Diablo 3 Patch Notes on Gems and Jewel Crafting

This week’s Diablo 3 patch has dozens of changes.  As a casual gamer I want to review the most important changes.

Repair costs have been increased for item levels between 53 and 63

Notice this is for ITEM levels, not character levels.  You can get around this be not equipping items in this level range, or just live with it.  I tend to die a lot, quite a lot.  But since I play slower than the power gamer, I probably have enough cash.  I wonder though, was it really out of alignment?

The rewards provided for replaying quests has been reduced

Obviously someone was exploiting a quest completion.  Too bad.  Since my hand-eye coordination isn’t as good as others, I play at a slower rate and, with my monk at least, replay quests to make sure I’m higher power than the mobs. I’m not sure how much reduced is really.  I’m sure somewhere someone has crunched numbers.

The character screen should now always display the correct act and quest information

Thank you!  I didn’t realize this was an error until I panicked last week.  My teen-level monk was showing on Hell difficulty.  Odd thing was, none of my characters were on Hell difficulty in their quests at that moment.  My demon hunter had been on Normal in Whimsyshire.

There are a lot of changes to various classes in Diablo 3, I’ll let you read them yourself.

Magic Find will no longer be considered when looting objects in the environment such as chests, barrels, vases, pots, and corpses

Another change because someone was exploiting the game.  So Magic Find is only useful against monsters you can kill. Good to know.

Destructible objects no longer have a chance to drop items, and will only have a small chance to drop gold when destroyed

That is unfortunate.  Sounds like the drop rate of blue items has seriously been reduced now.  Between boss mobs not guaranteed to drop magic items, magic find not working on environmental items, and environmental items not dropping items at all, that equals less items total.  This all makes me wonder, was there too much money in the world?

Tooltips for items on the ground will now show comparison stats

I didn’t notice this yet, because I gave up on the Tooltips of items on the ground.  My brain isn’t as smart as the guys I play with, so I rely on seeing that green text.  I’ll have to look again.

There are a ton more changes that I didn’t go over.  These are just some of the patch notes that caught my attention as a casual gamer.