Diablo III PvP Preview

With a couple of weeks to pore over the information they gleaned from BlizzCon, IncGamers brings us a detailed report of Diablo III’s player vs. player mechanics as demonstrated on the show floor of the annual event.

Everyone was a stranger (to each other and largely to PvP in D3) in the first two of my three play sessions, so teamwork and strategy were largely absent. It wasn’t FFA; everyone knew they had teammates and the red or blue circles underfoot were obvious enough that no one tried to kill their teammates (except by accident, and there was no friendly fire, so it wasn’t possible anyway), but most of us were learning the characters, skills, and controls during the games, so while tactics improved over the course of each game, no one ever used anything you’d mistake for actual strategy.

What strategy? Well, there were obvious tactics that could have been employed. For instance, one team could rush their Barbarian forward, while their two Wizards or Witch Doctors covered him with artillery. Teams could have focused on one enemy and turned the battles into a 3v2. Players could have used their movement debuffs (Grasp of the Dead and Slow Time) to slow the enemy and make their teammate’s spells more accurate. Players could have taken turns getting health orbs, or switched places in offense and defense to let a nearly-dead character contribute damage from the back row. Etc. All things that actual teams will do, (and much more) when we’ve had a chance to play the final game. All things no one did much of in my games, at least not on purpose/consistently.

One thing that’s striking if you watch even the Blizzard guys play 2v2 on the B-roll footage is how even the devs don’t have any real teamwork. The players in the game are just doing their own thing and only occasionally teaming up against a common opponent, or covering for or supporting each other. I feel very safe in saying that nothing anyone did at Blizzcon, or even what the testers are now doing at Blizzard, has even scratched the surface of what skillful, practiced duelers will do as a matter of course in the final game.

So, not much teamwork, but a lot of chaos and a lot of fun. Early rounds in most games were marked by a lot of stupid, very quick deaths. Not only did players hit the wrong hotkeys (I teleported instead of Meteor’ed twice in early rounds with a Wizard, both times launching myself right into the grinding range of enemy Barbarians, with predictably-grim results.) but most players had to learn what their skills did, while also trying to figure out what the other classes’ skills meant.