This is a transcript of the Diablo III Gameplay and Auction House Panel held at BlizzCon 2011.

Jay Wilson: What’s up BlizzCon, how you doing? Are you guys ready to talk about some Diablo? So I have to tell you, the endless forces of hell, they got some plans for you guys. But started looking around the room I think you can take them. I think so. So what we’re going to talk to you today is the endless amount of items, class tuning abilities, and a whole bunch of stuff about how you can take on the forces of hell.

I’m going to let Bender get started.

Diablo Achievements

Bender: I’m going to talk about achievements today a little bit, and you can get achievements in a number of ways.

One of those ways is coming to Blizzcon. So congratulations guys, you got your first virtual achievement.

So not all achievements involve you going to LAX and all that jazz. (Blizzplanet Note: LAX is the code that identifies the Los Angeles Airport when you buy a flight ticket)

Some of them are really easier to get. Normally you might be playing through and kill the Skeleton King and you can get an achievement for that. It allows you to track your progress as you go through the game, and review what you have done.

Some of them are a little bit crazier, extreme behavior. We consider it extreme to get to a level 60 hardcore character because it’s not easy. So if you do things a little tougher in the game, you’re gonna get achievements for that.

And then, of course, Absurd Shenanigans — because we all love some shenanigans. Our German players know about these, they play Diablo II without putting any armor on. That’s pretty absurd. In this case, it might be for beating every boss by punching them in the face without wielding a weapon. So that might be something that might get you an achievement.

What’s the point beyond that? They are fun to collect. Track your accomplishments. When you get achievements, they unlock components for your Banner. Your Banner is sort of a visual representation of what you’ve done in the game.

The more you achieve, the more components for your banner you unlock.

In PvP, you might open some, just playing through the game normally, and getting achievements by quantity will extend the pennants, so it gets more stuff on it as you play.

Other achievements can change the plot, the accents, and then, of course, if you play a lot of hardcore, the base of your banner will get bigger and after a while it can add up to something pretty cool.

Now, these banners are not just pretty, although they are pretty. They also allow you in coop to teleport directly to your friends.

If they’re out running around, you don’t know how to find them, you go back to town to craft something or buy from a vendor — you can click on their banner and you will teleport to them. That’s pretty useful.

It’s a good way to ensure that people see your cool banner.

New Gameplay Elements

Bender: That’s not it, though. Some other elements we’re adding to make gameplay more convenient for you. For example, the Stone of Recall.

The Stone of Recall is an endless use item. You can use it as many times as you want to get yourself back to town from the wilderness. So here we are like casting, takes about 10 seconds, can be interrupted by monsters, hope that guy on the left doesn’t interrupt us, so you get back to town, and it leaves this blue portal thing behind, and that allows you to get back to where you came from. Only you can use it. Your friends can’t use it.

They can get to you with your banner so that’s not a big deal. Not sure how to call this thing. Maybe like village door. If you can think of something, let us know.

Also, we have the Cauldron of Jordan allows you to sell stuff right out of your inventory. Want to clear up your inventory, want gold, you can sell as many thing as you want out of your bag.

Similarly, the Cube of the Nephalem allows you to pick items of your bag and convert it to crafting components. Got stuff in your bags, you replaced your gear, don’t want to go back to town yet — use it to convert them into crafting materials, all kinds of cool stuff.

Diablo Crafting

Chambers: Holy Molly! A lot of you guys out there. How are you doing? I’m going to talk about crafting for a little bit. Crafting is all about making items, or making your existing items even more awesome.

So, I wanted to take a step back and look the way that the items were handled in Diablo II and what their item life cycle was.

Item from two sources in Diablo II: Buy it from a vendor or you could do what I have done here, kill Andariel and get awesome tridents. Once I’ve picked up that item, I’m probably going to wear it for a while, but then it’s going to get upgraded, and I can trade it to my friend for some gold maybe, if I’m lucky, or sell it for some gold to Charsi. What do I do with that gold?

Well you can gamble it, but Geeds allowed you to buy these unidentified items for like crazy amounts of gold, or crazy amounts of gold and identify them and find out what it was.

The system is cool, because it gave you access to super powerful items, but a lot of people had a negative experience when they tried it out, so they never really went back and kept on doing it again and again.

You just end up hoarding all of your gold, and that’s not really a life cycle.

That’s just a pub with no beer. And that makes Andrew really, really sad.

So what are some of the things that we’re doing in Diablo III to make this item life cycle better? First off, I want to talk about The Mystic.

The Mystic

The Mystic is where you go if you want to enhance your items. She can take any item that you have, like your chest piece, or bracers, and she can add an enhancement to it.

The enhancements are a wide array of things like gold find or magic find, but also increased core stats, and a whole a bunch of things for class related, like for example, here it increases Hatred regeneration by 0.83 per sec on a One-Hand Melee Weapon.

The interesting thing about enhancements in Diablo III as opposed to World of Warcraft, is they’re actually random.

So that 0.83 per second that actually has a chance like the bottomline for that is .66 per second.

So you can see up here, I’ve enhanced my Keen Heavy Axe of Storms with Hatred regen, and it’s .66 per second. I can reapply that enhancement and have a chance of actually making it better.

Making it get the top end of that. The awesome thing about that is, as you’re leveling off you apply the enhancement, and that’s good enough, but it’s maybe like middle range, but at the end game, by applying these enhancements you can get super powerful enhancements on your items you can get by not necessarily investing time and resources in that.

She facilitates — what the what is that? That’s a Demon Hunter running around with a one-handed axe and a shield. Who the hell thought of that? We did. Because it’s awesome, you know.

Like you don’t always have to run around and play with ranged weapons. Maybe you just want to like spam Fan of Knives, and Chakram and Bolt everywhere, that sort of thing.

Mystic can allow you to do that. Ordinarily you wouldn’t get it on a one-handed axe, but she lets you do it, because she’s kind of cool, and she levels up.

Awesome artwork. We have amazing artists by the way. Have you noticed? She levels up. She has ten levels. Every time she levels up, she gets more powerful enhancements, and she uses pages of training to level up which you can get from killing monsters randomly in the world.

Blizzplanet Note: Check out the short video below to see the Mystic level up animation. Her tent transforms into a better version with more gear and stuff.