…The new gems and some of the new legendaries very likely will be Season 3 only.
Nevalistis: This is correct. The Season 3 Legendary items went into the 2.2.0 PTR patch without being flagged as Seasonal items, so they are currently dropping for everyone regardless of which game mode you are in. Of course, this will change for when the patch goes live, but in the meantime, it allows a greater pool of folks the opportunity to try them out and test them. 🙂
Why weren’t the “Bane of the Stricken” and the “Iceblink” new legendary gems dropping for everyone then?
Nevalistis: The exception is actually the Legendary gems, which should be flagged as Seasonal only. I’m checking into Mutilation and some of the other details; as soon as I have additional clarification, I’ll be happy to share it!
I have to think that 1/3 of the Legendary Gems dropping freely and 2/3 being tagged as Seasonal is an error, given that all of the other new legs aren’t seasonal tagged. (Which I think is smart; as the Blue says, give them to a wider pool of testers, especially since S3 didn’t start for weeks after the PTR went up.)
I wanted to try out a new char in S3 and started up a new softcore Barbarian yesterday morning, along with two other guys in our PTR clan who also did new Barbs. We were zooming along and rather enjoying the 300% EXP and +2000% Legendary buffs, but the servers were more PMS than PTR, and twice in an hour the entire game locked up, forcing us all to exit Battle.net entirely, and we couldn’t log back in for several minutes due to “character error” failures.The technical issues took the wind out of the sails of our joint rushing project and I gave up to work on other things at about level 30, but I hope to return to the task. Even without a slew of S3-only legs, I enjoy the fresh start of a new season, and with that enormous exp and legendary buff it’s amazing how fast you can level and gear up.
Elsewhere, if anyone needed further clarification about how the increased Blood Shard cap works, click through for a Blue explanation.
Nevalistis: Just a few clarifications:
Hope this is more clear!
Your account stores separate caps are separate for seasonal and non-seasonal, and for HC and SC as well, for obvious reasons. Presumably if you earned GR40 / 900 Shard cap in Season Two, that would carry over to your Era account when the season ended and merged, if it was a higher value than you’d done prior to Season Two.