Diablo III Patch 1.02b Now Live, Details On 1.03 Coming Later This Month
Despite E3 being in full swing, Diablo III developer Blizzard has been hard at work with patch progress for their dungeon crawler. Patch 1.02b is out right now, and it’s packed with a bunch of game fixes. The login screen has been updated to reduce the server load, the Auction House has been rolled out, and the Barbarian class has gained some tweaks.
Here’s a full list of fixes in the 1.02 patch:
General:
- When logging into Diablo III, the “Cancel” button will now be grayed out for 30 seconds after a Battle.net email and password have been entered. This is done to reduce server load during the login process.
Auction House:
- Damaged items can now be sold
- Once sold, damaged items will be repaired automatically when moved from the purchasing player’s Completed tab to their Stash.
- Unsold damaged items will not be automatically repaired when returned to the seller’s Stash
- Description messages for several auction house-related errors had been updated and added
Mac:
- Several performance enhancements have been made
Bug Fixes:
- It is no longer possible to skip entire Acts in a multiplayer game
Barbarian Class Tweaks:
Active Skills – Fixed a bug that was allowing certain skills to continuously trigger each other’s critical strikes, to the point of causing the player to crash. To address this crash, the following skill and rune combinations can no longer be triggered by each other’s critical strikes:
- Battle Rage (Skill Rune – Bloodshed)
- Cleave (Skill Rune – Rupture and Scattering Blast)
- Hammer of the Ancients (Skill Rune – Thunder Strike)
- Wrath of the Berserker (Skill Rune – Slaughter)
Followers:
- Monsters who are charmed by the Enchantress’ skill “Mass Confusion” can no longer kill event NPCs
That about sums up the new patch, and players should have it downloaded and implemented now. I’m glad Blizzard is doing what they can to reduce the server load on login, mainly because that’s a lot of players’ biggest concern. Hopefully the patch will smooth things out.
With the release of 1.02b, Blizzard also detailed the very next patch they’re already working on – Patch 1.03. This patch will be much bigger, and include some major changes. The team plans to change the Inferno difficulty, including more rare item drops on bosses and bonus monster damage when playing in a group. There are also plans to reduce the number of guaranteed rare items on bosses when players have the full five stacks of Nephalem Valor from two drops to one guaranteed rare. The patch will remove the bonus monster damage per additional player in co-op groups, because Blizzard feels that “The bonus monster damage per additional player is one of the biggest inhibitors to wanting to play with your friends.”
Some enemies on Inferno difficulty through Acts 2-4 will have reduced damage and health in order to streamline the “difficulty ramp out a bit.” This way players won’t feel so underpowered on later Acts after murdering everything through the first Act with their offensive build. Repair costs will be increased a bit in order to shy players away from “graveyard zergging” enemies. The cost on level 60 items will go up a lot according to Wyatt Cheng, the author of the details post on Blizzard’s forum. They will see prices up to 4x to 6x their current values. Blacksmith and Jeweler costs will go down a bit, making it much easier to train them and craft new items. As for the classes, there won’t be any major changes coming to them.
More details about the post, including a hotfix list, will come closer to when the patch rolls out. Until then players can get back into the game with the recent 1.02b patch and get playing.
