Diablo 3 Patch 1.04 Buffs Co-op, Removes Invulnerable Monsters

Blizzard Entertainment plans to release Patch 1.04 for Diablo 3 in a "few weeks." On Friday, they detailed some of the included changes which will affect co-op, difficulty, and other aspects of the game.

In a Battle.net post, senior technical game designer Wyatt Cheng said that they want to encourage players to team up more often. Single-player is still far more popular than co-op. In order to encourage multiplayer, Blizzard will stop averaging magic find stats among players. Furthermore, monsters' health will scale up by a lower rate as new players join your game.

Blizzard also wants to make the difficulty of the game more consistent. Normal monsters will have 5-10% more health in Inferno, while Elite/Champion packs will have 10-25% less. They're also tweaking some of the random abilities that monsters have. For starters, you won't see Invulnerable enemies again. Enrage Timers will be removed from monsters as well, along with full heal abilities.

"You’re already incentivized to kill things quickly, if a pack happens to take you a long time it can just feel unfair to have the pack enrage, kill you, and then heal back to full," said Cheng. "The original intent behind Enrage Timers was to have a few encounters that served as a 'DPS check' that also add tension and excitement. Due to the randomness of Champion and Rare monsters, combined with a general philosophy of efficient farming, this was simply the wrong approach for us to take."

Again, the patch is a few weeks out so Blizzard is taking its time with explaining all of the changes. They plan to make a post specifically on Legendary item improvements. Patch 1.04 will also make a "metric-ton" to classes so those will necessitate their own blog posts as well.

The update sounds pretty massive and perhaps the alterations will bring some players back into the fold. Reports suggest that the active player base for D3 has been dropping sharply. I'd imagine a lot of inactive players are more eager to get their hands on the promised PvP arenas, though.