Diablo 3 - Imminent?

Deadend · Aug 21, 2009

12 min monk gameplay video

http://www.giantbomb.com/twelve-minutes-with-diablo-iiis-monk/17-1228/

Sirius · Aug 21, 2009

Das ist gut. Bash-happy zergling melee has always been one of my personal favourites, so unless the fifth class is really awesome I think this will be a mainstay for me.

Speaking of which, considering where they have yet to go, it doesn't take much to note it's highly likely the last one is going to be your ranged class (in fact I bet they call it a "Ranger" or something to that effect. ). Bow, most likely, and I'm guessing it'll be complemented by some sort-of nature-ish tricks as well. It's hard to go very far without trespassing on the witch doctor's territory, but only a little; if they do an "animal companion" type thing, it would make sense in that class. If they do shapeshifting, likewise, and it could be forced in there (although I half expect it'll be pushed into the expansion now, if they bring it back at all). Wouldn't surprise me to see a native American motif for that either; Barbarian was pretty much your Caucasian guy, with wizard Asian, witch doctor tribal African, and now monk ... sort of Byzantine, maybe a little middle-eastern.

But yeah, we have the witch doctor doing an interesting twist on a replacement for the necromancer, and honestly it could work. Barbarian is barbarian, nothing really to say there; and the wizard does a good job replacing the sorceress. The monk kind of melds parts of the paladin and parts of the assassin, though we will see quite a bit of each dropped outright, it does seem. The two classes that are largely neglected are the amazon and druid; the elemental parts of each are covered decently by the wizard, and some of the summoning maaaaybe by the witch doctor, but not much else.

...yeah. Actually, if you approach it from that perspective I'm still picking a classic D&Dish ranger character to be the most likely follow-up. Maybe with lycanthropy added to the mix, if they intended to bring that back.

The Cox · Aug 22, 2009

As much as I love the Barbarian and am probably going to be making that my first toon, the monk looks bad ass!!!

Sort of like gambit with his stick =D

Sirius · Aug 24, 2009

Interesting...
http://pc.ign.com/articles/101/1017305p1.html
There's some talk there about various things, including how they plan to handle the "end-game", magic find, a confirmation that nightmare/hell and hardcore will be returning, and a hint that the final class might be a returning class from one of the earlier games. If we read into that, it most likely means a rogue or amazon - something to that effect. That they haven't decided, on the other hand, may mean they're mixing the abilities up a bit.

noein · Aug 24, 2009

http://www.incgamers.com/News/18182/two-blizzard-releases-next-year

Confirmed, Diablo 3 will not be released next year

Valindria · Aug 25, 2009

Thanks for posting new stuff. I was out of town all weekend for Heart and Journey at the State Fair.

Full Monk Skill Tree (of Blizzcon Skills)

The Monk’s skills were an odd mixture at Blizzcon this year. There were only 8 of them, spread over 3 generically-named skill trees, but all of the skills in the game seemed very polished and worked nicely. I suspect that a lot of others are done but were held back to retain more surprises, and that lots of others must be in the “under construction” phase. There were no skills shown with icon and description, and a “disabled” tag, as was true for the other characters.

With only 8 skills, divided up 4, 2, and 2 by tree (The 3 trees which were memorably named “Skill Tree A,” Skill Tree B,” and “Skill Tree C.” Catchy! Descriptive!) there is no way to say how they will be grouped or what sort of trees the Monk will ultimately have. The 8 skills themselves were quite well defined and were all fully functional and polished, and I used them all during my hour+ playing the Monk. The demo character starts off at level 12, with points in 6 of the skills. I leveled my Monk up to 15 by clearing out every bit of the large, multi-level demo, and adding earned points to enable Way of a Hundred Fists and Inner Sanctuary, so I could test those as well.

One interesting detail was that the skills on the fourth tier, shown between level 15 and 20, were usable as soon as I reached level 13 and had a point to place. Looking at the tree, I thought I’d be unable to use that skill until level 15, since they were listed horizontally, between the 15 and 20 on the left side of the skill tree window. (The same was true of the other characters; they could put points into Tier 4 skills at level 13, so it wasn’t just the Monk.) It’s not clear if this was a change made just for the demo build, or if it’s a change/difference in how skill requirements are processed in the game.

Click through to read them all.
Skill Tree A

This tree had 4 of the 8 skills, with a level 5, 10, and two 15s. All the skills in the 1, 5, and 10 tiers had points invested in them already, so they could be used from the very start. There were only 2 level 15 Monk skills in the demo, the only two Monk skills without points already in them on the demo character, and both were in this tree. Both were fairly cool to use, too, though 100 Fists was the clear champ of the two.

Tier 2
Force Without Thought
Passive skill
Rank: 1/5.
Description: Counteract enemies without interrupting the normal flow of your attacks. When you dodge you automatically counter act the attacker for 10% of your normal weapon damage.

Rank: 2/5.
Description: Counteract enemies without interrupting the normal flow of your attacks. When you dodge you automatically counter act the attacker for 20% of your normal weapon damage.

Rank: 3/5.
Description: Counteract enemies without interrupting the normal flow of your attacks. When you dodge you automatically counter act the attacker for 30% of your normal weapon damage.

Rank: 4/5.
Description: Counteract enemies without interrupting the normal flow of your attacks. When you dodge you automatically counteract the attacker for 40% of your normal weapon damage.

Not much to say about this one, since it had a point in it and I never added any more to see if I could discern the improvement. The Monk hits so fast and was overpowered for the Blizzcon build that needing to dodge or getting your hits interrupted wasn’t a real major problem.

Tier 3

Seven Sided Strike
Mana cost: 30
Rank: 1/5.
Description: Dash at your enemies, striking six times in succession for 50% of your weapon damage.

Rank: 2/5
Description: Dash at your enemies, striking 7 times in succession for 50% of your weapon damage.

A very fun skill. Much like a finishing move in a fighter. The Monk teleports to his target, Dragon Flight style, and commences to strike multiple times. As best I could tell, the Monk was invulnerable, or perhaps intangible, during this attack. He’s not visible except as flashing series of human shapes, all shining gold and two-dimensional. You can see a screenshot to the right, or see it featured in the Blizzcon B-roll gameplay footage. The evolution of the skill was described in detail during the Monk design panel as well.

The hits always seemed to land, and did considerable damage in total. If this one was cast on an empty space, the monk would do three flashing hits before stopping. He’d also stop short of 6 if the target died along the way. If there were multiple targets in the area, he seemed to select targets randomly, hitting each of them some number of times out of his total of 6.

This one was best used on single or double targets, ideally a boss that needed finishing off, especially a teleporter or another elusive one, since all the hits would go to it in rapid succession, and hit it no matter how it squirmed.

Fun and effective. What more do you want?

Tier 4
Inner Sanctuary
Mana cost: 24
Rank: 1/5
Description: Creates a protected region on the ground for 6 seconds that can not be bypassed by enemies.

Rank: 2/5
Description: Creates a protected region on the ground for 7 seconds that can not be bypassed by enemies.

I tried this one just to be thorough, since there was no need for additional defense at any point during the Blizzcon demo. At least not for the (intentionally) overpowered Monk. When cast, this skill creates a large rune on the ground, with a Stop Time-like bubble shield in the middle of which stands the Monk. It appeared to be impermeable to melee attackers; the Fallen I used it against couldn’t penetrate, at lest. They could reach through it, though. A Fallen Overseer had enough range to whack me with his improvised pole arm, as I stood in the center, immediately after casting it. Regular Fallen could not though, and just stood ringed around the exterior, waiting their turn.

I didn’t try it against bosses or flying enemies, and there were very few projectile enemies in the Blizzcon build to test that aspect of it against. And it was never necessary, since I was always better off attacking than standing back on defense, with the Monk.

Way of the Hundred Fists
Combo skill. A fast series of attacks strikes enemies in front of you.
Rank: 1/5
First hit: A short range dashing attack that deals 100% weapon damage.
Second hit: Attack rapidly 6 times for 8% of weapon damage.
Third hit: Attack all enemies near the monk for 85% of weapon damage.

Rank: 2/5
First hit: A short range dashing attack that deals 108% weapon damage.
Second hit: Attack rapidly 7 times for 8% of weapon damage.
Third hit: Attack all enemies near the monk for 85% of weapon damage.

Rank: 3/5
First hit: A short range dashing attack that deals 116% weapon damage.
Second hit: Attack rapidly 8 times for 8% of weapon damage.
Third hit: Attack all enemies near the monk for 90% of weapon damage.

This one was a blast to use, and was about the most fun Monk skill. It’s just straight out of an action movie, or some game like Tekken 3. The Monk does a short dash to the first punch, throws a flurry of blows for the second stage, and then blasts an explosive, AoE attack. It’s an excellent crowd killer, and when used on a monster marked with the Explosive Palm 3rd stage, it’s almost certain to clear the room.

Skill Tree B

Tier One

Crippling Wave
Combo skill. Light attacks that apply a series of increasingly debilitating debuffs.
Rank: 1
First hit: Deals 50% of weapon damage. Enemy movement speed reduced 50% for 2 seconds.
Second hit: Deals 50% weapon damage. Enemy damage reduced 25% and they take 25% more damage from attacks.
Third hit: Deals 60% weapon damage. Debuffs refreshed on all targets.

Rank: 2
First hit: Deals 60% of weapon damage. Enemy movement speed reduced 60% for 2 seconds.
Second hit: Deals 60% weapon damage. Enemy damage reduced 30% and take 30% more damage from attack.
Third hit: Deals 75% weapon damage. Debuffs refreshed on all targets.

An interesting sort of combo attack, since it’s about defensive bonuses. The damage is lower than any other Monk attacks, lower even than just plain attack (which I never used once during my Blizzcon play time). Like Inner Sanctuary, this one was never needed at Blizzcon. There’s no big end boss anywhere, and the only dangers came from large mobs. This skill could be useful against those, but they were generally easier to just destroy with many fast hits than to weaken first.

This one seems like it would be very useful against big bosses, since it makes them susceptible to damage, while making them deal less to you. Throwing in stage 2 or 3 of this in the midst of other more useful combo attacks could be helpful, now and then, since the curse-like debuff can hit multiple enemies in close proximity.

Tier 2

Exploding Palm
Combo Skill. A quick succession of attacks ending with the deadly Exploding Palm.
Rank: 1/5
First hit: 35% of weapon damage.
Second hit: 50% of weapon damage.
Third hit: Target bleeds for 60 damage over 7 seconds. Moving causes 200% more bleeding damage. If target dies it explodes dealing 60-100% of its maximum life in damage to all enemies nearby.

Rank: 2/5
First hit: 40% of weapon damage.
Second hit: 60% of weapon damage.
Third hit: Target bleeds for 70 damage over 7 seconds. Moving causes 200% more bleeding damage. If target dies it explodes dealing 60-100% of its maximum life in damage to all enemies nearby.

Rank: 3/5
First hit: 45% of weapon damage.
Second hit: 70% of weapon damage.
Third hit: Target bleeds for 80 damage over 7 seconds. Moving causes 200% more bleeding damage. If target dies it explodes dealing 60-100% of its maximum life in damage to all enemies nearby.

This was probably the coolest spell most people saw at Blizzcon, just for the massive blood explosions it created. It was magnificently overpowered, working like an early D2C version of Corpse Explosion. Triggering the third stage of this one, then beating that monster down with 100 Fists, was almost certain to clear any room, killing every monster anywhere near melee range.

It will have to be nerfed in the final game, and probably moved down the skill tree as well, since this is just insane for such a low level skill.

Skill Tree C

Tier One

Impenetrable Defense
Description: Momentarily turn your weapons into an impenetrable wall that rebounds enemy ranged attacks and grants 100% dodge against weapon attacks.
Rank: 1/1
Mana cost: 5

This one was not needed in the Blizzcon build, since the Monk was quite overpowered in combat. I didn’t experiment with his “dodge” ability, which is mentioned as a by product of several skills, since it was so much more fun just to blast everything with his offense. Plus, testing time is always limited, even in the press room. I would have made sure to try the other element of this skill, the “rebounds enemy ranged attacks,” but there were zero monster archers and virtually no projectile spell casters in the Blizzcon build.

Fallen Shaman were fairly common in the surface desert areas, but they seldom hurled Fireballs (they were quite quick to resurrect dead Imps,though). There were lots of Dark Cultists, but only the foot soldiers and the “transform into a demon” types. None of the spell casting mage types. And while there were some weird insect-like mages in the dungeons below the desert, they were infrequently encountered and were always behind a mob of melee enemies, so I never had time to stop beating down the foot soldiers just to try to reflect the (easily avoided) projectiles.

The spell does have a cool animation, at least. The Monk stands still and does a simple staff twirl, while a large rune appears below his feet.

Tier 2

Radiant Visage
Rank: 1/5
Description: A flash of light sears the eyes of all enemies within 20 feet, blinding them for 2-4 seconds. If attacked they will fight back with a 40% reduced chance to hit.
Mana cost: 15

Rank: 2/5
Description: A flash of light sears the eyes of all enemies within 20 feet, blinding them for 3-5 seconds. If attacked they will fight back with a 42% reduced chance to hit.
Mana cost: 15

Rank: 3/5
Description: A flash of light sears the eyes of all enemies within 20 feet, blinding them for 4-6 seconds. If attacked they will fight back with a 44% reduced chance to hit.
Mana cost: 15

A useful war cry-like attack, this one had a substantial radius, and blinded every non-boss in the area, stopping them in their tracks. I used this against every charge of Fallen Imps (performed when a Fallen Overseer got a mob of 6-12 amped up all at once). No, it wasn’t really necessary, since a bunch of Imps were essentially walking health orbs/combo power-ups, but it was sometimes fun to pretend that strategy was required.
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Source

There are tons of links in these 2 parts.
Blizzcon New Wrapup (part 1 and 2):
http://www.diii.net/blog/comments/blizzcon-reporting/
http://www.diii.net/blog/comments/blizzcon-news-wrap-up/

I seem to recall reading and hearing on various parts of blizzards sites and on the forum itself that aside from the Barbarian that they wouldn’t be bringing back any more old classes. However they announce the Monk… He’s from Diablo Hellfire, while technically not a Diablo 2 character (and I think Hellfire was someone else’s project) hes still known in the Diablo universe. So why did blizzard tell us no more old classes then throw us a curve ball in the Monk?

Bashiok: It’s not a recognized part of the Diablo franchise, and to be honest it is so much so not recognized, that when people asked about returning classes in the Q&A’s and in some of the press interviews the Hellfire expansion just wasn’t in anyone’s minds.

Plus, it isn’t the same class. We aren’t taking an old class and updating it. The monk from Hellfire, and in fact the story and content of Hellfire, doesn’t exist as far as game lore and story is concerned going into Diablo III.

They happen to share a name, the same as all of the other monk classes that have existed in all other RPG’s since the beginning of time. It doesn’t mean they’re related kit/story/flavor wise.
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The funny thing with that is my friend said after the Wizard was released the other classes would be monk and bard types. He said Monk would be paladin/assassin and Bard would be Zon/Rogue/Druid. I told him it would no be a monk due to Hellfire. So if the next class is a rogue type class he would have been right on both. Though most people on the forums I go to seemed to think the last 2 classes would be a holy/unholy warrior and a ranged fighter (zon style).
Source

Valindria · Aug 27, 2009

Full Barb Skills (with descriptions) From Blizzcon :

http://www.diii.net/blog/comments/full-barbarian-skill-trees-and-stats1/

I thought I would just post the link because 35 skills would be a wall of text.

Valindria · Aug 28, 2009

Full WD skill list. Similar to the barb one I will just post the link because it would be a wall of text to post them all.

http://www.diii.net/blog/comments/full-witch-doctor-skills/

Bashiok on Zombie Dogs:

First thing’s first, the mongrel is now (or again) known as the Zombie Dog. It was the name that was used when the idea was first proposed and all the way through development. Calling it a mongrel was kind of confusing because everyone was so used to calling it a zombie dog for so long, no one remembered to call it a mongrel (dune thresher and fallen imp suffer from it as well to a degree). The name zombie dog doesn’t need to be lore-fied really. It describes the skill perfectly, so why not use it?

So anyway, right, the fire and poison/locust enhancements for the zombie dogs was removed. It was a cool idea but it just wasn’t really panning out to be anything meaningful. It was sort of confusing as to why you would be switching between fire and poison, was it to keep an additional DoT active, or maybe there would be tactical reasons for it? But it just wasn’t really jiving in a way that made sense for the rest of the game as it all came together more. It wasn’t shaping up to be a meaningful or fun decision to make on-the-fly. And if you didn’t happen to spec into the skills that would empower the mongrels in different ways, what then? You’re just constantly refreshing a fire DoT on them? To what end? It seemed more and more that a decision that was made at the base skill, either through spending points in another skill (passive potentially), or using particular runes to alter the zombie dogs, made the most sense.

I haven’t spoken to the designers about it, so I could be way out of line, but I think the potential for passives that affect all “summoned zombies” is definitely there as there are quite a bit more of them that exist now. The gargantuan, zombie charger, wall of zombies, grasp of the dead, and then the zombie dogs of course.

It’s not an issue of coming up with various ways the effects could work, it’s the issue of why is it interesting or fun to switch between the two? Why/when/how would I choose to set my dogs on fire versus poisoning them, and most importantly! could it be done accurately enough so that it actually makes a difference?

“Ok I’m a firebomb WD.
Firebombing, firebombing… Oh sweet, my zombie dog lit on fire and is doing extra damage/trail of fire/etc etc
Firebombing, firebombing. Yup, he’s still on fire and doing all that stuff.
Still on fire.
Always on fire since I use firebomb so much.
... still on fire.
This might as well be a passive.”

Repeat the above for locust swarm.

“Ok I have firebomb AND locust swarm!
Firebombing, cool he’s on f… wait nope I accidentally hit him with locust swa… nope now he’s on fire agai… ok they need to stop getting in my way I want them to be on fire but they… ugh.
This should just be something I can choose/switch in a more meaningful way.”
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Source

Valindria · Sep 3, 2009

Binding:

Yes, true, as Jay said at BlizzCon we are planning to have some amount of items that will bind to a character upon equipping them.

We absolutely won’t have items that bind when picked up, except for the obvious things like quest items and other character-specific items that wouldn’t/shouldn’t be tradable anyway.

That alone, I think, should dissuade the most severe concerns with binding items.

And before I go on just understand that while a lot of this is very stable in its concepts, the details aren’t final.

For Bind on Equip (BoE), the idea right now is that it would only be applied to “end game” items of specific quality levels. So to start, it’s not every item, and it’s not even every item above a certain level. For the BoE items that will exist, you can pick them up, if you don’t want it you can still trade it, or give it to another character, a friend, vendor it, whatever you like. But, if you make the commitment to keeping the item and equipping it, yes, it’s yours now.

The reasoning is that in reality we need a solid way to keep the economy stable at the end game. With items building up over a potentially infinite amount of time there’s no way to have any measure of control over worth of items. While an item may be the rarest and best in the game, over four or five years a stockpile has built up and those items are now commonplace and hold little value as compared to their rarity. The gold being earned by players stays the same or likely increases as players become more proficient at playing the game while they spend less as items lose their value. Gold value drops, and we’re skirting into a familiar cycle.

By ensuring we can rely on some amount of “consumption” of items, their relative worth stays high, the market is predictable and both sellers and buyers enjoy a stable marketplace for (hopefully) many years.

Diablo II has an inconsistent approach which is the somewhat stable Ladder economy, since it’s quite literally flushed out every so often. But it’s a very intrusive approach to a problem that could be solved through other means that don’t require making everyone start over.

As a quasi-aside: There’s an idea being thrown around, and this is really not guaranteed in any way, that some or potentially all items that are bound to you could be bound to your entire account. So if you yourself “own” an item from it being bound, you can trade it between all the characters on your account freely. Feed alts your old-but-still-very-nice items, etc. That’s just an idea, it may not take shape, but it’s a possibility.
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I’ll be honest I skimmed this, sorry, raspberry but let me clarify again (I’m not doing this well today, huh?) and see if it helps.

No armor/weapons/equippable items will be Bind on Pickup unless they are rewarded by quests.
End-game items of specific quality types are currently planned to be Bind on Equip.

I confused it all by attempting to allude to other things just so I don’t get called on it later, and it really wasn’t necessary. Just follow the above two lines.
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"Let me try to clarify. As of the Blizzcon build, there was a special quest items inventory, on another tab from the main inventory. It holds items you must have for quests, and they are BoP, since if you drop them you can not complete the quests. They’re not items you equip, or if you do you’ll only use them for a short time until the quest is finished. Think of them like the Horadric Staff, or Khalim’s Will; you just can’t put them down or give them to another character."

Source

Other news:
- Some people still bitching about colors of Blizzcon build
- Some rumor D3 will be out 9-9-9 (Unlikely, but it has been posted as a rumor before)
- There will be respecs in D3

Bashiok posted a quick update on the status of the long-awaited D2X:v1.13 patch.

Work commences on patch 1.13. We won’t be providing any information on when the patch will be available, except that we expect the PTR to be available “soon”. We will provide some amount of warning very, very shortly before the PTRs become available. Please keep in mind that any number of factors could delay the start of the PTR and ultimate release of the patch. Thanks for being patient, we’re getting close now.

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PTR = Patch Test Realm. We’re going to get to try this one out before it goes live, and yes, they’re planning to introduce respecs (in some unknown form) into D2 with this patch.

source

Valindria · Sep 3, 2009

10 things you need to know about the monk:

http://pc.ign.com/articles/102/1020729p1.html

It's a pretty funny read.

"Total bad-assery."

Valindria · Sep 22, 2009

I'm with most people I don't understand how the wizard will not use mana. This is Diablo. It's not a DnD where they get spells per day. Maybe the wizards spells will be entirely cool down based.

The monk will probably use "Ki" or something. Maybe a mix of fury and mana.

I don't know I have a hard time wrapping my head around it but I guess we'll see.

Enjoy,
Val

Weâ€™ve stated that only the Witch Doctor is planned to use mana at this point in time, if that clarifies anything for you. As to what the Wizard and Monk may use, weâ€™ve not said.
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I donâ€™t understand how the Wizard should have something else than mana. I mean, itâ€™s logic that magic users use mana and the wizard is the class that ressemble the most of a classic mage as we know it.

Bashiok: I think when we unveil the resource system the Wizard uses it will actually make a lot of sense.

I agree with this, and I donâ€™t really understand why every class has to have their own individual â€œenergyâ€ type. Besides trying to implement more differences between classes.

Bashiok: They donâ€™t HAVE to of course, but it definitely makes playing each class a lot more unique and interesting when your skills are not only flavored or tailored to your class but your ability to use them is also specifically flavored and tailored to your class.

The barbarian fury system works off of the idea that as he gets more into the battle, doing and taking more damage, he builds up this power which lets him unleash more damage. That idea is ingrained in the way he plays and the way his skills look and work. And the visual style of the resource system itself, of the three fury orbs, is sort of a molten lava. Which again plays into his very physical earth-shattering flavored skills.

The other classâ€™ resource systems play very much into what each class is, their flavor and kit, and individual style in approaching combat.

Since each class will most likely have their own resource system how will item modifiers work without an item only being valuable for one class? Such as a caster armor that the wizard and witch doctor could make use of.

Bashiok: Thatâ€™s a good question, and something we donâ€™t have any specific solutions decided on yet. It will likely be a combination of approaches to ensure that resource stats stay meaningful, without making the majority of items you find potentially worthless. - Sort of a half answer but itâ€™s the best I can do without specifics that relate to systems we havenâ€™t talked about yet.
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Source

Tal · Sep 23, 2009

Valindria said: ↑

I'm with most people I don't understand how the wizard will not use mana. This is Diablo. It's not a DnD where they get spells per day. Maybe the wizards spells will be entirely cool down based.

The monk will probably use "Ki" or something. Maybe a mix of fury and mana.
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My guess is it will use something very similar to mana but it won't be the same, so that the different classes need different kind of pots rather than all classes using mana pots like in D2

Sirius · Sep 24, 2009

Well, they're not really doing the potion thing this time around (I understand there ARE potions but they're the exception rather than the rule and have massive cooldowns in comparison) and I've yet to see blue "orbs". So I start to wonder how mana/energy/whatever management will work. For the barbarian we already get the idea; it's more akin to the Guild Wars adrenaline system. The wizard most likely doesn't recover energy in the same method though - so perhaps they'll just set its regeneration to a rate that effectively limits the number of spells you can cast, and so forces you to consider their economy, or something like that?

Valindria · Oct 9, 2009

diii.net's Interview with Jay Wilson

Diii.net: Everyone seems pretty happy with the function and form of the Barbarian’s Fury resource, but nothing has been revealed about the non-mana resources that the Wizard and Monk will use. Can you give us some insight into what kind of play style their resources are meant to encourage?

Jay Wilson: Well for the Wizard we want to enforce the fact that she’s a glass cannon. I don’t think it’s fun to ever run out of mana. I’m not really interested in an extended resource for her. For the WD we’re okay with mana, since he’s got some pretty good skills to recover mana that also double as attacks. And he’s not defenseless when he’s out of mana. He’s got pets and ways to attack with them that aren’t mana intensive. For him that makes mana fairly interesting.

For the wizard, when she’s out of mana she just dies. And that’s not fun. So if anything, we want to encourage how she plays. So she’s the kind of character that blasts first and asks questions later. Very vulnerable. So we want to implement a system that makes her more blasty, but even more vulnerable. We want to make that a choice for the player. “Do I want to make myself more vulnerable in exchange for being more blasty.” And that’s a cool gameplay pull there.

For the Monk um… I’m not ready to talk about him yet since he’s just too early. We still haven’t decided exactly what we want to do with him. We’re still playing around with his resource system.

Diii.net: Do you envision the health globes will boost those other resources in the way that the Wizard and Witch Doctor were gaining mana from them at Blizzcon?

Jay Wilson:Um, maybe? *sounding intrigued* Usually in the third or fourth skill revision on classes we look at that kind of thing. For the Witch Doctor we figured that a lot of the mana things we had on the Wizard would work better on the Witch Doctor. We were having trouble maintaining enough mana while play testing the Witch Doctor. Especially if players didn’t take a specific mana recovery skill. So we focused on spreading that out across a lot more of the class so he can pull mana back more easily. When we get to other classes I’m sure we’ll look for more of that.

But the key is that we don’t necessarily want to…. we don’t want to cannibalize an existing gameplay mechanic. So when you take health globes that are already important, and you make them even more important, then that doesn’t really create gameplay. For the WD, the health globes weren’t that important a lot of times, since he very rarely took damage with his pets, so for him by enhancing his desire for health globes, we’re really putting gameplay where it wasn’t. So whatever we’re designing a class that’s what we look at.
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Source

Diii.net: We saw 8 Monk skills at BlizzCon (all detailed in Diablo Wiki). All were melee offensive or defensive. Can you give us some idea of what other skills the character will have at his disposal?

Jay Wilson: Most of the Monk’s skills will focus on combat skills and attacks, along with his various escape skills. And we talked at Blizzcon that we’re likely to put some defensive and supportive abilities on him. Possibly Auras. We’ve not done the next round of skills on him yet so we’re not exactly sure.

Diii.net: Really? That’s handy, since I was also going to ask if he’d have any co-op or party-boosting skills.

Jay Wilson: We definitely want to do that with one class. Whether or not it’s the Monk hasn’t yet been decided. The Monk does seem to be the logical choice. The only reason we might not do with him is that he’s too logical.

Diii.net: You want to mix it up?

Jay Wilson: Exactly.

Diii.net: There was talk of the Monk’s lore, that the Monks have 1001 gods and they give themselves tattoos to honor their gods and celebrate their glorious achievements in life. Are any of his skills going to be representative of those gods? Say there’s a fire god, and the Monk would have a fire attack in His name?

Jay Wilson: Yes. Leonard Boyarsky is our lead world designer, and he’s definitely talked about some of the mythology of the Monk. And relating them to some of the Monk’s skills.

Diii.net: On that topic, players are wondering if we’ll see those tattoos on the monk in the game.

Jay Wilson: I think some of them are in already. As to whether we see more during the course of the game, that’s undecided. It’s tied to the story arcs we create for the game.

Diii.net: Seems like a lot of work too, for the graphics?

Jay Wilson: Not necessarily. IF we have them over the course of the game it’s fairly problematic. How are they seen through his equipment? If they’re part of his base texture then that’s a little easier.

Diii.net: The Monk has a staff and the fist weapons. Will he have any weapon specific skills? Like dual wielding with just the fist weapons?

Jay Wilson: We’re talking about that. One of the things we’ve talked about with the Monk is that a lot of his skills don’t really use his weapons. So he’s doing melee skills with his weapons almost holstered. For instance, Debilitating ... I think it’s called Crippling Wave now. We change them a lot and I get mixed up on the titles. Anyway, the Crippling Wave skill seems like it should be a staff skill. It’s kind of AoE, he does it and affects a lot of guys around him. So it’s a possibility that we’ll do skills and redefine them based on combat styles and have those styles have a weapon preference.

Diii.net: The monk has a small shield on his arm in the concept art. Is that just decorative or ornamental, or is that an example of an actual equipment option for the character?

Jay Wilson: It’s part of his armor. The artists were trying to visualize the monk. One of the challenges is to do it by remaining faithful to the lore, and he needed armor. What’s armor for a guy like that? They were exploring ideas of bracers and just defensive aspects of things on his arms. That gave him a lot of freedom of movement, but also protected him.

Diii.net: That was a question that I saw in our forums, people were wondering how the monk could use heavy plate mail and still do all of his high motion combo attacks.

Jay Wilson: Well we do different versions of armor for every character. The Diablo II Sorceress could use heavy plate mail without actually looking like she was covered in heavy plate mail. For us, our focus is to make sure that every character has armor that they look cool in. So the Monk’s armor isn’t going to look like heavy plate armor. It’s going to look like a shirt, what our imagination of what the Monk’s armor could be. It’s definitely going to be equipment, but he’s not going to look like he’s covered in metal, like the barb is likely to look.

Diii.net: One other question on the Monk’s armor. Traditionally in RPGs, Monks have bonuses to light armor and penalties to heavy armor. Is that something you guys are looking at?

Jay Wilson: No. We’re an item based game. The idea of a character that doesn’t use items is foreign to our basic game philosophy. So one of the things we decided when we were creating the Monk was that we were not going to explore that aspect of the character. We’re going to make a Diablo Monk, and the Diablo Monk uses items.
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I meant to get back to this and add the 3 link to the rest of the questions. Only I didn't find any of them worth while. Anyway I think the coolest thing to come from this is the possibility of Monk auras.

Valindria · Oct 13, 2009

This is the fifth (of six) part of our exclusive Jay Wilson interview. In today’s section Jay covers skill design concepts and character build variety, as well as touching on returning D1/D2 monsters, and letting us know how we’ll be quickly and easily making town selling trips, without Town Portal scrolls to help.

Check out parts One, Two, Three, and Four if you missed any of them, and join in the always-juicy post-interview comment conversation. Tomorrow’s installment will close things out with a bunch of miscellaneous questions, and I’ll post the full transcript on Friday,

Diii.net: The Witch Doctor build seems fairly narrow in concept. He’ll always have mongrels for tanking, some mini-mage support, and some minion attacks and a bit of mind control. Looking at his skill tree now, there doesn’t seem to be that many potential Witch Doctor builds, which isn’t true of the Wizard or Barbarian. Can you comment on that? Is it just that we don’t know enough about the Witch Doctor yet?

Jay Wilson: The Witch Doctor is less developed than the Wizard and the Barbarian. His skills are on what we call a second round, a second revision, while the Barbarian and Wizard are firmly in their third, maybe even their fourth revision. So as every time we revisit the systems we expand the abilities. It’s based on playing them. We discover basically the same things, and we’ll say something like, “Oh, this class seems a little bit more focused than we wanted. We can’t make this kind of build the way we wanted to.” So we end up expanding them over time.

In the game, every class is different. Some classes offer themselves up to a lot of variations. Some classes tend to have a lot more focus. We saw that in Diablo II, some classes had fewer variations and fewer possibilities than the others. That’s not really our goal though. Our goal is to make sure that every class is equally diverse in the types of builds they can be made for.

Diii.net: That’s what players hope for long term, but as you said earlier, it’s amazing the variety of things players find to use once they have the game in their hands. Look at all the weird builds in Diablo II.

Jay Wilson: The hardest thing as designers is relinquishing control. That’s hard to do as a designer. We have to accept that. We have to sometimes say, “Here’s a cool skill, we’re not really sure what to do with it.” Unless it’s just crap. Q&A can go, “This is just crap.” And we’ll fix it. And make it better. But it’s really difficult sometimes to do that and really truly turning your game over to the community is hard. You have to stop thinking, “This is the kind of wizard I’d like to build.” so you aren’t keeping the game one way so you can build that. You have to allow for other things. That’s the biggest challenge, and it’s something we work on and iterate on constantly.

Diii.net: Do you guys work and plan in advance to plan multiple potential builds for each character? Or do you just throw in as many cool skills as you can and see how players find ways to use them?

Jay Wilson: A little bit of both. We try to anticipate what we think will be good builds. For example, there’s lots of things we put into the wizard, to try to make a battle mage more viable. But sometimes we put in skills that we’re not 100% sure is an awesome skill, but that we think somebody will find an awesome use for. We try to plan things ahead of time, but we’re not foolish enough to believe that the three of us who work on skills can come up with as many possibilities and variations as the millions of players who will take the work we’ve done and have fun building stuff with it. We mostly try to make sure they have the tools to have a lot of freedom and create a lot of cool stuff.

Diii.net: Can you place your heads into the lion’s jaws and name the 3 of you who work on skills?

Jay Wilson:Myself, Wyatt Cheng, and Julian Love, our lead technical artist. Oh actually 4. Chris Haga does a lto of skill work as well.

Diii.net: Hah. I talked to Julian and Chris at Blizzcon. In fact, I sat beside Chris at the fansite convention lunch and he said he first decided he wanted to work at Blizzard when he was reading our D2 website back in high school. And he was amazed to meet me since he used to read stuff I wrote on the website like 8 years ago. He was like, “Oh wow, you’re Flux?”

Jay Wilson: That’s where we all started.

Diii.net: Are we going to see any more monster types from Diablo I that weren’t in Diablo II? Such as Hidden, Knights, Horned Chargers, etc?

Jay Wilson: Um… I would have to review our monster list to know precisely if they’re in Diablo I and not Diablo II. There are a few more returning from Diablo 2, but I don’t think there are others from Diablo 1 that weren’t in D2 as well?

Diii.net: How will we sell items easily in town, since there are no more town portals? How do you pop back quickly and easily without slowing down the gameplay?

Jay Wilson: Waypoints are a little bit more frequent and your bag space is a little bit bigger.

Diii.net: It’s going to be Diablo 2 in style? There won’t be pets you can send back, or NPC merchants out in the wild, or any other odd features?

Jay Wilson: No.
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Nothing ground breaking but more interesting then the last few.

Bashiok:Inventory management and the systems that surround it are something we’re obviously interested in, but not something that can really be tuned until we have more of the item game fleshed out and tuned itself. It’s hard to know exactly the best way to handle inventory management when the items, types, pickup frequency, and removal frequency can’t really be measured with any real accuracy.

Gold is picked up automagically, and it’s because it’s one of those things that you always want to pick up. You’d never not pick up gold, unless you’re playing Diablo II maybe. PAH-ZING! If there are other item types we feel fall into that category they may be automatically picked up when you walk over them too.

We want inventory management to include player choice and interaction, and so while we’re definitely not opposed to new ideas and while we’re certainly drawing inspiration from many places, we want to maintain that inventory management doesn’t become an automated process.

I prefer the way Titan Quest handled it, especially after their Immortal Throne expansion came out. The labels on drops would not display unless you pressed a hot key, and you couldn’t pick an item up unless the label displayed (this was to save you the aggravation of accidentally picking things up when all you’re trying to do is move).

Bashiok: This is a feature in Diablo II, and will likely return in some form in Diablo III. Type /nopickup into chat. Items won’t be picked up unless you hold down Alt.
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Valindria · Oct 14, 2009

Last part of the interview.

Diii.net: These are the lightning round questions. These are a bunch of quick topics that youâ€™ll probably say no comment on. If you canâ€™t give any new information on them just say pass and Iâ€™ll go on to the next one.
Jay Wilson: Okay.

Diii.net: Fifth character.
Jay Wilson: Pass.

Diii.net: PvP?
Jay Wilson: Uhâ€¦ we will have PvP in some form. And weâ€™re working on it now, and itâ€™s pretty awesome, and itâ€™ll get announced at a future date.

Diii.net: Are we going to see any large info releases before next yearâ€™s blizzcon?
Jay Wilson: *pause* I dunno. Thatâ€™s a question for Ryan. (The PR guy.)

Diii.net: Mercenaries?
Jay Wilson: Like hirelings?

Diii.net: Yeah. In the past youâ€™ve said you want to do more with Hirelings in D3, but youâ€™ve not given any details on them yet.
Jay Wilson: I canâ€™t give any details on those yet.

Diii.net: Guild support online?
Jay Wilson:Umâ€¦ we donâ€™t really know yet. Weâ€™re not working on battle.net yet.

Diii.net: Respecs. Cost, gold mechanism, any specifics?
Jay Wilson: We will have respecs. We havenâ€™t determined the mechanism yet, but weâ€™re definitely trying to do something different than a wholesale pay a token price and get all your skills back. We want to have a higher price than that.

Diii.net: Gambling in the game?
Jay Wilson: *pause* Undecided.

Diii.net: What percent are you complete with the entire project, or any of the individual acts.
Jay Wilson: Now thatâ€™s a sneaky way to try to figure out what our release date is!

Diii.net: *laughs* Oh I know that already. Iâ€™m just trying to get a percentage now.
Jay Wilson: No, we donâ€™t really measure percentages. We donâ€™t really know.

Diii.net: Do you plan on allowing voice support in game?
Jay Wilson:Uh, probably. Well yeah, I think thatâ€™s one of the core features Battle.net said theyâ€™re going to support.

Diii.net: Are there going to be different character titles for completing difficulty levels or quests or other such things.
Jay Wilson: Wow, thatâ€™s a cool idea. *sincerely* Uhâ€¦ I donâ€™t know?

Diii.net: People are wondering about the single player save state. If itâ€™s going to save the entire world as is, like Diablo 1 did, or if itâ€™ll just save your progress and reset everything else, like Diablo 2 did?
Jay Wilson: *pause* Uhâ€¦ no comment.

Diii.net: Weapon switch hotkey?
Jay Wilson: No. We took that out.

Diii.net: Oh, I loved that feature in D2.
Jay Wilson: Mostly we took it out because the only examples we could come up with of how people used it were somewhat exploitive. Most frequently people used it by accident and wondered where the freak my weapons went. So it didnâ€™t seem a useful feature for anyone but a very small portion of the audience that used it to swap items for magic find purposes, which seemed not a great super fun reason to swap weapons. There were probably some other uses, which Iâ€™m sure Iâ€™ll be reminded of in the forums.

Diii.net: There were a lot of specialized builds that found it essential to use two sets of weapons. Hybrid Amazons, chiefly. Used a bow and also a javelin/shield.
Jay Wilson: Yeah.
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The author goes into a rant about weapon swapping in the source link. Personally I like weapon swapping. Ever since D2 I have done it in other games. GW high and low energy weapon swaps, DDO different enemy swaps, and + energy swaps. It seems strange to me to not have it.

Source

Sirius · Oct 14, 2009

It's probably not as small as Jay Wilson thinks; apart from newbies, or relatively simple builds, there is often benefit to having something on swap. I recall I did it with my bowazon to have something to deal with physical immunes (elemental damage); likewise, quite a few melee characters had something to buff skills for warcries, or summons, or something like that. Swapping from DPS mode into mfind mode is something you can use it for but it's not the only use - and in fact it's not one I practice, personally.

Valindria · Nov 3, 2009

Mercs will be back. This time they will be called Followers. Bashiok talks a little about the followers and shared stash. Torchlight has an option to send a follower back to town to sell stuff. It would be cool if they added that into D3.

Bashiok said:

We all play a lot of games so it’s without question that if someone finds a feature in some game they enjoy, or encounters something especially cool, we’ll see if it could work for us.

Regarding mercenaries, the most we’ve said is that for Diablo III we have them and we’re calling them followers… and that’s all we’ve said. So I couldn’t comment on what features they would or wouldn’t have or speculate on if a feature would work for us or not. You’ll just have to wait and see.

We’ve said since announcement that we want to make sure you can get items to other characters quickly and safely. It could take any number of forms, an account-shared stash is one option we’ve talked about.

These aren’t really new ideas, not to discount them being fun or useful additions to any game, but there’s always something to learn. We also just like having an excuse to play more games.
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Bashiok replied to a forum post asking if we’ll have a movable camera angle in Diablo III. Short version; no. Longer version:

Blizzard Quote:
It’s a fixed camera. Back when we announced the game we had our dialogue interaction set up where the camera would zoom in, and you’d see the characters up close and they’d talk to each other in this zoomed in view. We threw that out a long time ago though just because it was too intrusive, it stopped the game, pulled you out of the action, and just felt like too much. There was also a point where we zoomed in on the character in one of the videos to show some attack animations and item switches better, but that’s not a feature of the game.

The camera doesn’t zoom or tilt or rotate, it’s a fixed camera.

It’s kind of fun to watch people that have never played a Diablo game before, or it’s been a long time. They immediately go for the WASD keys, and when those do nothing they then try holding down the right mouse button to rotate the camera. Sometimes by accident they’re reminded it’s click to move.

It’s just not a control scheme and camera angle that are used a lot these days, there’s maybe been a handful of games in the past five years that qualify as isometric arpg’s? So anyway, props to all those games and the developers keeping the style alive. We’re continuing the tradition, proudly, because we feel it’s the best way to present a sequel in the Diablo franchise.
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Ironjaw · Nov 7, 2009

this needs to come out pronto! i need a 3rd person hack and slasher bad!

Valindria · Nov 9, 2009

Ironjaw said: ↑

this needs to come out pronto! i need a 3rd person hack and slasher bad!
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The latest rumors are it won't even be out in 2010.

http://www.diii.net/blog/comments/diablo-iii-not-part-of-blizzards-2010-plans/

If you need a fix, I would recommend Torchlight. It just came out. It's $20. It was done by the guys who did D2.

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