The latest design journal has been posted on the Diablo 3 site that gives a bit of background information about how rift encounters are planned to provide the right mixture of monsters to keep players engaged and to provide mechanics to let player skill and legendary abilities shine. It's not just random monsters, but carefully orchestrated combinations of avoidance, basic attackers and some type of heavy hitter to keep things interesting.
In addition, while a monster’s signature ability can make it engaging to battle against, sometimes it can cross the line and become frustrating. When Reaper of Souls launched, the Primordial Scavenger’s armor wouldn’t break until you’d taken off a significant chunk of its health, but only certain types of attacks were able to bypass the armor to deal damage. This mechanic wasn’t communicated clearly, and some classes had trouble delivering the right kind of damage to break its armor. It didn’t make the monster engaging because it wasn’t obvious what you were supposed to do or how to do it. So in patch 2.3.0, we changed the armor to break after it takes five hits. Since it breaks more consistently, you can now focus on putting the hurt on the Scavenger after it breaks.
Read the full article on the Diablo 3 site.
