Diablo IV

— PROJECT NAME

Diablo IV

— ROLE

Game Designer

— Publisher

Blizzard Entertainment

As a Class and Final Designer, I was responsible for owning the philosphy of balancing classes for Diablo IV. I worked with our design team to constantly monitor and adjust the balance of the game.

I directly designed and implemented many seasonal updates including new items, revamped abilities, and brand new powers with the aim of refreshing the meta every season.

I was the public face of the Final Design team for Diablo IV and appeared on countless developer update live streams and marketing videos.

Play Diablo IV

Diablo IV is a genre-defining systems driven action RPG, where players use class skills, abilities, and items to slay hordes of demons and collect powerful loot.

There is a near endless variety of ways to customize and build your character across Diablo IV’s classes, using hundreds of skills and thousands of items.

Class and Final Design

Prior to Diablo IV’s launch, I worked on the Class Design team to finalize and balance the player skills, abilities, upgrades, and items.

Post launch, I worked on the Final Design team. My team was primarily responsible for reacting to the state of the live game, designing and balancing seasonal class and systems updates, and fixing high priority live bugs.

We were the team that was most in touch with community sentiment. A large portion of our work was gathering and analyzing player feedback and data, identifying pain points, and then driving those improvements.

Balance Philosophy

I owned the philosophy for balancing all of classes and items in Diablo IV.

By defining power budgets for all skills, upgrades, items, and systems, I established guidelines for other designers to ensure the game was balanced from the ground up. Through in-depth analysis, I created a framework for evaluating and comparing the massively diverse set of player skills in Diablo IV.

I built consensus across the team by constantly communicating and working collaboratively with other designers. I helped audit and balance their content to ensure it aligned with this framework, and educated them with robust documentation. This ensures that all future content will release in a much more balanced state than ever before.

Seasonal Content

Many of my contributions to Diablo IV came in the form of seasonal updates to classes. In nearly every season since the launch of the game, I have designed, implemented, and balanced new Legendary and Unique items that dramatically alter your playstyle or introduce brand new ways to build your character.

We used a class ownership system, where each designer would take ownership of one or more classes each seasonal release. They would be responsible for every update to that class in a given season, from balance changes, to new items, ability reworks, and bug fixing. I frequently handled the design updates of multiple classes each season since the launch of the game.

I was the primary designer on the seasonal powers for an upcoming season. Details to be added once the season is revealed.

Starfall Coronet dramatically altered your Meteor skill, and enabled a powerful build that was previously underutilized.

Banished Lord’s Talisman was one of the “Duriel Uniques”, a set of class generic Unique items that I created explictly as a reward for beating Duriel, who was being released the pinnacle boss of Diablo IV.

Ophidian Iris altered the fantasy of playing with the Hydra skill. Rather than focus on making as many Hydra heads as possible, you can now grow them in size and in power!

Paingorger’s Gauntlets was part of an initative I drove to make Basic Skills more viable as an endgame option. These Basic Skills were typically thought of as starter skills and resource generators, but with proper itemization support, you can turn them into a powerhouse on their own!

Aspect of Ancestral Charge enabled a whole new playstyle for Barbarian players that took over the meta in Season 3. This fast paced, highly mobile build had you Charging around the screen and squashing all the demons against the terrain!

Scripting and Implementation

I directly implemented all of my designs for new content, abilities, and items using LUA scripting and our proprietary game editor, Axe.

I also frequently handled more complex implementation tasks, such as those dealing with minion AI and behaviors, rewriting scripts for server and client performance improvments, and modifying visual effects and animations.

For the Seaon 7 update, I rewrote behavior of all Summoning skills in Diablo IV. Prior to this update, Summons behaved inconsistently when it came to how they dealt damage and the types of effects they interacted with or inherited. As such, players found them generally unappealing to use.

But after my rewrite of all Summons, they behaved much more predictably, and interacted with all the effects players would expect them to. Players found them much more powerful and enjoyable to use after this update.

Itemization Overhaul

In Season 4, the Season of Loot Reborn, we did our most ambitious update to Diablo IV yet, the complete overhaul of the itemization system. This update required a cross disciplinary team of class and system designers, engineers, UX/UI designers, artists, and marketing to successfully deliver this update to players.

The itemization overhaul had many new systems and updates. I was the primary designer for updating the base affixes, the Tempering system, and the Greater Affix system, while also contributing heavily to the Masterworking system.

Prior to the itemization update, the base items had stats that were both overly specific, and ultimately, not very interesting. "Damage on Tuesdays" was a common complaint about how prescriptive they were. The updated affixes simiplified and streamlined the baseline, to make room for more customization through crafting systems.

Tempering was a new crafting system which allows you to customize your items in ways that are more specific to your build, and that directly modify your abilities. I designed all of the Tempering Affix recipes, and directly scripted their effects into every class skill in the game.

Greater Affixes injected more excitement into the loot drop moment by providing guaranteed power, and the chase of extremely rare multiple Greater Affix items.

Masterworking is an endgame upgrade system that further pushes you to perfect your items.

Developer Live Streams and Marketing

I was the public face of the Final Design team for Diablo IV and appeared on countless developer update live streams and marketing videos.

I revealed our new content and updates to our community, discussed the design philosophies and intend behind them, and answered questions directly from our players.I also interacted with our players on social media, often through our community and partner Discord servers.

This type of community interaction and communication is crucial to developing a trusting relationship with your community and driving positive sentiment.

See just a few of my video appearances below:

Season 9 Developer Update

Season 8 PTR Campfire Chat

Season 4 Itemization Overhaul Reveal

Burning Questions