Wizard Skill Tree Revealed - hellforge

Shacknews has posted up their write up of the demo straight from the floor at BlizzCon.


The skill trees are split into three branches, Storm, Arcane and Conjure. The frost tree is mainly made up of Cold and Lightning spells. Arcane contains various armours, a magic missile, and the old favourite teleport. Lastly Conjure, contains many fire skills including the old favourites such as Hydra and Meteor.


Blizzard
-Rank 0/1
--Mana Cost: 70
--Call down shards of ice to pelt an area dealing 6-10 cold damage per second for 3 seconds. Critical hits from cold damage freeze targets.



Teleport
-Rank 0/1
--Mana Cost: 23
--Teleport to the selected location up to 40 feet away.



Slow Time
-Rank 0/1
--Mana Cost: 20
--Warp space and time, slowing nearby monsters and projectiles. Enemy attack cooldown increase: 1 second(s)



Hydra
-Rank 0/1
--Mana Cost:
--Unknown Creates a multi-headed beast that attacks your enemies with bolts of fire.



Skill work differently from how the used to in Diablo 2. Now main skills can only have one point in them, and you can develop it further through a separate 15 point skill subspec. The subspec can then take the tree in one of three directions, letting you specialise even further.


As an example, in the Conjure skill tree, there are just two spels at level 3 so far. They both have a common subspec though, which takes them into one of three possible directions, however you could just max out all three of these and create really powerful level 3 skills.


The subspecs don't always relate to the main skills in the tree, but are rather passives that can help out all of you skill sets. To top this off, there is now runes to contend with, which are used on skills as you can see in our Q&A writeup.


As an example, if you have a lightning skill and you use a rune which multiplies it, you then get a chain lightning skill instead. Using this same rune on an illusion skill, can mean that you multiply into more than one clone of yourself.


It is worth checking out each skill tree on your own to see what I mean.


As an aside, Australian website GamesOn.net has a reporter at the show conducting a liveblog which you can read here.


The Rune System.


Runes are a random drop, used for all classes. They have a significant impact on skills - with a system that encourages experimentation. The system uses elements taken from other systems that the devs found and liked. Random drops, being the main thing - and skill customisation / crafting.



Basic Monster Deaths


Other half of the visceral equation Physical forces Damage flavoured deaths Critical deaths - "we wanted to make them noticeable... so they *have* to explode!" (different and awesome deaths, mainly - dependent on attacks, damage, and characters)



Crazy monster deaths:


Special deaths - some monsters have hand-crafted animations that are theirs specifically. Skill-driven Deaths - "you can't have a disintegrate skill if it doesn't actually disintegrate something" - so there are now locusts, acid bursts, that sort of thing. The death is very much part of the skill. Rare Deaths - Characters are full of "evil" - so when they die, obviously, they have to explode. Why? "Explosions are cool!"


It is worth noting that the liveblog also describes the rune system for skills, so is once again worth checking out.