After announcing a long list of changes that were made in Diablo 3, Blizzard has announced that a few more additional changes are in order. The team stated on Friday that both the Scroll of Companion and the Scroll of Reforging will be removed because they "weren't good enough" for the upcoming PC game in its 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," wrote the community manager. "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."
Before its death, the Scroll of Companion allowed players to summon a random non-combat pet to pick up gold within a short radius. The list of pets included a bat, a chicken, a pig, a rat, a scorpion and more. As for the Scroll of Reforging, it transmuted all properties of a single magic item into an entirely new set of properties which in turn permanently reduced the maximum durability of the item by 10-percent.
For those currently in the closed beta who were particularly fond of these scrolls, they're not quite completely dead just yet. "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," the blog reads. "For the time being, they will not be in the initial release of the game."
Diablo 3 is currently at v.0.6.0.8296 (patch 10). As previously reported, the team already made changes to the core character attributes: Attack, Defense and Precision have been removed, and Dexterity, Intellect, Strength, and Vitality have been added. Armor has taken the place of Defense, +Physical Resist has replaced the original Armor, and +Chance to Crit has replaced Precision.
To see the full list of changes, check out the Diablo 3 blog here. Nope, it doesn't look like Diablo 3 will be out anytime soon...
