Who’s your favourite wizard? Mine is King Rollo’s royal magician, who in one episode tries to use wizardry to do all the dishes. “That’s cheating!” scolds King Rollo, allegorically, before nerfing the wizard’s dishwashing skill and ruining all the fun. Blizzard, meanwhile, are previewing the upcoming patch 1.0.4 changes to Diablo 3’s wizard in a blog post on the official blog. It potentially affects the wizard’s ability to do the dishes.
Hydra is a skill that summons a faithful, multi-noggined dragon friend from the underworld to spit elemental damage at enemies, and Venom Hydra is by far the most popular flavour of Hydra. Blizzard want to change that by buffing the other variants and, hopefully, creating a little more diversity in the wizard class.
Senior designer Wyatt Cheng dishes out some interesting details behind the skill’s development: “Hydra took many times more development time to create than an average skill. There are more art variants, more spell effects, and more lines of code associated with Hydra than almost any other wizard skill in the game (except potentially Archon). We did this because Hydra is an iconic skill in the wizard’s arsenal and we wanted it to stand out. When you’re in a multiplayer game and you see that Hydra spawn, it’s instantly recognizable.”
The post then describesprecisely how each variant will be improved, though it does also mention that Energy Twister is being dialled down slightly – one of the “very few nerfs” in the upcoming patch 1.0.4. Interestingly, Energy Twister, of all the wizard skills, is the one most likely to be useful in washing dishes.
The update arrives at the end of the month, with previews of changes to the remaining classes coming before then.Yesterday, Blizzard described planned changes to the Barbarian, as well as Legendary Items and general System Changes.