Diablo III Patch 1.0.4 Details Leaked, Gamers Unhappy

Diablo III from Blizzard has for the most part received solid reviews but at the same time remained in the center of controversy. Times are not necessarily peachy for Blizzard Entertainment as details about a security breach at Battle.net has gamers up in arms over the loss of usernames and passwords to hackers. At the same time, the Diablo III team continues to be hard at work to patch the game to improve the D3 experience.

Speaking to the Diablo III 1.0.4 patch, it was released on the Battle.net forums by “Bashiok” that the developers behind the game have been working hard to get new features and updates out for the game, available for both PC and Mac. While the post did explain that the list wasn’t set in stone it should serve to be a useful guide for what’s going to be coming out soon. Comments for the post were certainly mixed, some applauding the updates while other bemoaning the lack of any new real content such as a new level or dungeon.

The first will be major Systems Preview. While some people are enjoying the co-op experience, Blizzard Senior Technical Game Designer Wyatt Cheng admits that the bulk of gamers are going through the game solo. Stating that the change in 1.0.3 to remove the bonus monster damage per additional player was a good start, he’s aiming to go further. For co-op, Blizzard will remove the averaging in multiplayer games of the Magic Find and Gold Find. That means you’ll benefit from your own Magic Find stat, not potentially weighed down by others. At the same time, the health multiplayer for monsters per additional player will also be going down. This should make enemies more manageable.

Another major update will see the gap between normal and elite monsters lessen. Too often normal monsters die easily and elite monsters take some time and skill to kill off. Normal enemies will be brought up a notch and Champions and Rares will be brought down. One very interesting note is that health of normal monsters will be increased 5-10% in Inferno mode, but they will be increasing the likelihood of dropping magic/rare items by a factor of four.

Improvements to Legendary items will also be coming in v1.0.4 for Diablo 3. In the next couple of weeks, Blizzard will be revealing more information. Each class will have what Cheng is calling “a metric-ton of changes” and each class will have their own blog post to outline their changes in the coming weeks.

Now that the “System Changes” blog entry is completed and posted on the Battle.net forums, gamers wait to hear about Legendary Item Improvements next from Andrew Chambers. After that there will be a post about Magic Find Update by Jay Wilson who’ll talk about how this feature is evolving in this new patch. Up after that post will be Class Changes by Wyatt Cheng who will outline a preview of the changes for each class along with the philosophy for changing each class. The previews will end with a post from “Lylirra” who will post the Patch Notes which will be posted shortly before the update goes live. There’ll also be a series of interviews and developer chats around the patch which will be shared on Diablo 3′s front page.

In the present, gamers continue to be angered by the leak of information to hackers. While details continue to seep out of Blizzard, all people that have an account at Battle.net (as in anyone that owns Diablo 3 or World of WarCraft) is highly advised to immediately change their password. At the same time, there’s shaky details about the security question and answers being leaked but at the time of this article’s publication a solution to reset the question and answer has not presented itself. In the meantime, we’re also advocating changing your Battle.net password and also engaging the free two-factor authentication method for your account.

Stay tuned in at Gaming Illustrated for all the latest on Diablo III’s v1.0.4 patch and for more details about the Battle.net security leak.