BlizzCon 2016 Diablo III Dev Talk Panel Transcript

Legendary Items

Travis: So what would the new Diablo patch be without a bunch of cool new items to find. So in patch 2.4.3, we’ve got some new things coming for you.

 

It’s always been one of our goals that every legendary in the game does something really cool, and we’ve got some items that aren’t there yet.

 

So I will show you what we did with a few of those. So you might remember Saffron Wrap. Not the best item ever, but I remember playing when the game first came out in classic, I had these awesome whirlwind build for whirlwind through giant packs of mobs, and hammer Overpower, and we thought it would be really cool if we brought Overpower kind of back up in there, sort of gave the Whirlwind set a little boost.

 

So Saffron’s Wrap now, whenever you use Overpower, the next Overpowers are going to do bonus damage based on the number of enemies you’ve hit. So we wanted it to be powerful, but have some cool gameplay where you kind of wait until you’re in the middle of the pack of mobs and then you hit it, and then your next one’s like 2000% better. So hopefully, this will help with that.

Next, some of you may recognize Manald Heal as the ring you instantly disenchant when Kadala gives it to you. We wanted to take that and turn it into a really cool lightning wizard build. We always love the idea of like lightning Wizards. Shoot the electricity out of their hands, arching around the screen. So we thought: “Oh, alright! Well, what if paralysis just did a ton of damage?” So now you have got Manald Heal, and you’re spamming your electrocute, or your assortment of electric spells. It will do tons of damage, and just murder everything around you.

 

Next, is Faithful Memory. We’ve really loved the sword. It’s been around forever. Also not the best sword in the game, but now if you get this, anytime your Falling Sword into the pack of monsters, your hammers are going to do tons of bonus damage. So you want to take aim for really huge densities, and then start spamming out hammers, and watching everything die.

 

Rabid Strike. The first weapon that does some poison damage. Okay, we got rid of that because that was lame. Instead, we thought Epiphany is really cool, and I love when you teleport around, like spending, and it’s really awesome. What if we made a clone of you that duplicates everything you do while you’re in epiphany? So, now Rabid Strike will make a duplicate of you that’s also going to teleport around mirroring all of the spenders that you use.

 

For Demon Hunters, so grenades, traps, gadgets, have always been part of their kit that we really liked, and we wanted to give them something to sort of play that up. So Hellcat Waistguard will now allow your grenades to bounce additional times up to (I don’t remember) 5-extra, each time it bounces, it’ll deal more and more bonus damage. So the final bounce will do up to 800% bonus damage. So you can really get a grenade build going on.

 

Fan yells: Thank you!!!

Travis: You’re welcome! Finally, The Barber. So this one, we just wanted to redefine like how people use Spirit Barrage. It’s always been kind of this really cool-looking single-target nuke. You are channeling your lasers at people, we thought alright that’s pretty cool. What if instead, you’re just charging all of that energy into one guy, and then when you stop channeling it, it explodes.

 

So this will change Spirit Barrage from a single target nuke to instead a channeled skill that stores up all the damage, and when you stop channeling, it detonates for all the damage, and kills everything around. This is one is a ton of fun to play with. So that’s what we’ve got to show for items today. I want to kick it over to Adam Puhl. He is going to talk to you about one of our awesome new features: Challenge Rifts.

Next: Challenge Rifts

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

Hope you enjoyed this article. Please, support Blizzplanet on Patreon (monthly) or PayPal (once), and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitch for daily Blizzard games news updates.