Q&A with the Developers!

Do you have any plans for adding diffrent skins to the UI? or adding a MTX just for the UI so that we could change back and forth?

Hi guys, have a few...;)

1.The game feels good for leveling at the moment; you can get good deeps and its fun, sort of like it was in the awakening beta. Are there going to be nerfs like there was for awakening for ascendancy? (i hope not)

2.What do you guys think about act 4 Cruel balance? To me it still feels way out compared to the leveling in act 1-3 Merci. So many people just pay for full act 4 rush's or you have to over level to do it, are you happy with this as it affects the economy? (personally i nearly always pay for a rush in act4 cruel, there are only a handful of builds that feel capable of clearing it without been to sketchy)

3.Will you be able to start a new character at level 60 one day? Obviously you would need to get one to 60 first to have that option and then the gear to use?

4.How far ahead is the story/acts been planned out? like the ascendancy statue in act 3

Would it be possible for players to pay for the design costs of an items 3D art?

Will maps ever feature cosmetic variations such as randomised lighting or weather conditions? When will we see the snowy, frigid wastes of Wraeclast?

Have you ever considered voice pack MTXs, for example adding demonic reverb to a character's dialogues/remarks. No re-recordings necessarily, just interesting and cool effects.

Gameplay:
* How do you balance skills and stats?

* Is there a power curve that you try to stick to with regards to the different aspects of each skill? For example, do you have spreadsheets that contain example gear/links/stats so that you can calculate theoretical dps and then balance around that? Or perhaps do you run simulations to see how specific changes affect gameplay? Or none of the above? I imagine the vast number of combinations make it difficult to predict and model the output of the build, particularly since there's so many different factors that can change the result.

Development/programming:
* If you were to start development today, what engine would you use? I believe I remember Jonathan mentioning in FSG's podcast that there weren't many options available back when development first started, but nowadays there's engines like Unity and Unreal that are readily available to indie devs.

* What tools do you use to profile the game's performance? Development on Windows gives you access to tools like Windows Performance Analyzer and Visual Studio's built-in performance tools. Do you leverage anything like that?

* How did you stay motivated enough to stick to the project during the early years when there was no money coming in? My personal motivation has always been to go back and replay my favorite games. Was there a lot of Diablo 2 being played during development?

* When interviewing candidates (both design and programming), what attributes/experience do you look for?

1 - The passive tree will have new changes until Ascendancy? Many people complain of currenty Sniper position on the Shadow tree for example.

2 - At first looking subclasses revealed so far the proposal that is that they want to make truly very efficient builds (like Assassin or Inquisitor), the final proposal really is to allow builds to be very strong?

Could we please get a crow pet mtx in the game? There are crows in crossroads, so the resources are already in the game, nothing new to animate, I pledge to buy at a minimum, two.

Sorry for my english, google translator is my father... Its obvious thing when you see the synergy between increased life passives, base life from character lvl and life prefixes on items and you have no other choice but use it for increse your defense instead of learning some increase armour\evasion passives, because if you learn both armour and life passives in equal amount you spent about 70% skillpoints and that clearly decrease build diversity. But the problem is not in the fact that you need 70%+ defense-like passives in tree for a comfortable run 10+ tier maps(ofc im talking about builds like 2hand melee anything without block\dodge) , problem is in inevitability of using the synergy of life together with the synergy between life and armor\evasion\dodge\block, because if you have armour\evasion\block\dodge and dont have life passives its always boss-oneshot but if you have a lot of life without some armour\evasion\block\dodge its not that bad but its just like you use energy shield.
Here's how I see it: this game has "global defences" things - its armour\evasion\energy shield and as i can see there is three "equal" basic ways to defend yourself:
1)armour - decrease damage taken from mobs hits thereby increase the number of hits before you die
2)evasion - decrease number of sucessful mobs hits thereby increase the number of hits before you die
3)energy shield - just increase amount of mobs hits before you die without changing the properties of hits
but in practice we are forced to choose between life and energy shield, making evasion\armour secondary factors of survival.
So here is my question: Why you cant just greatly increase base life gain from lvl, remove increased maximum life passives from tree and let the people get additional life from items IF!!!!!!!!!!!THEY!!!!!!!!!!!!WANT!!!!!!!!!!??????????????????????

1) Are there any more QOL improvements coming soon, like MTX stash sorting, better guild features, etc?

2) Whatever happened to forum trading?

3) Are custom (paid) leagues still something you'd like to see done?

Someone(I forget who) made a suggestion in the forums to have a jewel they called VOID BRIDGE, which would link two sockets on the sphere grid and let people more easily reach keystones on the other side, at the expense of using two jewel sockets and the stat nodes around them.

Is anything like this planned to be implemented? If not, what would be the development reasoning against such a thing?

PS: Talisman league has been nifty. Well done.