Patch 1.0.5 brings changes to Trail of Cinders
With patch 1.0.4 we have seen a flurry of activity in the game and old players have returned. This last week has been a rather slow one understandably, but there are some small things to do warrant a mention.
We will get a patch 1.0.5 before patch 1.1
One of the biggest upgrades to come out of 1.0.4 was Trail of cinders being buffed to 1500% of weapon damage. To further add to the slightly overpowered nature of this skill, when patch 1.0.4 first hit, sharpshooter was also bugged, when used with Trail of Cinders. If you had Sharpshooter on, you could let it tick up to 100%, then use Trail of Cinders without proccing Sharpshooter. This led to some pretty fantastic farming using trail of cinders! Essentially you had double damage, since you were always critting! That was fixed pretty fast, but Trail of cinders is still a fun skill….maybe too fun!
As it turns out Trail of Cinders was never meant to do that much damage, and the fact that it released doing 1500% damage was a bug. Well, that was the official statement is regarding Trail of cinders. It takes nerves of steel to say, that something that was released in a patch and was mentioned in the patchnotes is a bug! But that is what they claim.
Trail of Cinders gets “nerfed” or rather “bug-fixed” in patch 1.0.5
TOC was originally meant to do 300% weapon damage over 3 seconds, which means it would have done 100% every second. What happened instead was that someone as blizzard HQ accidentally applied those 100% per second to 100% every tick, and there are 5 ticks per second, giving you 1500% weapon in 3 seconds. Somehow they missed this in playtesting and somehow they also missed it in the patchnotes and released it in its broken form.
TOC “bug”-fix announced on the forums – hilarity ensues!
To no-ones surprise announcing this on the forums and calling it a bug resulted in a pretty huge shitstorm. But for once it seems that this actually had positive results, since Blizzard changed their original intent of changing it to 300% weapon damage (which would mean no one was going to use it), to “we will have a look at what the community says and maybe change it to something between 300% and 1000%”. That is great news for Demon Hunters everywhere. The sad thing is, something like Whirlwind barbarian is still pretty OP, but that is working as intended.
Now the fact that they mention patch 1.0.5, also means that we will see at least one patch before we get the PVP patch 1.1. Most likely we will see more patches than this, since I am pretty sure Blizzard thinks that patch 1.0.4 was a pretty big, content patch and the next patch or two could just be maintenance patches. There is no date for patch 1.0.5 yet and even though Blizzard is at PAX, all eyes will be on Mists of Pandaria, so no news will come out here.
Diablo 3 Patch 1.1 release date speculation
Mists of Pandaria is launching at the end of September, and that hype needs to roll for a month or two, before Blizzard rolls out something as large as a PVP patch. I expect patch 1.1 to release in November at the earliest, and we might even be pushing early December/Christmas, to allow Blizzard to give Diablo 3 christmas sales a boost. Whatever the case may be, I hope they at least have the decency to release something other than maintenance patches before that!
Let us know when you think we will see the next big content patch in Diablo 3, and whether it is going to be PVP. Head on over to Facebook and join the fun. We are almost up to 1200 members!
