Class trees
Diablo II's class skill trees: three pages per class, each skill sitting in one of six tiers. This is the skill system - the six vanilla class skills are retired.
How the trees work
- Tiers gate ownership. A skill's tier is the character level it opens at: . That is the whole gate - there is no prerequisite graph.
- The Rule of Rangs gates depth. Rank N of a skill wants
tier + (N - 1)character levels, so a tier-1 skill takes its tenth point at level 10 and a tier-30 skill at 39. - Two stores, one pool. A skill with a spell slot keeps its points where
GetSpellLevelfinds them, so every ladder that already scaled with spell level scales with investment for free. Slotless skills - auras, passives, masteries - keep theirs separately. Both spend from the same per-level pool, and both refund a rank at a time. - Books raise spells. Points raise skills. A spell a Book could teach takes its level from books and item bonuses only - no skill point can touch it, and the Spells sheet has no spend controls. A skill with no book takes points as before. The line is already in the data: the Paladin's seven were authored bookless on purpose, "earned at the tree, not bought". Any tree row whose slot is a book spell is retired from the tree - still castable, still readiable, just no longer somewhere to spend.
- Auras are the right button. Lighting one clears the readied right-button skill; readying a skill puts the aura out. One slot, one occupant.
- Unbuilt rows are inert. A skill marked not implemented is listed, described and struck through with a red X in game: it takes no points, no hotkey and no assignment. Those are the rows still waiting on design - or, more often, waiting on a mechanic this engine does not have. A row is never approximated into something close; it says what it would do and does nothing.
The Sorcerer's tree is thin, and honestly so. The books rule retired her
thirteen castable rows - they are spells, and spells take their level from books. Of the seventeen
left, four pay out: Warmth, Enchant (your weapon burns), and Fire and
Lightning Mastery, which grant their element's damage and its resistance.
The masteries are deliberately not D2's "deepens every fire spell": this engine scales a spell by its level and has no per-element channel, so mastery reads as command of the element instead.
The other thirteen are inert for reasons that will not change soon - ten are the cold page, and this engine has no cold damage type at all, so there is nothing to scale, resist or pierce.
The masteries are deliberately not D2's "deepens every fire spell": this engine scales a spell by its level and has no per-element channel, so mastery reads as command of the element instead.
The other thirteen are inert for reasons that will not change soon - ten are the cold page, and this engine has no cold damage type at all, so there is nothing to scale, resist or pierce.
What each level buys
Every skill, spell and aura caps at . Three formulas govern what a rank is worth, and all three are read out of the source that defines them.
Why the cap is and not 98. A character earns one
skill point per level from 2 to - points in
a lifetime. The cap used to be 98, which was that budget, so it never bound a build; it
only restated how much there was to spend. Against a curve that multiplies by
1 + 1/ every rank, that made concentration win by six orders
of magnitude - 98 points in one skill was about x9,770,000, while the same 98 spread over five was
five things at x10.8. A cap that binds before the budget is what makes the tree a set of
choices: maxed skills and change.The three ladders
- Spell power -
ScaleSpellEffectadds an eighth of the running value per rank, so it compounds. The table shows a base of carried up the ladder with the game's own integer arithmetic, which truncates at every step; a floating power would be slightly wrong at every row. - Aura radius -
- Character level - the Rule of Rangs. The last column is how far above a skill's own tier you must be to hold that rank, so a tier-1 skill reaches rank 30 at character level 30 and a tier-7 skill at 36.
| Rank | Spell power (base ) | Multiplier | Aura radius | Character levels above tier |
|---|
Not every skill uses every ladder. A spell's damage runs through the power
column. An aura's reach is the radius column. A melee skill like Zeal has its own written ladder -
Zeal buys a strike at ranks 1, 3 and 5 and accuracy at every rank - and reads none of these. The
per-skill effect is on each row of Every skill; this table is the shape of the
curves behind them.