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[[Image:Talisman.png|left|thumb|150px|Talisman]]Before we get into the Tailisman I want to talk about Charms from Diablo 2. The charm system, if you are not familiar with it, was a very simple cost benefit thing. There were these objects that would sit in your inventory, they would take up some of your inventory space but they would give you a wide variety of bonuses. This was good, we liked the concept behind the system and we liked the charms themselves but what it led to was people keeping as many charms as they could and keeping a tiny bit of inventory space and we didn't think that was a great choice to have to make. You couldn't resist taking the charms because it augmented your build so well. How do we solve this? The Talisman is a dedicated inventory for your charms and not only that it gets bigger over time, it keeps all of the advantages of the Diablo charm system. You have more charms that you can fit in there so you still have to pick and choose which ones you're going to have to augment your build.<br><br>
[[Image:Talisman 2.png|right|thumb|150px|Talisman]]So now that we had a better spot to put your charms we wanted to work on the charms themselves. So how have charms evolved? The bonuses for Charms in Diablo 2 were very varied, incredibly varied, there was almost no kind of bonus they didn't have and in Diablo 3 we are going to have them concentrate on your core attributes so this is very much about customising your build, about augmenting what weaknesses you have and making your strengths better etc. The charms are going to be a core part of your build so they are still very important and there are different tiers of them throughout the game so as you go forward you're going to be playing with your charms a lot. As you choose new skills you'll be choosing different charms to try to make up for the options you chose. <br><br>
We haven't talked about Runes for quite a while, in fact we gave them the year off last year to let them percolate a little bit but they are back and they are in the game and you can play them here at the show. They are fully implemented in the Witch Doctor, the Wizard and Barbarian and I urge you to play the game and give Skill Runes a try.<br><br>
Just a quick update to get you up to speed to where we are with Runes. If you remember Runes are a system for modifying your skills, they drop in the world like gems do but instead of putting them into your items to modify what your items do you put these in your skills and modify what your skills do. Skill Runes are a huge feature for your characters. Usually when we think about customisation people think about things like skin colour or hair style or maybe gear but the skills that you pick for your character are a huge part of your character customisation.<br><br>
[[Image:Build numbers.png|right|thumb|150px|Possible # of builds]]I'll give you an example of what I'm talking about. Take an Amazon, we didn't just make Sorceresses or Barbarians, we made Spearzons, Frenzy Barbs, Nova Sorceresses, things like that. We are really going to blow the lid off this idea with Skill Runes by providing a whole lot more builds. How many more builds are we going to provide? I kind of got curious about this so I enlisted the help of some programmers to give me some help because I blow things up for a living and they came back with this outrageous number. 96,886,969,344 builds per class.<br><br>
That's a really big number and hard to wrap your head around so let me try to clarify what we are talking about. This is the number of skill combinations with runes that you can have per class, this does not include things like traits, gear, dyes, charms, this is purely active skills. You are really going to be able to come up with a tonne of different kinds of class combinations. It's not just about numbers skill runes are going to be able to provide a whole lot more and one of the key things to keep in mind here is that skill runes don't just change what a skill does they have the potential to change the way it looks.<br><br>
[[Image:Skill_rune_effects.JPG|right|thumb|150px|Skill Rune effects]]Originally we weren't thinking about having different graphics for every skill rune choice because it's a tonne of work so we thought we'd just do the ones that sound interesting. What we found along the way was that if we didn't have a graphical change the skill rune just felt weak or even broken and we found that everyone at the office would gravitate toward the skill runes that had graphic changes. This really comes down to a fundamental question which is that we could just change all the numbers underneath, give you a numerical change or we could have the screen filled with zombie bears and which would you rather have? Zombie Bears of course.<br><br>
[[Image:Rune types.png|right|thumb|150px|Skill Rune Types]]We still have five times the skill Runes only they have now changed their names. They are now called Crimson, Indigo, Obsidian, Golden, Alabaster. We had a system before where we named the runes according to the concept attached to them like Multistrike or Energy and Multistrike Runes did Multistrike things and Energy Runes did stuff with your resources. What we found was that we kept coming up with ideas that didn't fit with those concepts very well. At first we would have some concepts that would fit really well, we'd get some things that did a multishot and they would fit but when you started coming up with wacky ideas it became harder to shoehorn them into that system.<br><br>
To give you an example here. The Witch Doctor's new skill called Poison Dart and that kind of fit with the Power Rune before but then we changed the skill so we had another version that would make it a rapid-fire skill and then it worked really well with Multistrike but then we had this wacky idea of the Witch Doctor being able to shoot a live snake that would attach itself to monster's faces and stun them. Where does that fit? It doesn't fit anywhere so we just changed the names of the runes then we can come up with as many kinds of wacky ideas as we want. <br><br>
