Difference between revisions of "Follower"

Revision as of 15:31, 14 July 2012

Followers are NPCs who assist your hero in his or her battle against the demons overrunning Sanctuary. There are three Followers in Diablo III, each of whom has a unique story, look, and combat style. They are: the Eirena the Enchantress, Kormac the Templar, and Lyndon the Scoundrel.

Followers are only usable in single player games; they return to town and will not assist you when playing with other players. While the initial plan was for Followers to only be usable through Normal difficulty, fan feedback influenced the developers to revise the system to make Followers viable companions[1] throughout Nightmare, Hell, and Inferno difficulty. The design theory is that Followers will be helpful when playing alone, but not so powerful as to make them mandatory, and not so complicated that players need to constantly attend to their survival. (There is no way to feed them potions, though they do share in the benefit of health globes. As they do not die there are no resurrection costs.)

Diablo III's Followers are updated versions of the hireable mercenaries that were available in Diablo II. Improvements to the system in Diablo III include, integration into the quests and story, spoken dialogue, additional equipment options and in-game looks, and numerous unique skills/abilities for each of the three Followers.

Followers in Diablo III

The three followers take on different roles in combat, though they should be roughly equivalent in usefulness, with their style of combat determining which one your character will find most useful. (This is a big change from Diablo II, where the Act 2 mercs with their powerful Auras were by far the most useful of the four mercenary types.)

Each follower has eight unique skills, four of which can be enabled at a time, with two new ones coming online every five levels. Players can retrain their follower at any time afterwards, to use different abilities. See the various followers pages for full details on their skills.

• The Enchantress Eirena is a mage with numerous powerful ranged magical attacks and a variety of helpful buffs.

• The Scoundrel Lyndon is an ex-thief and archer who wields a crossbow. He has numerous bow attacks and can debuff monsters, slowing and poisoning them.

• The Templar Kormac is a heavily-armored tank, ready to act as a meat shield for your ranged attacker. He can take on large groups of melee fighters and draw enemy attention in the toughest scrap.

Lore-Abiding Citizens

The followers, much like the Artisans, are recruited through quests that the player must complete in order to gain their trust and companionship. Once this is done, the Followers can always be found in the town area, where a player may choose one of them to accompany him into battle. Followers have their own individual quests, which shed more light on their backstory as well as the overall game plot. A player will need to work through the entire game with each of the followers, individually, to experience the full game plot and all of the quests.

Fortunately, there are plenty of words from the men in blue themselves on the aspect of lore in the follower system, such as these quotes from Leonard Boyarsky in an interview with FZ.se[2]:

...First, I think they [the followers] are much more distinct characters now than they ever were before. As I’ve already pointed out we’ve put much effort into developing your companion's personalities. We want the players to use them as much for their personalities as for their abilities.

Continuing on that theme, Boyarsky also conducted an interview with Game Planet[3] where he stated:

In addition to this, each quest for the follower is character specific so, as an example, a quest for Kormac involved retrieving holy scrolls stolen by the Archbishop Lazarus.

While the mercs in D2 had no personality whatsoever, the followers have their own sets of motivations, their own goals, and they also react to the world around them. Boyarsky goes into a bit of detail about this in an interview with Ausgamers[4]:

The rather jarring days of having a mercenary step into the Burning Hells for the first time, and immediately poking things with a stick without so much as a comment, seems to be over.

Followers in Single and Multiplayer

Followers can only be utilized in single player, either offline or playing solo in a game on Battle.net. If another player joins your game, your follower will return to town. Jay Wilson contributes insight to this design philosophy in an interview with Now Gamer[5]:

Follower Death

Followers do not die in Diablo III. They are simply incapacitated for 15 seconds, after which they will get right back into the fight. Players can accelerate their resurrection/nap to 5 seconds by standing near them while they are recuperating.

There is no mechanism to feed health potions to your Follower, though they do share in the benefit of health globes. The Followers also possess various buffs and healing spells, which they can use to help your character, as well as themselves.

Gaining Experience

Much like the player, followers will gain experience, and also benefit from plus experience items. There are some differences, however. Followers will level up along with the player, in a manner of speaking. If the player has Kormac at their side, and the player levels up, then Kormac will not automatically level up as well. However, a follower will never be more than one level behind the hero. If they are, then the follower can be dismissed, and when the player re-hires them in town, their experience bar will reset to zero, but will have leveled up to precisely one level below the hero. Obviously at level 59, they gain no automatic leveling to 60. That final level must be gained through combat.

Followers also benefit from bonuses such as the Massacre boost. It is unknown if they gain the full massacre bonus or just in part.

Beyond Normal Mode

The Enchantress in action.

The initial plan was that Followers would not be viable past Normal difficulty, as Bashiok explained in May 2011.[6]

After players talked about finding ways to make Followers viable in Hell, especially for their Magic Find and other item finding bonuses, Bashiok made the developer's intentions even clearer. [7]

The developers changed that design theory later in development, and announced at BlizzCon 2011 that Followers were being rebalanced to remain viable throughout the higher difficulty levels. Bashiok added an update on that in early January, 2012.[8]

Follower AI

Diablo II players have not-so-fond memories of the lacking pathfinding talents of the Mercenaries, who would often get stuck in corners, or remain locked in combat long after the player had run away -- not to mention the maddening habit of not turning on their Auras when newly-hired. The AI and pathfinding of followers in Diablo III is much improved, but it's one-size-fits-all; there are no options to set the Followers in some sort of "aggressive/defensive" mode, nor can players point to specific spots and tell the Followers to remain there.

Jay Wilson spoke about the AI challenges they faced, and what players can expect from follower AI, in an April 2011 interview with Now Gamer[9]:

The Templar is available in the beta, and players have found his AI quite good. He tanks appropriately, and stays quite close to the player, breaking off combat and quickly catching up to your character if you head the other direction. As the Mystic and Scoundrel are not available in the beta, nothing is yet known of their behavior.

Follower Personalities and Voices

The developers have repeatedly stressed that all of the Followers have full voices and numerous pieces of dialogue, all of which stem from their individual personalities. Kormac is said to be stoic and noble and determined, Eirena is pure of heart and concerned for the suffering the demons inflict, and Lyndon is sarcastic and cynical and funny.

Kevin Martens talked about the early days of the Follower dialogues in an April 2011 interview.[10]

The Follower Interface

The Templar's interface.

The interface for followers is separated into three basic sections: Gear, Skills, and stats.

• The gear portion of the pane lets players equip their followers with items.
• The skills interface allows the player to assign skills or spells to the follower for each milestone bracket of levels.
• The stats portion of the interface allows the player to view relevant statistics such as health and elemental resistances.

Skill System

One of the larger changes from mercs in Diablo II is the ability to assign abilities to the followers, instead of picking a vague type from a list. Gone are the days of useless Flux mercs from Act III!

Upon reaching level five, the player can choose one of three spells or skills for the follower. Each subsequent five levels, up to level twenty, will award an additional choice for the player. Each different type of follower will offer a customizable skillset to either boost the player's effectiveness in a certain area, or cover a weakness in another.

Once the skills or spells are assigned, that is the end of it, unless the players choose to respec them, which will be small in cost. There are no extra ranks of abilities for followers, nor do they benefit from traits of their own. Follower abilities may not be affected by runes.

Follower Inventory

A Scoundrel special item (rare quality).

The player is able to equip the follower with two rings, an amulet, an a weapon load-out that is specific to the follower (ie, Kormac can equip one-handed weapons while Eirena cannot). The locked box in the inventory pane holds an item that is unique to that follower, which is unlocked automatically at level 18. The items are referred to as "Follower Specials" and they can roll as either magical or rare items. They often have very large ranges for attributes, much more than what the player can find on a piece of gear at the level. As an example, a Demon Hunter cloak at level 30 may be able to roll dexterity up to 30, but a Scoundrel relic at level 30 would be able to roll dexterity up to 130. The numbers are used as example only.

There are no legendary follower specials, nor any special attributes that can only roll on their items.

Follower Statistics

Benefiting from a Scoundrel's items.

Followers have a similar system for statistics and items as the player, with the caveat that they are severely limited in what they can equip. As previously mentioned, they can equip a weapon, three pieces of jewelry, and one follower special. Followers do not benefit from a player's gear in any direct way, but a player may benefit from a follower's gear. In the follower's "Details" tab, anything in the adventure section listed at the bottom is the percentage of benefit that the player also receives. This includes experience gain from items, Magic Find, gold find, and more. The player doesn't receive full benefit from the items, but only 20% of the amount. So if a Templar has a set of gear with 100% magic find on it, the player will receive an additional 20% magic find.

A follower's kills aren't checked against their adventure statistics. So if the Templar mentioned above with 100% magic find kills a monster, the game will only check the magic find of the player (combined with the follower's contribution).

Design Goal of Followers in Diablo III

The function of a mercenary in Diablo II was a permanent helper that would scale with their level. Upon release of the expansion pack, Lord of Destruction, mercs gained a lot of power, particularly due to duped runeword items. Many MF characters relied on mercs for defense and damage.

This is not the case with followers. The design philosphy for the follower differs drastically, where the dev team has stated that they want the followers to be a sort of introduction to co-op multiplayer. Bashiok expands on this idea[11]:

The development team has done a bit of a turn-around with their philosophy towards followers in end-game. They are now viable and can still help out the player in Inferno difficulty.

Development

It was said by the D3 development team for ages that they "weren't ready" to reveal mercenaries in Diablo III, or otherwise they "didn't know" what they would do with them. In April of 2011, the follower system was indeed revealed, but to the chargrin of Blizzard, it was leaked by the Korean Blizzard official website on accident. Diablo fans quickly picked this up[12] and accepted it as real due to the superb quality of the presentation of the video. The day after, Blizzard unveiled the followers in an official capacity[13] in a deluge of interviews, information, and new screenshots.

Previous comments by the development team follow:

The team has said they hope to include full mercenaries as a feature, and that if they do they'll be bigger and better than mercs were in D2. But they've given no details yet. [14]

Leonard Boyarsky spoke in more detail about their plans for Mercs at Blizzcon 2008.

Leonard went on to say that there would be different hireables to fill different roles, such as tanks, artillery support, etc.

No more updated info has since been released, though in April 2011 Bashiok hinted[15] that an announcement was imminent.

Video

This is the reveal video for the Followers released on the 12th May 2011 by the official Korean site before, it seems, Blizzard Irvine was ready to do so.