[The Dude]

It's out. So far so good. The game runs smoother in RAVE now, don't know about Glide or OpenGL. And you can pick with realm to connect to before you connect to Battle.net. Also the game accesses the hard drive much less now, adding to the smoother gameplay.

And here's the list of changes:

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Diablo II Version History
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- Patch 1.04
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Major bugs

- The Prismatic amulet, Coral ring, and other Horadric Cube recipe items
no longer change into other items upon starting a new game.
- Lances, Holy Water Sprinklers, Grim Helms, War Clubs, and Stilettos can
now be dropped by monsters and chests.
- Using the Paladin Charge skill as a monster dies cannot generate a
"zero hit-point" monster.
- Fixed an assertion when a high-level character kills a monster.
- Barbarian's Whirlwind and Leap Attack and Paladin's Charge no longer
keep all inventory items red and unusable after attack ends.
- A "dead, but alive" bug has been fixed.
- Equipping a barbarian with a two-handed sword or with a shield while
holding two two-handed swords will no longer cause disconnection from
the Realm.
- Fixed an assertion that could happen when unequipping one item while
wearing another gemmed item that enhances a character stat.
- Fixed a bug that prevented damage-enhancing magic properties from
working properly on bows.
- Closed a loophole that could allow a player to declare hostility on
anyone regardless of where the declarer is.
- Closed a loophole that could allow a player to run around too fast.
- Closed a loophole that allowed a player to equip and use an item that
was beyond the character's ability.
- Improved compatibility with Delta CD-ROM drives.
- When loading a saved character holding bad items, all the bad items
are deleted, allowing the character to be played.

Minor bugs

- Charged Bolts are no longer invisible for a radius (based on the
caster's light radius).
- "Bonefarming" eliminated in Single Player and Open games.
- Fixed the "Moon-walking" bug that occasionally appeared when knocked
back by a monster.
- French and German Create Queue status messages no longer overlap.
- Fixed attack speed bonuses and descriptions to be accurate for
Griswold's Edge, Goreshovel, The Diggler, Witherstring, and Twitchtroe.
- Fixed cast rate descriptions for the unique and set items: Arcanna's
Tricks, Maelstromwrath, Ume's Lament, The Iron Jang Bong, Wall of the
Eyeless, and Magefist.
- Long emotes in chat combined with a 15 character-long name no longer
assert.
- The inventory sounds of the Sallet, Heavy Bracers, Battle Gauntlets,
War Gauntlets, Mesh Boots, Battle Boots, War Boots, and Demonhide Sash
are now the same as the unexceptional versions of these items.
- Removed "invisible islands" from the River of Flame, Tal Rasha's Tomb,
Spider Forest, and Tower Cellar, preventing Barbarians/Sorceresses from
leaping/teleporting onto them.
- Changed the Amazon's Jab skill description to multiple attacks.
- Fixed a number of typos ("ordinateur" (in French version), "Eats and
Spits Corpses", "Stiletto", "Explore Tal Rasha's Chamber") and
capitalization mistakes ("extra gold from monsters", "better chance of
getting magic item", "Hit Causes Monster To Flee", "bonus to Attack
Rating", "Slows target by", and "Hit blinds target").
- When a Realm character tries to join a game at a higher difficulty level
than earned, the correct error message is used.
- The difficulty setting of the last Realm game created or joined will no
longer carry over to the next Single Player game.
- Fixed an error displaying the Chance to be Hit by a monster when having
activated a second Armor Shrine before the first one wears off. The
chance actually never goes below 5%.
- Fixed a bug where an open quest log was not updated to reflect the
saving of Cain.
- Fixed a bug that gave the wrong name to a Waypoint highlighted by a
player standing in a different "room" in the game environment.
- Two-handed items are now equipped properly (doing proper damage) at the
beginning of a game.
- Clicking on one's corpse (while equipped with nothing) properly
re-equips all the items from the corpse.
- Closing the Waypoint list by pressing Ctrl+Alt no longer disables pop-up
text on NPC's and inventory items.
- Attempting to trade a Tome or Scroll to a player without enough room to
accept them, no longer causes a phantom Spell to appear in that player's
spellbook.
- The gauntlet cursor can no longer be erroneously turned into a
trade/repair arrow/hammer.
- Fixed a bug with the mini-experience bar above level 75.
- Fixed a bug in the display of the Chance to be Hit.
- Fixed a bug in the count of the number of Scrolls remaining in Tomes of
Town Portal and Identify.
- The ranges of the Scythe and Grim Scythe have been increased to the
intended values.
- A miscalculation of the distance ranges of some skills has been fixed.
- The Iron Maiden skill now heals a Blood Golem based on the amount of
damage done to it rather than the maximum life of the monster attacking
it.
- Fixed a bug with experience accumulation and its display in the Realm
Ladders above level 93.
- Guided Arrow skill properly increases damage with additional skill points.

Improvements

- The Realms handle character data more quickly now.
- Added a Battle.net gateway selection to the main menu.
- Added a Change Password feature.
- Battle.net messaging has been upgraded to use character names, not just
account names. The new message addressing formats are:
/msg CharacterName, /msg CharacterName@RealmName (where RealmName is
USWest, USEast, Asia, or Europe), and /msg *accountname. The old
addressing format was: /msg accountname.
- Duriel's graphics are pre-loaded before entering his lair. This
minimizes the chance of getting killed by him before loading is complete.
- Added a CONTRAST video option to allow users who preferred the original
Glide settings to the 1.03 version to change the setting back or
somewhere in between.
- Slightly increased the effectiveness of Corpse Explosion by making every
point (not every other one) add to the radius of the damage.
- Health and mana reductions are no longer smoothed. Now, if you take a
big hit, you immediately see a big drop.
- Grim Shield base blocking was changed from 0 to 10.
- Added low quantity warning for Balanced Axe and Hurlbat.
- Added chances for Blades and Stiletto to be generated as treasure.
- An equipped belt can now be traded, if it is empty of all items.
- If player 1 has a chat window open and player 2 clicks on player 1,
nothing will happen now. This prevents trading requests from
interrupting someone who is trying to chat.
- Messages sent by a player in trade are only sent to the other person
with whom the player is currently trading. Also, messages from players
outside the trade are squelched and will not appear in the message log.
- Color codes sent by other users in chat are filtered out, preventing
malicious masquerading.
- Chat colors have been adjusted to help players identify the source of
the text. The new chat colors are Name = Gold, Whisper = Green,
Alert = Red, Message = White, Emote = Gray, Enter/Exit = Gray, and
Blizzard Representative = Blue.
- Removed the chat cheats "scrollhack1" and "scrollhack2".
- Added some new error messages to Battle.net and clarified a few others.
- Changed the Battle.net chat history scroll bar to Windows-style
"page up/down" instead of "scroll to this spot".
- Changed the "i" and "l" (lower-case "L") in the Battle.net chat font
to look different. The small "5" and "6" in the Character screen are
now more distinguishable, too.
- Maximum number of characters increased to 8 Battle.net characters/realm.

******Game Hint/Spoiler******

- Quest items will no longer be destroyed when transmuting quest items in
the Horadric Cube already containing another complete recipe.
- Fixed a bug that occasionally prevented the Golden Bird and Gidbinn
quests from giving their rewards.
- Cain no longer gives out extra Mephisto Soulstones.
- Removed the pesky "thief" ability from Lord De Seis.
(That oughta' fix him!)
- Fixed a bug that erroneously gave credit for the Act 4 Soulstone
quest to a party member who was not in Act 4.
- The resistances of certain Super-unique monsters have been reduced. Now,
Andariel correctly takes extra damage from fire, while the Smith and
Hephasto take extra damage from poison.

There are complaints all over battle.net's forums about two bugs introduced in the 1.04 patch:

Blessed Hammer and Concentrate don't work together. Lots of paladins are upset.

Items with unnaturally high durability get their current durability reduced to the natural level, requiring lots and lots of money to repair. This reduction happens each time a new game is started, which gets really expensive.

Blizzard has acknowledged both as bugs, urgently needing fixes. But of course, they can't promise when.

There are more bugs in 1.04 than just those 2. I made the mistake of sending a mail to macsupport@blizzard and got a joyus quasi canned response "delete your prefs or reinstall d2"

The problems i have found are as follows. in the character selection screen if you select the change realm button and select another realm... even ifyou press cancel and drop back to your own i get a "create a new character" text slecton with no picture.. this is in addation to the regualr one with the picture. I belive this is related to the "no character to slect" problem

secondly i was playing and the game froze due to bnet lag, and all my minions and most of the monsters were frozen.. except the 4 swarms of itchies that were still moving for no good reason. i cant attack them i cant go into town to avoid them...

however when i expressed these issues i was told " oh we are making updates to 1.04 (which there is no way to tell)" and you should reisntall to download said updated 1.04 patch. there is *NOTHING* i hate more then mindless support. I swore i would buy another blizzard title because of my poor support resonses i got on other issues... andi bought d2 anyway. Perhaps trevor could just tell me taht mebbe my issues will be added to the list and pretende that what i say matters.