Reaper of Souls “Super Shrines”: Blizzcon 2013 Hands-On Guide

One of the cool new Reaper of Souls features to debut at Blizzcon is a new class of shrines. All the current six shrine types remain in the game with unchanged functions, but now about every third or fourth shrine you find as you explore the world is dark red in coloration, wreathed in flames, and offers a new, very powerful, short term buff. We don’t know how many such shrines there are in the game and they’re obviously still a work in progress, but I saw five of them in my play time.

All of these shrines give a very large boost that lasts for 30 seconds, compared to the current shrines that give a less-large boost that lasts for 120 seconds. I don’t know if Blizard has a special name as a new class of shrines, “Super Shrines” seems obvious enough, though it’s not the official name. Humorously, I had a chance to ask Wyatt Cheng about these new shrines when I caught him holding court at the “Meet the Blues” booth late on Saturday night, and not only didn’t he throw out the official name, but he wasn’t actually sure how many different types were available in the demo. (Since he’s been doing things more important than counting shrines in the Blizzcon demo.) Yes, RoS development continues at a fast and furious pace, with new features in and out all the time.

So I’m calling them Super Shrines until someone says different, and please Blizzard, don’t call them “Nephalem Shrines.” It’s already getting confusing with every other damn feature in Reaper of Souls called “Nephalem Trials/Rifts/etc.”

The following are the exact names of the shrines, plus a description of what they do. I didn’t have a chance to copy down the actual tooltip for each, but they were all short and literal.




Speed Shrine

The Speed Shrine boosts your character to “your maximum run speed” for 30 seconds. That made a huge difference to the RoS demo characters who did not have faster run equipment, but it’s hard to say how much diff it would make for a high level character who already had 24% MS. The effect did *not* display in my character stats when I opened the Inventory and viewed the Details pane, so I’m not sure exactly how much speed it was adding. (I think that’s just a display bug since it’s a brand new feature.)

It was a considerably larger boost than I got from the current Fleeting Shrine, but it’s hard to say just how fast I was going when playing in a solo game with a lvl 33 character without any Movement Speed gear on.




Click through for full details on the other four new shrine types: Consecrated, Power, Conduit, and Shield.




Consecrated Shrine

The Consecrated Shrine removed all Cooldowns for 30 seconds. I got it in a game with a Crusader using the Tempest Horse skill (properly known as Steed Charge), and promptly broke into the Fiery Gallop effect until my resource was dry. (Which didn’t take long at lvl 33.)

Removing cooldowns wasn’t that big a boost for my char, but for a high level char with huge skills limited by their cooldowns, this would be an amazing effect.




Power Shrine

The Power Shrine boosted my character’s damage by 400% for 30 seconds. It did show up in the Inventory numbers; the first game I got it I checked before and after clicking and my Monk’s displayed damage went from 402.3 DPS to 1609.1 DPS.

This made little difference in the demo since things are pretty easy on Normal difficulty at lvl 33 in a solo game (the PC demo machines were all single player only, alas) but it could be pretty cool with a big character if you timed it right. Most characters in Diablo 3 are happy with a 25 or 30% damage boost from one of their skills, and that usually lasts about 5-10 seconds at most. Thirty seconds of 400% gross damage is insane. That would take your 200k dps char up to 800k dps and would simply melt enemies. Just got to figure a way to get a boss nearby when you pop it.




Conduit Shrine

The Conduit Shrine was the most fun single thing I saw in the entire demo. (Nephalem Rifts and Adventure Mode are both awesome, but I can’t fairly compare a whole new game system to one small shrine effect.)

This shrine turns your character into a moving lighting generator, just like those glass lightning globes that used to be amazing conversation pieces and now sell for like $20 from Amazon.com. They’re round balls of glass with a Tesla-style electric thing in the middle which sends out beams of lightning to your fingers when you touch the side.

And then you die.

Okay no, they’re not usually fatal. But in the Diablo 3 version your character becomes the central lightning generator and the monsters become the touching fingers… and they die. All of them! In crispy charred agony, before they can even touch your pearly flesh.

For thirty seconds you run and electrocute anything you move near. And “near” isn’t that near; the range for first strike seemed to be about 30 yards, so every enemy I met died in one or at most two lightning strikes before they were in range of my Crusader. It’s simply awesome to behold, and I laughed for the entire thirty seconds. Unfortunately I wasn’t in an area with a really dense spawn, and I didn’t encounter a boss either, the one time I had this shrine.

How much damage does it do? Not sure. The damage display numbers weren’t turned on in the RoS demo (and the options menu wasn’t accessible) so I couldn’t compare the damage of the Conduit bolts to my own damage. There’s nothing in the shrine tooltip that hints at damage being higher or lower than your weapon damage either. However, I can say that Conduit was a one or occasionally two shot kill on every trash mob, and those enemies were taking me 2-5 hits to kill with my my basic Wrath-generating skill. (Punish or Justice were the options to select from in the demo.)




Shield Shrine

The Shield Shrine was the last of the five that I saw personally, and it does what you’re probably thinking it does. Full invulnerability for 30 seconds. Your character gets a shield bubble around them, just like the effect we used to see on Invulnerable Minions before they were patched out of D3V, and you fight without risk of injury. I didn’t get to test it in just thirty seconds, but I’d assume this provides full immunity to debuff and rooting effects as well, so you can run right through Jailer, ignore Vortex and Frozen, etc.




Conclusion

There’s no telling if these are the final forms of these shrines, or if they will all remain in the game upon release, or if we might see some more added. (Imagine a Super Fortune shrine, or Super Experience shrine, and what sort of benefit it might convey for 30 seconds?)

They were all very fun and powerful enough to be instantly game-changing, it only for half a minute. Clever players will probably figure out ways to utilize them more perfectly — save the Power Shrine until you’re about to leave one area and head to another with a boss right by the entrance? But even if you just grab them when you find them and then rush onwards into battle, it’s a great half minute of variety and murder.