Today sees the launch of the latest Diablo III patch, 2.1.0. It’s a major patch, with a raft of changes, despite only weighing in at around 300 MB. European and Asian players will get the patch after the US launch.
The Diablo III patch 2.1.0 has two major goals, according to its developers. First, they want to ‘reduce the number of extreme outliers in class balance in order to set us up for ongoing improvements,’ and second, to ‘provide ourselves a new metric (Greater Rifts) by which we can more easily identify future outliers’. Both of these goals are essentially about improving balance between the different classes (types of character) in the game.
This patch includes four major new features: Seasons, Greater Rifts, Leaderboards and The Cesspools. Read more about them here.
‘Outliers’ refer to classes, or certain combinations of classes with certain skills, items and so on, that appear to have an unfair power advantage over other combinations.
While it’s relatively small at 300 MB, according to an official post on the games’ forums, applying the patch may take up to 30 minutes, as it alters a lots of files within Diablo III. Once the patch has been rolled out to players, the game’s servers will be taken down for maintenance between 3am and 1pm PDT (pacific daylight time). This or course follows the downtime players suffered during the weekend when Battle.net suffered a malicious DDoS attack.
Diablo III is available for Windows and OS X.
Source: Diablo II forums
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