Posted by Bashiok on US forums, http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/3657284291#1

I'm ok with most of it, having short and succinct explanations is a good thing. What is completely and utterly dumb though is this part:

<<<<< Some of you have been discussing tooltip complexity and more than a few times the World of Warcraft solution of having two different sets of tooltips (simplified and normal) has of course not escaped us. It’s a solution we’d like to explore, but if we did it’s extremely likely that our “normal” tooltips would be the toned-down versions we’re working toward now, and the “simplified” would be even more basic, giving game intent advice in place of any numbers. >>>>>

You "could" have an even more simplified version - though imo you underestimate the intelligence of your gamers by a wide margin when thinking that you need that. Still, you could - but something that would surely add a lot more value to the ingame experience for most of us would be to have more detailed tooltips on an in-game easily accessible but separate tome of pages.

Pls uprate if you agree, and/or request sticky... Not needed at release, but gd, at least don't waste time going in the opposite direction...

But as Tzekelkan said, someone asked for a checkbox and Bashiok said he'll put it to the devs. To be honest, I'd like to see this too. I'm also interested in a full description of my spells rather than a hugely simplified version.

As things are right now, advanced tooltips becomes available when pressing down the control button. However, the request for a toggle option between advanced and simple tooltip defaults have been forwarded to the developers, so there is indeed a chance that we might see such an option in the future.

The "easy to learn, hard to master" design philosophy is one we have been happy with for quite a while, and with Diablo III we would like to maintain a strong and immediate focus on getting into the gameplay right from the start.

We feel that the best way to achieve this is to make the game quick to pick up and fun to play straight out of the box, and by offering short and clear descriptions, and not too many numbers, we hope to avoid confusion and irritation. Simplified tooltips are more helpful for the novice player to learn and play the game, and for the more experienced players, they help to quickly differentiate between abilities.

We do of course realise that there are those who prefer the advanced tooltips over the simplified ones, and we are also very much aware that there are those who simply want as much information available as possible without any filters. We acknowledge this, and we do of course want to find good ways to cater to these wishes as well.

In order to present more detailed Diablo III data and information, we are looking into the possibilities for creating a web page similar to what we see with the D2 Arreat Summit (http://classic.battle.net/diablo2exp/skills/barbarian-combatskills.shtml). Having such a page for Diablo III would allow us to provide more organised content, and it would also allow us to provide more timely content. For an example, if we would make a hotfix, we would be able to get that updated information up on the web page immediately, whereas the game client would require a patch before the tooltip can be updated.