Some general changes being made in 1.0.4

• Legendary items are getting a buff! A big one! Not only will they have better stats all around, but they’re going to have unique affixes. Such as affixes which spawn demons and angels to fight beside you, and affixes that give you elite mob skills(like shielding and molten).

• Weapons will get an overall buff. iLvl 61 and 62 items now can have as much top end DPS as iLvl 63 weapons, which should hopefully fill the market with more attractive weapons that have good LoH/Dex/Crit hit damage. I’ve seen so many weapons with +800 LoH and 300 DPS that I want to cry. Hopefully this alleviates some of those moments.
• Legendary items will be added which promote build diversity. For example this spear increases the thrown damage of Barbarians by 45%! These open up a whole world of possibilities. Builds that are completely non-viable as of now could become extremely powerful with the right gear set up(providing Blizzard implements this correctly).

• Elites are getting a nerf(10-25% reduction in health) and also some of the more frustrating affixes are getting nerfed(fire chains, vortex).

1.0.4 Changes and Implications for the Monk

• The primary focus of 1.0.4 will be to make improvements to damage-focused Spirit Spenders
  • This should open up a whole new world for monks and spirit per second items. Effectively spirit per second items have gotten an indirect buff, because spending spirit on skills like exploding palm/SSS/wave of light is much more effective.
• Exploding Palm will have improved visuals to make it easier to tell who is affected by the bleed and who is being damaged
  • The bleed effect and damage is being increased from 220% over 3 seconds to 745% over 9 seconds
  • I can see some awesome builds using really powerful 2handers with a lot of spirit per second and stacking exploding palm dots on mobs and kiting them to their deaths.
• Seven-Sideded Strike will be receiving a straight damage buff to make it more appealing
  • Maybe it will actually be worth it to have on your skillbar now? Maybe…
• Wave of Light is being increased from 215% weapon damage and +45% AoE Holy damage to 390% weapon damage and +45 AoE Holy damage
  • 390% That’s MASSIVE. Especially if Pillar still does double damage. Imagine 390% on the first hit, and then another 390%…
• They won’t be touching “mandatory” passives such as One with Everything for now
  • Meh, kinda wish they would make passives more interesting, but guess its good that they’re at least not nerfing us this patch.
• The Spirit generation bonus from Guardian’s Path is being increased from 25% to 35%
  • Depending on how well they fix two handed weapons I can see some really interesting builds coming out of this increase. A 2hander with massive DPS and high spirit per second could be great alternative to all these DW LoH builds.

Positives:

Looks like there’s a good chance that spirit spenders will actually be useful. I know pretty much all through Inferno, 90% of my spirit has been spent just keeping Mantra of Evasion up. This really opens up the door to more builds and more interesting builds, especially those focused more towards offensive DPS. And ACTIVE offensive DPS. What I mean by active is that so far most DPS builds have focused around our passive abilities(sweeping wind and tornado procs) so that we were still spending spirit mostly to keep one of our Mantras up and just letting our passive procs and primary attack generate most of our damage. Now we can focus more on using big cool attacks like Wave of Light to do some 300k+ hits to mobs. That should be quite fun.

If they fix two handers in an intelligent way this literally doubles our choice of available weapons. This should in theory lead to a lower cost for good weapons across the board both one hand and two hand and give us a much greater variety of weapons and thus builds to choose from.

Negatives:

They still didn’t touch Mantra of Healing or Mantra of Retribution! What the hell. These skills are fairly useless in the state they are. Mantra of Healing right now grants us a 960hp damage shield when you hit it. FIFTY spirit to absorb not even ONE THOUSAND damage? Even mobs in Act 1 do way more than 1k a hit.

My biggest concern for Diablo 3 still stands, the lack of an incentive to really play after you’ve hit 60 and killed Diablo in Inferno. Yes, 1.0.4 is going to improve the loot and make it more interesting, but I foresee people getting bored again very quickly once the “newness” of the legendaries and builds fade away. 

If I were a cynic, I would say this is just a way Activision devised to pump some more money out of players via the RMAH by introducing a bunch of cool legendaries but not really addressing the underlying fundamental fact that the game isn’t fun to play longterm… If I were a cynic 😉
You can find all my monk builds here. My youtube channel with tons of Diablo 3 guides here.
[Read more…]