Posted by Chuck Corbin on May 28, 2012

While many people, including myself, love Diablo III, I can see that there are a few problems. From the Blacksmith, whose costs to train and build items seem to be too high for what you get out the item, to the fact that some builds are just plain not viable, this game does have a few problems. That’s why I’m a bit excited by the fact that Blizzard posted a game design update to let us know that they’re aware of some of the problems the game faces, and they’re going to fix them.

Patch 1.0.2 is likely to be released sometime in the next week, according to Blizzard. They’ve said that we shouldn’t expect to see any major changes with this patch, as it’s mainly aimed at addressing service issues. So, boring, and perhaps even a little frustrating, but it’s still much needed as some people still seem to be having problems maintaining a connection to the game. This patch should hopefully help with that little problem.

The next patch, 1.0.3, is going to be the first real big patch that Blizzard is doing for the game. That’s the patch that Blizzard is planning on doing their first real game balance changes. Inferno difficulty seems to be suffering from two issues: one, there’s too much damage “spikiness”, where a character is taking tons of damage at one time, and two, where there’s only a few builds that seem to be viable. With this patch, expect to see some runes and skills changed to a level where more builds for characters will become viable, and the spikiness to drop off a bit, in favor of a more gradual health loss.

Blizzard also went into details about items, and what they mean. They state that Legendaries aren’t necessarily meant to be the greatest items in the game, but rather they’re just an additional item. Rare items have a possibility of rolling up the “perfect” stats that end up beating out an Legendary, and according to Blizzard that’s by design. To keep people from showing “proof” of an imbalance between low-level Legendary items and high-level Magic items, Blizzard will be exposing the item levels of 60+ items in the 1.0.3 patch. And while Legendaries might not necessarily be the best items in the game, Blizzard does want to make them more, well, Legendary, by buffing Legendary items, most likely in the 1.1 patch. However, that buff will only apply to items made/discovered after the patch, so if you’re holding a Legendary item in the hope that it’ll be buffed later, you’re not in luck.

The last big thing they talked about for patch 1.0.3 was the Blacksmithing and Jewelcrafting costs. Many people, including myself, have found the Blacksmith costs to be a bit prohibitive, especially when you consider that the items you get usually end up being useless to you anyway. Blizzard plans to adjust the costs for training (both gold and pages) and crafting from levels 1-59. Hopefully, this makes the Blacksmith a bit more useful, because as it is I just end up using the auction house for all my stuff. The Jewelcrafter is getting a bit of a makeover as well, as they’re planning on changing the requirements on combining gems to go from 3 gems to 2, up to the Flawless Square. The levels after that will still likely need 3 gems.

Not many details were released about what to expect in patch 1.1, which is likely to be the first big content patch. The only detail of note, besides the Legendary buff, is that Blizzard intends for the 1.1 patch to be the PvP patch, where they will be adding the arena for PvP. Though they offered no hints on when patch 1.1 will be coming out, they did say that at some point they will be opening up a PTR (public test realm) where people will be able to try out the different changes. Overall, it looks like Blizzard has a lot on their plate, but I’m really looking forward to seeing some of these new changes!

Source