Nethaera Community Manager A few more changes have made their way in to Diablo III beta patch 10, including the removal of Scrolls of Companion and Scrolls of Reforging, and we’ll be updating the patch notes to reflect that.
In both cases these are features we felt were underdeveloped and just not quite good enough for the game in their current state. The companion pets felt like they were mandatory to maximize play efficiency and some of the pets were too cutesy for the gritty, dark world of Sanctuary. Neither of those are issues we felt like we could solve without a lot of additional work, and we’re trying to close in on a solid release date for the game, not move further away. When weighing these systems against releasing the game, we decided to cut these scrolls and stay on track for the game’s release.
We think we can make companion pets into a much cooler system (both mechanically and visually), and evolve the reforging scrolls into a more meaningful system at some point in the future. For the time being, they will not be in the initial release of the game.
Jerusahat wrote on Jan 27, 2012, 20:53:I'd agree about cutting not being unusual if this was the only announcement about it. But there's other core changes announced recently that require the entire game to be rebalanced at this late date.Beelzebud wrote on Jan 27, 2012, 20:45:
What is going on over there? Starting to smell like a train wreck.
Cutting stuff to make a release date doesn't seem too unusual. The cynic in me expects them to be added back as micro-transactions though.
Dades wrote on Jan 28, 2012, 01:18:That would be because the beta is restricted to NORMAL difficulty mode, not nightmare or anything else. In hardcore, there will be much better loot dropped.
I hope this isn't the developer attitude about dropped loot because there is already too much reliance on crafted loot since its so superior to all of the known beta drops.