BlizzCon 2019 Diablo IV Systems and Features Panel Transcript

ITEMS

David: So let’s take a look first at the item qualities in Diablo IV. So as you can see up in the screen, normal items are the weakest items and the mythic items are the strongest items that we are proposing for Diablo IV. So let’s take a deeper look at each of these categories.

So for the three first categories: Normal, Magic, and Rare — of course, if you played Diablo games in the past, you will notice that you have more item affixes, the higher the quality; and our main goal for item affixes is to increase the number of playstyle choices and options for players when they are picking item affixes. So, of course, we will have a good mix of returning affixes, as well as brand-new ones. For example: Attack Speed, Critical Strike Chance, Critical Strike Damage, Damage against far away enemies, cooldown reduction, damage resistances, damage bonuses to specific elements — like all this stuff and more, but what I want to talk about on top of that is one of the affixes on the stream — it says +1 rank to Master of Arms on the rare amulet. It is the bottom one that you see. What that is doing is giving me +1 rank to one of my talent points, so what that is going to allow me to do is as I put my talent points and pick a playstyle, I’m not going to have enough choices to go down every single tree; but with items I can break some of these rules by getting access to talents that I normally couldn’t access before; or I can use them to go past my maximum talent point through items as well.

So we want to add many of these types of affixes as possible in Diablo IV. For Legendary Items and Sets, the goal is to provide as much player choice and customization as possible, while forming your end-game build; and in order to do that, the most important change in Diablo IV is to make sure that Legendary Items are on equal or greater power level compared to set items in Diablo IV; that way you will have full customization of picking every single slot, and which specific legendary power you want to use.

So let’s take a look at a simple example of customizing your playstyle through one specific simple skill in Diablo IV, as well as items that only modify that specific skill; but of course, we will have a wide range of Legendaries in the game.

So this is Teleport, as you can see. Pretty straightforward. You teleport to the targeted location — like you just saw. Say you are struggling on the Defense, and you can pick something like this up. Every time I teleport, I get damage barrier.

— and this one, whenever I teleport I create this rift on the ground, and whenever I stand in it, I gain increased critical strike chance.

This next one, I can use teleport as much as I want now. It has no cooldown, but it is random, and I need mana to use it.

— and this last one, I can cast damaging ligthning nova whenever I teleport. So let’s check that out.

So pretty straightforward. Let’s try to equip the one that let’s me teleport as much as I want, and now I turn my mobility skill into a damaging skill at the cost of it being a little bit random; and I just want to stress once more that not all Legendaries will work so specific to one’s skill. We will have a wide range of skills ranging from Legendaries that are generic and good for every type of build; Legendaries that are good for specific categories of skills; and Legendaries such as the ones that you saw here.

 

MYTHIC ITEMS

— and finally, Mythic items are the strongest items in Diablo IV. Their equip limit is 1, but they have 4 Legendary powers on them. This is simple example of a Barbarian legendary: a Barbarian mythic amulet. So you can look forward to more info coming in the future on the Mythic Items.

 

RUNES

— and there are Runes and Runewords in Diablo IV.

(Audience applauds)

How they work is quite straightforward. You have two different types of Runes in the game: Condition Runes and Effect Runes. You can take any Condition Rune, combine it with any other Effect Rune in the game, to form our Runeword. So this example on the screen it says the Condition Rune — whenever you freeze an enemy and the effect is reduce a random skill cooldown by 15%, and as you can see from that item, I have formed my Runeword.

So let me show you some more examples of Condition Runes and Effect Runes. One thing that is not described here that we are working on is — we are working on adding progression to Runes as well. So you can look forward to more info on that in the future as well.

So I will hand it back to Tim for Q&A, so you can quickly read this before he goes to the next slide.

NEXT: Q&A

BLIZZCON 2019 DIABLO IV SYSTEMS & FEATURES PANEL TRANSCRIPT
1. Classes	2. Skill & Talents	3. Sharing the Open World	4. Dungeons
5. Monsters	6. Items	7. Q&A
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