4Players: You want to stop the potion spamming with the new health orbs. But how do you want to realise long boss fights?

Jay Wilson: Essentially when we are designing a boss, health recovery is built in the design. We could drop health orbs at some percentages of the creature's overall life and that's what we do with rares and champions, actually. So those guys (a sort of mini-bosses) get a chance to drop health orbs, when you're fighting them. In a bigger boss fight, which is more structured, we could provide some small creatures for health.

Female Barbarian vs. Siege Breaker

We've considered out a fight, where we use the wells like in Diablo 2 that bubble up over times. So you might have multiple of those. Then you have to run over and hit them for health and for a certain amount of time you can't use them and then they come back. So there are a lot of different ways how to do this. And really, the idea is that, when we are a designing a boss, we should figure out how health recovery could be an interesting mechanic for this boss.

4Players: Aren't there any heal spells or health regenerating skills?

Jay Wilson: Yes, there are some ways for the characters. One example is the barbarian skill Bloodthirst - but we didn't decide if we keep this skill or kick it in the final version. It is like a temporary boost/buff for yourself to recover health by killing enemies. So there are other ways to recover and we didn't remove the potions. They are a lot less effective and you can't use them very often. They should be used in emergency situations.

For me there is a big difference between difficulty and challenge. Challenge is compelling, like challenge is basically the illusion of difficulty. When you feel a game is really challenging, then the game is exciting. Difficulty is where the game is hard and frustrating. So difficulty we try to avoid and challenge we totally want to embrace. And one of the problems I think Diablo 2 had, it would feel difficult and easy but almost never challenging. You had almost infinite resources and health. So as a designer our only option in this case to actually challenge you is to crush you with damage. Anything less then just crushing you (like one-shotting you) with damage is not gonna challenge or scary you, cause you could instantly recover your health. So what we are trying to do is, essentially create a game, where it is a challenge to just surviving and in which we don't have to make the monsters crush you again. We could actually reduce the

Barbarian using Warcry.

4Players: It sounds like the fights would be more complex and I should have a tactic, instead of just clicking on the enemy until he's dead.

Jay Wilson: Yes! That's exactly what we want to do and the health system fits into that. A good example: Shield skeletons that block you from the archers in the back. In Diablo 2 they wouldn't be very threatening, well, except in one case, when the archers do a ridiculously high amount of damage. We could actually make the archers do very little damage, but because you know, that you don't getting the fast health back (potions) and suddenly those guys are attacking you, it makes the archers threatening. And so it's really purges the player to get through the shield scouts quickly. And there are a few ways you could do this. With the Barbarian you could leap pass them and get directly to the archers or you could stun the shield guys, cause them to drop the shield, in which case they are much weaker and power right through. 

And with range classes, there is a bunch of tactics too. For example the Witch Doctor, he is sometimes very effective against stationary ranged targets, because a lot of his long ranged attacks are slow like the firebomb, which isn't effective against melee-target, cause they are moving too fast, but ranged targets are fairly static and so he could bombard this guys. But he can still deal with this advancing group of melees. So we are really trying to create a lot of interesting tactics across all the different classes and monster types.

4Players: Will the horadric cube returns?

Jay Wilson: We have not decided, whether or not. We will make some type of crafting system, perhaps with the horadric cube or not. Most players used the horadric cube just as a bigger inventory slot and this was an annoying kind of use. But you will see the

Female Witch Doctor surrounded by enemies.

4Players: In the WWI-presentation I saw gems dropping. What about runes?

Jay Wilson: Runes and Gems are in the game, yes. We're not talking about the specifics right now, but I can say, runes are not item-based anymore and they have nothing to do with items anymore. And I'm not a fan of "rune words" and we are really moving away from those.

4Players: What are the challenges and restrictions with randomly generated content?

Jay Wilson: I think the biggest problem with randomly generated content is, that it's very difficult to do exteriors and we actually avoided it in our exteriors, we don't use random layouts (only layout or fundament). [...] When you look at Diablo 2, I really think that random layouts wouldn't add much to the exteriors, we could just make them big squares areas. But there are some elements like randomizing the exits, causing you to explore. But there other ways to get the same effect, for example you could block the exit. It requires you to find something in the actual exterior to move forward, that will generated the same effect of exploration. So we need a big square to randomly place something in there and we've a variety of different options (called adventure-system), like terrain-sets,

Female Barbarian vs. Wood Wraiths

4Players: What about PvP (Player vs. Player) in Diablo 3 (ab 15,88€ bei kaufen)?

Jay Wilson: We recognized the duelling was very popular in Diablo 2. Just flip a switch and let players attack each other, wasn't enough for us. We love competitive play but we prefer to formulise it in some ways. So we don't realising any information about the pvp-system now, but we are working on specific Player-vs.-Player modes.