[Xeen]

Originally Posted by Bugalugs McScruffin

This deals with the biggest problem I have always had with systems like Diablo 2, where you can either diversify your skills, and have a lot of weaker skills, or just pump all of your points into a single one to become 'all-powerful'.

Except that's wrong, because you could never put all your points into a single skill - it was capped at 20, which generally gave you 4-5 maxed out skills (an arbitrary number, as well) that defined the focus of your character and created the potential for diversity.

The problems were:

A) The introduction of synergies in 1.10 alongside major stat rebalances meant that to be effective at all, suddenly you had to focus on 1-2 skills and use every other point to boost them (this sort of creates the situation you mention, but it has an entirely different cause). There is a similar situation with the Mastery skills, that effectively created a 20-point sink for some classes.

B) Some skills were so ridiculously well-rounded and powerful that there was no need to diversify beyond honing a single skill to maximum power + a few support skills (Hammerdin, etc). This is a balance issue.

All I see is that rather than polish the system or fix the most glaring issues, it was scrapped altogether. Again, that's not a good or bad thing (it'll depend on how well it gets executed), but implying the skill point system was the root of all lack of diversity is short-sighted.