Diablo 3‘s pet system has been chastised for giving certain classes and builds fragile/weak/”squishy” companions.
No more, sayeth the mighty Blizzard, shall Diablo 3 hold such a travesty upon its servers!
Okay, so Blizzard itself can’t talk, but that’s the gist of what game designer John Yang said about the current system on this Diablo III forum post.
“Pets should be roughly as survivable as the player. There’s a lot to this statement so let me clarify a bit:
- Pets should scale with your survivability stats. They currently scale with most of your stats but not all of them. This is being worked on.
- Pets should derive their Toughness from yours, and if you skip out on it, your pets’ survivability should be noticeably lower as a result. On the flip side, they should be noticeably tougher if you’ve increased your own Toughness. You shouldn’t skimp on Toughness just because you have pets.
- We don’t want pets to be invulnerable tanks. In the live environment pets are too squishy, but even after our review is done in a future patch, if your pets are still dying a lot, we want you to be looking to increase your Toughness, which will consequently increase your pets’ survivability.”
You have to give Blizzard some serious credit when it comes to Diablo 3. Since the game’s initial PC launch, which was plagued by obvious flaws and glitches, as well as a total collapse of the auction house, Blizzard has turned the game around, giving it the high quality expansion it deserves and even porting it to consoles. As much as gamers give companies grief for releasing broken or stripped-bare products like SimCity and X Rebirth, one can still take a step back and see that some companies do hear their community’s complaints and suggestions out.
I’m not saying Blizzard is a perfect or even a good company, mind you, but it’s great to see a positive relationship between them and their customers being fostered over the usual DLC hostage situation that publishers like Activision or EA are liable to form.
Here’s to hoping the Diablo 3 pet system’s revamp is just as beneficial in practice as it is on paper. And as always, keep your eyes glued to gamerheadlines.com for tech buzz, gaming news, and reviews for the releases that matter to YOU.
