Blizzard rep addresses inquiries to health globes and re-speccing

Let’s face it: while Activision Blizzard did break the ice and let loose the fires of Diablo III, they’ve incorporated many changes to the action RPG that may be a drastic turnaround for many an avid Diablo fan. First up is the incorporation of health globes, which according to the developers should eliminate the need for potions and micromanaging bottles. Second was the art style, which many decided was to vibrant and colorful. Today, Blizzard’s developers address the changes to health recovery.

Blizzard community manager Bashiok of Battle.net Forums addressed the growing concerns over Diablo III‘s incorporation of health globes, which apparently forced potions to take a backseat during all the action. The blue poster said:

The health globes are actually, in my opinion, really cool. Playing the game and actually seeing what types of strategy they encourage, you can start to see what they add and how they make the combat more interesting.

Interesting in a way, like how a player could find himself without potions and a hair’s breadth away from shuffling off the mortal coil. In this situation, Bashiok believes that the final enemies marching on to take you down could be taken out and more health globes might drop to aid the player. But we don’t see how this makes Diablo 3 any more interesting than if a potion was dropped instead.

Potions, while still in the game, will be hindered in consumption by cooldowns. The potions, like Diablo II, will also incorporate healing properties reltative to the amount of HP your character possesses. They will also still be instant-healing types or add HP over time. Blizzard intends the potions to be used in emergencies, rather than standard in-battle heals.

In the case of classes for tanks and healers, Bashiok says Blizzard doesn’t have any intentions of creating dedicated player classes, and adds:

Every class will play their own way, and while some may take direct hits easier than others, it certainly wouldn’t define their role within a party. Everyone should be kicking in heads at the same time.

Blizzard has plans to install a form of re-specing (reassigning attributes to specialties, that is) that seems to tie in with the lack of dedicated classes, so that experimenting with specialties might be a possibility. This, however, will be limited than in World of Warcraft, but not so limited that it becomes useless overall.

Also, Bashiok addressed concerns over the loot mechanic. Blizzard revealed at the WWI demonstration that players will only see drops that they will be able to pick up. Without clarifications, the statement threw many players off – allowing speculations that players of a certain class will never be able to see an item of another class drop from monsters. The community manager says that this is not true:

There is no effect, or at least no currently intended effect, to restrict which items which classes can or can’t see for their respective drops. It’s still intended that you could see an item that your class can’t use. It’s easy enough to drop the item, ask if anyone can use it, or just sell it off of course.

There’s a whole new set of questions that Diablo fans would have for Blizzard, but we’re pretty sure that E3 won’t be a place for them to be answered. We’ll keep an eye instead on the WoW and Battle.net forums, and those feverish for a new dungeon-crawling romp reminiscent to previous Diablo games better stay tuned for updates.

Via Diablo Fans

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