Diablo 3 Paragon System Revamp Design

A while back, it was announced that the game designers of Diablo 3 were working on a revamp for the paragon system. At some point, the community managers asked for input about what the players would like to see in the new paragon system. So I started designing. I first made a photoshop mockup of the ideas I had in mind, sometimes It’s easier for me to visualise something before I start writing it down in words. Then I wrote down the specifics in a word document.

Here is my design:

Paragon Rank

-          - Account-wde

-          - 1000 ranks

-          - Linear XP formula (both level 1-2 and level 999-1000 take the same amount of XP)

-          - Every 50 ranks gives 1% Movement speed

-          - Every 100 ranks gives 1 yard pickup radius (10 pickup radius at rank 1000)

-          - Every rank you gain 10 Spendable Achievement points and a chest that contains a random key, a random organ and 10 Demonic Essences

-          - Based upon the chosen paragon path for the character, every rank up will give one of the following: 1% magic find, 1% gold find, 1% essence find, 1% Key find or 1% Organ find

Paragon Level

-          - Per character

-          - 100 Levels

-          - Reaching level 70 unlocks the ability to choose a secondary paragon path for this character

-          - Reaching level 100 unlocks the ability to choose a third paragon path for this character

-          - The player has the choice to make a level 100 character or to make 2 level 70 characters to achieve the same amount of paragon paths. Or make 5 characters with no level requirement to have all paths available

-          - Every level will unlock 5 spendable stat points

-         - The available stats are: Power (increases damage done), Flexibility (decreases crowd control length), Defense (Damage reduction) and Endurance (life and life regeneration)

Diablo 3 expansion dream features

Here are some of my dream expansion features for Diablo 3 that I wrote a while ago to post on the Diablo 3 forums in hope that the developers would read it. Too bad it seems Diablo 3 has gone into “maintenance mode” and there won’t be any more development nor expansions in the future. The good news is, a new Diablo game (Diablo 4?) is in development as there are job openings for a unannounced Diablo title at Blizzard's jobs website.

Here are my dream features for an expansion:

New Class: Warden
-    Uses javelin and spear skills
-    New Warden class-specific items: Javalins
-    Old skills like Lightning Fury, Decoy, Lightning Strike and others

New Feature: Runes and Runewords
-    Runes now drop. There are 12 different runes each providing a different stat boost
-    Normal (white) quality items now roll with sockets
-    Runeword recipes have been added to the game. Runewords are unique items with a legendary passive that are obtained by putting certain runes in normal quality items with sockets.

New Event: Forge of King Kanai
-    This new random event can be encountered in the Ruins of Sescheron.
-    Rewards for completing the Forge of King Kanai includes 3-5 Random runes and a Resplendent chest

New Feature: Bartering NPC
-    Forgotten Souls can now be used to purchase random legendary items,  set items and runes
-    3 Forgotten souls for a random set or legendary item
-    3 forgotten souls for a random low rune
-    30 forgotten souls for a random medium rune
-    100 forgotten souls for a random high rune

New Feature: Team Brawl (Player vs Player)
-    Two Teams of 4 players fight against each other to win the entrance to the realm of Demon Queen Tamylar or 4 other realms with a boss
-    Demon Queen Tamylar is a boss that the winning team can battle to earn valuable PvE loot
-    In PvP every character gets standardized equipment to keep it balanced
-    When you enter the realm of Demon Queen Tamylar, your regular PvE gear is equipped.
-    Items that drop from the bosses of the special realms are meant for PvE.

New Trading City: Kingsport (Socializing/trading game type)
-    Big city where you can setup trading stalls to show off your items you have for trade
-    32 players are allowed to enter this game
-    Trading is now allowed for legendary and set items
-    Best-in-slot items are now a lot harder to find, in order to motivate people to trade items

New Secondary stats: Salesmanship and Item Drop Quantity
-    Salesmanship increases your chance to get random vendor NPC’s to sell high quality goods to you
-    Item Drop Quantity increases the amount of items that drop from monsters

New Paragon Stat Category: “Luck”
-    Magic find
-    Salesmanship
-    Item Drop Quantity
-    Gold Find

Other Features:
-    No new level cap, your high level characters will still remain top geared max level characters
-    New set items have been added that provide more build options for characters
-    Magic find is now being averaged across players in a multiplayer game
-    New Legendaries with powers for Magic find have been added to the game

New Items:

Magic find:
-    Blade of Ali Baba – Your magic find is no longer averaged across players in a game
-    Skullder’s Ire Chest Armor – Magic Find has increased potential (now counts for 100% for legendary/set drops)
-    Nagelring – Your Gold Find is now converted to Magic Find

Life Steal:
-    Bloodletter Sword – Your lifesteal has increased potential (now works up to lvl 70)
-    Vampire Gaze Helm – 1-2% Life steal
-    Lich King’s Band ring – Heal 1-2% of your maximum life on Critical Hits

Defensive:
-    Shaftstop Chest Armor – Increases Armor by 15-20%
-    Dwarf Star Ring – Your Dodge chance is now equal to your critical hit chance
-    Hellslayer 2h Axe – Critical hits increase your resistances by 5-10% for 2 seconds

New Set Items:

Barbarian set
-    2 set bonus: Increase Seismic Slam damage by 100% and Weapon Throw damage by 300%
-    4 Set bonus: Weapon throw now jumps to 5 additional targets
-    6 Set bonus: Each hit of weapon throw now splits in lightning bolts hitting a nearby target for 500% weapon damage

Tools for a game designer

Concept Artists have Photoshop, 3D Artists have 3DS Max or Maya, Audio Engineers have Pro Tools or Cubase,  Programmers have Visual Studio. And many other apps and plugins.

But what do Game Designers have?

Pen & Paper!

Maybe it sounds a bit old school, but this is your very first go-to tool when doing any first design iterations. It's fast and easy to write stuff down in mind maps or charts. Or you can even draw out a game canvas. This way you can easily visualize what you are designing. It's always good to add your original pen & paper designs to the design document when handing it out to the developers or artists. This way they can really feel what you intented with your designs, and you can add drawings that you can't easily make with pc software. Ofcourse the parts that you can actually recreate with a pc, you should, to make it look more professional. Like charts and mindmaps can easily be recreated with software.

Photoshop

Your go-to tool for creating quick mockups of game UI's. Obviously you can't do any 3D visualizations, but for systems that work through the Game's UI you can easily create mockups. Often when I'm designing something new I start by creating a mockup in photoshop to visualize my ideas. From there I can easily create a word document with all specifications for the system. It's easy to take screenshots from the existing game UI that's made by a UI artist and use his elements (buttons, progress bars, etc..) to create your own mockups and suggestions for improvements. This way you don't need to be able to paint your own UI designs, but you can just copy paste existing elements together.

Microsoft Visio

If you want to create flow charts and diagrams, this is the tool for you. It provides a good amount of shapes to drag on the canvas on which you can add text. You can also easily add arrows and connections. There are shapes for database design, brainstorming (mind maps), gantt charts, etc... I use this tool often to visualize things that would not be clear enough to the developers just by plain text.

Xmind

A great tool for creating mind maps. Although Microsoft Visio has the ability to create mind maps as well, I prefer Xmind as the interface is easier to use and the visual style of the mind maps is more attractive to my personal taste. This is a pricey piece of software though, certainly when you consider you can make mindmaps with visio too. It's your choice.