In the eighth installment of the Blizzard podcast senior Diablo III artist Mike Nicholson was quizzed about the changes to the skill icons from Diablo II, and how they came about.

"I am unabashedly a fan of WoW, I’ll probably catch flak “oh you’re making it look like WoW oh no!” but I love them, I love the WoW icons," said Nicholson. "You know what we’re trying to do is see, okay what works about the WoW icons? They’re illustrative; is there a way to try to maybe bridge the gap."

Also Lead Technical Artist Julian Love also explained how Blizzard are developing a multitude of ways for monsters to die in order to "try to make your experience with monsters meaningful."

"Most of what you’re doing is killing them. So one of the things I was really interested in doing was making as many different ways for monsters to die as possible," said Love, "so that was kind of the goal, and think we’re up to something like 35 ways for any given monster to “bite it” at this point." The rest of the transcript of the podcast is available here.