Something you might have missed that'll make your D3 experience smoother

[Ryquis]

I thought this would be a nice thing to do after a conversation with a random in Hell A2 where he was complaining that he couldn't pick the abilities he wanted, and people in the room agreed with him:

There is an option, under the game preferences section of the options tab, to make it so all your action slots are completely customizable instead of being restricted by categories. If you have 2 skills you want in the same category, you can pick and tailor every facet of the abilities you use to fit your play style. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say a lot of people struggling in higher difficulties haven't stumbled upon this yet, and are caught up in a very limiting and restrictive metagame that essentially makes high end play impossible unless you're a god on the keyboard (I don't know how I would play a barb if I didn't have at least 2 shouts available at all times), and blizz really makes no effort to enlighten the player, in fact, the way the game presents it to you makes it seem like you HAVE to play with 1 skill from each category.

So there you go, I hope someone that didn't know this now does.

[Raxingar]

Yeah I was playing around with the options when I first got in the game and found that option, "elective mode" which is awesome cause I kind of hated the restrictions without the option. Kind of makes me wonder; why they put those restrictions in at all?

[Mormolyce]

I think they did it to introduce the different ability "slots" to new players. Like, these are your 2 main attacks, this is your snare slot, escape slot, and so on.

I think Blizzard is conceptually struggling with the balance between fixed talent builds and re-talenting on the fly. They have the same problem in WoW, but in D3 they've been much less restrictive. I wonder if they will actually patch this in some way, or at least clarify their design intent.

Has anyone been able to verify if using multiple skills from the same category breaks the Nephalem Valor buff? It's supposed to break if you change abilities. Don't know if there are enough level 60s to work this out yet, but that might give us an idea of whether they want us doing this or not.

[Ryquis]

Well since I run two shouts, and am sitting at level 56 I guess I'm next in line to test it out... I must say though, it would be a real downer if Blizz WANTS me to have less variety; I mean it's bad enough that they never really make an explicit statement of "Hey this is how you learn the game, but theres this option tucked away in the menus if you really wanna metagame"

[Arrowstormen]

Everyone has mentioned elective mode, even I know it, and I haven't played the damn game yet.

[Cyphran]

We need a sticky with the title "We Know: Elective Mode allows you to choose all abilities!"

[Baelskar]

Thank you, so much. You just made my solo farming a billion times easier.

[Highangel]

hmmm this was 1 of the things i wondered about in the beta, why can't i use all my stuff?! :-)
Thought it was a design decision... nice to know.