BlizzCon 2013 – Diablo III: Gameplay Systems + Crusader Panel Transcript

Skill Iterations

Eberle: Hi, everyone. So the first thing that we do when we are designing a new class on Diablo III, is we ask the question of What’s the fantasy for this character. So we brainstormed and come up with all kinds of ideas and fantasies that we want to see in the Crusader.

So I’m going to show you how we came up with those fantasies, and bring those to finish skills. The first skill I’m going to show you is called Heaven’s Fury. The fantasy that we started out for this was we wanted to see the hand of god reach out, destroy the Crusader’s enemies, and we thought that sounded really cool, but then we had to figure out well — what does that do? And, how does it look like?

So this is the first version of Heaven’s Fury. Mechanically for this you would right-click and drag out a line and then these beams would come raining down destruction on the battlefield and visually we liked it. We thought it looked pretty cool, but it had some problems. It was really loud, that if you were in a multiplayer game and your body was cast on this, so it was kinda annoying.

So we kept making some revisions. For this version we had the beam chase the mouse cursor around, and we really liked the way it looked. We thought it felt really powerful, but it took too much space on the screen; but mechanically it was a little rough.

We didn’t like having a channeled skill for the crusader. We want him to be able to move around and hit things. So we thought — what happens if we gave the skill its own A.I.? So this is the final version of Heaven’s Fury. You right-click, the beam goes out. It chases down monsters. Leaves the Crusader free to fight his enemies, throw a shield at them.

So a knight in battle-scarred armor. Every class needs a movement skill, though. So we kinda asked the question. What is a knight without its horse? The Steed Charge. The Crusader summons a mystical horse. Just cruises around the battlefield. It’s really, really fast. It has some awesome runes too. Definitely need to give it a try.

War Machine Made Human: So we talked about the Crusader being a big Abrams battle tank. One of the cool things about a tank is that it got a big gun on top. So we didn’t want to give the Crusader a gun. That doesn’t fit its kit. But we asked ourselves the questions — what if he was the artillery shell in that cannon?

This is Falling Sword. So it jumps up into the air and crashes down doing a ton of AOE damage. Really helps getting into the fight if there’s anything left after that hits.

So he is descended from Paladins, and I’m sure a lot of us were Diablo II fans. That was my first character when I played in Diablo II. So there was one skill that we had to bring forward. Hammers? So really an iconic skill for the Paladin, and we had to bring that forward in Diablo III.

He summons his hammer. They swirl around him, piercing through everything. Just laying waste to the battlefield. Lots of fun.

I just want to show you a little video of the Crusader. It has got a bunch of skills. There are some runes in there if you look carefully. Here we go.

I hope you guys are as excited as we do. Now to talk about the rest of the classes, Wyatt Cheng.