…or rather a preview of a preview of the patch notes for D3 patch 1.0.4

Diablo 3 is a great game and I think Blizzard have succeeded very well in doing to action-RPGs with Diablo 3 what they did to MMORPGS with WOW. They made it readily accessible for everyone, set the bar low for entry and expanded the potential customer base ten-fold. However, this also comes at a price.

When you “dumb” things down, you rob people of the joy of discovering things themselves. You get less of a sense of achievement, when you get everything handed to you on a silver platter. So Blizzard have a problem here, since people have gotten fed up with there being nothing to do except the “endgame”, which is making the numbers bigger….by going on the AH.

So patch 1.0.4 is pretty much make or break for Blizzard. This patch introduces new legendary system, rework of classes and changes to magic find.

Patch 1.0.4 is not the PVP patch, far from it

Blizzard just released a preview of a preview of the patchnotes on the official Diablo 3 site today. As I mentioned on the Diablo 3 farming Facebook group, I find it pretty telling, that Blizzard need to inform the community of a series of blogposts previewing the upcoming patchnotes and patch 1.0.4 itself. When someone is doing a preview of a preview, they are grasping for straws. In the post they mention what they will be revealing in the upcoming days (and probably weeks):

• Improvements to legendaries. This is going to be pretty exciting to see what they do here. Currently legendaries are underwhelming and not the standout items they are supposed to be. Hopefully this will change and hopefully this will also include crafted legendaries.
• Magic Find update. A few weeks ago, there was an official post about what changes to MF people would like to see. Specifically the Diablo 3 designers are looking to get rid of gear swapping, or rather trying to incentivize people not switching out gear before getting drops. Let’s just hope they don’t do anything like resetting your MF for 5 minutes after any changes, but rather that they let MF adjust gradually or something similar.
• Class and system changes. This could be pretty huge or it could be nothing. I don’t think we will see complete class overhauls, but rather tweaks to lesser used skills to encourage a diversity of builds. System changes could really be anything, so that one is going to be pretty exciting as well.

And then they mention the upcoming patch 1.0.4 and the patchnotes for 1.0.4, which will be released up to the release of patch 1.0.4.

Something is missing in this picture….and that something is a specific mention of what could give a huge influx of players to Diablo 3: PVP and PVP arenas

Did you notice anything missing from that preview? They didn’t mention PVP at all. But I would think that something as huge as PVP would get a specific mention and not just get the silent treatment. This is no surprise, since patch 1.1 will be the PVP patch, but it would still have been nice to get a small update or a mention.

This lack of information doesn’t surprise me, since Blizzard have a need to try and balance the classes for PVP. The problem is that the classes aren’t made for PVP, they are made for PVE. Trying to balance a PVE game for PVP is akin to opening Pandora’s Box. But sadly Blizzard will try, just like they tried (and failed) in WOW. But this also means we won’t be seeing PVP until Blizzard feel that they have balanced the classes, and that could take a while.

No PVP also means no end-game except farming. And in 2012 you can’t really have an online game without some form of competitive play and expect it to have a lasting appeal. Hopefully I am wrong and patch 1.0.4 will release with PVP and it will release soon. We’ll just have to wait and see what gets released these next few days, including the patchnotes for patch 1.0.4.

Head on over to the D3 Farming Facebook group, join the discussion and let us know how you feel!

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