Diablo AFK Bots

How to get millions of gold

2013-08-10T01:21:00.000-07:00

As most of you probably have found out, it can be quite difficult to gather enough gold to buy all the items you want and sometimes even stay up on repairs. I have tried farming and I've tried my hand at the auctions. Farming can be quite useful but it is more or less random and luck. I have found the occasional item that sold for a couple million gold and even an item that sold for almost $200 which made me quite happy. Playing the auction house was a different story however. I tried buying and reselling legendary items (which didn't do well). I also tried gems, unique items, etc.. Pretty much every different item I could think of. I just didn't understand well enough how to turn a reasonable profit on the auction house.

Again like most of you, I had heard of a few different guides that advertised teaching you how to make a bunch of gold. I never wanted to try them because for starters I felt like crap thinking about giving someone money to learn how to do something I thought should have been easy. Obviously it is not the most simple thing in the world, especially with a game that doesn't have a set item list like WoW does. Finally I broke and bought a couple guides when it got to the point that I wasn't making enough gold to cover my repairs after some solid farming rounds.

Enter the Diablo 3 Billionaire guide by Daniel Chan.

Click Here

Surely you've all heard of this guide before but let me tell you my personal findings. Although the guide covers everything from leveling to farming to auction house strategies, the leveling and farming portions are lacking. Not due to content mind you, but because it is the same information you can find anywhere. For farming it includes butcher runs to treasure goblin runs. I didn't have to buy this guide to know about those but I suppose it's nice that they are included in this guide just for completion. The real benefit to this guide is the auction house section which comprises over 50% of the guide anyway.

Now I have bounced around from having a balance of only a few gold up to about 40 million when I had a bot running 24/7. I hated that because the computer was always running and I couldn't do anything on it. Daniel Chan includes strategies for starting with only a few thousand gold on up to playing the auction house. Starting small and working up. No matter what your starting balance is I promise if you actually read the guide instead of just skimming it you will be able to start generating serious amounts of gold.

On to the price tag.

I understand not wanting to pay the $37 price for this guide but think about this. How much gold would $37 buy you in game and how much do you stand to make once you actually know how to. Also these strategies apply to making gold and selling items on the real money auction house. So beyond the gold you will undoubtedly make you have the opportunity to make real money on top of that. I don't know about you guys but making $37 on the real money auction house really doesn't take that long if you know the right things to buy and sell.

The Diablo 3 Billionaire guide also has an ironclad 60 day money back guarantee that is handled by clickbank. I know you won't have to use this because trust me the guide is well worth the $37 that you will be out for a few days while you sell a few items. I'm still mentioning the guarantee because it is what alleviated my concerns when I was on the fence about this guide.

If you are interested (which you should be!) click the link below to read more.

Diablo 3 Billionaire Guide

Diablo 3 1.0.4 Leveling Guide 0-60

2012-08-22T23:34:00.005-07:00

Diablo 3 1.0.4 Leveling Guide 0-60

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Hello everyone! Today I'm going to share my leveling technique for getting your Diablo 3 characters to 60 quickly. This can be done in a single day if you want. I think it took me about 12-14 hours to get to 60 but I could be wrong as I wasn't really paying attention at the time. Now I have 45 hours since I've been using the character to farm gear and level my paragon now that 1.0.4 is out. Make sure to get a helm with a socket for your low level character and put as high of a ruby gem in it as possible for the bonus exp%. You can get gear with +exp per kill on it but it isn't as important as the helm gem.

Level 1-25: Have your high level friend/second account invite the character you wish to level to Act 2: The Black Soulstone: Soulstone Chamber quest. The high level character goes in and kills Zoltun Kulle quickly. DO NOT TURN IN THE QUEST. Leave the game on the low level character only and start a new game. Turn in the quest then return to the game the high level is in. Before turning in the quest again have the high level character leave the game and start his own new one. Then turn in the quest again on your low level and proceed to join the third game the high level character has now created. Repeat until level 25. This way you get triple the experience for killing Zoltun Kulle. This can be done quickly and you will be 25 in only a short amount of time. Have the high level character kill Diablo on Normal and then you can proceed to Nightmare.

Level 25-50: From here it's not very viable to continue killing Zoltun Kulle for very long. You can up until level 30-35 or so if you want but then it starts to go pretty slow. Instead we will be taking both the high and low level character to the Act 3: Heart of Sin: Kill Azmodan quest. Once in the game Take the waypoint to Arreat Crater level 1 and kill your way through it. If you go down a long path and hit a dead end just teleport back to town, it's not worth it to waste time walking back just to try and find more mobs. Then go to Arreat Crater level 2 and kill your way through again. After you clear that area head to The Core of Arreat. Same principle applies here except it's only one path, kill your way to the end where the entrance to Azmodan is. Here you can either leave the game and restart or you can go kill Azmodan for the quest exp. Personally I don't find the quest exp to be high enough to be worth the time but to each their own. This works great because of all the little scorpion/spider mobs that come in huge packs of around 50 sometimes. They provide a massive amount of exp in very little time and are easy to kill. Once you are at 50 kill Diablo and proceed to Hell difficulty.

Level 50-60: Do the same thing you did from 25-50 except this time on Hell. It can take longer each run because the mobs don't die nearly as easily as they did in nightmare but it still goes pretty quick. You should get a level per entire clear up until 55 and then past that it will be about 1 1/3 runs per level.
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This seems to be the fastest way I've found to level your characters since they have drastically reduced the amount of exp you gain from quest turn in's now. If you try this method please comment with how long it took you to get from 1-60. Like I said I didn't really pay attention to the time it took me so I'm curious to see how long it will take others. I also was running two accounts instead of using a friend to help so I'm sure that made it take longer as well. Also if you found this information useful please subscribe to this blog, it really does help alot.

Thanks everyone for reading and good luck leveling your future characters.

Will try to come out with a paragon guide once I have a better grasp on it. Only at paragon level 6 right now and I've only been farming gear, haven't been focusing specifically on leveling it.

-Diablo afk Bots

Diablo 3 Paragon System Unveiled: No More Gear Swapping

2012-08-20T12:10:00.003-07:00

Summary of the Diablo 3 Paragon System:

The Paragon System is the first endgame introduction in what will hopefully be a long line of end game updates.

Most of the time when Blizzard comes out with a patch I will skim the patch notes but never really care whats going on, that is until now. I really like the idea of this Paragon system and hopefully it works as well as it sounds. Heres a breakdown of what the Paragon system entails.

Once you get a character to 60 you will stop gaining exp towards the next level but instead will start gaining exp towards your Paragon level. Every level that you gain will give you an added 3% magic find and 3% gold find. This will stay regardless of your gear, if you change skills, or really anything for that matter. They are also setting a cap of 300% for gold find and magic find so once you hit Paragon level 100 you won't need any magic find or gold find on your actual gear. This will be a base cap and will not affect NV. Another addition with the Paragon system you will first notice when you get your Paragon level to 10. Every 10 levels you will unlock new portrait frames for your character that will appear on the left side of the screen when you are in a co-op game so other players can see what Paragon level you are.

First person to get to Paragon level 100 gets massive bragging rights!!

Originally posted by Blizzard at Official Forum
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While working on patch 1.0.4, we came up with all sorts of ideas for ways to improve Diablo III. Some of them you’ve probably already seen, such as the general systems changes, the awesome buffs forLegendaries, and the improvements we’re making to the barbarian,demon hunter, monk, witch doctor, and wizard. The entire team really banded together to get as much into this patch as possible, and one of the exciting changes I’d like to tell you about today is called the Paragon system.

Two of the issues we’ve been thinking about while working on patch 1.0.4 have been what to do with Magic Find and how to give level-60 players who aren’t satisfied with the item hunt something more to strive for. I’m sure many of you are aware of the blog we posted proposing some different Magic Find gear-swapping solutions, as well as our general thoughts on how rewarding the game is once you hit level 60. The Paragon system is designed to help us address these concerns -- but before we get into exactly how it works, let’s go over these two core issues in a little more detail.

Magic Find
As you may remember, we posed a number of possible solutions to the gear-swapping issue and asked you to give us your feedback. While we saw some support for a couple of the options, what your responses ultimately told us was that although having to swap into Magic Find gear mid-fight annoyed some of you greatly, others were ambivalent, didn’t gear swap themselves, or -- in a few cases -- wanted to see gear-swappers penalized in some fashion. Those who do swap gear generally do so for the raw power advantage it gives, so we wanted any solution we went with to provide the same level of power. Overall, our analysis of the situation really hammered home one stark truth: we needed to come up with a way to make our Magic Find system more fun.

Level 60 Rewards
We understand that some players feel frustrated once they hit level 60 because they no longer feel like they’re making progress. It can be demoralizing to play for an hour, not get any drops, and also be out a big chunk of gold from repair costs. Your play session may not only end without an upgrade, it can wind up being a net loss. Everyone wants to feel like they’re making some progress when they log in, even if they don’t get that new sword.

Introducing the Paragon System
The new Paragon system coming in patch 1.0.4 is designed to address Magic Find gear-swapping while providing players who’ve reached level 60 with an extended progression system.

Here’s how it works:

After you hit level 60, any further experience you earn from killing monsters will begin to count toward Paragon levels
There are 100 Paragon levels
Every Paragon level will reward you with:
- Core stats such as Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, and Vitality in amounts similar to what you’d gain from a normal level
- 3% Magic Find and 3% Gold Find
In addition, a distinctive increasingly-impressive border will surround your character portrait in the in-game party frame to denote your Paragon progression, with a new frame earned after every ten levels. Your Paragon level will also be visible to other players wherever your normal level is shown

We know that a lot of you out there are level 60 -- maybe on multiple characters -- and this system provides a way to make progress every time you log in to the game.

To support the new system, Nephalem Valor (NV) will now also provide a 15% experience bonus per stack, applicable toward Paragon levels. The first Paragon level should take about as long as it took most players to get from level 59 to 60, and the experience requirement will rise from there. The time to reach the upper Paragon levels approximates the long-term time investment required to get a level 99 character in Diablo II.

… What Was That About Magic Find On Items?
While the benefits to progression are obvious, you may be asking how this impacts Magic Find on items. We wanted to find a solution that was not only very forgiving of gear swapping, but one that would ultimately help us slowly and gently move Magic Find off of items in the future. It’s such an intrinsically important stat to the core purpose of playing the game that tying it to gear -- which is a customization system in many ways -- is ultimately an approach that would continue to cause problems. We need to transition away from it, and do so in a way that doesn’t flip the entire game end-over-end.

With the Paragon system in place, we’re capping Magic Find and Gold Find to 300% (before Nephalem Valor). This means that without any Magic Find gear at all, you’ll hit the cap when you reach Paragon level 100. This way, you can continue wearing your current Magic Find gear as you slowly but surely work to gain Paragon levels. Eventually, once you hit Paragon level 100, you’ll have the freedom to completely focus every slot on stats that help your character kill stuff faster and stay alive longer. The idea is that if you’re currently swapping gear in and out for the Magic Find bonuses, you can continue to do so… but gain enough Paragon levels, and you won’t need to anymore.

Phew…
The Paragon system is a fairly big addition to the game, and one we’re pretty excited about. On behalf of the entire Diablo III development team, we hope you enjoy the changes we’re making with patch 1.0.4, and we look forward to seeing you in-game when it releases. Stay tuned to Diablo3.com for the final patch notes and official launch announcement in the days ahead.

Diablo 3 easy gold and item farming routes.

2012-08-17T21:23:00.000-07:00

Hello everyone, I'm going to start periodically posting useful farming routes and the most efficient way to farm them. The first two I will share today are fairly well known but I'm going to add them so I can start compiling a list of all the best farming routes in one place. These first two are in act 1 and can be farmed easily by most players on inferno.

The first one is at the beginning of act 1 and better used to farm gold than items although you can on occasion get useful items. With enough magic find you could use this spot for items as I have gotten hellion crossbows as well as ilvl 63 armors along with quite a few legendary and set items. Nothing was very good quality but with the changes in Patch 1.0.4 so that higher quality can drop from act 1 it could be a viable item farming location. Anyway here are the steps for continuous farming.

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First farming route act 1.

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Start by selecting The legacy of Cain: Explore Cellar quest in act 1.

Take the Old Ruins waypoint (will be the only one you have besides tristram). From their run northwest along the path where you will eventually see a dead tristram guard and get a checkpoint.

Continue heading northwest going past a few minor enemies until you come to the dank cellar. Sometimes it is not open and if so just teleport to town and leave game, then restart the game and you will be right at that checkpoint where the dead tristram guard is. If it is open however it will look like this. Enter the dank cellar.

Once inside run into the room to kill the "Rare" enemy Sarkoth.

As you can see once he is dead he and his 3 friends drop quite a bit of gold. Here is 5,747 gold for only a about 30 seconds worth of work.

From here you can teleport to town and leave game. Once you hit resume game you will be back at that checkpoint and can do this run over and over again. Each run takes about 30-45 seconds and can easily net you 400k an hour if you have the gold find. Now obviously this is can become a very boring farming route and we do provide a bot to do this for you The bot can be found at the top of the page where there is a Get Bots Here tab, or you can just go to Diablo afk bots.

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Second farming route in act 1.

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Start by selecting the quest The Broken Blade: Talk To Alaric on act 1.

Go to the way point and select the Drowned Temple waypoint. It will be the one the quest is telling you to go to .

From there follow the quest objectives and go talk to Alaric, then follow the objective again and head northeast into the Festering Woods. Once you are in the Festering Woods look for a place called Warriors Rest. It is usually located around the northern part of the Festering Woods but sometimes moves around a bit. When you find it this is what it will look like.

Immediately once you are inside you will get a checkpoint here.

Head east just a little ways and you will come to this spot shown here. For ranged I would suggest standing here and unleashing everything to kill the enemies further to the right. Obviously for melee you will have to continue on and fight. There will always be an elite over here but the possible affixes will vary.

This elite usually drops at least one rare item and a few magic ones. This is also with my characters 20% magic find so I can only assume with more magic find you can find even more rares here. From my testing of this spot I have noticed more ilvl 63's drop here than from the first spot I mentioned today.

Once you have gathered your loot do NOT touch this blue globe here. Instead just leave the game and restart so you will be back at the checkpoint and immediately fight the elite all over again.

As you can see it will take a few minutes to get here for the first time but once you have that checkpoint you can farm this elite about once every 30-45 seconds possibly shorter or longer depending on how much damage you do. This place has the possibility to net some decent rares especially if you are trying to find gear to progress into act 2 inferno.

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Thanks for reading and like I said I know these spots are already well known but I'm going to compile as many farming routes as I can in one location and keep them updated in case one gets nerfed. I will continue to update with more farming routes hopefully once a day or at the very least once every other day until I have a complete list on here. If anyone has any routes they would like to share please feel free to leave them in the comments and I will test them out then add them to the list giving credit to the commentor.

-Diablo afk bots

Diablo 3 Witch Doctor Patch 1.0.4 Preview

2012-08-17T01:48:00.000-07:00

Summary of the changes to the Witch Doctor with Diablo 3 Patch 1.04

1: Zombie Dog's will have a passive version of the Wizard's Force Armor skill to help reduce their damage as well as an increase to their passive life regeneration to help their survivability in all acts of Inferno. They will still scale their stats with the Witch Doctor's stats so for any of you glass cannon Witch Doctor's you may still lose a dog or two during difficulty fights.

2: Base mana regeneration is being increased from 20 per second to 45 per second for all Witch Doctor's.

3: There will be no changes to Zombie Bears, but they will be changing other skills in the hopes that they will compete with the Zombie Bears.

4: The character animations when casting a skill are being updated so everything will run more smoothly.

Originally posted by Blizzard on their Official Forum------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Out of the five Diablo III classes, witch doctors are receiving the most attention in patch 1.0.4. The goal for this patch, like for many of the other classes, was simple: identify the unpopular or hard-to-use skills, figure out what’s not working, and then make them better. In some cases, skills only needed slight tuning -- a little more damage here, or some increased durations there. In other cases, more significant changes were required. For the purpose of this preview, we'll focus on the bigger changes, which can be broken down into the following categories:

Pet survivability
Vision Quest design flaws
Splinters and Zombie Bears are way more appealing than most other skills

Pets

One of the core play styles for the witch doctor (and indeed the reason many people chose to play a witch doctor to begin with) is to have pets. Unfortunately, while witch doctor pets do pretty well in Normal difficulty, their survivability has been virtually non-existent in Nightmare, Hell, and Inferno. From our perspective, this isn't acceptable, so we're making some significant buffs to pets in 1.0.4. The goal of these buffs is to make pets not only more viable in those later difficulties, but also more enjoyable for players who prefer to base their builds around them.

From a design perspective, we want your pets to be durable enough so they can tank for you, but we don't want them to just be automatically immortal. The cooldown on summoning pets is there for a reason. Speaking more specifically, we'd like for there to be times when your pets have died, your cooldowns haven't refreshed yet, and you have that period of increased tension as you wait for the situation to stabilize again. On the other hand, we'd also like for there to be noticeable improvements for players who put thought and effort into their skill and gear selections to make their pets as strong as possible.

Trial and Error:
One of the first things we tried internally was to have Zombie Dogs scale their Life directly with their owner's Life (Zombie Dogs already inherit Armor and Resistance from their owner). This had mixed results. For example, if the player stacked a large amount of Life, Armor, and Resist, it was possible to have Zombie Dogs tank most of Act I and parts of Act 2 in Inferno. As much as it made sense to have Zombie Dogs scale directly with your gear, it actually inhibited a completely different playstyle: players who wanted their witch doctor to be more of a glass cannon, but still have their Zombie Dogs able to tank. And with that we went back to the drawing board.

The next time around we gave the Zombie Dogs a base amount of Life, and in addition to this base value, they would also receive 35% of their owner's Life. So, you had a Zombie Dog that could scale with your gear, but if you were built as a glass cannon you’d still have that base amount of Life to fall back on. To help with general survivability, we also gave Zombie Dogs some innate passive Life regeneration. This test was much more successful. The Zombie Dogs could survive through most parts of Act I and Act II of Inferno just fine and died only occasionally to really difficult encounters. In Act III and Act IV, however, they could take maybe one or two hits, but the outcome was always the same: dead Zombie dogs. We tried increasing the bonus to 100% of their owner's Life -- and even to 150% at one point, just to see what would happen -- but it was to no avail. The incoming damage just scaled up too high in those later Acts.

So, we made some more adjustments to their scaling, we gave them more passive regeneration, and we made pets resistant to even more AoE effects (such as Plagued, Frozen, and Mortar). The result was positive, but not perfect: Zombie Dogs could now tough out Acts I and II of Inferno, but they were still melting in Acts III and IV.

The Final Product:
Our final iteration was to give Zombie Dogs their own version of the wizard skill Force Armor, which limits the amount of damage a wizard can take in a single hit up to 35% of their maximum Life. Much like the rationale for reducing damage for AoE effects, pets take more damage from melee than players. Pets also don't back off when they’re low, make use of doorways, or avoid big attacks.

When translating "Force Armor" over to Zombie Dogs, we wanted to make sure they could still scale with the player's Life, Armor, and Resistances. So, rather than a flat 35%, the damage cap per hit is based on inherited Armor and Resistance values, and rather than scaling with the total Life, the mitigation amount is calculated on the base health of the Zombie Dogs, allowing additional Life to actually scale exceptionally well.

This might be a bit confusing, so let's set up an example using a level 60 witch doctor. Let’s say this witch doctor has 32,000 Life, 45% mitigation from Armor, and 30% mitigation from Resistances. (For clarity, this means that 55% of incoming damage gets past the player’s Armor, and 70% of the incoming damage gets past Resistances.)

The base Life of a level 60 Zombie Dog is 10,000 Life
With scaling, each Zombie Dog will have 21,200 Life (10,000 [base] + 32,000 * 35% [scaling])
The maximum damage the Zombie Dog can take in a single hit will be 3850 Life (10,000 [base] * 55% [damage not mitigated by armor] * 70% [damage not mitigated by Resistances])
Ignoring passive Life regeneration, this means each Zombie Dog will always be able to take at least 5.5 hits (21,200 [Life] / 3850 [damage])

Once you factor in some passive Life regeneration and healing from health globes, Zombie Dogs can do reasonably well in Inferno. Players who decide to go with a glass cannon build while using Zombie Dogs will have pets that can tank for short periods of time. Meanwhile, players who build with some survivability and choose pet-oriented passives like Fierce Loyalty, Zombie Handler, and Jungle Fortitude will find their pets to be extremely durable and very capable of handling all Acts of Inferno.

Vision Quest

As it stands now, without Vision Quest, many builds feel like you never have quite enough Mana.

Don't get me wrong: feeling like you always want more Mana can be a good thing, otherwise the resource system isn’t really doing its job. Even so, there are two major issues with Vision Quest that we want to address. The first is that it can feel very "feast or famine" when you're using it; sometimes you have near limitless Mana and at other times you're starved for resources. Second, and perhaps more importantly, it forces you to keep four skills on cooldown in order to be useful. This can be frustrating for a witch doctor who wants to use a cooldown skill strategically, but ends up casting the spell early for the Mana regeneration benefits.

Let’s use Big Bad Voodoo as an example. Big Bad Voodoo might be ready to go, but you need it on cooldown for Vision Quest to stay active. So, you cast the skill with only a handful of enemies on the screen. Then, no more than 20 seconds later, you come across a nasty Elite pack. While this would be a great moment to drop a Big Bad Voodoo to help you kill everything in sight (and ultimately avoid being killed yourself)….the skill is, of course, on cooldown. This can be a very aggravating experience! This isn't a dilemma we want players to face on a regular basis, so Vision Quest is getting redesigned for 1.0.4.

What’s Changing:
We're keeping the focus of the skill on Mana regeneration, but we're going to shift the way you get that regeneration away from needlessly spamming cooldowns to attacking and doing damage. The first thing we're doing is increasing the baseline Mana regeneration of all witch doctors from 20 Mana per second to 45 Mana per second. Not only does this help to alleviate the "feast or famine" effect, it also acts as a big buff to witch doctors who choose to skip Vision Quest. As for Vision Quest itself, it will increase Mana regeneration by 30% for 5 seconds after dealing damage with Firebomb, Corpse Spiders, Poison Dart, or Plague of Toads. One of the fun things about this set up is that you can combine it with a Spider Queen (Corpse Spider rune) or a Pyrogeist (Firebomb rune) and they’ll keep Vision Quest active for you the entire time they’re out.

Of course, Vision Quest going down to 30% can seem scary. Base Mana regeneration is increased, and the new mechanics actually allow for Vision Quest to have a very high uptime, but is it enough?

As we continue internal testing, one of our checks to determine how well Vision Quest is performing is to see if a level 60 player can still summon hordes of stampeding Zombie Bears. While we can't accommodate every skill and build combination out there, the goal for Vision Quest is that a player who has chosen the right passives and gear will still be able to summon waves of stampeding bears for at least a few seconds. The new Vision Quest is a lot less "feast or famine" than before, which means some players won't be able to spam Zombie Bears for quite as long, but the tradeoff is you’ll have a more consistent stream of Mana coming in, and (more importantly) you'll have your cooldown-controlled skills available to use strategically for maximum effect. A more reliable Mana stream, being able to use your cooldowns, and having the option to use other active and passive skills seems like a better design for the class as a whole for the long term.

Skill Options

In case you're wondering, we’re not touching Splinters or Zombie Bears this patch. While these are the two most popular witch doctor skills right now, it’s probably not just because people love the sound of Splinters or the look of Zombie Bears (though both of those are pretty cool). Instead, their popularity is likely due to how attractive these skills are, both in terms of damage output and overall feel. To help compensate and open up more build options, we’re buffing a lot of other skills to make them as appealing as Splinters and Zombie Bears.

Speaking of how a skill feels, the reason players avoid many of the lesser used witch doctor skills have more to do with the skill feeling "slow." For example, Firebomb, Plague of Toads, and Corpse Spiders all have animation timing issues which are being improved for 1.0.4. In general, all of these skills will cast faster, which will make the class feel snappier and more responsive. We're also doing a straight damage increase on many skills including (but not limited to) Acid Cloud, Firebats, Firebomb, and Spirit Barrage.

That wraps up the witch doctor, and all of our class previews! We hope you're excited about these changes and look forward to hearing your feedback.

Diablo 3 Demon Hunter Patch 1.0.4 Preview

2012-08-17T01:36:00.001-07:00

Summary of the Demon Hunter changes in Diablo 3 Patch 1.04

1: Hatred generating skills besides Hungering Arrow are being given damage increases to compete with Hungering Arrow to give players more diversity in their Demon Hunter builds.
2: Along the same principle, Hatred Spending skills are also receiving an increase in damage to compete with Elemental Arrow for a spot on the players skill bar.
3: Rain of Vengeance will become the Hydra of the Demon Hunter world. It is getting a HUGE damage bonus going from 75% weapon damage over 5 seconds to a whopping 715% weapon damage over 5 seconds. (Can't wait to have some fun with this.)
4: Last but not least the Sentry skill's damage is being doubled to make it more appealing.

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Originally posted by Blizzard on their Official Forum

Hungering Arrow is currently the best-performing Hatred Generator for demon hunters. With its high theoretical damage output, strong Hatred generation, and straightforward mechanics, it's an easy go-to skill to have on your bar.

As with other classes, when there's a single skill (or set of skills) that is much stronger or more worthwhile to use, it curbs potential build diversity. To help open up some other options, we're taking a look at Hatred Generators and Spenders, as well as some of the demon hunter's more iconic abilities like Rain of Vengeance and Sentry, and will be upping the damage on all of them.

Hatred Generators

Four skills are intended to compete with Hungering Arrow as a Hatred Generator: Entangling Shot, Bola Shot, Evasive Fire, and Grenades. While each of these skills offer some unique utility options (Entangling Shot slows enemies, Bola Shot has an AoE component, Evasive Fire provides an escape route, and Grenades can bounce off walls), their damage just isn’t competitive enough when compared to the theoretical damage of Hungering Arrow and its rune variants.

In the case of Grenades, the skill has some minor mechanical and control issues that keep its unique ability to bounce off walls from really shining through. It can be difficult to get the grenade projectiles to where you want them, and using the skill doesn’t always feel very smooth. We explored some alternate targeting methods over the course of 1.0.4's development cycle to help improve this, but we weren't happy with anything we came up with. Most often, we found that by introducing targeting that allowed Grenades to bounce off a wall in a satisfying way, it would often make it so you couldn’t hit a monster you directly clicked on. Unfortunately, we haven’t found a great solution yet, so the Grenades skill isn't going to get as much love this patch. However, we do want to revisit the skill in the future.

As for the other three Hatred Generators, rather than nerfing Hungering Arrow to be less powerful, we’re instead bringing up the damage values for all three skills to make them more attractive. To use Bola Shot as an example:

Damage to the primary target is being increased from 130% to 160%
Damage for Thunder Ball and Acid Strike is also being increased from 130% to 160%
Damage for Imminent Doom to the primary target is being increased from 182% to 216%

With these changes, Hungering Arrow will still do more theoretical damage against a single target, but Bola Shot damage will become a viable DPS alternative and it will also do AoE damage. Entangling Shot and Evasive Fire are receiving boosts to their damage as well, so they should be much more compelling choices when it comes to Hatred generation. Much like Bola Shot, they won't compete directly with Hungering Arrow in terms of raw theoretical damage to a single target, but the DPS loss won’t be as great in order to gain the utility they offer.

Hatred Spenders

Our general philosophy for resource-spending skills (and this applies across all classes) is if you take the time to spend your resource, we want you to feel like you got a good return for it. Elemental Arrow is currently the most popular Hatred Spender in the demon hunter's arsenal and a good example for what works -- given how quickly you can fire off each arrow, you can deal a lot of damage to nearby enemies. Unfortunately, many of the other Hatred Spenders fail to meet this benchmark in terms of DPS output, so we're buffing them up to match.

To give you an idea of what kind of increases you’ll see in 1.0.4, let's use Chakram and Cluster Arrow as examples.

Chakram:

We're increasing its damage from 150% to 170%
We're increasing the damage for Twin Chakrams from 100% to 114%
We're increasing the damage for Serpentine from 203% to 230%
We're increasing the damage for Razor Disk from 165% to 187%
We're increasing the damage for Boomerang from 188% to 230%
We're increasing the damage for Shuriken Cloud from 30% to 34%

Cluster Arrow:

We're increasing the initial bomb damage from 200% to 225%
We're increasing damage for Maelstrom from 145% to 165%
We're increasing damage for Loaded for Bear from 290% to 304%

Iconic Abilities

Just like Hydra for the wizard, Rain of Vengeance is intended to be a trademark spell for the demon hunter. We want it to be one of those buttons on your bar that you look forward to pushing -- not only because it's visually very fitting for the class, but also because it packs one hell of a punch.

While the skill is where it needs to be visually, mechanically it lacks the "oomph" that most iconic class abilities possess. Its damage is just far too low to compete with other skills available.

To bring Rain of Vengeance up to the level it needs to be, we made some pretty notable changes. Not only did we buff the damage, but Rain of Vengeance is one of the skills being converted to a strict X% weapon damage over Y seconds format, as alluded to in the Systems Preview. As a result, the new base skill is quite potent:

Current: 75% weapon damage for 5 seconds
1.0.4: 715% weapon damage over 5 seconds

(Anathema now also uses the "X% weapon damage over Y seconds format." Meanwhile, Dark Cloud, Beastly Bombs, Stampede, and Flying Strike are receiving straight boosts to their damage. )

Sentry is also a very distinctive spell that doesn't get used very often. It's interesting mechanically, and it has some nice potential for team play, so we'd like to make it more attractive. The solution was pretty simple for this one: we took its damage, and then we doubled it.

Diablo 3 Patch 1.0.4 Wizard Preview

2012-08-17T01:26:00.002-07:00

Summary of the changes to the Wizard class in Diablo 3 Patch 1.0.4

1: Buffing Hydra so all variants can compete on some level with the Venom Hydra.

2: The proc chance of Energy Twister is being reduced.

3: Meteor and Arcane Torrent are both getting damage buffs.

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Originally posted by Blizzard Official Forum

Like the other classes, the wizard is also seeing a lot of tuning improvements to help promote build diversity. Rather than focus on those minor adjustments, though (which you'll be able to learn more about in the 1.0.4 patch notes), I'm going focus the majority of this preview on Hydra.

Here are the major points I'll cover:

Skill design philosophy for Diablo as a whole
What makes Venom Hydra as strong as it is
Why, rather than nerfing Venom Hydra, we're simply going to buff all the other Hydra variants

Nature of the Beast

From a development standpoint, we love Hydra and put a lot of effort into its design. In fact, Hydra took many times more development time to create than an average skill. There are more art variants, more spell effects, and more lines of code associated with Hydra than almost any other wizard skill in the game (except potentially Archon). We did this because Hydra is an iconic skill in the wizard's arsenal and we wanted it to stand out. When you're in a multiplayer game and you see that Hydra spawn, it's instantly recognizable. And for those who are familiar with the class, you can also immediately tell which rune variant a wizard is running with.

Our goal for Hydra is to not just have each rune variant be visually distinct, but also for it to be better at something than the others. Specifically:

Arcane Hydra: Best at AoE
Lightning Hydra: Good against targets that move a lot
Venom Hydra: Good against targets that stand still
Frost Hydra: Good for snaring
Mammoth Hydra: Best in hallways

New Tristram, We Have a Problem

Despite these goals, it doesn’t take long to figure out that Venom Hydra is simply the best Hydra to use, regardless of the situation. This is mostly to do with its very high damage output. Although (technically) against fast-moving targets the Lightning Hydra does slightly more damage, Venom Hydra does three times more damage if you get the target to stand still, and that difference is simply too big to pass up.

The other rune variants have similar issues. The range on the Frost Hydra is too short to be useful. The DPS loss Arcane Hydra takes for being good at AoE makes it too weak versus single targets (especially when you consider that most of the hard fights are against high health Elites). The niche for Mammoth Hydra is very narrow and, if you can get a target to stand still, Venom Hydra does more damage in hallways than Mammoth Hydra anyways.

Five Heads Are Better Than One

To address these issues, we've decided to boost the damage of Lightning, Frost, Arcane, and Mammoth Hydra. Venom Hydra will remain the best against stationary targets, but if the targets are moving in any way, Lightning should be a clear winner. The range of Frost Hydra has been more than doubled as well, which should allow it to fill the intended role of snaring. Arcane Hydra will do less damage than Venom Hydra versus a single target, but rather than doing approximately 60% less damage, choosing it should only cause about a 15-20% DPS hit against single targets -- and you should be much better against groups. Mammoth Hydra will be getting a modest bump, but ultimately "good in hallways" just doesn't seem like a very good specialty. We're going to keep an eye on this one for now, but down the road we'd like to find something much cooler for the Mammoth Hydra -- like giving it the ability to move around the battlefield without needing to be recast (just as an example).

Here are some raw numbers:

Arcane Hydra: Weapon damage increased from 28% to 60% per Arcane Orb
Lightning Hydra: Weapon damage increased from 34% to 64%
Frost Hydra: Weapon damage increased from 31% to 36%
Mammoth Hydra: Weapon damage increased from 22% to 67%

Frost Hydra's cone width has also been changed from 15 yards with a 60 degree spread to 35 yards with a 30 degree spread.

Skill Diversity

One concern is how this change will affect skill diversity. If our goal is to promote a large variety of builds, why are we taking one of the most powerful wizard runes and then bumping all of the variants to match it rather than simply nerfing Venom Hydra?

From our point of view, it's okay for Venom Hydra to be extremely powerful. One of the trickiest things throughout our design process has been creating lots of appealing skills. You only have six skill slots, so the more appealing skills we can make, the more significant your choice becomes of which skills earn a spot on your bar. If a Signature skill is on the strong side, it starts to trump the other Signature skills. If a Signature skill is way too strong then it starts to trump your Arcane Power spenders as well. This hurts build diversity. Similar situations exist for Arcane Power spenders, many defensive skills, and the trio of Armor skills (Ice Armor, Storm Armor, and Energy Armor).

However, in the case of Hydra, the risk of trumping other skills is much lower. It’s totally okay for Hydra to be one of the most used skills because there’s still a lot of flexibility beyond making it your only source of DPS. If you can spare the skill slot, you’ll almost certainly want to combine it with a Signature skill to cast while the Hydra is out. If you can spare two skill slots, you can do even more damage by adding a secondary Arcane Power spender.

Trigger-Happy

While patch 1.0.4 has very few nerfs, one of them does affect the wizard. Rather than waiting for players to discover this change in the patch notes or while playing, I wanted to call it out here because it affects a build that I find to be quite cool and enjoy a lot.

Energy Twister is having its proc coefficient reduced from 0.25 to 0.125. For players who may not know what proc coefficients are: they affect how effectively a skill triggers procs (or effects that have a small chance to activate). Many skills (like Magic Missile) have a proc coefficient of 1. Skills that hit multiple targets or pulse multiple times have lower proc coefficients.

In the case of Energy Twister, specifically Wicked Wind, the 0.25 proc coefficient causes the skill to generate more procs in a given time period than any other skill. Currently, this is used in combination with Critical Mass to lower the cooldown on skills like Frost Nova and Diamond Skin. By reducing the proc coefficient from 0.25 to 0.125, the build still works and remains fairly strong, but it won’t be quite as good as it is now. (For those with extremely high Crit rates, you may not even notice much difference, but I wanted to call it out anyway. )

Originally, we weren’t going to make this change, but 1.0.4 also brings with it a number of new Legendary items, and many of them have phenomenal new proc effects. If we left high proc coefficients as they were, then a handful of skills with higher coefficients would become the de facto choice to use with these sexy new items. We were faced with a choice: we could either reduce the proc coefficient, or we could make it so these skills could not trigger the procs on Legendary items at all. We opted for the former because it seemed like getting a Legendary with a proc effect but never seeing it trigger would be very disappointing. Regardless, having well-balanced proc coefficients on all skills is not only better for Legendaries, but also for the game in the long term.

Buffs, Buffs, and More Buffs

The reduced proc coefficient is just a drop in the bucket, and overall wizards are seeing their fair share of buffing.

In addition to the Hydra buffs, we're also increasing the damage of some lesser used Signature skill runes. A few skills are very popular right now such as Seeker (Magic Missile) and Piercing Orb (Shock Pulse), so we’ll be buffing the other runes to match. We'll be revisiting all of the other Signature skill runes with much the same philosophy as Hydra.

Meteor and Arcane Torrent are both going to get buffs, as well, since neither of those feel strong enough to justify the Arcane Power expenditure.

Meteor:

Base damage increased from 200% + 60% over 3 seconds to 260% + 60% over 3 seconds
Molten Impact damage increased from 260% +78% over 3 seconds to 390% + 90% over 3 seconds
Meteor Shower damage increased from 80% to 104% for each smaller Meteor
Comet damage (of initial hit) increased from 240% to 312%

Arcane Torrent:

Arcane Power cost reduced from 20 to 16
Base damage increased from 175% to 210%
Arcane Mines damage increased from 150% to 180%
Cascade damage increased from 175% to 210%
Death Blossom projectiles are now less random

Meteor requires the player to correctly predict enemy movement in order to deal maximum damage, and Arcane Torrent requires you to stand still for extended periods of time to do damage. Since a player is putting in some extra effort to use these skills, some extra damage seems justified.

Diablo 3 Patch 1.0.4 Monk Changes Preview

2012-08-16T13:31:00.003-07:00

Patch 1.0.4 Monk Preview originally posted by Blizzardentertainment at Official Forum

The most important changes for the monk in 1.0.4 are aimed at improving damage-focused Spirit Spenders. We're happy with where Spirit Generators are right now, but unfortunately once you have Spirit, there aren’t very many appealing ways to use it. In many cases, the most effective use of Spirit has been to recast a Mantra repeatedly for the three-second bonus. While this is certainly one possibility, it doesn't seem as exciting as using one of the more offensively-focused Spirit Spenders (or at least having that option available).

Spirit Spenders

Exploding Palm:
From a strict usability standpoint, we think the visuals for Exploding Palm can be a little difficult to interpret. It's hard to tell who's affected by the Bleed and who's being damaged by the resulting explosion. Our Visual Effects team has made some improvements in 1.0.4 which will make it easier for players to tell who's bleeding and who's getting damaged.

From a mechanics standpoint, the three-second Bleed can make the explosion hard to pull off, and the damage just doesn't seem enough to be worth the Spirit cost. To help with both of these issues, we’re increasing the duration of the Bleed to nine seconds as well as its damage per second, which should make it more likely that monsters you’ve touched with Exploding Palm will go boom when they die.

Current: 220% weapon damage over 3 seconds
1.0.4: 745% weapon damage over 9 seconds

(Don't worry, Impending Doom is also having its duration increased to 15 seconds.)

Seven-Sided Strike:
The original intent for Seven-Sided Strike was for it to be a solid damage dealer that you could use for a quick burst. Where Serenity granted you an amazing period of invulnerability, and your other combat skills could put out some damage, Seven-Sided Strike would ideally exist somewhere in the middle by offering some invulnerability and some damage. Unfortunately, the way it currently plays out, Seven-Sided Strike feels more like a bad version of Serenity, and the damage just doesn’t seem worth it. To address this, we’ll be doing a straight damage increase to Seven-Sided Strike to make it an attractive option for those who are looking for a skill that really packs a punch.

The damage buff to Seven Sided Strike is significant. And although players rarely complain when a skill gets buffed, it does leave one wondering why a lower damage existed in the first place.

The answer is: our initial design was flawed in several ways. To get the skill where it needed to be, we identified three distinct problems that were plaguing not only Seven-Sided Strike, but other class skills as well, and each problem merited a damage increase.

First, we're upping the damage of many skills with longer cooldowns in 1.0.4. Across all classes, if I can only hit a button once every so often, it needs to dole out some significant damage to justify the spot on my bar. While some skills, like Archon and Wrath of the Berserker, are significant enough to make the cut, there are a lot of skills that need DPS improvements to make their cooldowns worthwhile. Indeed, many monks use Seven-Sided Strike for the brief invulnerability, not the damage.

Second, we're also upping the damage on skills that spend Spirit. As mentioned in the introduction, Spirit Spenders are getting buffed because the Spirit cost needs to be weighed against the benefit of using that Spirit on something else -- such as refreshing your Mantra.

Third, we're taking a hard look at distinctive, class-defining skills that create better tension on your skill bar. We'd like to promote skills that help to fulfill the fantasy of a class; skills that make you feel happy that you chose the class you did. Since the fantasy of a monk involves being fast, agile, and hard to hit, Seven-Sided Strike seemed like a natural candidate.

We looked at making these improvements across all skills and all classes, and Seven-Sided Strike benefitted all three times. As a result, the 1.0.4 version of the skill is incredibly potent (we'll save the details for the patch notes).

Wave of Light:
Wave of Light is the kind of skill that just needs to do way more damage. It has a big Spirit cost, but it doesn’t seem to pay off based on the amount of Spirit invested into it. In general, we’d like Lashing Tail Kick to be a skill that’s good against a small number of targets and feels relatively "spammable," and for Wave of Light to be a skill that’s more of an investment -- something that you don’t use as frequently, but pays out with bigger damage numbers when you actually do hit the button.

Current: 215% weapon damage as Holy + 45% damage as AoE
1.0.4: 390% weapon damage as Holy + 45% damage as AoE

This is just for the base skill. Wall of Light, Explosive Light, and Pillar of the Ancients damage has also been buffed up by a fair amount.

Passives

In terms of passives, it's pretty clear at this point that One With Everything is considered a mandatory passive for all monks. While "mandatory" passives aren't great, making any major change would do more harm than good, particularly when a) incoming damage is so high and b) monks need the extra durability in order to survive. Additionally, as a result of this passive, monks are more heavily tied to their current gear, so making changes to One With Everything would have very noticeable negative repercussions to the gear monks have invested in.

While we'd prefer that there wasn't an "absolutely mandatory" passive, we're going to let this one ride for now. If we do try to make changes we'll ideally do it in a way that doesn't invalidate the passive, doesn't hurt monk survivability, and doesn't undermine the gear people are currently wearing.

Last but not least, we added the ability for monks to wield two-handed weapons in 1.0.3, along with supporting animations. This has allowed some monks who enjoy two-handers to play this way, but it's not always effective. In the Systems Preview, we mentioned that two-handed melee weapons are getting a buff, and that will help. As additional support, the Spirit generation bonus granted by The Guardian's Path is going to be increased from 25% to 35%.

Be sure to check out our other class previews for patch 1.0.4:

Barbarian
Wizard
Demon Hunter (Coming Soon)
Witch Doctor (Coming Soon)

Diablo 3 Patch 1.0.4 Barbarian Preview

2012-08-15T09:40:00.000-07:00

The preview for the Barbarian changes in Patch 1.0.4 is now released. I'm going to go over a couple of things that we personally find exciting and then will paste the original below for those who want to read the entire thing.

For your main fury generating attacks Bash and Cleave are getting buffed to make them do more damage to compare with Frenzy. Hopefully this will give people the option to do what they want without losing to much single target damage.

For fury spending skills they are giving buffs to Hammer of the Ancients, Seismic Slam, Rend, and Whirlwind to make them more appealing and help diversify the barb builds we see being used. Hammer of the Ancients is getting an insane base damage buff of 125% on top of what it already was. No word on the exact figure for the increase to Whirlwind yet which is what I will be waiting for. They will also not be nerfing the double tornado barb build.

Anyway that was just a very short version if you didn't want to read the entire post by blizzard but as promised I am including it below for those that want to read all the specific details.
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Credit to Blizzard Entertainment originally posted at Official Blog

One of our primary goals with class changes in patch 1.0.4 is to help improve build diversity. Of course, this has been a goal for the Diablo III development team since launch, but our approach this patch has been a little different. For 1.0.4, we're taking a good look at some of the most unpopular skills for each class, figuring out why they aren't being used in your builds, and then seeing how we can make them better -- either by redesigning how they work or just buffing the hell out of them.

For barbarians, we focused on improving the following areas:

Bash and Cleave are not very attractive compared to Frenzy
Many of the damage-oriented Fury Spenders don't do enough damage to justify the spot on your bar

Fury Generators

Frenzy:
It’s easy to see why Frenzy is the most popular Fury Generator right now. It generates a solid amount of Fury, it has the highest single-target damage of any Fury generator, and it has the highest single-target healing using Life on Hit. The bonus attack speed also provides good combat mobility as well as the option to focus all your damage on a single target or distribute it between multiple targets as needed. We're going to buff Bash and Cleave to be viable alternatives to Frenzy for people who would like to try a different play style.

Bash:
From a design perspective, Bash should be the definitive choice when it comes to maximizing your Fury generation. That’s not currently the case, and given the current state of the game, this means attacking the problem from two sides. First, we need to make Fury a more attractive resource to build up (which also means making Fury Spenders more attractive, which I talk about below). Second, we’re going to increase the amount of Fury generated by Bash from 6 to 8, as well as the amount of weapon damage done by Bash from 150% to 165%. The goal is to make Bash not only a very compelling option if you decide you want to focus on Fury generation, but also an appealing single-target alternative to Frenzy if you don’t enjoy its mechanics (like having to manage Frenzy stacks). Currently, Frenzy surpasses Bash in single-target damage as soon as you have your third stack of Frenzy, and it feels like the breakpoint should be around the fourth stack instead. These changes should help better balance the appeal of the two skills.

Cleave:
Looking at the three basic Fury Generators (Frenzy, Bash and Cleave), the role of Cleave is fairly straight-forward: it should be the clear winner when there is more than one target to hit. In a single-target situation, however, Cleave will always perform worse than Bash and Frenzy. While this is intended to a degree, the amount of single-target damage you currently have to give up feels too great to make the trade-off worthwhile. At an extreme, if Cleave did almost exactly the same damage as Bash or Frenzy, but had the ability to hit a second target when one was around, Cleave would definitely become that “clear winner.” So, to make it more appealing to some players, our goal is then to find that sweet spot between where Cleave is now and doing the same single-target as Frenzy and Bash. We’re going to increase both the damage and proc coefficient on Cleave to close the gap when fighting a single target.

Fury Spenders

For many players, using Hammer of the Ancients, Seismic Slam, or Rendjust doesn’t seem worth it. To make these skills more attractive, we're going to straight up buff their damage across the board. How much? Well, we noticed that more players use Battle Rage than any of these other Fury Spenders, but Battle Rage is less exciting to use and doesn’t quite evoke the same visceral joy. So, we used Battle Rage and Frenzy as our starting point. We basically asked ourselves the question "How much damage would Hammer of the Ancients have to do in order to make Frenzy + Hammer [of the Ancients] as appealing as Frenzy + Battle Rage?" Players who really want to go the extra mile for the most damage could go so far as to combine all three skills together, so we kept that in mind as well.

Hammer of the Ancients vs. Battle Rage was a simple starting point, but we used similar approaches with Seismic Slam, and Rend. The basic idea was: Fury generation isn’t attractive to players because Fury spending isn’t attractive to players, so what do the numbers need to be to fix that? To continue using Hammer of the Ancients as an example:

We're increasing its base damage from 200% to 325%
We're increasing the damage for Rolling Thunder from 155% to 275%
We’re increasing the damage for Smash from 270% to 406%

And to provide another example, here’s what we’re doing with Rend:

Weapon damage increased from 210% over 3 seconds to 700% over 5 seconds
Lacerate weapon damage increased from 271% over 3 seconds to 903% over 5 seconds
Bloodbath weapon damage increased from 60% over 3 seconds to 100% over 5 second

With these improvements (Whirlwind and Seismic Slam will be receiving similar tweaks to improve their viability), we hope to see Fury Spenders become more appealing for all levels of play.

But What About…

I'll close by adding that there are no changes planned for either Sprint or Battle Rage, so all you crazy double tornado barbarians will still be able to log in after 1.0.4 goes live and continue with your current build. Or, you can try out some of the new toys we’re adding. Either way, we hope you have fun and are looking forward to 1.0.4!

Be sure to check out our other class previews for patch 1.0.4:

Demon Hunter (Coming Soon)
Monk (Coming Soon)
Wizard (Coming Soon)
Witch Doctor (Coming Soon)

Diablo 3 Patch 1.0.4 Legendary Item Preview

2012-08-15T00:04:00.000-07:00

Originally Posted by Blizzard on Official Forums

Soon after we released Diablo III, many of you commented on Legendary items. Most of those comments were fairly harsh, but they were also dead-on accurate. In many ways the Legendary items that we released with the game were just Rares with flavor text. You called us on it, and we’ve listened.

Since then I've been working hard with the team to give Legendary items some of the flavor and feeling that they deserve. With patch 1.0.4 just around the corner, and the new Legendary items coming in that patch, I wanted to share some of the changes with you here today.

Let's talk about the biggest complaints we heard from you all, along with some we had from our team, and look at what we've managed to do to address them.

They Should Feel Unique

Many of you commented, rightly, that the Legendary items in the game didn’t feel unique enough. Something that Diablo II did really well was to create some very memorable items, and they were called “Uniques.” While we call them Legendaries now, the word “unique” was something we tried to keep in mind when making these changes. The rarity of Legendary items combined with their color means that when they drop you should feel like you’re getting something special, something that isn’t just another sword. A truly legendary item should have history behind it, something that you can imagine a powerful wizard imbuing with special magics from within the depths of his musty library.

Part of that feeling comes when you equip the item, and you see that it has special, custom artwork that sets it apart from every other item in the game. The artists already nailed this part of it, but with 1.0.4 they’ve gone the extra mile to ensure these items show off, visually, how truly epic they are. But we’ll cover that in a bit.

On my end, the design end, to get the uniqueness into Legendary items, we've added custom effects to over 50 of them. Here are just a few.

We're letting players exact some revenge on rare and Champion and Rare packs by giving players monster affixes through Legendary items. This is just one example.

Reminiscent of the Enchantress ability, this lets you turn enemies against each other.

Aside from looking really cool as it leaves a trail of fire behind you, this lets you create some interesting traps.

There's some just-for-fun stuff too. Everyone wants to be just like Ghom! These pants make you “stinky”, complete with debuff and gas cloud effect -- you can even spread this effect to friendly players.

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A giant column of light shoots down, summoning an Angel to fight by your side. 'Nuff said.

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This sword has a chance to summon a demon to fight with you -- with a twist. This demon has the Fire Chains affix, and the other end is attached to your character. Mwahaha!

Promote Build Diversity

Because Legendary items are unique, we can do some fun stuff with them that we can't really do with other types of items. One of the main goals of Diablo III and the skill/rune system is providing a huge amount of character customization. With Legendary items we can help support those goals.

In 1.0.4 we've added a number of items that really fit into a niche skill kit. This can help people to branch out into less common builds by seeing this item and thinking, heck, why not give it a try? They may not have the highest DPS stats in the game, but they can help you play your class in new and interesting ways.

Some people want to try out a ranged barb. We think that's awesome. Here you go.

The melee wizard concept is pretty popular, and we think this wand will be too.

Certainly not an uncommon build, but this is a great item for any pet-focused witch doctors, and with the pet buffs also coming in 1.0.4 we think it’s going to be very desirable.

Provide Interesting Choices

With great power comes great responsibility. Some affixes in the game seem like they'd be too unbalanced if we let them stack too high. So how do we make sure we can go higher?

Goldskin is a good example. 100% gold find on it, plus monsters have a chance to drop gold when you hit them. Not too bad, right? But the tradeoff is it can’t roll core stats. We instead follow the flavor of the item, and being a skin of gold (!), provide you with some additional resistances and mitigation. It’s going to create some interesting choices on how you can make this item work for you. You have to find other ways to get the stats that you really need if you really want all that sweet, sweet gold. Balancing your items out like this can provide some fun and interesting challenges.

Honoring Our Ancestors

We brought a lot of items back from the Diablo franchise for Diablo III, but in many cases all we really did was bring back their name. I don't think we did a great job initially of bringing back the way that they helped you play the game. We've done a pass on all the "ancestor" Legendaries to make sure they remain as true to their name as we could make them, and in some cases we've made them even better.

New Frosties feel a lot more like old Frosties, with big bonuses to Cold Damage and Cold skills.

Honoring the original by giving all projectile attacks a chance to pierce through the target's defenses.

They Feel Powerful

We used to reduce the value of certain affixes on Legendary items because we were concerned that having fixed affixes would make them unbalanced. What it actually did was make those items kind of crappy. For example, if the item's level (ilvl) was 50, the first affix would always roll at 50, then the next would roll at 47, and the next would roll at 43. This was done to offset the power of fixed affixes in a random world, but we've learned it's not necessary, and Legendary items being powerful is OK. So lesson learned, we no longer reduce the value of any of the fixed affixes on Legendary items. For example, if an ilvl 50 Legendary item had Strength as one of its fixed affixes, previously it may have rolled a range that you would have seen on a level 45 item, making it seem really underpowered, but now it will always roll within the range of a level 50 affix.

In addition, Legendary items used to cap out at ilvl 62, making it near impossible to find a weapon that had strong DPS. No more. We’ve promoted a LOT of the new Legendaries so that they will roll at ilvl 63, giving them access to the highest possible affix rolls that are in the game.

We're also working on some changes for 1.0.4 to make two-handers better in general, and this will affect two-handed Legendary items as well.

Here’s a good example of all-of-the-above.

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BOOM.

Everything Else

That probably about covers it for the major points we're hitting with Legendary items in 1.0.4, but there's a few extra details on how they’re going to work once the patch hits we want to make sure everyone is prepared for.

Going Forward - As a reminder, these changes will only affect Legendary items that drop after the release of patch 1.0.4. This includes items that haven’t been identified yet (as items are rolled when they drop). With the extensive changes being made we can’t exactly translate old Legendary items to new. What might have been a decent item could become worse if we re-roll it, and vice-versa.

Not Everything is Changing! - Sometimes a Legendary just being really powerful is enough, and some Legendary items are already really good. Helm of Command, for example, won’t be changing in 1.0.4.

What About Sets? - It’s worth clarifying that green Set items are Legendary items (just with a set bonus) and so the above philosophy applies to them as well. Some set bonuses are changing, they’re becoming more powerful, and a lot of them are having their base ilvl increased to 63.

New Set Names - As set bonuses won’t interact between pre-1.0.4 and post-1.0.4 sets, the new Sets will have new names, as well as new individual pieces, to prevent confusion.

Crafted Legendaries - If you currently have a crafting plan for a Legendary item, and if we change the item that you’re able to craft in any way, you will NOT have to get a new crafting plan for that item. If you craft something right after 1.0.4 comes out you’ll get the new item.

We thank you for your continued feedback, and look forward to seeing how the new Legendaries treat you in 1.0.4 and beyond. Look out for additional 1.0.4 info blogs as we near the patch release.

One More Thing…

I’m really proud of how the entire team came together to make these changes -- and it truly was a team-wide effort. When we were first discussing buffing Legendaries and making them cooler, a bunch of the artists got really excited and went out of their way to make them a whole lot sexier. Here's a sneak peek at just a few of the changes they're making to the items, as well as some of their proc powers.

Please enjoy!

Andrew Chambers is Senior Game Designer on Diablo III, and spent six months running a live action Vampire the Masquerade game for over 100 people, and it mostly wasn’t to meet girls… mostly.

Diablo 3 - Patch 1.0.4 changes

2012-08-14T13:43:00.002-07:00

As we all know Blizzard Entertainment plans to release Patch 1.04 for Diablo 3 in the near future. There is no set release date yet but they have said it will be a few weeks. So far they have said they will be making changes to the difficulty of elites, legendary items, and the co-op system, among other things.

There aren't many details yet on the updates for legendary items. The update will aimed at improving legendary items crafted or found after patch 1.04 goes live. Existing items will not be changed. Hopefully more updates will be coming soon.

Elite groups of monsters are getting a few changes. First thing is enrage timers are being removed so for all you ranged kiters you shouldn't have to worry about how fast you are killing elites specifically for the more difficult ones. Blizzard is also trying to reduce the gap in difficulty between normal and elite monsters. Normal monsters health will be raised 5-10% and elites monsters health is being reduced by 10-25% as well as making certain elite affixes unable to occur together, such as fire chains and shielding. They are also taking out the invulnerable minion affix entirely. As part of raising the normal monster health they are increasing the magic/rare item drop by a factor of 4.

In co-op right now the more players there are the greater the monster health is increased in inferno by 110% per player. After patch 1.04 goes live the increase will be 75% per player regardless of difficulty. They are also getting rid of the magic find and gold find averaging between players, saying that the current situation is doing more harm than good. They want to get more people playing co-op without feeling like it is more punishing than playing solo.

Most of these changes are setup because they want to increase players farming efficiency. This information on Patch 1.04 has been gotten from and for greater deatils can be found at Official Forum/.

-Diablo afk bots

New Diablo 3 Gold Farming Bot

2012-08-11T17:52:00.004-07:00

Diablo AFK Bots Gold Farming Bots

http://www.diabloafkbots.com

Have you ever gotten tired of farming for gold or items on MMORPG's? World of Warcraft required insane amounts of time spent in game in order to accomplish your goals. Diablo 3 is here to carry on that farming tradition, and like it's predecessor Diablo 2, it requires that you farm for days or even weeks on end to get that item that you need. Who has the time to do this without getting frustrated every time you identify an item that ends up being worthless?

Blizzard continues to bring us successful games that millions of people play. So far they have done a great job of making games that take time to complete and even when you think you are done they have more end game content to keep people occupied. An example of end game content for diablo 2 and diablo 3 is farming the perfect items. Diablo 2 was easy to level and beat the story portion of the game, but after that is when the fun began for most people. Many people, myself included, farmed mephisto over and over until we had carpal tunnel or our dial-up internet got disconnected. Eventually it becomes boring and so most people turned to running the old mephisto bot (I forget the actual name). It is in memory of that farming bot that diablo afk bots was born.

We provide gold farming bots for all 5 Diablo 3 classes. The bots farm Sarkoth to collect gold and although Sarkoth is a simple monster to kill, killing him gets very boring very fast. Our bots do not get bored farming for as long as you'd like. They do it quickly and reliably earning you huge quantities of gold per day. Although you can find a few free bots out there, most are littered with viruses or just don't work as intended. We even found a couple that were designed to buy certain auctions off the auction house that would put all your hard earned gold into the pocket of the person who supplied the "free" bot to you. Skip the hassle and risk and buy one of our bots. They are cheap, reliable, and the best part is we have our own customer service if you ever have any issues.

Features:

No memory injection making it very difficult for the warden to notice you are running a bot.
Stashes high level rares and vendors blues and any whites it may pick up.
Designed for each class individually to make the best of their strengths to minimize accidental death.
Will continue to run on the event of death and will repair when necessary.
Makes anywhere from 100k-450k an hour depending on +gold find%
Can also be used to farm items. (Even more useful when the next patch comes out since they are increasing the possible quality of act 1 inferno items.)

Purchase one of our bots today or watch the videos at www.diabloafkbots.com

-Diablo AFK Bots