DiabloFans

No patch planned for tomorrow. Just standard maintenance.

APRIL 27

• Bug Fixes
• Pets summoned by players and items no longer grant experience when killed in the Scorched Chapel

That's an interesting idea. It is unfortunate when you see a legendary crossbow, pick it up, and realize its a Hellrack. I've got an alternate idea, what if we make all the legendary items good so that you can Actually get excited even if you know it's a Hellrack?

We’ve seen a number of post letting us know that there are a lot of players who want to be able to customize how a piece of armor appears, and the good news is that we agree. Being able to distinguish yourself from other players can be compelling, and it goes a long way to enrich Diablo III's experience. We don't have an estimate on when this feature will make it into the game, but it's something we're working on. Travis Day is one of the game designers on Diablo III, and this is what he had to say on the subject.

I agree, visual customization has a lot of value, people like to differentiate themselves from each other or sometimes just get bored of looking at the same thing all day every day. In fact we agree SO much that we have plans to add this feature in the future.

Back in March we posted a developer journal focused on itemization, and Travis made a brief reference to customizing the appearance of armor then, too. Here is a link to the entire blog, but the section I quoted below is towards the bottom of the Gold Sinks Should be Exciting section.

"Other avenues we want to explore include providing players with vanity options or potential ways to differentiate themselves from their friends or other characters (i.e. character customization options in terms of gear)."

We’re also exploring ways to customize gear that isn’t just aesthetic, like giving players the ability to augment stats and sockets:

Don: Giving players more control and customization of their item stats is something we talk about a lot in our office. There have been a lot of ideas thrown around here and some great suggestions from the community, but we have not finalized any systems yet.

To give you an idea of what direction we're heading toward, though, here are just a few ideas that we're considering right now:
The ability to change a portion of a particular stat on an item to another stat of your choice
The ability to augment an existing item with a stat bonus of your choice
The ability to create an item with one or several fixed affixes—similar to the Rare recipes introduced in 1.0.7
We've also discussed adding other types of "socketables" with a wide variety of possible affixes that you can put in your socketed items instead of gems

All of these systems have their positives and negatives, so we want to make sure we make the right choice and consider all other changes we plan on making before deciding which systems we want to implement.

As far as the Mystic goes, she's a cunning lady. I’m sure we haven't seen the last of her.

Wyatt: When the game was in development, the Blacksmith had the ability to add a socket to an item. Adding a socket makes the item better, so you pretty much always wanted to do it, and we found adding the socket felt like a small chore that didn’t actually increase the gameplay depth. You already need to insert gems to a socketed item, and felt having to add a socket as well would be a step too many.

With that in mind, there are still some gameplay benefits to adding a socket that we’d still like to capture. Although having to add a socket every time can feel like a chore, if there was a mechanic that made it a legitimate decision, that is something we could explore. Additionally, there’s something to be said for feeling more invested in an item—taking steps to improve an item increases your emotional bond with it, which is something we could definitely do better at.

So, to answer your question, it’s something that’s definitely on the table for the future, but it likely won’t be identical to the system that was in Diablo II or the early iterations of Diablo III.