traits boost the damage of other spells, lower the mana cost of casting them, increase their duration, etc. Passive skills were often called "masteries" in Diablo II, and fans were using that term in Diablo III as well, before the big traits switchover.

Balancing Passives and Actives

This issue was largely removed from the game when traits replaced passive skills, leaving only active skills in the skill trees.

Prior to this change, there was much player debate about how passives and actives would be balanced in the skill trees.

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 char and 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.

Abilities

Abilities are actions all characters can perform, such as throw, attack, unsummon, and resurrect. Just how many of these we'll see in Diablo 3 is not yet known, and this coverage is somewhat speculative, but we're assuming that at least the ones from Diablo 2 will return.

Skills Define Characters

Monk Skill Tree interpretation by Muldric.

D3 Lead Designer Jay Wilson discussed how skills drive game development, and vice versa, in a December 2008 interview with 1up.com. The D3 team later coined the expression "signature skills" to express this further. Skills that truly guides the rest of the development of a class.

1UP: In creating this game, would you say that the character classes and their powers drive the rest of the game, or are their powers created as a result -- or solution -- to problems presented by the game?

JW: Probably the best way to describe it is that initially, when we're doing skills for a class, we're not thinking anything except "what makes this class awesome? Why do I care about this guy?" Then you say, "Because he can hit the ground and create a small localized earthquake that destroys everything in front of him." That sounds pretty awesome; that sounds like a guy that I'd want to play. So early on, that's really our fixation: What is going to make this class sing? But that only really drives the first half-dozen skills. After that, we start getting into what mechanics have we put in the game that we want this class to take advantage of. For example, with the Wizard, we gave her a passive skill that causes enemies to drop mana orbs -- just like health orbs. So that's a mana-recovery mechanic for her; it plays into her resource and plays into the health-orb system.

So there, we just said, "We need a recovery mechanism for her -- what would work? Well, we can give her something similar that we already give for health." But then that doesn't mean anything for the Barbarian since he uses a completely different resource. For him, we tend to focus on skills that make him play in a way that's interesting. His "fury resource" is designed to drive the player forward, like a Barbarian, because he's very tough and is a close-quarters combatant. He wants to move forward, because the mechanic is "I have a lot of fury, which helps me deliver a lot of damage, but I'm going to lose it just sitting around." It makes him very aggressive, which is what we wanted out of the character. So that was driven by [the concept of] how do we want this guy to play. Very aggressively, and hence we built this mechanic.

And lastly, [there's] the monster design. As we get further and further into the game, our goal is to make monsters that we can't figure out how the player can defeat [with the existing skills] and give the player the tools they need to defeat them. So the design of the monsters has a direct relationship to the design of the classes. That's kind of an ongoing thing; we [decide] "Let's create a monster that has really debilitating rooting attacks that just get you stuck when you encounter them." Then we see that this really screws with the Barbarian, so we give him a skill that lets him break out of roots so that he can counter that. Those things are interesting and allow for the player to have a broader, deeper character. On the other hand, we don't want to go too far -- a lot of mechanics of World of WarCraft are based heavily on control, and we want to make sure that Diablo 3 stays mostly a combat game based mostly on attacks.

Also on this topic, Jay Wilson spoke about how much planning the team puts into potential character builds. October 2009 interview:

Diii.net: Do you guys work and plan in advance to plan multiple potential builds for each character? Or do you just throw in as many cool skills as you can and see how players find ways to use them?

Jay Wilson: A little bit of both. We try to anticipate what we think will be good builds. For example, there’s lots of things we put into the wizard, to try to make a battle mage more viable. But sometimes we put in skills that we’re not 100% sure is an awesome skill, but that we think somebody will find an awesome use for. We try to plan things ahead of time, but we’re not foolish enough to believe that the three of us who work on skills can come up with as many possibilities and variations as the millions of players who will take the work we’ve done and have fun building stuff with it. We mostly try to make sure they have the tools to have a lot of freedom and create a lot of cool stuff.