Thanks to a staggering number of leaks the reveal of Diablo IV at BlizzCon 2019 wasn’t exactly a surprise, though that didn’t stop the legion of fans still sore from the announcement of Diablo Immortal from getting onboard with the hype. Now that Blizzard has begun to officially release new information about the upcoming game, the company also announced that the Druid class would be officially making its return to Diablo IV. That said, according to game director Luis Barriga there wasn’t always a plan to bring back the Druid for the new game.

Following the initial reveal of Diablo IV, Blizzard held numerous panels that took a deep dive into the con’s announcements, with Diablo IV of course getting plenty of time in the spotlight. During one such panel, Barriga opened up about the first three classes revealed so far, revealing that the Druid class wasn’t initially part of the lineup. “The Druid was not part of our original lineup for Diablo 4,” Barriga said. “That lasted about a day until basically one of our artists did this amazing piece of art.”

We went from ‘I don’t know, Druid? Maybe we …’ to ‘No, we’re making a Druid 100% starting tomorrow. Right now.’”

Those that haven’t checked out the gameplay trailer yet should know that the Druid no longer has access to fire-based abilities, with the developer giving the Druid more nature-based spells instead. “One of the things we said was ‘Hey, we love the idea of the Druid, how do we move it forward?’” he said. “One of the things that we did is we took some of that fire magic that didn’t feel like it met the fantasy of being someone who was in tune with nature and we replaced it with storm magic and earth magic. We feel pretty great about that.”

Diablo IV is now in development.

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