BlizzCast Episode 13

Blizzard Entertainment has released a thirteenth BlizzCast episode, and while the primary topic is the freshly launched StarCraft II beta, there’s also a World of Warcraft/Diablo III Q&A toward the end.

Zarhym: Ok so is the respec system in Diablo III going to be similar to the one in the Diablo II 1.13 patch?

Bashiok: Not really. We’re still working on the respec system for Diablo III. For those who haven’t seen the Diablo II 1.13 patch the respec system in there, which is still on the PTRs by the way (or maybe not), is you can get three different respecs by completing the Den of Evil quests and then any additional ones beyond that by picking up item drops from bosses and using the horadric cube to combine them. For Diablo III we don’t have it really nailed down yet but some of the main points we do want to hit are that it’s more than just a gold cost for changing your mind. Although that will be a major component of it. That it’s targeted for specific skills so you’re not resetting your entire skill tree, but you’re able to target specific skills to reset those ones specifically. To also scale the cost of respecing so early on in the game it’s cheaper and easier to respec and as you go farther into the game it will be harder and more expensive. And all of those things together make it a very challenging system to implement, hitting all of those notes. And those are all pie in the sky, I guess, hopefuls for the respec system we may not get all of them in. We don’t have any specifics on what the actual respec system will have but those are sort of what we’re shooting for and of course it’s all up in the air still.

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Zarhym: So how are those different resource systems working out so far?

Bashiok: They’re all going pretty well, none of them are finished. We’re still working hard on everything. The witch doctor is probably the most solid which probably makes sense because he’s using mana. But we don’t have mana potions so we need to work on his recovery of mana. So he has, some people might have seen soul harvest as one of those at BlizzCon and that might be part of a larger group of recovery systems. The monk is probably actually the next most solid which might seem weird since he was the most recently announced. But his resource system just kind of worked right when it came out of the gate. But nobody has seen it yet, and we haven’t talked about it yet… aside from this right now. [laughs] So we’re still not announcing what it is, we still have some work to do but it’s pretty solid, it’s looking pretty good. The barbarian is close. We have a new revision going in soon and we’re hopeful for that. And the wizard is probably the hardest right now. It’s been a struggle trying to get that nailed down but it gets closer with every revision. And the fifth class of course would be… nah I’m just kidding.