Diablo III was unplayable again earlier this week when Blizzard released a new patch and the flood of players once again broke the game’s servers. As asinine as this concept is, the good news is that everything should be back to normal, and there are a few new changes you can look forward to.
The two most obvious changes will be the major tweaks made to the auction house (mostly improving its player feedback and clearing up a few issues,) as well as the introduction of general chat. I’ll go ahead and save you a bit of time here; simply type /leave to make that go away.
A smaller patch was released earlier this morning with a few quick fixes, but most notably, it has cut down on some farming opportunities. It seems some players had found a loophole in which they would kill the last boss in Act 3 repeatedly with a few friends and turn it in repeatedly. Reportedly, this could bring in as much as 120k XP in less than 10 minutes, and a nice share of gold to boot. Nigel Cutthroat, a bandit from Act 1, had his loot nerfed lowering the incentive to farm him as well.
The real world money auction house has been postponed yet again, so we’ll have to wait to June 12th before we can see what impact it will have on the game.
Check out the full patch notes below:
General
- Players will now automatically join General chat when logging in
Classes
- Monk
- Active Skills
- Serenity
- Skill Rune – Tranquility
- Duration of immunity granted to nearby allies from crowd control effects reduced from 2 seconds to 1 second
- Mantra of Healing (tooltips will be updated in a later patch)
- In addition to increasing Life regeneration for you and nearby allies while active, Mantra of Healing will now also shroud you and nearby allies with a mystical shield that absorbs damage for 3 seconds after activiation (up to a limited amount, based on level)
- Skill Rune – Boon of Protection
- Boon of Protection has been renamed Boon of Inspiration
- Mantra of Healing will now heal you when dealing damage to an enemy (heal amount will be based on hero level)
Bug Fixes
- General
- Players should no longer receive an “Error 14009” when logging in
- The “Select a Hero” menu will now also display the difficulty level for each character
- Several speed improvements have been made to the streaming downloader
- Achievements
- All players in a party should now receive “Till Death Do Us Part” even if they don’t have Haedrig Eamon as their active follower
- Acts
- Act IV
- Witch Doctors should no longer receive an error if they kill a Shadow Clone with a Damage-Over-Time (DoT) skill after it’s launched a Firebomb but before it’s reached its target
- Auction House
- The auction log in the Completed tab will now display a player’s activity (bids, buyouts, sales, etc) in the proper order
- When placing a new bid over a previous bid on the same auction, players will now be provided with the correct warning message: “Raising your maximum bid on an Auction you are already winning raises your current bid to just above your previous maximum bid. Are you sure you want to continue?”
- Players will now receive an error message if they attempt to purchase an item after the 50 item limit has been reached in the Completed tab
- The “Physical Damage” Preferred Stats option for rings has been renamed to “Bonus Minimum Physical Damage”
- The “All Damage” Preferred Stats option for weapons and armor has been removed and replaced with bonuses of specific damage types
- Items which have been purchased from a vendor and equipped by the player can now be sold on the Auction House
- Listing items on the Auction House from a different character than the one currently selected should no longer cause item display issues
- Battle.net
- The public chat list will now sort alphabetically
- Skills
- Witch Doctor
- Spirit Vessel (Passive) no longer clears debuffs when using waypoints or changing equipment
Diablo III Patch 1.0.2a – v.1.0.2.9858
General
Tooltips for the following class abilities have been updated to reflect changes made in patch 1.0.2 and previous hotfixes:
Demon Hunter
Smoke Screen (Skill Rune – Lingering Fog)
Monk
Fists of Thunder (Skill Rune – Quickening)
Mantra of Healing (Skill Rune – Boon of Inspiration)
Wizard
Energy Armor (Skill Rune – Force Armor)
Nigel Cutthroat has recently fallen on hard times and will now drop lower quality items when slain
Gold and quest experience rewards for replaying “Heart of Sin: Get the Soul of Azmodan” have been reduced
Gold and quest experience rewards for replaying “Heart of Sin: Go to the Keep” have been removedAuction House
The maximum duration for posted auctions has been reduced from 48 hours to 36 hours Diablo III was
