Diablo Immortal Devs Detail How the Warlock and More 5.0 Content Was Brought to Life

The 30th anniversary of the Diablo franchise has seen some incredible releases, including brand-new DLC for both Diablo 2: Resurrected and Diablo 4. A common element of both of these releases was the introduction of the Warlock, debuting as a class for the first time in the Diablo franchise with Diablo 2: Resurrected‘s Reign of the Warlock DLC and followed by the class’s addition to Diablo 4 with Lord of Hatred. Now, Diablo Immortal is joining in on the fun with its own take on the Warlock, joining as the 10th class when update 5.0 launches on June 17.

To kick off this milestone for Diablo Immortal, GameRant recently spoke with Diablo Immortal systems designer Kyle Anderson and associate art director Emil Salim about the development of the Warlock for Diablo‘s mobile entry. With Diablo Immortal wrapping up the Warlock class’s 2026 tour of the franchise, Anderson, Salim, and the rest of the Diablo Immortal team hope to deliver an experience that is worthy of the Warlock Diablo fans have already come to know while giving the class its own Immortal identity. The following transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.

How the Diablo Immortal Developers Approached the Warlock Class

GameRant: Right off the bat, I just want to talk about the process of designing a Warlock class that is unique for Immortal after we’ve already had Diablo 2: Resurrected‘s Warlock and now Diablo 4‘s Warlock. So what’s the process of designing a unique take on the Warlock that’s unique to Immortal?

Salim: On the visual side, right from the very beginning, it was a very close collaboration between all three games. All three art directors met together, and we first discussed the through lines across all three Warlocks. What are the similarities? I remember some of the earlier ones that we think about are the element of Hellfire and the element of chains. The Warlock binds demons to their will. The element of including red gems around their armor design. And then, once we have all of these through lines, each of the developers worked independently to try to find our own unique take for Diablo Immortal.

One of the unique takes we have is the personality of the Warlock, and a lot of that is taken directly from the storyline, because we had written an entire story journey for the Warlock, starting from D2R to DI to D4 and for our timeline, it is when the Warlock has fully dabbled with the dark arts, and now they’re sort of drunk with power, and so our Warlock can be a little bit demented; they can be a little bit of a risk-taker, a bit of a rebelliousness to them, and so the art team, we tried our best to balance that personality for our Warlock, while at the same time having some sort of charm that pulls our players to them.

GR: What was the challenge of designing the Warlock’s unhingedness, but still keeping it reigned in enough that it fits within a heroic persona that players can engage with?

Salim: First, we tried to find some different archetypes, not just from games, not just from the medieval era, but even from modern day. Like, what are some archetypes that we feel fit into that kind of personality? It’s badass, it’s a little bit demented, a little bit on the evil side, but yet it’s very, very charming. What we ended up with is rock stars and punk rock culture. We really, really like that because it’s very jarring, the visuals are very unique.

When you look into rock stars and punk rock, there are a lot of key visual elements that we can immediately use, which is why, when you look at the design of the Warlock, you have studded belts, you have leather, you have spikes all over their bodies. These are taken directly from rock star visual elements. And who doesn’t want to be a rock star, right? We really want our players to feel like a rock star while they’re killing demons as a Warlock.

GR: Obviously, summoning demons is the big draw of the Warlock, but other than that, were there any parts of the Warlock that you thought needed to be included, or else it wouldn’t feel like a Diablo Warlock?

Anderson: Mechanically, there’s that bit of chaos in there, and an uncontrolled, unpredictable nature. The Ultimate for Hellfire Ball is Reign of Chaos. Everybody loves Rain of Chaos in terms of Blizzard lore. And so it felt like a great name, but also just the meteors raining down; it’s an uncontrolled chaos moment.

Then we’ve got Infernal Eruption, where they can concentrate those eruptions into a smaller area to be more effective, but it’s still inherently something that is slightly out of their control. There’s also a little bit of pain and punishment elements within the gameplay. There’s a set of skills that have a sacrificial power mechanic that lets them gain this power based on the damage the Warlock takes, so they inflict pain upon themselves and even their demons to increase the damage that they do, which also plays into that chaotic nature and the risk and reward.

Diablo Immortal’s Warlock Layers on Mechanics for a Range of Player Types

GR: The Warlock class feels like a fairly complex class to manage, especially when you’re mixing in things like the Demonic Portal skill, where you’re then given the option to summon three different types of demons on top of everything else. So how did you approach balancing this class for new players and potentially players who maybe haven’t played for a while and are coming back after a hiatus, while still making it complex enough that veterans and longtime players are going to enjoy digging into it?

Anderson: Where we’ve landed right now is that the gameplay has a lot of depth to it. The skills function at an individual level, but there are a lot of interconnected things that will allow players to go from just a simple understanding of it to showing mastery of the class. You have a portal that opens, you can get passive demons, and half of them even act like basic skills. The way we built Demonic Portal was very intentionally a way to try and minimize the amount of space that summons would take up inside the class.

The Diablo Immortal Necromancer has three buttons condensed all the way down into one, and even technically, if you don’t want the summons active, you don’t need to. If you don’t want to use Demonic Portal, there are the Warlock’s Hellfire skills, and the Blood Sacrifice skills that go into builds, which can make the class much simpler. You can even disable your Soul Gorger if you don’t want it active in PvP. The mechanics are intentionally layered to give complexity to the players who want that additional gameplay avenue.

GR: One of the things I’ve loved with Diablo 4‘s version of the Warlock is being able to summon Lunatics as my primary attack, and I’m glad to see that it is back in Immortal as well. How did you decide which demons would be used in the Immortal Warlocks’ version of their demonic arsenal?

Anderson: Most of it just came down to what type of skills the demons naturally had inside the world, in either their visual look or just the mechanics that already existed. For us, it makes sense to have those Fallen Lunatics run around and then just stab themselves and explode, just like the players are used to. So, we wanted to draw from things that players were already used to seeing and give them that control, because they’re now the ones wielding the power of Hell.

Diablo Immortal Update 5.0 Also Includes New Helliquary Bosses for Players to Face

GR: Moving over to a little bit about the Helliquary bosses that we’ll be able to encounter. There are these three new ones. What drove the decision for these specific bosses in the game?

Anderson: I know for Shackled Maw, Primordial Soulgorger, we wanted it to be a direct tie-in to the Warlock, and kind of show the origin of where the Soul Gorgers came from. It shows the strength and power, and just how much it has influenced the class design in the way the fight plays out, so you can see the direct correlation to how the Devour mechanics work on our Soul Gorger in the middle of that encounter.

Salim: That’s also the reason why the design is very similar to the Soul Gorger that the Warlock can summon. The Helliquary boss that you battle has this giant mouth on their stomach, and then the Soul Gorger that you can summon as the Warlock has the zipper mouth, which is very, very similar. That’s on purpose; essentially, they’re the same species, except the Helliquary boss is much, much older.

GR: Speaking of Soul Gorger, what type of gameplay niche or power fantasy did you want that mechanic to play for players who are using the Warlock?

Anderson: The way I thought about it is that it’s the ultimate tool for a Warlock to fight hell with hell. Soul Gorger devours demons, which, granted, you’re summoning them for your side, but that also takes away from the strength of hell in total. So the Soul Gorger mechanics were a way that we could introduce new, meaningful gameplay onto a single ability and add the complexity that we talked about earlier into giving players loadouts of different abilities through the Demonic Portal that’ll have different Soul Gorger Devour effects. It just really opens up a lot of opportunities for different Diablo Immortal builds.

One of the ways to do that is to make a lot of interactions between how the base summons and the portal work, and even just having Soul Gorger itself as a tool; the Warlock thinks of these demons as tools. It gets to whip it with Lash of Pain and do damage to it, causing it to go into a frenzy of attacks, or the Infernal Eruption will light it on fire. And so it’s not a friendly relationship that the Warlock has with its summons, compared to Necromancers or Druids. It’s really just an additional tool or arm of the warlock, and we wanted it to really expand on the class fantasy.

GR: So there’s this idea of being able to adapt your build almost on the fly as Soul Gorger devours different demons during combat. Is that something that you were intending with the mechanic?

Anderson: There’s a lot of predetermination on what types of things you can interact with, based on how you build your loadout on the Demonic Portal. You can have a stun, or you can have a knockback, or you can have fire damage, or big wings on your demon. And so you’re given three different predetermined choices in combat, and you have to know which choice is the right one for the given circumstance. There’s a little bit of flexibility for Diablo Immortal‘s PVE and PVP, and really, you’re determining what types of things you need to accomplish.

GR: Do either of you have specific builds for the Warlock that you personally enjoy, or that you would recommend that other players try out?

Anderson: There’s one that has the player hanging on to a demonic hell flyer, and he just flies around the zone, and he’s got a big AOE fire circle that increases damage and size based on your movement speed. So that one’s a great one for doing Abyssal Verge a bunch of movement and farming-type activities. If we’re going to get into some of the boss-type stuff, the Soul Gorger or Devour mechanics, and all of that is going to play much more heavily into a single-target encounter style build, where movement isn’t quite as important.

Some of the sacrifice mechanics also have build potential, like the one where you can buff yourself up with a bunch of things, you’ll continually take damage to fulfill this ritual, which then increases your damage and increases your range. It’ll give you some life leech, and so you’ll be throwing out shadowy daggers and swords. There are just a lot of options inside this class, just like Druid had a lot of options in terms of transformations and healing or summons. We just want to give players the tools and then have them find out unique things more than we’ve built in necessarily unique things. We’ve got 10 sets of Essences with all having 10 completely different gameplay elements added to them, but the mixing and matching is where players really make it shine.

GR: Is there anything else that you would want players to know about jumping into the Warlock with the 5.0 content that we haven’t discussed yet?

Salim: I hope it is obvious to our players that the Warlock has a lot of depth in its game design, and even though it remains to be a class that is very, very easily approachable for new players, the hope is that the amount of depth that we have designed into this class will pull the player to continue playing as the Warlock for the long term. All that being said, the Warlock is not the only thing that we’re releasing in this content. We also have Lut Gholein that players are returning to, and players who have played Diablo 2 will be familiar with this key location.

Speaking from the art team’s perspective, we have taken this existing city from D2 and we have expanded upon it to include many different sub-locations. The idea going with our timeline from Diablo 2 to Diablo Immortal is that several years have passed, and therefore the city has had a lot of time to grow. One example I can think of is the port of Lut Gholein in D2 is quite minimal; it’s really just a barge and a bridge down to the ocean. But now we have expanded it quite a lot to be like an entirely new port. They will also get to meet a lot of key characters that Diablo 2 players are probably familiar with. So, for a lot of big fans of Diablo, I hope they will be able to see a lot of this.

Anderson: There’s a lot of care and detail that’s gone into this class. For me, it’s a very personal class. I’ve played Warlock for 22 years on World of Warcraft, and so being able to bring a version of Warlock that coincides with the 30th anniversary addition of the class for Diablo 2: Resurrected and for Diablo 4 was just kind of a once-in-a-lifetime thing. I think we really hope that players can see the evolution of this class and the way its mechanics work compared to ones that they might have played in the past.

Again, the Demonic Portal ability is an evolution of the way transformations work in the game, and how you can reassign buttons to specific slots. And so we took that tech and repurposed it here again, condensing down all the gameplay for the summoning into a couple of buttons, but even still making summons a forward-facing aspect of the class and other abilities that they use. Everything serves a purpose, and we hope that everybody thinks this class, and all the content that’s coming out, Helliquary bosses, and everything, is as cool as we do.

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