The maintenance begins on Wednesday, June 20th, at 3am PDT and Blizzard says that they’d be finished around 1pm PDT.
Players will not be prompted to download the patch until the game becomes live again in their home region.
“If you are logging in from a European or Asian client, you will need to wait for this patch to release in that region before it can be installed,” community manager Takralus explained on Battle.net.
“Additionally, if your home region is the Americas, you will be unable to log into Europe or Asia using Global Play after patch 1.0.3 is live until those regions have also patched.”
The reason for the patch is because there are changes being made to the Inferno difficulty, rare item drops on bosses and bonus monster damage when players are playing among others and many other details as well to follow.
They want to bridge the Inferno item gap because according to the blog, people are forced to certain strategies. In order to fix this there are new drops rates coming out for this new patch. Nothing is changing about the legendary items in the game, but they will be working on it in the near future.
“For a lot of people they would rather do something frustrating or boring in Inferno Act IV (such as having Tyrael fight for them or breaking vases) for a chance at a “top-tier” upgrade, rather than fight hordes of monsters in Inferno Act I.”
“We?re shifting to a philosophy where the best items in the game can drop from many different places, so a wider variety of play styles are viable.”
Not only are they changing the item drop rate, they are changing the levels of difficulty in Inferno as well by lowering the the damage and health of monsters in Inferno act II, III, and IV. They ultimately want to keep them challenging, but smooth out the difficulty ramp out a little.
In terms of group-play, they are removing the bonus monster damage per additional player in a co-op game. They feel that the extra damage per player is an inhibitor for wanting to play with friends.
They are also increasing repair costs as well in order to preserve the style of the game. The repair costs on level 60 characters are going to be increasing a lot and Blizzard is “currently evaluating repair costs between 4x and 6x their current values”.
Those are some of the major changes that are happening within the game. There are to be many more small changes in terms of Auction house improvements, quality of the game and little fixes here or there.
If you want to take a look for yourself, check out the Diablo 3 blog post.