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Blizzard’s Jay Wilson has announced that the Diablo III rune system is finally complete, and no more majors changes will be made before the final release of the game. According to the Diablo 3 game director, the new rune system will go live in a few days through a new beta patch.

This looks like it will be the last major beta patch that will be introduced in Diablo III as Blizzard is preparing for the game’s launch in the second quarter of 2012. It’s just another proof that the game is very close to be being completed as Blizzard is just adding the final touches to what will become one of the best games of all time.

The Rune System has given a lot of headaches to Blizzard, and it has received several major overhauls in the past months, however, Jay Wilson confirmed that the company found the perfect system. According to Wilson, the runes have been the “biggest design hurdle” of Diablo 3, and the developers and designers were forced to come up with new things all time.

The Diablo III game director said that the Diablo series has also concentrated on “item drops” and in the latest version there were more than 120 base skills. This meant that more 600 rune varieties were available, and if you took the “five quality levels” then you would have had more than 3,000 runes in Diablo 3. This was “a problem,” added Wilson.

It appears that a lot of gamers complained about the rune variants, while Blizzard noticed that there was no way people could have had a lot of fun “juggling” with the runes. In addition, this posed a huge problem for the gamers’ inventories. The final changes made to the rune system have solved all the problems, and the new “skill runes” will allow players to customize their characters in a fun and easy way.

Skill runes will be unlocked while gamers will level up, and a rune has a single rank. This means that a rune has a single “notable effect” and it’s not acting as an “upgrade system.”

As Diablo 3 characters will only level up to 60, the new skills will be unlocked up until level 60.

The Diablo III Beta Patch 13 will go live soon enough and the users will finally be able to make use of the Skill Runes in their final form. Maybe this time Blizzard will finally meet its deadline and Diablo 3 will be released in the second quarter of 2012.