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Diii.net has posted a new article exploring aspects of Diablo III, Blizzard Entertainment's upcoming return to the popular action RPG franchise. The article examines Blizzard's decision to use preset character attributes in Diablo III rather than allow players to allocate points as they level up.

One of the most controversial features yet announced for Diablo III is a big change from how characters were created in the earlier games in the series. The character attributes, which are strength, dexterity, vitality, and willpower in Diablo III, will be automatically placed when your character levels up. Attribute points still exist, and the values are displayed in the character window, but you don’t set them yourself. When your character levels up; they are automatically allocated in a mixture the D3 Team has devised. The characters at Blizzcon could only level up to level 9 or 10, so we have no idea how the points will be distributed long term, but from what we saw while playing, they were fairly-evenly distributed. A level 10 Barbarian didn’t have 80 strength and 5 willpower, for instance. It looked like each attribute gained 1 or 2 per level.

Player reaction to the auto-attributes announcement has been mixed, to put it kindly. This change was first revealed in a news item we posted from Blizzcon, immediately after hearing this news from Jay Wilson, and it spurred massive discussion there, and especially in a now 29-page thread in our main D3 forum. Much of the early discussion centered on an error; we’d reported that there would still be attribute requirements for equipment, which turned out not to be true. Jay hadn’t said there would be, but he hadn’t said there wouldn’t be either, so we just assumed that basic game feature would return from D1 and D2. The fact that there will not be any attribute requirements for items in D3 defuses a lot of the “But what if my Wizard wants to wear heavy plate?” complaints, but there were other arguments than that.

Incidentally, there will be some item requirements, they’ll just be based on Character Level, possible other unknown factors, and sometimes on class. We saw a few class-specific items in the Blizzcon build (axes that only Barbarians could use) but on the whole, characters will be able to wear or use the vast majority of items they find in Diablo III, if they so desire..

Diii.net: D3 Attribute Discussion

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