Jump to content

Diablo III


Bren
 Share

Recommended Posts

Me and the fiancee quickly beat the game when it was first released and haven't touched it since, I enjoyed it decently enough. Now I'm seeing everyone talking about how much better it is now vs how it was terrible when it released. Can anyone give me a basic rundown on what has changed that has so drastically swayed everyones opinions? If we were to dive back into the expansion, whats the biggest change(s)?

1. No auction house and virtually no trading (gold, legendaries, and gems are all bind on account).

2. All classes re-balanced, so many more skills + builds are viable.

3. After hitting max level, you continue gaining xp toward "Paragon Levels", which let you put extra points into 16 different stats/modifiers for extra character customization.

4. Normal, Nightmare, Hell etc is gone. Now, monsters scale to your level, but you can choose a difficulty on top of that. You can switch difficulties anytime and you don't have to clear the game over and over to unlock them. Furthermore, you get good items at all difficulties.

5. There's a new mode called "Adventure Mode" which unlocks all waypoints and removes all story events. This ties into "Bounties", which are quests listed on your map that you can complete for gold + xp bonuses. Completing 5 bounties in an act gives you even more gold/xp plus bonus loot.

6. By completing bounties, you can unlock "Nephalem Rift Fragments" to enter the titular Nephalem Rifts. These are randomized dungeons with random enemy types from all 5 acts. Kill enough monsters in a rift to face an uber "rift guardian" who drops awesome loot.

7. Speaking of loot, items have been totally rebalanced. Rather than getting tons of bad items, FAR fewer items drop... but they're much better on average, and tailored to your class. So if you're playing Monk, you will get lots of Monk items, +Dex items, etc.

8. Continuing on the loot changes, legendaries are way better and drop way more often. There are also tons of new item effects (on legendaries and otherwise) ranging from +% Area Damage to Resource Cost Reduction, crazy modifiers to specific skills, +% damage to elemental skill types, etc. Finding a single awesome legendary can inspire you to make a whole build around it.

9. Crafting is incredibly useful now. By salvaging drops you don't want, you get materials that can be used to craft anything from rares all the way to set and legendary items.

10. A new artisan, the Mystic, has been added. She allows you to reroll one stat on any item. You can keep rerolling that one stat over and over but it gets more expensive each time and requires salvage materials. This feature means you don't have to keep waiting for the "perfect drop" and instead can tailor you gear. This helps since there is no longer trading or an auction house.

Put all these things together and the game is simply way more fun and deep.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Haven't played WoW but this does sound good and useful.

The reason damage meters are terrible is because once they're introduced, everything is about damage meters. Playing Diablo with some friends and you're doing a quarter of their damage and they give you nothing but shit about it. Joining a group of randoms and getting kicked for not doing enough damage. Playing with someone who always just talks about how much damage he's doing, etc. If you don't have meters, there's less emphasis on damage and more emphasis on like...the game.

Me and the fiancee quickly beat the game when it was first released and haven't touched it since, I enjoyed it decently enough. Now I'm seeing everyone talking about how much better it is now vs how it was terrible when it released. Can anyone give me a basic rundown on what has changed that has so drastically swayed everyones opinions? If we were to dive back into the expansion, whats the biggest change(s)?

The end game of Diablo is to get better gear. Basically not much else. So if weren't into that, you won't be into this. There's some harder difficulties. There's some bigger bosses, but it's all about gear. They made gear drops less terrible. They made the gear grind more bearable. They took a lot of the annoyances about trying to get gear less terrible, but it's still about gear.

Edited by Ramaniscence
Link to comment
Share on other sites

They already have DPS in the character sheet. What more do you really need?

Granted, the dps in the character sheet isn't a very good way to weight items. I have, for example, 412k sheet dps, but in reality my dps is hovering around 480k or more, because the sheet calculations don't take into account stuff like +% elemental skill bonus, or +% skill damage, which if you are running the correct build, can amount to much more dps than crit hit/dmg/attack speed which always give you a big boost in the dps sheet because of the way it's calculated.

That said, you don't need a degree to do the math in your head for that kind of stuff, and for the average joe the sheet dps will be good enough.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I kinda miss monsters and areas having loot pools, I want a cinder coat and andariel's visage for my fire barb, gosh darnit! :P

I prefer the way it is now honestly. Sure, how you get your loot is more random and less controlled, but at least you don't have to farm the same bosses over and over and over. At least with adventure mode and bounties you get some variation in what you do every time you log in.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The exception is that you DO need to farm specific mobs for legendary materials, which is currently a pain. They should make the droprate for those WAY higher off those specific bosses. After all, you need quite a few of resources to craft a single legendary item, along with the plans themselves.

From what I've read, farming those mats isn't that hard because you can lower the difficulty and still get the chance at the drops, while killing said required mobs in seconds.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

The exception is that you DO need to farm specific mobs for legendary materials, which is currently a pain. They should make the droprate for those WAY higher off those specific bosses. After all, you need quite a few of resources to craft a single legendary item, along with the plans themselves.

They can't be all that rare -- I have seven or eight Adventurer's Journals lying around in my stash, waiting for me to find the plans for Pender's Purchase.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

They can't be all that rare -- I have seven or eight Adventurer's Journals lying around in my stash, waiting for me to find the plans for Pender's Purchase.

That's the common one, because it drops anywhere. You need "Angelic Shards" to craft the new Hallowed set which I just found... I've killed Izual about 5 times on Torment1 and haven't found a single shard yet.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

diablofans just posted the rates at which they drop, at T1 it's 10% :|

Edit: they are going to buff it in future patch however, they say it'll be about the same as death's breath droprate, so at T1 it'd be 31%, not bad.

That's why people are farming them on normal difficulty. Sure the droprate is 5% less than t1, but you can probably get to the mob and kill it 5 times in the time it takes you to do so in t1.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 1 month later...

How is everyone enjoying the new 2.0.5 patch and anniversary bonuses to drops?

My Holy Crusader is going to have to change, it seems -- Fist of the Heavens --> Divine Well and FotH --> Retribution both got significantly nerfed. I am hoping to explore a Shield Bash build once I get a 2H weapon to replace my Darklight...

Was anyone else significantly affected?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

 Share

×
×
  • Create New...