Encounter Design

One of the moments I most remember from BlizzCon 2019, besides the time I met an escaped mental patient and fell down and hurt myself in front of a wandering cat, was watching the Diablo 4 panels and hearing Candace Thomas talk about her work on the game.

There's always one of those fights in an expansion, something that no matter how often you beat the boss just feels off.

No matter how many moving parts an encounter has, how it is ultimately tanked can be boiled down to one of a few formulas that Blizzard repeats over and over again when designing fights. As human beings, one of our evolutionary survival skills is recognizing patterns – many times, if you're like me, you'll be tanking a new encounter and think to yourself “hang on, I've seen this before.”