Diablo III: Reaper of Souls BlizzCon Q&As

IncGamers is offering up two separate transcripts from the preview panel and open Q&A that Blizzard hosted at this weekend’s BlizzCon for their forthcoming expansion pack Diablo III: Reaper of Souls. A couple of questions and their answers from each:

What are you going to be doing about unique items, right now it seems like you have a lot of items with cool effects but the stats just trump any of those effects. what are you doing about items that have cool effects but are also optimal to use so that we actually want to use them?

Lots of different things. We’ll be hiving examples tomorrow at the gameplay panel. We are narrowing the range on things so, for example if you can have a could roll 1-500 strength, at the upper tier that’s narrowed to 300-500. So even if you got the minimum roll it’s still a pretty decent item. The legendary effects on the new legendaries are somewhat game changing. We’re trying to give them whacky things they do that changes the way you play one of your existing builds.

We have Witch Doctor mask for example that causes horrify to not just fear monsters but to root them as well so you get a major crowd control effect. If as a Witch Doctor you haven’t used Horrrify before, you’re probably going to want to now. We a have a lot of things like that, we;re smart dropping it so your primary stats for your character class that finds the item is much more likely to be rolled, and so on. There’s probably 3 or 4 other smart drop systems we can talk about tomorrow.

The side dungeons at the start of the game taper off towards the end of the game, are you going to add more of those in or do you have any additional plans to freshen up the first four acts?

The density lowers for a couple of reasons, especially in act 4, we really feel at that point after the bog reveal they just want to get to Diablo so it became a little more narrowed and centered but we recognise that it’s an issue and that is where adventure mode comes in. When we talked about that people were playing th game over and over again, part oif it was that you had that goal. You wanted to kill Diablo on your current difficulty level, that was actually encouraging you not to bother with the side dungeons because that slowed you down to getting to your goal of Diablo and ultimately Inferno.

With removing that requirement and making these side dungeon Bounties, we’ve taken every nook and cranny in the game and give you occasionally a good reason to go there to increase the variety so al the side dungeons we do have happen in a much more varied order. When you’re in Heaven and you have some Bounties to do there, we’re gong to ,make sure you see some side dungeons there and we’re going to send you to th acts to do other things. I think we’ll be addressing that concern really well with adventure mode.

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I saw the Loot 2.0 information in the previous panel and a lot of the items look really awesome. Do you guys have any plans for expanding the stash space so we can store all these items?

Kevin Martens: At this point, no. Straight up we are not intending to increase the Stash space. We are approaching the problem from a different point of view. We are trying to find more things to do with the items you have and less you feel to hold onto a lot of stuff. so there are a few different things we doing for that. One of the main ones is Enchanting and Blacksmithing, breaking items down, Salvaging is worth more and if you have something that is almost good enough of course you can use enchanting to make it better.

If you have a transitional item, let’s say you found a level 40 legendary, you’ve hit level 50 and found something you want to replace it with, that breaks down and you can get one last hoorah out of that item by using legendary salvage reagent to make your new legendary better. So that’s just one example but we are trying to do a lot of stuff to make sure you don’t feel you need to hole on to a whole bunch of transitional gear.

Many other things of Loot 2.0 is that you getting better, smarter drops on a more frequent basis. That requirement, whatever it is you’re trying to hold onto you just don’t need to do it as much. We are trying to make better use of the space you have and we think that that is actually a much better, more fun solution than giving you more stuff that you need to manage.

I notice there are some new monster affixes like Poison Enchanted and Frozen Spike. Do you plan on expanding on that concept a lot more because it’s pretty boring right now to be honest with the current affixes in live.

Wyatt Cheng: The goal is to combine the abilities that the monsters have with a random affix pool. We are adding a few new ones in Reaper of Souls but on that topic we are also looking at the monsters that exist and making sure that their abilities are really shining through.

It’s kind of a balance. You have every monster who exhibits their personality and their unique abilities and then the ideas that you layer on top of it, these random affixes, and we want both sets to feel as rich as possible because at the heart of Diablo is randomness and one aspect is the combat and the challenge that the monsters present. It’s a system we are always working on and you’ll see some more in Reaper.