Wyatt Cheng – Senior Game Designer
It wouldn’t be right to work on Reaper of Souls without revisiting the five original classes. As we sat down to look at what changes we wanted to make, the team really believes on focusing on the fantasy. That means that every class represents a classical fantasy archetype. Any changes we make should pay into that fantasy and reinforce it. We went over all the existing skills and runes, every class in Reaper of Souls is going to get a new skill.
The [wiki]Barbarian[/wiki] exhibits physical strength. He focusses on his connection to the Ancients. We have a theme of Earth and Might coming through. This is exhibited in skills such as [wiki]Seismic Slam[/wiki] or [wiki]Eathquake[/wiki]. We feel these skill weren’t quite performing as well as they were so they’re getting some huge buffs in Reaper of Souls.
His new skill is called [wiki]Avalanche[/wiki]. This allows him to let out a huge roar and call down a huge pile of rocks to fall from above. Avalanche is currently on a 30 second cooldown in internal builds, but the way we have it set up is that the more [wiki]Fury[/wiki] that you spend it reduces the cooldown on the skill. If you have a build that spends a lot of Fury, you can use Avalanche more often.
The [wiki]Wizard[/wiki] is a powerful ranged caster. This is a really strong fantasy archetype that’s been around for years. A lot of people want to play the Wizard as a [wiki]Glass Cannon[/wiki], clearly an elementalist. As you know in the live game there are elements like Frost, Lightening, Fire, Arcane. Of course Arcane gets a little more attention and Cold, Lightening, Fire, could serve to be played up a little bit more. That’s one of our focuses for the Wizard in Reaper of Souls. If you want to play a Frost, Fire or Lightening elementalist wizard, now you can.
We’re looking at a lot of existing skills like [wiki]Spectral Blade[/wiki] and [wiki]Magic Missile[/wiki]. Magic Missile is getting a rune variant that will actually allow you to do cold damage. As we were looking at [wiki]Arcane Orb[/wiki], it gave us an opportunity to pay homage to one of my favourite D2 skills. In D2 you had Frozen Orb. Here’s what that looks like in Diablo 3.
The Wizard’s new skill is called [wiki]Black Hole[/wiki]. This pulls in all the monsters, CCs them and does a huge amount of damage in that targeted area. This lets you lay up that fantasy of being a ranged glass cannon, you can use crowd control skills and still dish out a lot of damage. Nothing sets up the perfect Meteor than Black Hole.
The [wiki]Monk[/wiki] is a martial artist. Unlike the Crusader who is heavily armoured, and the Barbarian who is physically strong, the Monk’s core fantasy is to be fast and agile. He also incorporates elemental, he integrates fire and lightening. What we want to play up is the sense of mobility. The Monk should be the fasted character on the battlefield.
This didn’t quite play as well as we wanted it to on the live game so we’re making changes to skills like [wiki]Fists of Thunder[/wiki] + Thunder Clap, the most popular rune on Live and the reason is it incorporates a Teleport into its ability. No wall rune variants of Fists of Thunder will be teleporting you to your opponent. We’re also looking at [wiki]Dashing Strike[/wiki] which was kitted to fill that fantasy of the fast Monk but for a number of mechanical issues wasn’t used as much as we’d like. One of your goals is that if I click on an empty location I should just go there. We’re looking at [wiki]Seven-Sided Strike[/wiki], another key skill.
His new skill is [wiki]Epiphany[/wiki], once activated allows all of your melee attacks to teleport you directly to your target.
The Demon Hunter’s fantasies are clear, ranged weaponry, a deadly assassin using shadow energy an traps. The trap fantasy wasn’t played up as well as we thought. Skill like [wiki]Spike Trap[/wiki] get used more as ranged damage dealers than a trap. So we’re looking at skill like Spike Trap and Sentry. we ant players to play in a way where they set a trap and lure enemies into it. At the end of the day the Demon Hunter is a ranged class. Her new skill will play into that. With [wiki]Vengeance[/wiki] every single attack you do fires off even more ranged weaponry. Pew Pew Pew!
The [wiki]Witch Doctor[/wiki], his theme is strong, Zombies, Festishes. We’re happy with the way the aesthetic of the Witch Doctor plays out on live. Although the aesthetic is strong, the mechanics aren’t all there. One of the fantasies of playing a Witch Doctor is to be a DOT class, or a pet class. Although the pets will tank with you, they don’t do enough damage. Although the DoTs are there, they’re not worth using. We’re making huge improvements to [wiki]Haunt[/wiki] and [wiki]Locust Swarm[/wiki]. One of his new passives make his DoTs last for five minutes. Totally balance (*laughs*).
We wanted his new skill to play in to many different play styles. For inspiration we drew upon D2’s [d2w]Amplify Damage[/d2w]. Amplify Damage is a great utility spell but it’s not super flavourful. It’s great mechanic but there’s not a great aesthetic to go with it. So we have to pair those up.
We talked to [wiki]Julian Love[/wiki] and we wondered how far can be push this. He’s got the bats, the frogs and all these creatures. Could we do Piranhas? Why, yes we can.
You can see the Piranhas stuck to the monster as a visual indicator. That’s a monster affected by the [wiki]Amplify Damage[/wiki] effect.
But what lies below the surface of the water?
One of the requests we got a lot for items is a way to modify the items that you find. The [wiki]Mystic[/wiki] will allow you to do exactly that. The Mystic allows you to modify any item in one of two ways.
You can change the way it looks and you can also change a property.
[wiki]Transmogrify[/wiki] allows you to take your Crusader from looking like this to that…
[wiki]Enchanting[/wiki] allows you to choose any property on an item that you don’t want and ask the Mystic to re-roll it. She’ll offer you three new randomly generated properties to choose from and for gold and reagents costs you can do that as many timed as you want. The enchanting process also works on end-game legendaries, we want to make sure it works as an effective gold and item sink for the end-game.
One of the three properties you see is actually the original property on the item so you can never make the item worse. You can always fall back on the property that was there before.
Travis Day – Game Designer
Going into Reaper of Souls we talked a lot about the things that we liked with the item game, things that we wanted to improve upon, and we came up with three big philosophy changes. The first is less is more, item support build and rarity = power.
Less is more is our way of saying we wanted to make sure the players find awesome items and we don;lt want to flood the screen with them because we felt like we just dropped too many things and most of them weren’t as good as they could have been.
Item supports builds, this was our way of making the items feel like they were really changing the game. We wanted them to be more than just maths problems. So going into the expansion we’ve added a lot new affixes and legendary effects to embody that.
Finally rarity = power. This was our way of expressing that it’s OK for things to be rare, it’s OK for legendaries to not be flooding the screen, but when you find them they’ve got to be really awesome. We felt like we and a lot of work to do in that department.
To address the less is more philosophy we implemented what we call the [wiki]Smart Drop[/wiki] System. This our way of going “Hey you’re a Barb. you probably want some Barb items”. You probably don’t want a quiver and you definitely don’t want [wiki]Intelligence[/wiki] on the quiver. We have behind the scenes a system running that periodically is just going to go “you’re going to get a sword, it’s going to have strength, you;re going to be happy. Huzzah!
Another thing we did to help with dropping less items and making them better, we reduced the random range on our affixes. Remember when we shipped the game, you could find items that were 100 strength or 1 strength. We kinda went “that’s a little excessive”. We don’t need it to be that random. We love random, it’s at the heart of Diablo but we can narrow that down some. Now you’ll find things in like 70 – 100 strength. You can still find things that were better or worse than you have but they won’t be offensive.
One of the last things we did to help with the ‘less is more’ philosophy, some stats were not so great, we love finding pickup radius and we love finding bonus experience but I’m not going to wear it instead of strength or attack speed. So we said “what if break these stats out, what if we acknowledge these stats are cool but they’re not going to help you kill monsters better. So what did was separate the item stats into what we call Primary and Secondary. Any items is going to gave a fixed number of primary stats and a fixed number of secondary stats. So you can have [wiki]Magic Find[/wiki] but it doesn’t cost you [wiki]Crit[/wiki].
We also wanted the items to be exciting, we wanted you to find items and go “hold crap, I’m going to change my character for this”. Or “I found some items that really work with the skills I like using”. We wanted them to encourage diversity so that not everyone would be a [wiki]Whirlwind[/wiki] Barbarian. Here’s some examples. We’ve got a helmet that increases [wiki]Energy Twister[/wiki] damage by 14% and we have an axe that reduces the cooldown of all your skills. These are just a couple of examples to encourage players to change their style and try out things they maybe wouldn’t have thought of.
Finally rarity – power. This was our notion that we’ve got this item progression and it makes sense for most of the game. You go from grey items, to white to blue to yellow. But then it starts to get pretty fuzzy when you get to legendaries. Legendaries are really hard to find, people were saying “why do we never find any?” but what they were really sating is “why do they suck? Why can’t they be better?”. So we wanted to deliver on this fantasy that the harder it was to find something, the better it was going to be. It deserved to be as rare as it was.
Steve Shimizu – Lead Gameplay Programmer
I recognise that there are people out there who maybe played Diablo 3 for 100 hours and never found a legendary. We have a new philosophy for the expansion, ‘End Game for Everyone’. Everyone will now have a reasonable chance for finding these items. That being said, legendaries and set items are our most rare type of item, and in keeping with what Travis has said, rarity = power, they should also be the most powerful items as well. This is something we didn’t deliver on for the launch of Diablo 3 but it’s something we are very much looking to fix for the expansion.
After the 2.0 patch comes out, we’re going to be dropping new versions of each of these legendaries and these new version have been addressed in three different ways.
Drops at monster level. Currently every legendary in the game drops at one particular level and one particular level only. In RoS that item can drop at every level from then on. For example you might have a [wiki]Puzzle Ring[/wiki] (db) that drops at 32, that item can also drop at 32, 33, 34 all the way up to level 70 with stats that are appropriate for that level.
We’re going to be doing a stats pass on all of the items to make them viable. Rarity = power, they should be the most powerful items in the game and the stats should reflect that.
Finally, we are going to be adding new powers to many of these legendaries. They should not only be good from a stats point of view but to make them unique from a utility point of view, give them powers you don’t see anywhere else in the game.
Here’s an example, the [wiki]Frostburn Gauntlets[/wiki] (db)
On the left is the current live game version, on the right is an example from RoS. Previously this would only drop at ilevel 62, now it can drop at 62, 63, 64. This example is a level 70 version. You’ll notice we’ve added a primary stat, it’s for better stats and is a much more viable item.
The grey numbers on the right is an are feature added in 2.0. You highlight any item with the mouse, gold down the CNTRL key and these grey numbers will come up. These show the possible range of random values you could have got for each affix. We want people to understand the items better.
If you’re lucky enough to get a legendary item, you shouldn’t have to be extra lucky on top of that multiple times to have a viable version of it.
The last point is the affix in Orange. This is a new power added to the item which has a 50% chance to freeze instead of slow.
This is where a large part of our item development is going, into the creation of these new affixes that change the way that you play.
Some if the powers we have been working on include the Haroutunian Arm Guards. The affix in orange says “Every time you destroy a wreckable object you gain a short burst of speed”
In this example I’m paring it with Firewalker Boots that destroy things around me, every time I get near one of these grave stones to get a little short burst of speed. This changes the way you look at the environment, you may not have noticed all the wreckable objects in the environment before but now you have this item you definitely will as you’ll be steering towards them to get that burst of speed.
Next is the Illusory Boots (You move unhindered through enemies). It means you have the freedom to run right through enemies. I can see this being a valuable Hardcore item where getting surrounded might mean the end of your character. We want you to look at your hotbar after finding an item and think “maybe I don’t need [wiki]Vault[/wiki] any more” or “I don’t need some escape skill any more” because this item is taking that ability for me.
So some of the powers we are making them modify some of the skills you already have, so in this example of a Witch Doctor mask, and in this item it will change Horrify where “Horrify causes you to root enemies around your for 8 seconds.
He’ll pop [wiki]Horrify[/wiki] and it will follow him around and he can just stun enemies around him and then finish them off with his other skills.
Some items we’re doing just because we think they’re cool to do. This item is a homage to an item in another popular online game and this is what it looks like in our game.
Every time the [wiki]Wizard[/wiki] attacks she has a chance to proc a cool chain lightening effect to dispatch her enemies.
The final example is a set item example. Now we recognise that set items are going to be among the most difficult and rare to get the powers from because you need multiple items in the same set.
We’re saving some of the better skills for set items this time around. So in this example this is a [wiki]Demon Hunter[/wiki] set and the 2-set bonus is your [wiki]Spike Trap[/wiki] lures enemies to them. This increases the utility of Spike Traps so now you can control where they’re going. Every time a Spike Trap foes down, enemies are taunted to it.
This concluded the Panel
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