The problem with that is that you can always start over. There is no hard choice if you can just start a new character.

All they've done is take the TEDIUM out of it.

I'd say it's a pretty hard choice when the price you have to pay is starting over.

If it takes 2-3 hours of gameplay to get back to where you were, that's annoying, not hard.

More like 20-30 hours. And yes, not wanting to go through the annoyance is what makes the choices hard.

The Tedium is the price you pay for having a good character. When you spend XX hours grinding a character up to level XX only to find out that your skill choices aren't good enough to survive in Hell level, you pay a price for your mistake. This price invests people in their characters. Starting a new character is no small thing.

In DIII, you just reset you stuff and ask some high level where he put his stats and boom ... your elite. Even a freaking monkey can have a great character.

ex.) If you have a level 99 Hammerdin Pally and want a Templar ... just reset and you have a max level Templar. No need to level up more than one character of each type when you can just switch everything around. It will cost Blizzard replayability in the long run.

Not to mention that apparently in DIII the number of skills are cut and i don't even know if they have (m)any synergies. I guess you can switch around skill gems or something.

Blizzard has switched the game from character building to equipment finding to have a good character. Conveniently they will now have a real money auction/trade house for people to buy good equipment.

why have people work/earn building good characters when they can just buy one from Blizzard.

oops ... Saul is not going to be happy.

Dude, we're not talking about changing from a Barb to a Zon. We're talking about going CLEAR back through the game to take 1 point from double swing and add it to Whirlwind. What you're talking about is completely absurd.

Dead end difficulty is not a GOOD thing in any game. I can't believe you'd advocate it as such.

D2 was ALREADY that way. People could go from zero to 80 or whatever it was in about 6 hours. All they've done is removed the requirement for starting over for those of us who don't want to repeat the same parts of the game over and over.

Now this I agree with. Perhaps a good middle ground is only allowing a certain number of points be redistributed. I'm certainly not advocating being able to start over with a completely new character. But penalizing someone because they mis-allocated 1 or 2 skillpoints out of 30 is silly.

D2 was EXACTLY the same way. Good eq trumped everything else, because ultimately everybody settled on the same 2-3 builds for each character.

I absolutely agree with this. But online auction house and allowing people to redistribute skill points are two COMPLETELY different issues.

Uhhh, no. I took a Thornadin all the way to like level 33 before deciding that was a reeruned build and went back to make a Zealadin. Same with my Barb build.

And honestly guys, the solution to this is

1) balancing skills properly and/or
2) not binding players to such a rigid skill system

The whole idea of spec builds is outdated, is it not? Allow the player to build whatever they want and balance the game so that their choices don't make the game unplayable later. Bethesda has been doing it for a long, long time.

Well, I don't necessarily disagree with you. If you want to make a wholesale change to your character, then start over.

But redistributing 1 or 2 skillpoints here and there should be completely possible.

Maybe it could be tied to skills you already have? For instance you can only subtract or add points to skills you've already paid for?

That way you can't make a whole "new" character in an instant.

Bethesda's leveling and loot systems are also coincidentally complete garbage. Blizzard made an incredible loot system that has been copied in the world of RPGs ever since. They created an even better version of the D2 trees in WoW and kept a similar (but balanced for an MMO) loot system.

Their loot system is not nearly as addictive as Diablo. But then again, Laz was complaining about equipment vs. skills. Isn't that what we want?

As for leveling systems, I'm not suggesting what Bethesda did is perfect but it's certainly workable in a sense that you're not going to be overly penalized for decisions you make. BTW, did you ever play Arcanum?

Never played Arcanum but heard it was good. And, yeah, I wasn't necessarily agreeing with Laz because, let's face it, D2 was 80% loot grind and 20% character building.

Did you ever play World of Warcraft?

No.

I avoided WoW for the same reason I never tried heroin. :)