Diablo III's New Rune System Sounds AMAZING!

The basics: As you play through Diablo III you will come across various runes, which can be slotted into active power slots to enhance their powers. Rather than just increasing the damage or range of an ability, however, the runes radically change the form and function of said abilities, almost creating completely new skills with completely different uses.

During a panel on Diablo III development, Jay went over some of the various examples of how runes interact with powers. By far my favorite example was teleport, an ability the new wizard class receives. By itself, it simply moves the character to a different location on the map. Add a damage rune and suddenly porting into a group of monsters hurts them. Add a multi-attack rune and teleporting splits you into multiple characters for a brief period of time.

Another example was the witch doctor's flaming skull spell, which by default has him filling a skull with fire and tossing it at the enemy. With a power rune attached, the skull leaves behind a damaging pool of fire. With the multi rune, it bounces. Bouncing flaming skulls equals love.

It seems like a ton of work, not only creating each of the skills but determining how they function with runes attached, but Jay assured me it wasn't a problem for Blizzard.

LINK

Yup, agreed. Makes assigning attributes look like kids play. This is the kind of custimization that changes the way the game is played.

Yeah, I said this in an earlier post and I'll say it again. You lose some customization and gain a tone of customization. Rune System=Amazingcrazymaghie123

exactly

I hope there will be rare and hard to find runes with unique properties. What's most amazing about this concept is it has the potential to keep the game fresh even in late game. In most ARPG's late game is just finding all the "leet" items in order to incrementally increase stats and effectiveness...the problem is you really are not adding anything new to the formula at that point as your skills are pretty much assigned and you are only increasing their damage/ect. What this system could effectively do is if in late game you find "super unique rune of X" and it changes the way your skills work...well that reallly brings new life once again into your character and actually changes the way you play it.

Love the concept...hope Blizzard really runs with this one.