BlizzCon 2016 Diablo III Dev Talk Panel Transcript

Greater Rifts

Joe: So those are the zone changes that are coming. But some of you are probably thinking: “Alright, I love the new zones. These zones are great. The monsters sound great. What are our Greater Rifts? What do you have for us?”

 

Or to put it another way, I do Rifts.

 

(audience laughs)

And we have some awesome stuff for you. We have a brand new way to spawn monsters, and Greater Rifts. No more huge empty areas with no monsters where you are vaulting through. For this, we took a density first approach, we look at the amount of playable space in the tileset, and we look at the amount of XP for monsters that feels good in that space, and we fill it that way.

 

So every floor can be a great floor, and this is an example of 2.4.2, right? You could see ice caves here.

 

The same place in 2.4.3.

 

So that’s great. But we’ve also changed, we had a rule for a Greater Rift. When you went down the floor, we tried to keep the tileset the same, because we felt like it preserves continuity, right? You are in the cathedral, you go down it’s a cathedral, it makes sense; but we realized that what’s really important in Greater Rifts is that every time you go out on a floor, and it has the potential to be awesome.

It has the potential to be a great floor, filled with awesome monsters. So that’s gone. You’ll see a new floor every time. There’s an equal chance to get a new floor every time, and monster populations can now spawn on any floor. So even floors that have monster populations that maybe your class have more trouble with, you’ll be able to see different monster populations now.

 

Also the size in each floor is more consistent. And finally, entrances — and I have to say as a demon hunter I have gone down on the floor, this three Elite Packs that jump on me, I run back up the floor, go up and down, that won’t happen anymore.

Okay, so that’s great. That’s a bunch of great stuff. We’ve also got, though… have anyone fought Lacuni? They are leaping at you, maybe they are winged assassins and you are shooting them, but they just somehow, they make it to the last step and punch you? Well, now you can kill them all in mid-air.

 

And this extends to basically all the leaping monsters so you’ve got your Westmarch Brutes, you’ve got even the Burrowers from Act I. Basically, it’s jumping through the air at you. You can take it out. Also, have you ever had the experience where you’re in a Great Rift, and there are a bunch of invisible snakemen around you, like: “Just attack me, what are you doing? Come on!”

 

Well, they’re going to jump out and attack you now. This also applies to burrowing monsters. So this is mostly about a Great Rift, but you probably have that Bounty situation where there’s that one Rockworm somewhere, you just: “Where is he?” He is wandering around. He’s going to jump out, and when he does, he’s got a little floor-crack so you can see where he’s going to pop out.

 

We’ve also made some changes to some of the affixes that we’ve continued to iterate on. We’ve never been completely happy with how Reflect damage works. So now when you shoot a monster that has Reflect damage active, it will fire a projectile back at you. This means that you have a chance to dodge out of the way of the projectile. And of course, it still maintains the same damage type that you shot like you’re used to; and finally if you’ve ever had that last shielding monster, and somehow he’s still shielded, he’s the only guy left. Well, now cancel instantly so you can kill him as soon as the other monsters are dead.

 

I like that one, that’s a small change. Remember what Wyatt said about small changes though, can be good. Alright, so Travis is going to talk to you about some of the new Legendary Items.

Next: Legendary Items

BLIZZCON 2016 DIABLO III DEV TALK PANEL TRANSCRIPT
Seasons	Leaderboards	Devil in the Details	Adventure Mode	Greater Rifts	Legendary Items
Challenge Rifts	Summary	Panel Q&A

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