Diablo Immortal Devs Introduce New Tempest Class, Say Players Tend To Prefer Brand New Classes

There’s a stirring in the air, and it heralds the arrival of the newest Diablo Immortal class, the Tempest. Drawing upon the powers of water and wind, the Tempest is shaping up to be an extremely agile class with an interesting arsenal of summons and abilities.

With the fateful day drawing ever closer, we had an opportunity to catch up with Diablo Immortal’s Lead Systems Designer John Yoo and Lead Artist Emil Salim to learn more about the Tempest and other upcoming changes to the game.

Interview was slightly edited for clarity.

Sculpted by the Storm

Creating an all-new class must doubtlessly be a challenge even for industry veterans, especially one such as Diablo where each class has its own unique playstyle and aesthetic. Considering this, we wondered what inspirations the Tempest draws from and what makes it stand out from the other classes.

Salim replied, “Once we go from cohesive design and narrative, we go into arts, and pretty early on I remember some of the decisions we made is that the Tempest is going to be very movement-based. Also, the Tempest can control water and wind.”

“To accentuate the water and wind elements, we took inspiration from telltale patterns and art nouveau because they have a lot of curvy lines that further accentuate the theme and their movement overall. The color palettes on the Tempest came pretty early too. We decided to go with a cooler color palette which is distinctly different from other classes within Diablo Immortal.”

“Earlier in the production, the Tempest was going to look completely different. At some point, it was going to look like a sea creature, like a half human half sea creature? When we discussed the theme of the Tempest, we had this chart where we looked at all of the other classes that we have in the franchise and we saw that we don’t have that much of a light-based, life-themed class that is not holy or angelic in any way. We wanted something that is life-based to further contrast with the latest class that we just released that is the Blood Knight. So we decided to change the visuals to become more human and more what you see today.”

“The design of the Tempest is not just there just for the looks. A lot of it directly relates to their backstory. It goes back thousands of years, so it’s a lot of information. One quick example I can think of is how the gear pieces on the Tempest are fastened onto their bodies. Usually, for all the other classes, we use material like leather, or robes, or some sort of twine or a combination to fasten all of their gear pieces together in place. But for the Tempest, they have these fabric knots and rings which are especially obvious on their torso to fasten all their gear pieces in place. The general idea is that people of the first age would wear their clothes in this manner. And because the Tempest comes from these generations and generations and generations of people that goes all the way back to the first age, that’s why they retain that manner of clothing.”

A New Class Identity

Longtime Diablo fans might have been surprised at the Tempest’s introduction, as the series has a large cast of classes to choose from and adapt into the mobile game. Seeing this, we asked Salim and Yoo about their reasons for creating an all-new class.

This time, Yoo answered, “It’s always on a case-by-case basis, and it really depends upon numerous factors. But with the success of the Blood Knight, it really felt like players gravitate towards these brand new classes that they’ve never seen. They also do a great job of expanding the story in a different way compared to existing classes.”

“But that doesn’t mean that we will only be doing new classes. It’s definitely challenging and it comes with different problems that we have to solve. But we think there is definitely a lot of value in both directions.”

The decision to create or adapt a character is not mainly based on demand from developers or players, but rather to find or create a class that fulfills a specific niche that does not yet exist in the game. As Yoo puts it, “There’s a lot of different things that we think about when we’re trying to make a decision on what next class we’re going to be building. And some of it has to do with gameplay types we already have in the game. So, if we have certain classes that already mimic other classes, we may be more hesitant to go in that direction for the very next one until we exhausted all the other ones first.”

Balancing

Undoubtedly the biggest challenge that comes with introducing a new element into any game is balancing it, both for PvE and PvP uses, while still keeping it exciting to play. The two leads agreed with us on this as well, with Yoo mentioning that PvE is easier to balance compared to PvP, as the environment and enemies are fully adjustable by the developers.

“PvP is something that we have to be very, very delicate about in terms of the balance. We have to ensure that we’re not upsetting the balance because it is supposed to be for all intents and purposes, an extremely varied environment. For the Tempest, we do a lot of playtests to try and ensure that we get it correct. Obviously, we do our best.

“The reality though, is that once it goes live, we have to really listen to feedback from players because, people who are playing the game, they’re spending so many hours providing feedback that they’re actually our best resource for information and data. We definitely figure out how to do our best within the time that we have in order to get it as balanced as possible, and we’re hoping that it comes out great, but knowing that we will definitely have to make changes based upon what the players are telling us.”

A Flurry of Skills

Keeping with the theme of water and wind, the Tempest commands the elements and works in tandem with them for impressive and destructive results. As Salim said, “Visually, one of the key differences that sets the Tempest apart from anybody else is the main weapon that they use. They’re dual wielding these swords where the blades can separate from their hilt and they turn into water whips.”

Yoo added, “ It’s really focused on being very very quick and agile, a hybrid between caster and a melee character who uses both elements to effectively make them sort of like a magic assassin. They dash in and out of combat, they have both melee and ranged attacks, and they also have their summons. And because they’re a very agile class, we had to rethink how they manage their summons because typically, summons don’t work well with classes that are based around movement.

Salim continued, “That’s also the reason why the Zephyrs (summons) are different from the Necromancer in the sense that they’re temporary to further accentuate their movement pace so you don’t constantly have to wait for the Zephyrs to catch up with you in the game.”

“It’s really cool,” Yoo chimed in, “There’s a lot of abilities where you’re able to dash quickly or you can even teleport and switch positions with your Zephyrs. A lot of it has a lot of interactions with your abilities. I’d say that the cool thing about this class is that it feels very much like a combo class. There are so many things that you can do to chain abilities in order to obtain the desired effect. It’s definitely very different from other straightforward classes that we have done in the past, so we’re really looking forward to seeing what people have to say and seeing if people enjoy this style of interactive combat.”

Affinities

When the Blood Knight was first released, some players were expecting it to be a hybrid of Strength and Intelligence affinities. However, in the end, it remained a single affinity class just like the others.

When we brought it up, Yoo chuckled and noted “We actually thought of that direction for the Tempest, whether we should make this the first class that uses a combination. Ultimately, that proved to be very challenging, so we went with the standard direction. So right now, the Tempest is going to be a Strength-based class, (but) it could have gone either way, honestly.”

“Because it is sort of a battlemage, it could have gone for Strength or Intelligence, and we did explore trying to meld both. But again, that definitely ended up being a challenge. But we’re not against trying to do something like that in the future, it’s just something that would take a lot of design, thought and effort in terms of trying to figure out how to make that work. But the Tempest at launch is going to be a Strength-based character.”

Playstyle

With the Tempest shaping up to be an extremely fast-paced character, we expect its playstyle to stand out from the rest of the classes in the game, and the developers seem to agree as well.

Yoo was especially enthusiastic about it, saying, “Initially, we weren’t thinking that the Tempest would have summons but that about after the development process, so that was a new and exciting twist that came up. We think we did a really good job in that their summons feels less like summons and more like physical essences of yourself. Because unlike the Necromancer summons, they can mimic your attacks and you can execute abilities with them in order to provide different effects whereas a classic summon class like Necromancer doesn’t have a lot of that extra utility.”

“Even though Monk and the Tempest both share mobility elements to them, how we theme them and how we execute their abilities make them feel radically different. For instance, the Monk is more of a classic quick-based melee class and it comes out that way when you play Monk. The Tempest does not feel that way. While they have some elements of that, they definitely feel a lot more magical in that sense.”

Paragon Rework

Alongside the new information regarding the Tempest, we were also made privy to the developers’ plans to rework the entire Paragon system. In addition to a cleaner UI/UX, the number of Paragon trees will be consolidated from 15 to five, and in exchange, players will retain all their Paragon progress and can now choose any combination of 15 skills per Paragon tree.

Yoo noted that the rework was made due to player and developer opinions that the current system is too overwhelming, and that “The whole goal about this is actually just to give players more options and more choice. So for us to condense them down and allow players to have more choices within those trees, we think that gives players more flexibility and more enjoyment and more control over their characters.”

“So we don’t think that this is going to add more complexity. And if anything, it probably is going to be an overall better experience for the players. There are a lot of things we did to clean up the old system. For example, you no longer have to purchase individual stat points with your Paragon points. Those will automatically come to you. So there’s a lot of things that we did in order to try to make things more streamlined and easier to understand.”

“We have more changes coming up in the future that will expand upon the Paragon system that we think players would get really excited about. Yeah, sorry for being a little vague, but that new expansion to the Paragon system is really what players in the end game are really gonna look forward to.”

Player Feedback

As Diablo Immortal continues to grow and add more elements to the game, we wondered how much player feedback affects and influences the development process, from design and iteration to post-launch balancing.

To that, Yoo replied, “Game development is very different before you go live and after you go live. Before you go live, there’s a lot of secrecy because you’re trying to keep things fresh and you’re not trying to spoil anything, but you are developing in a vacuum. But once you go live, there’s all this data and feedback and people who are actually playing your game and we have to listen to those players. We are always reading what people are saying in the community on forums, on Reddit, but also we have dedicated teams who are working to reach out to existing players, and lapsed players.”

“We look at data, we look where people are spending their time. All of this is used in order to provide players with what they’re looking for. Because the reality is in a live game, if we aren’t giving players what they’re looking for, they’ll just go find another game to play. So we always make sure that we’re listening and a lot of things that you see in terms of improvements to the player experience, optimizations that we make, a lot of those are because of people from the community.”

Give Tempest a Try

As we were concluding the interview, we asked Salim and Yoo if they would recommend the Tempest to new Diablo players.

Salim unhesitantly answered yes, while Yoo added, “It’s always a challenge trying to build any class for brand new players. We had a publicity event not too long ago, where we had people and press playing the class. Even though it is a class that has a lot of diverse functionality, all of them were able to get into it and enjoy it even though they had never played it before. I would definitely say that the Tempest, just like all of our other classes, is suitable for brand-new players because we try to design with that in mind.

We would like to thank our friends at Blizzard, as well as John Yoo and Emil Salim for taking the time to answer all our questions.

The Tempest will be coming for all Diablo Immortal players on the 23rd of May, 2024.

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Diablo Immortal

Release Date: 2022-06-01

Android, iOS, Microsoft Windows

Diablo Immortal™ is a brand-new mobile game from Blizzard Entertainment. A genre-defining action role playing game series set between the events of Diablo® II: Lord of Destruction® and Diablo III®.

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