Changes

On '''Diablo III Gameplay'''<br>Friday 12pm, Main Stage<br>:What’s in store next for the heroes of Sanctuary? Learn about the latest game developments in this don’t-miss panel was:for Diablo players.

Jay Wilson - Game Director'''Program Title:'''<br>Kevin Martens - Lead Content Designer<br>Christian Lichtner - Art Director<br>Julian Love - Lead Technical Artist<br>Wyatt Cheng - Technical Game Designer<br>Leonard Boyarsky - Lead World Designer<br>Paul Warzecha - Lead Character Artist"How does the Diablo III team go about creating a class fit to fight the legions of the Burning Hells? The designers and artists delve into the creative process."

[[Image:Jay_Wilson.png|left|thumb|150px250px|[[Jay Wilson]], Game Director]] Today we introduced our fifth and final class for Diablo 3 and that is the Demon Hunter. We are going to talk a lot about the Demon Hunter today, how we came to this decision and what she's really all about. So, the first question could be "Why the Demon Hunter?". A couple of you, maybe one or two guessed that we might put a class that shoots bows and crossbows and throws things. It was a good guess, those one or two of you that actually got it. Really, the Demon Hunter fills out our archetype. We knew from the beginning that we wanted a blasty Wizard type and a big Barbarian and a pet class, we knew we wanted a class that used conventional ranged weaponry. So she was really one of the earlier classes that we chose but she was very different when we chose to make her.<br><br>

[[Image:Demon hunter.jpg|right|thumb|150px250px|Demon Hunter's Bio]] Whenever we decide to have a class we like to boil it down to the top three things. What's this class all about. So the first one is pretty obvious. We knew we wanted a conventional ranged class which is the class that operates at a range but uses weaponry to do that. We also liked the idea of the Bounty Hunter vibe so we wanted to get in this idea of gadgets and traps. A Bounty Hunter prepares for a fight so we wanted to really focus on that with this character.<br><br>

[[Image:Woodland ranger.png|left|thumb|150px250px|Woodland Ranger]][[Image:Early demon hunter.png|right|thumb|150px250px|Early concept]]I'm going to go through a very brief history of the development of the Demon Hunter. I want to show you guys how things usually start out. We knew early on it was going to be a ranger. Class design and development takes a lot of time and effort from the development team and we take a lot of care in making sure that this is as much fun to play. Early on we started with concepts and what you can see here is a Woodland Ranger concept. That already looked pretty ranged obviously, you can see the arrows at the back.<br><br>

[[Image:Melee aspects.png|left|thumb|150px250px|Adding melee]]Whilst we already liked it a lot and thought there was some really good concepts going on with it already there was something missing. We didn't quite know what we needed to add to it. We started to added elements to give it a little bit of a twist. Most of the Diablo classes we do, we always give it a little bit of a twist, a little bit of a angle, a little extra something. In this case we started adding certain melee aspects, adding short daggers, short swords, even fist weapons and you can see some armour on the chest there.

[[Image:Demonic hunter.png|left|thumb|150px|Demonic Hero?]][[Image:Part demon.png|right|thumb|150px|Part Demon]]So, how do you make a Demon Hunter? First off we started off with the craziest thing we could think of and thought what if it was a Demonic Demon Hunter? What if it was a demon hunting demons and as you can see here (left) a concept of a fully-blown demon. We really liked this concept, we thought it was a lot of fun. It only had two problems with it. One of them was, in the Diablo universe, our heroes really have to be human, they are pitted against hordes of hell and having a hero that was demonic would be a problem. Also there was a problem as far as designing gameplay around a changeling or a shape shifting class so we went back a thought about making him part demon. In this particular concept you see a very large ==Demon Hunter and he has a demonic arm. One of the issues we had at that point we were worried about the fact that if this guys walks into town trying to sell his wares or try to buy something maybe the townspeople wouldn't quite go along with it once hey see the demon arm. Also the size and bulkiness of him really felt very strong and we weren't sure if it felt ranged or fast, swift and agile as we were hoping for. The arm implies melee because it's so thick and strong.<br><br>Evolution==

[[Image:Demon hunter born.png|right|thumb|250px|Demon Hunter Born]]We decided to look at more concepts and sort of go back to the basics and rethink from the get go what we wanted to do with this class. There were a few questions we asked ourselves at point. One of them was that we had announced the monk class in the previous year and we really wanted to make a class now that was a little bit on the darker side. One that you didn't quite know where they stood in the world and what their outlook was. We also knew that we wanted to make the class mysterious so you didn't quite know their history. The other important thing to us was, as huge fans of Diablo 2, we wanted a class on our line out that was on the more medieval side, a little gothic and that paid tribute to the Diablo 2 classes. Of course, most importantly, we wanted to make sure it read ranged so we came up with the Demon Hunter which is what you are seeing today.<br><br> [[Image:Demonic hunter.png|left|thumb|250px|Demonic Hero?]][[Image:Part demon.png|right|thumb|250px|Part Demon]]So, how do you make a Demon Hunter? First off we started off with the craziest thing we could think of and thought what if it was a Demonic Demon Hunter? What if it was a demon hunting demons and as you can see here (left) a concept of a fully-blown demon. We really liked this concept, we thought it was a lot of fun. It only had two problems with it. One of them was, in the Diablo universe, our heroes really have to be human, they are pitted against hordes of hell and having a hero that was demonic would be a problem. Also there was a problem as far as designing gameplay around a changeling or a shape shifting class so we went back a thought about making him part demon. In this particular concept you see a very large Demon Hunter and he has a demonic arm. One of the issues we had at that point we were worried about the fact that if this guys walks into town trying to sell his wares or try to buy something maybe the townspeople wouldn't quite go along with it once hey see the demon arm. Also the size and bulkiness of him really felt very strong and we weren't sure if it felt ranged or fast, swift and agile as we were hoping for. The arm implies melee because it's so thick and strong.<br><br> [[Image:Final demon hunter.png|left|thumb|150px250px|Finally!]]We changed all those things at that point. We went a slicker, more agile. We went with a design that only had armour up until the ribcage and below the ribcage it's very light and leathery. We also decided to go with dual crossbows because we thought that would be really cool. We were still holding onto the demon arm, we thought maybe we could pull it off but what we started to find was that when people were playing it they really wanted to hit things with the demon arm. They felt like it was something they really wanted to use so at some point we had to say goodbye to it. It also messed with the human part so last but not least we ended up with this design. It's very close to the previous one. As you can see it has a cowl. It's a little bit more on the dark side and a little mysterious. It still moves very fast and swift and we wanted to make sure it had a dark vibe and it really read very anti-heroish in that sense and also with that medieval vibe that we were talking about of course, most importantly, that it read ranged!<br><br>  ==Demon Hunter Modeling and Animation==

[[Image:Gearing up.png|left|thumb|150px250px|Gearing Up]]I'm going to walk you through the modeling, texturing and animation of the Demon Hunter. So right off the bat, we have this concept and we thought, this character, she hits the mark - yeah, there were like two guys that got that joke there. She was kind of a sexy character. I know Christian didn't get into that too much but at this point you've got the [[Monk]], this holy monk, a creepy [[Witch Doctor]], you have the [[Barbarian]] female if you're into that sort of thing, awesome but we wanted someone that was physically attractive and for the ladies in the crowd, don't worry about it, we are working on a male Demon Hunter now and are trying to make him as equally attractive. <br><br>

[[Image:Posing.jpg|left|thumb|150px250px|Naked Posing]]The first thing we do on the modeling side is we create what we call a 'naked look'. We do this for all our classes, this is the look before you have done any gearing up. We put this together and we hand it on to animation and they came up with a bunch of poses that really captured the attitude of the character. The cool thing, at least for inside the team is that this is the first time you see a character and you get the attitude of this character, that she's kind of pissed off, she's angry. She's got a lot of attitude. So based on that we build a geared up version of her.We were conscious of things like her silhouette, we want her to read really quick we want to reinforce the attitude and most importantly in Diablo, at least from the modeling standpoint, is this talk of readability.<br><br>

[[Image:Silhouette.png|right|thumb|150px250px|Readability]]So a character like this is very strappy, she's kind of gadgety, you can see there's a lot of stuff going on but when you zoom out to 30 feet above her head you want to be able to see that stuff and read the character so we grouped together and colours and values and that sort of thing.<br><br>

[[Image:Tool posing.png|left|thumb|150px250px|Body poses]]At this point we have a model we are happy with and the animators are going to take that and start filling out her animation suite with all the cool things that a Demon Hunter does and start putting together some of her tools. Obviously she's going to use bows and crossbows, she's also the only character who can dual wieldPistol Crossbows. You can see the fruits of everyone's labour. We've got a character that really takes advantage of her pose to pose action. Pulling a trigger is probably not as exciting as swinging an axe of a sword but they really reinforce her character by just the full body poses that she takes when she shoots stuff and also taking advantage of her skills.<br><br>  ==Demon Hunter Lore==

[[Image:Origins.png|left|thumb|150px250px|Origins]]The Demon Hunter is our most diverse class. What does that mean? She's not one type of person or she doesn't come from one social class she could really come from any walk of life. Demon Hunters are chosen, they are not born into their class like all of our other classes are. They are bound together by their thirst for revenge, revenge on demons who have slaughtered their family and friends. They are recruited by other Demon Hunters after they've had these encounters with demons that would crush lesser people. They don't have a homeland per se, they are nomadic and always chasing down demons. They really want to crush demons, that's their reason for living but they do have a base up in the borderlands up north where they train new recruits.<br><br>

[[Image:Philosophy.png|right|thumb|150px250px|What's her beef?]]She's a stalker of demons, she uses traps and gadgets and lies in wait for demons, she really wants to strike terror into their hearts. She wants demons to feel what they usually cause in human beings, she wants them to know the terror of being stalked. Finally, she realises the true stakes of what's going on. All the other classes have their own reasons for doing what they are doing. The Witch Doctor and the Monk are in it for their religious ideals, the Wizard is in it for personal gain, the Barbarian is in it for his people but the Demon Hunter is in it for one thing only and that is killing demons. She understands the true stakes of the eternal conflict between the high heavens and the burning hells and she's going to do whatever she can to ensure hell doesn't get a foothold in Sanctuary.<br><br>  ==Demon Hunter Skills==

'''[[Bola Shot''']] -- This mixes two themes, ranged and gadgets. She shoots out a bola which wraps around the target and explodes. It feels really tactical, it has a slight delay that you can use to your advantage in the right situations.

[[Vault]] -- This mixes two themesa movement skill. The Barbarian has Leap Attack, ranged the Wizard has Teleport and gadgets. She shoots out we wanted to make sure all our classes had a bola which wraps way to get around the target battlefield. In this skill we wanted to sell the Shadow theme. Initially we talked about Shadow Vault and explodes. It feels really tacticalstuff like that, but we decided to just call it Vault and let the art peak for itself. There's no need to have to weave these concepts into every single skill. The artistic representation has some acrobatics and has some shadow themes to it. It's basically a slight delay that you can use way to take a solid mechanic and wrap it up with the aesthetic we are trying to your advantage in sell and deliver something we think will be fun for the right situationsplayers.<br><br>

[[Spike Trap]] -- One of her themes is going to be traps and gadgets. This is not unlike some of the Assassin gameplay you might have seen in Diablo 2. In this case we want to sell again the shadow theme and the gadgets theme. We just take an ordinary trap spell, weave in some Shadow themes and the art kind of brings out the flavour, differentiates her from the other characters. Another thing I really like about Spike Trap is it has that sense of preparation. We want the player to know that the Demon Hunter is somebody that goes to sleep at night and dreams about killing demons. She wakes up in the middle of the night and goes "Oh, I have this great idea for a trap that will be awesome for killing demons", goes back to sleep, wakes up and kills a lot of demons. That'''Vault'''s her thing.

This a movement skill. The Barbarian has Leap Attack, [[Grenades]] -- Also selling the Wizard has Teleport and we wanted to make sure all our classes had a way to get around the battlefieldidea of ranged attacks is '''Grenades'''. In I love this skill in our game because we wanted to sell have a 3D engine so you can actually bounce grenades off the Shadow themewalls and floors. Initially we talked about Shadow Vault and stuff like that, but we decided to just call I think it Vault and let the art peak 'll be an awesome way for itself. There's no need players to have to weave these concepts into every single skillcome up with some creative uses for grenades, throwing them around corners. The artistic representation has some acrobatics It actually bounces around and has some shadow themes to it. It's basically a way to take a solid mechanic shows, again, and wrap it up with sells the aesthetic we are trying to sell Demon Hunter's themes - ranged attacks, gadgetry, preparation and deliver something we think will be fun for the playersplanning. This is premeditated demon killing going on.<br><br>

[[Multishot]] -- And finally I want to show you guys '''Spike TrapMultishot''' . Multishot some of you guys might remember from Diablo 2 but it's been amped up and brought to the next level for Diablo 3. We know that Multishot was a hugely popular skill in Diablo 2 so we wanted to bring back that mechanic that we know, the skill that people love but artify it up for something more appropriate.

Also selling the idea of ranged attacks is '''Grenades'''. I love this skill in our game because we have a 3D engine so you can actually bounce grenades off the walls and floors. I think it'll be an awesome way for players to come up with some creative uses for grenades, throwing them around corners. It actually bounces around and it shows, again, and it sells the Demon Hunter's themes - ranged attacks, gadgetry, preparation and planning. This is premeditated demon killing going on.<br><br> And finally I want to show you guys '''Multishot'''. Multishot some of you guys might remember from Diablo 2 but it's been amped up and brought to the next level for Diablo 3. We know that Multishot was a hugely popular skill in Diablo 2 so we wanted to bring back that mechanic that we know, the skill that people love but artify it up for something more appropriate.<br><br>==Skill System Overhaul==

[[Image:Skill tree.png|left|thumb|150px250px|Old skill Tree]][[Image:Skill tabs.png|right|thumb|150px250px|Skill tabs]]This is the one we had last year (left)and it was just big. All the choices were there at once, you could see the whole tree, which was a good thing but it covered your character, it encouraged people to spend their skill points too widely and experienced Diablo players know fewer skills and spend more deeply into them. It had these three different class lines which were a little arbitrary and we learned that a little bit later. So we took this and wondered how we could make this more accessible without losing any of the depth. So we went to a tab system that was improvement in a major way, it made everything bigger, you could see it all. It compartmentalized into the tabs but with all these skill lines, fitting them all in there to be equal across all the tabs and some of the skills were a little arbitrary, you still couldn't see all your options at once and you had to skip back and forth between the tabs. People often, when they were leveling up, forgot to check on the other tabs and ended up spending more points in whichever tab they first chose to spend points in.<br><br> [[Image:Skill list.png|left|thumb|250px|Skill list]]So we went to a list approach. With this we were getting a little bit closer. On the left hand side we had all seven of your skills in one place. This was a major improvement for us, you could see your entire character build all in one place and on the right, when you were choosing new skills, it was getting better you could see everything bigger, you could see what you could choose next and you could start thinking ahead by scrolling down the list but it wasn't quite good enough.<br><br> [[Image:Current_ui.png|right|thumb|250px|Current UI]]Here is the current UI. We kept everything with the seven skills on the left and on the right hand side we made that window a whole lot bigger so you could still plan ahead but you could see all your choices available at one time making the entire skill UI a lot more accessible. At a glance you could see what you could spend.<br><br>

[[Image:Skill listslots.png|left|thumb|150px250px|Skill listSpending points]]So we went to a list approach. With This became very straight forward, this we were getting UI idea that at a little bit closerglance you know what to do. On the You look on your left hand side we had all seven of and you can choose a new skill or spend points in your old skills in one place. This was good. If you can see a major improvement for us, blinking plus sign that means you could see your entire character build all can spend points in one place and on the rightit, when if there's no plus sign that means you were choosing new 've maxed it out. Now a little extra insight into the seven skills, it was getting better . At the beginning of the game every skill that you could see everything bigger, choose has five skill points that you could see what can put into it but throughout the course of the game you could choose next have ways to deepen that and augment the skills so that you could start can spend more points into them, So, initially, it's much easier to make builds, it's easier to thinking ahead by scrolling down , to respec when you want to do that as well and you can try a lot of things very rapidly. But there's a lot more to the list but it wasn't quite good enoughskill system than just this.<br><br>

We knew that he needed a ranged attack so here is an example of [[Ancient Spear]]. We don't want to turn the Barbarian into a ranged class so this is something that feels very appropriate for him. We want to sell the theme that he's strong, he's tough, he's melee so we had to come up with something that felt appropriate for that.<br><br>

We are going to bring him back another fan favourite, the same way we brought back [[Multishot]], bring back [[Meteor]]. Meteor was also a popular skill in Diablo 2. People liked it, we liked the gameplay of it so we brought it back, artified it up and I tell you right when you get some runes in Meteor it's five times the fun.<br><br>

I alluded to it earlier, that we want some movement options for every class and [[Spirit Walk ]] is the movement skill for the Witch Doctor. We wanted something that stays thematically consistent for every class and in the Witch Doctor's case, he's about spirits and voodoo so in the Spirit Walk ability where he turns incorporeal, he can walk around, through enemies, walk round corners and when Spirit Walk ends he comes back in his physical form that becomes teleported to wherever his Spirit form is when Spirit Walk ended.<br><br>

[[Wave of Light]]. He summons a mystical bell that he shoots out at range. It's kind of a combination of a melee and ranged attack. One of the things that I really like about this skill is that we need to differentiate the Barbarian from the Monk, they are both melee classes and in his case he's abbot combining mystic arts with martial arts and I like the evocative imagery that happens here. The concept of a mystical bell that he fires off, it's very vivid.<br><br>  ==Traits==

I'm going to tell you about a new system that we've introduced into Diablo 3 in the last year. It's called [[Traits]].<br><br>

[[Image:Traits.png|left|thumb|150px250px|Introducing Traits]]Essentially they are passive skills. They are a way you can customise and modify and essentially role play with your character and diversify your character builds. You can them as you level up, every other level, you don't get a point in every level but it's every odd numbered level you get a Trait Point. The goal of these is to alter your core attributes and aspects of your character. If you have a Barbarian and you want to be stronger there is a Trait for that. If you have a Wizard and you want to focus a lot more on elemental skills you have a Trait for that. A lot of it is also to take the opportunity to add flavour to the game world so every Trait has, in addition to just instructions on what it does it has a little excerpt of some flavour text that tells you about the world and it also was designed as a skill that tells you something about your character and your class.<br><br>

[[Image:Trait inner rage.png|right|thumb|150px250px|Barb's Inner Rage]]Here's a Trait example for the Barbarian called [[Inner Rage]]. This highlights something really important about Traits, they are not universal to all classes. Every class gets Traits that are unique to them, there are some that carry over that make sense but for the most part they are very unique to the each class.<br><br>

Here's a Trait example for the Barbarian called [[Inner Rage]]. This highlights something really important about Traits, they are not universal to all classes. Every class gets Traits that are unique to them, there are some that carry over that make sense but for the most part they are very unique to the each class. We want to sell the idea that the Barbarian, is not only an angry dude, you probably have figured that out already but he actually gets power through his rage.<br><br>

[[Image:Prismatic cloak.png|right|thumb|150px250px|Wizard's Prismatic Cloak]]For the Wizard, a lot of the Traits take on a more mystical bent, we want to make sure we sell the idea that even when the Wizard's not casting magic missiles or summoning up tornados that there's something just inherently magic about her. Here we have a Trait called [[Prismatic Cloak ]] that essentially makes all of her armour spells more powerful and it's the idea that she's just focused on this one ability such that's she's amped them up and, again, we put some player text that sells the idea of if you choose to be this kind of Wizard this is who you are.<br><br>

[[Image:Traits points.png|left|thumb|150px250px|Trait Points]]As I mentioned before, you want a really strong Barbarian, somebody who hits really hard and is really tough. There's Traits for that. You can take Legendary Might which increases your strength, you can take Iron Skin which gives you more actual armour but let's say you want a Berserker Barbarian, you care more about attack rate, hitting the enemy before they can hit you back well there are Traits that can increase your attack rate, increase the power of debuffs on enemies. More variety equals more builds. Every class has now roughly 30 Traits and those Traits you can spend 1 to 5 points in them, that adds up to roughly right now 90 points per character. When you consider you can only get about 29 or 30 Trait Points it's a lot of customisation. Even if we look at this and decide it's too many Traits we'll just reduce the point spending in it because we want to keep the customisation really high.<br><br>

 ===Making Numbers Awesome=== [[Image:To do list.png|left|thumb|150px250px|Trait To Do List]]So the last thing is making numbers awesome. How do you make maths cool. We tried to set it on fire and put skulls behind it, that makes it pretty cool but it wasn't really enough. A lot of the design behind the Trait system is if we're going to have you take a passive Trait I don't want it to be like oh if you if you take this Trait you get 0.1% more armour. 0.1% doesn't sound very awesome so for us it's like no, it's a big number, it's 25, 500, a 100% more. Whatever number basically sounds cool when we get it. So we're really working on the system to make sure these don't feel like weird numbers that you're not really sure what they do. Diablo customisation is very straight forward. The idea is very simple to grasp and that's important to us.<br><br>

[[Image:Talisman.png|left|thumb|150px250px|Talisman]]Before we get into the Tailisman [[Talisman]] I want to talk about Charms from Diablo 2. The [[charm ]] system, if you are not familiar with it, was a very simple cost benefit thing. There were these objects that would sit in your inventory, they would take up some of your inventory space but they would give you a wide variety of bonuses. This was good, we liked the concept behind the system and we liked the charms themselves but what it led to was people keeping as many charms as they could and keeping a tiny bit of inventory space and we didn't think that was a great choice to have to make. You couldn't resist taking the charms because it augmented your build so well. How do we solve this? The Talisman is a dedicated inventory for your charms and not only that it gets bigger over time, it keeps all of the advantages of the Diablo charm system. You have more charms that you can fit in there so you still have to pick and choose which ones you're going to have to augment your build.<br><br> [[Image:Talisman 2.png|right|thumb|250px|Talisman]]So now that we had a better spot to put your charms we wanted to work on the charms themselves. So how have charms evolved? The bonuses for Charms in Diablo 2 were very varied, incredibly varied, there was almost no kind of bonus they didn't have and in Diablo 3 we are going to have them concentrate on your core attributes so this is very much about customising your build, about augmenting what weaknesses you have and making your strengths better etc. The charms are going to be a core part of your build so they are still very important and there are different tiers of them throughout the game so as you go forward you're going to be playing with your charms a lot. As you choose new skills you'll be choosing different charms to try to make up for the options you chose.<br><br> 

We haven't talked about [[Runes ]] for quite a while, in fact we gave them the year off last year to let them percolate a little bit but they are back and they are in the game and you can play them here at the show. They are fully implemented in the Witch Doctor, the Wizard and Barbarian and I urge you to play the game and give Skill Runes a try.<br><br>

[[Image:Build numbers.png|right|thumb|150px250px|Possible # of builds]]I'll give you an example of what I'm talking about. Take an Amazon, we didn't just make Sorceresses or Barbarians, we made Spearzons, Frenzy Barbs, Nova Sorceresses, things like that. We are really going to blow the lid off this idea with Skill Runes by providing a whole lot more builds. How many more builds are we going to provide? I kind of got curious about this so I enlisted the help of some programmers to give me some help because I blow things up for a living and they came back with this outrageous number. 96,886,969,344 builds per class.<br><br>

[[Image:Skill_rune_effects.JPG|right|thumb|150px250px|Skill Rune effects]]Originally we weren't thinking about having different graphics for every skill rune choice because it's a tonne of work so we thought we'd just do the ones that sound interesting. What we found along the way was that if we didn't have a graphical change the skill rune just felt weak or even broken and we found that everyone at the office would gravitate toward the skill runes that had graphic changes. This really comes down to a fundamental question which is that we could just change all the numbers underneath, give you a numerical change or we could have the screen filled with zombie bears and which would you rather have? Zombie Bears of course.<br><br>

[[Image:Rune types.png|right|thumb|150px250px|Skill Rune Types]]We still have five times the skill Runes only they have now changed their names. They are now called [[Crimson]], [[Indigo]], [[Obsidian]], [[Golden]], [[Alabaster]]. We had a system before where we named the runes according to the concept attached to them like Multistrike or Energy and Multistrike Runes did Multistrike things and Energy Runes did stuff with your resources. What we found was that we kept coming up with ideas that didn't fit with those concepts very well. At first we would have some concepts that would fit really well, we'd get some things that did a multishot and they would fit but when you started coming up with wacky ideas it became harder to shoehorn them into that system.<br><br>

[[Image:Rune ranks.png|right|thumb|150px250px|Skill Rune Ranks]]Runes now have ranks. There are seven ranks which increase as you progress through the game. Runes take whatever the rune does to a particular skill and make that attribute extreme. To see how the skill runes affect the skill let's look at the Wizard's Magic Missile. Unruned it shoots one missile when cast, when we put a rank one indigo rune in it and now it shoots missiles per cast and then he's rank seven and you're going to need that in hell.<br><br>

[[Image:Arenas team based.png|right|thumb|150px250px|Team-based Battles]][[Battle Arenas Arena]]s are our first approach to PvP and hopefully not our last. The vision for Battle Arenas is a dedicated place for all your dueling needs. Dueling was a massive part of Diablo 2 and a lot of people really loved to duel. We know you like to kill each other and Diablo 2 didn't support it very well, so were really focused from the very beginning to make sure we corrected that mistake. It's focused on team-based play and the reason for this is, as Julian mentioned, we had 97 billion builds and the idea that every build is perfectly balanced versus every other build is not going to happen. We definitely want to get all the class balance a lot better than it was in Diablo 2 but the idea is that some of the builds are supposed to be better than others, that's the point, you're supposed to try and find the best PvP build. So focusing on more team-based play softens that issue a little bit, that issue of balance. Maybe if you go into the Arena and you face a build you are weak to your team mates can help you make up for that. It becomes more than just about your own build but your teams' build.

Here is the Witch Doctor and Wizard show off a bunch, we got some [[Zombie Bears ]] in there. That's a crowd favourite. [[Blizzard ]] which is a great crowd control and attack spell, [[Teleport ]] which the Wizard uses in just a second, Meteor. There are a lot of awesome skills and a lot of them worth great across both PvE and PvP and some of them are design specifically for PvP. If you've ever looked at any of the skills we've shown at the previous Blizzcons and didn't know how you'd use that in PvE it actually might be PvP skill because several of them we specifically focus for there.

[[Image:Pvpv battle 2.png|right|thumb|150px250px|PvP Battle]]Here we have the Witch Doctor using [[Horrify]] to [[Fear]] the Barbarian and the Barbarian is using [[Ignore Pain]] to break out of that. There's also tonnes of cool tricks. For for example we can teleport, freeze, Meteor and "bye bye".

[[Image:Pvp battle 3.png|right|thumb|150px250px|Best of...]]We set up a round mechanic and essentially the goal of this is, when we played the game one round was never enough we would see what the other team was but we didn't have a chance to react to that so the game is played as the best of 2 out of 3 or, 3 out of 5. We haven't figured out exactly what the great round count is but we are going to be working on that and would appreciate feedback on that.