Fan of Knives

Fan of Knives is a Demon Hunter skill unlocked at level 4. The Demon Hunter quickly whips around in a full circle, sending out a nova of blades that hit all targets in range, many of them multiple times.

Background

Diablo III Active Skill [e]
Fan of Knives
Used by:	Demon Hunter
Enabled at:	Clvl 4
Skill Description
Send out a nova of blades to cut and slow your enemies.
Type:	AoE Damage/Debuff
Resource Use:	Costs Hatred
Skill Rune Effects
Alabaster rune:	Unknown
Crimson rune:	Unknown
Golden rune:	Unknown
Indigo rune:	Unknown
Obsidian rune:	Unknown

The Demon Hunter magically summons a wealth of blades, distributing them in a spinning arc, damaging and slowing enemies within close-range, similar to the nova spells from Diablo of yore.

Skill Design

Fan of Knives may have the best D3 acronym yet.

Fan of Knives is a short-range area-of-effect ability that damages all of the enemies in range of the skill. This type of skill is best used either when surrounded by enemies or within close quarters where the enemies are bunched together to a point where the skill will penetrate deeply into the group. The knives also include a slowing debuff.

Fan of Knives Video

A video of Fan of Knives can be seen below, courtesy of the Diablo.IncGamers.com You Tube channel.

Skill Rank Table

• Rank 1: Throw knives out in a spiral around you doing X-X damage to all enemies within X feet of you. Your knives will also slow enemies by X% for X seconds.

Synergies

• No synergies with any of the passive skills are yet known.

Skill Rune Effects

No runestone effects are confirmed. There's some speculation that the red, honeycomb pattern on the ground beneath the Demon Hunter's feet in two screenshots from February 2011 show a runestone effect. That's not confirmed, and this might just be a new animation upgrade for the skill, since it was last seen at Blizzcon 2010.

The second shot does not show the FoK blades, but since the red pattern is fading, FoK was cast a second ago and the fast-vanishing blades disappeared from sight before the red pattern could fade entirely.

Fan of Knives rune effect graphic?

Blades gone, but the red graphic remains.

Development

Faces. Knives. An uneven match.

Fan of Knives was first shown at BlizzCon 2010 as one of the originals when the Demon Hunter was unveiled. Flux gave it a whirl in the demo:[1]

The real limiting factor of this one is the very short range of the knives. They did good damage, but the range was barely beyond melee reach (not that the DH was using melee weapons), and it was fairly mana-expensive. As a result, this one was only worth using when you had at least two or three enemies at very close range. The perfect situation for it was a circle of Vessels, and I enjoyed killing all 6 or 8 Vessels in such scenarios several times with this skill. It took 2 or 3 FoKs to finish them all, but this was the fastest and most effective skill against those clusters of enemies in the entire demo.

Skill tiers were removed for the July 2011 Press Event, and Fan of Knives became a level 4 skill.

In Other Games

As many fans noticed upon announcement of the Demon Hunter and getting to see her skills for the first time, Fan of Knives is a returning skill from previous Blizzard games, namely WarCraft III and World of WarCraft. In WarCraft III, it was an ability used by the "Warden" hero character, and in World of WarCraft it is a level 80 ability used by the Rogue class. Fan of Knives appears to be making a niche within the Blizzard pool of spells and abilities, such as other spells like Teleport, and Blizzard.

Media

Fan of Knives can be seen in action on video here:

• Gameplay: Blizzcon 2010

You can find pictures in the Diablo III screenshot and picture gallery:

• Diablo III screenshots and pictures
• Fan of Knifes specific gallery contents

• 

  Fan of Knives.

• 

  Where does she get those wonderful toys?

• 

  FoK, another picture.

References

• BlizzCon 2010 Demon Hunter PvM Hands-on Report
• JudgeHype.com July 2011 Press Event Coverage - The Demon Hunter (Translated by Zediono)