This is the second dev stream, hosted by Mike Weicker, which originally aired on March 5, 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: Will Shaman see more Fire support or will it stay thematically away from fire and just keep what little it has?
A: Shaman is pretty heavily in the physical, lightning, cold. Part of the issue with giving it more fire stuff is that you then have two classes that have the same element pool…pretty well taken care of – with Mage variants and Shaman as well. That’s why we try to avoid it a little bit from fire. It does sort of fit in that force of nature theming so we like having some fire elements and it is a good conversion. There might be a few little things that get added here and there. I wouldn’t say it’s completely done, but it’ll definitely stay a secondary theme instead of a primary one – like what I would call lightning, cold, and physical.
Timestamp: 02:55-03:55
Q: So Sarno teased 3rd transformation stuff a long time ago. Care to give any more info about it?
A: The third transformation – I know we have teased that there will be one if you look in the passive panel, you can see that there’s a gap there for it there in the Druid. Druid really is that transformation thing. We do want to get different archetypes covered. The goal with Druid is to have different archetypes available through multiple transforms. Being able to do DPS through different transforms, having support roles be possible through different transforms in different ways, and really get that like I can play the style I want and the transform I want and have options or maybe you’re playing multiple transforms simultaneously. I would say the two core archetypes that are already visible is the bigger/beefier/tank DPS/bruiser type transform with the Werebear form, and then we’ve got that smaller/nature theme/caster style transform with the Spriggan form. So I’m not going to tell you the name of the new one but I think you can get a good sense of what’s missing in that space. The general theming around it is not similar to the other two. We’ve already got that tank archetype. It’ll definitely have ways to deal damage effectively.
Timestamp: 04:00-06:08
Q: Mike, Werebear is so ugly, will it ever be updated?
A: Yes, we’ve got plans for Werebear updates coming and how I previously said Werebear fits that beefier/tanky theming…the new model for it definitely exemplifies that very well.
Timestamp: 06:30-07:02
You can see this new model shown off here in a recent developer post.
Q: Can we expect and what should we expect with some new totems?
A: Yeah, there’s a bit of a gap in upper section of the Shaman passive tree, I think a totem would go really well right there. If we look at the totems that are available for Shaman, we’ve got a very lightning themed totem and then we’ve got a very physical themed totem. There’s a nice little gap sitting right there for one. They’ll definitely be one more totem coming. Shaman’s are supposed to be the Totem heavy primaries.
Timestamp: 09:10-09:55
Q: Are you going to address perma support for transformation within the Druid tree in future updates?
A: Yeah, so the really interesting thing about transformations – this is a great topic, I love this topic – transformations have sort of a weird spot, especially because we’re trying to keep them unique from class to class. We’ve got the – and Necromancer and Primalist share a lot of stuff in general – so they both have transformations, they both have minions, they both have spells, they both have melee attacks…there’s a lot that they share. There’s also a lot that they don’t share – the damage types they’re generally doing and we try to keep the styles of the minions distinct, we try to keep the styles of the transformations distinct. So the Acolytes transformation – yeah there’s only one – you retain all your skills on your bar. With the Primalist transformations the goal is to keep them feeling like another creature you’re becoming, not like a different version of yourself. So having those very thematic abilities linked to it really helps with that transformation theming. So there’s this need to have unique abilities for those transformations and what that does is that it then – unless there’s really significant interactions between your other skills and the transformation if you have 100% uptime on that transformation you’ve got up to four other skills that you’re specialized in that do just nothing…so it suddenly becomes how can these skills be proc’d by other means. Can I have an item that casts Maelstrom for me, can I have an Idol that casts something else for me, or it’s just equipping minions and letting the minions roll so you have four minions and your transformation skill. It’s sort of one of those things where you want the other skills you’re specialized in to play a role which is part of why we were initially trying not to let 100% transformation uptime happen. Now if it comes at a price and there’s a trade-off it’s really not that terrible, you build yourself around it and that’s great.
Personally, I think a really cool play style would be something where you are very intentionally transforming multiple times into different forms so you’ve got Werebear on your bar and you’ve got ‘other form’ on your bar (wink, wink) and you’re switching between them fairly regularly. I think that would be a lot of fun. I know a lot of people just want to be Werebear. One of my best friends all he does in games like this is play Werebear builds and when I first told him I was making this he’s like, ‘tell me when you got Werebear and I’ll play it for you’. So we know people do want that 100% uptime as an option and we’ll be giving some love to those transformations in general as we introduce the last transformation as well. I think there’ll be a lot of different good things coming in that category, in general. We definitely recognize that Primalist is one of the older classes – we’ve learned a lot in the last three years making this game – and a lot of the stuff we made really early on is not as high quality as some the stuff we’ve made recently. It certainly shows, I think that the Rogue is definitely a significant step above, quality wise in general, from most Primalist skills. [Opens Primalist skills window] There’s a lot of things in here that probably need some reworks and they’ll get them.
Timestamp: 10:52-14:36
Q: I love Warcry, is the property of “blocking” projectiles something intentional? I hope it is. I think it’s amazing.
A: Yeah, I mean, it’s a physical thing that sits in the space and can take damage and die and everything so it makes sense that it can block projectiles. I also really like Warcry, I had a ton of fun working on it.
Timestamp: 15:35-16:02
Q: What do you think LE’s biggest weakness is when it comes to player choice that you wish you could address but can’t?
A: I don’t know, that’s a tough one. There’s not a ton of things that we just can’t even touch on at all. Maybe someone in the chat can help me out there with something recently, but nothing comes to mind. There’s a lot things that we want to work one but don’t have the time to work on simultaneously with other things. There’s a lot of things that people point out very frequently like stances. People have been wanting more control over the minion AI and the stances that they use type thing. We mentioned that was a possibility a while ago. Usually it comes down to priorities, in cases like that it’s definitely something that we’d like to do but the positive impact on the game of adding new content in the form of new skills or new areas or expanding other systems or rebuilding some elements in the UI to make them flow better for everyone’s experience, building multiplayer – it’s those things that sometimes take priority. So we’ve got to keep things in scope for 1.0. There’s a lot of things that pile up that we want and we’re like okay, we’ll do that one day post launch…we’ll definitely get that thing in type thing. There’s a lot of things like that.
Timestamp: 17:12-19:02
Q: Can you talk a bit on how Arena went from a random game mode for players to mess around in, to one of the main endgames?
A: Yeah, really it was primarily just feedback from the community. When we first launched a version of the game for Kickstarter there was about an hour or two worth of gameplay. There wasn’t really a lot of content at all and in some of the early builds the feedback we were getting was, ‘I want to play for more time and I don’t know how to do that’. There was no way to keep playing. Passive points at that point in time was a center panel that was an X grid thing that grew out and it was very complicated. There was a ton of stuff you could get for your character but there was no way to really use it in the content. So we added the Arena game mode as sort of a ‘what is the fastest thing we can put into the game, development time-wise, because we were a week or two out from the Kickstarter. It was mainly what can we get in quickly so the players have something to do past the campaign snippet that we had available at the time. People really liked it, it was fun, and we started building other endgame systems after that but it was just one of those things where no matter what we built – because it was so easy to build a ladder for – it was such an easy benchmarking system. It was really easy for people to compare their progress to one another, and competition drives all sorts of things. It was fantastic to have a way to have competition in the game so early and having it be that competitive landmark was what really drove its popularity, I think. We initially had planned to just have it in temporarily, but the community loves it so we kept it in and we’ve been expanding on it ever since.
Timestamp: 20:26-22:42
Q: Will there be “true end game bosses” which will make you REALLY push your build and min/max? For example, like Shaper\ Uber elder\ Maven\ Sirus in POE. Maybe with some cool dedicated loot with low drop chances.
A: Yes, definitely! Those are all great example. I’d put things like; the Pandemonium Event in Diablo 2 and then things like what Path of Diablo created for their Diablo Clone fight – things like that where you have to build up to it, you really can’t go in there unprepared. It’s a badge of honour to say, ‘I’ve got a character that can do this’. I think that’s really important to have. Part of the reason we’ve steered a little bit away from having that just yet, is partially lore reasons. Whatever that large uber fight is going to be, having that be a climax in the story for when the game’s actually launched is really great. I’m not saying we’ll wait completely until then. We’d just like the encounter to be a little further on in the campaign where you’re not like jumping from part way through the campaign to like all of a sudden, ‘why am I fighting this person, this makes no sense’ – in an endgame that starts part way through. Things like that is part of the reason we’ve started without it, but we definitely want to have it later. Also, we don’t have ‘huge’ amounts of content for people to do and play – there’s really only two endgame modes at the present time. If we spend too much time working on content that’ll only be available for 1% of the player base – it makes it tricky – we want to have lots for everyone to do and then work on getting things for really dedicated and hardcore players to do.
Timestamp: 24:18-26:34
Q: When can we expect skill and passive revamps for Primalist again and overall class updates with its Mastery trees?
A: That is something that we are actively working on. I don’t have an exact timeline for when we’ll get that, but that is something that we’re already making progress on and is definitely in the forefront of our discussions. We were just talking about it yesterday, and we had a big discussion on Primalist class reworks and how that’s going to happen, where to start, who’s working on all that sort of stuff. So it’s in the pipe, as they say.
Timestamp: 26:55-27:35
Q: When approaching skill passive trees. Are you going to keep added secondary effect options? Or will you keep the idea of damage only trees with less secondary effects or procs?
A: We definitely want to have interesting interactions with every single tree in the game. So there’s tree like – I’m going to pick on the Sabertooth tree here – there’s almost zero interaction with Sabertooth and anything else in the entire game…there may actually be zero interaction. Yeah, there is no interaction at all [laughter]. There’s also almost no interaction in the way the passive tree interacts with it – there’s a little, there’s a few things – but we’ll definitely want to expand that. Every skill in the game should have interesting secondary effect options in their tree and interesting interactions between other skill options in their trees. We don’t want to force anyone to take these options but we do want there to be like ‘okay, if I’ve decided to take Sabertooth and I’ve decided to take Scorpion’ – maybe there’s some interaction between the two. Or maybe I’ve decided to take Sabertooth and I’m a Shaman and I’m using Avalanche and the cold version of Sabertooth and there’s some interaction there. I’m literally just pulling stuff out of thin air here, but I think that there needs to be that type of interaction that we’ve really intentionally built in things like the Rogue already into these other classes.
Timestamp: 27:37-29:38
Q: Are there plans to expand the dual wield capabilities? Having only certain Masteries able to dual wield in addition to limiting which items they can dual wield takes a bit of the fun away.
A: Yeah, so there’s – this is a pretty big topic – sometimes restrictions can breed creativity. It’s one of my favourite sort of sayings, I guess. Giving restrictions in this allows us to make items that couldn’t exist otherwise. So like, because the Spellblade can’t dual wield two axes, maybe we can make an axe that if they could dual wield them it would be broken on that class but it would have a really cool interaction on Primalist or something like that. So there’s mechanical reasons in things like that and there’s also thematic reasons, whereas having an old dude with two maces is kind of a break from the class theming and how that class would likely operate in the game world. So there’s things like. There’s also technical things where every time we add a new dual wield option there’s a ton of animations that go with it. There’s some things there where we can make more stuff when we restrict certain things like that. I wouldn’t say that it’s out of the question that more won’t get added, but we don’t immediately have plans to add a bunch more right now. Who knows though, maybe some of the other Masteries that aren’t in the game yet might get some – I never really thought about that.
Timestamp: 29:42-31:36
Q: Are there plans to do anything with stance skills?
A: Yes, we have plans for the stances. My personal opinion on stances, in general, with skill tree systems – it’s really hard to build a skill tree for a stance…I’ve tried, it’s really hard. Most of the passive style abilities, things like Enchant Weapon – it’s almost a stance really, it’s really hard to build skill trees like that. We do have some interesting plans for stances that will make them accessible to use. I think the really interesting part about stances is switching between them. Having multiple of them on your bar is not likely great. So if you have two stances on your bar and each of them has a skill tree and you’re switching between them – that’s a lot of your skill budget, I want to say, that is effectively taken up by passive skills that are sitting on your bar. There’s not really a lot of really active things to do apart from just like, ‘okay well this one ran out…I’ll switch to the other one…this one ran out I’ll switch to the other one’. Sometimes there might be circumstances where you can get a build where maybe you’re like, ‘there’s a lot of enemies around me…I switch to a certain stance…oh I’m fighting one guy I’ll switch to a different stance’. There’s a little bit of decision making/gameplay there, but not a lot really. For the most part, generally, people will end up with just one stance on their bar and it basically just sits there taking up a slot and doing very little – which I’m not a huge fan of, personally. Having that stance functionality and interaction without it needing to be on your bar is really cool, I think, and makes having conditions for those stances to be a lot better, I think. I wonder if I’m making any sense here [laughs].
Yeah, we definitely know that stances are thematically really cool and people like them. There’s lots of great examples of stances being used in other games – like WoW had a lot of stance interaction with different warriors – and it’s a very different game style, for sure. Then there’s my favourite implementation of stances in a game – Udyr from League of Legends – having that really active stance switching, but that requires a whole character built around it. That’s the whole thing that character is – switching stances. So we’ll see.
Timestamp: 31:42-35:08
Follow-up Question: Yeah, maybe have just have two stances in one skill that you switch between?
A: Yeah, that’s definitely a version that we’ve looked at. Then you just have like…the stance skill. It’s kind of what ended up happening with like Diablo 2 where there’s like a dozen aura skills in the game, and you really have to pick which one you have up at a time. That’s kind of like a stance system, in a sense. When we did auras we’re like we don’t ever want to have two auras on your bar simultaneously so we just put it all into one skill, and try to get as much variety and theming in that skill tree as we can. I think I can see that having a little bit of love too coming up, in general.
Timestamp: 35:15-36:08
Further Follow-up Question: One easy solution to prevent having more than one aura at once is making auras toggle, and when one is toggled on, others are toggled off.
A: Yeah, you’re right about having one aura turns on it just turns off the others. Once again, making a skill tree for an aura is pretty difficult [laughter]. We had a lot of stuff that was either just overpowered or really similar. Getting it so that the aura feels interesting and unique and all those things that we want in skill trees just ended up being kind of like, ‘why…why do we have these two different things’. It’s the same problem as having two passive skills on your bar, and we like to avoid that scenario whenever possible. However, we know people like to have that sort of lazy playstyle. We build nodes into different skills like, for example, Enchant Weapon has that node in the bottom right where it auto casts the skill. We build thing like that from time to time, though we do like having different things to do – I personally think is more exciting.
Timestamp: 37:30-38:45
Q: Will unarmed playstyles get more love? We have uniques for them but what about making it a viable choice like dual wield?
A: Yeah, that’s a really interesting playstyle mechanics and interactions – having unarmed combat. Again, there’s lots of precedence in other games – like I love making an unarmed Skyrim character, a ton of fun. You can see that there’s talk of it…we definitely haven’t abandoned the idea. We don’t have immediate plans for it, I’d say. I would keep an eye out for it post launch, but I wouldn’t expect any heavily focused unarmed playstyles pre-launch…would be my guess.
Timestamp: 36:12-37:18
Q: Currently projectiles, like Fireball or Lightning Blast, don’t act as light sources. Will this be implemented sometime in the future? I guess it could be a performance thing.
A: It is a performance thing. We have a great new technical artist on the team, Max, and he is doing all sorts of awesome wizardry in the tech art side of things. It’s a really cool field that, I’ll be honest, I didn’t really know existed before working on this game. He will be making that a possibility which I know Sam, our VFX artist, is very happy about because he frequently likes to put light sources in VFX and it just wrecks performance so we can’t currently do it properly. It’s something we are looking at and this goes hand-in-hand with the performance updates that we keep talking about that are one day coming…and they are coming along quite nicely.
Timestamp: 39:04-40:30
Q: How long until colourblind options will be mentioned or developed?
A: Yeah, so there’s examples of colourblind things that we need to do…like when your health drops there’s that yellow health or orange health that sits behind – or gray health or whatever you want to call it – that says like, ‘oh you’ve just got hit by a big hit and this is how big that hit was’ and then it slowly drains. I know there’s certain types of colourblind that have really big problems with that. We do try to avoid that as much as possible. With the new UI, wherever something is colour distinguished we try to give it a symbol distinguish as well so that if it is the same colour the symbols help distinguish it. It is likely that colourblind options will be a little bit in the future. With the new UI we’ve built we do try to keep those things in mind. There’s a lot of accessibility things that still need to get added to the game. There are some accessibility options that you don’t even think about sometimes, like subtitles. There’s a lot of accessibility options that we know we need to add and we plan on it. We know that having colourblind options is really important.
Timestamp: 40:40-41:57
Q: Are there any plans or possibility for an ‘endless’ scaling dungeon, similar to PoE’s Delve, with monster difficulty scaling the deeper you go as well as better rewards the deeper you risk going? I immensely enjoyed the delve aspect of PoE and wanted to know if there might be anything similar coming to LE one day?
A: Yeah, that would be a really cool thing. Right now the thing that kind of takes that place is the Arena, and it’s not the same thing…it’s not a dungeon really, you’re just sitting in a small arena that changes styles here and there but it’s not a dungeon really. We do have plans for more things like that, and I would say that you’ll be pleasantly surprised where the Monolith’s going. It’s not exactly that, but there will be more things like that for you in it. Hopefully that gets you excited for it because we do want that style of gameplay. We know Delve is a very popular game mode in PoE, but we can’t just copy it – and we don’t want to either – we always try to develop new things to get different playstyles and gameplay experiences that are possible for people to experience and have fun with. We want to do this in our own way. There’s a lot of great examples out there.
Timestamp: 42:34-44:05
Q: Sockets and gems implementations, what can you say on it?
A: I don’t know if I mentioned this last time, our deterministic crafting system works very similarly to socketing and gem systems in Diablo 2. We have to do something different with our socketing system, and it has gone through quite a few different iterations as we’ve been designing and developing the game. As the crafting system evolved our plans for socketing have changed. It is still a really cool way to have multiple items combined together. Whether or not those items are removable or not and if you can then recraft on things with sockets – there’s things we’ve talked about, a lot of different things – like having an affix on an item become a socket and then have things that can go in it. There’s all sorts of challenges with these things. Each one of the different ways we’ve talked about doing it and – I can’t give you exact details on it because it’s not quite nailed down yet exactly what it’s going to be. There’s lots of cool stuff that we’ve been exploring around it.
Timestamp: 45:00-46:46
Q: How happy or unhappy are you with the Community Testers? Is this really helpful? Well I think so at least, but is there something to say about these fellas that might be interesting?
A: Yeah, the CT program has been very successful…it’s been great. They’re all really enthusiastic members of our community already so I know they enjoy getting a chance to get a little bit of an early look at things. It’s been really helpful having really focused feedback on things before it comes out. I think we’ve had better quality releases and less dramatic or emergency hotfixes. Overall, it’s been a very positive thing and the development team is very happy with the results thus far.
Timestamp: 46:52-48:06
Q: While the new VFX for skills look amazing, I do find the game suffers from visual clutter more than before. Any plans on a “minimum VFX” mode for those who just want to play efficient and not as pretty?
A: Yeah, we have talked about having this type of mode and that also comes into play with things like when you’re talking about multiplayer – it’s even a bigger thing. In multiplayer tests we’ve started looking at when there’s two people that have this skill in the game together no one can see anything [laughter]. We’ve definitely started to look at that. Like I mentioned earlier with getting light sources and things like that into skills that really can use it, it helps keep things smaller but still distinct and being able to tell what they are. There’s two types of VFX for abilities;
- There’s enemy VFX, which needs to be really clear because you need to be able to know exactly what’s hitting you when…so that needs to be obvious and very easy to distinguish.
- Then there’s the other side of it with player ability VFX where it really helps sell the fantasy of ‘I am a Primalist that is wielding the elements of nature to destroy my enemies’. Having that impact feel good is really important to have the whole class experience feel good as well.
It’s a really fine line to walk with noisy and impactful VFX and we’re definitely always talking about it and always tweaking them. Yeah, that’s something we take to heart for sure.
Timestamp: 48:10-50:10
Q: With how much the items have evolved since the Kickstarter, does the initial design of the Eternity Cache still work or has it been completely overhauled since?
A: A lot of things have changed quite a bit from their original descriptions. I don’t think we ever really gave a clear description of what the Eternity Cache was going to be. The same feeling is still something we’re talking about. There’s a lot of changes to the game – the engine itself – that have come through since those things have been talked about. I’d say basically everything’s up for changes. Anything that was announced or talked about or released more than two years ago is very up for changes [laughs].
Timestamp: 50:32-51:30
Q: With so many questions can we expect longer streams soon?
A: Maybe, I don’t know…there’s kind of balance that needs to be struck there. I mean, I’d love to keep streaming more but I got to get work done too guys. I’ve been working on a lot of UI reworks right now with Judd and Scott, and it’s been going fantastic but it takes a lot of time.
Timestamp: 51:45-52:50
Q: How important is player punishment in your eyes? How do you balance challenge and frustration?
A: So player punishment is really an interesting thing. We’re kind of light on it right now, in general. There’s no death penalty really, aside from the walk back that you have to do. I think people should be able to pick, to some degree, the punishment and that’s why hardcore mode exists really. Personally, I like the Diablo 2 method of it – losing gold and experience – I think the gold was like…I get it, the repair costs and you die a whole bunch and you got to go back and get your gear and everything. I think the experience loss is the best part of that because it’s something that doesn’t actually reduce the power of your character at all – it doesn’t make you worse. It does provide a semblance of like I can’t die because it’s less efficient, I lose experience I lose progress, things like that but your character doesn’t become weaker or anything like that.
There’s also been questions about the Monolith setbacks and things like that. We’ve got some plans for changes on that, but having some sort of setback is, I think, good. Part of the reason the setbacks in the Monolith exist is because if you’ve gotten to a position where it’s actually too hard due to the modifiers you’ve picked than we take you back a few timelines to allow you to possibly change them – and there’s a thematic reason there as well. It can give you a second chance and keep going instead of having to abandon the whole thing.
Timestamp: 53:12-55:46
Q: What are the hidden zones in this game for?
A: They are – to be revealed at a later date. One of my favourite things are hidden zones in game like the secret cow level…absolutely love it. I think, right now, the purpose of those zones is more to let you know that hidden things exist and to let you know to keep an eye out more than anything. Let you know that we like hiding things, let you know that we like putting little easter eggs and secrets here and there.
Timestamp: 55:50-56:50
Q: Will you create more ways to offset negative effects (chill, enemy dodge etc.), like chill immunity on gear/skills/passives or something?
A: Yeah, there’s new items coming in all the time and I think that having items that are specifically designed to fill in gaps in your build – if there’s something that’s particularly difficult for you – is really good. For example, if your build is ultra susceptible to chills maybe there’s a pair of boots eventually that lets you – or a really warm coat, new unique coming: Really Warm Coat [laughs] – and maybe it helps fix that. I think that’s a really good thing to have – having ways to prevent these big problems and to fill gaps in your build with specific items.
Timestamp: 59:10-1:00:02
