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So how is it?  I'm still waiting on my copy, don't know when it's getting here. 

Shieke picked it up and sounds like she's been thoroughly enjoying it so far. Even got a crusader to a decent level and sounds like it was pretty fun. I haven't bought it myself but that's more because I've been distracted by Fire Emblem Awakening at the moment. I will probably pick it up soonish myself.

I picked it up, but had just recently reset my quests so last night finished running the quests through killing Diablo last night. I'll start the new content soon. The level scaling definitely works, though. Before leveling past 60 I had been running at Torment 2 difficulty and not having much trouble with it. I didn't kill things fast, but nothing killed me either. In order to move through the quests faster I bumped it down to Master difficulty (the step below Torment). After leveling up 3 times my gear wasn't providing me with a huge edge any longer and it felt as tough as Torment 2 had been. After leveling up a couple more times I found it hard. At level 67-68 I actually have been dying to certain combination of elite/legendary monsters! Glenn and J were playing last night in the new content and sounded like they were enjoying it. I'm looking forward to starting the new stuff.

I've been having fun with the new act.  I managed torment 1 up til 63 I think, then I kicked it down to master (I think) when I couldn't defeat a boss. The story is kind of interesting. They have A LOT of side conversations in the town, and your companions give you some side quests which is kind of cool. Also, I recommend making sure you do all the little side "mini dungeons" or "caves" or whatever the heck they are, at least in the first section. There's a whole rather interesting subplot you miss if you don't do so.

*WARNING: Mild non-story-related spoilers which you all probably already know may be below*

I wasn't able to play this pretty much at all yesterday. Had to keep alt-tabbing out to get actual work done. Today I got to play it a ton. I decided I wanted to be level 70 before starting the new content, so I went and farmed various places (The Azmodan run, Dalgur Oasis, "Wretched Mother"). This proved to be a mistake, IMO, since it made the gaining EXP-heavy Act V a little less exciting than it should have been.

As others have noted, difficulty scaling is pretty notable. I had to drop out of Torment I by the time i hit level 65. By the time I was at Level 67 or so, Torment I was as painful as old pre-nerf Inferno. This (obviously) changes with better gear though, and it's absolutely painless to switch to lower difficulties. Also, EXP requirements scale up fast. Level 61 is gonna set you back just a few million EXP (ten or less, iirc). One Azmodan run completed it for me. Level 70 levelup costs about 86million by comparison.

I like the new big bad. He looks like a Dementor, and while I wouldn't exactly say he's cleverly written or brilliant or anythiing, there's something satisfying about watching his powerful cold villainy. Ultimately though, I'm the wrong person to really analyze the plot as even when I'm trying to appreciate it it's the thing that I tend to pay the least attention to in D3.



The new content thusfar is awesome. I love the seamless sidequests, love the rich rewards, there are a few new enemy types that are rather satisfying to fight. The boss fights I've come upon thusfar have been entertaining. This might be a plus or minus depending on your tastes, but some of these new areas are HUGE. As in, twice as big as dalgur oasis from act II or the keep depths from act III.  OK, maybe not TWICE as big. . .but you get the idea. Leads to some entertianing exploration, but god help you if you're trying to speed-demon it.

The new Demon Hunter choices in the skills plugs itself seamlessly into my existing build . . .and it kinda reminds me of a League-of-Legends ult. 15 seconds where each attack causes 6 or so auxiliary attacks with rockets and grenades? And my hatred regeneration is increased by TEN? Amazing. And then followed by a long ass cooldown (90s).

I think the Mystic and the way they've implemented item enchanting is gonna be one of my favorite aspects of the post-endgame eventually. Also you can transmute items now to make them appear as you prefer.

Oh! While I'm a far way from upgrading my loot fully/properly, I've gotten started on the process. My current weapons are both Lvl70s now... and while they're only rares, they're both socketed. Meaning I can put the imperial emeralds in them and get an additional 260% crit damage! Along what I already have. . .. I've been critting for 1.6 to 3.8 million. With alarming regularity.


All in all? I like it. The demon hunter skill upgrades provide entertaining options without giving any "no brainer" decisions. And the process of powering up and wanting to try out good loot is always fun.

-AHMAD

This post was edited by BountyHunterSAx on March 26, 2014, 8:55 pm

Adventure Mode, Bounties, and Nephalem Rifts?

Short answer: The most amazing Diablo 3 experience.

So... have now done a good 3-4 hours of this post-game stuff. Don't ask when I went to sleep last night please. And as I 'alluded' to before - this is quite simply the best feeling I've had playing D3 in ages. There will be one vaguely-story-related spoiler below, which I will use spoiler tags for. The rest is only a 'spoiler' inasmuch as it discusses game mechanics / rewards.

So, after the events of Act V, when you start up adventure mode you enter Sanctuary, Act II. . . and it's decidedly 'off' in some way. It doesn't take long to realize it's desolate . . and sparsely populated. Turns out the story did have consequences! Turns out there was some significant death, after all!. But this sets up the world beautifully for the gameplay that follows.

You are the Nephelem -- and the world is your oyster! All the Acts, all the checkpoints -- they're all readily accessible from the map menu. the hub-city in an act has a quest-giver, but you don't even need to interact with him to get those. The 'quests' at this point are 100% not-story related. Instead, there's a variety of miniquests that you can be assigned called 'bounties'. You teleport to the checkpoint and go to town on it; ya'know - since you're the uber-elite nephelem. This felt so awesome I can't really do it justice. For the first time playing D3, I really felt like Sanctuary was a *place* and I was traveling across it doing my deeds. Typical bounties include:

* Kill a (specific) champion/elite. . .+40-150 other enemies for good measure.
* Kill a boss character (like Azmodan, the butcher, etc.)
* Find a (specific) dungeon and kill ALL enemies on a given floor [LOTS of fun :)]

can take a good 5-10 minutes has been my experience thusfar.

In many ways, this really feels like doing what I like to do anyways when playing: Pick a nice 'high density' spot, and go kill many mans. Except *now* they're calling it a quest. And thanks to the random nature, you get to go where you please and the content remains at least a little fresh throughout :).

You get to GO places and DO things. As much as I loved doing Azmodan runs and Pony-runs, it's fantastic to be able to do similar styled runs and see DIFFERENT places and things! But then...wouldn't that make it low yield?
*NOPE*
Then there's the rewards!

** Completing a quest will net you in the 1-5 millions of EXP at Master. it scales with the difficulty you play on (obviously). But thanks to the downscaling for exp rewards in campaign quests, this is a huge boon. Further, i think this is BEFORE modifiers; so things like playing on harder difficulties will multiply it out much much higher.
To put it in perspective, I gained a paragon level from just doing 5 bounties. This was about 140million EXP total. . . and I wasn't even in Torment. Hell; I wasn't even running %EXP boost stuff (though i did find reflection pools aplenty along the way ;) ).

After you complete 5 such bounties, you are given a fat stack of quest rewards, tons of money, and MORE exp. I felt like loot was raining on me with how MUCH i got -- and even got a nice legendary or two. Among these rewards (and rewards from the bounties) are items that build towards letting you into the Nephalem Rift...

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Nephalem Rifts.

This place is the ultimate in a good loot run. It takes quitea while, since you need to kill TONS of enemies to spawn a boss. once that's done you kill the boss. Honestly I was a little let down by it though.. the flavor just didn't appeal to me as much as the bounties and blood shards. Still, it's a great 'capstone' to doing a set of bounties in an Act.

For my part? I'm kinda stockpiling these for now. I think I'd have ten times more fun doing this with company. Or maybe trying "kill-race" style massacres where we go in opposite directions for mass murder. Or whatever - - just not doing a huge-ass floor clear alone. We'll see.


**EDIT**
I could not have said it better myself:

Speaking to Polygon, Martens described Adventure Mode as a sandbox for Diablo 3, allowing players to play the way they want to. He said finding new gear and levelling up is the main draw of the game for a lot of people, and the development team noticed a significant number of players going into areas with the highest density of monsters with good loot drops and chests, killing those monsters, jumping out of the game, restarting it, and doing that over and over again.

"We took the 'If you can't beat them, join them' approach, and now you can do that across a wider variety of content, so you're not stuck in the one run of the game," Martens said. "If you want to get the best gear and you want to get it as fast as possible, mathematically, this is the best way to do that. You're getting a big tour of the hundreds of hours of content we've added, and this is now both the most varied and smartest way to play."

This post was edited by BountyHunterSAx on March 27, 2014, 11:17 am

So JonTron, Markiplier, and two guys I've never heard of played Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls, HARDCORE mode.  It may contains lawls.  Your mileage may vary.

EDIT UPDATE: apparently there are two teams.  The other one includes a bunch of Polaris personalities like JessieCox, WoWCrendor, Peanut Butter Gamer, and Criken

This post was edited by machvergil on March 27, 2014, 1:45 pm

As I'm sure most of you noticed last night when Battle.net said I was playing Act V, my copy of Reaper of Souls came in.  My goal is to blitz the storyline of Act V asap solo so I can enjoy exploring and the story with no social pressure or risk of accidental cutscene skips.  Once I'm done with that I'll rejoin the multiplayer community and start earning Paragon Levels again.  I've even placed this a higher priority than my Pokemon Y progress for the moment (though once I beat Act V, Pokemon Y will regain priority). Wizard is 66 and is moving on to the second major location in Act V after beating the boss in the tower with all the fire (that should be a sufficient spoiler free way to explain my progress).

As an aside I have to hand it to Blizzard.  I never thought they'd convince me to take Archon off my bar, but the synergies between black hole, the new Wizard spell, and blizzard are insane. 

As another random, grammar aside, are spells, powers, skills, etc proper nouns?  As I wrote this post it occurred to me I'm not sure if it is "arcane orb" or "Arcane Orb."

I got the Deadmau5 trinket for my wizard.  Just when I thought Black Hole had replaced Archon on my bar. 

Requires level 61
Halcyon's Ascent

    Neck

    Legendary Amulet

    Primary

    Reduces damage from elites by 10.0–15.0%

    Increases damage against elites by 10–15%

    Reduces cooldown of all skills by 4.0–7.0%.

    One of 6 Magic Properties (varies)

        When you use Vengeance, you mesmerize nearby enemies with your skill, causing them to jump uncontrollably for 6–8 seconds.

        When you use Wrath of the Berserker, you mesmerize nearby enemies with your skill, causing them to jump uncontrollably for 6–8 seconds.

        When you use Archon, you mesmerize nearby enemies with your skill, causing them to jump uncontrollably for 6–8 seconds.

        When you use Big Bad Voodoo, you mesmerize nearby enemies with your skill, causing them to jump uncontrollably for 6–8 seconds.

        When you use Epiphany, you mesmerize nearby enemies with your skill, causing them to jump uncontrollably for 6–8 seconds.

        When you use Akarat's Champion, you mesmerize nearby enemies with your skill, causing them to jump uncontrollably for 6–8 seconds.
    +2 Random Magic Properties

Unique Equipped

This post was edited by machvergil on March 30, 2014, 2:50 pm

Party hard!