Supporter newsletter 60

Issue
This is a copy of Eternal and Diamond Supporter Newsletter #60, published by Grinding Gear Games.

Hello Supporters,

Nick has been very busy working on unique designs. This week he will be discussing the development of the unique item. A very early version of this unique design was shown in newsletter #54. - Carl

Designing a unique from scratch

There's a process to making a new unique item, and it begins with the purpose. Many of the uniques we make come from a gap we've identified somewhere, or a playstyle we want to encourage. Buried amongst the new unique items that came with patch 1.1.2 was a low-level quiver called Hyrri's Bite. It was the first unique I designed, though not the first one implemented, and it was made with the express intent of replacing a function of the older dexterity-granting.

When we made the decision to remove the Light Quiver from the new leagues, we removed an item that was very important early on for a lot of off-class bow users. Bow-marauders and Bow-templars struggle to maintain enough dexterity, especially at early levels, to keep their weapons up-to-date. Without a good weapon, their progress begins to slow, and a bow build becomes less and less appealing.

We love that players were trying to find ways to play non-dexterity classes as bow-users, and wanted to ensure that, despite the removal of the dex-based quiver, they could keep doing that. So Hyrri's Bite was conceptualized. We knew that dexterity was going to be the main stat, but deciding what else went on there required taking a look at what low- and mid-level off-class bow users needed.

We wanted to grant some survivability, but not a huge amount. Strength became a good option, since it also meant that these characters could then continue to gear themselves with heavy armour if they wanted. Intelligence was added for the same reason after seeing that maintaining mana was quite important too.

And with the way the passive trees are set up, it's tricky to get much attack speed on the left-side early enough for it to be meaningful for a ranged character, so attack speed (albeit a pretty small amount) was included.

and are both decent leveling skills for these ranged builds, and we wanted to grant something that was a little special (since so far this unique was looking a lot like a rare), so an increase to area of effect was tossed on. This constituted the "unique" stat.

At this point I was pretty happy with the item. We were debating about which base type to give it and settled on the. I passed the item onto Erik to take a gander, and he noted that Intelligence and Area of Effect were a nice pairing, as was Attack Speed and Dexterity. He suggested adding more life-gain-on-hit to tie it to the Strength base stat. It was a nice little subtlety that helped unify the stats in a flavourful way, while signifying that this particular quiver was an extra special version of the basetype it comes from.

Erik also suggested that we tie it to the ranger character that wasn't always a ranger that we have in our lore -- Hyrri. From there, art became a matter of visually linking it to Hyrri's other items.

Its function as a low-to-mid-level build enabler isn't really achievable if the item is incredibly rare, so in addition to giving it one of the higher drop chances, we included a recipe to make it craftable. Our internal testing showed that it's arguably one of the best levelling items for off-class bow users, and its effectiveness drops off quite a lot by the time you reach late Cruel—which is really what we were after. - Nick

Insider Info

This week's inside info is from the archives. Here is an early prototype of the website from 2009, one and a half years before the game was announced, and the website made public.

http://i.imgur.com/sW05Nwn.jpg