Two redditers took some time to make an interesting calculation: How many possible builds are there in total in Diablo III and how many years will it take to play them all.
Blind Sight and BetaKeyTakeaway use the combinations formula to determine how many different builds will each class have and what do they all add up to. We'll save you the math (which you can follow by visiting reddit) and instead will just scare with some twelve digit numbers. Yes, twelve, like in "a lot".
In guide mode where the skills are divided into certain categories and is a bit more restrictive towards skill combinations, the numbers are the following:
Non-elective mode build variations | |
Barbarian | 20,160,000,000 |
Demon Hunter | 21,840,000,000 |
Monk | 9,828,000,000 |
Witch Doctor | 16,380,000,000 |
Wizard | 34,125,000,000 |
The fun begins in elective mode where you can put anything anywhere, thus greatly increasing the number of combinations. Just see for yourself:
Elective mode build variations | |
Barbarian | 652,863,750,000 (22 skills and 16 passives) |
Demon Hunter | 717,670,078,100 (23 skills and 15 passives) |
Monk | 308,626,500,000 (21 skills and 14 passives) |
Witch Doctor | 520,451,796,900 (22 skills and 15 passives) |
Wizard | 1,259,070,313,000 (25 skills and 15 passives) |
This adds up to a total of 3,458,682,438,000 (3 trillion 458 billion) different builds in elective mode. According to the original poster, if 10 million people played Diablo 3 for 40 hours/week, playing each build for 5 minutes, it will take 13 years, 10 months, and 8½ days to play all possible builds.
How's that for variety?
Source: Reddit