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Diablo III Thread 2.0

43K views 763 replies 29 participants last post by  Iron1 
#1 ·
Don't know if any of you guys that used to play this had heard about this, but Blizz made some pretty big changes ahead of the upcoming expansion.

Basically they:

1) Totally redid the difficulty system. Normal/Nightmare/Hell/Inferno are gone. Instead we've got a bunch of new difficulty settings culminating in Torment, which then has a slider from 1-6, functioning kind of like Monster Power did previously. Essentially, the higher you go, the harder it gets but the more loot/gold/xp you get. Also, you don't have to run characters through the story 3 fucking times to get to 60 anymore. If you want, you can start a fresh character and run through on Expert or Master and level up way faster. You can also lower difficulty on the fly if you get stuck somewhere, and you can raise it by just jumping out to the main menu and then get right back into the game.

2) Redid loot (again). Drop rate are way buffed, legendaries actually drop kinda regularly now, and the game takes your class into account when rolling the stats on some loot, so you'll see more actually useful shit and less +Strength +Dexterity boots. They also redid a ton of the legendaries so they actually have cool and unique effects instead of just bigger stats. My friend found a legendary which on hit, summons a treasure goblin that follows him around collecting white items. After it collects a certain number, it drops a rare or legendary item. There are others that summon shit to fight for you or give you some kind of AoE. You know, actual fun shit.

3) Changed paragon levels. Instead of getting a bonus to magic find or whatever it was they did before, each paragon level gives you a point you can spend in one of four categories of buffs - stuff like pumping your main stat, movement speed, crit chance, max mana, etc by a small amount. On top of that, your paragon level is account wide, but the actual points are per character. So if you get to paragon 20 on your wizard, when you start a brand new demon hunter, he'll have his own 20 points to spend on whatever.

4) Closed the auction house and real money auction house! This one actually doesn't take effect for a couple of weeks, but yup. No more auction house since it's actually possible to find good gear in game now.

5) Overhauled a ton of skills for all the classes. They completely replaced some abilities altogether, and a lot of skills had their runes reworked entirely. There's a lot more freedom in how you build your character now - you don't need to use the one true build just to make it through the game, and a lot of the new/changed skills are ridiculously fun.

6) Crafting actually produces useful gear now, and they unified all the crafting mats. No more having half your stash filled up with all the different level crafting mats. They actually did the same with potions too: There's just one type of health potion now and it restores 60% of your health, period.

Here's a video explaining it:

I gotta say, I had given up on this game a few months after launch because once you hit 60 it was horribly unfun. Inferno was a fucking grind, you never got any decent loot, and anything worthwhile on the auction house cost 50 million + gold. My friend had good things to say about the patch so I decided to give it a shot and...damn. Kudos to Blizzard for listening to the community and putting in the effort to do such a major overhaul of this game this long after release, and for removing the RMAH cash cow.

Within the first two hours I had replaced pretty much all my level 60 wizard's gear with better stuff from drops, including a couple of pretty rad legendaries. This is how the game should have launched, but better late than never. I'm actually considering picking up the expansion now, where before that was about as likely as getting a legendary drop prior to this patch. :rofl: Definitely check it out if you enjoyed the vanilla game but got burnt out on the utter bullshittery of the endgame.
 
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#3 ·
:agreed:

They milked all they could out of the RMAH, and now they're trying to get people to buy expansions and build some longevity like D2.

Did they fix the online connection requirement? Because that really killed it for me in some of the places I lived with shitty internet.

Also, it got pretty boring pretty quickly, IIRC :-/
 
#8 ·
I'll give it a go - I may start a new character and run it from the beginning, though. I wish they had randomized the maps again, but it looks like basically everything else they did is a very sensible change that will likely make the game a lot more fun.

I didn't play D2 until well after they'd finishged tweaking it, but isn't this the same story as D2? They released it, it kinda sucked, no one really liked it, and then they finally released a major patch which turned it into a pretty awesome, very fun game?
 
#10 ·
I didn't play D2 until well after they'd finishged tweaking it, but isn't this the same story as D2? They released it, it kinda sucked, no one really liked it, and then they finally released a major patch which turned it into a pretty awesome, very fun game?
Yeah pretty much. D2 didn't become the D2 we all know and love until the expansion.

Also starting from scratch seems way more feasible now. Like I said, you can level up way faster if you're familiar with the game by doing a higher difficulty/have a higher level character that can gift some gems/gear. Beats the hell out of having to play through the story three fucking times.

I loved everything up to act 2 of Inferno when Beard and I were plowing it. Cool story, great gameplay, pretty fun maps. Then we got stonewalled by the WTF difficulty increase, and the game was basically Act 1 Farming Simulator 9000. :(
The funny thing was that Act 3 actually felt significantly easier even though strictly speaking, the mobs had higher health/damage. The problem with act 2 is that it has so many bullshit monsters that are just fucking obnoxious to fight. The snakes that can go invisible, the sand crocodiles that can burrow, those cat-man assholes that leap everywhere, those wasps that shoot the smaller wasps, which you can't see in the middle of a big fight and which hit like a truck. And for a nice chunk of the act you had to fight them in narrow sewers with nowhere to run. Throwing all that crap together on old Inferno difficulty was a nightmare.

Thankfully it's not so much of a wall now that you can pick the difficulty that works for you while still getting useful drops at a decent rate.
 
#9 ·
I loved everything up to act 2 of Inferno when Beard and I were plowing it. Cool story, great gameplay, pretty fun maps. Then we got stonewalled by the WTF difficulty increase, and the game was basically Act 1 Farming Simulator 9000. :(
 
#11 ·
I think a lot of that depends on the character you're playing - I was a Monk and a Wizard on the two characters I played, and both had great ranged attacks. That made Act 2 quite a bit more bearable, whereas a pure melee character would have been rough.
 
#14 ·
Not to continuously sound like an elitist, but Nightmare was absofuckinglutely NOTHING like Act 2 of Inferno man. EVERYTHING in Act 2 of Inferno one-shot everyone. Ranged, Melee, it didn't matter. It was fucking obnoxious, and broken as hell. :lol:

The damn Diablo fight on Inferno was easier than some of the Act 2 trash. It was ridiculous, like two completely different games.
 
#23 ·
So I installed this and played maybe an hour and a half last night, leveled a Barbarian up to 10, and called it a night when I got to the old cemetary to start looking for the crown.

Shockingly, it was a lot of fun. I went straight to Hard, so it was nice to feel like I couldn't just steamroll everything and I had to pay attention to my health (which IMO is probably the right difficyulty level - I'm not much of a gamer so the fact that I beat the game on Regular without dying once, I think, was IMO kind of a problem). Crafting seems to produce useful items, but the drops are a lot better too it seems. There's currently a +50% XP bonus in advance of the expansion so I might go up a further difficulty level as well.

They still didn't randomize the maps, but combat is balanced quite a bit better, items are more useful, and there's a few additional little tweaks here and there that have just made it a more fun game to play. I may even grab the expansion. :yesway:

EDIT - yeah, I had to go back to the thread and check, but I made it to the very end of Act I Nightmare before I died for the first time, as a guy playing a wizard more like a melee fighter. That isn't right. :lol:
 
#29 ·
They still didn't randomize the maps, but combat is balanced quite a bit better, items are more useful, and there's a few additional little tweaks here and there that have just made it a more fun game to play. I may even grab the expansion. :yesway:
For what it's worth, the new outdoors areas found in the expansion will apparently be randomized to some extent. :yesway:
 
#24 ·
The crafting overhaul is really, really welcome. It was such a bummer before to drop money into leveling up the blacksmith only to find that 99% of recipes were useless. My barbarian hit 60 last night and I got a recipe for Archon Gloves of Strength. I figured hey, why not, and spent the 50k + crafting mats and...actually got a really solid piece of gear with stats appropriate to my class!

Also got an awesome 1H legendary sword a little later and was able to craft a pretty usable shield to go with it, and have been replacing the rest of my pre-60 gear at a pretty steady rate. My barbarian already has almost the same DPS that my wizard had after a month or two of banging my head against inferno back at launch, and yet they really neatly avoided having the easier access to gear trivialize the difficulty through the Torment system.
 
#27 ·
Speaking of gold, a pro tip: Flawless square gems are selling for 20-35k gold (depending on type) for some reason, and white weapons reliably sell for 80-90k. I guess people are stocking up for the expansion since the auction house is shutting down, and you get 6-8 of the new basic crafting mat from white weapons.
 
#30 ·
All right so I completed up to Skeleton king to see how much loot has changed and here's the results:


usually at this point I have all blues and maybe a yellow (depending of the yellow drop is good for my class) This time around I picked up 5 Blues, 4 Yellows, 1 Orange. Very pleased with the changes for sure!.
 
#32 ·
They buffed the hell out of the common loot, eh? I'm getting junk yellows with monster stats on them compared to the top tier stuff I had before.

Playing on the hardest difficulty, the trash is surprisingly easy but man, the unslowable specials are a fucking bitch. :lol: I managed to kill a couple of rares, but definitely did a shitload of dying tonight. :lol:
 
#36 ·
They buffed the hell out of the common loot, eh? I'm getting junk yellows with monster stats on them compared to the top tier stuff I had before.

Playing on the hardest difficulty, the trash is surprisingly easy but man, the unslowable specials are a fucking bitch. :lol: I managed to kill a couple of rares, but definitely did a shitload of dying tonight. :lol:
You bitch, I'm going to have to up a difficulty level myself now, aren't i? :lol:
 
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