Might want to check this out, if you haven't seen it already: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=488240 http://blog.metaclassofnil.com/?p=101 Still might be buggy, but should have issues ironed out in a few days as people play the game with the fix.
A friend just pointed out to me that Blizzard had created a page on Battle.net where you can view you and all your friends' gear. Curious to see what everyone's got. Here's mine: http://us.battle.net/d3/en/profile/Drex-1586/hero/7400765 Not sure how often the page updates. Might be overnight or something. I just bought a new crossbow for my DH and it hasn't shown up yet.
fyi, if you haven't seen this site, it's pretty cool. www.diabloprogress.com search for your account and then click on your character and see how you rank world wide and in the US.
Kinda depressing to see all the ridiculously high DPS numbers from stacking crit chance and crit damage. Without doing that at all I feel like my Monk's damage is decent at 25k unbuffed... but then there are monks with 200k damage because of all the crit stuff. Craziness. Apparently the one extraordinary thing about my Monk is that I'm #60 in the world among Monks for life regen with 2660. And it does serve me well... between that and the LoH (not to mention 9000 armor and 950 resist all), I'm really hard to kill.
So the expansion comes out at the end of the month, and if you haven't played in a long time, the game has significantly changed. They removed the auction house from the game, changed how difficulties work so once you finish the game on normal you can play any difficulty you want, changed most of the skills and abilities to some degree, and drastically changed itemization and loot drops. They have what is called "smart loot" which means when a legendary drops it has ~66% chance of rolling with the stats the class you are playing needs. They also drastically increased legendary drop rates, so you are practically guaranteed one every 2 hours or less even with no magic find. Paragon levels are shared with all characters on your account and allow you to customize your character with various stat increases, bonuses to crit chance, crit damage, life on hit, resist all, ect. •Pools of Reflection have been added to the game •Pools of Reflection provide a 25% bonus to experience •This bonus persists until you reach a set amount of bonus experience (equal to approximately 10% of the current amount of Paragon experience needed to reach the next Paragon level) or your character dies •Gathering additional Pools of Reflection bonuses increases the amount of total experience bonus a character can receive until character death, stacking up to 10 times •This experience bonus persists on logout •Nephalem Glory has been added to the game •Occasionally during battle, monsters will drop Power Globes when damaged or killed •Power Globes grant the Nephalem Glory buff, which causes players to deal additional damage in the form of golden lightning bolts and increases their movement speed for a short time •This buff can stack up to three times •New Character statistics have been introduced •These include Toughness, Healing, Splash Damage, Cooldown Reduction, and Resource Cost Reduction •Players now have the ability to resurrect in multiple places when they die in non-Hardcore games •You may choose to either resurrect at your body, in town, or at the last checkpoint you encountered •Players may not resurrect at their body during a Boss encounter •Players may only resurrect at their body a maximum of three times in a row •Followers now automatically level with characters •Quests now occasionally grant item rewards when completed during the leveling process •Gold can no longer be traded •Nephalem Valor has been removed from the game Potions have been changed to a single type that gives a % of life back on use. •All crafted items will now roll with stats appropriate to the character crafting them, using the Loot 2.0 Smart Drop system •Crafting materials have been condensed into two item level tiers: 1-60 and 60-70 •This change is to reduce the amount of stash space consumed by crafting materials and simply older crafting recipes •All crafting materials currently in character inventories and stash have been converted accordingly Full patch notes: https://us.battle.net/d3/en/game/patch-notes/2-0-1 Anyway, if you have the game and haven't played in a while it's worth checking out, and if you have thought about getting the game, it's on sale online from battlenet for $20 right now https://us.battle.net/d3/en/
Hopefully the combination of killing the auction house and an expansion that overhauls the core mechanics will save this game. I didn't think the auction house was a bad idea, per say, I just think the ham-fisted way it was implemented in combination with the TERRIBLE itemization was what ruined the experience. Let people who find super duper fat loot that doesn't suit their chataracters sell it... but don't make it the *only* way you can upgrade your items.
I am still on the fence on whether to buy the expansion or not and give D3 another try. **if you didn't play d2, don't bother reading the rest of this post as it won't make any sense. (minor rant) D2 LOD was mainly fun for me cause of the everlasting replay value of PVP-ing and the all around customization. The classes were so well balanced that it made you want to experiment with all the different builds (fire/light/cold sorc, ww barb, ww sin, bowazon, trap sin, hammerdins, bone necs, foher, town bear druid, etc). That in turn caused me to spend many years trying to collect godly items for each of these builds so that I could own in duel games and show off my character. Mf-ing and hoping to find good gear wasn't really plausible for me, and I had to upgrade my gear mainly through trading and trying to gain a little profit with each transaction. While I can see where Blizzard was trying to go with the auction house (mimicking d2jsp.org), it limited community interaction and didn't really allow the d2 community to create its own economy. Everything had a discrete value and inflation was nuts. In D2, sojs, 290, 32020s, runes were all forms currency and it was always what the D2 community decided it would be. D2 quests were pretty mundane but if you're into that stuff, you could do them on your own one by one. They always seemed like chores to be me but in D2, at least you could "rush" and there was always motivation to complete them so that you could get to hell games (where you could level up faster, be able to wear all your items, max out all your skills/synergies, and duel with your character at full strength). Unique mods on items/different character break points/socketing all made character building really fun and made you feel the need to gather more items so that you could switch out depending on the situation. Heck, even hacked items made the game really fun. They helped stimulate the D2 economy, created risk for people, and once duping was fixed, hacked items (e.g. btals) became super expensive, giving you something to always strive for. Towards the end, many people were just trading for perfectly rolled items Imo, all Blizzard really had to do was remake D2 LOD with better graphics and they would be banking.
This patch did the game good. No longer is the only good gear you could possibly get found in the auction house. Drops are great, and now they are specialized for your class. You still get drops for other classes once in a while, but most of the time the items dropped are GREAT for you. I found better EQ in 3 days of D3 post-patch than I did the entirety of playtime beforehand.
If you already have the game, you might as well try out the new patch, it will give you a decent preview of what to expect in the expansion. The expansion will add adventure mode, where "bounties" are placed on different objectives in random acts thru out the game, and you can jump between acts at will in any order you want. Their objective is to eliminate any one grind spot being the "best", and encourage people to see as many different parts of the game as possible. To that end, they also added the "reset quest" option, which resets all your quests as if you hadn't did any, and if you kill Diablo after doing that you get a guaranteed legendary. And of course the new level cap with new skills, and the crusader class, along with the Mystic which will do enchanting of gear and the much improved itemization and loot drop rate make the game feel much more rewarding than just farming for gold or stuff to sell on the AH to get gold.
Lol the auction house was so stupid. I don't know how they didn't see that happening. With that said I'll play again when it comes out for PS4 with my wife, we haven't had 2 pcs to play games on so it'll be fun to play with her.
Oh and until the expansion releases next week, they have a 50% exp bonus going on if you want to level a class quick, or raise your paragon level faster. It stacks with the pool of reflection xp bonuses.
This. Everyone just likes to say "auction house = bad". That's not really true though. What's bad is a game where itemization was so terrible as to make the auction house required. (I'm talking about gold AH only, obviously pay-to-win, real-money AH is stupid in my view). As long as people are extremely likely to get their own good drops, having an AH isn't really an issue. On a sorta-related note, one thing that actually annoys me a bit about the patch is that legendaries aren't trade-able. If I find a unique that's awesome, but not for a character I care to use, I'd like to be able to give it to someone in my group of friends who could use it. Or if I have a really awesome weapon for one of my characters, and I find a better version of the thing... would like to be able to give the old one away, instead of just vendoring it.
Yeah, though you can trade it to players who were in the same game as you when it dropped. I think it's a fair trade off for massive increases in legendary drop rates, other wise everyone gets the best gear incredibly fast with the new drop rates and trading.
I agree with the above posters about the problem being itemization. You played for hours got no useful drops and ended up having to resort to the AH to fill the majority of your slots. If you didn't advancing to higher difficulties was almost never going to happen. I have been pretty happy with the new loot system. I have gotten a god number of legendary items. My concern was that it would water down the items. However, not all the ones I got were upgrades. IMO it is much more fun to have them drop then be slightly disappointed that they aren't an upgrade, than to play for 10-20 hours and not see anything of significance drop. I am also looking forward to the expansion next week. The Crusader should fit my play style well, and I am looking forward to Adventure mode. That feature seems more like D2 in that you can move between acts, but it also provides some more content in letting you do bounties and other events without having to play through the storyline over and over.
everything looks good so far in Loot 2.0 I've done alot more crafting and the new legendary drops are having some cool effects my monk can do Torment IV, I can't handle the elites on V
Add me if ya'll wanna do some runs together. http://us.battle.net/d3/en/profile/myktek-1631/hero/19141123 I usually just play casually, no specific runs I do.
The expansion will go live tonight at 12 pm EST, 11 pm in Houston. Unfortunately have to work early so probably won't get to play til tomorrow.
