[wiki]Jay Wilson[/wiki] recently conducted an interview with IGN discussing Diablo 3’s development. The majority of the conversation revisits much of what we heard from the many Blizzcon interviews and also discusses the reworking of the Monk skill [wiki]Breath of Heaven[/wiki].
[blue]JW: Basically what we’re talking about is [the monk] needed a damage bomb. He needs the occasional ability to just AOE around him effectively. We used to have an ability that we called Circle of Wrath — that was like Holy Nova in World of Warcraft — where it does damage and it heals, but for Diablo we felt like that was a confusing skill so we changed it to just a pure healing skill. We took the wrath out of it. But then we found we missed what wrath used to do.
And so we decided to separate them. So we’ll have two different [abilities], but then we’re also talking about a bunch of ideas to make it more interesting than just a way to AOE.[/blue]