March 3, 2016
We debate current game issues including power creep, competing against botters, the ancient item augmentation struggle, and the ridiculous lengths players will go to avoid Set Dungeons. Then it’s time for some more Anniversary review, as we cover TDP #102-125, hitting the super-busy second half of 2013, including the Reaper of souls reveal and beta test. Featuring Tyr, N3rdwards, and Flux.
March 10, 2014
ZappaFan talks about his years playing the Barb & why he’s still the class for him
February 24, 2014
Surprise news that the Reaper of Souls Beta and PTR Shutting Down Tonight. As in 5 hours from now!
Reaper of Souls beta chat including recent D3 dev livestreams, build-changing legendaries, the power of Paragon Points now that experience grows so quickly, and RoS launch party plans. Featuring Flux, Neinball, and Holyknight.
February 22, 2014
A couple of useful Blue posts on two-handed weapons and the new legendary property of the Unity ring.
February 20, 2014
IncGamers is taking part in a live play session of Reaper of Souls with a Diablo 3 developer tonight. I’ll be playing (probably my Barb) with Blizzard developer John Yang. John is primarily responsible for the Barbarian and Demon Hunter, and he also does tuning for all classes and works on legendary items and mods.
Blizzard has posted an illustrated article about Clans and Communities as they’ll function in D3v2.0 and Reaper of Souls. The clans are live in the beta and on the PTR right now, and we’ve got a fair number of site regulars in the guild already, though it’ll all be reset once the test realm goes dark and D3 and RoS go live later in March.
February 19, 2014
Some of the less-documented changes in the recent patches have been crafting and economy price changes in Reaper of Souls. (These apply to Diablo 3 on the PTR also.) Earlier in the Reaper of Souls beta crafting was mostly a gold expense, and it was much more expensive than now. Rares and Legendaries cost exponentially more to enchant than they do now, and since legs also require a Forgotten Soul material, they were very hard to upgrade for a month plus during the “no legs for you” patch.
February 18, 2014
Clothes may make the man, but in Diablo 3 and Reaper of Souls, gear makes the Nephalem, and one of the most important affixes is the Wizard’s Arcane Power on Crit, or “APoC.” That affix does what it sounds like; instantly generating X amount of the Wizard’s resource each time a crit is proc‘ed. Of course it’s more complicated than that, with different skills carrying different (hidden) proc rates, which are adjusted to match the power and amount of proc chances for each skill. A free skill that hits lots of enemies per cast has to have a low proc coefficient or else it would instantly refill via APoC. Expensive skills that only hit a few enemies can have a higher proc chance. And so on.
February 14, 2014
I hadn’t played a Crusader in a while, and while I’m enjoying all of the other classes (yes, even the Barb) in Reaper of Souls, I figured I needed to catch up on the new guy and his ongoing balancing process. So I fired up a new level 1 softcore Crusader, and rather than going right into Adventure Mode, I tried an experiment. It’s Reaper of Souls New Character Strategy time! How fast does a level 1 character level up, playing on Story Mode, on a high difficulty, with some +EXP gear, now that the monsters scale up along with your character’s level?
February 13, 2014
As promised, the emergency patch went up earlier tonight. There are almost no general changes, and aside from the bug fixes virtually all the changes are balances to character skills. Judging by the very minor changes, the balancing is going pretty well. Earlier in the beta when things were still rough we saw skills doubling in damage or cutting cooldown by half, that sort of thing. This patch is much subtler; most of the changes just increase or decrease skill damage 5% or 10%, as the devs clearly think they’re getting very near the final state.
February 12, 2014
Blizzard is pushing an small but urgent Patch Today: Reaper of Souls and D3 PTR, and they’ve given us advance notice with a warning.
February 10, 2014
This weekend Flux took the new patch for a test run and here’s what he found…
February 9, 2014
A player mentioned a bug with calculating the Paragon Levels of accounts freshly-imported to the PTR or RoS beta. Here’s the quote, but this is so not the real news about experience in the new patch.
February 7, 2014
Some good discussion about the latest changes to build density in Reaper of Souls and D3 on the PTR. Let’s start with the patch notes, which mentioned the issue thusly: