Diablo III: Barbarian's Fury System, Missing Runes, Monster Types

A slew of new information is coming out of BlizzCon today, with a quad of Diablo III developers revealing plenty of details about the upcoming game. Here's some of the gameplay details they mentioned:

The Fury System

The new Fury system for the Barbarian encourages fast paced gameplay by giving the Barbarian more Fury for killing more monsters. When he uses a skill that uses a massive amount of Fury on a massive amount of monsters, he'll generate enough Fury to perform yet another powerful skill.

What happened to Runes?

Diablo III is to feature an extremely high level of customization but the Rune system isn't available in the build at BlizzCon because they are still being designed, tweaked and changed. The Runes will only be implemented when they are fully developed.

Monsters in Diablo III are designed to be simple because they believe that monsters should each have their own specializations. Complexity and depth comes from combining different monster types. You won't have a monster that does 5 different skills. Having simple monsters allows players to identify monsters quickly in order to kill them – monsters in Diablo III are designed as silhouettes to have different shapes and colors. It's really similar to Left 4 Dead's and Team Fortress 2's character design philosophy.

Monster Types

Swarmers – Weak, Melee. There's more of them!

Ranged – Projectile Speed, Arc, Direct.

Lieutenant – Resurrect, Buff, Spawner. They're high priority targets.

Elite – Tough, stronger attacks, or both. These monsters have a very high priority but difficult to kill.

AOE – Point blank, line, radial, cone. These monsters change the playspace by forcing players to change their tactics.

Weakener – Debuff, Slow, Drainer. These characters make the swarmers and ranged enemies more dangerous.

One offs: Sleeper, Alarm, Bee Hive, Linked, Sapper, Thief. Figure these out!

Magic Find

According to the short Q&A with Geoff Keighley, Lead Designer Jay Wilson mentioned that Magic Find is implemented into Diablo III, but balancing it may require that Blizzard remove the stat from items themselves.

Note: I've been Twittering BlizzCon, you can follow me here.