This exclusive interview was conducted at the beginning of Day 2 of Blizzcon 2014.

The first question I have is about balance. What are the biggest issues right now? Which character is too strong, which is too weak, which is just right in your opinion?

Rather than talk exactly about who’s #1 and who’s #3: What we think about a lot is – players are going to want to do as good as they can, players want to optimize their characters and beat the hardest content they can. Diablo is a complex game, so sometimes the answer becomes “this particular build is the most effective, so that’s what I’m gonna do”. So we ask ourselves: ‘Does this build seem like a fun build to play?’ If I’m going to play this way for eight hours, is that a fun way to play for eight hours or whether it’s two hours, eight hours or eighty hours, however long, we want to have a fun gameplay style.

So I’m gonna use an example of a set we really like and some examples of sets we don’t like. A set we really like is the Witchdoctor’s Jade Harvester set. What you see here is a variety of skills, you know? Haunt, Locust Swarm in that Jade Harvester set, you see the Witchdoctor getting in really close to do damage and putting themselves at threat, but you get a big payoff if you pull if off successfully. We see players really applying a high degree of skill to differentiate themselves from other people. So we like that. And we’re happy to see people doing that!

Here’s a set that I don’t like the gameplay of: It’s the Monk top tier Flying Dragon or Sun Wuko sets. What you see there is Monks using a single generator (quite often way of the hundred fists) and just casting their mantra over and over and over again. That is not something that we wanna have going. So we could talk about numerical balance, how do we make the Monk as powerful as the Witchdoctor, but do we really wanna increase the numbers on a gameplay style we don’t find appealing? So what we’re doing right now is we’re looking at: Let’s get the gameplay style to a good place fist and then we can, like we can take any number like on Sun Wuko, the explosion can be 3000% damage, it could be 3500% damage. That can be 4500% damage. That can be anything that it needs to be for the monk to be doing well. But let’s get the gameplay style good first!

You know, another example is the Demon Hunter where you are at the top of the leaderboards, and the gameplay is dropping turrets and hiding three screens away. We want to fix that, so what you see on the short floor now is that we’ve previewed sort of the classes and the builds, the demon hunter has a new set that really gets back to the roots of the demon hunter of shooting enemies in the face with a ranged weapon. So we’re saying that no more sentry spam. We love that sentry turret play was fun and can be good – and I still believe that it can be good – but we really want to say ‘now, if you want to shoot people in the face we’re going to make legendary items that reward you!’. And once that’s fun we can tune the numbers to make it competetive. Same with the Monk, we can make changes so that you get the most effectiveness out of casting your spirit spenders again. Once that’s there we can get you anywhere you need to be.

Alright, considering that set items are generally the core of most of the builds – you explained why – and they are so good that player’s generally HAVE to get a certain set to play efficiently. Do you plan to create legendaries that are good enough to allow efficient builds that don’t evolve around the sets, that I don’t HAVE to use like, Firebird or the new sets?

You know, I think that will happen, it’s not something that we consciously design for. But, if you think about it – I have 13 inventory slots on my character, so if you have 13 legendary items that all synergize perfectly, I bet you would get to that point. We don’t really have the depth of the legendary pool for you to hand choose synergistic legendaries in 13 different slots, so that’s why you see a lot of power in the sets.

I personally tried to make a Barbarian using the new frenzy two hander, let frenzy stack to ten and then you’ve got depth digger which increases the damage, I don’t know if you’re familiar with that. But – I put together a bunch of individual legendary items, and you’re right, it wasn’t quite there, but that’s more for the players to explore at the end of the day. We make awesome legendary items, we think about the interaction, but we’re more than happy to be surprised by what the players put together.

There are quite a few players who are not really challenged by Torment 6 anymore. Do you have any plans to add additional Torment levels or do these players have to play Greater Rifts only?

We’re pretty happy with the way it is now, to be honest. Torment 6 being easy doesn’t worry us so much, Greater Rifts were designed to provide players with ever increasing challenges, so if players want more challenges, that’s what Greater Rifts are for.

Are you going to buff the underused legendary gems to allow for more choices?

You know it’s funny, I think that some of the Legendary Gems just come and go based off game changes around them. Like if sometimes items become better (or not) not because we changed the items, but because we changed something else about the game. There’s a great example: Everyone used to use the belt, I forgot the name out of the top of my head right now, but it gave you seven percent attack speed. But now everyone – or Barbarians at least – use (and for a while they were using String of Ears) and now they are using a belt that increases the duration of my Ignore Pain. Basically, what is good changes even if we don’t do anything. And the reason is because with Greater Rifts the damage went up. So they stopped using one and started using the other. And I think we will see that happen with the Legendary Gems as well. You know, we’re not really to worried as long as each gem fulfills a certain purpose, we believe that when players come up with unique builds, then these gems will see use.

Will the higher stats on the Ancient Items only apply on the basic stats or is it possible that certain items will get a strong legendary bonus when they are ancient?

Just the basic stats. We’re not trying to create a whole new set of legendary effects here, we wanna make sure that for the very serious players there’s always a great item to go hunting for.

Do you have any plans to allow more customization regarding skills. Is it possible that we might see something like paragon points for skills?

It’s not really on the radar right now. Our focus right now is on the legendary items. I think that’s because we have a lot going, we just had a panel where we revealed over a dozen new legendary items coming. And I think that’s because players are the most excited about finding new items. I think that’s the most exciting thing you can do in a game: make the combat good and then reward you with sweet loot from the monsters. A lot of the points stuff sometimes can feel more math-y, like a math puzzle, or it can feel like I’m playing the UI. And we really wanna say ‘no, kill monsters, get sweet loot, now your character is better!’.

Could you guys talk about other ideas people from the team recently had for Diablo 3 that didn’t make it into your plans for the future patches yet?

That’s a little tricky, because I don’t know if you saw the panel today, that showed the evolving of Reaper and our gameplay. We like to keep all of our ideas in our idea graveyard that we resurrect as zombies, theoretically. You know, I can’t tell you how many times I went back to a conversation or a lorebook or just a basic idea that we had for a long time and then we never ended up using it, or it didn’t fit, and then we integrating it in some other way. So I don’t really want to go into depth about stuff we haven’t done because there’s a good chance we might find a way of implementing it.

Question by Wyatt Chang: How did we decide to do the Ruins of Sescheron?

I don’t know the actual decision there, but the interesting part about the ruins was that we tossed around different ideas on what they could be and we settled on the idea of them being the ruins of Sescheron because we thought it was so fascinating because it is the central hub, the capital city of the Barbarian culture. And you know the Barbarian culture has really been decimated since Lord of Destruction. They are at the gates of Sescheron at the beginning of Lord of Destruction, those are the gates of Sescheron and, you know, one of the key things about being a Barbarian and the Barbarian culture was guarding the world stone on Arreat. And to the extent that the ultimate goal of a Barbarian was to be buried on the slopes of Mount Arreat (which is no longer a possibility because Mt. Arreat doesn’t exist anymore). So, along with the actual physical structure of the city of Sescheron the actual heart and soul of the Barbarian structure has been decimated so this was like a really nice way of kinda tying in that and really digging into the lore to evoke certain things that any other area or just an area that players hadn’t had some backstory on, this makes it more visceral and added another layer that we wouldn’t have gotten otherwise.

Every weapon needs to have a socket, and a player basically has to put a green gem inside. When are you going to make other options available. I mean since like the release of Diablo 3 it has to be an emerald. Are there any plans?

There is a lot of nuances to that question. You know, on a very basic level… it’s a problem. It’s a very real problem. But it’s also not a gamebreaking problem, you know. I use an old example: Do you remember before Reaper of Souls, people talked a lot about “what gem do I put in my helm”, and you could either have a magic find, gold find, life or XP, and people only ever chose the XP gem. Nowadays no one chooses the XP gem. But we didn’t change the gem at all. The whole game changed around it. So sometimes when we’re thinking about changes to the game we have to weigh: how big of a problem is this really versus how dramatic would the change be, not just to the hardcore serious fans who follow the news and understand the nuances, but to millions of people who don’t read the fansites every day and are just playing. If we were to say “no critical hit damage emeralds on weapons!” they would log in one day and wouldn’t know what happened. Since it’s not a huge gamebreaking problem it’s something we have an eye on but are not in a hurry to fix. I think what happened with the Ruby in the helm is that first we added a diamond, so people had another choice that was compelling. We also had way cooler legendary items. So sometimes you’re more concerned about getting a cool legendary effect than getting a socket at all! So nowadays people sometimes use a helmet that doesn’t even have a socket in it, because they’re like ‘it’s okay, I’d rather have four properties’, you know? We shifted the emphasis away from paragon grinding towards item acquisition. So people are just focused on maximizing their paragon and all these things change around it. When I look at our gems on weapons what I see is, I see and item that heals me very well – the purple gem. If the game changed around it so that everyone started thinking that healing was more important than damage, then people would switch.

You know, there is another one that increases my elite damage. If the game changed so that elite killing suddenly became the paramount, then people would switch. Maybe there’s some tuning changes that would have to happen to really make that happen, but we’re not in a huge hurry to fix that one. But… I wanna close my rambling answer with emphasizing – no, it’s not perfect. Not everything is going to be perfect, but we’ll see.

Johnny Ebert said yesterday that we might see trading options like the gifts that the console version has. Can you say anything about this?

Cheng:Yeah, I mean at the end of the day I that we know that the auction house short-circuited the reward loop. And we don’t want trading to ruin people’s games. There was something you said earlier about if we were to trade like…

Boyarsky: Yeah, I mean if we had some magic bullet or some ironclad way of guaranteeing that you were just trading with your friends and that it wouldn’t turn into some sort of exploit we’d do it in a second. Because obviously, with the community and the co-op, that’s our highest priority. But, one of the things we tried with the auction house was to short circuit the black market and people exploiting that kind of stuff and that did not turn out the way we intented to put it bluntly. So, you know, we’re always exploring stuff like that. But our biggest concern is that it destabilizes the game and the economy is almost as complex as an MMO economy. It’s very touchy, you can crash it with the best of intentions.

Cheng: Diablo is at it’s best when the best loot goes to the players who are killing monsters. Not the players who are playing an auction house the best. Not the players who have the most friends on their friends list. Not the people who manage a giant clan. It should be the person who is slaying monsters the most efficiently. That’s the situation we have right now. And we wouldn’t want to do anything that would jeopardize that.

Boyarsky: I think that the example of the auction house is very telling because even if we gave people something like that, and even if your intention was always like ‘alright, here’s something I wanna gift to my friends’ that’s all fine and well. But whenever it becomes the case where it’s just most efficient to do it some other way (like with the auction house for example), people are just drifting to that. You can’t help it, it’s just human nature.

Cheng: You know, what I always think about when I think of the auction house: the really most dedicated members of our community, they’re always like ‘when do we get trading back?’, right? And they say ‘I loved Diablo 2 and I miss that!’. Truth is – this is a different world now. You know what I miss (and maybe Leonard can relate to that a little bit)? I miss Adventure games with really hard puzzles. What happened to those, right? What happened to those is – the internet happened. If an Adventure game nowadays, like Kings Quest or Space Quest, some of those really old games that had weird puzzles, as soon as players hit anything that’s even remotely difficult… google! The same thing happened to us. Even if we didn’t have an auction house? Ebay. Right? Or third party site, grey market site, give away your account information, your Battle Tag, whatever. If you look at the early days of WoW, even during beta: Thottbot, wowhead. ‘Where do I turn in the quest’?

I have wonderful memories of playing Diablo 2, I have wonderful memories of playing adventure games, RPGs, I have wonderful memories of playing trading card games. Magic the Gathering, alright? Where the rarities weren’t on the cards so you’d just trade in stores. Doesn’t happen anymore. Why? Because the internet means it’s democratized, everyone knows what a card is worth, everyone knows the value of everything. The internet changed the world. It’s not reasonable to… I mean we can wish for those things, but we can’t got back because the internet changed everything.

Are you still discussing PvP or is it gone for good?

We embrace the spirit of competition a lot, with leaderboards and seasons, but right now the way legendary items are being made these days, we are way more concerned with making sure your character feels awesome and powerful in PvE, than we are about PvP. Right now I would not want PvP because I didn’t want to fight against a Wizard who is teleporting infinitly. We added that item to the game because it makes PvE really awesome, but we design now to make PvE as good as possible, but sometimes that comes at the expense of ‘that would not be as fun if I was fighting against that’.