Last night’s concept art of the Treasure Seeker generated some questions about it, which Bashiok replied to.

So I was just wondering if the Diablo 3 team thought up this idea by themselves or possibly got a little spark from a game called Kirby Airride or some other game. Here is a video of what im talking about. Toward the end he finds Tac and gets tons of power-ups for hitting him Bashiok: Yeah, it’s inspired by the little bastards in Golden Axe you’d wake up to stealing your stuff and have to kick the crap out of them. I hope the whole “better loot with each hit” thing was a mistake, because then you’d have players spending minutes cherry-tapping him over and over. Bashiok: Think of it like he has 20 loot drops in him total, not that there’s some cooldown period. There’s no cooldown, he tries to run away and portal out, so you gotta get all those 20 drops out of him before he does. It’s not really tuned yet, people that saw him in the BlizzCon demo can probably attest to how easy he way to finish off with a caster.

Perhaps Bashiok had just read my post from last night, in which I… attested to how easy the TS was to finish off with a caster. Not that I was the only one to notice such a phenomena. At any rate, I’m surprised to hear that the little guy has twenty loot drops in him. And that they get progressively better. That seems too rewarding?

I don’t think I got more than 6 or 8 drops from him in the 2010 Blizzcon demo, before I killed him with a Demon Hunter or a Wizard. He was good for three or four flurries of damage, dropping one or two items each time I battered him, and then when he died he basically corpse popped, with another 4 or 5 items falling at once. Nowhere near 20, though. At least in my memory. Apparently he must be managed, hitting him repeatedly, but not too hard lest you break the Go-Go-Goblin before extracting maximum satisfaction?

Update: Bashiok made a few more replies in response to the disparate Blizzcon memories of various fans.