Diablo II: Lord of Destruction Patch History

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This page concerns the patch history for .

Patch 1.10

Long thought to be a myth or an aborted attempt, Patch 1.10 was announced in May 2002 and was finally released to the public on October 28, 2003. This patch adds several new features and items into the game.

Ladder Characters: The patch introduces a new type of characters called "Ladder Characters". Only Ladder Characters are ranked on the ladder (lists of the top 1000 characters on a realm in different categories), and these characters can only join games created by other ladder characters. This effectively creates a distinct economy for these characters free from the existing economy where any item in the game is available.

Ladder seasons are also introduced where ladder characters play together for a season. The standard season length is still unknown. When a ladder season ends, the ladder characters are converted to non-ladder characters. To continue playing in the new ladder season, players will have to create new characters, thus restarting the economy.

Ladder-only Features: The patch also includes items and cube recipes that are ladder-only. These can be found in game types except non-ladder Battle.net games. This restriction was added to compensate for increased monster difficulty in ladder games, and also because overall difficulty was further increased as the players have no longer access to their non-ladder items to help. When a ladder season ends the ladder-only items found will be moved to the non-ladder realm with the characters and will be quite valuable.

Rust Storm: Blizzard also implemented a new system for identifying and deleting illegal items on the realms. The system was dubbed "rust storm" because hacked items are "rusted" and removed from the realms. When Blizzard is made aware of a new hacked or bugged item, they can simply update the rust storm filters and the item will be deleted from the entire realm. The feature was intended to help keep the economy stable and free from items that give players an unfair advantage. The rust storm has had the unintended side effect of actually creating instability in the economy. Runes, extremely rare items that are ingredients in the most powerful weapons, have become the main currency in the game's economy. Runes have an extremely low drop rate which would render their availability very limited. Mass illegal duplication of these runes have made almost every high end rune a fabrication and subject to deletion by the rust storm. The problem then arises that players which do not duplicate runes are subject to trading for these runes. At any moment these duplicated runes would vanish and leave the legitimate player with nothing.

Leeching and Rushing: A popular playing style in the pre-1.10 realms was to "rush" a character, meaning that the player would have a friend of much higher level (the "rusher") quickly play through the game for them, completing the needed quests and skipping the others, while the friend of lower level (the "rushed") tagged along at a safe distance. This allowed the rushed player to bypass much of the long areas of the game that are time consuming to complete. The player would then "leech experience" (i.e., gain through no effort of their own) from higher level characters to gain levels before continuing. Leeching experience was most commonly done in the Secret Cow Level, since this level could be created repeatedly as long as the Cow King was not killed by the game maker, and because the level had the highest density of monsters, providing a fairly large amount of experience per unit time spent when the game had the maximum number of players. With 1.10 these tactics were made much more time consuming and more difficult because the amount of experience a player receives from being partied is based on the proximity to the actual fighting and the difference between player levels. This was meant to encourage players to play the game the way Blizzard designed it, in truly cooperative games. However, the player community found variant methods to leech (namely the so-called Baal runs and Pit runs), which, albeit slower than the "Cow runs", are still well beyond the intended leveling speed.

Skill Synergies: With Patch 1.10, Blizzard introduced a feature called "Synergies" (before 1.10, seen in the Druid's and Necromancer's summoning skills). Synergies allow skills to gain bonuses depending on the skill levels of other, related skills. This enables the player to build a more varied character while still attaining the efficiency and power of a specialized build (the so-called "cookie-cutter" variants). The downside to synergies is that many pre-1.10 characters were made essentially useless because the popular ways to allocate skills before 1.10 results in extremely low damage characters after 1.10.

The World Event: Patch 1.10 also introduced the world event. This is a server-wide event that, when in effect, replaces the next spawned super unique monster by a Diablo Clone that is much tougher than the regular Diablo act boss monster, but also drops the much sought after unique Annihilus charm. This charm is dropped only in the Diablo II: Lord of Destruction expansion. The event is tied to the selling of "The Stone of Jordan" (or "SoJ"), a very popular ring that was/is, as such, very extensively duplicated, and remained resistant to the "Rust Storm". The objective seems to have been the removal of excess SoJs from the game. When 80-120 SoJs were sold on a certain ip server, a diablo clone appears in your game, spawning from the first superunique monster seen.

The general player opinion of Patch 1.10 is mixed. Some players celebrated the new cheat-free environment, while others were aggrieved that their characters were affected retroactively by new features, drastically altering their efficiency and often forcing them to start over.

Other patch 1.10 features include:

The quality of rare armors, helms and weapons was increased.
Over 100 new unique items were added.
Monster speed, damage and toughness was greatly increased for higher-level characters, especially in the Nightmare and Hell difficulties.
Experience gaining penalties for level 70+ characters were increased.
The number of unique monsters was increased in every area and difficulty level.
20 new rune-words and 46 new Horadric Cube recipes were added.
New XML format for the patch, allowing much easier future modifications.

Patch 1.11

On July 29, 2005, Blizzard announced the following:

A Call to Heroes! July 29, 2005 Great evil has returned to the world of Diablo 2. Will you answer the call to save Sanctuary? Patch 1.11 is coming...

Patch 1.11 was generally considered a total surprise by the player base, since the team responsible for the game up to patch 1.10 had left the company. It was announced only two days before its release on August 1, 2005, although the patch disappointed some fans. There was no real new content other than the new 'Überquest' and several new rune words. Many longtime bugs and issues were addressed in the patch; additionally, the patch also made it less of a hassle for the player's Hireling to "catch up" with the player in terms of Experience.

The new 'Überquest' involves getting the Key of Hate from the Summoner, Key of Destruction from Nihlathak and Key of Terror from the Countess, then cubing each of them into a portal to a new sublevel, featuring Lilith (a renamed Andariel), Über Izual, or Über Duriel. These bosses drop body parts, which can be cubed into a portal to Chaos Tristram. There are many theories on the chances for the Countess, Summoner, and Nihlathak's chances to drop the Keys of Hate, Terror, and Destruction, some people thought a 1/36 chance, some thought 1/32, some thought 1/12-1/13-1/14, each item dropped from the Summoner, Countess and Nihlathak has a chance to be a key, meaning if Nihlathak were to drop 5 items there is a chance each of the 5 items could be a Key of Destruction, however this is extremely unlikely, however 2 keys are occasionally popped up. The keys can only be obtained in Hell difficulty, and Chaos Tristram will NOT open up in Single Player or Open Battle.Net. Uber Lilith drops Diablo's Horn, Uber Duriel drops Baal's eye and Uber Izual drops Mephisto's brain (The official pricing of trade on battle.net for these organs are from least to greatest Eye-Brain-Horn.) It takes 1 terror, 1 hate and 1 destruction at one time in the cube to make one portal, meaning your going to need 3 destruction, 3 hate and 3 terror to make all the portals to the Pre-Ubers to get the organs required to Chaos Tristram. It is smart to make all three of the Pre-Uber portals in the same game, therefore a random portal isn't spwaned if you make them in different games. You'll get the definite organs.

In Chaos Tristram, players fight beefed up versions of all three Prime Evils simultaneously. When all three are dead, the last one killed drops the new Hellfire Torch unique charm. It gives +3 to all skills of a random class, random bonuses to all attributes and all resistances, and 25% chance to cast Diablo's Firestorm attack on striking.

Despite being quite difficult, several players found the 'Überquest' within a few hours after release. The secret seems to be the "Life Tap" skill, which gives a tremendous 50% life steal and renders characters almost immune to damage.

The most popular class to use on the Uberquest is a Smiter Paladin, Paladins using the Blessed Hammer skill class are also capable of tackling this quest but it usually takes a little longer than Smiter Paladins. You can find online guides on the status points to put to the classes, skills to put to and items to equip onto. Smiter Paladins and Blessed Hammer Paladins are really the only known classes to be able to take down the Uberquest Solo.

There is some speculation on how this quest will affect the 1.10 'World Event', which involved only Über Diablo and rewarded the player with a much less powerful unique charm, but requires a large number of Stone of Jordan unique rings to be sold by other players. The 1.11 'Überquest' seems highly exploitable by characters built for it and may well obsolete the 'World Event' and the Annihilus charm.

Blizzard North, the subdivision that created Diablo II and its patches, closed its doors on patch day, making a new 1.12 patch highly unlikely. However, 1.11 contained several bugs – another minor patch (named "1.11b") has been released recently due to the bugs.

Patch 1.11 also added ten new rune words. Seven of these have been released, and of these seven, each one must be done in a 3 socket body armor. They each give +2 to all skills for a specific class.

The new Ladder season began on August 8th, 2005 and two days later Blizzard banned 36,000 accounts for various ways of cheating, and had their serial-keys disabled for a 30 day-period, and around 2000 serial keys were permanently disabled for repeated cheating. The majority of bans were set due to maphacking.

State of the game

Some players considered the last patches before the expansion the most balanced and fun of all. Shortly after the expansion was released, players began to notice new ways to exploit the game in order to "farm" items. Eventually these item farmers found ways to create 'bots, capable of exploiting the game for items autonomously'. The addition of monster damage immunities did little to keep some players in check; characters would be configured specifically to run one high experience or high drop rate area, particularly the Bloody Foothills (a lower difficulty portion of act five) repeatedly for accelerated leveling.

Also, the shift from the randomized "rare" items to the preset "unique" items as the most powerful items in the game greatly reduced character variety. Certain unique items were vastly superior to most other non-unique items of the same category in the game. In some cases, this created a major power gap between the haves and the have-nots.

In 1.09, the collective attention of the Battle.net players turned to the "Secret" Cow Level, with its large packs of cows running around with halberds, no resistances, moderate item drops and high experience rewards. As a result, the vast majority of Hell difficulty games took place in the Cow Level. Additionally, Pindleskin (a unique monster found in the first area of Nihlathak's Temple) was both very easy to reach from town and could drop all of the elite items. This resulted in players killing Pindleskin repeatedly to get high-level unique items. This process proved to be so effective, that some of the afformentioned 'bots were made specificly to farm Pindleskin. Patch 1.10, however, fixed a great deal of these problems. By essentially turning down the quality of item drops in the most heavily-run areas, Blizzard encouraged players to hunt everywhere for powerful items.

The patch also introduced a large number of new and powerful Rune Words. Rune Words, previously rarely used, became a way to create some of the best items in the game. Most of the new rune words had permanent auras, large bonuses to damage, stats or defense, and the newly introduced and controversial oskill bonuses, which grant any class access to specific skills of another class. Many Paladin and Barbarian players felt that their classes' greatest party assets, auras and Battle Orders respectively, had been stolen away from them.

When the ladder was reset in 2004, a second batch of even more powerful rune words (the Season 2 rune words) was added, including the powerful Infinity, which had the resistance-lowering, immunity-breaking Conviction aura built in.

The release of the 1.10 patch made casters (elemental druids, necromancers, sorceresses, hammerdins, and trap assassins) extremely powerful versus groups of monsters, while weakening physical-damage type characters (except in the case of bosses, where some characters could quickly slay any boss in a matter of seconds, with the correct items).

Patch 1.11 fixed a few subtle game bugs, included a stronger anticheat program, introduced a new quest, and added new rune words. The main focus was the new quest, which would grant a single extremely powerful charm to the players who completed it. The new quest involves conquering three 'Über' versions of some of the game's normal bosses (Mephisto, Diablo, and Baal).

Patch 1.11b was recently released to correct for the "peace" bug which allowed players to crash the game and dupe items.

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