Returning to one of yesterday’s threads about the odd lack of fire skills for the Wizard, a fan posted a recolored screenshot, with the red laser-like beam of Disintegrate palette shifted to purple, which is the official color of arcane spells. Bashiok took notice.
[BLUE]Nice! Looks pretty cool in purple. There are a couple points to be made though on the current visual style of the skill.
It doesn’t actually feel anything like fire in-game. The screenshots don’t really give a good impression of the way it looks and acts. In a screenshot you may think… well it has a lot of colors of fire, but in motion you just don’t get that impression. It comes across as a red-dominated skill. And the sound of the ability actually plays a huge part in how it feels, and it feels like a very focused and powerful energy beam.
The second point is that we’ve made some conscious effort to ensure that we’re not looking at each tree of every class and making all the abilities look and feel the same. If you were to really specialize in a single tree it would probably get boring kind of quick seeing nothing but… in this case, purple. So in some ways there is intentional shifts in palette and design to ensure there’s enough visual variety.
Third, and maybe most important, is that the skill is in the wizard’s arcane tree, which should be a big tip off. But also if there are any skills where stylistically their visual effects may not obviously reflect the type of damage they do, their damage type is specifically called out in their tooltip. Which it is for disintegrate, as arcane damage.[/BLUE]
Here’s the purple fan-colored shot, beside the red original.
