Diablo III “Ask the Devs” Round 1

Blizzard community manager Lylirra has posted up the first round of questions and answers submitted by the Blizzard fanbase, with those answers taken right from the mouths of the game developers themselves. The questions are pretty varied and the answers are very in-depth, which is a rare thing to see from developers these days.

On the pay to win aspect of the real money auction house and PvP:

There are essentially two different questions being asked. Question one: “The current environment seems very one-hit kill, are there any plans to address this?” The second question is “What effect does the AH/RMAH have on brawling?”

Players have a great deal of control over the gear that you wear. Many players in the current live environment choose to build their characters to be extremely offensive, forgoing defense almost completely. Other players choose to build their character extremely defensively, so they can take a few hits and keep on ticking. Most players fall somewhere on the spectrum between these two extremes, though there is a tendency in PvE to lean more on the offensive side as it results in faster clears of PvE content.

When the 1.0.7 PTR went live, you saw a lot of one-hit kills because players are stepping into the Scorched Chapel with their offensively-oriented PvE gear and sometimes even their PvE skill builds. You are certainly going to see a lot of one-hit kills in an environment like this. Sometimes you see one-hit kills simply because you’re vastly out-geared by your opponent. However, if players re-gear for some survivability in their item and skill choices, things have the potential to shift. Indeed, if two players are both extremely defensively-minded you quickly get into stalemates in which neither player is able to ever kill the other. Ensuring that it is at least somewhat worthwhile to build defensively is part of the reason for the 30% damage reduction for all classes (35% for Monks and Barbarians) seen in the latest PTR patch. If a person who makes a balanced build between offense and defense is still getting 1-shot by somebody who is completely offensively-minded, then it doesn’t feel worthwhile to have built defensively at all, so the 30%/35% damage reduction is intended to close the gap to help people survive the 1-shot scenario.