Diablo 3 Expansion Reaper of Souls Launches

Today Blizzard released the first expansion to Diablo 3, titled Reaper of Souls. The expansion continues the story with Act 5, which includes trips to Westmarch and Pandemonium. The level cap goes up to 70, there's a new class: the Crusader, and a new crafting NPC: the Mystic. The Mystic lets players reroll specific stats on their gear and change how the gear looks. The loot system has seen a drastic revamp, and Blizzard recently shut down the game's controversial auction house so they could have players find better and more interesting gear by fighting monsters. There's a new type of gameplay called Adventure Mode, which unlocks all waypoints and lets players go wherever they want, unrestricted by the campaign progression. This includes completely randomized dungeons, which can pull art and monsters from almost anywhere in the game. They've combined Adventure Mode with the Bounty system, which opens up randomized objectives scattered throughout the world. Blizzard has confirmed that the first major content patch after the expansion will bring ladders and leaderboards.

something I never thought I'd say

[Anonymous Coward]

I played a *lot* of Diablo 3 after it came out and, after bleeding my way through half of the game on inferno difficulty, I realized that whatever magic Diablo 2 had that made me want to keep playing for years just wasn't present in Diablo 3. The game wasn't fun so I stopped.

Fast forward to a couple weeks ago and I decided to log in again just to see if things were still as bad as I remembered and... to my utter amazement, Blizzard had actually fixed the game. It's fun again- they expanded difficulty settings to allow you to find the sweet spot where things are tough but manageable, good loot actually drops, crafting isn't hideously tedious... it's exactly what I was hoping Diablo 3 was going to be when it was announced. Also, the new act is pretty cool as well.

From someone who gave up on the game...

[Last_Available_Usern]

I reinstalled the game a few weeks ago after not playing for ages due to a constant feeling of never finding decent items and being tied to the AH for upgrades. The game (even just post patch, not even counting the xpac) is so much more playable. If you're on the fence, I can give you a few bullet points that have kept me interested:

1) With the AH gone, way more legendaries and meaningful items drop.
2) The drops (both rare and legendary) are often more meaningful as they cater the stats to your class for the most part.
3) All items (including legendaries) roll max-level with appropriate stats for the person who made the game.
4) +Skill and +DmgType has become very prevelent stats on many pieces now, making it less about sheet DPS and cookie cutter builds and more about building a spec that compliments your playstyle and the gear you've found.
5) Paragon levels are shared across all characters so no more grinding paragon for all your toons.
6) Paragon points are used to supplement stats like Int/Dex/Str, Vitality, Life on Hit, Crit Dmg, etc, allowing you to customize your build further and fill in the blanks your gear lacks.

All in all, I really like the changes and what little I've seen that they added to the Xpax (namely the Mystic for customizing drops in both appearance and stats) I like as well.

Re:Nope.

[Mashiki]

I'm guessing you actually haven't played the game since 2.0 rolled out. And while what you said was semi-true before the AH was removed it's not now. Otherwise you'd know that loot is rolled based on the character you're playing. While you'll see an "off" stat like "arcane orb" on your "pew-pew disintegrate" build, you're not going to see +133str on your offhand anymore. So that pretty much guts the whole "flavor of the month" thing. There really isn't a pure build out that kicks ass anyway for any class atm.

Your complaint on the story? Meh. It's the same writer as Warcraft, Diablo, and everything else. There's plenty however for you to experiment with different builds for your playstyle. For quite a while I was a orb launcher, now I'm a destrobeam wizard. On several of the bosses, on torment there was no way I could beat them without using hydra's either.

Odd that you say the game doesn't have staying power. If you base that on the number of people playing it seems to be just fine. Then again, the only thing that kept people going back to D2, was that they could hack their way to happiness.

Re:Nope.

[Anonymous Coward]

Clearly Blizzard likes to shut down their servers ... I mean how can they shut down allowing people to telnet to the old battle.net chat!! I mean Diablo is 18 years old, its clear they have no respect for their customers!

          Chat (1996-2005) (they used to allow standard Telnet clients to connect to their servers for chat purposes)
        Diablo (1996-present) (limited to public chat channels)
        StarCraft (1998-present) (and expansion)
        WarCraft II (1999-present) (support added by the "Battle.net Edition" expansion)
        Diablo II (2000-present) (and expansion)
        WarCraft III (2002-present) (and expansion)

          StarCraft II (2010-present) (and expansion)
        World of Warcraft (2010-present) (and four expansions, support added in 2010 with the "migration" of WoW accounts)
        Diablo III (2012-present) (and expansion)
        Battle.net Desktop App (present)
        Hearthstone (present)