Changes

'''Jay Wilson:''' They brought [[Diablo 2 ]] manuals, I think they were hoping, you know they brought lots of stuff for us to sign and it was really cool to be able to like talk to people one on one. Have the whole little subsection of the team there. We had artists drawing little impromptu sketches in people's books and that was really fun.

'''Jay Wilson:''' Uh, [[Jeff Kang]], one of our environment artists. He drew houses, and so I did a UI mockup because I don't really have any drawing skills.

'''Bashiok:''' So, everybody's back from [[WWI 2008| WWI]] now, have been for a while. Where is the development team focused right now? What is everybody working on?

'''Jay Wilson:''' Well the [[:Category:D3_Team| team's pretty big ]] so we've got them split up on different things. Most of the art team is actually working on the second act of the game, because a lot of the team is really production focused now and we're generating content for the most part a lot of the tech and underlying engine is really solid. Most of the design team is still on Act 1 because we're refining and improving the quests and flow and some of the big game systems that we haven't really announced yet. We kind of dove back into content production fairly quickly.

'''Jay Wilson:''' Well there are a lot of factors that go into ability selection. Some abilities satisfy those factors a little differently and that's fine. You mentioned cool factor that's an important one, you want an ability to be cool, you want a class to be cool, so if he's going to be cool his actions define that. So if he's does cool stuff he's going to be a cool class. The next one is you really want him to be archetypal. A great example with the [[Barbarian ]] is we really wanted him to be all about physical force so we made some of his choices, like the changes we made to [[Berserker_Skill_Tree#Leap_Attack| leap attack]]: it's a lot more forceful, it does AOE damage instead of single target damage. We did those types of things to enforce the fact that he's a very physical character.  You know the next one would be we want each class to be unique. What happens is a lot of players will request ‘Can we have 20 or 30 classes?' The answer would be yes but a lot of them are going to be really similar and we don't want that. We want each class to feel unique, to have unique abilities that are key to them. But the one that probably defines them all is really function and challenge, as we create new enemies and new challenges for the players to face, a lot of times giving the player the tools to face those challenges is in the form of an ability. If we introduce a character or an enemy who is really good at controlling the player, say he's got crazy slow attacks that make it really hard to face him, especially if you're a Barbarian, maybe the Barbarian needs some kind of way to counter that, maybe he needs an ability prevents him from being slowed or allows him to get good hits. D2, Diablo 2, had abilities like that as well, like concentration [http://diablo2.diablowiki.net/Paladin_Offensive_Auras#Concentration| Concentration] and things like that. So function is one thing, the challenge of enemies, keeping a class archetypal, all those different things