Information about upcoming 1.0.4 patch

[Chesspiece_face]

Newcomers aren't playing inferno so does inflation really hurt them?

Not if they're new to inferno, that's more what I meant. The biggest issue with inferno IMO is people giving up fast when they hit an act difficulty wall.

It's hard to say how things will pan out with the adjustments to item affixes in the upcoming patch, but at the moment my biggest concern is the complete necessity surrounding the Crit stats and progression in Inferno.

"Normal" players moving through Inferno and building what reasonably seems like a good gear set can get about 22k damage from a decent weapon/offhand and a strong amount of your primary damage stat. If you add in ~25% crit you can boost that up to about 35-40k damage. Throw in 300-400% crit damage, however, and suddenly you are up around 120k damage. The way the later acts are balanced at the moment that is the path you want to be taking. To paraphrase Rodney Dangerfield in Caddyshack: "If you own anything but Crit, you own a popcorn fart." Crit is so powerful it often overrides what might seem commonsense gearing decisions.

Playing my new Witch Doctor over these last few weeks I've hit a brick wall in gearing. Barring getting a superb weapon upgrade, the only way for me to begin advancing my damage again is to start building serious crit. Which is, not only a massive stat allocation reserve when choosing your items but also a massive investment of currency. That is where you are gonna find the biggest divide between players. Those that can afford the insane premiums on Crit gear and those that can't and are thus gated from playing the higher acts because Crit is the only game in town.

[Archon_Wing]

Crit is nice, but at least for monks, you don't need them. Wizards and DHs are another story. My monk went through all of inferno with 15k dps and no crit at all. But she was tanky as hell though, lol.

High resist gear and getting gear with MF to make late act farming viable is what I feel the greatest barrier.

[ErickTheRed]

The game is getting easier for new players as time goes on. The low end gear in the AH is just getting better over time, and I see no reason why this would change. Breaking into inferno certainly isn't the problem - even somewhat wacky builds can do Act I. 3-5 Million can buy most classes into act 2 and the ability to slowly push through act 3 with an appropriate build. That might sound like a lot of money but it actually feels like a reasonable progression to me as even without getting lucky and finding something to sell you can make enough money to buy something new after every play session.

The big progression problem comes after the initial investment in the AH. It starts to feel like a tedious exercise in spreadsheets. I feel like I have to be aware of the range of values for all the stats you want for each equipment slot and it's still a guessing game which slot to search for upgrades in. This is really just an interface problem, but a hard one. I want to tell the AH that I have 1M to spend and that the stats I care about are str, vit, resist all, resist phys, armor, life on hit, crit, and crit damage: go find me a list of pieces that don't sacrifice too much in any one area and have a higher combined total.

The AH works great as a way to let me easily try out variations on builds for act I inferno. It let's people "catch up" and break into act 1 inferno quickly if they want to. It seems great as a way for the really high end people to trade items for amounts of money I may never have. It just falls down for me as a progression path.

I'm mostly excited about the coming patch. Reducing the damage and nerfing some of the pack mods that caused problems for me will indirectly help with any gearing problems. I wish the class skill balancing would have gone a little farther, but I like the changes I see. The new legendary items seem interesting. However the drop rate for legendary items is pretty low currently. I guess the idea is I'm expected to grind out 20-50 paragon levels to get magic find to address this. I hope that makes some people happy, but it doesn't really excite me.

[Archon_Wing]

The game is a bit easier, but not by that much. If you couldn't beat act 2, you'll get further, but don't think you'll be visiting act 3/4 much for any time soon. The elite monsters are easier to kill now, but it was never about their health or damage they deal with the regular attacks. Molten/desecrator/arcane will still wreck you, and they still put out as much frozen as spammers put out junk emails. I ended up dying 5-6 times to the same pack in act 3, (which was all over the place since those skull cleavers move so fast) was killing me ridiclously fast. That's not typical for a run of Act 3, considering not even Act 4 gives me that much trouble. I don't get it... desecration and plague take a while to gib me, but that molten was killing me in less than 2 seconds. I mean there's only less than 5000 people with more EHP in the world than me (well, actually probably more, since the site updates a bit slowly, and a number of people quit). But today I died about 10 times. What. Well, every combo was awful so maybe it was bad luck

Still though, I'm about 1/2 my way to my 1st paragon level and that should be amusing to deal with.

Edit: Reached level 1 in act 1. It's much easier to farm for exp sadly, so I feel later acts should either give more exp, or act 1 less. Also, Wave of Light is awesome.

[Chesspiece_face]

First thoughts on the new patch:

1. Mortar is finally fixed! No, seriously this time... We really mean it. (For really realz.) Not only that but there is a graphical warning for where the mortars will land. Very nice.

2. Witch Doctor actually feels responsive now! About time. This class above all else had the issue of animation lock and the lack of ability to animation cancel.

3. New visuals for enemy abilities. Molten, Desecration, and Frozen are all much more visible on screen. Molten bombs scream "GTFO!!" and Frozen shows an aura range for the danger area of the explosion.

4. The increase in Normal mobs dropping magic/rare items is noticeable. It's not at all uncommon during a run to get a handful of rares now from trash mobs.

[LochnarITB]

I like that gems/pages/health pots are now a light blue instead of white. Didn't there used to be a check box somewhere to not display white/gray item names? I looked around but can't find it anywhere.

[Occhidiangela]

I like that gems/pages/health pots are now a light blue instead of white.

I noticed that too, and like it. Tonight had a brief play with patch download, then to bed.

Last time I played before the patch, I tripped over an artisan recipe. It allows me to make a bronze colored staff.

So, I made one, which I gave to a lvl 23 Monk. Eh, that would be a slight twink. :-) I socketed it with a Ruby.

Makes the act she's playing in a LOT less of a challenge, but who cares, it's normal diff where experimentation is part of the fun.

More in a few days, not much time to play until the weekend. I deleted five alts whose slots are now reserved for Hardcore when I get a better feel for each class.

Glad to see that witch doctor has a few fixes. All odd movement aside, he's the one I have farthest along.
He ate Diablo for breakfast, which cannnot be said for my DH. DH had to work at it.
Barbarian gets the next shot at Act IV and Diablo. Still working on movement and rhythm.

Until later ...

[Archon_Wing]

Yep, it was like a much demanded feature even since Diablo 2, and the color scheme works perfectly.

[FireIceTalon]

Ah, now we are talking. Game feels much better now. Played some Act 3 with my Wiz, and while still hard, it doesnt feel "impossible" anymore. I was actually able to face an elite Soul Lasher pack and feel like I had a shot at beating it, and sure enough I did (though I died twice to them, but with monsters no longer getting full health regen and repair costs being much more reasonable now, it isn't nearly as frustrating). I guess there will still be some "unbeatable" elite packs, but overall Blizz made a huge step in the right direction as far as I can tell, in terms of game play.

The paragon leveling was a pretty good idea I think, I was sort of indifferent to reaching max level than playing the highest difficulty, but now that you can actually kill things to progress in some fashion it feels better to me.

The quality of items dropping so far seems marginally better, most everything from 2 runs is still vendor trash but it is early to tell yet.

Really glad they buffed the other runes on Hydra. I hadn't been using hydra in the longest since only Venom was really any good and it was more of a DoT rune instead of AoE, so I was using Magic Weapon instead. Arcane Hydra is now back in my repertoire.

[ErickTheRed]

I noticed a lot of small quality of life improvements, and maybe some stealth changes. I ran through all of act 2 yesterday, and I don't think I've ever seen just 2 packs in the Vault of the Assassin, but maybe I missed some in a corner.

I found a couple of 2H weapons with high stats that I sold for a total of 2.5M. I think the market needs to adjust to the new items - I'm fairly sure those will drop in value soon.

I did my run with Hammer of the Ancients swapped in to try out the fury spending mechanic again. It definitely has potential, and it was immensely satisfying to leap to a bee and smash it in one blow with a crit. However, I'm not sure it did well enough overall to justify the opportunity cost. This would change if I had better dps - then I could see bursting packs down during Wrath of the Berserker, so I guess that's something to shoot for.

The patch did boost me up to Act 3. The combination of the 15% damage reduction and the nerfing of some of the more problematic pack affixes makes a very big difference. In particular the change to nightmarish makes me very happy.

[Treesh]

Well, the changes have made act 2 bearable for me. This is acceptable. I'm also glad that now I have some skill choices again and watching the little blue bar makes me feel like I may actually be accomplishing something again. Don't even care what the extra levels do really. I just like watching the little bar move again.