Follower

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]:

The first thing that happens when you meet them is that you can play through a short sequence that sort of explains their roles in the world. Then it's up to you whether you want to dig deeper into their stories by completing side missions and such. They’ll also make small talk while you run around in the world and you get to know them that way, too.

...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:

As you’re running through the main story arc, you’ll encounter them doing similar things to you. They’re adventurers fighting the good fight. You’ll interact with them in their story and then they have reason to follow you and to help you in your quest. These happen in the first third of the game, they’re spread out a little bit. Once you’ve unlocked them you can keep them with you or send them back to town and choose which one you want.

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]:

We’ve put a tonne of work into their voice-talent and the number of lines they have to talk to you about stuff, to really bring them to life and add a lot to the experience of the world.

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]:

Followers aren’t in PvP at all, and in cooperative Followers return to town. We found that having four players and four Followers on-screen all at once was pretty chaotic and hard to tell what’s going on. We logic’d out that a player is better than a Follower, they’re better companionship and they’re certainly more effective than a Follower. We figured any player would prefer to have another player, so at that point we decided to have the Follower return to town. You can always get him back later – if the other player leaves the Follower will return.

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.

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]

Well, followers are essentially a flavor bonus to those playing through normal the first time by themselves. It provides some story elements, but more importantly it gets the idea in their head of playing with another person. You come across each of them pretty quickly in Act 1, and then they help you throughout the rest of the game if you'd like. They aren't required to beat the game on Normal, even if you're playing by yourself. Feel free to leave them behind if you like. But they are pretty awesome.

They're also tuned so that they become very weak starting in Nightmare, and then are completely unusable in Hell. Even if you're playing alone, you will probably not be using Followers past Normal - - you can try but they're going to just be one-shot back to back. They're there as a bit of flavor, to help get people into the mindset of co-op if they're a bit reluctant, and... that's about it. They won't be usable at end-game, and they'll never replace the abilities and power that another player can bring.

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]

Followers will not stay alive easily past Normal, and if they’re not alive you aren’t going to be getting their bonuses. I’m sure people will try to game this, and ideally they will fail. If not we will ensure followers are not part of the end-game MF equation. They are not intended to be, and we will take whatever steps are necessary to ensure they cannot be.

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]

A lot of us wanted to see followers become viable throughout the game too, and agree they really add something to the experience as a whole. One of our main driving forces in making this decision was the benefits of the co-op experience, and the disadvantage of playing alone in the Nightmare, Hell, and Inferno difficulties. Followers won’t follow you into co-op games because you’ll already have the superior firepower of your friends to help you, but playing alone you’re going to want to take advantage of their benefits. We’ve made the later difficulties of the game brutally difficult, and we realize that for those attempting to tackle these later difficulties alone, they’re really going to actually want some additional support in the form of the followers.

Some players didn’t like their experience with mercenaries in Diablo II. We took feedback regarding mercenaries very seriously when designing Diablo III followers, and they differ from mercenaries in a few key ways that we think set them apart and resolve many issues. First of all, there is no resurrection or cost to your followers’ deaths, which makes their upkeep far less intrusive. When a follower takes enough damage to “die”, they simply take a knee, catch their breath, and after a few moments are back in the fight. That downtime could potentially have an effect on your own survival, but it’s unlikely to create a situation where you’re worrying about them or constantly working to keep them alive. We don’t want to turn what could be a fun benefit into a punishment by making players pay for their followers’ poor combat choices.
Secondly, when you die, so does your follower. These aren’t characters that can hope to compete or continue on without you. While some players prefer to be the lone wolf taking on the forces of evil, our intent isn’t to dilute the hero aspects by adding more wolves to your wolf pack. We want followers to be an extension of your bad-assery, not a liability. The followers could almost be considered automated buffs/damage skills, but of course with quite a bit more flavor and customization options.

We still have some tweaking to do with the followers, including their skills and end-game balancing. We continue to discover cool little ways to improve how each follower performs and the complements the different heroes. Our intent is to ensure players who take followers along find them to be helpful additions to their single-player experiences.

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]:

'''NowGamer''': You’ve talked in the past about improvements to enemy AI – what about NPCs?

'''Jay Wilson''': They were a bit easier because they tend to lean on the monster AI, use a lot of the same things as them. Making the Followers interesting revolved around making our monster targeting systems better. In Diablo II monsters pretty much just targeted whatever was closest to them, which meant if you played as a necromancer, it could be kind of a boring class because you almost never get attacked by anything. Your scouts always moved fast to get in front of you. So we said ‘OK, let’s have enemies that attack in different ways, or choose their targets in different ways’.

Take an enemy that burrows for example – they’re really most dangerous to a ranged class, so that’s what they focus on – they burrow and make a beeline for a ranged character. Whereas a lot of enemies will go ‘I want to attack somebody, but if I can’t reach one of the guys closest to me, or he has a lot of people attacking him already, I’m just going to choose somebody else’. So the attacks get spread out a little more. It makes having a Follower a lot more interesting because they’ll pick up some of the enemies’ focus but not all of it.

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]

They are actor-voiced right now so when we are early in the development we just had sort of computer-generated voice so they sound like Stephen Hawkings *laughs*. It sounded like an Australian GPS. Now that they actually have voice acting it's supercool to walk around with them, they'll comment on the architecture, one of them will thank you for helping on its mission and your character will comment back to him as well. It really has made a huge difference in the world when you don't have the opportunity to play with another friend or something. Playing with a follower is the next best thing.

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

The player is able to equip the follower with two rings, an amulet, a main-hand weapon and a shield. The locked box in the inventory pane holds an item that is unique to that follower, which is unlockable at level 25. The unlockable item will be gained through completing the follower's questline, and only one special item is known at the moment: Kormac the Templar can unlock a holy book to equip that will grant some sort of passive bonuses once retrieved and equipped.

Follower Statistics

The attribute section of the interface for mercenaries is gone with the introduction of followers. Instead, the relevant statistics displayed are the health of the follower (current health and maximum health), the range of damage they will inflict with a standard attack, and also resistances. It is currently unknown what effect, if any, equipping a follower with an amulet containing player attributes will have, or if there are restrictions on gear or modifiers that the followers will be able to equip.

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 will not be 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]:

Well, followers are essentially a flavor bonus to those playing through normal the first time by themselves. It provides some story elements, but more importantly it gets the idea in their head of playing with another person. You come across each of them pretty quickly in Act 1, and then they help you throughout the rest of the game if you'd like. They aren't required to beat the game on Normal, even if you're playing by yourself. Feel free to leave them behind if you like. But they are pretty awesome.

They're also tuned so that they become very weak starting in Nightmare, and then are completely unusable in Hell. Even if you're playing alone, you will probably not be using Followers past Normal - - you can try but they're going to just be one-shot back to back. They're there as a bit of flavor, to help get people into the mindset of co-op if they're a bit reluctant, and... that's about it. They won't be usable at end-game, and they'll never replace the abilities and power that another player can bring.

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]

Do those NPC's provide abilities to the hero, like a proper party system?
Julian Love: That's also not yet finalised. We're trying to make them definitely a step above the henchmen of Diablo II, but how big of a step is something I can't say yet. Hopefully next time we reveal something I can show you more.

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

We have two different types of mercenaries now. As you saw in the demo, if you got the quest where you could rescue the adventurers or their leader, those guys are a low level and are just along for the quest, or are cannon fodder. You can't really control them or have anything to do with them at all. When you have what we are calling followers, they are the guys you can equip, give them different weapons, you can give them different armor. They will probably have some quests that involve them. Much more than in Diablo II, you could equip them but they were more like a game mechanic in a body of an NPC. Where this time, were making them much more individuals with their own back story and their own reason for being in the world.

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.

We’re not quite ready to talk about our approach, but I will say it’s something that’s been a part of the game since before announcement. We have a very solid direction for them.

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.