Diablo 4’s skill tree has changed dramatically

Diablo 4’s skill tree, through which players allocate skill points to learn new talents and abilities, was once a totally sick, evil-looking, gnarled and blackened tree with, like, hellfire inside, and veins and blood pouring out the bottom. The tree looked great. Playing the game’s beta this weekend, I was deeply conflicted to discover that the game’s skill tree is no longer that sick-ass literal tree.

Instead, Diablo 4The action-RPG will launch with a simpler video game interface. Now, the skill tree can be described as a figurative one. It has nodes and straight connective lines and branches that are brimming with modifiers and skills. This diagram now looks almost like it was carved from stone. The big board is navigable by players using a mouse, an analog stick or a keyboard. They can also spend skill points they earn through leveling up.

Here’s a peek the current look of Diablo 4’s skill tree for the Barbarian class:

Image: Blizzard Entertainment

Changes from a sickly old, ancient hell tree into lines and icons are perfectly fine. While the original skill tree looked awful, it was still practical. The tree shown two years ago was clearly described as “pre-alpha,” “in development content,” and “NOT FINAL.”

At least, it was the second-most recent version of the skill trees. Diablo 4Blizzard presented an earlier version back in 2019 at BlizzCon.

Image: Blizzard Entertainment

A more easily-readable skill tree, regardless of the visual change is what games like Diablo 4 needs. There is a huge number of skills abilities that players can acquire over the course of the first 50 levels, all of which players can try out — either by acquiring the skill itself and respeccing, or by acquiring a piece of gear that has a skill attached to it.

Blizzard’s approach to speccing out your character in Diablo 4 is a blend of the studio’s approach to Diablo 2 and Diablo 3. As executive producer and head of the Diablo franchise Rod Fergusson put it, “Diablo 2It was like locking in, but you could also respec at any difficulty. You could respec once per difficulty, but with D3You could change your body like your clothes. Everything was gear-based as opposed to skill-based.”

Fergusson added, “I think the fact that we have skills on the equipment [in Diablo 4] is really nice for experimentation — as a sorceress I [might] get Blizzard [on a pair of boots] three levels before I should and I can try Blizzard to see if I actually want it.”

Game director Joe Shely told Polygon in a roundtable interview that “having your character feel like a compilation of choices that you made leads to really interesting decisions, at least interesting opportunities.”

Image: Blizzard Entertainment

Shely said that the Diablo team is aware that players, especially early on, won’t have a full understanding of each class’ set of skills. They will love to try new things.

“When you look at our respec systems,” Shely said, “which apply to both the skill tree and to Paragon for later levels, which is our endgame progression system, we’ve really tried to approach it in a way that has the sense that making a choice matters, and your character is not the same as everyone else’s character, but that you have a lot of flexibility to try things out.

“You’ve got the ability to respec point by point. […]It is easy to click on Unspend to spend a point, and then you can use it for the opposite thing. However, as you progress in levels, that cost increases to allow you to make these choices. [feel]You should take some time to think about it. Of course, you can also respec your whole tree at once if you want to rebuild from the ground up.”

Fergusson noted that as players go deeper and deeper into their character “the in-game currency cost to respect becomes higher and higher — eventually you’ll get to the point where you have a level 90 Barbarian and instead of completely changing my build it’s better to just roll a new Barbarian and start again.”