Beta is Over and RMAH Delayed

The Beta is over... And now we patiently wait two weeks for the game to go Live. In other news, the RMAH will be dealyed at least one week after launch. This would be shocking if it wasn't completely predicatable given the sorry state of the Auction House.

Patch 9359 (# 18)

Nothing really to write about here. Move along...

Patch 9327 (# 17)

This patch contained nothing of note from an Item / Mod / Affix perspective. Very few of the MPQ files were changed. As a result, I won't bother updating the few StringLists that did change.

There is now a new (4th) module that is loaded during the authentication process. This module deals with "Identity". Still need to do more research as to the exact purpose of this module (which saves a 64-byte secure random value in the Registry).

Also a reminder that the Beta ends May 1st and that release is May 15th!

Patch 9183 (# 16)

Update: Items, Affixes, and Mods pages are updated. Looks like a whole lot of "Legendary" affixes were dropped, but not all. To be honest, I don't know what they were there for except maybe to allow Legenedary items to have affixes that were not possible on other items.

Another pretty boring patch. I guess the good news is that there are fewer things that need changing. I did notice that a ton of the "Unique" items were deleted from the Items.stl StringList file. Perhaps these items will be moved into their own "Legendary" file once they are all ready. At this point, I doubt that we will see any data on these before launch.

None of the Affix or Item changes looked particularly interesting. Mostly small tweaks here and there. Likewise, many recipes have again had their required mats changed. A handful of new Legendary recipes were also added.

The StringList Data Changes are now up, but there aren't too many changes. These changes will show you, among other things, which spells have changed and how. Keep in mind that you can view "Current", "All", and "Changes" for each of the StringList files making it easy to see exactly what has changed!

Items, Affixes, and Mods pages should be updated tomorrow.

Patch 8896 (# 15)

Update: Items, Affixes, and Mods pages are updated.

Overall, a very uninteresting patch. The StringList Data Changes are now up, but there aren't too many changes. These changes will show you, among other things, which spells have changed and how. Keep in mind that you can view "Current", "All", and "Changes" for each of the StringList files making it easy to see exactly what has changed!

Diablo 3 coming May 15th

Evil Returns...

Patch 8815 (# 14)

UPDATE #2: Sorry it took me a while to get all the content updated; some of my MPQs got corrupted and it took me a while to get everything squared away. There were some minor structural changes to both the Item and Affix structures. For a game supposedly close to launch, there are still some major changes going on...

The StringList Data Changes are now up. These changes will show you, among other things, which spells have changed and how. Keep in mind that you can view "Current", "All", and "Changes" for each of the StringList files making it easy to see exactly what has changed!

Don't miss the "CraftingPlan_Smith_Smith_StaffofCow_Inferno", called "Infernal Staff of Herding". Looks like the Cows are back!

Auction House Search Preview

I've finally completed the first pass of my Auction House item viewer. Currently, the item data is old (from Patch 8692) and is not being refreshed. There's still a long ways to go, but to get an early sneak peak, click on the Auctions link at the top.

Patch 8610 (# 13)

Update: Items, Affixes, and Mods pages are updated. Here are some of the changes that I noticed.

The Physical Damage affixes have had their ranges greatly reduced; for example, "MinDam 14" went from +[56-112] to +[27-33]. Meanwhile, Elemental Damage affixes had their values increased further; for example, "FireD 14" went from +[150-300] to +[191-381]. So Elemental Damage is no longer in sync with the Physical Damage. The only explanation I can think of is that Elemental Damage no longer scales as part of the weapon damage (which is how it worked in D2).

The Skill affixes that appear on Items can now affect the given Skill in the following ways: increase the damage %, reduce the resource cost, reduce the cooldown, increase the duration, and increase the crit bonus %.

Weapon damage has been slightly tweaked. Shield Block % and Block Amount were tweaked slightly higher. Quivers have been tweaked and now have 4 Attributes: Requirement_When_Equipped (I assume this enforces class restriction), Quiver, Damage_Min, Damage_Delta (the last two would give it a bonus to min and max damage). Orbs and Mojos now both have the Damage_Min and Damage_Delta Attributes as well.

There were 31 Recipes that had something altered (mostly the fixed Affixes for crafted items). Recipe costs and levels had significant changes, but not focusing on them given the major changes to crafting mats recently. Some of the data for Legendary items was changed, but there is still almost no such data in the MPQ files, so I won't comment more on this until there is some more complete data to examine. Finally, all of the item image (Texture) files were re-packaged, but there are only 3 new images related to unlocking the crafters; not really sure why the MPQ contained updates for things that were not changed. There were also some new images for quest items.

New patch is up. There are several new affixes: Bleed, DamageVsElite, DamReductionVsElite, Indestructible, and ReducedLevelReq. Be sure to check out the changes to "AttributeDescriptions.stl" for a comprehensive list of Rune changes and new text.

Be sure to check out all of the StringList Data Changes. These changes will show you, among other things, which spells have changed and how. Keep in mind that you can view "Current", "All", and "Changes" for each of the StringList files making it easy to see exactly what has changed!

Bypassing Game Client Patching (for Mooege)

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote an article about Patching the Diablo 3 Game Client. This new article describes how tp bypass game client patching so that you can use Mooege without an Internet connection (useful for folks like myself that travel a lot). Click here to read more...

On Duping...

Let me start of by saying that if duping exists in Diablo 3, it will kill the game. I don't think that's an exaggeration. You may think to yourself that it won't be so bad because Diablo 2 is still popular and duping there has been going on forever, and in large amounts. While that may be true, duping in D3 will bring Blizzard to its knees. Click here to read more...

Patch 8392 (# 12) and Patch 8350 (# 11)

Update: Patch # 12 equally as uninterseting as Patch # 11. As stated by Blizzard, this is a minor bug-fix patch. There is a new version of the SetItemBonuses.gam and SocketedEffects.gam, but the changes seem to be too minor for me to bother doing much with them. Legendary and Set items are still a long ways from being completed. Unsurprisingly, there are no StringList updates. So pretty much nothing to see here... move along.

Patching the Diablo 3 Game Client

Every Beta Patch, I noticed that some websites were able to obtain the Patch MPQs before my Beta game client was able to download them. Some folks on various forums posted as much, and Bashiok even commented on this on Twitter:

@crypto2000 @Angryrobotics Nah, they just know where to look. The patch is technically public, just not enabled in the game launcher.

@crypto2000 @angryrobotics Our patch clients are always available before the patch is officially released, if you know where to look.

I found those tweets quite annoying because rather than informing the public exactly where the publicly available patches were, Bashiok confirmed that they did exist, and implied that you were just not cool enough to be in the club with those in-the-know.

A friend from the great d3db.com website gave me the links to the Patch MPQ downloads which I really appreciated. But what I really wanted was to understand more about the patching process so that I would not have to rely on others should the process change down the road. Read on to learn more...

Patch 8296 (# 10) Updates

All of the Items (including images), Affixes, and Mods should now be updated with the latest Patch 10 data. For the Mooege folks, here is the updated attributes.xml file (this file is generated from an in-game memory dump).

Markco Banned from Beta

In what is probably one of the dumbest things Blizzard has ever done, they have banned Markco, host of the Diablo 3 Gold Site, from the Beta. Why is this so dumb? For starters, he didn't exploit, he didn't use any mods or cheats, and he didn't violate the Terms of Service. In other words, he did absolutely nothing wrong. On the other hand, Blizzard should want folks like Markco to try out these things during the Beta so that they can fix them (if they feel they are wrong) before the game goes live. Isn't that the entire fucking purpose of the Beta?!?

Patch 8296 (# 10) Live

UPDATE #4: I won't have the Item, Affix, and Mods pages updated until Friday since I am traveling and forgot to copy some of my development files on this new laptop installation. The StringList files were updated yesterday, but I can't regenerate the other pages without first being able to extract all the updated Attribute ids from the game client memory space.

As expected, the "CraftingPlan_Mystic" was removed as an item type from the "ItemTypes.gam" file. However, I also noticed that the generic "PageOfTraining" was removed while "PageOfTraining_Smith" and "PageOfTraining_Jeweler" were added. I did not see anything in the patch notes about this.

Looking at the "Items_*.gam" files, I can see that all the "Mystic" recipes have been removed. Most (if not all) armors and weapons have had their gold prices adjusted. Armor values have also been tweaked. Many weapons had their damage tweaked. Potions had their health values adjusted. Finally, the "salvage common" value was nulled out since white items will no longer be salvageable. All in all, nothing particularly exciting here.

In the "AffixList.gam" file, the "WeaponHit" affixes were all deleted and replaced with 1H and 2H version of "WeaponHit". This makes sense since a 2H proc should be more useful than a 1H proc (otherwise it might excessively favor dual wielding). As we already knew from the StringList files, the now obsolete "Attack", "Defense", and "Precision" related Affixes are gone, and new "Dex", "Int", and "Str" ones have been added. As with every patch, all of the Attribute ids (which I often refer to as "ModCodes") have changed, so I will need to extract all the new values from the game client memory space.

Some Affix values had major changed. For example, "ColdD 14" went from [17-18]-[31-48] to a whopping [75-150]-[150-300]. Physical damage Affixes were also similarly increased. Elemental Resists, on the other hand, were lowered from 101-120 to 51-60 (percentage?) at max Affix level (12). SpiritHeals was slightly buffed from 35-40 to 46-61 at max Affix level (10). Skill Affixes had massive changes since they weren't implemented before, and now have Attribute (aka, ModCode) associations. I'll need to do some more research on this in the next couple of days. Skill Affixes have both a primary and secondary group hash; not sure if that means whether an item will be able to have more than one skill on it, but it should definitely prevent an item have the same skill twice (with a different power level). Also, the "Damage_Percent_Percent_Bonus_Vs_Monster_Type#Beast" key was added to the StringList file, but only for "Beasts", not for the other monster types (although they should be similar). We now know that the values translate to "+{VALUE}% Damage to Beasts", which gives us a max of 40-50% at max Affix level (12).

In the "ItemEnhancements.gam" file, some obsolete Enhancements have been removed, but many others have been tweaked. With the Mystic gone, I thought that these were going away?!? Really not sure why these were updated if they are going to be removed. Legendary (including Set) items still have almost no data. Blizzard has indicated that this is still being worked on, so no surprise here.

The StringList changes are now up. On the Affix front, a number of Affixes were removed (Attack, Defense, Precision) and replaced with the new Dex, Int, and Str. The prefix/suffix names for these have simply been switched over. For example, the "Feral" prefix used to be for PrecVit I - IV, and is now for DexVit I - IV. The suffix names for the "DamageVsMonsterType" affixes that were added (in the AffixList.gam file) back in Patch 7841 now exist in the StringList data. Finally, the non-NLS keys for all the skill affixes have been slightly changed (underscores were added).

In typical Blizzard fashion, the maintenance window was extended several times during the deployment of this patch. It's beta, so obviously it's no big deal, although you would think that by now, Blizz would plan for a much longer maintenance window since they haven't been able to deploy patches in a timely fashion thus far. Just getting my hands on the new MPQs so it will be a while before I have everything updated, so check back often over the next 24 hours for all the latest and greatest info. In the meantime, be sure to check out the official patch notes.

I've had a couple of folks ask me when I thought the game might finally launch. And my answer has been the same for a couple of months now: "Not until Blizzard fixes the Auction House, or announces that the AH will not be available until some time after the game is launched."

New Beta Patch Coming Soon

Been a while since I've posted anything since there has been very little happening in Diablo 3 land... at least as far as us outsiders could see. But finally, a new Beta Patch is on the horizon with tons of changes! Although I am a little worried about what losing Attributes will do to item generation. Of course, we'll have to wait and see what this patch brings in terms of new Affixes.

Beta Auction House

How bad could it really be? The short answer is atrocious. Read on for the longer answer...

Beta Impressions

I finally had a chance to play in the Beta after a friend (thanks Chris!) got access and gave me his info so that I could play. First of all, I want to say that it definitely feels like a "Diablo" game. It has a lot of the viceral gameplay that we've come to love from this franchise. And while the loot in the Beta is not super exciting, I did find it fun to tweak out my toons and plow through mobs in 4-player PUGs.

I played up to level 12-13 on each character class to try to get a comprehensive sense of the different skills and how they worked together. Click here to read more...

Patch 8059 Live

I just had a major scare. After patching the game, it appeared that the MPQ encoding had changed. After playing around on my other machine, I instead discovered that the patch had failed (without any errors) and the MPQs had been garbled; the MD5 checksums did not match on the two machines which was a sure-fire sign that the patch had gone horribly wrong.

I will be posting more updates tomorrow, but for now, be sure to check out the StringList Data Changes. These changes will show you, among other things, which spells have changed and how. Keep in mind that you can view "Current", "All", and "Changes" for each of the StringList files making it easy to see exactly what has changed!

UPDATE: All the Affixes, Mods, and Items have now been updated. There were a number of changes across the board including some new item artwork (images). Looks like Enchantments (which aren't in the beta) had a ton of the values changed (some increased, some decreased). There are also some new "WeaponHit" Affixes (for all the procs such as "Fear", "Stun", etc). I am not sure why the weapon procs versus other item procs would be different. A lot of Skill Affixes were removed (e.g., Wizard's Wave of Force), but the ones that remain now go from 1 to 8 rather than just 1 to 3. For the Mooege folks, here is the updated attributes.xml file (this file is generated from an in-game memory dump).

Item wise, a number of "shadowClone" weapons were added (Mighty Weapon 2H, Ceremonial Dagger, Daibos, Hand Crossbow, Staff, and Mojo). There are one for each of the difficulty levels. I have no idea what these are. They don't have NLS names in the StringList file and they don't have unique artwork. My guess is that it is part of some quest (hence a version for each difficulty level) and will probably not be an item you get to keep.

Patch 7931 Live

There are no changes to any of the StringList (*.stl) or GameBalance (*.gam) files (that means no item changes) I have posted so I won't bother to re-generate them all just so that they have the correct "latest" version number. There are changes to the 2D Textures, so I did update all the images althought it doesn't look like many of them changed. All in all, a very unexciting patch for me.

Patch 7841 Live

Needless to say the Patch was released at some ungodly hour so I didn't get all the updates finished until now. Everything should now be good. There were no structural changes to any of the MPQs that I am parsing so it was pretty smooth. Most of the item data changes I saw were minor (e.g., fixes to things like gem types for non-gem types). However, there was one very noticeable change: all of the Legendary items are now gone (file has been deleted from the MPQ). This is probably just temporary since as of Patch 7728, most of the Legendaries were missing affixes. Blizzard did mention that they were in the process of revamping them.

Some new Affixes were also introduced such as chance to proc an effect on hit (blind, chill, fear, freeze, immobolize, knockback, slow, and stun). A new type of DamageReduction was added for elemental damage types. Not sure how this is different from elemental Resists. Some of these new Affixes show up with min/max values of "0" because Blizzard has not yet added the display formats for them.

But most surpringly of all are the new "DamageVsMonsterType" affixes. The reason this is so surprising (even though Diablo 2 had them) is because Inferno difficulty is supposed to be the same across all Acts. If you can acquire a lot +Undead damage, it seems that you will only farm areas with lots of Undead. This goes against what Blizzard said about making Inferno difficulty even across the board: so that players would not want to farm only certain areas and bosses.

The Very Latest

Patch 6 scheduled to come out later tonight! Patch 5 didn't hit until 4 AM (Eastern) last time around so I hope this one won't be quite so late.

Markco over at Diablo 3 Gold guide asked me to write a guest post to introduce myself and talk a little bit about what I was doing. So be sure to check it out if for no other reason than to look at the sheep (it will make more sense once you click)!

I have added a section detailing the SetItemBonuses.gam MPQ file. I have also made a number of corrections to the Item structure section; specifically, I have fixed the "affixGroupHashes" and "enchants" offsets.

Patch 7728 Live

The new D3 Patch 7728 wnt live around 4 AM EDT on a late Thursday night (early Friday morning for you calendar-abiding folks). There are a ton of changes across the board. As of now, everything on this site has been fully updated to take all of the patch changes into account. All of the dynamic pages (items, affixes, mods, strings, etc) have been completely re-generated with the new client game files.

The size of the "Item" structure changed, but what is more interesting is that the way the min/max dmg on weapons is calculated has changed. Before, weapons had a min/max range and in addition to that, they also has a ModCode modifier for min and max damage. For example, a Shiv had a range min/max of 2-7, a min modifier of 0-2, and a max modifier of 0-2, making the item's min/max range (2-4)–(7-11). Those ModCodes are now gone, and instead, there are new float values which modify the min and the max.

Feel free to check out all of the Item structure changes.

Recent Updates

Information about Recipes is now available. The information is split up into three sections: one dealing with the Recipes*.gam files (Blacksmith, Jeweler, and Mystic training-only), one with the ItemEnhancements.gam file (Mystic non-training) and the last dealing with the Recipe *.rcp files.

I forgot to mention this earlier, but the Items pages now have all of the (available) class/gender artwork. Not all Armor pieces have much of the artwork yet, but have a look at the Chest Armor and in particular the top tier Archon Armor.

Details are finally available for the GameBalance Items*.gam files. The basic structure is available, but I will be adding some more details and examples over the next couple of days.

Details have been added for the Texture (*.tex) files and the Actor (*.acr) files. Together, these two sections fully detail how the images for items are stored and correlated together. Links to third-party tools are also provided so that you can extract the images yourself.

Please check out the recently improved and expanded guide on String Hashing. Diablo 3 makes extensive use of string hashes as a way to correlate data making this a must-read section!

I have finally decoded almost all of the Affix and Mod data and have have decent looking (humor me) looking HTML pages to display all of this information. Some rough Item data is now also posted.

Be sure to check out the brand new Diablo 3 Lexicon web site for a much nicer looking version of what is provided here. They also have a nice database search capability. Just as with the data you see here, they also obtain all of their game data from the Diablo client files and not from screen scraping from the official Blizzard site. This means that our data will be more reliable and quickly updated after patches.

While a lot of the Diablo 3 game information on this site has started popping up in a lot of other places, I do plan to bring some unique features to this site. My original mission for starting this site (read below) remains on track.

Mission Statement

The purpose of this site is to provide the Diablo 3 community with a place to discuss and analyze items. While this sounds pretty mundane, Diablo is at its core an item hunting game.

The central feature of this site, and the one that differentiates it from the myriad of other Diablo sites, is the ability to create "Item Profiles" and to evaluate items against these profiles. An Item Profile is a template that allows you to evaluate an item based on how well the attributes of the item match those defined in your profile. For example, you could create a profile for a "dual leech" ring; this profile would require that the item be a ring, and that it has both "life steal" and "mana steal". Furthermore, you can assign values to other useful mods (e.g., prismatic and +Life). This will allow you to assign a "rating" to a given item. That rating represents how good the item is based on the profile that you have defined.

I also plan to allow users to submit their Item Profiles to the community. This would be done using a forums-based review process. Once an "Item Profile" is accepted, it would become public for everyone to use. The purpose of this feature is to create Item Profiles that actually reflect the wants and needs of the community.

When you want to evaluate an item, you will have the ability to rate the item based on all your profiles (and/or public profiles) at once. This way, you can see whether an item might be suitable for niche purposes.

Eventually, I hope that Auction House data will become publicly available (as it now is for WoW via the Blizzard Community Platform API). When this happens, I plan to add Auction House features to the site. This will not only let you see current auctions, but also get historical information about past auctions. Most importantly, it will allow you to scan the Auction House using your custom Item Profiles. This will help you find the items that you are looking for. Ultimately, the Auction House scanner could be enhanced to support email notifications such that you would be notified immediately once an item you are looking for has been found. There are a lot of possibilities with this feature, but it all depends on the Auction House data being public or data-minable (e.g., screen scraping using OCR technology).

MPQ Reverse-Engineering

Another feature I am working on is a reverse-engineering of some of the crucial game files. Since this is quite a daunting task, I started off with something very simple: StringList files (click on the link for more information). I am hard at work on reverse engineering the AffixList.gam and Items_*.gam "GameBalance" file formats.

In the not-so-distant future, I hope to publish item data, affix data, spell data (with per level details), and treasure class data (monster loot drop information).

The MPQs menu link above provides an introduction to the Diablo 3 MPQ files. It will also contain links to the game file details as I make them available.

The details of the ItemTypes.gam File were previously posted. This was a prelude to the more juicy Affix and Item information which is now available.

StringList Files

The StringList files are used by Diablo 3 to convert Non-NLS keys into language specific strings. A number of these files are now available for viewing. For each file, differences between (beta patch) versions can also shown allowing you to track patch changes as they happen.

What this site is not

This site is not a replacement for general community sites such as Diablo incgamers or Diablo Fans, nor is it intended to act as a wiki for the Diablo 3 universe.

When will it all be ready?

Features will be added as they become available. I have a very long list of features that I plan to add over the coming months, and will also be soliciting feedback from the community via the Forums. Speaking of Forums, I have recently enabled them (email verification required). That's the good news! The bad news is that it will take some time to build up a steady community, and forums are only as useful as the posts contributed.

I expect this site to be fully ready before the launch of Diablo 3, towards the end of this year. I will continue to evolve this site based on feedback from the community.