Re: diablo 3 - amazons
Grouping Barbarians and Amazons would be a tad too much. They're two different types of fighters the way I see it. A tank with its shouts/melee skills (if they kept it along those lines which seems they did at this point) and then the more fragile, missile using type (I know, I'm seriously dismissing the spear and javelin skills atm
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Amazons are only fragile because we need so many dexterity to make our damage decent. Take the away or change it somehow to make it more effective in mele - i.e. in dungeons and dragon, dexterity is an important part of your defence rating.
Now I agree that putting them in the same class is a bad idea, though I don't think they already revealed how the class/skill/stats system will work, and I'm now try to give an example how you could merge a mele class and a ranged class in one build - the biggest problem might be combining in the elemental skills, though those can be for an other class.
P.S. note that I don't think they will do so, though it could.
Make for each class two large main skill tabs. For the barbarian this would be one with combat skills as we know them. The other one would be a merge between the warcries - of which most aren't used - and the masteries - you don't need a mastery for each class of weapons, and if you want them to chose, you can lets them change the mastery per skill.
Then you can have three smaller side branches of which they have to chose one. One side branch containing skills that allow the barbarian to go crazy like we know him now. A fearless warrior that jumps in battle. It contains skill to enlarge his damage output during battle. Skills like frenzy, something that enlarges their damage/life with each kill and this for the duration of the battle...
An other branch might be focussed on tankability. Containing skill like stun effects, concentrate etc. It still is a full mele warrior though it focusses more on defence then on pure killing power.
And the last branch can be one containing different ranged skills that on combination with the right gear/stats and skill from the masteries, is somewhat viable on its own. This branch has skill like multi shot, double thrown, strafe and even perhaps guided arrows/knifes or something.
The main focus of the branch is try and weaken the monsters enough so that when they are closes, the barbarian simply can kill them in a few strikes.
The reason why amazons don't play like this is because they don't have enough good defensive skills, they need an offensive stat distribution and if we be honest, they don't really have a great offensive skill for this type of play.
I hope they don't, though if they want to be original, I'd say that is original.
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