Wyatt Cheng sat down at BlizzCon to play the Diablo 3 Necromancer and also spilled more information on what is and isn’t coming in future updates with a few explanations to clarify. This was recorded prior to the second day’s panel so some stuff has already been covered.
Still, there’s plenty of Necro gameplay Things to take away from the video…
- Looking at Necromancer skills first then runes once the skills are nailed own.
- At release, all four sets won’t be released at launch so they can see how the class evolves. One or two sets initially.
- Any plans for Kanai’s Cube and new sets? Wyatt only mentions the Legendary Soulstone reward from the new Diablo 1 dungeon. He says, “We had ideas for Cube recipes. We didn’t have any we were happy with and put them on hold and focused on new features like the necromancer and Armory.”
- Scythe is the class specific weapon, one handed.
- The Necro Pack comes with two character slots and two stash tabs. Wyatt says,”We initially wanted people to use the Cube to free up a couple of extra stash spaces, but it didn;t make an impact on the stash. You’re never sure if you’re going to cube or wear an item, or just keep it around. So stashes end up being filled with all these items. So we were playing around with the Cube recipe idea where you could take a power you had previously extracted and reconstitute it back into a Legendary item. We were implementing it and looking at what the cost should be. The problem is it became too easy to get an ancient version of the item and it didn’t affect people’s stash space like we were hoping.We added the recipe then cut it.”
- Will we see Legendary drop rate changes or bring in ancient tiers of gear in the future with a low drop rate? Wyatt says.”Some people would like to see a second ancient tier added, whereas others get frustrated at how hard it is to get ancient items as it is. So designing for these different audiences has been a challenge. We had considered a second ancient tier, some people have enough trouble as it is. So we added the Caldesann augments to provide an equivalent augment to the stats instead of a second ancient tier, but in a predictable way.”
- A second server for old players who love the hard grind? One standard one hard mode for the heavy grind? Wyatt. says,” To be honest. most of the feedback we get is people still think it’s a long journmey. Rather than splitting the community, I guess we should keep looking at more solution.
- People with lots of time dominate the Leaderboards because of Paragon power creep. Will there ever be a cap? Wyatt says,”We’ve been thinking about how we can let people compete but you can;t make a one size fits all solution. The reason Paragon is uncapped is, on the one hand while for the competitive aspect it would make sense if we wanted pure competition and maybe have a cap. Even then people would say your cap is too high, or too easy to get to Paragon 800, or whatever it may be. Others say they don;t want a cap/ It;s the iodea that even when I login I may nit get new items but I may get some Paragon.”The design values for the Diablo 3 team is that every gameplay session you play is rewarding. We always want to make you know that when you sit down to play Diablo for 15 minutes or longer, you are always going to be progressing. I wouldn’t want the lack of Paragon to undermine that. But that said we do have new feature called Challenge Rifts.”