Diablo 3 - future plans include tweaks to item drops, update 1.0.8 to contain co-op changes

Blizzard is not only looking to improve "co-op farming efficiency' with Diablo 3 update 1.0.8, bit it also looking into making Rare and Legendary items more special.

According to a developer post from Travis Day, the team wants to make rare drops "feel" rare and actually be powerful. In other words, they want players to "farm the monster, not the auction house."

"By design, Legendary items are going to drop far less often than Rare items, and we want that rarity to be reflected in their power,: said Day. "When a Legendary drops, the question that goes through a player's mind should never be "is this a good item?" It should be "how awesome is it?" It's a problem if players don't want to bother identifying their Legendaries, let alone pick them up. We want to change this.

"In the future, we plan to allow Legendary items to also roll their base stats at the level of the monster that dropped them. This gives us the opportunity to broaden the range of Legendary items, providing players with more diversity. Everything we're suggesting for Legendaries also applies to Sets, too, by the way."

The same process will apply to Rare items. Day went on to say that the team wants to make it "fun and rewarding to hunt down new items through play," and in order to do this will be reducing some of the "clutter" by lowering the frequency which Rare items drop.

"This doesn't mean we want players to earn even fewer good items," he continued. "It just means we don't feel it's necessary to present the player with hundreds of bad Rares for every one that they might want. In the end, you'd find fewer items, but more of the items you find would be worth equipping. That's our goal."

According to another post, this time on the Diablo 3 forums, Blizzard is also looking into improving co-op farming efficiency with patch 1.0.8.

"Co-op play in general is a big focus of the 1.0.8 patch and efficiency is definitely one component of that," wrote senior technical designer, Wyatt Cheng. "Co-op is already more efficient for some players, but this is the exception rather than the norm. The degree of co-op efficiency depends heavily on the co-ordination of the party, skill builds, and the relative gear level of the teammates.

"We don't want to go so far as to make multiplayer feel "mandatory" for those who prefer to play solo, but we still want to err on the side of being co-op favorable. There's also a number of hurdles to co-op play beyond raw efficiency, so we'll be looking to alleviate/solve some of those hurdles too.

"The Identify All feature in 1.0.8 is an example of this. Nobody wants to be in the dungeon fighting monsters while your teammate is off in town identifying a full inventory."

You can read more on Blizzard's potential plans for loot and the co-op changed planned for update 1.0.8 through the links.

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