Diablo III - Patch 1.03 Being Deployed

Diablo III Patch 1.03 is already available in the Americas region. Scheduled maintenance started today (June 19) at 3 a.m. PDT (GMT-7). Servers even went back online ahead of schedule, at 9:45 a.m. instead of 1 p.m.
It will then be deployed in Europe, tomorrow morning (June 20), between 3 a.m. and 1 p.m. CEST (UTC+2).
Finally, Asian servers will receive the update on June 21, between 4 a.m. and 2 p.m. GMT+8.

Patch content

This patch includes numerous bugfixes, and brings several changes to monsters and items:

• Drop rates: High level items will have a small chance to drop a bit earlier in the game.
  
  This should solve the following problem:

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.

• Monster damage: Monsters will no longer receive a damage bonus per additional player in co-op. Playing solo used to look like the only viable option for level 60 characters. Hopefully this will not be the case anymore.

• Inferno nerf: When developing Inferno mode, Blizzard kept increasing the difficulty until their team could barely make it. Then, they doubled it. And they shipped Diablo III. It turned out to be a little too extreme:

Inferno balance right now has a difficulty gap in which Act I feels about right, but Act II feels like trying to bust through a brick wall. In patch 1.0.3 we’re going to be lowering that wall by adjusting the damage and health of monsters in Inferno Act II, III and IV. We feel like Act I Inferno is in a pretty good place.

• Repair costs: Repair costs will be significantly higher for level 60 characters, in order to prevent players from considering strategies that involve dying a lot (which is not fun): "We’re currently evaluating repair costs between 4x and 6x their current values."

• Increased attack speed bonus: "Attack Speed bonus values on weapons and armor have been reduced by 50%"

• Artisans costs: It will become cheaper to level the blacksmith and the jeweller up, and crafting will cost less, as well. The most drastic change applies to gem combining:
  
  "The gem combine costs for Perfect Square and above will remain unchanged."

Not included in this patch

Blizzard acknowledges that legendary items should be better than blue items, and that it is not the case at the moment, but they will not be fixed in Patch 1.03.

Similarly, class tuning is not the main priority of this patch.

Class tuning will be an ongoing process, and we’re targeting the 1.1 patch for most class tweaks, with a focus on punching build diversity up a few more notches.

For more information, you can read the Official Patch Notes, or the excellent Design Preview article.

Update (June 20, 2012)

Some players reported problems such as: not being able to earn any XP, followers reverting to level 13, and/or the game showing "Starter Edition". Apparently, all of those problems can be solved by changing your Battle.net password, and restarting the game.

FOLLOWERS LEVEL 13/CAN'T EARN XP/MUST UPGRADE

If you run into this behavior, please attempt the following.

1. Log out and close Diablo III
2. Perform a Password Reset: https://us.battle.net/account/support/password-reset.html
3. After you've changed your password, log back in and try again.

*update 6/19/2012 4:00 PM PDT- This issue should now be resolved