Beta Patch 1.14

The original beta patch notes you can find here.
Further undocumented changes you can find here.

Now a short summary and analysis about some changes.


Magic Find and Gold Find are now shared amongst party members. The average combined value of the entire party's Magic and Gold Find applies to all players regardless of location in the game world. The averaged values will not display in the UI

I already blogged about this (MF, GF and +XP bonuses are shared across the group and Opportunities for easy multiboxing), because it was announced some days ago. Now it's confirmed that the shared mf and gf applies to all players regardless of location in the game world, which is the precondition for my multiboxing ideas. Blizzard won't show us the averaged values in the UI. I think they want avoid players to search for public games with high mf / gf without much effort. If you want to know the average values you must ask the other players and / or inspect them. I don't like this additional effort, although I prefer to playing with friends and not much in public games.


Barbarian and Monks now have innate 30% passive damage reduction versus all sources.

This change seems to be necessary in higher difficulties for melee charakters to be balanced against ranged charakters.


Several aspects of the game economy have been adjusted, including but not limited to:

• Gold drops
• Item sales values
• Vendor costs
• Repair costs

This is a very good change, because a constant gold dump is necessary to achieve that gold don't lose on value. This allow us to make money with selling gold in the RMAH. The increase in gold drops at lower levels are adjusted by the lower gf on items.

Crafting

• Gold cost to craft items reduced
• Cost to train blacksmith doubled
• More crafting materials are now required to craft items
• Chance to salvage rare crafting materials from magical items reduced from 10% to 5%

The doubled cost to train the blacksmith is only a one time expenditure for every account. This won't have a big effect on the gold value in the long run, but in the first weeks of the game maybe this higher costs for leveling the blacksmith will lead to more buyed gold in the RMAH and / or less player are leveling there blacksmith this early. Both leads to an advantage for us. If there is more demand for gold at the beginning, the prices for gold stay longer high. If lesser player level their blacksmith there is much less competition in selling crafted items and the demand for crafted items also increase, because the players can't supply their self with better items.

The increased requirement of crafting materials to craft an item is necessary, because there is a bigger supply of magical items. This bigger supply of magical items come from 2 changes. Champions now drop 2 magical items. Overall there are more monsters and more magical items drop then before. Lesser rare crafting materials are also an effect of the bigger supply of magical items.

Overall it seems that we will play Diablo 3 soon.