As Blizzard prepares to deliver hearty Diablo 3 updates in patch 1.0.4, the developer's sharing more on exactly what it's planning. This week it's issued dev blog-a-blogs detailing its revamp of Barbarian skills, so more of them are useful, and the overhaul of Legendary items, making them far cooler and more useful.

The plan for Barbarians is to make Bash and Cleave as worthy Fury-generating competition for current king of the roost Frenzy--by buffing them, rather than nerfing Frenzy. Bash is to generate 2 extra Fury and receives a small damage boost, when Cleave damage is being boosted too. Likewise, Blizzard noticed players using Battle Rage to spend Fury more than other skills, so they're being boosted too.

As for Legendary items, Blizzard admits, "In many ways the Legendary items that we released with the game were just Rares with flavor text." To make them more unique, many items are getting special effects not found on regular items, like monster abilities and summoning angels or demons. Though, of course, this doesn't mean much if they still have rubbish stats.

Legendary items will no longer suffer an affix penalty, and many are being boosted to item level 63 so they can be as powerful as regular end-game items. Blizzard is also adding new Legendaries to promote irregular builds, like the melee wizard and throwing barbarian.

Sadly, 1.0.4's boosts will only apply to newly-dropped Legendaries, so yours may be obsolete.

More 1.0.4 class updates are promised soon, but for now here's a peek at new Legendary effects: