BlizzCon 2016 Diablo 20th Anniversary Panel Transcript

The Armory

Wyatt: Thanks Kevin. So we have a lot in store for you in 2017. As Kevin mentioned, there is the Anniversary Event, in a little bit you are going to hear more about the Necromancer, but for some of you, I think that the biggest feature coming in 2017 might actually be something we haven’t talked yet a lot about… which is the Armory.

Now I know some of you are wondering: “What’s the armory?” Let me set the stage. Have you ever been out as a monk in a Dashing Rift set, Dashing Strike Monk set, but you actually wanted to put on your Uliana’s gear.

So you have to swap your items, and swap all your skills. By the time you are done, your group doesn’t need you anymore.

We are going to fix that. You guessed it. We have a full equipment manager coming in a future patch in 2017. You’re going to be able save 5 loadouts per character, all your skills, all your passives, all your items, Kanai’s Cube powers. Everything is saved for you.

Let’s take a look at what that looks like. So here we want to save our Dashing Strike set. You can see the armory is located right next to the stash. You can name the set the way that you want. So that you can remember what it is later.

Once you have saved it, You can inspect it, to remind yourself what items were in there, what Kanai’s Cube power you have, what passives you had selected.

Later on, when you want to retrieve that set. let’s say that you just came back from doing some rifts as an Uliana’s, and now you want to go back to your Dashing Strike set. You switch back to your Dashing Strike set. Hit a single button. Here it comes. Boom! Just like that. Done.

Now you are ready to go off in your Dashing Strike set. There is a lot of details we had to work out to get this to work properly. A lot of questions people have: “What happens to my Paragon points?” You know, it’s interesting we actually don’t save your paragon points, but it’s for a good reason: you are constantly earning paragon levels, and we didn’t want it to be that we saved your paragon point distribution, and then you come back just twenty minutes later, you’ve gone into extra Paragon points, you have to reallocate those two points and save it again. It was actually more inconvenient. We want this to be a convenient feature for you.

“How about my gems? I’ve got lots of different gems.” We actually remember the engineer who is in charge of the feature, Mr. Kevin Hassett, he wanted to make sure that this feature did exactly what you wanted. So if you put in some Marquise rubies, but then later on you come back to a set, you have actually upgraded to Flawless Royal, it wll grab those Flawless Royal rubies for you, and put those in automatically.

Now some people wonder: “Well, I have to swap the gems back and forth. How do I pay for it? … because we want to be able to swap back and forth, but moving those rubies around every time cost money.” Right? No, it doesn’t. Not anymore, because starting in the future patch with the Armory, we are removing the unsocketing costs.

We want you to have no reason at all not to swap back and forth between all the sets and toys that you have accumulated. We are doing the same thing for your legendary gems. Let’s say that you have got your Bane of the Trapped, and you are going to level it up, or you use one for an augment. It will go to whatever your highest ranked gem is, of the type that you saved at the time that you wanted to save your set. Everything is handled for you.

And of course, the Armory is coming to both PC and Console. Here is a quick shot of the Console implementation.

So up next, to talk about the necromancer I’d like to introduce Mr. John Mueller (our art director) — who fun fact: did the design for the shirt that I’m wearing right now. This is a Diablo Dev Team shirt.

So if you see anybody on the showfloor wearing this shirt, they are going to be a member of the Development Team. It’s got this skull design on the back for the Dark Wanderers. They want to talk to you, all the members of the Diablo team want to talk to you. So if you see somebody wearing the shirt, go up to them. Say hi. Tell them what you are looking forward to in a future patch. So I’m going to pass it off to John, but before we do that — in case you haven’t seen it yet — first we are going to play the Necromancer reveal cinematic.

Next: The Necromancer

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