Actually this was not a real surprise since a lot of us were expecting to see it at the Gamescom and would have bet on it for the “mysterious conference”. However, what we’ve seen was absolutely new, interesting, and presented in pure Blizzard style.

The presentation, which you can see in the video we promptly recorded for you, started with a jaw-dropping Blizzard-quality CG Cinematic trailer where Tyrael meets the new villain which players have to face in the new fifth act of the game: Malthael, a fallen angel, once known as the angel of Wisdom, returning now as fearsome as death itself. The character’s art style is really cool, simple, elegant and gloomy, with his ghostly wings, dark colors and his twin dual-wielded sickles.

They showed us the new class: the Crusader, with some gameplay footage as well. This new character is a heavy armored knight who uses flails and shields and who is described as a “mid-ranged melee character”, using melee attacks and holy magic to smite his enemies. They told us that the shield is an extremely important part of the character, and will be a core element in the gameplay experience.

Another important feature coming with the new expansion will be what they call “Loot 2.0”. Basically they reworked the whole loot system in order to offer a more satisfying and less frustrating loot hunting experience, without making it too easy. This will be possible mainly thanks to the new “smart drop” system, which will give to the players a chance on every drop to obtain an item tweaked for their class, which brings to less “trash loot” and more happiness for the players!

In order to enjoy this new system at its best, they are developing what in our opinion could be the nicest addition to the general gameplay experience: the loot runs dungeons. These will be random-generated levels with random final bosses which players can choose to face in order to obtain new loot without being forced to repeat the same zone over and over again. If you are a Diablo III player, probably you know how much this feature was awaited by the community, so it was definitively time!

The last important thing worth mentioning is the rework of the Paragon levels. Now you can stack them without a cap and they are account-bounded and shared between all your characters. You can use them to improve your characters in different ways, for example increasing their base stats and obtaining an even further build diversity. Even if the general paragon level has no cap at all, the available paragon upgrades for each character will have, of course, a limit.

As a lot of you could be wandering “wait, and what about the PvP?” just as we did, as you will see in the video interview we will publish in the next days, we asked the question as first thing to Josh Mosqueira (Game Director) and Christian Lichtner (Art Director), and after a short laugh they told us that even if they are doing different “experiments”, for now there are not actual plans for a complete PvP mode.

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