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I finished getting upgraded to the patch yesterday afternoon and spent maybe 3-4 hours playing last night.
I thought it might be interesting to post my impression of the changes!
I have a paragon mid-40 something wizard I decided to try things out with and decided to take her through each difficulty level by playing a the areas north of down, plus a few of the crypts in the cemetery.
One thing I wasn’t expecting was how much her skills have changed. I found I had to go through every skill I was using and re-evaluate their worth and figure out which one’s I really wanted to use. I still kept the skills I was using before, but just changed the runes around to something comparable to what I’d previously had.
I don’t have my specific skills information handy right now as I write this, but can add that in later if theres any interest.
Some of the skill effects themselves seemed to have been reworked -and I like what I’ve seen!
Mob density is smaller than what I was used to before, but the areas I chose to explore didn’t feel barren -actually they felt ‘right.’ There seemed to be the right amount of monsters in comparison to the resource I was spending.
So, after playing through the area north of town progressively at each difficulty, I finally settled at Torment level 1. I could handle Torment 2 easily enough, but was running into problems with my arcane power running out too quickly. This was slowing me down enough that I decided to drop a torment level just so I felt I could run around faster.
I actually really didn’t start playing around with my paragon points until maybe Hard or Expert level -honestly, because I was too busy looking at all the new things.
I had about 11 points to spend in each paragon group:
I settled on my main stat in my Core Points (int). I thought adding more points to my resource (Arcane Power) would be helpful, but 11 points allocated here (I’m a level 44 paragon, remember) resulted in only about 2-4 extra resource points (what a joke). I don’t believe that’s enough for one extra spell cast! So I left all my points in intelligence.
In Offensive Points, I settled on critical hit chance. I’d already built my character in such a way that critical hits and damage was pretty high. And since faster casting speed only caused me to just run out of arcane power faster, I decided to go with bigger hits instead, which works pretty well.
In Defensive Points, I really didn’t have a preference, but think I dumped all of those points into Resist All in the end. The reason for this is elite monsters now seem to cover the screen with effects and hazards now. It’s almost impossible to fight an elite without getting hit through the fireworks display of effects going on. To be honest, the new mortar effects on the ground are a little confusing to me. And there’s that one attack which is like a rapid thunderbolt from the sky (I can’t recall the name currently) which I wish there was a little more forewarning to. There’s so much other effects going off in the screen at once it’s hard to see that one when it starts hitting my character. Of all the attacks I got from elites, that’s the one that killed me the most only because it was hard to know when it was going to happen.
In Utility Points, I think I dumped everything in resource cost reduction. Once again, it’s because I found myself running out of arcane power often. Fortunately, through the course of the several hours I was playing, I found several new upgrades with reduced my resource usage further, so maybe it’s working as planned?
Pools of Reflection are cool. I admit to not being very smart about it, though and being too reckless and dying often before using it up to it’s fullest extent. I got smarter after a while, promise!
I leveled up 3 times in the time I played. That’s pretty fast, but I liked it, since it allowed me to allocate one more paragon point somewhere. If all of these little paragon increases come at this rate, I’ll be happy.
I found several new uniques while playing and upgraded both my rings. I also found rare upgrades for my shoulders and belt. My biggest surprise was when a unique recipe for some monk gloves dropped. I have never, ever seen a unique recipe drop before. Unfortunately, it was for a Monk, and also unfortunate, it was for a level which was much lower than the other craftable gloves I have. Several other rare recipes dropped, all of which I couldn’t use due to being under-powered. But that’s kind of the way all found recipes have gone since first installing the game.
I noticed vendors now have better or at least more viable items for sale than before. I still haven’t found an upgrade to my current gear from them, but at least I don’t feel I’m visiting a ‘Normal’ vendor while playing in a ‘Torment’ world.
I think the change to the new health potions is a smart one. It’s kind of a no-brainer, when I really think about it. You also auto-pick up all potions you run over, which is nice (and takes a little getting used to.)
Raise your hand if you still had that knee-jerk desire to go kill 5 elite monsters as soon as you start the game! This also took some getting used to. It felt strange to know that the first elite I encountered would give the same drops as the very last one, but I’d accustomed myself to the change by the end of my play experience. The Pools of Reflection seem to be the new thing to chase -at least in story mode.
There were a few bugs I seemed to run into. I found helms for my wizard, at levels 60 and even 59, which had a locked icon over them, preventing me from equipping them. Maybe I was missing something, but it was odd.
Also, either it was a bug, or some of the events have been changed a little bit. I played through The Matriarch’s Bones event (the one where the woman is crying over her defiled grave and you have to summon Lord Dunhyld 3 times and defeat him). Anyways, I clicked on all three places to summon him, beat him down to near-death, and he wouldn’t die! “Maybe I have to kill all his skeleton minions now?â€, I thought. I tried that, but as I was going after the last skeleton, I noticed the crypt glowing, so I went over and clicked on it. The event ended, I got the loot, and Lord Dunhyld died. Weird.
Also, when I took the waypoint to the Fields of Misery for the first time, my video card seemed to wig out for a minute and had difficulty loading the scene. I’ve never had this problem before and I only experienced this happening once during my whole play time last night.
I think there is still a little balancing which could be done between some of the reworked runes for some of the wizards spells. One in particular is the difference between Arcane Orb’s Obliterate and Frozen Orb. Pre-patch, I was using a similar rune to what is now comparable to Obliterate (maybe it was named the same before? I don’t know. I honestly haven’t opened up the skill window to swap out any of my skills for the last year), but I’ve found that Frozen Orb to be much more powerful due to it’s ability to go through enemies, it’s area of effect, and slower speed. In my opinion, Obliterates higher damage bonus and smaller area of effect still doesn’t justify its use. It could use a damage boost to be more competitive with Frozen Orb. I used less Arcane Power and did more damage with Frozen Orb than when I was using Obliterate.
-Hit box problems? Not anymore! Gameplay felt especially tight and responsive. I never noticed once having an enemy register a hit on my character when I seemed to be well out of reach of it.
-Loading problems with using skills or killing monsters for the first time after starting DIII?
I can’t speak for others, but in the past, I found I would have to ‘prime’ all my skills and kill a few ‘primer’ enemies to load those effects into the game first before getting serious. (Otherwise, I could experiences some game lag somewhere else while the game tried to load all those assets at once -and more often or not, it would happen at a most inopportune time.)
I didn’t experience anything at all like this with the new patch.
I didn’t try any boss fights or playing the actual story content, so I can’t really give feedback on that or how the ‘ignore cutscene’ feature works.
I wasn’t a big fan of the icons in place of names on the ground feature. I’d rather read the names, but I can see how this would be more attractive while playing on a console.
I miss unidentified rares. It would be nice if there was at least something other than unique items which would need to be identified.
I had mixed feeling about hiding the gold amount on dropped gold. On the good side, it helps de-clutter the screen, but on the bad side, I kind of liked knowing whether a pile of gold was worth going to the other side of the screen to pick up. Also, I miss the huge piles of gold which used to drop prepatch. From my experience last night, all piles appeared to use the smallest gold pile artwork, seemingly without regard to how much was actually in the pile.
The actual amount of loot dropping in the game has been cut back quite a bit. I really didn’t find this a problem. I was getting about as much or more gold as before, and seriously, the useful items I found dropping now seemed higher than before the patch.
Oh yeah, and I was also getting crusader lore dropping left and right -probably due to Blizzard wanting to promote Reaper of Souls. Clever, clever . . . Might as well have Abd al-Hazir make a plug for the expansion after each entry!
. . .I jest!
Speaking of followers, It seemed to me the Templar had some new dialogue. I didn’t try out the other followers to see if they had anything new to say.
And speaking of new dialogue, my wizard had some new dialogue telling me she was going back to town every time I’d use a portal -kind of annoying actually. Do I really need to know that?
Being able to jump to any waypoint in the middle of the game was convenient. I liked that. I think there could be a little more UI finessing navigating between the regular map and the waypoint map. I could get to the waypoint map from the regular map by right clicking, but couldn’t find a way to get back other than clicking the top buttons. I think it would be nice to use the mouse wheel to switch between the two maps instead.
All in all, gameplay felt really good. I didn’t experience any of that spiky damage experienced before the patch where I might run into a monster that one or two-shots me. If I found I experiencing some difficulty with the monsters I was fighting it was because of my choosing a higher difficulty, rather than running into that one single monster which could wipe me out easily.
With that said, watch out for those monsters with fire chains. They are probably the most dangerous ones to run into currently.
I wished D3V had launched with what’s in the game now. It would have probably been received much differently, much more positively. But what’s done is done and I’m happily awaiting the day when Reaper of Souls comes out.
I thought it might be interesting to post my impression of the changes!
I have a paragon mid-40 something wizard I decided to try things out with and decided to take her through each difficulty level by playing a the areas north of down, plus a few of the crypts in the cemetery.
One thing I wasn’t expecting was how much her skills have changed. I found I had to go through every skill I was using and re-evaluate their worth and figure out which one’s I really wanted to use. I still kept the skills I was using before, but just changed the runes around to something comparable to what I’d previously had.
I don’t have my specific skills information handy right now as I write this, but can add that in later if theres any interest.
Some of the skill effects themselves seemed to have been reworked -and I like what I’ve seen!
Mob density is smaller than what I was used to before, but the areas I chose to explore didn’t feel barren -actually they felt ‘right.’ There seemed to be the right amount of monsters in comparison to the resource I was spending.
So, after playing through the area north of town progressively at each difficulty, I finally settled at Torment level 1. I could handle Torment 2 easily enough, but was running into problems with my arcane power running out too quickly. This was slowing me down enough that I decided to drop a torment level just so I felt I could run around faster.
I actually really didn’t start playing around with my paragon points until maybe Hard or Expert level -honestly, because I was too busy looking at all the new things.
I had about 11 points to spend in each paragon group:
I settled on my main stat in my Core Points (int). I thought adding more points to my resource (Arcane Power) would be helpful, but 11 points allocated here (I’m a level 44 paragon, remember) resulted in only about 2-4 extra resource points (what a joke). I don’t believe that’s enough for one extra spell cast! So I left all my points in intelligence.
In Offensive Points, I settled on critical hit chance. I’d already built my character in such a way that critical hits and damage was pretty high. And since faster casting speed only caused me to just run out of arcane power faster, I decided to go with bigger hits instead, which works pretty well.
In Defensive Points, I really didn’t have a preference, but think I dumped all of those points into Resist All in the end. The reason for this is elite monsters now seem to cover the screen with effects and hazards now. It’s almost impossible to fight an elite without getting hit through the fireworks display of effects going on. To be honest, the new mortar effects on the ground are a little confusing to me. And there’s that one attack which is like a rapid thunderbolt from the sky (I can’t recall the name currently) which I wish there was a little more forewarning to. There’s so much other effects going off in the screen at once it’s hard to see that one when it starts hitting my character. Of all the attacks I got from elites, that’s the one that killed me the most only because it was hard to know when it was going to happen.
In Utility Points, I think I dumped everything in resource cost reduction. Once again, it’s because I found myself running out of arcane power often. Fortunately, through the course of the several hours I was playing, I found several new upgrades with reduced my resource usage further, so maybe it’s working as planned?
Pools of Reflection are cool. I admit to not being very smart about it, though and being too reckless and dying often before using it up to it’s fullest extent. I got smarter after a while, promise!
I leveled up 3 times in the time I played. That’s pretty fast, but I liked it, since it allowed me to allocate one more paragon point somewhere. If all of these little paragon increases come at this rate, I’ll be happy.
I found several new uniques while playing and upgraded both my rings. I also found rare upgrades for my shoulders and belt. My biggest surprise was when a unique recipe for some monk gloves dropped. I have never, ever seen a unique recipe drop before. Unfortunately, it was for a Monk, and also unfortunate, it was for a level which was much lower than the other craftable gloves I have. Several other rare recipes dropped, all of which I couldn’t use due to being under-powered. But that’s kind of the way all found recipes have gone since first installing the game.
I noticed vendors now have better or at least more viable items for sale than before. I still haven’t found an upgrade to my current gear from them, but at least I don’t feel I’m visiting a ‘Normal’ vendor while playing in a ‘Torment’ world.
I think the change to the new health potions is a smart one. It’s kind of a no-brainer, when I really think about it. You also auto-pick up all potions you run over, which is nice (and takes a little getting used to.)
Raise your hand if you still had that knee-jerk desire to go kill 5 elite monsters as soon as you start the game! This also took some getting used to. It felt strange to know that the first elite I encountered would give the same drops as the very last one, but I’d accustomed myself to the change by the end of my play experience. The Pools of Reflection seem to be the new thing to chase -at least in story mode.
There were a few bugs I seemed to run into. I found helms for my wizard, at levels 60 and even 59, which had a locked icon over them, preventing me from equipping them. Maybe I was missing something, but it was odd.
Also, either it was a bug, or some of the events have been changed a little bit. I played through The Matriarch’s Bones event (the one where the woman is crying over her defiled grave and you have to summon Lord Dunhyld 3 times and defeat him). Anyways, I clicked on all three places to summon him, beat him down to near-death, and he wouldn’t die! “Maybe I have to kill all his skeleton minions now?â€, I thought. I tried that, but as I was going after the last skeleton, I noticed the crypt glowing, so I went over and clicked on it. The event ended, I got the loot, and Lord Dunhyld died. Weird.
Also, when I took the waypoint to the Fields of Misery for the first time, my video card seemed to wig out for a minute and had difficulty loading the scene. I’ve never had this problem before and I only experienced this happening once during my whole play time last night.
I think there is still a little balancing which could be done between some of the reworked runes for some of the wizards spells. One in particular is the difference between Arcane Orb’s Obliterate and Frozen Orb. Pre-patch, I was using a similar rune to what is now comparable to Obliterate (maybe it was named the same before? I don’t know. I honestly haven’t opened up the skill window to swap out any of my skills for the last year), but I’ve found that Frozen Orb to be much more powerful due to it’s ability to go through enemies, it’s area of effect, and slower speed. In my opinion, Obliterates higher damage bonus and smaller area of effect still doesn’t justify its use. It could use a damage boost to be more competitive with Frozen Orb. I used less Arcane Power and did more damage with Frozen Orb than when I was using Obliterate.
-Hit box problems? Not anymore!
Gameplay felt especially tight and responsive. I never noticed once having an enemy register a hit on my character when I seemed to be well out of reach of it. -Loading problems with using skills or killing monsters for the first time after starting DIII?
I can’t speak for others, but in the past, I found I would have to ‘prime’ all my skills and kill a few ‘primer’ enemies to load those effects into the game first before getting serious. (Otherwise, I could experiences some game lag somewhere else while the game tried to load all those assets at once -and more often or not, it would happen at a most inopportune time.)
I didn’t experience anything at all like this with the new patch.
I didn’t try any boss fights or playing the actual story content, so I can’t really give feedback on that or how the ‘ignore cutscene’ feature works.
I wasn’t a big fan of the icons in place of names on the ground feature. I’d rather read the names, but I can see how this would be more attractive while playing on a console.
I miss unidentified rares. It would be nice if there was at least something other than unique items which would need to be identified.
I had mixed feeling about hiding the gold amount on dropped gold. On the good side, it helps de-clutter the screen, but on the bad side, I kind of liked knowing whether a pile of gold was worth going to the other side of the screen to pick up. Also, I miss the huge piles of gold which used to drop prepatch. From my experience last night, all piles appeared to use the smallest gold pile artwork, seemingly without regard to how much was actually in the pile.
The actual amount of loot dropping in the game has been cut back quite a bit. I really didn’t find this a problem. I was getting about as much or more gold as before, and seriously, the useful items I found dropping now seemed higher than before the patch.
Oh yeah, and I was also getting crusader lore dropping left and right -probably due to Blizzard wanting to promote Reaper of Souls. Clever, clever . . . Might as well have Abd al-Hazir make a plug for the expansion after each entry!
. . .I jest!
Speaking of followers, It seemed to me the Templar had some new dialogue. I didn’t try out the other followers to see if they had anything new to say.
And speaking of new dialogue, my wizard had some new dialogue telling me she was going back to town every time I’d use a portal -kind of annoying actually. Do I really need to know that?
Being able to jump to any waypoint in the middle of the game was convenient. I liked that. I think there could be a little more UI finessing navigating between the regular map and the waypoint map. I could get to the waypoint map from the regular map by right clicking, but couldn’t find a way to get back other than clicking the top buttons. I think it would be nice to use the mouse wheel to switch between the two maps instead.
All in all, gameplay felt really good. I didn’t experience any of that spiky damage experienced before the patch where I might run into a monster that one or two-shots me. If I found I experiencing some difficulty with the monsters I was fighting it was because of my choosing a higher difficulty, rather than running into that one single monster which could wipe me out easily.
With that said, watch out for those monsters with fire chains. They are probably the most dangerous ones to run into currently.
I wished D3V had launched with what’s in the game now. It would have probably been received much differently, much more positively. But what’s done is done and I’m happily awaiting the day when Reaper of Souls comes out.