Originally Posted by
sycld
I know; the bastards!
Alright, here's a little info that might not be completely clear without experiencing the game, as well as other general information:
First, of course, the meat-and-potaters of DIII are the skills and itemization systems. Itemization has changed a bit, but still will mostly be familiar to any player of Diablo-esque games. The skill system, on the other hand, is completely revised.
There are no skill trees anymore. Instead, one skill is unlocked per level. At first you can only equip two abilities at a time, but every 6 levels thereafter a new ability slot is unlocked until you have the maximum of SIX ability slots at level 24 (out of 60). By level 29, you'll have unlocked ALL the skills of each class, 24 per class.
However, it doesn't stop there, not by a long shot. In addition to unlocking these skills there is also a slot for one rune stone per ability slot. Rune stones are drops from creatures, appearing in Act II
Nnormal and beyond. Rune stones modify or completely change the ability that they modify. There are 5 colors: alabaster, red, gold, indigo, and black. So in essence, you actually get 5 abilities for every 1 ability unlocked.
There are 7 levels of rune stones, with the highest only being rare drops in the new Inferno difficulty, and the lowest being fairly common drops in Normal. Obviously the higher the level of rune stone, the more powerful the modified ability.
In addition to active abilities, there are also 3 slots for passive traits that are unlocked at levels 10, 20, and 30. By level 30 you'll have all your passive traits, 17 in total. Note that passive traits are ALL UNIQUE to each character class.
So, to summarize: 24*5 rune stone-modified abilities = 120, of which 6 can be equipped, and 17 passive traits, of which 3 can be equipped.
Blizzard has said this results in about 97 billion possible combinations per character class, though of course not all of them will be viable, and not all of them will be much different from each other. Still, seems like a rich territory of choices to me.
I'd go on but I need to go for now.
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