Vaneras returned to the scene of his anticipation-building crime and threw some cool (but not cold) water on the llama orgy of excitement his predictions of upgrades to the Diablo 3 Legendary items created.
[blue]I do feel I need to clarify something though, before people build up crazy expectations; we will not necessarily get to see a lot of new legendaries added to the game, we simply cannot promise that at this point in time – as described in the Developer Journal update, we are looking into a “Less is More” model, where you will see fewer drops overall, but a much larger percentage of those drops will be interesting.
It is still too soon to say if the game changing legendaries will be all new ones, all reworked ones, or a mix of the two. When we do have this information, then we will of course let you know, but for now the only information we have on the future of itemisation is what have been posted in the Developer Journal update and of course the “Ask the Devs” answers on the topic of itemisation.[source]http://eu.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/7100770193?page=4#72[/source][/blue]
There’s no word yet on when the itemization changes will roll out, or how sweeping they will be, and none of the updates have given us any specifics thus far. The devs can roll out some new and/or improved legendaries in a patch, but any major reworking of the items system would seem to need to come with an expansion pack, since that would inevitably cause massive devaluation to all existing items. The changes are not coming up any time real soon, at least.
[blue]Grimiku: I’m really looking forward to the monster density changes in [wiki]patch 1.0.8[/wiki] as well, but we don’t have any updates for the patch schedule yet. We should have some information to share about it soon, though, and are currently planning to do a [wiki]PTR[/wiki].
The item changes mentioned in the Itemization blog are not going to be in patch 1.0.8, and we don’t have any additional information regarding when they’ll be implemented. We know people are eager to know more about when they can expect those changes, though, so we’ll be sure to keep you updated as soon as we have more details.[source]http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/8414572061#7[/source][/blue]
I doubt I need to remind you guys of this, but as the joke goes, it’s hard to lose money betting on something from Blizzard taking longer than expected. If you refer to the [wiki]Patches[/wiki] article in the wiki, you can see details on every Diablo 3 patch thus far released, and the dates they went live. There have been 4 patches since release with major content changes.
- [wiki]Patch 1.0.3[/wiki] – 19 June — Numerous major skill and balance changes.
- [wiki]Patch 1.0.4[/wiki] – 21 August– A huge content patch with dozens of skill changes, Inferno nerfs, the Paragon system, and much more.
- [wiki]Patch 1.0.5[/wiki] – 16 October — Many game and skill changes, a major nerf to Inferno, and the new Monster Power and Infernal Machine game systems.
- [wiki]Patch 1.0.7[/wiki] – 15 January. New ilvl 63 crafting recipes, the PvP brawling system, and made numerous skill buffs, chiefly for the Monk and Wizard.
- That’s 4 content patches in 10 months since the game’s release, and v1.08 is still a TBD amount of time in the future, without even a PTR start date. Given that history, it’s crazy (though tempting) to think we might see v1.09 before July-August at the earliest.