This is the first dev stream, hosted by Mike Weicker, which originally aired on February 26, 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.
Q: Why is there such a long cooldown on Leap?
A: Most movement skills are either gated by mana or cooldown specifically to prevent that zoom-zoom playstyle. The decision whether the movement skill is gated mana or cooldown gated is a class distinction. So most of the Mage…well Teleport at least…was mana gated [originally it was mana gated] because the class is much more mana focused in general. You can get cooldown reduction in a couple of places, but we really wanted to avoid allowing the player being able to bounce around the maps. It’s also important that we allow it to be used more tactically.
Timestamp: 09:30-10:48
Q: What is your favourite class?
A: My favourite class currently is the Rogue, mostly because it’s the newest and we’ve spent the most time on it recently. However, I am really big fan of the Mage in general and was hoping the community would select the Mage for this dev stream. That said, I like them all though, there are things I enjoy about all of them. Usually it’s a specific skill I’ve worked on. I’m actually a really big fan of Tempest Strike, it’s very unique in the way that its been made and the way it works. In general, I like things that are very unique.
Timestamp: 10:50-11:38
Q: What is your day-to-day role at EHG?
A: I am a Senior Developer so day-to-day for me is a lot of things. The short answer is coding; I sit in front of a text editor all day and write words that somehow make stuff do things. Most of the like UI hooked up that’s usually me so if there’s a UI bug that’s normally my fault. I do a lot of the stuff regarding skills. Though, there’s lots of people that help with that so it’s by no means just me…and I don’t design any of the UI stuff either. Nothing’s really a one-person thing. Yeah, so I do a lot of skill implementation, general hookups for interaction with UI, a lot of stuff like that.
Timestamp: 12:12-13:12
Q: Are there plans to bring Shaman and Druid into 2021 as they’ve stayed dated for so long?
A: Yeah, I don’t think I’d consider any class done…I don’t think I’d consider any class really done for a long time to come even. There’s always going to be new things that we want to do with them, there’s always going to be new things that we want to add to them, and we’re always looking at what class do we want to work on next, what do we want to really focus on. We’ve found that in the Rogue patch, where we built the Rogue all together as one cohesive thing, where we built all of the Rogue skills over the course of that patch, and I think it really shows the quality of those skills. When they first dropped they were all really good, they felt awesome together, and there was this feeling that these skills were designed together…because they were. So we’re going to keep looking at that sort of thing because designing skills together makes them feel better so that hopefully when we do skill reworks it’ll be a bulk thing in one class so that the end result feels a little bit better.
Timestamp: 14:32-15:55
Q: Do you play any other ARPG’s?
A: Yeah, I mean I don’t have a ton of time these days, but my favourite go to ARPG from forever is Diablo 2. That’s the one that I’ve probably played the most of, but name an ARPG and I’ve probably played it --type of thing. Same goes for most of the people on the team. That’s how most of us got involved with the game; it was just the love of ARPG’s in the first place. Yeah, so Diablo 2 would be my favourite one and a lot of that has to do with nostalgic feelings – you know, it’s something you grow up playing and is something you love. I haven’t had a ton of time to play it recently but I have played it as recently as a year ago.
Timestamp: 16:20-17:24
Q: Have you tried Project Diablo 2?
A: I haven’t, but one of my good friends starting playing it about a month ago and he had good things to say so – all those mods; Project Diablo 2, Path of Diablo, Median XL – they do a lot of really cool stuff and I hope that there is still modding support going forward.
Timestamp: 17:30-18:12
Q: Did PoE have any influence on your development?
A: I mean, tons of use have played PoE and, as with any game development, every game you’ve ever played has influence on it. So like I’ve played a ton of Civilization games and the Game Guide – a big influence for how we built the Game Guide and how there’s links in that take you to other things and things like that – a big influence was the Civilopedia in that game. It’s a completely different genre entirely but there’s these – like every time you play a game, as a game developer, other influences seep in whether it’s something that you want to do or something you want to avoid…it’s really unavoidable just because you remember everything that you do [laughter]. I mean, the same is true for every creative medium; like writing songs and that sort of stuff…everyone gets influenced. So yeah, PoE is a huge ARPG that most of us have played so there’s going to be influences [for sure].
Timestamp: 18:20-19:30
Q: Do you plan on adding monster diversity in the campaign?
A: Yeah, there’s new enemies getting added all the time. Where they get added to the game really depends on where it needs it most. The people that work on certain things, do the same on other things…so like the people that work on enemies also work on – like making skills for enemies also work on making bosses. So for making a new boss for endgame maybe there’s less time to work on adding more trash mobs to the various story content. Yes, there’s always plans to add more diversity in enemies. There’s a really good thing that happens when you have recognizable enemies so that when people come to a new encounter they haven’t been to before and they see that there’s these certain shapes they know that there’s these certain enemies and that there’s that recognition of what type of enemy that you’re fighting – usually that’s conveyed just through size but also through shape and being able to recognize them – but the thing is, like, there’s a line when there’s too much variety. We’re not there yet, that’s for sure, but we will continue to expand them.
Timestamp: 19:52-21:24
Q: Are there any plans for a class similar to Witch Doctor?
A: There’s like…we’ve gone through plans for so many different classes. I’m not going to say yes or no. There’s influences of the Witch Doctor – because it’s a game we’ve all played – even something as simple as the Acolyte and the Primalist too – there’s similarities there, there’s certain skills I’m sure…I can’t really think of any right now but I’m sure there’s some similarities [laughter]. We don’t have direct plans for that the next main class is going to be after this. We have ideas on like – oh this would be cool to add one day – but right now we’re just looking to launch with the Masteries we’ve already announced.
Timestamp: 21:38-22:30
Q: Do you guys have any details on what potential fixes there might be for minion AI, especially for my precious Necromancer?
A: Yeah, there’s some work on minion AI coming down the pipe. People have noticed that the Wolves behave differently than every other minion in the game. For a while now the Wolf has had a unique AI on it that we’ve been testing out and I think the reception has been generally positive for it – I’ve really appreciated the difference at least – so we’ll probably be rolling that out to most other minions. If you’re talking specifically about the ability to control minions a little bit more – like stances, that sort of stuff – we’re still looking at it. I don’t have an exact timeline or if we’re going to do it for sure or not or what, but yeah…we know that’s something that’s important. The minions don’t always behave exactly as you want them to and there’s different minions that you want to behave differently. So, right now, minion AI is sort of – I guess – procedurally done or sort of done on the fly…they’re just given a list of abilities to use in a priority list and so they say like; “oh can I use the first one? Is there a lethal target? Okay good, I’m going to go use that on them”. That’s about it and we can control it by ranges and there’s lots of things we can do to make that feel smoother, but there’s very little in the sense of like ‘how aggressive is this minion’ and being able to change that on the fly and change what it does…would be nice. We had talked briefly about implementing that in the UI – on the HUD – but it doesn’t really work.
Timestamp: 24:57-26:45
Q: Could you talk about the next major endgame system that you’re working on behind the scenes and what it brings to the game?
A: I would love to, I really would, but I’m sorry…I can’t. There’s a lot that goes into them and if I start telling you things about it now it could be completely wrong before it comes out so I don’t want to mislead people or anything like that.
Timestamp: 27:18-27:50
Mike talks about what he’s currently working on:
I’ve been doing a lot of work on various parts of the UI recently. We’ve got a fantastic UI guy [named Artem] that is reworking a lot of the user interface. So yeah, there’s some big UI overhauls coming down the pipe.
We’ve since been shown a sneak peak of these UI changes in this developer post.
Q: Will you be adding auto-pickup of crafting items?
A: Internally, it’s a discussion we have regularly. So if you guys think we’re ignoring you, we’re not, don’t worry…we have that discussion with you guys as it’s happening. It’s a really difficult line to walk because there’s this feeling of – is there just shiny stuff that’s dropping and, like, I’m a vacuum cleaner that just goes around and sucks them up or am I actually picking up real tangible physical items. Keeping them feeling like a real reward is important…I know a lot of them are not that important, but we really want to hold on to it (if we can). It’s another one of those things where once it’s been granted it can’t be ungranted very easily. We might be a little stingy on it but we have our reasons.
Timestamp: 30:38-31:36
Q: Would you say that the new Tooltip DPS is accurate in showing the real damage as of this moment?
A: No, it is not accurate and it does not show the real damage…and it probably never will. The tooltips are really good at, and are really designed for being able to tell differences in items you’re equipping. There are a lot of nodes in the skill trees that we just can’t show in the tooltips very easily…at all. For example, conditional damage to rare enemies…so if a skill tree node says plus 80% additional damage or 100% more damage dealt to rare enemies…the tooltip has no idea if you’re going to hit a rare enemy or not. So there’s that condition of yes, I’m going to hit a rare enemy and I will do more damage but the tooltip can’t see that – so taking that node won’t change the tooltip at all because it has no idea if you’re facing a rare enemy or not. There’s a lot of things like this that the tooltip just can’t really know and the DPS is something we’ve literally been working on for years and the fact that it’s in at all is a bit of a miracle [laughs].
Timestamp: 31:55-34:58
Q: Are pet DPS tooltips coming?
A: Yes, they’re coming and they were even harder to implement…mostly because pets have their own set of abilities and that set of abilities can get modified at runtime – as you summon them they are given new abilities – so figuring out how often they’re attacking, the effect of everything on those abilities is really difficult to do. So we’re working on that…we’ve got a plan on how to do it so it should be soon.
Timestamp: 35:00-35:28
Q: Will multiplayer have group matchmaking similar to what Diablo 3 has?
A: Unfortunately I can’t answer any questions regarding multiplayer right now. We’ll have more details on multiplayer coming up…hopefully pretty soon.
Timestamp: 38:16-38:38
Q: Is penetration part of the Tooltip DPS calculation?
A: Yes, penetration is part of the tooltip calculation.
Timestamp: 38:39-38:44
Q: How do you feel about new skill progression being slowed for endgame? Do you think you’ll change this in the future or just adjust it more?
A: Personally, I’m a really big fan of how it is. I think there’s a lot of pluses on it. I think it promotes having respec’s earlier in the game…like I just respec’d two of my skills and I don’t feel like there’s any major negative impact on that, and having that catch-up and that slow down at higher end really helps put a bigger tail on that progression of your character. Which I think is a really big plus. So having more time where you’re like ‘oh, I leveled up I’m still getting something out of this level up’ other than just the passive point because every passive point you get is less impactful as like a percentage of your total passive points than the last one. So like once you have 10 passive points and you get one new one it’s 10% more passive points than you had before, but if you have a hundred passive points and you get one new one that’s only 1% more than you had before. Now this is counteracted by you moving the passive tree faster, you unlock new skills, you get access to new passives but once you’ve unlocked all of the passives that you want access to you’re going back and putting points in lower nodes the impact of those passives is less and less as you get into the late game because you’re going back and picking up ones that are not in your high priority nodes to get. So we want to give you a little more of a reason to still be going after levels where you’re still feeling that positive impact of ‘oh I leveled up, hooray I get this new thing’. So there’s a lot of different ways we can that; with skills just put a hard cap on skills completely and make it so it’s…and we want to make that… [kills the Voidfused Forge…selfishly walks into the fire to collect the loot and receives a fitting death
]
Timestamp: 38:49-41:30
Q: In the past week I’ve noticed a lot of streamers replay their deaths in slow motion to highlight that they’re dying to mob AoE’s when they aren’t standing in them. Any chance the hit detectors will be corrected so as to receive the correct damage output?
A: Yeah, so that’s actually an interesting point. We’ve been looking at changing hit radiuses a little bit with certain things. The conversation actually started when Void Rahyeh showed up. It’s because there’s a lot of big AoE’s in that one and so we’ve been talking about doing various things like, simple things, maybe where the AoE is a little bit bigger but the ring is less damaging on the outer edge and then making it a tiny bit smaller than how big it actually is. So your character has a radius that is basically the same size as you and then the radius of each ability is basically the same size of the ability and sometimes that overlap is not – like there’s a tiny bit of overlap because things aren’t perfectly circular when they’re hitting you…there’s a few tricks to make it be a little more performant and sometimes they need to be a little more forgiving at the same time than they are.
Timestamp: 42:26-43:52
Q: The game lacks feedback when you are standing in fire.
A: I think there’s a lot of visual noise that can happen, in general, and the things that are the most important not to be standing in are probably the most important to be noisy. Having that clear indication of when you’re going to take damage and when you’re not going to take damage based on positioning is really important for sure. We do try to keep that as tight as possible.
Timestamp: 44:00-44:44
Q: Short question, Healing Wind skill tree soon?
A: I don’t really like Healing Wind so it’s not at the top of my list. I think Eterra’s Blessing is a much better healing skill. I’m not sure we really need two, really. We’ll see what happens with it though.
Timestamp: 44:48-45:20
Q: Will other classes eventually match the Rogue in both levels of power and skill synergy?
A: Yeah, for sure. Yes, we want every class to feel just as awesome as every other class. So we want people to be able to come into the game and say, ‘what’s the best class in this game?’ and the answer to be ‘what do you want to play?’, so people are not necessarily picking the class based on what’s the most powerful thing. I mean, there’s always going to be some sort of meta involved but we want there to be a; everything feels good, everything plays good, everything is viable…you know, that’s the dream. I think we can get there. We have opportunities, especially with the Mage and Acolyte, to really take a solid look at them as a whole. A little while ago we restructured a lot of the Acolyte skills in which Mastery they were involved with and which Mastery they were going to be going forward with and I think it laid some good groundwork for sure.
Timestamp: 46:00-47:40
Q: MTX when?
A: We’ve been slowly working on MTX stuff. It’s important that we get the main game out first and running smoothly. Also, when we release some sort of MTX thing we don’t want it to be here’s a couple options, we want it to be here’s a lot of options. So we’ll be rolling that out when it’s ready. That’s kind of the answer to everything isn’t it…when it’s ready.
Timestamp: 48:50-49:18
Q: Do you have any plans of adjusting the current stun mechanic system in the future?
A: We adjust a lot of things a lot, so I’m sure it’ll get adjustments. Overall, I personally pretty happy with it. I think there are some pitfalls with…for example, the new endurance mechanic that just came out – which I think is really great – there was a lot of incentive right off the bat to get your endurance threshold higher than your health so that you would have less of a chance to be stunned. I think stuns are an important part of the game, really, being able to be in that state where you are either strong enough that you can take a stun and be fine, or you’re just avoiding the big hits so you don’t get stunned in the first place, or you specifically have enough stun protection that you just don’t get stunned as frequently. Having that bit of variance in how the flow of a fight goes I think is still important though, and – I know sometimes it doesn’t feel good to get stunned. Maybe having some sort of…kind of just coming up with ideas here so who knows if any of this is going to happen…but maybe a boss that has a really high stun chance or has an ability that every time you get hit with the ability the third time you get hit it always stuns you. Maybe there’s some sort of ‘he does less damage after he stuns you’, or there’s other elements in the map that impact where you’re getting stunned, or has negative impacts on your movement for a while, or there’s some sort of, like, there’s a downside to getting stunned but it’s not just that ‘oh I got stunned and now I’m dead’. There’s little things you can do to change that feeling and that experience but overall I think stuns are an important part of game systems like this; both in being able to stun things and being able to be stunned.
Timestamp: 51:16-53:42
Q: What are new things coming that you’re allowed to talk about?
A: There’s new skills we’re working on…I’m not going to tell you what they are just yet. Right now I’m working on a ton of UI stuff.
Timestamp: 53:54-54:16
Q: When are you doing some big performance pass?
A: Yes, okay, there is a ton of performance stuff that’s going on behind the scenes that we’ve been working on for quite a long time. If you’ve been with us for a little while you’ve been hearing about it. We keep saying ‘we’re working on performance guys’. It is happening, it is coming. There’s a ton of performance stuff that is happening. Recently, so look at my character for a second and when I cast this ability there’ll be an effect that appears around him and it’s like that ice that comes in before the ice shoots out – that’s the cast visual effects. Without getting into the details of what was happening, basically that little tiny visual effect is way more performant that it ever used to be. Now this doesn’t have a huge impact on the game as it doesn’t happen that often and not a ton of enemies have cast VFX, you’re not using eight abilities at the same time so this isn’t a huge impact on performance. However, we have already seen slight improvements from this. Now this system can be extended all the way to the little spikes that come out…it’s a lot harder to do it for those but the way the system was built it was designed to work with the little spikes that came out as well. So there’s abilities like, for example, Avalanche that have huge boulders crashing down – there’s a ton of stuff happening – all of those things need to be switched into this new system where it will be way better.
This last patch was a bit of a test to make sure that this new system is stable and it’s working well and to catch bugs that are happening with the cast VFX right now. Once we’re happy with how this is working and we’ve worked out the bugs here – because it’s not as big a deal if you Teleport and you see the Fireball casting VFX as opposed to the Teleport VFX than it is if you use Avalanche and see Fireball…it’s a big disconnect. Once we’ve got all the bugs worked out – and it’s working great so I mean, hopefully soon – we’ll be looking to extend this system to more things. That performance improvement is coming, we are working on it very hard, and hopefully it’ll be in next patch…but I can’t say it’s going to be next patch. However, when it does arrive it’s going to be great because it’s the big thing…like every once in a while I’ll see a forum post that’s like I have an RTX3080 and I’m struggling to reach a certain frame rate and someone will be like ‘oh, I’ve got a GTX970’ and it’s the same frame rate. It’s got nothing to do with the video card really, it’s a CPU bottleneck and it’s something that’s not really going to be improved by more hardware it’s going to be improved by better software – so we have to write that better software. We’re working on it, it’s definitely getting there.
Timestamp: 55:35-58:48
Q: Do you have any plans to expand the Idol system and its variety?
A: Absolutely, we got some cool stuff coming there. Can’t tell you what it is, but it’s cool. I think the big problem with the Idol system right now is that the best way to build your Idol layout late game – and this is a problem that…so the Idol system is very reminiscent of Diablo 2’s charms. There was only one two height charm in that game ever worth using, torch, and everyone always had either all 1x1’s or 3x1’s and a row of 1x1’s on the top. That distinction of there’s always the best way to build this because of the shape of the inventory that’s – ignoring the fact that the shape of the inventory was fighting with your actual inventory space – it was always advantageous to just stack up a bunch of 3x1’s across the bottom and a row of 1x1’s on the top and avoiding that I think is really important. Right now because we’ve got a 4x4 Idol space, and some of the best Idol’s are 1x4 or 4x1 they just get stacked all the across or all the way up and down. Fixing that I think would make the system a lot more interesting – specifically where you’re looking into ‘oh there’s some 1x3’s that are important’, ‘there’s some 1x1’s that are important’, ‘there’s some 2x2’s that are important’ – having those different shapes and having that configuration matter and be different and unique for different classes I think would be a really positive change on the Idol system in general.
Timestamp: 59:14-1:01:32
Q: Is there already some work done for cosmetics to see what could be done and how or is it something you’ll start working on once the games finished?
A: We have definitely started working on cosmetics. We have 2D concepts for them, we have some 3D models built for some of them, we have other stuff done for some of them…so there’s definitely work that has been done on those. It’s something that we do in parallel with the rest of the game so we don’t stop working on bosses because we want to work on MTX. We’ve created a second MTX pipeline for that. Finishing the game is the most important thing. The MTX doesn’t mean anything if the game is not done.
Timestamp: 1:01:48-1:02:42
Q: Can you tell us what your plans are with the upcoming Bazaar multiplayer trading system?
A: The Bazaar, multiplayer, and how all that stuff’s going to work…I know we’ve had some posts in the past on what our plans were for that – a lot has happened since those posts went live. So there’s a lot still going on. I can’t answer what exactly our plans are just yet, but the high level plans are pretty concrete though we are still ironing out some of the details. Until everything is finalized it’s not helpful to speculate on these systems.
Timestamp: 1:04:15-1:04:35
Q: I’ve heard that sockets are planned in the future. Could you talk about your plans for sockets?
A: This is a whole system that is not finished yet. Many people that have been around for a while now, a lot of systems get changed a lot as we go through and that one has gone through a few iterations. Any information that has been lingering from alpha/pre-alpha…that sort of stuff probably isn’t right anymore on exactly how that’s going to look. I don’t know what people have heard or anything like that but – any information you are hearing about it is either speculation or out of date, unfortunately.
Timestamp: 1:04:36-1:05:12
Q: Will there be more opportunities to join the Community Tester (CT) program?
A: Yes, there will be. If you are interested in joining the CT program my advice is don’t ask to join the CT program [laughter]. If you are a positive member of the community and we see you on the forums and on Discord and on Reddit and on all these places and you’re helping people and being nice and not being a jerk and having insightful good feedback – we are more likely to ask you to join the CT program. We don’t have any scheduled intakes right now but just keep being awesome.
Timestamp: 1:06:32-1:07:16
