I thought I'd spread the message from a fellow guildmate (Strength in Honour!) - credit goes to him.

A lot of people who didn't play beta (and even some who did.) don't realize this is a thing.

Elective Mode is very important. Go to the skill calculator here:

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/barbarian#.

Notice how above each skill slot, it says Primary, Secondary, Defensive, Etc?

With EM off, which is the default, you can only assign those skills to those slots. Which cuts the number of possible builds available to you way way down. For example, with EM off, a Barb can't use both Bash and Cleave, if he were so inclined.

Turning EM on lets you put any skill anywhere (With some exceptions. They don't let you stick some skills on your LMB.), and lets come up with much more diverse builds. And just in general gives you more freedom.

I will never understand why Blizzard set it up this way. During beta, especially open beta, I saw a lot of complaints from people who didn't know the option existed.

Also, turn on Advanced Tool tips. Makes your tool tips actually tell you useful information. The default/simple tool tips in D3 are extremely basic (more than WoWs) and basically don't give you any numbers. That's bad.

So, now you know. (And knowing is half the battle.)

TL;DR: Turning elective mode on lets you place any skill anywhere by removing the skill categories on the hotbar. This allows you to make any build you want.

good to know.

Nice tip, thanks.

thank you sir

Word. Thanks, dude

Now I know, and knowing is half the battle.

yeah that made the beta way more interesting

Thanks. I really had no idea about this.

Why would they do this?

I was wondering if there was someway to do that, nice to know about this. Grazie

@TentPole: They did this so that they can expand their market segment to non-gamers and non-core gamers market i.e. your grandmothers and hippy aunts.

@Henny: ...but isn't the greatest potential market for Diablo III all the people that enjoyed Diablo I/II way back in the day? Seems strange.

Anyway, thanks OP for bringing this up.

Thank you very much! Its a shame that this isn't on by default but I'm glad they included it.

@isnipeyoudie: Those people are confirmed purchases. Blizzard is very good at balancing risk versus rewards. In this case, risk alienating the old school players by a little for an avalanche of new fans who will get hook on the digital morphine that is Diablo.

True story: I played all weekend on the open beta, looked at the options multiple times, and didn't notice this.

Thanks OP!

@isnipeyoudie said:

@Henny: ...but isn't the greatest potential market for Diablo III all the people that enjoyed Diablo I/II way back in the day? Seems strange.

Anyway, thanks OP for bringing this up.

That is the greatest potential market, but that market is probably about a 75% guaranteed buy while outside of that market is probably a very very small guaranteed buy.

(I pulled the 75 out of my ass. It is just an example, I wouldn't be surprised if it was way off.)

Tell your friends, I had to tell a bunch of people who didn't know.

Wow, you just made this game a billion times better. Thanks!

On a similar note, a lot of my other problems with the game revolving around the lack of specific numbers and stats could also be fixed with various optional settings. I have only played the beta, so maybe this has changed in the final release, but I really didn't like the way the game defined skills with ambiguous or subjective descriptions like "does light damage" or "slightly increased damage" as opposed to "does 16% weapon damage" or "adds 5 fire damage."

I was a lot happier with the game once it started giving me real numbers.

What a bizarre thing to put in. Thanks for the heads up, I never would have guessed.

@BBAlpert said:

On a similar note, a lot of my other problems with the game revolving around the lack of specific numbers and stats could also be fixed with various optional settings. I have only played the beta, so maybe this has changed in the final release, but I really didn't like the way the game defined skills with ambiguous or subjective descriptions like "does light damage" or "slightly increased damage" as opposed to "does 16% weapon damage" or "adds 5 fire damage."

I was a lot happier with the game once it started giving me real numbers.

That's another option that they hid. If you hold Control and mouse over the skills, it gives a more number-y readout. There's an check box buried somewhere to toggle that on all the time, as well.

@isnipeyoudie said:

@Henny: ...but isn't the greatest potential market for Diablo III all the people that enjoyed Diablo I/II way back in the day? Seems strange.

Anyway, thanks OP for bringing this up.

If I'm missing sarcasm, I apologize for explaining the obvious and being humorless.

Otherwise:

The amount of people who are playing games have exploded in the last 12 years (since Diablo 2 was released in 2000). It's inevitable that there are a lot more potential customers who have never played a Diablo game before, compared to those who have: which is why "simplified" is the default.

I haven't put any thought or effort into character builds (yet?), but I expect that it's a lot harder to make a build that is straight up broken as long as you keep elective mode to off, while obviously, the potential for greatness is potentially (but not guaranteed) greater with it set to on.

I didn't really understand the reasoning behind making elective mode an off-by-default setting until I was watching the stream yesterday where Brad was playing D2. The instant he put points into his stats and skills, the chat exploded with talk of "oh God, he ruined the character. He should start over because he wasted those points." The default non-elective mode helps give a bit of structure for your build if you don't have something already in mind. If nothing else, it at least introduces newer players to the concept of specializing by skill types (a primary attack, secondary attack, and a few supports) as opposed to spreading your points among mutually exclusive skills (like weapon masteries or auras).

Granted, this issue is also already fixed by the ability to respec whenever you want, but I see why they'd go that extra step.

I suppose more flexibility is always better, but I think that the way skills are split up so far (I'm only level 12) is very logical. One free attack, one 'mana' attack, one utility skill, one movement skill... that's really as far as I've gotten.

Thanks for the PSA.

Give me options or give me death!

Thanks for this, and also it's nice that you didn't shit your pants with anger and then go give a 0 on Metacritic.

The option being off as default makes sense, as people have said. For the people who the system is good for, it's another safeguard from you just making a totally broken build. For the diehard diablo fans who want to tinker with minutia, they should have no problem finding the option and clicking it. That could be me though, the first thing I do in every game is look through the options and tweak stuff around.

Oh yeah, and Advanced Tooltips. Those are the other thing you'd want to turn on. Though again, for the players that just want to know 'this hits hard, this hits weak' it's perfectly fine. For the players who may just go through normal and call it quits, you probably never need to worry about these things.

Thanks for the heads up man. I didn't know about this feature, and I can tell already that it will make a big difference.

This PSA was brought to you by a kind, informed duder. Thanks duder.

Might also want to add that turning advanced tooltips on (the box above) is pretty damn essential for comparing skills. Was quite surprised at how little information the skills gave you before I discovered that one.

Good on ya, mate. Everyone must know!

Bump because everyone should know this. The build I currently use on my Barbarian tears through everything, doesn't die and is very unorthodox, at least I think: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/calculator/barbarian#WQXYVR!Zcd!aaaZZZ

No fury-spending, three defensive abilities and two AOE's with cooldown. But my god does it work!