Diablo 3 Patch 1.0.2a Fixes Act 3 Farming

Blizzard has released another small patch for Diablo 3 today. This patch seeks to prevent some easy farming that players have been doing in Act 3 of the game.

What players would do is kill the last boss of Act 3, turn in the following quests, and then do it over and over. Apparently it gave them a lot of gold and experience, making leveling a snap. Today's patch lowered the rewards for those last quests.

The patch also targeted Nigel Cutthroat, a bandit in Act 1. He now drops lower quality items when killed by players. I guess someone was farming him as well? If so, that's the first I've heard of it.

Patch 1.0.2a's other changes are relatively minor. They've updated the tooltips for Smoke Screen, Fists of Thunder, Mantra of Healing and Energy Armor to reflect changes made in previous updates. Furthermore, auctions' maximum duration has been lowered from 48 hours to 36 hours.

In order to implement this patch, Blizzard took down the servers at 2PM EST for maintenance. They should be back online by now, though.

The next major update for D3 will be Patch 1.0.3., which Blizzard detailed earlier this week. It's intended as a balance patch and will address some issues with Inferno difficulty and crafting. It's not clear when we should expect that patch.