More Simplified Tooltips Discussion

As things are right now, advanced tooltips becomes available when pressing down the control button. However, the request for a toggle option between advanced and simple tooltip defaults have been forwarded to the developers, so there is indeed a chance that we might see such an option in the future.

The "easy to learn, hard to master" design philosophy is one we have been happy with for quite a while, and with Diablo III we would like to maintain a strong and immediate focus on getting into the gameplay right from the start.

We feel that the best way to achieve this is to make the game quick to pick up and fun to play straight out of the box, and by offering short and clear descriptions, and not too many numbers, we hope to avoid confusion and irritation. Simplified tooltips are more helpful for the novice player to learn and play the game, and for the more experienced players, they help to quickly differentiate between abilities.

We do of course realise that there are those who prefer the advanced tooltips over the simplified ones, and we are also very much aware that there are those who simply want as much information available as possible without any filters. We acknowledge this, and we do of course want to find good ways to cater to these wishes as well.

In order to present more detailed Diablo III data and information, we are looking into the possibilities for creating a web page similar to what we see with the D2 Arreat Summit (http://classic.battle.net/diablo2exp/skills/barbarian-combatskills.shtml). Having such a page for Diablo III would allow us to provide more organised content, and it would also allow us to provide more timely content. For an example, if we would make a hotfix, we would be able to get that updated information up on the web page immediately, whereas the game client would require a patch before the tooltip can be updated.