In his most recent responses on the official Diablo III forums, community manager “Bashiok” addresses questions about NVIDIA 3D support, clothing dyes, item sockets, and more.
On monster terminology:
As far as I know it right now the terms we’re using and what they mean:
Champions – small packs of tougher mobs that have a unique champion trait, one affix, increased health, damage, harder, etc.
Rares – single enemy of great difficulty, can have a few affixes, they’re named (randomly), much tougher, comes with a group of minions that inherit their affixes and bonuses
Uniques – Unique boss monsters. Unique name/art/skills/lairs(or specific location) and are usually a part of the story/goal of a quest, if not the actual end-boss of an act. The Skeleton King and the Siegebreaker would both be uniques
On the chat interface:
The chat interface is a bit more robust because … frankly chatting wasn’t exactly user friendly in the previous game. A lot of options and choices are moved to UI elements so that you aren’t charged with remembering a ton of /commands.
On whether DPS charts will be made available:
There are no DPS charts in World of Warcraft.
People have though created add-ons which attempt to compare the DPS of each player, as well as healing output, absorption, etc. These aren’t included in the game, nor are they supported. Personally I think they can be useful to a point, but are abused by people who don’t know how to use and read them properly, and are too commonly relied on as a means to judge the performance of others.
In any case, Diablo III doesn’t provide customizable UI through add-ons, and we have no intent to provide DPS charts.
On salvaging negatively impacting trading:
I think there are too many unanswered questions about the trading game to really know how it will be affected by salvaging.
You’re right though, as people get higher and higher level, the bar they set for items they feel are worth trading will raise. But that’s a natural inflation associated with character level. It isn’t an effect of salvaging, simply a product of relevance as items lose their usefulness to higher level characters (and thus relative worth). Is salvaging worse than simply passing over an item? Unlikely, but it depends on how the salvaged commodity works its way back into the economy, and I don’t think I can speak intelligently about that.
It’s never truly a real problem as the game is still able to be played and enjoyed and finished without ever trading with another character, but a true inflation where low level items are being sold at prices only high level characters can afford, I think would still take years.
On clothing dyes:
I wouldn’t take the mechanics of how dyes will be accessed as gospel just yet, there have been many ideas on integrating them with other systems, but for the sake of implementation they’re drops. They could stay that way, we’ll just have to see.
There are specific slots that are able to be dyed, and it’s generally the slots where dying them would actually matter (ie they have some surface area to be dyed).
The dye system is also not a tinting system. And by that I mean we don’t apply a color shift to the entire piece of armor. Each piece of dyable armor is specifically designed and built with certain areas that can have their color changed. It could be as simple as a strip of cloth running down a chainmail chest piece, or as complex as an entire robe. We hand craft and designate these areas, and in combination with specific colors we’ve chosen, we can allow players to have a lot of additional visual variety, while maintaining a controlled look and style to the game.
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They’re technically a two color gradient, which allows us to achieve a more natural looking coloration, but for the sake of simplicity, yes they’re presented as a single color.
I think the idea of having dies apply effects in different ways is awesome, but don’t forget there are plenty of other things going on gear that could be the basis for those types of effects as well.
On who’s doing the writing:
I believe Leonard has written the majority of the updates, but I know our creative development team has chipped in.
Mike Chu wrote the Archivist entry. Potentially others.
On the possibility of a gambling system:
I can see there being a possibility for some high end crafting recipes to have fewer or no fixed attributes, which in the latter case would be gambling, essentially. But better.
As far as a system dedicated to gambling, there are no current plans, but as I just said gambling could be pulled off a whole lot better through the crafting system directly. If we thought those types of recipes were a good idea.
Which I have no idea if we do. ‘We’ being other people that decide these things. 😉
On adding sockets to an item:
As far as I last heard it (and this is subject to change of course) the blacksmith can add one extra socket (max) to specific items, up to the maximum allowable. So if (for example, I’m not claiming max socket numbers) a sword can have two sockets, but drops with none, you can add one socket to it.
On how critical hits will function:
We have Critical Strikes. When you crit it does 50% more damage. Your chance to crit and increase above the 50% are both variable with skills, items, etc.
On crafting high level gems:
I mean keep in mind none of this has been proven through actual testing but the current design is that yeah, it’s going to take a lot of lower level gems to reach the very highest high end.
The gem-to-gem upgrade intent is not to have these huge gaps where you feel like you’re lame unless you have level 14 gems in every slot, but as a long term goal for the hardcore min/maxers and PvPers who are going to be playing for a long time and be able to work toward those goals. It’s something you can put a little time into just by upgrading the gems you pick up during normal play, so you’re constantly able to keep working toward the goal of crafting a level 14 gem.
Also the trading game and millions of people playing for months is going to make them a lot more attainable than they may seem when throwing out numbers like 19,000. 🙂
It’s possible it may feel crappy or we need to add something to help jump gaps, or, who knows. It’s all very unproven at the moment, but we think provides a nice long term goal anyone can work toward just by killing monsters and picking up gems.
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Gems do stack. Right now it’s 10 but that could go up as we see fit. They have a good chance of being used in other ways aside from simply being socketed, something that would siphon them out of the economy. Maybe crafting. We like them remaining as something you have to visit the Jeweler artisan to combine. We don’t want it to be annoying or take a lot of time though. We also don’t anticipate someone visiting one with 19,000 gems looking to upgrade all the way to level 14. 😉
They don’t have a level requirement so we do intend to see them used as a way to twink new characters, or allow people to buy into gemming up a bit earlier on if they have the gold.
Our current anticipation is that it will take the hardcore players quite a while before they start maxing out their gems, long enough that they won’t see level 14 gems in all slots for all of their gear before we throw something new at them.
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You will not get anywhere near the amount of crafting reagents back from what it took to craft the item. If you craft something, then salvage it, you’ll be losing a significant portion of what it will take to make another one of the same type.
It’s important to keep in mind that you can pay an artisan to remove the gems from an item. The last design I had heard of was that it was based on gem value, so as you socket higher level gems it becomes more expensive, but you’ll almost certainly want to unsocket gems to level them up, or swap to new gear. This may cause some unique problems for low level (non-twink) characters attempting to buy high level gems and then being unable to remove them from the socket when they get a better piece of armor (because they can’t afford it), but that may turn out to be an acceptable roadblock.
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The idea of gems even being required for recipes is still just a notion, so in-depth design on how they’re incorporated with crafting is unknown.
On item drop frequency and an auto-pickup hotkey:
We don’t like and don’t want to encourage any type of item-hoovering. Killing monsters, seeing items pop out, and then picking them up is part of the game.
We don’t mind auto-pickup for gold because there’s never any reason you wouldn’t pick it up, because it doesn’t take up inventory space. Anything that takes up inventory space has some amount of choice attached to it, regardless if you think you’ll salvage most things or not.
It’s important to note that fewer items drop in Diablo III as compared to Diablo II, and the chances for rarer items to drop is less extreme. So you’ll be picking up fewer items, and they’ll generally be of higher quality as compared to the previous game.
On melee weapons and skills:
We don’t have a lot of skills that require specific weapon types. The monk is the exception as he does have a few combat staff or fist weapon specific skills, and we expect players won’t pick both at the same time so there is a bit more skill customization there. For the barbarian though, his skills really only require that a melee weapon be equipped, which will probably be the case all of the time for everyone playing a barb. The witch doctor and wizard, none of the current skills require a weapon at all as far as I’m aware, although you obviously want to have one equipped.
The general philosophy and intent for the differences between the three main melee types is to make them all viable, but with obvious trade offs. For dual-wield versus two hander, it’s currently balanced so that it’s essentially an aesthetic choice. If you think it looks cool to run around with a big two hander, do it, if you get two awesome one-handers, then use those. Obviously that comes down to tuning affixes and such as it’s one item versus two, but that’s the intent and how it is balanced and works in the game right now. Compared to using a shield it should be viable either way, but you’re obviously gaining some survivability with a shield. The drop in damage output should be accurately offset with a better chance to live, ability to take some greater risks, etc.
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There’s obviously a difference in the way they play, yeah. Two-handers are bigger, slower, but feel more powerful. And dual-wield is much faster and bashier. What I meant was from a damage perspective they should be balanced so that no matter what you use, two hander or dual wield, you’re going through enemies at the same pace. One slow two-handed swing would equal a few bashes from dual wielding.
On whether there will be NVIDIA 3D support:
The nVidia 3D Vision products don’t (I believe) take any development support on the game’s end to make it work. There are some specific system requirements for it to work (120hz monitor, newer geforce) but if I could guess I’d say Diablo III will probably work with it out of the box.
In fact one of our programmers had the whole thing hooked up and running a few weeks ago. I didn’t make it over to check it out though. I am curious to see how it would impact a fixed camera/isometric view, if at all.
And on different stance animations:
What you saw of the monk was simply because his animations weren’t complete yet. When you enter a town or while speaking with an NPC you take a relaxed, non-combat stance.
