BlizzCon 2014 – Diablo III: What’s Next Panel Transcript

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I really like the way that played out. It really took a commitment from the players to prove themselves to be high on that leaderboard, and we really like how that works. That one is coming back.

How about reach level 70? No that one is gone. We are not going to bring that conquest back. We are going to replace that one. Why? Well, plain and simply focusing on getting experience as much as possible leads players to do things that are sometimes repetitive or boring; and we want the players to be doing a variety of fun activities.

It’s for the same reason that we don’t have a paragon leaderboard. You know, people ask “Where’s the leaderboard for greater rift? Where’s my paragon leaderboard?” Well, we don’t really want people to then say: “Well, I’m going to get to the top of that paragon leaderboard. Let me go and do this highly repetitive activity and optimize my XP.”

Another, now this one is another interesting conquest speed racer. This one challenges the players to finish the entire game from beginning to end in one hour. We thought this was really cool. I mean, it’s not a conquest for everybody. Not everyone is going to do it.

But for the people who didn’t just want to do more Adventure modes, bounties, or greater rifts– can say: “Hey, I got some buddies. We are going to get together.” Because to people to put together custom gear sets, look at their skills in a different way. Maybe even re-gem in a different way, change what’s going on and coordinate and plan with their teammates to kind of say how are we going to finish the whole game in one hour?

We really like that it put an interesting twist on how you would normally play Diablo. So here’s the three conquests that we are bringing to Season 2.

These will be joined by two old ones. I’ll let you guys take that in a little bit. Again as you can see the focus is on playing the game in a different way.

You are not going to get these conquests by accident; you are going to get these conquests by saying: “Hey, I want to do something different today. Look no one has done this conquest yet!” or… “Oh, I can still be in the top 100. Let me try and do this.”

You are probably going to need to plan, you are going to need to think about how you are going to achieve it. You might need to change your gear a little bit or your skills to do that one. Except for that the last one for Lore there are some people out there who really love to collect those Lore books. It’s a different way to play.

Not every conquest is for every person, so we want to encourage these different play styles. So also coming in Season 2 is the new Transmog.

So we release a new two pieces of the Transmog Set every season. For those of you who have a level 70 in Season 1, you are going to get your helm and shoulder piece.

If you get a level 70 in Season 2, you are going to get the legs and the boots; and here’s a preview in season 3– what the full set will look like.

Let’s talk about legendary items. So I’m going to preview two legendary items and these two legendary items are both season-only legendary items.

So anybody here has a Jade Harvester witch doctor? Yea, I love playing my Jade Harvester witch doctor and this staff is really inspired with being able to change up that gameplay a little bit. Yes, you are going to cast Locust Swarm. I just want to point this staff always roll out a 21 or 25% increased poison damage as well.

In fact, you don’t even need to be a Jade Harvester to make this work. I mean, you might be a pet build, a fetish build and you could still use this staff and just have the locust swarms coming off without the skill even being on your bar.

Here’s a video of it in action, notice as the video plays when the witch doctor runs around you don’t even have to stop to cast locust worms it just comes out in start affecting all the monsters around you.

Another legendary that we are going to look at, this one is for wizards, this one is for energy twister. It has a chance to pull enemies in.

For this legendary we really like how energy twister (which we have seen a lot before in Reaper of Souls). The thing is energy twister has been a lot less popular because simply there’s not a lot of legendary items that go well with it. So we are fixing that.

Again, this will be a season-only legendary. Let’s take a look at the gameplay.

Cheng: Yea, so that’s going to be good times. Alright, so I’m going to pass off the mic now to Kevin Martens, our lead designer.

(Audience applauds)

Ancient Items

Kevin: Thanks, Wyatt. So that’s just a sneak peek of items. We are showing a lot more at tomorrow’s Reaper of Souls panel; and we’ll talk a lot more about it in a moment. We have something special coming there too.

Ancient items, so essentially with Reaper of Souls and Loot 2.0, we completely changed how we gave out loots, the rate at which we gave it, and so on; and I have a simple diagram here to show you the difference between that. So this is Blizzard. We are Barbarian Santa and that is a sack full of legendaries that are raining from the sky all the time for you guys. So that’s good right?

For being much more generous. Way less when the game launched, that’s all good. We don’t want to change that. However, that means some players are particularly lucky or have played a ton have actually maxed out their sets. They might have a set exactly what they want. They might even have it on even every character. Good rolls, and they ask “Hey I like to playing the game, but I sort of ran out rewards that I’m actually looking for, can you guys do anything about that?”

Well, yes we can. So coming in 2.1.2 this should start feeling exciting again for max gear people because we have ancient items. So this applies to all legendaries and all new legendaries going forward as well.

It’s an entirely new tier for them. The short version is that it’s up to 30% better and these are available starting in Torment. So the higher you go in Torment with your current max gear characters the higher chance it is that any item will roll as legendary.

So getting right to an example, Maximus one of everyone’s favourite swords give your own demonic slave on a fire chain (a nice tactical weapon), this is a pretty good Maximus; and this is an ancient Maximus and look at all those green numbers.

So this is coming right away on PTR as well and again let us know what you think about that. This should give a longer tale to the people who are really max gear in the game. So this will again apply to all new legendaries as well including all the cool ones we are showing off tomorrow.

Ruins of Sescheron

So we have a whole new zone for you guys and this one you can play (if you haven’t already) on our demo just over there on the showfloor; and this is: The Ruins of Sescheron.

We have a game we released a little while ago quite a few years it was called Diablo II Lord of Destruction.

(Audience applauds)

Martens: And I have here an edited version of the opening cinematic and in this a Barbarian lord confronts Baal the lord of destruction with his demonic army. This takes place in front of the gates of Sescheron; and you’ll see– you probably remember what happens next, so let’s watch that for a second before we show you what this area looks like.

(Audience applauds)

Martens: Ok, so I grabbed that part of it because it shows you an establishing shot of Sescheron and what’s about to happen to it when Baal sends his army forward. This is going to be a new area in Adventure mode. It’s going to have bounties, it’s going to have monsters, it will be near Arreat Crater in Act III, and what you’ll see on the showfloor is just a very basic version of the ruins.

So a lot of the decorative elements aren’t there yet. It already looks pretty cool, but what I have here is a bunch of new things you are going to be seeing when the zone is finally done.

So as you can probably tell Barbarian is one of our favourite classic and has been for years. It’s the only one that came forward from Diablo II exactly as is and the artists are excited to actually show you things from the Barbarians homeland.

This was once a mighty proud people. They lived in a super harsh land and they built an extraordinary massive city; and it was wiped out basically in a day by the lord of destruction.

So those remnants of those who are left including the old Barbarian that you played in Diablo III, they can do nothing but come back to Sescheron and bury the dead.

So in the final version of it you are going to see a lot of funerary arts, pyres, and so on. So it’s going to have basically a lot melancholy to it as well. So we also have a lot of traps as far as gameplay goes in this area and this stuff is on the showfloor.

So instead of showing you videos of these traps in action, I would love you guys to go and play and give us feedback on what you think.

Here is the giant swinging blade traps, and this is quite the hazard. The monsters move in and out of these.

You are weaving through them trying to avoid them, and then these are spike traps. These have a nice tactical element to them.

That shield in the middle you can safely stand there and you can click it and spam spikes at any monsters that you have lured into that area. So this is a very interactive trap as well. Good tactical ability, and we’ll continue bumping up the damage in this because I know we all love spikes.

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