14 DAY TRIAL // After sharing the general modifications that will be made to Diablo 3 once patch 1.0.4 is released in a few weeks, Blizzard has now highlighted some of the changes that will be made to existing classes and their abilities once the new update arrives.
Diablo 3 came out back in May and, since then, it has attracted more than 10 million players to its addictive dungeon crawling experience.
Sadly, many players are still upset about certain things, including the five classes and their various abilities.
Blizzard has already made plenty of changes to certain classes, in order to eliminate overpowered abilities or to solve exploits.
Now, with patch 1.0.4 for Diablo 3, the studio is once again going to make various changes relating to classes and their abilities. In order to make things clearer, Blizzard's Senior Technical Game Designer, Wyatt Cheng, has highlighted the questions that have motivated the changes in the new update.
Does the skill have any control or readability issues that would make the skill less satisfying to use? If so – polish the skill more. A good example here is the Barbarian Rend ability – many people don’t use it because you can’t always tell which enemies are affected by the bleed and which aren’t.
Does the skill fill a similar role as an extremely popular skill? If so, buff the skill to be competitive with the popular skill. For example, Bola Shot could be a solid skill, but simply doesn’t have the raw damage when compared to Hungering Arrow, so we’re buffing Bola Shot to be competitive.
Does a skill have a dominant rune? If so, can we buff the underused runes to be more competitive? A good example here is the Wizard Hydra skill. The Venom Hydra is by far the most popular rune, and for good reason, so we are buffing the other runes to make them more competitive with Venom Hydra.
Is the skill a resource spender? In general we have found that many resource spenders just don’t do enough for their resource cost. Here I would use the example of Wave of Light, which is a fairly significant expenditure of Spirit that doesn’t always seem worthwhile. Many damage-oriented resource spenders are receiving buffs in 1.0.4
Would buffing the skill increase or decrease build diversity? Some skills when buffed cause other skills to become obsolete, so there’s a net decrease in build diversity - we’re more careful with those. Other skills, when buffed, add to the total pool of appealing skills, which increases build diversity. The most obvious example here is the Witch Doctor Zombie Dogs and Gargantuan, which are both receiving significant improvements in 1.0.4. Blizzard still doesn't have a concrete release date for Diablo 3 patch 1.0.4, but you can expect to hear some more details until it's ready for launch.