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Some skills, such as the Acid Rain version of Acid Cloud, reference ranges that are specified in yards. How can I figure out what this translates to on my screen?

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There's nothing more you can do other than learn how big the individual skills are, as yards (like all game units) are of arbitrary length. – Raven Dreamer♦ May 14 '12 at 16:31
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Plus it is relative to your screen size :) – ayckoster May 14 '12 at 16:36

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Here is an awesome visualization of the distances, courtesy of diablo.incgamers.com. Note the dashed lines that indicate different display ratios.

enter image description here

So 10 yards gives you a radius about the height of your character, while 40 yards gives a circle that reaches just about to the edge of a 4:3 screen (note that you can see further in front of you than you can in back).

Here's the larger discussion around the creation of this image.

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Reading the original article, it's clear that those are yards. I agree with the o.p. that it looks more like the player is closer to 8 or even 10 yards tall as opposed to 5, meaning people in D3 are almost as tall as a three story building on earth. Flansburgh and Linnell? – Theodore Murdock May 14 '12 at 20:58
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I think a case could be made that they are not 8 or 10 yards tall. It depends on the angle that you are looking down on him at. You are looking over his head and then on to the floor. This appears to be a shallow angle since you can see farther forward than you can back. I'm too lazy to do the math to figure out what the angle would have to be to make 5 feet look like 30 feet though. – MaskedPlant May 14 '12 at 21:08
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And again. Game-units. Entirely meaningless. – Raven Dreamer♦ May 14 '12 at 22:17
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You shouldn't expect two entirely different worlds to both have the the exact same crazy measuring system... this "yard" unit you speak of probably just represents a different size in the world of Diablo III :) – Rachel May 17 '12 at 13:34
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Their official explanation was simple: they used yards for globalization purposes. It is simple to switch the word "yards" for "meters" in those parts of the words that use the metric system. If they had used the more intuitive "feet" then they would have had to tack on some numerical conversion as well, since there is no "equivalent" to feet in the metric system. – Phong May 21 '12 at 22:00
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