Patch 1.03 and 1.1 news
Patch 1.03 and 1.1 news
1.03 Hotfixes
http://diablo.incgamers.com/blog/comments/promised-hotfixes
Today’s promised hotfixes include a variety of areas, though it’s clear that the drop rate change was the most anticipated. Based on the figures below, the ilvl 63 drops have nearly doubled for Acts II, III, and IV. In addition to this, they have tweaked 
Nephalem Valor yet again to provide 2 guaranteed rares with 5 stacks, while guaranteeing 1 rare with 4.
Blizzard has outlined changes coming in the next patch for Diablo III, which include modifications to item drop rates in Inferno. This setting is only playable after running through the content on Normal, Nightmare and Hell difficulties, and represents the end game of Diablo III. Complaints have arisen about the steep ramp up in challenge, which requires you to replace your gear with better versions that may not be available without using the Auction House or doing a mind-numbing amount of farming in Act IV on Hell against less powerful creatures that aren’t as exciting to fight.
As Blizzard senior technical game designer Wyatt Cheng explains, “The way the game is currently set up, Act I drops [item level] 61 gear and below, Act II drops ilvl 62 gear and below, and Act III and IV drop ilvl 63 and below. Unfortunately this has caused two main issues. The first is players who find an Act too difficult feel compelled to use the auction house in order to progress. The second is that certain classes, skills, and play styles are less gear dependent than others, so although great items are making their way into the game economy, people feel pigeonholed into a handful of viable strategies.”
Cheng says that after patch 1.0.3, there’ll be a chance for even ilvl 63 items to drop in Act I on Inferno setting. He provided a table showing the updates in a post on the Diablo III site:
Also on the subject of softening the blow of Inferno, Blizzard will be modifying the difficulty at the outset of Act II. “Inferno balance right now has a difficulty gap in which Act I feels about right, but Act II feels like trying to bust through a brick wall,” said Cheng. “If a monk or barbarian is geared well enough that they can use a heavily offensive build and murder everything in Act I, they should be able to swap to a more defensive build and do okay in Act II.”
If you prefer to play in a group in Diablo III, then perhaps you’ll also be relieved to hear Blizzard will be reducing the bonus damage of enemies as more people join a group. “We feel the bonus monster damage per additional player is one of the biggest inhibitors to wanting to play with your friends,” said Cheng. “In a perfect world, single player and co-op would be absolutely equal, but that’s not attainable when you consider item properties such as “Life on Kill” or skills such as Archon which simply scale better when you are solo… our goal is to make them as close as possible but err on the side of co-op in cases where we need to make adjustments.”
Cheng outlined a number of other changes to the cost of fusing gems, the attack speed affix, the Nephalem Valor bonus, Legendary item stats and revealed that armor repair at level 60 will soon become much more expensive. “Current repair costs at level 60 are barely noticeable, and because of that we see a lot of people wonder if “graveyard zerging” tough enemies or “chain rezzing allies on a boss” is intended gameplay – it definitely is not.” As a result, Blizzard will be increasing repair costs of level 60 items between four and six times.
Blizzard will not be making major adjustments to class balance in 1.0.3, those changes are being held for patch 1.1.
http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/06/06/diablo-iii-blizzard-making-infern...
biggest change is cost of "gemming up" I can't wait. I've been selling any gem below flawless and I now have stacks of 30+ throughout. I don't gem-up unless necessary as it's prohibitively expensive at the moment. Huge drop in price coming. can't wait.
I'm heavily into Gems, I have yellows on almost everything, two purples and one red. Looking ahead to later Hell and Inferno stuff, i think one of the only options to compete there is to take advantage of gem enhancements for your class.
So on a regular basis i'm pulling them off my gear and upgrading them with better ones. I got a couple radiant squares last night and put them on. All my stuff is squared except one yelllow and I have one purple both radiant squares that I haven't attached yet.
I have a ton of triangle ones and lower, i was going to sell them but since the AH hasn't allowed that, i've just given them away to people. Some people I game with hvae jewellers that can make better ones out of three lower ones. I havne't bothered upgrading my jeweller yet, figured i'd do that and the blacksmith once I hit lvl 60. I'm nto sure if star gems drop in the game or if you have to make them.
The three highest tiers of Gems need to be 'taught' to the jeweler with Design plans.
I hope patch 1.1 when it comes is going to buff the witch doctor. Too many spells are under powered . All the good ones have a 2min recharge and only last a couple seconds. its fine for nm and normal but in hell its really an issue and I imagine inferno is unplayable.
Have you done a search for WD builds? I mean I hear a from people the WD is almost too powerfull.
Here is a google search for the builds.
Looks like this is going live right now B.Net is down and the launcher just got an update.
While the better item drops will be a welcome site, it's a joke getting a 150dmg weapon on Inferno difficulty, where's the good loot for crying out loud ?!?!?
But the nerf on Increased attack speed and the heavy increase in repair costs for level 60 are both going to suck ass. It already costs like 7k for me to fix my gear from red/broken and i'm not making that much money per night. I dunno how these guys have 20+ million money intheir banks, I"m not getting gear to sell work even 100k.
No, this was 1.0.2c.
servers are down again to pick up a "service update" I wonder why this time
.
I feel like a garbage man picking up the crappy garbage stuff that falls on the ground and taking it to the merchant where i dump it in his lap. I'm like the Janitor of New Tristram.
Anyways... I saw the AH went offline earlier today but I haven't received a Launch update yet, had one of those earlier in the week though.
Or it could be 1.02f or some shit, they've gone down at this time for the last few weeks and we're still on 1.02. While i'm looking forward to the better drops because i'm about to stop playing because I dont' ever find shit. I'm not looking forward to the increased repair bills. Might need to start investing in indstructable items, I'd hate to see a total on the gold i've wasted repairing.
This really blows big, it's going to be really tough to make money now. Used to be even with all smashed gear it would cost me 9k to repair, today with just yellow repair gear, 32k!
This really sucks and makes it harder to find good gear, not that I ever found any myself anyway so maybe it doens't matter that much. Definitly going ot need to invest in GOld Find gear though with these new stupid high repair prices.
One of the only two viable Witch Doctor builds for inferno was a 'darts' build which relied heavily on attack speed. WIth this nerf, the only viable build now is Bears which thankfully is the way I went.
LoL... really? At what point was there quality drops in the first place?
As someone who's spent countless hours grinding mission 9 on Inferno, this is going to make that fight a lot more challenging. And with the item 'quality' drop, one less rare and the increased repair costs, i'm not even sure it's worth it.
This is good or not good, depends on how much money it costs you to kill the elite packs to get to 5 stacks. Some of those packs are just dirty dirty bitches.
I guess i'll give my normal run a go tonight and see how it goes. But it costs gold to play D3 and if you can't make enough to compensate for the increase in repair costs then basically you can't play. And affording higher level gear just got even harder because it's more difficult to accumulate any substancial amount of gold to buy that gear with because at least for me, it sure ain't gonna drop for free.
Blizz wants only a certain amount of players to get great drops, so they will sell them on the RMAH and make money off the transactions. If too many got good random drops, no AH.
I've heard people call the game D3 just a shell for the AH... I refused to believe it but the 1.03 patch has me saying WTF.
My class is almost worthless, you could go one of two ways with WD to make it usable in Inferno and one got nerfed with the IAS nerf and they messed the Bears trajectory so they get stuck on dirt now rather than go for the target. So my character is now so broken that it's not usable. I've seen some tank WD builds where they're basically barbarians using some spells for health regen with real high armor and resist stats and they're just in there meleeing. Seems to be the only viable build now for WDs on inferno except I can't see being able to make enough money now to re-gear for that kind of thing.
I'll see how it goes tonight but i'm playing with the expectation that when I shut down for the night, i'm done with D3. I think 1.03 just fubar'd the game for me. And i'm not about to spend another 100+ hours building and gearing a level 60 wiz or dh because blizzard can't get their shit together. So sad.
Used to be that games just relesed broken but then they'd release patches to fix/make them better. Seems lik ethis year the trend is release them broken and then make it worse with server tweaks and future patches.
My wizard has been officially sent back 2 acts in inferno because of the nerf. 15k damage lost because I wear 2 or 3 ias items the math seems a bit off to me. When you need to use your entire arcane bubble to kill one white mob the game is not working as intended. Also I did mf runs to test the drop rate percentage and found the results to be unlike the numbers posted by blizz.
As a comparison, for the past week i've been running Inferno Act 1 quest 9 warden/butcher runs in public. Usually i would net 250-300k in gold a night. Tonight doing more or less the same thing, my net was 100k in gold with about 75k lost in repairs.
I noticed that there is a reduction in elite packs roaming around the primary path of this mission, without going off mission i wasn't able to get 5 NV stacks roll'in. The Warden didn't drop any yellows for me and the Butcher dropped one yellow. The gurantee of a yellow drop when killing an elite pack is great but it doesnt kick in until you have 5 NVs going. Since you can't seem to get that just doing quest 9 the net is a reduction in yellows not a gain unless you spend extra time looking for rare packs that don't appear on the primary path anymore.
I can confirm that the WD is completly brokent now. It already was the hardest class to play in the game and now it's just totally broken. IAS nerf killed the 'darts' build and they inadvertantly fucked up the bears so they get stuck on things and don't run to the target as intended. So that makes a bears build worthless now too. This game is going in totally the wrong direction, think i'm pretty much done with D3 now. Maybe blizzard will get ti's shit together and correct their ill thought out ideas in future patches, or then again they could continue the downhill slide.
Think i'll blow the dust off my xbox and go back to console gaming now lol...
apparently I'm the only one that didn't get affected by the nerf, and I'm a DH to boot. I went down maybe 1K in damage, but then I switched to my LoH bow and added some dex other places and I came out above original damage. I think I'm at like 30K now.
Tank, if you want to power level a character class let me know, I'll do speed runs with you.
I dunno if it's worth leveling another character or not, i'm on the fence about it. The gold and gear drops have been nerfed so i'll just call it by 2/3rds so I'm not sure I could make enough gold to gear a new character. Sur ei can level one but gearing up is now a significant hurdle. But since i have nothing to play until the start of july i guess I have 10 days or so to kill, maybe I can fill that time power leveling a second character, maybe a wizard.
I didn't take much of a DPS drop on my WD because i wasn't relying on an IAS build, i lost maybe 1400dps or so.
For the past two patches I was on the fence about what they were doing. Oddly enough I find myself now siding with a lot of the haters on the b.net forums who hate this new patch. I know that before this update I couldn't get out of town in act 2 inferno and last night I tried and actually got started on the "disrupt the rituals" part so that's a good thing right? However I still die a TON and that costs gold. I'm lucky if I'm breaking even when playing now in terms of gold accumulation.
Boss runs now are pointless
Pony level is now completely pointless because the clouds won't drop loot (I've had 4 different legendaries drop from those clouds before)
clicking on barrels or other breakables is pointless; costs you more to break a barrel than the gold you'll get for doing so.
So this game I'm really feeling is dumbed down to "go hunt elites". What happened to "play how you wanna play" diablo days I remember. I have coworkers who have quit D3 and went back and installed titans quest or went off to play through Torchlight 1 again before 2 comes out. Besides the few of us holdouts my friends list hasn't seen 10 people online in a few weeks.
Is this game dead on its feet now? Have blizzard actually managed to destroy the playability of their game? Maybe we should all just walk away and come back when the dust clears and they figure out how to make this thing fun again.
Blizzard is clearly on the wrong path here. They're making decisions that affect 'normal' gamers like us based on illegal activities like automated gold farming. That's why the repair costs got raised. So many automated bots out there that there's too much gold in the system and AH prices have gone way up to the point where you can't afford anything unless you're using an atuomated bot gold farming script. However, now for us regular joes, we can barely make more gold in a nights session to cover repair costs never mind be able to save a few hundred thousand gold to get that next upgraded piece of gear from teh AH. Prices in the AH sure haven't come down any. So now we're stuck relying on drops for stuff that's an upgrade for free or to sell in the AH for some gold but in one nights session i get maybe 1 or 2 pieces worth of sticking on the AH for 25k or so.
Sure they've spread out the level 61-63 gear but don't assume just because it's level 61-63 that it's any good. I've picked up quite a few 200/300 damage weapons with 61 or 62 levels. I don't even know why this crap exists in the game. The gear needs to scale with the level it is. No one wants a level 60 200 armor belt, glove or bracer when they're running around in Inferno! It's just garbage drops after garbage drops. I want to be able to FIND better gear and I pretty much have just given up and realized that the only way I can get better gear is to use the AH. Except now i can't, I don't make enough gold anymore, my gold profits are down to 1/3 what they used to be per night. Instead of 90-120k a full butcher chapter run, i'm netting about 40-50k and that's stopping to pick up whites to sell. And then they nerfed the money you get for saving the Stranger, used to get 3800 gold for that, which used to help cover repair costs now you get 810. That's a huge loss for 4-6 runs a night.
So since I can't find better gear and I can't make enough gold to buy any better gear, i'm left with paying real money for either gold or items. And maybe that's the whole point of it, the game's just a shell for the real money auction house where blizzard takes 15% of all transactions whether you're buying gold or items. I refuse to pay real money for items though, especially since as we've seen, blizzard can nerf them whenever they want.
The game is fun and it's Diablo as it was for playing it thru normal and nightmare, possibly hell except in hell you'll start running into the bullshit i've talked about here. Once you hit level 60 the game falls apart, there's really no point in continuing to play anymore. I got i dunno, 140-160 hours out of it so I got my moneys worth and for most of it , the game was what I had expected and I enjoyed it. But now the design flaws and the bullshit have destroyed the game.
FYI, the clouds do still drop loot, they're just not affected by your MF
"Magic Find will no longer be considered when looting objects in the environment such as chests, barrels, vases, pots, and corpses"
But they still drop at level 61+ items at the rate of the difficulty you are on.
except that I did a Hell pony run yesterday and pulled exactly 0 items from clouds. Have you run it and gotten items since the patch?
Yes
Im just glad they made patches to the Mac performance. I can play the game now, where I couldnt before.