The first at all detailed information about potential patch features was posted in our UFAQ in March 2002. Our information was directly from the Blizzard North programmer who was doing most of the patch changes at that time. At the time the items listed here were all more than likely to make it into the patch. Keep in mind that this was in late February/early March, and much may change between then and the final release of the patch, which will probably not be until June or July. Or at Blizzard likes to timeline things, "soon".

Massive randomization of monsters in Act 5, as well as boosting the number of champion and boss monsters encountered. (This would mean no more set monsters in every area, so no more super easy Bloody Runs.) Cows will be fixed. How this will be done is unknown, if they'll make cows harder, cut their exp rewarded, cut their drops, or just make it impossible to enter the level more than once with a given character. There will be more dupe detecting and deleting features, as well as other anti-cheating techniques.
There will be some skill and item balancing intended to even things out between the characters.
There will almost certainly be some Runewords added, and possibly more crafting recipes and elite uniques as well.
Lots of changes to item runs are being considered. Meph will probably drop less or be much harder to kill, or both. Many of the seldom-killed SuperUniques, especially ones on quests, (such as the Summoner, Fangskin, Maggot Queen, etc) should have their drops increased.
There may be reassigning of TreasureClasses on some of the most run bosses (such as Pindleskin) to make them less profitable. Blizzard also is aware of how many characters would like a realm wipe, or realm split, and while that's very unlikely, they are looking at other possible ways to enable a fresh start to at least some portion of the economy.

Note the last paragraph. At the time we were asked not to mention the planned ladder characters, so we merely hinted at them here as best we could. They weren't at all finalized at the time, but were being strongly considered.

Blizzard doesn't like to be quoted on any specific patch changes, since so often they have to make changes to planned patch features, and it's easier for them to work if they don't have players going on and on about something that may not even be included.

Blizzard made a couple of official comments on v1.10 last month, and though they offer few specific details, they did at least confirm the ladder character concept.

Characters created before patch 1.10 will not be able to join games with these new ladder characters, although they will be able to play with other normal characters that predate the 1.10 patch or characters created after 1.10 that are not created as ladder characters. This means that for the duration of the ladder season - which is yet to be determined - these ladder characters will exist in a new separate economy from the other Battle.net Diablo II characters. No legitimate characters or items will be deleted with this patch, although we continue deleting hacked or duped items, as well as characters that are part of accounts used to attack the Battle.net servers.
Players have continued to ask about Ladder Characters, so we added a FAQ item to cover it in early May. To recap quickly:

Ladder characters will only be possible to create in v1.10 and later, and only on the Realms (we think).
You can make a non-Ladder character in v1.10, it's entirely optional. Non-ladder characters in v1.10 will be just like existing characters, able to mix with them freely.
There will be Hardcore and Softcore ladder characters. The main selling point of a Ladder characters is that they can only play with other Ladder characters. So there will be a totally fresh economy, and no cheesy lvl 4's turboing to Hell. At least not the first day.
There are no transfers of items from normal to ladder characters, no giving waypoints, etc.
Ladder characters will be the only characters eligible to show up on the new ladder.
The current ladder will be wiped, and there will be no ladder for non-ladder characters.
The most recent list of patch features was obtained by speaking to Bill Roper at a gaming press event in Germany, where he was helping to show off Warcraft III. This info is thanks to the Diablo II Network, who were able to speak with Bill about D2 there, April 26th. Their info forced Blizzard to post the Ladder Character info listed above.

The Patch will contain a lot of new content including new crafting recipes and Runewords.

Blizzard will continue to fight duping, hacking and cheating with the patch providing additional security against those actions. The real sensation: There will be another ladder reset Only people who create completely new characters will be able to participate, twinking (the transfer of items from other, older characters and mules) will not be possible for these character. It seems that it will be even impossible for old and new characters to play together in one game. The experience system will be completely redone, according to Bill Roper a character at level 75 will already count as a very high level character. However the cap of 99 levels will remain.

There isn't any exact date of release known yet, expect the patch late the end of june to early july, which would put the release shortly after the release of Warcraft III.

So Bill is confirming Ladder Characters and Crafting/Runeword additions, but there's no mention of the general changes to monsters and item finding. We heard earlier this year that there were possibly going to be changes to character level up rates, but nothing as drastic as scaling high level characters down by 15 or 20 levels (since Clvl 90 or 95 is considered high now).

Blizzard doesn't really like this. After all, they worked on all those other areas, making a variety of monsters and levels, and intended that the game would be played all through and through. Some players do play a wide variety of areas, for the fun, challenge, variety, etc, but the majority of players are going to do the lowest risk/highest reward areas over and over again. It's not uncommon, for softcore characters especially, to have two full changes of equipment, one for power leveling, and the other for magic finding. They'll wear their shaftstop and vamp gaze while doing endless cow runs in public games for experience, and then switch to skullder's, harlequin, war travelers, and MF jewelry and do Meph or Pindleskin runs for items.

While Blizzard doesn't want to force characters into specific play styles, they said repeatedly pre-game that Hell difficulty would be really hard in D2X. They didn't envision any characters being able to clear it successfully solo, and thought mixed parties would be required. Their main error was not realizing how powerful certain skills are at higher levels, and not anticipating how much the new uber D2X equipment boosts character abilities. They also didn't anticipate players clearing the same area or two over and over and over again, avoiding any area with hard monsters. Not that there are all that many hard monsters; most of Act 5 is a cake walk, with only Minotaurs and perhaps Yeti being a real threat. Numerous Act 5 monsters are complete wimps, such as the annoying but harmless Succubi and Imps, the slow and non-damaging Shambling Undead, Death Maulers and Minions, and the nifty but not-dangerous Defilers and Lashers.

In addition to the easy monsters, there is zero monster variability in Act Five. You get the same types of monsters in the same areas every single time. If you're scared of Minotaurs, or don't like PI Succubi, you can just do areas that don't have those monsters. An area is easy or hard, fast or slow, depending on the monsters found there, as well as the level layout. Big open levels (like the Cows or Bloody Hills) are much faster to clear, and if there are slow, easy-to-kill monsters there, that just compounds the issue. Since virtually all monsters in the game can be killed quickly by one character or another, level layout matters a great deal. Imagine if the WorldStone 2 level, which is always all minions, were as big and open as the Cow Level? Javazons and Nova Sorcs would herd a bit and go insane on exp there. Since the level is small, and comprised entirely of narrow hallways and small rooms, the monsters take much longer to gather up and slaughter than Cows do. The Halls of Vaught are the same way; the zombies and maulers there are very easy, but you have to cover a lot more ground to kill them all, which takes longer.

What might Blizzard do to add difficulty, and fun/randomization to the game? Changes we were told about included huge monster randomization, as well as a lot of reshuffling of monsters. So there will probably be random monster generation now; you might get Imps and Blood Lords in the Bloody Hills one game, rather than always the easy Minions and Death Maulers. There will probably also be new monster types set in various areas, so you might always get Minions on WS2, as now, but you'd get something else as well.

We were told that there might be a lot more bosses and champions of all types added as well. Randomly-distributed, as most bosses are now, but instead of seeing two or three a level, you might see six or eight. It's not known if they'll be adding bosses to no-boss zones like the Halls, Bloody Hills, Worldstone, etc, but it seems like a safe bet, assuming there's nothing in the game code that would make it too difficult.

It's unknown if there will be specific monster tweaking, or any global changes. It would be easy for Bliz to add say 25% to all monster resistances on Hell, or add that much to Physical Resistance, or give every monster in Hell a random boss attribute. They could also go through and change specific stats on monsters, boosting individual monster hit points, damage, foot speed, etc. These are a lot more work though, and haven't been mentioned yet, and could also have unintended consequences, so it's not as likely we'll see such changes.

Monsters worth much less experience? Steeper exp penalties at higher Clvls? More experience to reach the next level up? All of the above? This will apply to all gameplay in v1.10. So newly-created characters will have a lot harder time getting to a high level than they do now. You might want to pump up your MF'ing barb with his +MF per Clvl gear (Skullder's, Ali Baba) now.

In addition to lowering exp gain per kill, Bliz is definitely looking into ways to cut exp leeching. So many characters now get a turbo to Hell, and then just leech in the Cows or Bloody Hills. Reaching Clvl 70 or 80 while wearing all newbie junk and having 200 stat points saved up is not at all unheard of. You don't need to kill things to gain good exp, after all. Blizzard has considered numerous ways to lower exp gain in parties, including forcing characters to actually kill something or at least deal damage from time to time, making the exp sharing radius smaller (you'd have to actually be in the party, rather than just on the same level), or restricting the Clvl spread that would share experience in a party, or that would get good experience from monsters. As of now, once you get past Clvl 25 you can gain enormous experience from any monster in the game. This might be changed to require you to always be within 10 or 15 levels of a monster to get big exp from it, or not enable the full exp formula until Clvl 50, for example.

This change will make or some interesting game dynamics. It's unknown if some of the very high Clvl required items will have their Clvl reqs lowered. Since these are meant to be super quality items, perhaps they'll stay as they are, and you'll have to put in enormous time reach Clvl 87 to use a Cranium Basher, or 85 for Arkaine's Valor and even the generally-worthless Heaven's Taebaek.

It will also alter character development and builds. It's so easy to get a Sorceress to Clvl 85 or 90 now, due to them being so powerful with just one good skill and related mastery, that many players plan their long term skills for that level, knowing they can have four skills to Slvl 20, with a few points in several other skills, plus their equipment bonuses. If Clvl 70 or 75 becomes a high level, that's 20 fewer skill points, and maxing out FW/FM + Nova/LM will become impossible. Other skill point-intensive builds like Hybridzons, or PVP Barbs, will suffer as well.

The Hell Cows especially are unbalanced, since they have no special resistances to any sort of elemental damage, occur in tremendous numbers, and on a very wide open level. We were told specifically that these would be "fixed". I suspect Bliz will just make them impossible to enter more than once per difficulty level per character, as they always were in D2C. That would be easier than redoing their resistances or AI or other stats to make them more challenging. The other option would be to just nerf their experience, which might be happening all through the game. Bliz could easily make Hell cows worth 1 exp each, cut their maximum TC to about 60, and lower their drop rate as well, without changing any of the cow level entry requirements. This would effectively make the Cow Level not worth doing, unless you were hunting for charms or jewels or runes and didn't care about finding nothing else or gaining any experience.

The other levels we heard would probably be tweaked were the MF spots. Mephisto, Pindleskin, etc. Many characters are made specifically to clear these levels when loaded up with heaps of MF gear, and reap enormous item profits in short order. This is why the D2X economy is so screwed up (not including D2C converted duped SoJs, or D2X dupes), since it's so easy to find a bunch of great items doing Hell Meph runs with good MF.

The easiest way to change these bosses would be to lower their item quality drops, and/or their potential Treasure Classes. If Hell Meph suddenly dropped item quality like a normal monster, and could only drop up to TC 66, you'd get nothing higher than Dusk Shrouds, and would get 99% blue/gold items, which would make running him hardly worth it, even as easy as he is to kill. The other option is to make the MF-loved monsters much harder to kill. This is problematic since non-MF'ers need to be able to kill them as they advance through the act, but it wouldn't be hard to give bosses different stats if they were activated by a character who had already killed them once or twice. How to make them harder is a question also. More hit points would just take a bit longer. Higher resistances wouldn't matter to some characters, but would ruin others. Any major changes, such as Meph duplicating, or spawning minions, or requiring players to kill the High Council before he'd appear (like Baal) would require a lot of changes to the game code, which makes them very unlikely.

Barbarians were thought to be way underpowered initially in D2X, but are now quite the opposite, mostly due to everyone having some huge CCB, or Grandfather, or various Cruel elite weapons. These coupled with the vastly-overpowered Berserk makes a Barbarian easily able to kill anything but PIMI bosses in hell, and since you virtually never see anything Immune to Magic and Physical, Barbs have an easy time of things.
Much the same goes for Druids pre-IK Maul/Hellslayer/Messerschmidt, Pals pre-Baranar/Lightsabre, etc.

The point here is that it's hard to say a character skill is overpowered without it being overpowered due to the super damaging weapons that are so common now, but were unheard of early in D2X. Blizzard's testing had a hard game for D2C characters, but they didn't properly appreciate just how powerful characters would become once the best weapons were in wide circulation. Dupes and hacks have been major factors as well, with godly hacks like Ith weapons, and something like 95% of the best elite Uniques and 99% of SoJs being dupes.

Lots of Uniques were changed somewhat in v1.09, with a few godly ones toned down (Check out the original stats on Arkaine's, for instance. 1000+ hps on a Barb.) and dozens of mid-level ones improved, especially the Class-Specific Uniques. There hasn't been any word on more Uniques being added, and contrary to popular rumor, there have never been any other Uniques in the game, and there aren't other Uniques in the game code, but not activated, other than the Constricting Ring. There are names for Elite Uniques of every item type, but just the names, they don't have the actual stats worked out.

There will, for sure, be more Crafting recipes and Runewords added, which is good news. Hardly anyone does any crafting now, though it can be fun with a few things, such as Blood Jewelry, if you don't mind some rather absurd Clvl reqs. These are all legit, v1.09 items, if you're wondering. Made them myself, USEast, HC.

Since Blizzard has said they'll be adding Crafting recipes and Runewords, for sure, but haven't mentioned Uniques, it seems unlikely we'll see new Golden items. There's no word on what the new Runewords will be, or what type of Crafted items, but we'll try to get some info on that before the patch, as well as finding out if any Uniques are set for changes.

Another popular weapon issue to gripe about is the availability of top damage weapons. It's far easier to get a big sword than any other type of weapon, and getting a big damage one-handed hammer is almost impossible. This is nothing new, we wrote about it all the way back in September 2001, a month or so after v1.09 was released. In addition to the problems in finding a variety of weapons, some are clearly superior to others. Swords do as much or more damage than most of the biggest two-handed weapons, while swinging much faster, and Barbs can dual wield them, or wield with a shield (though they lose damage in the process). There's really no reason (other than variety) to use a spear or maul or polearm, when swords are better in almost every way. It's not just that there are a few Uniques that are super high quality (as is the case with bows/xbows), it's that entire classes of weapons are far harder to obtain, and do decent damage with.

The other problem with changing character skills is that they are always retroactive. So if you have a character built in one way, and the patch changes your main skill, you are probably screwed. When items change existing ones are generally left as is, but newly-found ones will all have the new stats, and using them is optional. If your best skill gets nerfed, you have no options but to do a new character.

There are also a number of skills with bugs, that we hope will be addressed.

Sasa: Even after being turned down a bit in v1.09, Firewall is still overpowered, when coupled with a high level Fire Mastery. Arguments can be made that Hydra and Meteor are also. Nova deals ridiculous damage to large groups, but this is only a real imbalance in the Cow Level (and possibly Bloody Hills), due to the lack of Lightning Resistance and the vast numbers of cows that can be herded up. Changes to random monster spawning might fix the Nova imbalance, and it's got small enough range and high enough mana cost to balance it somewhat as well.

Baba: Berserk is probably the best skill in the game. Just one point in this is sufficient for any Barb with a decent weapon to slaughter PIs in hell. Druids, Pals, Amazons, and Asns would kill for a skill that did 1/3 the magical damage per mana cost of Berserk. All weapon masteries give 100% Critical Strike. This is a long-standing bug. Whirlwind has several issues, including not counting weapon speed modifiers from other than the weapon and having an always-hit component. Overall weapon balance is tied closely to Barbarian skills

Pals and Druids: Since you hardly see these characters being used, it's hard to argue that they are overpowered, but there is almost no variety in them. Virtually every successful Paladin uses Zeal/Vengeance/Fanaticism, and Druids are all Fury wolves. Druids all suck against PI monsters as well, while having half a dozen skills no one uses. Converting Rabies or Fire Claws to a Berserk-style elemental attack would certainly make them more viable, compared to Barbs. Pals and Druids in the typical builds tend to get ridiculous AR bonuses as well. It's not at all hard to get over 5000 AR with less than 100 Dex, though you could argue that they need this advantage over the generally 2500-3000 AR Barbs.

Amazons: Bowazons are considered way overpowered, especially for PvM, but that's mostly due to pierce working on Guided Arrow. This is a known bug and is definitely on the list to be fixed in v1.10. Other issues with Bowazons are almost all due to the super high damage Buriza. Windforces are even more damage, but they're virtually impossible to find, and if not for all of the duped ones, they'd be so rare as to have no real effect on the overall gaming balance. Javazons enjoy Lightning Fury, which with Pierce is one of the most powerful attacks in the game. However this is tied to the Cow Level; in other areas, especially if monster randomization goes in, and there are LI creatures all over the place, it wouldn't be unfairly-powerful.

Elemental Druids: These are hopelessly weak, and can hardly manage Nightmare. Playing one in Hell that's not just a party exp leech is virtually impossible, with any quality of equipment. This whole tree could be doubled or tripled in damage, or a mastery added, and they'd still be far weaker than any decent Sorceress.

There are lots of character builds that seem to be nicely balanced. The problem is that players compare all builds to the most powerful, and if they can't kill as fast as a super-gear Barb or Javazon, players feel underpowered. It's simply not possible to kill non-PIs with a Paladin as fast as you can with a well-equipped Fury Druid. So the tendency of players is to think the Paladin is underpowered, rather than the Druid being too strong. This is why the bitching about "nerfs" is always 50x louder than anything you hear when a character has their skills improved.

So it's hard to say which characters are just right, when we don't know what else will be nerfed, and when character killing speed is so dependent upon equipment, which may or may not be adjusted.