Diablo III- Skills Article CLXVI: Elective Mode Analyses

The rest of the articles in the Skills series are going to be about applying Elective Mode to the classes, and what you’re going to need- and how to determine what you want in the rest of your skill slots.  This is going to take a bit of thinking, and it’s going to take a bit of organizing.

There are some basic requirements, and I’m going to use them to organize the articles themselves, for ease of reading.

The first point in each article that covers a class is going to be which skills you want to have on your mouse.  This is because these two skills are the ones that are easiest and fastest to access at all times, and are therefore should not only be skills that are easy to use, but skills that benefit from being used all the time and can apply to almost any situation you’re going to find yourself in as you play.  This is also the smallest set of skills- only two skills can be set to the mouse, and with the large number of skills each class has that you’re likely to want there, it takes a lot of thought to work things out.

The second bit of discussion is going to be what sorts of skills you want to have in your hotbar.  Keep in mind this isn’t as much about the individual skills, as about what kind of thing the skills do.  Blizzard has done a fairly good job of dividing the skills up into four subsets with nice themes, but the fact of the matter is that these themes don’t always leave the skill groups with a unified function- from the Barbarian’s Defensive skill group, that has two mobility skills, one manipulation skill, and one defense skill to the Wizard’s Mastery skill group, which is one tactical skill, one defense skill, and one offense skill.  Which skills you want to actually have on your hotbar is defined more by what exactly they do or how you have to use them than it is by element, damage, or more vague themes (the difference between a tactical skill and a defensive or offensive skill is clearly not made by these skill groups, which isn’t bad, per se, just a bit clumsy for non-Elective Mode players).  It doesn’t help that some runes can change the function of a skill, even when they only modify its secondary effects, to the point of changing the skill’s best purpose.

Finally, each such article is going to make mention of Passive Skills and how Elective Mode changes their utility and their impact on what Active Skills you take- and the impact Elective Mode selection of Active Skills can have on your choice of Passive skills.  I may also make brief mention of how the skill and gear selections impact each other as well, since that can also be significantly changed by Elective Mode.