1.04 Systems Preview

Patch 1.04. Too little, too late for Diablo 3? Read more about the upcoming changes, and what it means for you (and your wallet), after the jump.

8.28.12

Massive security breach.

The official forum PRs being mysteriously silent for a week (simultaneous PTO time?)

Hackers and botters running rampant.


...Is it too late to save the game?

Who cares, a new patch is coming out!

1.04 Systems PReview

Read it here: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/6923456/104_Systems_Preview-8_10_2012

Done?

Let's get straight to business.

MF/GF averaging

Change 1: The first change we’re making in 1.0.4 for co-op is to remove averaging in multiplayer games of Magic Find and Gold Find

Why did MF/GF sharing exist in the first place? Here was their original reasoning: We originally added Magic Find averaging so optimal play did not involve people stacking what we call “adventure stats” to the detriment of their party.

What this means is that if you had 400 mf, and I came in to your game with 0 mf, then you and I both magically now have 200 mf. With the new change, we don't have this weird averaging in place.

And we never needed it.

We aren't marrying our teammates. If someone on the team is being a bother, I cuss them out and then throw up a kick vote. GTFO. Worst case scenario, I just leave the game.

The real effect of this change is a very good incentive to now play with your buddies or random people.

The reason co-op is currently dead is because stragglers would "leech" your magic find. If I'm rocking a 400 mf swap, and some random guy joins a game with 0 mf, then I lose efficiency. It's not because he doesn't do enough damage or we can't kill fast enough; it just doesn't feel fair that I get less drops after I spent all that time and effort getting high end mf+dps gear. So I don't play co-op. But now I might.

Summary: This change is quite welcome. Quality work, Blizzard.  
Good - 1, Bad - 0.

Economic Value: Glass cannon builds will become more viable because a Barb may be taking the agro for you now. By encouraging co-op, more interesting builds will come about, and certain niche items will become more popular.

Co-op health scaling

Teamwork is fun

Change 2: Lowering the health multiplier for monsters per additional player in co-op games. It’s going to be a flat 75% in 1.0.4 for all difficulty levels, as opposed to the scaling 75/85/95/110% it is now. 

When your buddy joins your Inferno game, monsters now only gain 75% hp instead of 110%. It encourages you to play as a team and actually make friends in Diablo as opposed to losing them through player attribution.

Now, that's nice and all... but why do we need this change? 110% is fine. The reason it's set as 110% is because you should gain benefits and synergies from your teammates and vice-versa. If a well stacked Mantra of Conviction - Overawe Monk joins my game, I welcome the 110% hp gain; his Mantra allows us to output more damage together than we are capable of doing alone.

Let me stress this point: Making the game easier does not make it more fun. Any gameplay changes that make the game flat-out easier is generally not a good change. The exception to this are the obvious bug fixes: Champion demonic tremors should not have built in rocket engines, and certain Winged Moloks shouldn't be invisible and invincible.

Blizzard should focus on making quality of life changes and bug fixes rather than making the game less difficult to play. They probably saw the whole "OMG, there's only 60 people in public games" garbage on the forums and over-reacted.

Summary: This change is nice, but MF/GF averaging change will fix co-op better than this can. Making the game easier is also not a good idea.
Good - 1, Bad - 1.

Economic value: By making the game easier to farm, the economy suffers a price decline on items.

Drop rates

Change 3: In 1.0.4 we’re ... increasing the likelihood they drop magic or rare items by a factor of four.

We’re correspondingly lowering the health of Champions and Rares by 10-25% and editing specific affixes to shrink the difficulty gap. 

This must be the "mf gear swap fix" that they decided on, after spending a whole post describing possible nerfs. By making all monsters capable of dropping good stuff, there is a dis-incentive to using a magic find gear swap; if you don't have mf gear on all the time, then you are effectively losing drops from normal mobs.

This is a great change. If I was writing the Blizzard blog, I'd save this for last because it's the most innovative and interesting way to fix mf gear swaps.Whoever thought up this idea should be given a raise.

However, I do have one issue. But before I talk about it, let's take a step back and look at the article as a whole. Have you noticed anything strange about it?

There are only positive changes.

When you realize that, the entire preview sounds like Blizzard is trying to throw out life preservers as the player-base is drowning under the waves. It helps nobody when they don't talk about the offsets they are going to implement to prevent the game from turning into an easy-cake farm-fest.

Here's my issue with this change: If they make Champion mobs less difficult, does that mean they're correspondingly reducing the drop rates on Champions? They avoided this topic completely. I don't like that. Be honest Blizzard.

Summary: They're unwilling to give full disclosure on Champion drop rates. However, the mf change is clever enough to push this to the "good" side.
Good - 2, Bad - 1.

Economic value: I imagine the "bonus damage vs elites" affix will become less valuable. MF gear swaps will die out, and the mf affix on good gear will become even more of a super-premium.

Monster affixes

There's nothing wrong with fire chains, it's actually kind of hot

Change 4: To further reduce the gap between normal and Elite monsters, we’re adjusting some of the more frustrating monster affixes, such as Fire Chains and Shielding...

P.S. We’re getting rid of the Invulnerable Minions monster affix.

Shielding, Fire Chains, Invulnerable Minions are hard affixes, but nowhere impossible to deal with. Why make the game easier for no reason?

The actual outcome of this change is not healthy for this game: Affix nerfs will push players away from co-op and back into single player farming. Because champion mobs are easier, it allows you to solo them with ease. Players will now be able to create a solo one-build-fits-all setup where they can beat everything without difficulty.

Blizzard seems to have this weird idea that Inferno should be easily soloable. Why is this the case? Remember back to D2. Were solo Meph runs more fun to do, or Baal runs with 8 people? Solo farming should not be the norm. It's not fun.

By making the game accessible for soloing, it removes the need to cooperate and play as a team. That's the one thing right now that pushes people into co-op games: The game is too hard to beat on single payer, so you team up and synergize. There's nothing wrong with this system.

What they really need to do is nerf fire grates. Do these things penetrate through resists or something? Because they 2-shot my barb. There's nothing more annoying than having to sit in front of a fire grate and wait for it to drop before moving along. Every other terrain object in the game tickles you, but these things insta-gib you? How does that make sense?

Summary: They're bending to immature forum ragers and making mobs easier. Players are incentivized to solo farm because the mobs are easier.
Good - 2, Bad - 2.

Economic value: I imagine the "bonus damage vs elites" affix will become less valuable if they nerf champions.

A fighting chance?

fuck you

Change 5: To help give weapons a fighting chance, the raw damage value on all level 61 and 62 weapons will be able to roll damage that extends all the way to the top end of 63.

This is not a fighting chance. It's a nuclear bomb.

What this change means is that iLevel 62 weapons could roll and look exactly the same as iLevel 63s. The same goes for iLevel 61s. Think about it. It's like the drop rate for iLvl63s has suddenly jumped up. Of course, the chance that an iLevel 61 rolls exactly the same as an iLevel 63 is going to be low, but a item drop buff is still an item drop buff.

Ramification 1: Farming is now that much more efficient. This means that your current items are overvalued, because good items are going to drop significantly more. It might be time to get rid of the stuff on your mules if you're a hoarder. The market will probably freeze up for a bit while people are figuring out what this means to them.

Look at this. Now back to me. Now back to the recipe. It's now 30m gold.

Ramification 2: Holy shit, buy crafting recipes! This change means that you can craft extremely good weapons now. Because weapon crafting will be awesome, crafting materials will also soar in price.

Summary: This is going to be the downfall of the current economy.
Good - 2, Bad - 3.

Economic value: Buy 6 property crafting recipes for weapons and the corresponding crafting materials.

Zwei handers

I found him! This is the guy that bought my Fire Walkers

Change 6: We also want to close the gap between dual-wielding and two-handers, and so we’re improving two-handed melee weapons by creating a new set of stronger affixes to compensate for the loss of stats that can come from your offhand.

Awesome.

2-handed weapons epitomize the ideals of strength and brutality. Not 2 little toothpicks. My barb will be happy. Moving on.

Good - 3, Bad - 3.

Economic value: Existing 2h melee weapons will become worthless. This includes the premium weapons that you bought for your enchantress.

Worst ideas ever

Change 7: We’re removing Enrage Timers and the “heal back to full” behavior from Champion and Rare monster packs.

Great change. Enrage timers realistically only punish bad players, who don't need to suffer more than they already do. Go back to WoW where you belong.

The "heal back to full" behavior was certainly annoying; the champion would heal up to full health if you didn't poke it for a certain amount of time (sometimes as short as 10 seconds). The thing is, it didn't actually stop death-zerging (the original intent of the healing effect): The easy way to bypass it is to pull them back to the respawn, and then death-zerg them. Same effect for slightly more effort. All they did by implementing the healing effect was to annoy everyone else. It's like how DRM screws all the legal buyers over and does nothing against the pirates.

Good riddance.

Summary: They are getting rid of 2 annoying things that don't belong in the game.
Good - 4, Bad - 3.

Economic value: You may think that glass cannon gear will see a resurgence from this, but it's unlikely. You lose precious time when you die, so players are still heavily incentivized to stay alive.

Repair bill for expensive items

Change 8: That said, we think repair costs are just a bit too high, so in 1.0.4 we’re going to be reducing repair costs of high-end items by 25%.

NO. If you have high-end items, then you can pay for high-end repairs. For fuck sakes.
Good - 4, Bad - 4.

Legendaries

Change 9: As a general reminder though, existing items are not changing. The Legendary improvements are going to be for Legendaries dropped or crafted after the 1.0.4 patch goes live.

My interpretation from their wording is that existing 1.03 Legendary crafting recipes are going to roll stronger items in 1.04. In other words, if you have a Legendary recipe right now, it will roll something different in 1.04.

However, I do not think Blizzard will improve these Legendaries very much. They recognize that these crafted Legendaries are already strong. If they turn these into chase items, then it removes any desire to actually look for ilvl63 gear; your friend can just crank out hundreds of these amazing legendaries in the back room and hand you a pair.

Likely, what will happen is that they will nudge up the bad Legendaries to a point where they can roll good items with enough tries. Because of this, I definitely expect Fiery Brimstones to increase in value. Invest now.

However, I do not expect legendary crafting recipes to increase very much: Because the possible rolls will not be buffed heavily, these legendary crafting recipes will remain as high variance crafting recipes. I highly doubt that they will get buffed to a level where they can be called anything besides high variance.

Caveat: I expect prospectors to buy these recipes in bulk and cause the price to shoot up. They will definitely settle over time if Blizzard does not buff them heavily. Blizzard has said over and over that they don't want everyone to wear the same Legendaries; they aren't going to break that rule and make these Legendaries incredibly good.

Summary: They are going to improve the low level Legendaries while mostly maintaining the same power level for the best crafted Legendaries.
Good - 5, Bad - 4.

Economic value: Don't buy legendary crafting recipes unless you are planning on crafting high variance items. Do buy Brimstones. Essences are naturally going to go up as well.

A metric fuckton of changes

Who says "a metric-ton of changes"? I guarantee you that the blogger originally wrote "a metric fuckton of changes" and it was edited out.

Anyways, back to the topic.

I read the entire section where they discussed the general ideas behind the changes... and yawned. While it's well written, it doesn't really tell us anything that we don't already know. The entire section can be summed up as: Bad and underused skills will get better. Confusing skills will get less confusing.

They shouldn't have spent the time writing it.

Summary: They did not disclose any actual changes, and did not talk about skill nerfs at all. Because of the unwillingness to talk about nerfs, I'm giving this a "bad".
Good - 5, Bad - 5.

Economic value: Expect niche items to gain value. I would keep an eye out on the Thorns and Pickup radius affixes.

The final score

What's the final takeaway from the 1.04 preview?

1. Co-op is now fun.
2. Blizzard has ruined the economy.
3. The game is now stupidly easy.
4. Get gear that has mf on it before it becomes super expensive.
5. Cain is still old. Tyrael is still useless. Leah is still stupid.
6. Crafting weapons is now a thing.
7. Expect some new combo builds when skills/legendaries get buffed. 
8. Hopefully you've already bought those crafting materials and recipes.
9. Where the hell are the Auction House improvements?
10. I can't believe I missed lunch to write this.

Let me know in the comments if there's anything I missed!