SmashLovesTitanQuest said:
Hmmm, well that holds true for PvP chars I suppose, but not really single player characters, since in SP its more about "how much fun can I have" as opposed to the "how quickly can I kill people" stance PvP requires.
Do keep in mind the bulk of the game is meant to play repetitively at the highest difficulty level, and the tuning and balancing of that content has to be tied to reasonably optimal builds so that it isn't made trivial. That becomes nigh impossible to do when you have shitloads of variables and allow people to break their characters with substandard skill allocations. I actually adore theorycrafting and will happily spend hours pouring over different possibilities in skill calculators and talent builders, but even I have to admit that any system that is poorly balanced is a bad system in want of changing.
Look at Rift and Guild Wars 2. On the surface, Rift appears to have the far more complex, and ergo far more rewarding system. But Guild Wars 2's more streamlined system is going to be 100 times better to design content around, and 100,000 times better for PvP. If Diablo was a single player only game that you were meant to go through once for story and then never again, then I agree, balance would be a secondary consideration at best. But it's not, and I can see why they've done what they have, however disappointing it may be to have your options limited.
