Diablo III Forum Activity

Diablo community manager “Bashiok” discusses displaying damage output and automatic loot-snatching in his latest responses on the official Diablo III forums.

On displaying damage output:

Well good news then, this has been part of the character sheet for a long time now. I don’t foresee any reason why we’d remove it, but in any case just the normal disclaimer of this being a work in progress.

An example!

I have a barbarian with a halberd that adds 1-9 lightning damage in addition to its other stats. I mouse over his attack in the character sheet and it breaks down the damage for me in a tooltip:

Total Damage – “54.2 – 164.6”
– –
Physical Damage – “27.0 – 79.0”
– Physical Damage Bonus – “26.2 – 76.6”
Lightning Damage – “1.0 – 9.0”

And in researching this example I just found a bug, so it was a win-win situation for everyone.

Oh and the physical damage bonus is from Strength.

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Everything that can be broken down is broken down.

On automatic loot-snatching:

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.

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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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Gold is per player, same as items.

Health globes everyone sees.

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I’m not sure that’s actually the case with gold. For items, definitely. With gold though we do make conscious decisions on how much to throw out there, in what amounts, how many piles are tossed out, the visual representation, the sounds, etc. All that stuff is extremely important to making the player feel like they’re winning something.

It should feel like… HERE’S SOME GOLD!

I think that’s the most important part, and not the actual click to pick it up. To be fair there’s a decent amount of clicking just to walk around and pick it all up. We throw out a lot of small piles instead of just one or a few big ones.

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Throwing out lots and lots of items in part defines Diablo, and it takes a fair amount of energy and thought to make sure our item pools stay in check and have enough “junk” in them to keep drops interesting.

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As I mentioned we want to try to avoid automation. It should (ideally) be the player’s conscious decision about what items to pick up or leave. Setting quality filters doesn’t really have a granularity that would satisfy most players, so then we’re getting into all sorts of options and pedals and knobs just so the player can avoid what is essentially a large part of the gameplay. Items drop, the player decides what items to pick up. That’s a very big part of the game. That decision to drop an item to pick up a different one, that’s interesting, that’s a good player decision.

Also with those automated types of pick up systems what tends to happen is the storage spaces are absolutely enormous because you’re essentially vacuuming everything up. You’re removing (actually delaying) player decisions, and you don’t want to be punishing for something they’re not actually controlling – so the storage spaces are huge. And then really in the end all you’re doing is delaying the player’s need to decide on what items to keep or not. It cheapens the feeling of items and inventory to a degree. You’re detached from the decision so you’re then detached from the reality of the item importance and inventory value.

That’s all sort of esoteric designery ways of thinking about it though, and to a degree it’s that kind of “feel” of a system, the … ceremony of it, and the psychology that just doesn’t always translate well when explaining these things.

We prefer to keep it where it feels important, not allow the decision to just be delayed, and that’s having the player make important inventory decisions on the battlefield.