Blizzard has posted a detailed preview of its upcoming 1.0.4 patch for Diablo III, and it appears to be addressing some critical issues players have had with the game since its launch back in May.
The usual assortment of class/skill changes and item improvements are in the cards, but more importantly you can also expect significant balancing adjustments to co-op play versus solo play in addition to the overbearing difficulty of Elites.
To make co-op more desirable, Blizzard will be ditch the averaging of Magic Find and Gold Find and also lower the monster health multiplier to a flat 75% across all difficulty settings.
Once the patch hits in a few weeks, facing Elites will no longer feel like bashing your head against a brick wall. Champion and Rare monsters will have their health lowered by an average of 10-25% and certain affixes will be adjusted so they won’t seem so unfair. Enrage Timers and “heal back to full” will also be removed from Elites. To balance, normal monsters will become ever so slightly tougher on Inferno thanks to a 5%-10% health boost. This way the regular monsters won’t just be easy fodder to hack through and the gap between normals and Elites won’t seem so vast.
Other updates in the pipeline include a 25% reduction to repair costs on high-end gear, improvements to Legendary items, balancing between dual-wielding and two-handed weapons, and basically too much to fully list out here without cutting and pasting from Blizzard’s blog, which you can read in full here.
Blizzard will be posting additional patch previews in the weeks leading up to the scheduled 1.0.4 launch in the last week of August.
Matt Litten is a 28 year old from-the-womb gamer turned video game reviewer/blogger and current editor/owner/operator of VGBlogger.com. Matt got his first taste of gaming as a youngster on the NES and Atari, and the rest is history from there.
In 2004, three years removed from high school and still looking for a career direction in life, Matt landed his first gig in the video game review business writing for the now-defunct website BonusStage.com. After the sad and untimely close of BonusStage, the former staff went on to found VGBlogger.com, and after a short stint as US Site Manager for AceGamez Matt turned his attention to VGBlogger, and to this day is dedicated to making it one of the top video game blogs in all the blogosphere.
Matt is a fair-minded reviewer and lover of games of all platforms and types, big or small, hyped or niche, big-budget or indie. But that doesn't mean he will let poor games slide without a good thrashing when necessary. 