Open letter to Blizzard...

[smegged]

Brother Laz's mod for D2 had a lot of nice stuff in it, but, again, it was built on D2's skill point system, which was horribly flawed in that if you misplaced one, you had to reroll, and, for many builds, you held points till 30 or later to use them, and that wasn't much fun, either, to me. Removing that and attribute points is one of the best things they did from D2 to D3.

There were three problems with D2's skill point system:

1) You were stuck with bad choices or forced to reroll;
2) It was very imbalanced; and
3) You often had to save tons of points until you hit level 30

Point 1 is a problem, I agree, but mostly because accidental misclicks could cause you to build your character sub-optimally. They could have fixed this by allowing you to change your most recent skill point allocation.

Point 2 is a bigger problem, if you think that every build should be identical. I however, did not mind this so much. I think that there should be optimal builds for each class, sub-optimal but workable builds and builds that are flat out terrible. The real problem was that there was no good way of knowing which builds were terrible until you tried them. "Attack rating" sounded like it was a good thing, but was almost entirely useless, given the MLvl system that D2 used. This could have been alleviated by better tooltips and more understandable game formulas (which is something D3 got very right).

Point 3 could have been solved by unlocking the ability to skip normal difficulty and start at level 30 in nightmare, once the player has beaten normal once. This would of course mean that the player had one less imbue and one less personalisation quest, but I think that this could have worked quite well. Certainly with the better mathematical model for D3 they could have implemented something similar - except that there's absolutely no point now because you have all your skills at maximum power all the time once you hit level 60.

There were lots of stupid things in Diablo 2. Lots and lots of them. The skill system though was certainly not one of them.