In case you missed them, here are the previous Dev Stream Transcriptions:
- February 26th Stream
- March 5th Stream
- March 12th Stream
- March 19th Stream
- March 26th Stream
- April 2nd Stream
This is the seventh dev stream, hosted by Mike Weicker, which originally aired on April 9, 2021. I’ve transcribed the video below, but you can watch it for yourself here. I’ve done my best to capture Mike’s responses as accurately as possible (nearly word for word in most cases), but please consult the video for precise phrasing and/or context.
Currently, these streams take place every Friday at 4pm EST on Twitch. You can check the schedule here to see when it starts in your region.
Mike starts off with some news regarding stash tabs:
Huge breakthrough I just had, about an hour ago [Mike laughs]. I managed to reorder my category tabs on the fly, and I managed to reorder my stash tabs on the fly – so that’s coming! It’s not 100% setup, but stash tab reordering is now functional. I know a lot of people have been asking me for it for a long time now, and I’ve wanted it too.
Timestamp: 09:06-09:42
Q: Wondering if we can get some clarity on how the mechanics of Exalted items, and specifically Tier 7 items work. 1) I know Tier 7 doesn’t start dropping until level 90, but are the odds of finding Tier 7 items higher in level 100 zones then level 90 zones?
A: Yes, the higher the zone level the higher the chance you will drop an Exalted T7 item.
Question continued: 2) Does increased item rarity increase the odds of finding Tier 7 items? Can you explain how rolling items works with respect to increased item rarity/exalted/affix tier.
A: So I’m not actually 100% sure of the answer to this one. Reimerh I don’t know if you want to go ask Michael, he’ll probably know. I know that increased rarity does increase the number of tiers that will show up on an item. I think it is also set up to interact with Exalted items, but it would have been done manually. There’s a good chance it was done anyways, but I didn’t write that script so I’m not 100% sure it was done [Mike laughs].
[ReimerhArts later posts this in chat] To the big exalted item question. Answer from our lead designer: “The odds of an affix rolling in a specific tier from 1 to 5 changes with every level, with odds for T5 being highest at level 100. T6 and T7 work by having a chance to upgrade a T5 or T6 affix on drop. The chance of a T5 to T6 upgrade and the chance for a T6 to T7 upgrade are static. However because T5s are most common at level 100, T6s and T7s are also most common at level 100 by extension.”
Timestamp: 10:30-11:35
Q: Lots of people from the community have been wondering how party play progression will work in the Monolith? Will people be able to split to progress faster? Share progress, etc.?
A: Umm…we’re not actually 100% sure how that’s going to happen yet. I would say there’s a good chance it’s going to have to work off the party leader’s status of the Monolith, but we’re not 100% sure on that one yet. Having it feel good is really important, so having it feel like everyone in the party is making progress I think is really important. Uh, which ones are unlocked would likely have to be based on the party leaders, but any that become unlocked after in that playthrough and then you go to your own game would likely still be unlocked. We’ve just started introducing – with the new blessing’s inventory that we’ve shown – we’ve just started saving into the character slots what blessing’s you’ve discovered so that would also impact…we can add in other stuff as well.
Timestamp: 12:30-13:52
Q: But can you join someone’s Monolith you have not done? Etc.
A: I don’t know yet. I’d say likely yes, but we haven’t got there yet [Mike laughs].
Timestamp: 13:56-14:10
Q: Tell Sarno we need more details on 0.8.2!
A: Ah yeah, there’s lot of things that are work-in-progress. I’ve got a couple things to show you guys. I’ve already got you one thing – you’ll be able to reorder stash tabs. Right now it’s just a button that pushes them one to the right, one to the left and I’m working on dragging right now so that it’s easier to do. There’s something that’s coming.
Timestamp: 14:13-14:38
Q: What are the dots to the side of the items?
A: The dots represent prefixes and suffixes. For example, if you have an item that has 1 prefix and 2 suffixes it will have 1 dot on the left and 2 dots on the right.
Timestamp: 16:16-16:30
Q: How big is the team working on the game currently?
A: That’s a tough question to answer. There’s a lot of people that are contract…not contract – it’s getting bigger. Still not as big as we need to be probably [Mike laughs].
Timestamp: 16:35-17:00
Q: Can you leak some new crafting recipes?
A: There aren’t any major new crafting – like recipes.
Timestamp: 17:05-17:10
Q: Will the changes to crafting be in 0.8.2?
A: That’s still up in the air. We’re working to get it in there, but it may not find its way in. The crafting window changes are pretty big. We want to do the crafting window changes along with the crafting changes themselves, simultaneously. We’re still testing the crafting changes. It’s been a lot of hypothetical things so we do a lot of math around crafting. Like how hard is it to get a 4xT5 item from a common (white) base? How hard is it to get a 4xT5 item from X number of affixes when it drops? Then we need to get the difference from the old system and the new system in those difficulties – like how many bases you’ll go through, how many crafting materials you’ll go through, all of these things. So we’re doing a lot of math around it right now to see if it’s going to be – if there’s a relatively similar way to do it like math wise, and then look at the feel of it to see how it actually plays out in practice. So there’s still a fair bit to do before we get it moved over. We don’t know if there’s going to be enough time for it to sneak into 0.8.2, but we’re working on it.
Patch 0.8.2 has some other really big things in it too that the same people working on the crafting are working on, so those other things need to be done first [Mike laughs].
Timestamp: 17:13-18:42
Q: Will Warlock be available before 1.0?
A: I don’t know. I do not know when Warlock is going to be available. We are working to get those things in as quickly as possible.
Timestamp: 18:45-19:00
Q: When is 0.8.2 due out roughly?
A: I don’t think we have a date yet. I think we’re getting pretty close to when our normal cadence would have been and this one’s a little bit longer so it’s coming up on the horizon. We haven’t set a date on it yet. There’s a few features that have to get put into it before we can release it, and until those features are more concrete we don’t want to put a date on it – just in case, you know [Mike laughs].
Timestamp: 19:09-19:50
Q: Can you explain plans for the bazaar?
A: I can’t really explain this – you guys are giving me a bunch of stuff that I unfortunately can’t talk about very much. Umm, plans for the bazaar I can talk about from a theoretical standpoint – in the things we’d like it to achieve. Which is kind of similar to what I was talking about last week, unfortunately. We want the bazaar to create a sense of community. We want people to have a place to go to trade and interact with other players. We want it to be someone you go do – like I’m going to go search the bazaar for something and less a, and this is the example I gave last time, I hit level 40 I’m going to get my level 40 unique boots that I know are going to be for sale in the bazaar as soon as I get there for ten thousand gold or something, you know.
It’s about getting that core feeling of it’s a tool to help promote community. I think that’s really important. Having trade not be instantaneous is a little bit important, and not having it be guaranteed is a little bit important too. So having it be something where you are searching for the right thing – okay, you ever go to a flea market and you’re hunting for a game or something like that and there’s 80 different shops and they each have games and you’re digging through them all for this specific game. It’s this type of feeling that we’re more interested in invoking, rather than just a search box. It’s tough because we don’t have any of this stuff done yet so I can’t say exactly what it’s going to look like or be with the exact rules and restrictions it’ll have.
Timestamp: 19:52-22:13
Q: Are there any plans for a “grace period” for when you get kicked/fail a Monolith timeline echo? For example, the game crashing and it auto failing the echo and taking you back 4 echoes in the Monolith timeline.
A: This is a really tough one because the echoes themselves – sadly we have to treat every form of disconnect as intentional because as soon as there’s a way for people to not get punished for using Alt+F4 there’s kind of a problem that happens there. Also, we can’t tell the difference between an Alt+F4 and a game crash. We would like to have something for people who are experiencing game crashes. We might change it, I guess, because there are like stability problems, but it’s hard to do without opening exploits and we have to keep that in mind.
Timestamp: 22:16-23:28
Q: Will there be more chat channels? I see you are not using in-game chat either.
A: Yes, more chat channels is something we’re looking at. We do have the technology for it already. Technically when you’re whispering someone you’re using a different chat channel. So that tech is already there. We just got to have a way to switch channels and turn certain channels on or off, and things like that. We do know that the sudden influx of players that happened a couple of weeks ago caused chat to become a little less of a constructive place – let’s put it that way. I think that that works [Mike laughs].
Timestamp: 23:30-24:18
Q: Following the trend of Zizaran’s squirrel helm, do you have plans to develop more uniques that change the minions beyond the classes themselves?
A: There’s a lot that goes into changing a model. We already had a heads up that there was going to be some kind of squirrel shenanigans, so it was a little bit easier. I’d say the chances of us changing more minions into different minions right away is pretty low. I could see that being something we do down the road – maybe there’s another Mastery class for the Primalist where their thing is changing minions…I don’t know. There’s already quite a few companions in the game with another on the way, the Summon Storm Crow – which we teased last week. We could see some cosmetic items coming in that change the look of them, so that they’re visually different but don’t change their mechanics much. I’d say that’s more likely to happen, but it’ll be a while before that happens as well.
Timestamp: 24:21-26:05
Q: How does it feel to be in the field of big names like PoE and Diablo? What aspects do you guys try to focus on in disparity to the last two?
A: It feels fantastic to be in that conversation. There’s been some gaming websites I’ve read for years and seeing our names pop-up in there sometimes is really cool. There’s a lot of things that they can do – because they’re such huge companies – that we can’t do so we try to focus on our strengths…play to our strengths. We focus on the things we can do which is; adding new things/experiences, and be really adaptive by being responsive to the community. Because we do have a smaller community it’s a lot easier for us to communicate and talk and interact with you guys, and that sort of stuff. The community is getting a lot bigger these days so it’s a bit tougher to keep up sometimes, but things like that, things like this [these dev streams] are things we like to do to play to our strengths a little bit.
Timestamp: 26:08-27:39
Q: Any chance this game will be on GeForce Now?
A: I’ve been getting this question a lot recently. We are working on it. There are no blockers for us right now on it. It’s not 100% guaranteed to happen, but it is looking very good at this point in time. Luckily Nvidia makes it really easy to get involved with it – like really easy.
Timestamp: 27:45-28:28
Q: Thanks for doing such an amazing class like the Void Knight! I fell in love playing with it. But there is few confusing mechanics with its skills, like Abyssal Echoes. Any plans to improve their explanation? Also, it would be cool if echo chance appeared in the character stats panel.
A: So character stats, in general, we are looking to improve that character stats screen to partially include things that happen with skills – specific stats for skills. So things like generic stats for skill specific categories. So like Fireball ignite chance – ignite chance being a generic stat but specifically in the Fireball tree. Having things like that show up will be a lot easier. Having specific things like echo chance show up in a character stat screen is definitely tougher to do, not impossible, and we are looking at it. I’m not sure when that’ll happen exactly. I think that’ll be after patch 0.8.2.
Timestamp: 28:34-29:56
Q: Do you think there is space in this game for support/buff/heal type Mastery with the addition of multiplayer?
A: Yes, I do. I don’t think we’d have a Mastery dedicated exclusively to it. There’s different Masteries that have options already and options that’ll be expanding to make that sort of playstyle more possible. For example, Druid in Spriggan Form can have Healing Totem – there’s some changes coming to that which will be cool, I think you’ll like that – for support players. Eterra’s Blessing has a lot of support stuff in there as well. The Paladin has Healing Hand – which will be getting a skill tree that’ll have some cool stuff in there – there’s lots of cool stuff already in Paladin for support play. Those are the best ones. There’s other things that will be possible to make into support-esque things, but those will be the most useful support classes I think – Druid and Paladin. The problem with making a pure support class is that then you’ll have difficulty playing solo. We want every Mastery to have options to play DPS and be solo as well, and having pure support solo doesn’t work…because you’d be supporting yourself, I guess.
Timestamp: 30:12-32:23
Q: Are there plans for more gold sinks in the game to give gold some more “weight”?
A: Definitely.
Timestamp: 32:24-32:28
Q: Have you seen any D2R footage? If so, what are your thoughts on how it looked?
A: Yeah, I’ve seen D2R footage. I was watching MrLlamaSC’s stream and he was just putting on and taking off different items and comparing the old and new art style. I thought it was really cool. I think it looks gorgeous. I am very excited to try it – sadly I am not in the technical alpha. I wish I was.
Timestamp: 32:38-33:05
Q: Any plans for combat logs?
A: Combat logs are really tricky. There’s a lot happening, and we do have the thing that killed you that shows up. Full combat logs are unlikely to happen anytime soon. It’s not impossible, but I’d say it’s unlikely anytime soon. The way our combat is set up behind the scenes it makes it quite tricky to do a full combat log, and have it performant as well. That’s a very important part. A lot of these things are, ‘it’s really tricky to do that’ which really translates to, ‘it’s really tricky to do that and not tank performance’ [Mike laughs]. Because you can do basically anything but half the time it’ll just tank performance.
Timestamp: 33:09-33:57
Q: What do you (and the whole team) consider the biggest balance problem? Both theoretical and currently in the game.
A: Umm…I’m not going to call out specific skills, but I think the shear breathe of options makes it very difficult for us to consider every possible thing that could happen. Whenever we introduce a new item or a new skill or anything like that and probably the biggest problem is just that – we introduce something and there’s like a 30% chance someone’s going to be able to break it. The amount of stuff we think we’ve got all the options for and then someone internally goes, ‘so I was playing this new item and I managed to get a billion damage on this skill because of it’ and we’re like ‘oh great’. It’s really tricky getting that balance and because we do have so many options – that’s part of why we like to compartmentalize skill trees is because we can say this only affects this [Mike has Tempest Strike skill tree open as he says this]. However, we’ve recently been trying to branch out and make those skill trees touch more things, if possible. This has caused a lot more interactions that we have to keep track of.
Timestamp: 34:00-35:19
Q: Will the game come out with a Portuguese localization?
A: Umm, I don’t think Portuguese is one of the first languages we’re looking at – though, I don’t know the list perfectly off the top of my head. I can see Portuguese be something that gets added in in the second round type thing, but I don’t know if it’ll be in the first round. We are still working on how we’re going to localize things, where we’re going to localize things to – that’s all in progress right now. Once we have the localization stuff set up a lot of it depends on the cost for the game. Every time we do a localization and anytime we make a change we have to then make those updates to all of the languages. So every time we add a new language in it adds technical debt which is not a good thing for us really. We want to get as many in as possible, because we know there’s lots of people in different parts of the world that like to play games like this but don’t know how to speak English. In summary, as many different languages as possible, as soon as we can, but that’s not going to be everyone right away…unfortunately.
Timestamp: 35:20-36:32
Q: Will there be a colourblind mode? I have difficulty seeing some of the spells.
A: Yeah, that’s a tricky one. We’ve been working on that trying to figure out the best way to do a colourblind mode. For example, I’ve had people tell me that when they get hit with a big hit on their health bar and the grey health that shows up behind it looks like the same colour as the health globe – we’ve tweaked the colours a little bit and I think it’s helped. We are working on those colourblind things. There’s a lot of different accessibility options that we’re still working on. Another example, we need audio cues to not be necessary for deaf players or just people that don’t like to play with the sound on. We’re working on it, I guess is the short answer.
Timestamp: 36:38-37:38
Q: Once multiplayer comes out how will running Monoliths and other content work? Will we share progress in Monoliths or will we have to do them twice, once for each person?
A: So we’re not 100% sure how Monolith progression sharing is going to work yet. We do want – the goals of the system is to have everyone involved in the Monolith will be rewarded for their progress. The initial state of the Monolith will likely have to be based off of the party leader’s state. It’s tricky because there’s the whole thing about boosting – so joining someone who’s like ‘I’ve completed the whole Monolith’ and then you just hop in and you haven’t done any of it…do you get progress for everything? It’s tricky to figure out exactly what you get. Do you get the blessing at the end, but it doesn’t count as you completing the quests to have completed those Monoliths. Do you get everything? Play Diablo 2 – rushing was a huge thing.
We’re not 100% sure how it’s going to work exactly yet. These are a lot things that we’ve got on the go in multiplayer right now and we’re just like ‘it’s not quite ready to be doing all those things yet’ – like those small interactions…we’re not really worried about them until we’re slightly further along. We’re probably getting close to working on things like that. We definitely have concept meetings on it though. Picking out how we want it to be is the first step and then picking out what we can do is the next step [Mike laughs].
Timestamp: 37:48-39:36
Q: Is there any coincidence of this stream today and PoE’s stream yesterday?
A: These streams have always been scheduled for this time. This is our weekly timeslot for streams.
Timestamp: 39:58-40:16
Q: Any chance of a Manifest Armour crit bug fix in patch 0.8.2?
A: Yeah.
Timestamp: 40:22-40:25
Q: Will we be able to swap acquired blessings without doing Monolith again?
A: For now, no. That could change, but right now you can switch your Monolith blessing when you get a new one. I know with the new inventory for that coming out it looks like that might be a thing – and it might be – but it’s not currently planned.
Timestamp: 41:00-41:20
Q: Which Mastery do you see being the strongest support class in a full party? Will you try to have multiple Masteries able to be strong support classes?
A: I think Druid and Paladin are the two strongest, and will be the two strongest – from both a thematic and mechanical point of view. Like support Rogue doesn’t really fit too well, you know? [Mike laughs] Umm, support Spellblade also doesn’t fit too well thematically. It makes sense that they wouldn’t be really fantastic support classes.
Timestamp: 41:22-41:52
Q: Have you guys had any thoughts about a system like PoE Leagues or Diablo Seasons?
A: Yes, we will be having them – we call them “cycles”. At their core they’re very similar to PoE leagues. They’ll be more similar to PoE leagues than to Diablo seasons, but they will not be exactly the same. We have a few core things that we want to do differently. If you’re familiar with those then when you see cycles you’ll be like, ‘oh that’s just this’ and then you’ll be like, ‘okay well there’s a few differences’.
Timestamp: 42:02-42:44
Q: Any thoughts about monetization or a sort of system through which you guys will be gaining money in the future?
A: Post launch monetization, the game does have a sticker price and that will continue to be the same so there’s that part of making money – people buying the game – and also we do have cosmetics that are really strictly non-power so you can’t pay-to-win. There won’t be like a pet that makes you level faster or a pet that makes you get increased gold find or anything like that. Hypothetically, if there is ever something that is mechanical in the cosmetic system – we don’t have anything planned for it – but there would be the equivalent of it in a free version. For example, and we haven’t talked about doing this but hypothetically let’s say there was a pet that went around collecting gold for you. If we did that there would be a free pet that did it as well – that you would not have to pay anything for. So you wouldn’t have this sort of burden of, ‘okay I have to pay $5 to get a pet to go and pick up gold’. We want to make sure that if there’s ever something mechanical like that that there’s a free version of it, but we haven’t talked about doing that at all. It’s just an example.
Timestamp: 42:46-44:11
Q: Will some masteries/passives be reworked/enhanced since they do not work together? For example, I tried hard to do a pure lightning Smite Paladin build, but there’s like nothing in Sentinel’s/Paladin’s passives that supports lightning damage. Also, to get some bonuses to Smite like crit rate, etc I still have to go through “useless” things for that build like physical damage, making Smite viable only as an addition to other builds like Hammer Throw, etc.
A: I get a lot of questions like this – especially in the ask-the-devs channel of our Discord – like will this be changed to do this and I’d really encourage you, if you’re going to ask a question like this in that channel specifically, to put it in the suggestions-and-like-to-see channel instead. We are constantly combing those channels for things people would like to see. Usually the answer to something like this is, ‘I don’t know…maybe’ [Mike laughs]. Umm, so possibly. We don’t have any immediate plans for it.
I can go through the finer details of it. Lightning is a secondary element for Paladin. Primary elements for Paladin specifically are physical and fire. Sentinel has void in there as well, for Void Knight. We try not to get everything on everyone. So like Primalist is primarily lightning, cold, physical, there’s poison in there too, and then a little bit of fire. Fire is the secondary element for Primalist. Sorcerer’s primaries are fire, lightning, and cold with basically nothing else. So we try to keep this profile of which elements that each class is working with fairly distinct.
We do like to throw in some secondary things like lightning Smite and options like that just so that when some item gets released down the road maybe someone figures out a great way to incorporate it into their build because there’s a cool interaction that happens. We like to have those options there to facilitate these types of things. Also, maybe someone just wants to create a lightning Smite Paladin – they want to play Zeus or Thor or whatever. Having those options in there feels good. Not every option has to feel powerful. I think that’s really important – sometimes the secondary elements for these classes don’t feel overly powerful because there’s less support in the passive tree, and I think that’s a good thing really. There’s got to be less optimal things to make the optimal things stand out. It’s also possible that these things could be changed. There’s skills getting changes all the time and sometimes very simple changes like a single node getting reworked can be enough to take a skill from okay to powerful.
Timestamp: 44:50-48:16
Q: Which old skills will be redone next patch?
A: Umm, there’s not a lot that are getting redone this patch, actually. We’re trying to get more skills into the game. We’ve taken a look at when we want to release the game and how many skills are left to make – and there’s a lot of skills left to make still. The people who make skills do a lot of other things as well. There’s about 7 or 8 of us that work on skills, but that’s all kind of our secondary task now. We’re trying to get as many skills in as possible, but full re-works to old skills will be lower priority for a little while. There’s a couple that are getting hard reworks – not this patch but next patch. They’ll all be done in a big bunch. [Mike opens the Primalist passives window and specifically goes to the Druid passive tree to seemingly insinuate that those skills are the ones getting reworked]
Timestamp: 48:18-49:22
Q: When will the cosmetic shop be released?
A: I don’t know when that’s coming out. We’re still working on the UI for it. Also, releasing the shop too early could be a bad thing. There’s a lot of stigma around the release date of a game and what monetization is done in it and all those sorts of things, so we want to be careful to respect the players.
Timestamp: 50:16-51:04
Q: Any plans for a one click “sell all items” or “stash all items” button?
A: I could see a “stash all items”. “Sell all items” is dangerous because then as soon as you have that we have to have a ‘lock’ option – like don’t sell these things – and it starts getting a little complicated in your inventory. I don’t know…maybe.
Timestamp: 51:06-51:26
Q: How do you and the dev team feel about melee/ranged balance? Do you feel like it’s in a good spot or do you think there are some changes that need to be done?
A: I think overall it’s pretty good. So typically ranged has the big advantage of safety so we try to build enemies into the game that are dangerous to ranged players and enemies that are dangerous to melee players. When we’re designing a boss fight we try to have certain abilities that are like, ‘oh if someone’s just sitting way back this is really going to get them’ and ‘if someone’s right up close they’re going to have to run away’. So we’re trying to get the player to move in that boss fight so that the player doesn’t just stand there and shoot until the boss is dead. I think we’re doing a fairly good job of it. There are certain examples where it’s heavily skewed – Bladedancer and Marksman – and so we’re still working on that balance. It’s definitely still a work-in-progress.
Timestamp: 51:30-52:20
Q: Please consider launching the game in Portuguese. There are a lot of Brazilians looking forward to this game. Also, we are one of the biggest consumers of games in the world.
A: Yep, it’s definitely on the list of languages we are considering. It’s in the conversation. We can see where most of our players are from – well, in some cases we can see it. We do take into account how big certain markets are in certain areas and the cost effectiveness of each translation for sure. Portuguese is in the conversation for sure.
Timestamp: 52:25-53:05
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