Design a Legendary, Part 1: Choose Your Weapon

Design a Legendary, Part 1: Choose Your Weapon

The first step in designing any Legendary is to figure out what kind of item you want to create. Do you want a weapon? An off-hand? A ring or amulet? A piece of armor?

For this particular project, we'd like to focus on a Legendary weapon, more specifically a melee weapon. We decided to do this for a few reasons.

The first reason is that Legendary weapons typically have a very strong visual identity. Unlike other item types—like a ring or a belt, for example—you can see the weapon you're wielding, often very prominently. This is important because, in addition to discussing the mechanical design of Legendary items (its stats and powers), we also want to talk about their visual design, and that's much easier to do when you've got something that's bigger and has a lot of visible components.

The second reason is that Legendary weapons are iconic, and there's a much stronger fantasy behind them than, let's say, a helm or pair of pants. As a result, players tend to identify with weapons more than any other item type. That doesn't mean the other types are any less important, but Legendary weapons are certainly more recognizable and carry more street cred (so to speak).

As for why a melee weapon instead of a ranged weapon (or both)? Pretty simple. Of the weapon types available to all classes, melee weapons are used more often.


Okay, so we're designing a Legendary melee weapon. Done. But what class of weapon should we create? Well that's up to you! We've selected 10 different classes of melee weapons for you to choose from and have set up a poll to help collect your feedback. Pick your favorite by using the voting options below, and be sure to spread the word. Whichever weapon class gets the most votes globally wins!

After the poll has closed, we'll tabulate player votes from all our different Diablo III communities around the world to determine the winner and share the results next week. Don't delay, though—this poll will close Wednesday, October 30.