Diablo Goes On The Patch, Gets Cranky

As many had hoped, the long-awaited Diablo II patch 1.10 was released on Tuesday. The response has been…hectic.

The guys at Blizzard were being awful teases about it, putting up the “Rust Storm” warning on Friday, hints at upcoming ‘server maintenance’, creating new chat channels and shuffling the forums around on Monday, showing up in chat channels briefly and making cryptic comments, but never actually mentioning the patch directly. This of course got the players whipped up into a frenzy, and the number of pages of posts in the D2 forum exploded from twenty-ish to over 75 within those few days. (Now that the patch is out it’s even higher, at 153 pages as I write this. The WarCraft III forum has…four pages.)

Now that the patch is actually here, response to it has of course been mixed. In general, the patch makes two major changes: monster difficulty is greatly increased in Nightmare and Hell modes, and the skill trees for each class have been revamped. A lot of people like it — the changes are massive enough that it forces people to reevaluate equipment and tactics, rather than redoing the same old monsters the same old way as before. If the game becomes too easy and there’s nothing new to do, you eventually lose interest and stop playing, so this should keep things interesting for a bit longer.

Some people aren’t so happy though. They were apparently happy with the way things were and now because of the skill changes their characters aren’t as effective anymore, and because of the increased difficulty they can’t hunt where they used to. Sucks to be them but oh well, them’s the rules now. It’s not like Blizzard’s going to take the last year and a half of work on this patch and suddenly throw it all out and go back to how everything was before. They’ll just have to deal with it or start a new character and choose new skills properly. Or, if playing single-player, just not upgrade to the new patch.

The patch is still pretty nice, though. Here are the highlights from the massive list of changes:

1) Ladder Mode

I mentioned this one earlier, and it gives everyone a fresh start basically. You have to create new characters for it, but it gives you that everything-you-find-is-precious feeling and you might actually be able to find something valuable for trading with the new economy, instead of the flooded-with-zillions-of-items old economy.

There are also some features that are only available with Ladder characters. The limit on how high you can combine runes to get better ones is higher, 29 new Unique items are only available in Ladder games, and you can do new weapon and armour upgrade.

2) New items and monsters

There are over 100 new Unique items in total, especially among the highest-quality ‘elite’-class items which were sorely missing unique versions, and more bonuses on some set item combinations. Random items seem to be better quality overall, too, with Rares appearing far more often. Rares can now get the same prefix/suffix effects multiple times for higher total bonuses, making things like +450% enhanced damage weapons possible. With the higher difficulty, you’ll definitely need those better items.

There are a lot more mini-boss monsters scattered around in Nightmare and Hell. For example, in the Bloody Foothills of Act V, there were only two boss monsters, Shenk the foreman and the teleporting demon guy near the narrow middle section. Now you’ll run into 2-3 (I think) other random bosses in that area as well, giving you more opportunities for better items.

3) New Runewords and Horadric Cube recipes

I haven’t scrutinized all of the new runewords yet, but the Breath of the Dying looks like the new standard for mega-damage weapons. Damn hard to find all those runes, though…

There are also new Horadric Cube recipes for creating items with sockets in them, repairing items in the field, removing gems/runes/jewels from sockets, and upgrading weapons and armour. The upgrades in particular are neat: what it does is it takes the item’s bonuses and keeps them the same, but puts them on a higher quality version of that item.

For example, a normal Axe does 4-11 damage. The higher quality versions of it are the Cleaver (10-33 damage), and the Small Crescent (38-60 damage). If you find an axe with, say, a +100% damage bonus, it will do 8-22 damage instead. If you then apply the first upgrade Cube recipe, you will then have a cleaver that does 22-60 damage. Applying the second upgrade would then give you a Small Crescent that does 76-120 damage. Normally you wouldn’t waste these recipes on junk items like this example, though — it’s easy enough to find a Small Crescent with better stats than to go through the trouble of upgrading it. Where the recipes really become useful is on Unique items. There are a lot of uniques with very good bonuses but which are useless because they’re always on a lower-quality item, but now you can use these recipes to convert it to a high-quality item so you can keep all those good bonuses and get good damage/armour. (The highest quality upgrade is for ladder characters only, though.)

4) The World Event

People who play on the realms have a chance at experiencing the ‘World Event,’ which is apparently triggered by people across the realm selling a certain total number of Stones of Jordan to the vendors (this is Blizzard’s sneaky way of getting rid of the loads of duplicated SoJs people still have). Once triggered, Diablo will spawn nearby and if you defeat him, he has a chance of dropping a very, very nice new charm. However, when triggered this way he’s not nearly as much of a pushover as he normally is…

5) Skill Synergies

The amount of damage/duration/etc. of a lot of the skills have been tweaked a bit, but by far the biggest change is the introduction of synergies between skills. No, it’s not just a management buzzword… With this change, points in certain skills can also increase the effectiveness of other skills. For example, the sorceress Meteor skill also receives an additional 5% extra damage for each point in the Fire Bolt and Fire Ball skills.

This lets you ultra-specialize in certain attack types if you want, doing massive amounts of damage, but also leaves you less flexible since you have fewer points left over to put into other skills. It’s another strategy now available for character development, anyway.

Screw EQ, I think I’m going to be playing D2 for a while now…