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Why is it taking so #&*@ing long?
The reason it's taking so long is because they are making such a massive amount of changes. Much of the game code was totally redone. Not the actual programming, but how information is listed in lots of the spreadsheets was completely rearranged, mostly in ways that will make it much easier to do future patch changes. This should be very good news for mod-makers, since almost everything will be much easier to manipulate. This includes stats for everything, item hover descriptions, spell hover info, resistances on monsters, and on and on. This means that in theory v1.11 could be done much more quickly and easily, not that we're thinking that far ahead.
The patch took months of work to just become playable, with all of the changes in locations of information and instruction execution order. Technical stuff, for the most part.
What are some major gameplay changes?
Some of these have already been listed (scroll down this page to see previous updates), others are new.
Monster changes:
The 50% physical resistance for every monster on hell is gone.
Monsters will have massively-modified resistances, hit points, damage, speed, AI, and more. This means they'll have at least double the hit points in many cases (to offset the removed 50% physical resistance) and much more higher/more variety in their resistances.
Many monsters will have modifications to the AI. They might not be so easy to distract with a minion or merc anymore.
Monsters will spawn with far greater randomization, especially in Act 5.
Random bosses should be more numerous.
Drops will be tweaked, especially for the easiest/most run item droppers (like Pindleskin).
Attack rates will be tweaked. Ranged attackers will likely fire faster, for example.
Skill changes:
No nerfs! The plan is that no skills (or very very few) will be lowered in quality. This doesn't mean they'll all work just as well as they do now though, since monsters might become much tougher.
(For a hypothetical example: If everything in hell goes up to at least 33% fire res, and doubles in hit points, then Firewall, Meteor, etc would seem weaker, even if the actual damage stats didn't change at all.)
Skills might have more secondary changes (like the druid wolf/bear summoning skills, where adding to one boosts another).
Most unused skills are getting major overhauls. We won't be surprised if each character has around 1/3 of their skills greatly-modified. A couple of examples that were discussed with the Bliz patch programmer:
Assassin Skills:
We know the most about these since they were what was being worked on the last time the patch guy was around and in a talkative mood. As far as we know all characters are being looked over to this level of detail, we just don't have specifics on much for others yet. All these changes are in the planning stages, so don't count any chickens pre-hatching.
Blade Shield, a never-used Assassin skill. Improvements considered are making it do say 1/8 of weapon damage (including elemental), and also do special effects like chance to flee, crushing blow, % to cast spells, etc. Duration from effects such as poison would be lessened also, possibly to 1/8th as well.
Charged Bolt Sentry, another unpopular Assassin Traps skill, might be boosted substantially. Every two or three skill points might increase the number of bolts fired, and their overall rate of fire might be increased.
Dragon Talon and/or Dragon Tail may be much improved. There is consideration of putting boots damage back into the game, and having that add into the formula for Assassin kicking damage. (Boots damage is in the code, just not enabled. It's like smite damage on shields; only visible to one class and not boosted by item stats.) Early plans are for boots bonus damage to be +120% Strength, and nothing from Dex.
Psychic Hammer will no longer stun 100% of the time in PvP or against boss type monsters.
Blade Fury will do some percent of your weapon damage.
Other Skills
The Amazon's Fire Arrow is one exception to the "no nerfs" rule, and it's being lowered in quality. As of now it does 50% physical and 50% fire damage, at any level. It is going to do 95% physical/5% fire at slvl 1, with the ratios shifting by about 5% per Slvl. So you'd need lvl 10 to equal what lvl 1 does now, but could (probably) boost it to higher than 50% fire, if you wanted really big elemental damage.
There is consideration of making this work the same way for Magic and/or Cold Arrow.
Multishot might not increase one arrow per Slvl anymore. One every other, or .66 per level or something like that might be implemented as a minor nerf.
Again, there are dozens more skill changes being planned, with as many as 10 or 15 skills per character getting a large alteration. Some will have more, some will have less, and we don't have any more details than we've listed here, as of now.
Will dupes/hacks/cheats be fixed in the patch?
We don't have any more information about this. As far as we know Blizzard is doing all they can to stop cheating now, so we don't expect any big changes in v1.10.
Who is working on the patch?
We can't name names, but the current patch team is two guys at Blizzard North, with the main programmer one of the core D2/D2X team. The other guy was added more recently, and is handling the item changes.
How many new items will there be?
Our initial estimates of just a few here and there are probably low, considering how much work is being done to the skills and monsters and other such things. We can probably expect dozens of new elite uniques, and quite a few new runewords and crafting recipes as well.
What about a leech penalty?
Since the 50% physical resistance is being removed in Hell, if monsters don't have any physical res, but are double the hit points (hypothetically) you'd need the same number of hits to kill them, but would leech twice as much, making mana leech very easy to have enough of, and making it far easier to keep your red full. Something will be done about this, most likely a 1/4 or greater leech penalty in hell.
Won't things be harder for spell casters?
Probably. Monsters will all be increasing in hit points, at least in Hell, and will likely get a lot more varied and higher resistances.
What's going on with the Cow Level?
Nothing more is known about this than we said in the earlier update. It will be "fixed" in some way. Whether that means cutting the exp greatly, only letting characters do it once per difficulty level, making the cows have a wide variety of immunities, or all of the above is unknown at this point. It will definitely not continue to be the great easy exp treadmill of D2X though.
Does Starcraft Ghost affect the patch development speed?
Not at all. Blizzard isn't a huge company, but they have hundreds of employees, and are working on multiple games at once. SC Ghost is one of them, but one of the smaller ones, with Nihilistic doing much of the programming and graphics. No one from the (very) small D2X patch team has anything to do with SC Ghost, as far as we know, and since Bliz has been working on SC Ghost for over a year before announcing it, it being known publicly now has no effect on the amount of people required to work on it anyway. More discussion of this and other aspect of SC Ghost can be seen in this offsite article, and you can discuss SCGhost with other fans here.
New 1.10 info
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