Shrine

Shrines were a major feature in Diablo I and Diablo II, but it's not known if they'll return in Diablo III. Shrines were seen in the BlizzCon demos in 2008 and 2009, but not in 2010 and there have not been any recent official comments about them.

Back in 2008 and 2009 when they commented on shrines, the D3 Team listed several issues with shrines as they existed in D2, and said they hoped to fix those problems and improve on the feature. It's possible that they could not find a way to make shrines compelling, and thus they will not return in Diablo III, or not until an expansion.

No wells, springs, or pools of healing or mana restoration have ever been seen in Diablo III.

• Diablo I Shrines
• Diablo II Shrines

Shrines in Diablo III

Shrine bonus tooltip.

Restored Shrine..

Shrines were last seen in the BlizzCon demo. (That same demo build was shown at Gamescom 2009 and 2010, as well as PAX 2009.) In that demo, shrines were spotted around the surface desert area, and provided various bonuses reminiscent of their Diablo II counterparts.

In Diablo III all shrines were called a "Desecrated Shrine," which was "restored" by the player's click. This seems to suggest an unknown plot relation or implication.

Known Shrines

Below is a list of known shrines, all seen in the Blizzcon 2009 gameplay demo.

• Fortune
  • Your chance to find magic items and gold is greatly increased.
  • Lasts for 60 seconds from activation.

• Ice Armor
  • Slows movement and attack of enemies that attack you.
  • Lasts for 60 seconds from activation.

• Unknown Shrine
  • Shrine Restored. You feel Blessed.

• Unknown Shrine
  • Shrine Restored. You Feel Ready For Battle.

Development

First ever seen Shrine.

The D3 Team previously mentioned shrines and said they're tossing around ideas about how to implement them, but nothing was set yet.

Jay Wilson has addressed the issue of shrines in a couple of interviews. And given essentially the same answer both times.

Blizzcon 2008

Jay Wilson addressed the issue of Shrines at a press conference at Blizzcon, in October 2008. [1]

Will there be shrines in Diablo 3?
Jay Wilson: We have not decided about it. We have ideas for shrines. The things is that only two shrines were actually interesting to the player: Experience Shrines and Monster Shrines. Other shrines where like “nah”. We want to bring some system in with this functionality. This is where the combo exp bonus comes from. It’s not replacing shrines, but it’s playing in to it.

Blizzcast #8

The question came up again six months later, in April 2009. Jay's answer indicates that the team hasn't done any work on the issue since last October. The questions were submitted by fans, and relayed to Jay by Blizzard Community Manager, Bornakk.

Will shrines be making a return to the world of Sanctuary in Diablo 3?

Jay Wilson: Well there are some aspects of shrines that we liked, experience shrines I think are probably the prime example everyone uses. They're fun because they drive the player forward. Monster shrines are sometimes fun because they bring out a rare that you didn’t know or weren't expecting that could come from any direction and that's cool.

But for the most part, the pure mechanic of shrines, a random powerup that just appears in the world for no reason, we don't really want to literally bring that back. What we are going to try to do is integrate a lot of the best things of shrines into our quest and event systems so that when you encounter a random quest or random event that has a story context within the game it either rewards you like a shrine would reward you or something that is actually built into the gameplay of the quest. So while technically no shrines are not coming back verbatim, we are trying to bring back kind of the best things of them in a different form.

So you'll still have the randomness and spontaneity of it.
Jay Wilson: Exactly, and really they are kind of there to change up the gameplay and add a little factor of randomness, but we felt that very few of the shrines actually did that – accomplish that goal...

Stamina shrine?

Jay Wilson: Yeah, stamina shrine lets you run a long time. Skill shrine made you a little bit more powerful. We feel like we can take the best and put them within actual events that are a lot more fun and have a lot more gameplay to them.

Shrines in D1 and D2

Read about how shrines were implemented in Diablo 1 and Diablo 2:

• Previous Diablo Shrines

References

• Gamescom Wizard Gameplay Footage
• BlizzCast 8
• BlizzCon 2008 press conference with Jay Wilson