Patch 1.0.3 dropped for Diablo 3 yesterday, and I think that’s all she wrote as far as me and this game go.

In the interest of full disclosure, I’d already been playing a little less in the past couple of weeks, so my interest had started to wane prior to the patch that dropped yesterday. 1.0.3 isn’t entirely to blame for me getting fed up with Diablo. Let’s call it the straw that broke the camel’s back.

A while ago I had voiced my frustrations with the wall I was hitting trying to move from Act I inferno, which I had on farm, to Act II inferno, which was destroying me. Well, I kept at it, kept hunting down gear to sell so that I could upgrade my gear, and sure enough, I finally got my build into a place where I could farm Act II.

As monks go, the most popular build I’ve seen involves using a shield and going super tanky. However it also looks super boring to me. I didn’t roll a monk so that I could be super slow and wear a shield. So instead I worked on a build that catered to dual wielding, and a combination of attack speed and life on hit. I kept my HP around 35-40k, and as of right now my All Resist is near to 700. My LoH is 1300, and prior to the patch i was doing 2.4 attacks per second, with a base DPS of around 18k (jumping as high as 32k dps for a second or two at the height of my rotation, with runes). I was able to survive reasonably well against most elite packs in multiplayer games (I never play solo), and more importantly, it was exciting. My survival relied less on my defensive stats and more on my ability to keep attacking, and keep not only life regen coming in, but also replenishing spirit to keep my abilities going.

It was a fun build, and I was just starting to dabble in Act III, which was a renewed challenge over Act II. And then Blizzard decided they needed to nerf attack speed across the board by fifty percent.

It wasn’t a suprise that IAS was getting a nerf… they mentioned it weeks ago, and I agree… Increased Attack Speed could be a little too OP in some situations. I agree that it needed a nerf. However I was expecting lose ten, fifteen, maybe even twenty percent. But fifty percent? How the hell did they get to that number? How do they beta test and then launch a game with a stat whose effectiveness they then decide is twice as powerful as what they wanted it to be?

So suddenly my attacks per second are down to 1.7 from 2.5. And my 18k base dps is down to 10k. That I could deal with, if it didn’t also mean that I’m now not generating enough health/spirit to survive against many of the elite packs I’d worked to conquer. In one patch my monk has gone from confidently stepping foot in Act III, ready to face the challenge, to suddenly struggling on Act II again.

I could re-gear him, change my build, if I wanted to swap out about 5-8 million gold worth of gear… gear that I won’t be able to sell for nearly what I paid, because IAS is now such a shitty stat. It would also probably mean swapping over to a cookie cutter sword and board monk build, the thought of which bores me to tears.

I get that IAS was a bit of a problem, and I’m sure cutting it in half probably won’t effect other classes as much as it will effect IAS/LOH based monks like me. I do wish that they’d come up with a more elegant solution that didn’t seem to utterly invalidate an entire build. A fifty percent nerf seems like a kneejerk reaction to me, and in a game where supposedly there should be a variety of options on how to play/build your class, I don’t see how hamstringing one whole path serves the greater good of the game.

Diablo 3 has been nothing short of a fiasco since day one… most of it, the error 37, login troubles, RMAH stuff, etc has not bothered me all that much. It was inconvenient, but I was having fun playing the game. Now, though, they’ve told me that the way I was playing my character is not how they want me playing my character, and I’ve got to go back to drawing board. No thanks.

Fortunately I’ve just about recouped the expense of the game purchase through selling on the RMAH, so I’m going to cash out and call it a draw.