Diablo Immortalhas had an eventful first year with more than a handful of major updates, but the next one on the horizon is likely its most significant to date. Not only isDiabloImmortalintroducing an all-new vampiric Blood Knight class to the franchise, but it’s also shaking up gameplay for all players thanks to a new Stances system in addition to a secondary set of weapon slots.
Diablo Immortal senior narrative designer Ryan Quinn and lead UX designer Chris Liao recently spoke with Game Rant about the new update, particularly how the new Stance system will impact players both in terms of build diversity and moment-to-moment gameplay. Overall, the update is intended to create more opportunities for creativity while encouraging more active play styles as players make full use of the Stance system.
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Diablo Immortal’s Stances Add More Gameplay Variety
Once players reachInferno difficulty inDiabloImmortal, they’ll have the opportunity to equip a second set of weapons that unlocks the Stance system. Each class has two distinct Stances, and these trigger powerful short-term buffs upon activation in addition to passive buffs related to the stance. While most stances can be loosely defined as “offensive” or “defensive,” the two stances have different effects for each class.
The stances are actually tied directly to the weapon slots. After a player decides to graduate to Inferno, they will then have access to this feature. To access it, they need to equip two additional weapons, a main hand and an off-hand, which then unlocks stances. The first set of weapons represents the offensive stance, and the second set of weapons represents the defensive stance. The stance feature allows players to switch between offensive and defensive stances in more difficult content such as Helliquary Raids or PvP.
The stances should be a helpful boost during challenging combat, particularly for players who might not have as many defensive tools in their kit. Switching to a defensive stance during a critical moment could help players survive againstDiabloImmortal’s raid bossesor provide a timely advantage in a PVP bout. It’ll certainly be interesting to see how players work the stance system into their rotations for maximum benefit.
Diablo Immortal Players Will Have More Build Options Thanks To New Weapon Slots
Another crucial facet of this update is the additional weapon slots themselves, as the legendary gems and essences on those weapons will be active at all times. This offers players tons of opportunities to expand their builds in interesting ways and also gives established players some new goals to work toward as they strive to perfect the weapons in those slots. Thenew Blood Knight classwill also have access to an array of gems and essences to take full advantage of this new system.
With the introduction of stances across the board – for all classes, not just the Blood Knight – everyone is receiving more opportunities to customize their builds with legendary gems and legendary essences. The design decisions that we made during the process of creating stances were to open up build diversity. So from that sense, since all four weapons are active at the same time, this lets you do different combinations of legendary essences to really ramp up the power of your build or take some of your favorite builds and add additional utility tools to them. The Blood Knight given the wide array of legendary essences that they will have at launch will have the opportunity to do exactly that right from the get-go.
Despite the stories of playersspending exorbitant sums onDiabloImmortal’s legendary gems, the additional slots are still entirely beneficial to free-to-play players just looking to diversify their builds or explore more options. Overall, more options are a good thing in a game that’s all about coming up with fun ways to obliterate hordes of demons.
Diablo Immortalis available on Mobile and PC.
