Reaper of Souls Beta Patch Changes: Economy and Loot 2.1

[DMB]

Played a little bit with a new Crusader last night and just a couple of random thoughts.

- Levelling is way faster than it used to be, at least on adventure mode where I\'m playing on Expert.
- I had some low level items on my stash that I was keeping for the Crusader once RoS comes out and I\'m wearing them all (mainly XP gear like Cain\'s set). Loot 2.0 or not, no upgrades at all have dropped for me and the gear I got on vanilla is better than anything that dropped in RoS so far.
- With twinked gear, OP gems and paragon, it\'s pretty much impossible for my Crusader to die since no monsters have ever even got the Crusader\'s HP below 50%. I\'m assuming playing Hardcore without the risk of death pretty much renders it \"not fun\" so I\'m not sure how Blizzard is going to handle this... without ladder resets and whatnot I don\'t see anyone dying while levelling up new HC characters (note that I\'m a relatively low paragon level 51 and am not playing \"safe\" at all, just playing the game without any care if my characters die or not).
- I can farm bounty loot bags with my Crusader on a low level and then open them on a higher level character and the loot rewards will be adjusted to the character that opens the bag. Oops. Needs to be fixed soon
- Paragon feels weird... you start a new character and distribute 50 points or whatever (or hundreds for people with more time sinked in) and then you level all the way to 70 without ever spending another point in Paragon... this feels very weird. It would feel a little better if we could distribute points on every level-up because the benefits from each paragon point are very marginal.
- Pre-1.0.8 monster density still sucks. And loot 2.0 without an economy reset... meh not so sure about it.

Nevertheless, it\'s still the best gameplay/combat feel of any ARPG out there.

 

[adastra]

BohemianStalker ... you and I are the \'lone nuts\' here. The other diablo players are standing in line waiting their turn for the spanking machine. And you and I are the the two dudes in urine stained overcoats and long grey beards picking through the garbage outside of the starbucks.

The AH was abused, I agree. But, if one played D2 and traded there, you have a serious appreciation of the AH. I thought it was awesome. It might have been one of the best features that came with the game. But, that\'s only because of the problems inherent in the original version of d3: low legendary drop rate and item quality.

Free trade is just insane to give up too. Bound on Account legendaries is a huge mistake. All players will eventually regret that.

But, for now ... there are just the two of us standing in town, holding signs that say \"the end is near\" ... and we\'re no even talking about Diablo roaming the earth again.

 

[ShadoutMapes]

Free trade is just insane to give up too. Bound on Account legendaries is a huge mistake. All players will eventually regret that.

But, for now ... there are just the two of us standing in town, holding signs that say \"the end is near\" ... and we\'re no even talking about Diablo roaming the earth again.

Well, quite a few people are saying that BoA is bad and free trading is oh so awesome.

I bet people will not regret BoA though. It will be an improvement. Which is of course not the same as it will actually be good - that depends on so much else.

 

[MengNa]

I still think that\'s a pretty stupid idea.
The right solution to making single target skills useful can\'t be to make the entire world a barren wasteland. That\'s just backward thinking in my mind.

Something else I just noticed, is that once you run out of resource for your RMB skill, it now defaults back to basic attack instead of the LMB attack like it was before the patch... Too bad, I kind of liked it.

 

[mojolevel]

Because I got into the beta right as I was entering final exam week, I\'ve only had a chance to play 15-20 hours so far. But in that time I took my pre-RoS SC p100 barb to 70 and I\'ve worked up a crusader to 67.

That said, the legendary drop rates seem pretty low. I\'m certainly finding fewer than I was in D3V. I\'ve been playing a mix of Expert and Master difficulty...so maybe Torment is indeed where it\'s at. I\'ve found 3 legendaries so far (2 were blacksmith plans). The first was a Leorics Signet, which was perfect since I got it from the Butcher as I was just starting out my crusader, and believe it or not I\'ve never found one on D3V. So initially my impression was positive. But the two plans I found later on were utterly useless. I was somewhere in the mid-40s with my crusader when I found a legendary daibo plan and a wall of bone plan, both of which were legendaries with required levels in the early 20\'s. Even with scaling stats these just didn\'t have enough going for them for me to see how they would ever be useful. Hopefully as time goes on RNG will change my attitude on this point.

I haven\'t noticed much difficulty with Thunderstorm or Electricity - though I do like the new mechanic behind the latter - but I seem to have considerable difficulty with Poison, which with my luck always appears on a large mob that ends up virtually covering the entire area with poison. The other affix giving me a lot of trouble for some reason is Fire Chains. I\'m not sure if the damage got buffed there or if I\'m just getting unlucky with the mob types it spawns on, but I seem to always be caught standing in an intersection of chains from each mob member and have considerable difficulty evading it. Perhaps when I have better survivability (carrying 4,600 LpH right now) I\'ll do better. But for the time being that\'s a tough one. On the other hand, orbiter doesn\'t seem to pose much risk right now, but maybe that\'s just my experience.