The diablo III beta patch 5 notes – v.0.3.1. 7728 Patch Notes is live today 4th november 2011 confirmed by Blizzard. Already at Blizzcon 2011 the diablo 3 devs said that they have been working for a large patch for some time and leaked some new diablo III patch 5 info and the patch is expected to get out soon. and d3 patch is live now!

Diablo III Beta Patch 5 Notes (v.0.3.1. 7728):

General

• All characters have been wiped. As part of this process, artisans, gold, and items (including those placed on the auction house or in a shared stash) have also been reset.
• Switching out class skills will now require the use of a new feature known as the Nephalem Altar. Nephalem Altars are currently located in New Tristram, as well as in key locations throughout Act I. Clicking on an altar will open up the skill UI, allowing both active and passive skills to be selected or exchanged.
• Quests
  • Gold rewarded from quests has been significantly reduced
  • Experience rewarded from quests after level 4 is now based on the number of mobs you’d have to kill to earn the same amount of experience, rather than being a strict percentage of a level
• Skills
  • New passive skills have been added for all classes. See individual class notes below for more information.
  • AoE (Area of Effect) skills for all classes have had their damage reduced
  • Single-target skills for all classes have had their damage increased
  • All skills are now based off weapon damage
• User Interface
  • The in-game UI has been updated with general art and usability improvements

Classes

• Barbarian
  • Active Skills
    • The Barbarian’s Fury Generators have received a tuning pass. Bash, Cleave, and Frenzy now generate more Fury whereas the other Fury Generators now generate less.
    • Additional changes include:
      • Battle Rage
        • Damage bonus reduced from 30% to 20%
      • Revenge
        • The chance for this ability to activate has been increased from 10% to 15%
      • Weapon Throw
        • Fury cost reduced from 20 to 10
        • Damage decreased from 210% to 180%
  • Passive Skills
    • New passive skills have been added:
      • Nerves of Steel
        • Unlocked at level 12
        • Your defense is increased by 25% of your Vitality

• Demon Hunter
  • General
    • Maximum Hatred reduced from 150 to 125
  • Active Skills
    • The order in which skills are awarded has been adjusted for levels 1 to 13.
    • Resource management for the Demon Hunter has been reworked significantly. Skills for the class now fall into the three categories: Hatred Generators, Hatred Spenders, and Discipline Spenders
      • Hatred Generators
        • Bola Shot: Generates 2 Hatred
        • Entangling Shot: Generates 4 Hatred
        • Evasive Fire: Generates 4 Hatred*
        • Grenades: Generates 2 Hatred
        • Impale: Generates 6 Hatred
      • Hatred Spenders
        • Chakram: Costs 10 Hatred
        • Elemental Arrow: Costs 5 Hatred
        • Hungering Arrow: Costs 10 Hatred
        • Rapid Fire: Costs 30 Hatred (initially) and 1.5 Hatred per second for each additional shot
      • Discipline Spenders
        • Caltrops: Costs 8 Discipline
        • Shadow Power: Costs 20 Discipline
        • Vault: Costs 10 Discipline
        • Evasive Fire: Costs 4 Discipline to Backflip
    • Additional changes include:
      • Bola Shot
        • On-hit damage increased from 100% to 105%
      • Chakram
        • Damage reduced from 150% to 135%
      • Grenades
        • Damage increased from 75% to 80%
      • Hungering Arrow
        • Damage increased from 115% to 145%
        • Pierce chance is once again a fixed 35% rather than scaling with level
      • Impale
        • Impale has been given a new spell effect. It is now a thrown dagger instead of a bow shot.
      • Rapid Fire
        • Damage increased from 35% weapon damage per shot to 38% weapon damage per shot
      • Shadow Power
        • Attack speed bonus reduced from 50% to 30%
  • Passive Skills
    • New passive skills have been added:
      • Tactical Advantage
        • Unlocked at level 10
        • Whenever you use Vault, Smokescreen, or backflip with Evasive Fire you gain 60% movement speed for 2 seconds

• Monk
  • Active Skills
    • Mantras
      • All Mantras now have a 15 second cooldown and grant a bonus effect for the first 3 seconds after activation
    • Additional changes include:
      • Blinding Flash
        • Spirit cost reduced from 50 to 30
        • Duration reduced from 5 second to 3 seconds
      • Breath of Heaven
        • Spirit cost reduced from 75 to 25
        • Healing amount reduced
      • Crippling Wave
        • Damage increased from 120% to 135%
      • Deadly Reach
        • Damage increased from 110% to 120%
      • Fists of Thunder
        • Damage increased from 100% to 120%
      • Lashing Tail Kick
        • Spirit cost increased from 25 to 30
        • Damage increased from 130% to 180%
  • Passive Skills
    • Transcendence
    • Healing per Spirit reduced

• Witch Doctor
  • Active Skills
    • All Witch Doctor skills now do damage based on your weapon damage and cast at a speed based on your weapon attack speed.
  • Passive skills
    • New passive skills have been added:
      • Circle of Life
        • Unlocked at level 12
        • Whenever an enemy dies within 12 yards there is a 5% chance that a Zombie dog will automatically emerge
      • Jungle Fortitude
        • Unlocked at level 10
        • Reduces all damage taken by you and your pets by 20%

• Wizard
  • Active Skills
    • The order in which skills are awarded from levels 6 to 13 has been adjusted. Players will now unlock offensive and defensive spells in an alternating order.
    • All Wizard skills now do damage based on your weapon damage and cast at a speed based on your weapon attack speed.
  • Passive Skills
    • New passive skills have been added:
      • Critical Mass
        • Unlocked at level 12
        • Your critical hits reduce the cooldown of your spells by 1 second

Followers

• Templar
  • Skills
    • Guardian
      • Ability now unlocks at level 20, instead of level 5
    • Heal
      • Healing provided by this ability will now scale properly
      • When activated, ability will heal you for ¼ of your total health every 15 seconds
      • Will only heal when player is below 50% health, down from 67%
    • Intimidate
      • Slow amount reduced from 80% to 50%
    • Intervene
      • Intervene is the new name for Taunt, and now unlocks at level 5
      • Radius of monsters to be taunted reduced from 30 to 10 yards
      • Duration reduced from 10 seconds to 5 seconds
      • Will now only cast when player is below 50%
      • Cooldown increased from 15 seconds to 30 seconds
    • Loyalty
      • Life regenerated by this ability will now scale properly

Items

• General
  • Players now start with 5 health potions
  • Health globes now heal you over 1.5 seconds rather than over 5 seconds
  • The number of chests, shrines, and other interactable items (e.g. bookcases and loose stones) has been greatly reduced across the entire game
  • Items sold from vendors will now be at least one item level lower than those that are currently available to a player via drops from monsters
  • The level of an item is now much more likely to match or be close to the level of the monster from which it dropped, and the affixes that appear are much more likely to be from the upper range
• Weapons
  • Several significant changes have been made to weapons and weapon damage affixes:
    • The damage bonus granted to two-handed weapons over one-handed weapons has been reduced from 15%-38% from level 1-60 to 13%-32%
    • Wands attack speed has been increased from 1.2 to 1.4
    • Quivers, Orbs, and Mojos will now always come with +Min/Max damage
    • Ceremonial Daggers will now frequently come with +Mana Regen
    • Wands will now frequently come with the +Max Arcane Power
  • The amount of inherent slow granted by cold weapons has been reduced from 3 seconds to 1 second
  • One-handed crossbows and daggers now pull from a separate pool of affixes for + damage
  • The damage variance between weapons of the same type has been reduced.
• Bug Fixes
  • Fixed an issue that was causing two-handed Monk combat staves to not receive the proper damage bonus

Monsters

• General
  • A new Mortar affix has been added to the game. Mortar monsters will lob grenades at enemies outside melee range.
  • Lightning bolt damage from Electrified-enchanted monsters has been reduced by 40%
  • Monsters that are enchanted to an element (Molten, Electrified, etc.) now correctly have 50% resistance to their chosen element
    • Ex: Molten monsters will have 50% damage resistance to Fire at equal level
  • Wretched Mothers in Act I can now only summon one zombie at a time
  • Treasure Goblins are now immune to fear
• Bosses
  • Skeleton King
    • Whirlwind damage increased from 100% to 300%
    • Cleave damage increased from 80% to 100%

Crafting

• Artisans
  • Blacksmith
    • Blacksmiths now start with a Fist weapon and a Dagger weapon option to craft
    • Blacksmith leveling and crafting recipes have received a tuning pass
• Items
  • Pages of Training will now drop starting at level 6, down from level 8
  • The chance for Magic and Rare items to salvage into higher quality crafting material has been increased from 1% to 5%
  • Salvaging blue items now has a 1% chance to salvage into Legendary crafting material

Diablo III Beta Patch 5 confirmed by Blizzard:

Blizzard: We’re currently in the process of preparing the next beta patch for release. As part of this patch, we’ll be wiping all characters and items (including those placed on the auction house). While a specific ETA is unavailable at this time, please note that Beta Patch 5 may go live as early as tomorrow afternoon.

What expected in Diablo III beta patch 5?

• All characters, items and auction house wiped
• Changes to the runestones: not being level based
• Changes to skills: not be able to insta-swap and probaply only in town
• Fixed many bugs with Auction house where its not possible to buy out
• Fixes with many affixes and items suffixes
• Casters to use weapon damage as base damage, no more + casting damage items
• Huge changes to the Demon hunter resource system with the hatred system
• Monster balance changes
• Class balance changes
• Some new skills and new passive skills
• Alot of bug fixed, wizard electrocute stuck, barb stuck etc, fall down bug etc.
• Over all item drops changes
• Boss runs rares runs nerfed
• General bug fixes including lore and quests errors.

When Diablo III beta patch 5 get released?

Blizzard: We’re in the process of bringing down the Diablo III test server to deploy a patch and wipe all characters to continue the testing process. We anticipate the downtime to last until approximately 10:30 p.m. PDT. 4th november 2011.

Will there be new content or max level increase in the patch?

There is no indication or official statement that there will be added new content or the max level increased beyond level 13, it is possible in the future, but very doubtful. However there is chances in the future that Blizzard will release somekind of arena battle in beta as seen from BlizzCon 2011.

Total beta wipe of characters, experience, gold, auction house & items

Q: Would the character wipe also wipe stash space purchases, gold balance, blacksmith experience?

Blizzard : Correct. Everything will be wiped. Once the patch is live, you’ll essentially have a fresh account.

Will we see changes to items and auction house in the patch?

Yes, first of all items, characters, gold & auction house get totally wiped. The devs already confirmed that there will be changes to items prefixes and suffixes, there might also be added new items. It is also expected that Auction house gets advanced search functionality.

Will there be Class specific changes?

Yes, for the Demon hunter there will be huge changes for its resource system, where it’s hatred system will work very similar to monk and barbarian. The other big change is Wizard and Witch doctor will not have class specific items such as + spell damage or + spells casting (they are gone). As part of there base damage will be based from weapon damage (the weapon they wearing). Blizzard explains this with it should give more balance between classes and you also have to make choice between using 2-hand staff or 1-hand wand + orb or shield as 2-hand weapons give +20% more damage.

Known Issues and Bugs in the Beta 5 patch

Below are the major bug fixes that should be included in Beta 5. Not all bugs that have been fixed are included in this list. Please let me know if these bugs are no longer fixed by creating new threads per issue.

General

Experience Shrines are now granting the 25% EXP buff.

Battle.net

Clicking on “Remember Account” will now remember your account if you log out of Battle.net.

Several issues with the Auction House have now been resolved. Purchase away!

Classes

Demon Hunter

Several skills will now display elemental damage effects if the player is using an elemental weapon.

The Demon Hunter should no longer say “out of Discipline” when she is out of Hatred, and vice versa.

Fan of Knives will now be buffed by increased attack speed effects.

Monk

The player should no longer get stuck when casting and holding down Dashing Strike.

Environment

General

Shrines and health wells should now appear on the minimap.

New Tristram

The door to Cain’s house will now open correctly. A portal no longer appears on top of it.

Cathedral

Bookshelves have had several bug fixes. Loot from bookshelves should no longer drop on the level above the player. Clicking on a bookshelf will no longer attempt to path your player up staircases. Loot from bookshelves should no longer appear beneath players’ feet in multiplayer games.

Items

General

Rare items should now be correctly named.

Crafting an item with a full inventory will now drop the crafted item onto the ground.

Monsters

General

Fixed a bug where “!!Missing!!” would be displayed in the chat log if a player was killed by a Hydra spawned by an Arcane-affix monster.

The volume of monster and quest lore has been adjusted to match the volume NPC dialogue.

Quests

General

Pressing ESC and clicking “Yes” during a cutscene will now cancel the cutscene.

A quest bang should no longer appear on the minimap where the Blacksmith is located in New Tristram.

The Blacksmith’s anvil will no longer disappear when he is reforging Leoric’s crown.

Reign of the Skeleton King

It is no longer possible to lose control of your Templar after slaying Jondar. Previously, he would become unresponsive on the staircase near the exit of the Cathedral.

The Skeleton King boss fight event card should no longer appear when attempting to restart the fight after killing the Skeleton King.

User Interface

General

Cursor trails will no longer appear on screenshots players take using PrintScreen.

Hotkeys should no longer reset after a keybinding has been changed to “Not Set”.

Here is the list of known issues in Beta 5. This is by no means a complete list, but covers several of the general issues player will encounter or find during their testing.

Issues that occur in specific places are notated with “Act – Level Area”. The level area is the name of the location you are in. It is displayed above your minimap.

General

There is a slim possibility for characters to use temporary VO when leveling up.

Battle.net

A lot of the Battle.net UI art is using temporary art (such as in the Friends List) that needs to be updated. In addition, many pop-ups lack an X button to close them.

The /w and /whisper commands do not work. To Whisper a player, click on the Quick Chat Menu beneath your chat log, select a player’s name, and type your message. That will Whisper the player without using the Whisper command.

Clicking on “Remember Account” does not remember your account if you exit the game. However, if you logout of the game, it now remembers your account.

Classes

Demon Hunter

NOTE: Many of these Impale bugs are because of the skill’s redesign. Most, if not all, of these Impale bugs are fixed internally, they just did not make it into this Beta patch.

Impale has been given a new graphical effect. It is now a thrown knife instead of a bow shot. The tooltip’s damage numbers are correct, but the description of the skill is incorrect.

Impale’s skill icon does match current functionality of the skill.

Impale has a chance to miss targets when fired on an incline.

Impale requires a bow to be used even though it is no longer a bow skill.

Using Rapid Fire after running out of Hatred will play the animation of the skill but not shoot any projectiles. In addition, holding down Rapid Fire and running out of Hatred will not start the skill up again when your Hatred regenerates.

Wizard

No sound effect is played when Magic Weapon is cast.

Monsters

Explosions generated by enemies with the Mortar affix show up as giant pink squares. These textures are temporary art.

The lore entry for the Skeleton still will not play its voice over. The lore entry itself shows up correctly in your Journal.

Quests

Act 1 – Defiled Crypt: The Matriarch’s Bones event cannot be completed if players click two funerary urns simultaneously during the quest “A Shattered Crown : Search for Leoric’s Crown in the Cemetery of the Forsaken”.

Act 1 – Cathedral Level 3: The Templar does not speak when you locate his stolen items during the quest “Reign of the Black King : Find the Warrior’s stolen arms and armor”.

Act 1 – Cathedral Level 3: It is possible for the Templar to use temporary VO during the quest “Reign of the Black King : Find the Warrior’s stolen arms and armor”. The Templar will sound like a robot if this happens.

Act 1 – The Hidden Cellar: The lore journal “Adria’s Journal” is using temporary VO. Adria will sound like a robot as well.

Compatibility

We are aware of issues affecting nVidia Optimus users.

New Wizard & Witch Doctor Class Damage F.A.Q:

One of the guys who got up and asked a question at BlizzCon managed to get his question jumbled and sort of half-answered, so we’ve followed up directly with him. But we know it’s a big topic throughout the community, and so we decided to share a response Wyatt wrote up. This is pretty raw internal dialogue, so please be keep in mind that it’s rather mathy, assumes you know a lot about internal mechanics of the game, and of course… nothing is set in stone.

For any Wizard (that doesn’t use Golden runes and/or the passive that makes academic/signature skills add arcane power) the only regeneration you have is passive. Of two weapons with equal DPS, but one with a slower attack speed, you overall better damage for the skills that actually spend arcane power, while your academic/signature skills are no different in damage done for the same time spent.

What I mean is that if you are casting meteor and magic missile, the meteor does more damage on a slower weapon but your signature spells don’t do ANY additional damage at all for faster casting speeds. They do the exact same damage with slow and fast weapons given that the DPS is the same. The time between 2 casts of meteor is exactly the same regardless of weapon speed: 4.8 seconds. The DPS of signature/academic skills is the exactly the same regardless of weapon speed assuming same DPS. 2 casts at 100 damage each is the same as 4 casts at 50 damage each, because it’s taking the same percentage damage from the weapon. This means for any two items of the same DPS, you get a boost in overall damage done for any period of time, and no additional cost by going with the slower weapon because it makes meteor do more damage, for free.

Side note: There actually can be a small, but not significant enough difference if the casting time between casts of meteor can actually inch out an extra signature/academic spell between it, based off the item. The difference between the damage the extra cast gets in and the extra power of the meteor is always in the meteor (or otherwise high AP spending) skill.

The only two “offensive” skills that the wizard has that don’t drain AP significantly fast are like you said Disintigrate, and additionally Arcane Torrent. Everything else does drain it quickly as to where resource manangement does matter more. Which means anyone who uses any of the other 8 “offensive skills” WILL care about doing more damage.
So the question was, given the math and change to weapon speeds affecting cast speed, is there anything you were doing to make faster weapons have more incentive to using them (like changing the arcane power cost based on weapon speed, change the regeneration rate of AP based on weapon speed, making signature spells without runes and passives give AP back like other classes resource generators) or if this was an intentional design, and slower weapons of equal DPS just are, always better (until using golden runes/passives finally hurdles over the breaking point late in inferno) or is this still something that you’re looking into and need to work on?

I’d invite you to look more deeply into the math regarding why slower weapons are better, someone started a thread in the Diablo 3 Wizard forums:http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/3424795605

-BlizzCon Question Asker Guy

Okay so first I’ll start by saying that all of your math is correct, (except for the one exception case that I’ll mention later). The conclusions are all based on information you have available, so mostly I’m going to mention a few things to consider, and then I’ll fill in with additional information to complete the picture.

First, a few qualitative comments:

Yes, your build absolutely matters. Some builds may be well designed to favor 2-Handers, and some may favor 1-handers. So the general statement of “The correct weapon depends on your build” overrides everything else I write.

Additionally though, two general rules of Diablo weapon speeds still applies – spilled damage matters, and speed matters for combat effectiveness. In WoW, you might use a 1.5 second cast spell over a 2.5 second cast spell because you simply can’t afford to stand still that extra 1 second. How many spells in WoW do you cast purely by virtue of them being instant cast or castable while moving? In Diablo, virtually every spell is working off of your weapon speed, and the need to be able to quickly move 1/10th of a second sooner sometimes matters. Spilled damage matters too. Many aspects of Diablo involve fighting hordes of small monsters. When a monster has only 150 health, who really cares that you hit it for 300 damage instead of 200 damage? Either way it’s dead. And if it’s dead with a faster weapon, that means you can get to the next monster faster. This means that a weapon with a 1.3 speed that can 1-shot enemies actually has a 30% killing throughput increase over a weapon with a 1.0 speed.

“But I don’t care about these edge cases”.

Well first, I would argue that in Diablo, these aren’t edge cases, they are a core part of the gameplay that come up all of the time.

HOWEVER, for those who are insistent on maximizing theoretical DPS and AP usage, we’ve decided to cover you anyways.

First, straight up. all things being equal, 2-handers do more damage than 1-handers. This is pretty obvious, but I want to confirm and validate this. The reason it’s important to call this out is that all the calculations assume “for any 2 items of the same DPS”. But that’s not a great starting point, because for any two comparable items at any given level, 2-handers do at least 15% more damage than 1-handers, and in many cases 20-25% more.

To put it another way, many of the posts in the linked thread make an assumption that two weapons are equal DPS. This assumption is flawed – what you really want to ask is “For the theoretically best 2-hander in the entire world (even though I’ll never get one)” vs. “the theoretically best 1-hander in the entire world (even though I’ll never get one)”.

However, what you choose to put in your off-hand, should you choose to wield one, matters.

First, no matter WHAT you use, you are getting a bunch of extra stats. In addition to DPS from Attack and Precision, you’re getting whatever other item stats are on your offhand. So you’re trading off a theoretical Arcane power efficiency boost for the stats of an offhand.

Furthermore, if you use a shield, you’re getting a big armor boost. If you haven’t played Diablo in a while, people easily forget, but a lot of Sorceress players used a shield in Diablo II. For some players there is a “fantasy” of “I don’t need a shield ’cause I don’t plan on getting hit”. The reality is that we don’t let you get away with that in Diablo. You get hit. We don’t have heal, tank and DPS roles in Diablo, so everybody in Diablo eventually takes damage.

Additionally, if you choose to use an orb, every wizard Orb (and witchdoctor Mojo) comes with +dmg on it. So if your mainhand does 8-10 damage at 1.4 speed, and your orb adds 3-4 damage, then that means you’re doing 11-14 damage at 1.4 speed. In many cases the orb + the stats on the orb completely closes the 15-25% DPS gap between 2-handers and 1-handers.

Add on top of that +dmg from your rings and amulets, and currently with internal tuning numbers (this may not be how we ship), but 1-handers + offhand out-DPS 2-handers almost all of the time. It takes a luckily rolled 2-hander to out-DPS most 1-hand + offhand setups if you can also spare some +dmg on your rings and amulets.

Finally, fast weapons are better at fishing for procs. Diablo has lots of very cool proc effects. Chance to gain Arcane power on critical hit. Chance to summon a fetish on spell cast passive on the Witchdoctor. Faster and more frequent casts means more opportunities to fish for procs.

Where does that leave us? Well currently for internal testing of Inferno mode, 1H+Orb is overwhelmingly better. You get more damage, better mobility, more stats, and more proc fishing. 2H gets you better Arcane Power efficiency. If anything I’m currently worried that 2H is too weak. The most likely solution on this front will be to reduce the amount of +dmg found on rings and amulets to reel in the damage advantage of 1H+Orb. However, the value of Arcane Power efficiency varies the more you have to run and move. If you’re running and moving constantly, then AP efficiency lets you drop big bombs like meteor and Hydra when you finally get to stand still. Since the amount of running and moving varies from situation to situation, I’m actually fairly happy with where things are.

On the topic of Disintegrate and Arcane Torrent, we’re actually currently considering a change to make them drain AP faster, to match the drain rate on all other skills. I haven’t decided yet whether it’s better for the game for the philosophy on AP to remain consistent across all skills, or if it’s cool that 2 skills break the rule. (Ray of Frost breaks it too BTW). I am currently leaning towards having it drain AP faster because although I absolutely LOVE having different skills for different builds, I also think that when it comes to your resource system, having some standardized themes is what makes it possible to design all the OTHER skills/systems that break those rules. For example, standardized “fast weapons drain AP faster” is also what let’s us do “Arcane power on Crit” that let’s you feel like you’re cheating with all the skills.

On a side note, I don’t think you actually get any potential DPS increase by being able to squeeze in an extra cast in between casts of meteor because the time of 4.8 seconds is the amount of time it takes to regenerate back the AP cost of Meteor, but it’s not like any additional AP just ‘disappeared”, you still have it. A 65 AP cost spell gives you a 35 AP buffer to pool over multiple casts. So let’s say that you figure out your theoretical breakpoint is “6.9 electrocutes in between every meteor” and you think you’re going to get an extra cast if you can get that to “7 electrocutes between every meteor”. That’s not really correct because 6.9 actually plays out as “Meteor // 6 Electrocutes”…. repeated 9 times followed by “Meteor-7 electrocutes”.

To be even more pedantic, (but I know you theorycrafting folks geek out on this stuff anyways), this has never actually come up as a balancing issue in any of our internal tests because a Wizard never stands still shooting long enough for this to ever actually matter. The truth is that you’re going to weave in other skills, or have to spend time moving, or whatever else long before anything in the previous paragraph matters.

-Wyatt

Boss runs magic find item drops nerfed ?

So blizzard is trying to encourage us to do more randomized content. If I want to kill bosses to get my loot shouldn’t I be able to? Why penalize players who want to run bosses as well as random content why not make everything equal?

The purpose is devaluing boss runs, not making them pointless. I guess you could make the argument that anything beyond what is most efficient is pointless, which isn’t totally wrong, but there’s still plenty of grey area.

Bosses have fixed locations, and fixed mechanics, these two basic truths mean for very formulaic gameplay. Formulaic gameplay leads to formulaic builds to best take advantage of them, and as much as some individuals might like the repetition, we don’t believe they’re healthy for what we intend to be a diverse character landscape.

Character and build diversity is not only built by the mechanics and systems that create a build, but also what challenges those builds face that make them viable or not viable. You can have an awesome character customization system with tons of complex systems that feed into infinite character customization, but it doesn’t mean anything if the content that the character is facing doesn’t challenge it and validate the choices that were made.

Rares and champions tend to have either partially or completely randomized locations and affixes. We believe that making it less of a formula, and using the Diablo-centric randomness to drive the end-game gameplay as well as item drops, it will mean for a more compelling and diverse experience, which is simply going to be more interesting for more players. We expect that a huge chunk of people that buy Diablo III will never make it to Inferno, but that doesn’t mean we should punish the people who do with boring and repetitive avenues for acquiring drops. The formulaic nature of bosses will ensure that they are the goal for item runs unless we devalue them, and so that’s what we’re going to try out.

I will also say that we don’t think Inferno is the end-all solution to creating an exciting end-game. We’re pretty sure it will be a great improvement, and excellent first step, but it’s still quite a ways away from a true end-game content solution. We hope to be able to share some of the other thoughts we have post-release.

Please note that the information is subject to change by Blizzard.