Diablo 3 Info

[chaos5061]

It's essentially being nerfed to the point of obsolescence until we can implement a new rune in its place in a future patch.

[chaos5061]

We've made a number of class changes (again, intend to post about all of them tomorrow) and we want to monitor how those shake out before we attack any content difficulty changes. Our intent is to get classes a bit more aligned, verify no new issues crop up from these hotfixes, and then considering all the factors we'll look at content. It's not a preferred method of operating, I'd say, but just because the game is so new we don't think quick decisions on overall balance is the right approach when the metagame is still shifting.

[chaos5061]

AH transactions are temporarily metered until we can improve performance. If you try to buy/sell too quick you may hit a 31071/31072 error.

[chaos5061]

// May 22 //
General
Players will now receive an error message when attempting to remove a gem from an item with no sockets (rather than disconnecting)
Players will now properly have their casting interrupted when attacked while performing resurrect on a fallen group member
Resolved over 30 game and service crashes affecting players
Classes
Demon Hunter
Active Skills
Smoke Screen
Duration reduced from 2 seconds to 1 second (tooltip will still show 2 seconds)
Skill Rune - Lingering Fog
Now increases the duration of Smoke Screen to 1.5 seconds (tooltip will still show 3 seconds)
Monk
Active Skills
Fists of Thunder
Skill Rune - Quickening
Fixed an issue that was causing spirit regeneration to incorrectly trigger off critical hits from other sources, such as Sweeping Wind
Mantra of Healing
Mantra of Healing will now correctly provide only two times the base healing effect for the first 3 seconds after activation, down from four times the base healing effect (tooltip will still show the old value)
Skill Rune - Boon of Protection
A maximum absorption amount has been set to 1000 Life. This skill will be redesigned in an upcoming patch.
Wizard
Active Skills
Arcane Torrent
Skill Rune - Cascade
Fixed an issue that was causing Arcane Torrent to fire 3 new missiles per kill instead of only 1 new missile per kill
Number of new missiles generated from this rune will now cap at 10 missiles
Energy Armor
Skill Rune - Force Armor
Amount of damage absorbed from a single attack will now cap at 100% of a player’s maximum Life
Items
The rare chest in the Town Cellar in Alcanus will now only spawn 50% of the time, down from 100%
Players can no longer dual-wield two-handed weapons.

[chaos5061]

You know all that WoW stuff I mistakenly posted in the D3 thread? It's been moved to the WoW where it should be: http://www.zygorguides.com/forum/sho...er-December-or

[krendar]

Boneweaver Hauberk. An armor you can buy in Act 3 Hell/Inferno: monsters can't path over it!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDL3jOrR2K8

Edit: You can post a link to a game break bug but don't embed the video.

[chaos5061]

And that will be fixed soon most likely. Probably within the next week.

[chaos5061]

Real Money Auction House
After the first compromise occurs on a Battle.net account, that account’s access to the Diablo III Real Money Auction House will be restricted until an authenticator is attached. If the account is compromised a second time, access to the Diablo III Real Money Auction House will be permanently revoked.

[chaos5061]

Diablo III Blue Posts
Many of the points brought up here are relevant to WoW Account security as well. Keep your plugins up to date and use an authenticator! You can get one for iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone 7 or even the physical one.

Account Compromises
The "hacking" ("compromising" is probably a better word, since no real "hacking" is going on) being seen in D3 is no different than what World of Warcraft players have been seeing for five years or so. The sad thing is, if no one bought game currency (gold, credits, whatever) from these third-party companies, then essentially no account compromises would be occurring. Compromises not done by gold selling companies are very rare indeed. They strip one player to sell to another, because it's much more efficient than "farming" gold. They still farm some of course, but they do it purely with compromised accounts.

Unfortunately, these compromisers make a lot of money off of the practice (because players buy gold) and so they have a lot of resources to use to try to get your password from you directly, or through your computer. Some of their poorly translated phishing e-mails may be laughable, but their trojans, infected websites, etc. are not funny at all.

If you have the physical or mobile authenticator (both of which major banks use and charge $30+ for) the chances of you being compromised are very, very small. I've personally examined the MSInfo files of nearly all of the handful of WoW players who have actually been compromised through an authenticator, and the sheer number of backdoor programs and other malware on their systems has been mind boggling. Probably not coincidentally, these same people were also running a disturbing number of file-sharing and download programs, including ones which are commonly known to not be safe.

Again, compromising game accounts is a big business in some countries. They have people on their payroll who spread false rumors of "hacked through my authenticator" just to try to discourage people from using them. We charge $6.50 for the physical authenticator, because that's exactly what it costs us to make them. The mobile one is free because we don't have to pay a factory to build them. Use them, and enjoy your gaming without someone mucking with your stuff.

What is the concrete cause of the hackings?
Well, the cause is people desiring a shortcut in their games by buying gold. If you mean the technical cause, as I mentioned previously the gold selling companies use a vast array of methods. A good friend of mine is a long time network admin (and a very good one at that), who had decided to not use an authenticator because he'd never had any security issues with his computer over the years. Well, an Adobe Flash vulnerability popped up a couple years ago, and he procrastinated applying the update by a whole week. As you can probably guess by the fact that I'm relating this anecdote, his WoW account was compromised and stripped because of that one week window.

There's absolutely nothing shameful about getting compromised, these companies are good at what they do. Heck, the former head of Blizzard Customer Service had his account compromised. It's because of how devious and high-tech the gold-selling companies have gotten that we implemented the physical and mobile authenticators. We can't physically go to everyone's computer and make it safe, so we've provided a tool that does it for you.

I've been a computer tech for a long time, and I've never had a single malicious security breach on any of my computers that I'm aware of, but I attached one of the very first batches of physical authenticators to my account. Why? Because no matter how good I am, sooner or later they were going to get me. But now, they can't.

Are you claiming that I did not have both the dial in auth and the SMS auth?
No, you had those. But neither of those are the physical or mobile authenticator, the main line of protection that is being referred to. The Dial-In and SMS are just nice additional layers of security to add to the physical or mobile.

It's becoming pretty apparent that our naming scheme might be causing some confusion, and I apologize for that. I'll bring the subject up with my management, so can we review both how the devices are named and how they are presented. If you have only one authenticator on your account, you want it to be the physical or mobile, not the dial-in or SMS.

Auction House
Is this intended (To gear up solely through the AH) or will the drops at the end of Hell be better adjusted to help gear up for Inferno Act 1 and so on.
The auction house obviously provides an incredible service to allow for very easy trades between characters, and essentially blows out the wide range of items you could have available to you at any one time. So, in fact, the AH has to be a factor in how we drop items. On one hand you have a huge benefit because you can buy and sell items very easily, as opposed to having to post up WTS threads in the old USEast trading forums, but on the other end it does impact the item pool economy with the inherent ease at which you can trade items. If the AH existed but wasn't a factor at all into how items dropped/rolled, the economy would be completely tanked within a matter of weeks.

[chaos5061]

With Diablo III out for nearly two weeks now, millions of players around the world are storming Sanctuary and joining the battle against the Burning Hells. At the same time, we continue to work around the clock to make sure you have an epic online gaming experience.

As more and more players begin to perfect their character builds and progress into Diablo III’s higher difficultly levels, some of the most prominent feedback lately has been about game balance and design, and that’s what we’re here to talk about today. As with any new game, gameplay issues are inevitable, and we hear a lot of feedback regarding what‘s balanced, what’s not, and everything else in between. We recently made some decisions to adjust (or outright nerf) a few class skills, and today we wanted to explain our overall philosophy on design changes -- as well as give some insight into some more changes that are coming up.

Before we get to that, though, we thought it'd be fun to share a few interesting stats we've collected since Diablo III's release:
On average players have created 3 characters each
80% of characters are between levels 1 and 30
1.9% of characters have unlocked Inferno difficulty
54% of Hardcore players chose a female character
The majority of Hardcore deaths (35%) occur in Act I Normal
The most common level 60 build in the game is only used by 0.7% of level 60 characters of that class (not including Passive diversity)
The most used runes for each class at level 60 are Barbarian: Best Served Cold, Demon Hunter: Lingering Fog, Wizard: Mirror Skin, Monk: Peaceful Repose, Witch Doctor: Numbing Dart

When it comes to making game changes, in general, our intent is to react quickly to critical design and balance issues, bugs, and other problems that seriously conflict with our design intent through hotfixes. For issues which aren’t as severely out of line, we plan to react in a more measured fashion -- through client patches. We have a patch coming within the next week (patch 1.0.2) that has been in development since the game’s launch and is mainly aimed at addressing service issues. The first real game balance changes, outside of hotfixes, will be coming in patch 1.0.3. We expect that because the game is new, some other issues will arise that will need to be immediately addressed through hotfixes, but in general, most changes will arrive through patches.

Regarding the changes to Lingering Fog, Boon of Protection, and Force Armor: we determined these skills were simply more powerful than they should be, and we felt their impact on class balance and how each class was perceived warranted hotfixes as soon as we were able. However, we don't want you to be worried that a hotfix nerf is lurking around the corner every day. If a skill is strong, but isn't really breaking the game, we want you to have your fun. Part of the enjoyment of Diablo is finding those super-strong builds, and we want players to be excited to use something they discovered that feels overpowered. A good example of this is the monk Overawe rune, which many players have identified as being quite good. We agree it's good, but we don't think it's so far out of line that we're going to swoop in and hotfix it out of existence.

Inferno is intended to be extremely difficult, but with some specific skills, a few classes were simply able to progress far more easily than intended. This made the classes, which were about where they were supposed to be, seem very underpowered. It also created the perception that the classes doing well were intended to rely on specific runes in all their builds, and the other classes were just broken. This is the opposite of what’s true. If any single skill or rune feels absolutely required to progress, it means that skill is working against our goal of encouraging build diversity -- and those “required” skills need to be corrected. We know these hotfixes snuck up on people, and it took us a day or so to communicate that they had gone live. However, our intent moving forward is that when there are circumstances where a hotfix is necessary, we’ll communicate changes that could impact your ability to play your class through ‘Upcoming Changes’ posts in the General forum. Ideally, we’ll let you know as soon as we even have the idea that we want to make that kind of change.

That said, we also wanted to let you know we’re keeping a close eye on Inferno. The intent of incoming damage is that it should be a very consistent drain on your health, and mitigating that drain is a major part of what makes Inferno mode difficult. Right now, there’s a lot more damage “spikiness” occurring than feels right, and that’s one major area we’re looking to adjust in patch 1.0.3. While we don’t have any specifics yet, our design goals are to support and promote build diversity; continue to ensure that a mix of champion packs, rare packs, and boss fights are the most efficient way to acquire the best items in the game; and ensure that all classes are viable in Inferno.

From a high-level perspective, we think a more fundamentally fun way to approach difficulty in Inferno isn't seeing how much incoming damage you can avoid or mitigate, but rather to see how efficient you can be while voluntarily taking on a challenge that pushes you. For anybody who's ever died because they chased a Treasure Goblin too aggressively, you know what we mean; dying because you got greedy or overconfident can actually be a lot of fun. Now that the skills mentioned above have been brought more in line, we’ll be keeping a close eye on balance.

We've also seen some people saying our intention with Inferno is just one-shot you to make it difficult. While damage is a bit spikier than we'd like, we're actually seeing a pretty significant number of people attempting Inferno without sufficient gear. There's a good chance that returning to the previous Act to farm upgrades will do the most to help you survive. That said, we’d like to shift some of the focus away from survival and more toward using a variety of offensive tactics to succeed. Survival will still be important, but finding ways to maximize your damage while staying alive is more exciting. We’re not particularly concerned with whether or not a boss is “beatable,” though it should feel epic and challenging to defeat it. We’re more concerned with ensuring that acquiring 5 stacks of Nephalem Valor and taking on as many Champions and Rares as you can remains the most challenging and rewarding way to play.

On to items! One of the biggest pieces of feedback we’ve received regarding items is the relative power of Legendaries. This isn’t a simple issue to address, as it involves some intentional design decisions as well as expectations built by other games. First and foremost, Legendary items are not designed to necessarily be the best items in the game. They’re just one additional type of item as you level up, and they are not meant to be the primary items you’re chasing at the end-game. They can -- and should -- be exciting to find, but they’re not supposed to serve as the single driving force of the item hunt. Rare items, for example, have the possibility to roll up “perfect” stats that can, if you’re lucky, outpace the predetermined stats of a Legendary. That’s by design.

One problem we’ve seen -- and intend to correct quickly -- is players comparing high-level Magic (blue) items to lower-level Legendary items as “proof” of an imbalance. To help correct misconceptions of the actual stat budgets allocated to items, we’ll be exposing item levels (ilvl) of 60+ items in patch 1.0.3. Comparing an ilvl 63 blue to an ilvl 60 Legendary will hopefully make a bit more sense afterward. In addition, we’re planning to just straight-out buff Legendary items in a future patch, likely the PvP patch (1.1). These buffs will not be retroactive, and so they’ll only apply to new Legendary items found after the patch. In the long term, we’re looking at simply expanding the affix diversity and unique bonuses of Legendary items, and we’ll be able to share more details after the PvP patch.

Other areas of concern have been both the gem combination system and Blacksmith leveling and crafting costs. The intent, especially with the Blacksmith, is that he’s leveling with you, you’re able to use him as an alternate source for upgrades. Our design goal is that once you get to level 60, his recipes are actually good enough to help fill a character’s potential itemization gaps. To correct these issues, we’re looking to adjust the Blacksmith costs for training (gold and pages) and crafting from levels 1-59, and reduce the cost of combining gems so that it only requires two gems instead of three (up to Flawless Square). Both of these changes are scheduled for patch 1.0.3.

Of course, these are just a few of the more prominent issues we wanted to let you know we’re working on. In addition, we’ll be addressing a number of specific game bugs and other issues through future hotfixes and patches. We’re going full steam ahead on the PvP patch, which will also include a number of game changes unrelated to PvP, and we look forward to sharing more about that as we get closer to opening up a PTR, where you’ll be able to test out our changes -- and enjoy mercilessly slaughtering one another in the PvP arena.

[chaos5061]

Finding and Trading Gear
This isn't a new concept. In Diablo II gear was randomized and so absolutely ridiculously rare that you could almost be guaranteed to never find the exact item you were looking for just by farming for it yourself. To be the best you had to trade items with others, as you might find an extremely rare item, they may be willing to trade for yours. If you wanted to get ahead within any reasonable amount of time you had to trade. Now, Diablo II had one thing going for it which was the mass proliferation of dupes for the rarest items, which completely tanked its economy and quickly allowed anyone to gear themselves in the best possible items for nearly nothing. In Diablo III you don't have that luxury, you need to actually find the rare items, or trade for them.

Now, you have a couple options, you can jump into our Trading Forum, post up your item/s and then meet someone in-game and barter a trade. You can also use the in-game Trade channel, and again barter trades. Or you can use the auction house system. How you trade items is up to you, bartering out of game, bartering in-game, the AH for gold, or real money once it launches. We're not forcing anyone to do anything, and if you don't ever want to trade with other players that's your choice as well, but due to the nature of drops in Diablo games, if you want to be the best you need to trade.

The difference in Diablo 2 was that you could solo act 4 and 5 with gear you farmed yourself. In Diablo 3 you have no chance in act 2 and onward unless you buy gear from the auction house. The best gear drops in the later acts (Jay said there was one tier of drops in each Act), so there will be a looooong while until I even have a chance at starting farming the best gear. Basically I have to gear up so I have a chance at gearing up so I have a chance at getting the good loot. In D2, I could start farming the best loot the game had to offer by myself.
Good point! Yes, Diablo III has an additional difficulty level, Inferno, with a very steep difficulty curve. One bit of misinformation is that loot is static in where it drops, but in fact the loot table bands are quite large. For example the "Inferno Act I loot" has a chance to drop in Hell Act IV as much as it does Inferno Act II. You will need to farm Inferno Act I to get a shot at those higher level items to drop so you can continue progressing.

[chaos5061]

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
Bug Fixes
For a full list of documented game and service bugs, please review the Known Issues sticky located in the Bug Report forum.
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
Achievements
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
Classes
Witch Doctor
Spirit Vessel (Passive) no longer clears debuffs when using waypoints or changing equipment.

[chaos5061]

ETA for RMAH is now 6-12-12.

[chaos5061]

Hello everyone, and welcome to Sanctuary! Below you will find the Known Issues list for our 1.0.1 patch. Please do not report bugs that you see on this list as we already know about them, and help out other players reporting bugs by referring them to this list. Thank you!

Achievements
The description of the Feat of Strength for "One of the Chosen" does not specifically state that it was granted to Closed Beta players, not all Beta players.
The description of the achievement "Why’d It Have To Be Snakes?" is misleading.
The description of the achievement "Crispy Critters" implies that all critters are found in one zone, but they are not. Good luck finding them!


Auction House
You cannot list equipped items that have been bought from a vendor.


Battle.net
Typing /who in General Chat and pressing Enter can crash the client if General Chat is above 50 players.
Very quickly entering, leaving, and switching chat channels over and over can cause a player from getting locked out of chat channels.
It is possible for a friend to be on your friend's list with no name if that friend has a BattleTag but has never logged into Diablo III and is offline.
Changing your account's Parental Controls while you are in Diablo III can disconnect you from Diablo III.
Workaround: Exit Diablo III before changing Parental Controls.


Combat
Damage over time debuffs are not benefiting from items that grant crit chance.
The resurrection animation speed is being calculated by the player's attack speed. It actually should be a set amount across all players.


Environment
Act 2 - Players who cast Town Portal while standing in a tar pit will cause the tar pit slowing debuff to stay on your character until you leave the game or manually walk into and out of a tar pit.


Items
Several Legendary items are not benefiting from the increased Attack Speed affix. All of these items will properly gain Attack Speed in a future patch.


Monsters
The gold dropped from Treasure Goblins can be picked up by all members of the party. Items dropped by the Treasure Goblins are still individual player drops.
It is possible for Champion-class monsters with the Waller affix to cast their walls at their location rather than at the player's location.


Followers
The total life for Followers is rounding incorrectly and is off by 1.


Quests
Act 1 - The Scoundrel can fail to appear if monsters are present at his spawn location at the start of the quest "The Broken Blade : Go to the Drowned Temple".
Workaround: Leave the game and create a new one, or don't kite monsters to Scoundrel' spawning area.


Starter Edition
When a Starter Edition character hits level 13, the experience bar will read 0/0. If the player upgrades, they will start a 0 experience towards level 14.


Tools
If the user has any connections configured in "Dial-up and Virtual Private Network settings" and they're set to "Dial whenever a network connection is not present," the install won't proceed past 10%.
It is possible for your cinematics to stutter and not play well if you begin playing Diablo III immediately when reaching Yellow Data.
Workaround: Exit Diablo III and fully patch your game. Your cinematics should play fine then.


Compatibility
Running programs that put an overlay over Diablo III (such as Mumble, Xfire, and MSI Afterburner) can cause Diablo III to crash. Use these overlays at your own risk.


Mac
The Restore Hero button does not become available after deleting a hero until leaving and returning to the Select Hero page.
Game client window becomes unresponsive when a dialog box is opened in the background.

[chaos5061]

Blue posted this on twitter: