Characters can use up to six skills at once

The Demon Hunter: The game’s ranged weapon specialist, Demon Hunters are fast-moving archers with devastating offensive capabilities and a wide variety of tactical traps and demonic gadgets. The Monk: The follower of a thousand Gods, Monks from Ivgorod are holy warriors. Combining fast-hitting, melee-ranged martial arts with holy magics, auras, and defensive tactics. The Witch Doctor – A mysterious class from the jungles of Teganze, the Witch Doctor wields a huge array of magical attacks, as well as the ability to mind control enemies and summon up pets to fight alongside him.

The Wizard – An evolutionary improvement from the Sorcerer and Sorceress seen in previous Diablo titles. Wizards boast an impressive array of offensive spells that are useful for every situation, as well as defensive spells and escape abilities that combine to create this murderous glass cannon. The skills and their presentation evolved greatly during the game’s development, with the largest change coming late in the beta test, shortly before release. See the skill tree article for a full history. Characters can use up to six skills at once, and may cycle between them with only minimal cooldowns.

The biggest change from Diablo 2 comes from the runestone system, which enables every skill to be modified into five different forms, most of which are radically different in function from the base skill. This creates a vast number of possible builds, and with the easy respec system, players can try out all of the skills and rune effects, and switch between them as needed.

Each class has around 25 unique skills, which are unlocked at the rate of about one per level, from level 1 until level 30. Each skill has five rune effects which are unlocked every 5 or 6 levels, thus granting at least one and often three of four new abilities to try out every level up until the maximum level 60. Passive skills are also unique to each class, and starting at level 10, they are unlocked one every few levels, all the way up to level 60. Characters can have up to 3 passive skills active, adding an additional passive skill slot at level 10, 20, and 30.