As we near the May 15th Diablo 3 launch, Blizzard is hard at work fixing bugs and making last minute tweaks to the gameplay.
On Friday, Blizzard released Beta Patch 15 (v.0.9.0.8896) along with a detailed change-log.
As expected, there was a character wipe that also affected gold, items, auctions, achievements, followers, and artisans.
Perhaps one of the biggest additions is the inclusion of the Battle.net Authenticators. If you have a Blizzard Authenticator attached to your Battle.net account, you will be required to enter an authentication code when logging into the beta client.
Blizzard's community manager Lylirra noted that after your first successful login with an Authenticator, you may not always receive an authenticator prompt when logging into the game. This is an "intended convenience feature" and doesn't represent a risk to your security. If you log in consistently from the same location, you may not be prompted to enter the code.
In case you missed the patch notes, below you can find a detailed Beta Patch 15 change-log:
General
- All characters have been wiped. Please note that this wipe will also affect gold, items, auctions, achievements, followers, and artisans.
- Battle.net Authenticators have been enabled for the Diablo III beta test. If a Battle.net Authenticator is attached to your Battle.net account, you will be required to enter an authentication key to log in.
- The gold auction house for Hardcore characters is now available for testing
- A new quest selection feature has been added
- Accessed from the main character screen, this feature will allow players to select which stage of a completed or in-progress quest they wish to start at when resuming a game
- The costs of the first and second Shared Stash tabs have been increased
- First tab cost increased from 50,000 gold to 100,000 gold
- Second tab cost increased from 150,000 gold to 200,000 gold
- The levels at which character skills and skill runes unlock have been adjusted for most classes
- Treasure Goblins now drop slightly better loot and less junk (slay them all!)
Classes
Monk
- Dashing Strike
- Now converts to Basic Attack if you are out of Spirit
Witch Doctor
- Mana costs for all skills have been adjusted
- Corpse Spiders
- Weapon damage decreased from 24% to 16%
- Firebats
- Weapon damage increased from 100% to 150%
- Haunt
- Weapon damage increased from 360% to 575%
- Poison Dart
- Damage Over Time (DoT) reduced from 50% to 40% weapon damage
- Soul Harvest
- Now displays how many targets are affected on the ability's stack count
Followers
Templar
- The non-hired version of the Templar has had its damage reduced and will now deal approximately the same amount of damage as the hired version
- Intervene
- Radius decreased from 10 to 6
Monsters
- The monster affix "Thorns" has been renamed to "Reflects Damage"
- Jondar Poison damage has been increased
Bug Fixes
- Players should no longer receive error messages regarding the Starter Edition of Diablo III
- Buying extra Stash space in Normal mode no longer expands your Stash space in Hardcode mode
- Hardcore characters will now be correctly placed into a separate queue from Normal characters when using Public Games to queue for quests
- The names of a player's RealID and BattleTag friends should no longer appear as [] when chatting with them