D3 Xpac Thread

[VKhaun]

Bored at work. Last two hours of my shift are always ZZZZ, so you get TL;DR.

 

 

Wizard's new Black Hole skill is neat, but the area is a little too small. I find myself only using it with the Supermassive rune and still feeling like it's only adequate, and the other runes are largely unusable. The one that sucks up elite enemy effects sounds neat especially, but I don't think the radius is big enough to actually grab more than one or two things at a time. Haven't checked out the others yet, been playing the Crusader.

 

Act 5 (no spoilers) is very Blizzardy. They go crazy with the dialogue, saturate it with lore, made it feel a lot more linear and filled it with power creep of all kinds. The story has more people saying things like THAN I'VE EVER SEEN BEFORE. There are more purple mobs in Act 5 than probably the rest of the game put together. Numbers leap up after lv61 and that combined with Loot 2.0 means you'll replace old gear pretty quick.

 

Loot 2.0 works very well. A lot of what I find is my stat + vitality, or my stat + damage, and that covers everything from drops to any unique you ID and crafting.

 

I feel bad for anyone who spent money on the AH to buy gems. I bought two Radiant Star rubies (about $6) to super power my weapons. Got on my Lv60 wizard to find a new higher tier of gem drops like candy as soon as you hit 61. If you had a lot of gold, or bought gold on the AH that was a sick investment though. Gold doesn't drop too much, and all the new features cost gold. Nothing super crazy expensive, but it nickle-and-dime's you like crazy so it's hard to build up a stash. The new artisan also gives you the middle finger with old gear and says "Cannot Enchant Legacy Items". :/

 

I was surprised to see a lot of basic stuff still hasn't been adjusted. The Monk still warps their weapon onto their back and attacks bare fist for 2/4 of their builder attacks and doesn't have staff or weapon animations. Same with the wizard just warping their weapons to their side / source disappears, and they cast with bare hands instead of with their weapons. I really thought a huge company like Blizzard would clean that stuff up. 

 

 

 

 

 

New Mystic lady is "Meh".

 

You identify a unique and you get an extra little pop-up message that says "New Transmog" and you can go make any item you want look like that item. The only restrictions seem to be 2h vs 1h weapons. You can make a giant 2h sword look like a staff, or a dagger look like a flail. NotsurehowIfeelaboutthat.jpg.

 

I will definitely use her a lot because she comes standard with all the old armor graphics from normal items and it's only 500g to change normal items to look like other normal items. Can always look good or avoid clipping, even from lv1. Well, I guess I should say that MINE did. Those may have been unlocked because of something I did and got credit for retroactively. A new account might need to find them once or craft them once or something.

 

Her Enchanting tab lets you pick one property on a weapon to reroll. Once you pick the property you reroll, you can't reroll any others ever again. Only that one stat/slot can be rerolled, but you can reroll it as many times as you like. So if you find the perfect weapon but it's poison damage and you wanted holy, or all the stats are near max except one, or it has a bonus to the wrong spell... SO CLOSE... now you can fix it instead of trashing it.

 

When you reroll it, it gives you a choice between what was on there when you rolled, and two new random affixes with random values. That means it's always 'safe' because you can just opt to stick with what you've got, and it's a sort of back door way to add sockets. You pick a primary affix you don't want and keep rerolling it until you get the socket affix. Also nice for things like the Monk's passive where his highest resist is applied to all resistances. Easy to just find items with All Resists and any one resist, then just reroll the one resist until it matches your suit.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Crusader is LOL overpowered. He literally has everything. EVERYTHING that you could give an RPG character. Taunt, stun, MDPS, attack+defense buffs, auras, ranged AoE, PBAoE, ranged AoE + warp, pets, ranged pets, dash attacks, AoE team heal, AoE barrier, Stun, AoE stun, spammable stuns, move speed buffs, DoT's, AoE DoT's... he even has ranged attacks that are better than the wizard's arcane power builders. And he can use a two hander for DPS while holding a shield if he wants to... I think the only thing he's missing is a life drain... It's literally like playing Wizard + Barbarian + Monk at the same time, with a shield and two hander.

 

The one thing about the Crusader though, is it seems like it's designed to have to use it's timers and wrath a lot, where as the other classes are more flexible. I think attack speed and CDR are going to be paramount because even though his skills look OP, I suspect he'll lose out because the other classes have regular attacks that do far more DPS than his slow attacking builders, which also seem to build resources slower than the other classes. Without a CDR/IAS build, he's not going to be able to keep playing with the toys often enough. He even has achievements that require crazy CDR and the new gem (Diamonds) is CDR when you put it in helms.

 

 

 

[Archistopheles]

Thanks for the read. I now know that I can skip buying it :)