Back on June 2009, I theorized: What if Blizzard introduced a Gunslinger class in the vibe of Van Helsing?

There doesn’t seem to be any guns so far, but those crossbows of the Demon Hunter surely have gun-handles. That gotta count, no? err, ok. nvm. Ahh, the Van Helsing vibe. I guess I can scratch one line on the wall.

The Demon Hunter is a mysterious class which uses demon body parts as weaponry, and by the looks of his/her armor collects trophies too.

Gamespot and Curse’s Diablofans were able to interview Diablo III art director Christian Lichtner and senior game designer Jason Bender to talk about the Male Demon Hunter revealed last week.

“GS: What were your artistic inspirations for the design of the male hunter?

CL: I think for us the inspiration was to make sure it really reads as a dark class. [The demon hunter] was one of those classes that really came across as being on the edgier side, and the way we did that is by basically looking at other influences, such as what you would expect to see in Van Hellsing where there are a lot of gadgetry and tools that they use to fight the demon hordes. Visually, it’s not that much in that sense; visually, it’s really sort of an amalgam of things that we feel really pushes him apart from the other classes. Even the most basic designs try to push him apart, such as [how] the runes and glyphs he uses are sharp and aggressive looking. His skills oftentimes have a lot of black, red, and dark purple in them. Things like that have a more ominous feel to them and contrast well against, say, the monk who is very rounded and focuses more on lighter colors, such as yellows and light oranges. There’s a very, very distinct visual language here that we established for the male demon hunter to really push the idea that this is a badass.”

I really love the thought of how runes affect the Demon Hunter in ways we might be awed every time we see the results our rune-combination experiments. For example:

“GS: What sort of rune skill combinations are there for the demon hunter?

JB: Oh yeah, there’s a bunch we’ve been playing with lately. With the runes, we always like to think about where the energy comes from. With the wizard, for example, you may have some runes that tend toward lighting or tend toward ice, and we try to do it that way in an elemental energy sense. But with the demon hunter, it has been interesting because we get to play off the backstory of him being obsessed with learning everything there is to know about demons and finding ways to use their own strengths against them. So we have some [runes] that focus on shadow and play with how the demon hunter adds shadow magic into certain [attacks], making them hone in, split into two when they hit a target, or bounce from one target to the next. Traps are also really fun. When you lay out a spike trap, there are a lot of different things you can do with runes, such as have shadow creatures or tendrils come out of them. You’ll see a lot of really nasty and painful-looking attacks coming out of this character; he’s pretty wicked”

As a reminder, invite friends and family to ‘Like’ the Diablo Facebook page. Every 25,000 ‘Likes’ Blizzard Entertainment will provide Blizzplanet high resolution screenshots and concept art. So far there are a bit over 594,000. We are getting near to the next update folks. Get those gears running and greased up. Go to your favorite forums and rally your communities to ‘Like’ the Diablo Facebook Page.