Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Diablo III Patch 1.0.4

Last night I wanted to see if anyone was on Battle.net (I may have been looking for a scroll of resurrection) and I figured the best way to check would be to log into Diablo III. Imagine my surprise when I was greeted by patch notes for a patch being launched early this morning. I took a look through and some things really caught my eye...

Paragon levels - Essentially these are levels you can gain after you hit the level cap. It isn't clear just how brutal these will be to get but anything that encourages you to play the character you want to power up is good by me. Sounds a lot like merit points in FFXI (which I think started out as something in EverQuest?) There are 100 of them and each grant you small amounts of the core stats, gold find, and magic find. It sounds like if you manage to max out your paragon levels you'll be at the magic-find cap without any on gear which is an interesting idea.

Elective mode tutorial - As soon as you hit nightmare you'll get told about elective mode. It was idiotic that the average person would never find out about elective mode and it's nice to see them finally plug that hole.

Auction house fixes - You can now search for 6 stats instead of 3. They're fixing how you search for bonus damage. You can now cancel auctions without changing your system clock. How quaint.

Blacksmith can repair - Woo!

Weapon changes - They're making ilvl 61 and 62 weapons capable of being better. Not as good as 63s, but the gap should be closed enough to make it worth picking up a 62. They're making 2-handers and off-hands better.

Weapon racks - Will now always have weapons again but will drop lots of junk. This just seems more like Diablo.

Legendary item buffs - I remember finding multiple legendary weapons which were all absolute trash. They're reworking most/all legendaries to make them all potentially worth using which is nice. A legendary item should be cool, not garbage.

Monster power changes - They're nerfing monsters in multiplayer games to make it useful to group with people worse than you. They're buffing or nerfing normal and elite monsters all over the place to try to bring things in line. 

Champion pack nerfs - It seems like all the really brutal things are getting nerfed. No more invulnerable minions. No more enraging and healing after a long time. Want to kite/zerg them? Go nuts. Fire chains is nerfed. Jailer is nerfed. Shielding is nerfed. Nightmarish is nerfed. Pets take 10% damage from the AE stuff. Mortar is re-nerfed. Damage resistance based on mods is gone. 

YOU CAN'T PULL ABILITIES OFF YOUR BAR ACCIDENTALLY! YOU WON'T JUST THROW AWAY A FULL STACK OF YOUR NEPH BUFF BECAUSE YOU CLICK FRANTICALLY! HOLY COW! HOLY COW! IT'S ABOUT DARN TIME!

Class buffs - Looks like all the terrible damage spells are getting buffed up. You know some numbers were wrong when damages are getting quadrupled...


It really sounds like they're iterating towards a game really worth buying and playing. It's a shame I bought it more than three months ago and have since quit the game, eh? Even with all these changes they still haven't implemented the ability to chat with all your friends at once which is such an abominable gap. Realistically I should be able to have guilds/chat rooms via Battle.net across all games. There's no reason why I shouldn't be able to have a chat room with people from SC2, WoW, and D3 all together. That I can't even do with people in D3 alone is really stupid.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

From what I recall from a blog post they wrote, getting level 1 paragon is supposed to be equivalent to going from level 59 to 60. (Although NV now gives you xp bonus as well, so that might make it easier)

sSs