Diablo III Patch Notes

Diablo III Patch 1.0.2a – v.1.0.2.9858

General

• Tooltips for the following class abilities have been updated to reflect changes made in patch 1.0.2 and previous hotfixes:
  • Demon Hunter
    • Smoke Screen (Skill Rune – Lingering Fog)
  • Monk
    • Fists of Thunder (Skill Rune – Quickening)
    • Mantra of Healing (Skill Rune – Boon of Inspiration)
  • Wizard
    • Energy Armor (Skill Rune – Force Armor)
• Nigel Cutthroat has recently fallen on hard times and will now drop lower quality items when slain
• Gold and quest experience rewards for replaying "Heart of Sin: Get the Soul of Azmodan" have been reduced
• Gold and quest experience rewards for replaying "Heart of Sin: Go to the Keep" have been removed

Auction House

• The maximum duration for posted auctions has been reduced from 48 hours to 36 hours

Thank god for reduced auction duration.

Not quite sure why they'd lower the gold and xp rewards for quests though...unless those two were bugged and gave too much or disproportionate amounts relative to other quests.

@krisniiran: People were leveling to 60 in a day by creating a game, turning in the quest and rinse/repeat

@Leekspin: It was slightly more complicated than that, but that is the basic overall idea.

Yeah those two particular quests could give you ~400K+ exp if you did them in Nightmare/Hell mode with 4 people. 1 Person gets the max exp and then you cascade downward in the rewards until the last person only gets each quest once. Basically you could turn in each quest 4x with 4 people working together. Thereby super-boosting one person.

But now that is over and its back to farming Act 2 Road to Alcarnus or Act 1 Wretched Mothers over and over and over for exp in the "non-exploitable" way.

@krisniiran said:

Thank god for reduced auction duration.

Not quite sure why they'd lower the gold and xp rewards for quests though...unless those two were bugged and gave too much or disproportionate amounts relative to other quests.

Yeah, me and some friends leveled alts 1-30 in an hour with this method. It was only a matter of time.

@krisniiran said:

Thank god for reduced auction duration.

Not quite sure why they'd lower the gold and xp rewards for quests though...unless those two were bugged and gave too much or disproportionate amounts relative to other quests.

They did it specifically because of Nightmare difficulty Azmodan runs. Basically, you would create a game on the last quest of Act 3 (called Kill Azmodan). You would waypoint over to the small dungeon portion right before Azmodan (which was basically always the same), run through, pick up everything that drops and all chests/breakables/etc with a high magic find/gold find set, then kill Azmodan with about 2 to 3 stacks of Nephalem Valor (if you were 60). It would net you around 100K gold in about 20 minutes or so. It was also a highly disproportionate way to power level your alts.

Nonetheless, the Azmodan stuff were hotfixed at least five days before this patch hit, unless they reduced the gold from that first quest even more. It went from 1970 to 485. It doesn't mean the area isn't still worth it for 60s to farm for quick cash, so long as they pick up everything. I still make about 100k every 30 minutes in there. Then again, I also have a pretty hefty %gold set of gear to aid in that. = D

However, if you can farm Act 1 Inferno for Warden/Butcher runs, then that is about a 20-30 minute run as well in some cases and nets you about the same amount plus possible drops to sell for good money on AH.

@wreakOnes: Yeah, did the same for me, but went right through the second try. Just do it again. Why is Blizz having so much trouble with their patches is my question.

Another thing not listed on the patch notes but new is the appearance of general chat (which tends to be full of people not realizing they are talking on general chat or gold spammers). Hopefully this get's taken out on 1.3 or sooner as it seems like a waste.

As a design thing, there is a good case to be made that replaying quests quests should only offer only one and only one of the gold and nothing more. Any time you can set or reset a quest to make it repeatable it maybe exploited by players who are playing at "risk adverse" levels. I can see that players on Hardcore were reseting these quests and doing them several times in a row just to lower the danger while keep advancing in XP.

I'm getting real Fing sick of these 6 hour blocks of not being able to play MY game when they update!

@s10129107 said:

I'm getting real Fing sick of these 6 hour blocks of not being able to play MY game when they update!

Your avatar makes this post awesome. But yeah, this is pretty fucking lame.